This is a follow-up to the important TV news I posted a few days ago:

The stuff they have on YouTube continually amazes me.

I am currently kicking myself for not looking up the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on YouTube before now. Here’s the best clip I’ve seen so far:

If you don’t hear from me for a while it’s because I’m planning on watching more of these all weekend.

So the NYT is telling us that a new generation of professors are significantly more conservative than their soon-to-be-retired Baby Boomer predecessors. ["The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire."] Their evidence?:

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

Did the survey the paper cites ask how many consider themselves “progressive” activists or “radical” activists or maybe just activists? I doubt it, because that doesn’t fit convenient stereotypes.

This is exactly why I hate faculty surveys. The stereotypes they reinforce have nothing to do with my job. Almost everything I disagree with the administration about doesn’t fit the conventional left/right dichotomy, and my biggest ideological struggles are with other liberals.

Unfortunately, that nuanced and useful article on academic politics wouldn’t have fit in the paper so the Times took the easy way out.

Did you know that you can watch entire episodes of the first two seasons of the Mary Tyler Moore Show at Hulu.com? Of course, I saw them all when I was 8 (and several times afterwards), but it looks like I can also see Arrested Development for the first time.

Yesterday, I went to see former Senator George McGovern at the annual Ludlow Massacre memorial. [While this is a history blog, I'm not really in the mood to blog about Ludlow. If you want a recounting of the ceremony try here.] Listening to all the speakers, especially United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts (who I would pay $50 to read the phone book to me), I was reminded that the fundamental problem with the American economy is lousy wages. $4 gas means that people who were just getting by can’t anymore. It also means higher food prices – heck higher everything prices – which only makes getting by even harder. Most of us have been living on debt fumes for six to eight years now so when working class people start skipping payments, big financial institutions catch cold. Ordinary people get no help from government but, of course, Bear Stearns is allegedly too big to fail.

Oddly enough, when I came home from the ceremony and read my New York Times I saw that Ben Stein of all people is making the same argument:

Get this, friends: from 1947 to about 1973 — from the days from the great Harry S. Truman to the great Richard M. Nixon — real hourly pay for nongovernment workers rose by about 40 percent. The peak year was the one before R.N. left for San Clemente in 1974. Since then, real wages both hourly and weekly for all nongovernment workers, on average, have fallen by about 5 percent, very roughly.

There are all kinds of reasons for this, ranging from the larger size and different composition of the labor force to the devastating foreign competition in manufacturing, which tends to set a limit on other wages as well.

But the trend is dismal. The average private worker now earns very roughly $600 a week, not counting fringe benefits. For this worker, gasoline might well account for close to one-tenth of his or her earnings. If the price of gas goes up 25 percent, the effect is serious. To put it mildly, people making $600 a week do not have a lot of leeway on spending.

Ben Stein’s answer to this problem is not the same as Cecil Roberts’ answer or my answer (which would be more and better trade unions), but if people from the left and right can agree that low wages are a big problem why are so few people even talking about it?

Bill Haley’s resemblance to Elvis when singing was no doubt entirely deliberate:

I had no idea this was a cover until I went looking for it on iTunes:

I got an e-mail from an academic friend of mine yesterday about my Teaching With YouTube article. The gist of it was “I’ll be sure to use YouTube as soon as I get my teenage daughter to explain it to me.” I laughed when I saw that, but not at her. I laughed because this joke is so old now that it must be on life support in a nursing home somewhere. We need or kids to work our cell phones and fix our DVD players for us because they were born with this stuff and we weren’t. I heard this all the time when I first forced the teachers in my graduate class to blog, and it gets replayed in my office every time I speak to the nice undergraduates who work at my university’s tech support hotline. However, this academic technological generation gap is not the primary focus of this post.

The academic technological generation gap I want to focus on here is the one between university professors: those who do tech and those who don’t. When I went to college every single professor I had taught with a piece of chalk, some notes and maybe a stand full of maps. The vast majority of them were very good at what they did and I learned a lot as a result.

Therefore, when I started teaching, I thought, “Well, if it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my students.” But guess what? Times change. I have come to believe that it is educational malpractice to teach a survey course in American History (and probably World History too, but that’s not my field) without using pictures. And I don’t mean carting around an overhead projector so that you can show students those maps you got from your textbook company. I mean pictures. And don’t tell me this dumbs down the presentation. It improves it for many reasons, but especially because it allows you to analyze primary sources right there in the classroom.

The same thing goes for movies. As I wrote in my article, there are now countess primary source film clips readily available on the internet that I used to only talk about in lecture that I can now show students the class. Yes, it takes away from lecture time (if only to a limited extent if you pick the right clips), but more importantly it reinforces historical knowledge better than any single professor ever could. Your students don’t just hear history, they see it and to many of them only seeing is believing.

The generation gap I’m getting at here is the difference between those faculty who are willing to use technology to foster learning and those who aren’t. Of course, it doesn’t break down perfectly to an age differential. I know folks much older than me who are PowerPoint magicians (and yes, that’s not necessarily a good thing) and a guy much younger than me who doesn’t even have his own web site. However, I do think there are plenty of people who learned history in college the same way I did and who aren’t even willing to step into the late Twentieth Century.

Certainly I’ve read enough Margaret Soltan now to recognize that plenty of technologies hinder rather than help learning. [Clickers pop immediately to mind.] Nevertheless, for me there are a few minimum requirement that every professor in every discipline ought to have mastered.

E-mail and word processing go without saying. I’m a firm believer that everyone should post their syllabi on the web if for no other reason so that prospective students have some idea of what they’re getting into when they enroll in your courses. While I’ve seen too many PowerPoint presentations crash to champion that particular technology for everyone, history professors really ought to be able show pictures somehow. And for heaven’s sake, every professor doesn’t need to have their own blog, but by now they should at least know how one works.

If someone appointed you Dictator of Academia, what technologies would you require professors to know?

I don’t want to turn this blog into an unofficial Rick Perlstein fan site, but if you have nine minutes to kill you really ought to see this. I’d say that Perlstein takes Pat Buchanan to school, but Buchanan’s ignorance here is a total put-on. The viewers of “Morning Joe,” however, might actually have learned something.

I don’t know why, but I just love these videos: