The Common Room

BY WARREN FRISINA
FACULTY FELLOW

According to a recent study, students whose roomates bring video game systems to college wind up studying 40 fewer minutes per day. Negative grades ensue. I'm curious whether gamers think the study has merit? You can read a report on the study with links to the original by following this link:

http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/08/2007082803n.htm

BY WARREN FRISINA
FACULTY FELLOW-IN-RESIDENCE

OK, so you are now 3 weeks into your college experience. You've seen your faculty at work, and I'm guessing that every student wonders sometimes about the reliability of the person standing in the front of the room. Faculty bring strong opinions to the classroom. Moreover, they wield the power of the grade book to enforce their views. Or at least some would have you think.

If you've ever worried about contemporary charges of "bias" or "indoctrination" in the college classroom, you might want to take a look at a recent 5500 word statement by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) titled: "Freedom in the Classroom (2007)." In it you'll see academics struggling to distinguish "education" from "indoctrination." The former is applauded; the latter is not. The statement tries to arrive at accurate definitions and attempts to give you standards for knowing when a faculty member is "stepping over the line" or moving from education to indoctrination? Moreover, it does all of this in an effort to defend the core value we call Academic Freedom.

I'm guessing everyone these days (by that I mean both students and faculty) worries over this issue. I know that a little red light flashes at the edges of my consciousness whenever my free-wheeling classroom discussions edge near controversial topics like contemporary political conflict, religion, the war (as we used to call it back in the 70's). I worry that my asides (all typically designed to keep students engaged and to help them see the relevance of ancient philosophical and religious texts) will be perceived as contributing to a hostile learning environment. At the same time, however, I find it hard to know whether that red light is a healthy effort at self-control or a roadblock to the very inquiry I hope to stimulate in my classroom. I wonder, am I "dumbing my classes down" in order to avoid confronting students with things that they don't like to think about? Isn't my main job the cultivation of a capacity for critical inquiry? Can that be done without challenging accepted conventions?

Take a look at the AAUP statement if you've ever wondered about these issues. You might also look to a commentary on the same topic at: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/11/berube.

Comments welcome.

BY CYRUS PATELL
FACULTY FELLOW

A COMMON ROOM EXTRA

I find Toni Morrison's novel Beloved powerful because it tries to put us inside a slave's head, heart, and gut.

Slavery lies in the background of all of Toni Morrison's novels, but it is in Beloved that she tries to dramatize what it must have felt like to be a slave. The novel depicts the psychological damage that occurs when a human being is treated as property. The process of gaining self-possession that Frederick Douglass describes in his famous Narrative hinges on creating a self through literacy, work, marriage, and autobiography. But as Morrison points out in her essay "The Site of Memory," Douglass's Narrative, like most slave narratives, fails to convey any sense of its protagonist's "interior life." It is this task that she sets herself in Beloved, which chronicles her protagonist Sethe's gradual and painful struggle to possess the self she was not allowed to have as a slave, to become human again after being treated as an animal, to experience social rebirth: "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another" (95).

The guiding trope of the novel is a literary pun: Beloved depicts the dispossession of the slave by telling a story about supernatural possession, by overlaying the conventions of the Gothic novel onto the slave narrative.

Before it was the "Silver Center," it was known as "Main Building." But NYU's first building on that spot was the Gothic Revival structure built in 1837 by Town, Davis & Dakin. It was the first "Collegiate Gothic" building in America.

So here's the question:

What mid-nineteenth-century American novel, published by an author who died in the American Civil War, is set in NYU's "Old University Building"?

To enter the contest, send an e-mail to uhallfunfacts@gmail.com before 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 26. Include the words "Fun Facts Contest 5" in your subject line. In addition to your answer, your message should include your first and last name and your U-Hall room number.

This week's prize is a $25 gift card from Barnes and Noble.

BY CYRUS R. K. PATELL
FACULTY FELLOW

Harrison Ford has starred in some of my favorite films of all time: the original Star Wars trilogy, the Raiders of the Lost Ark trilogy (and soon to be tetralogy!), and Blade Runner (1982), which is about to be re-released as a special edition DVD in a definitive director's version. For my money, Blade Runner is still the best film that director Ridley Scott (Alien, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) has ever made, and now he's been able to polish it to perfection.

The new cut of Blade Runner will be shown at the New York Film Festival this weekend and is set for a limited engagement at the Ziegfeld Theater starting this Friday. It's a truly amazing film, and if you haven't seen it but care at all about either science fiction or film history, you owe it to yourself to check it out! [See the end of this post for information about a U-Hall outing to the film on Thursday, October 11.]

Blade Runner is a Frankenstein narrative and also a narrative about escaped slaves. Four androids (called "replicants" in the film) have returned to Earth illegally from the deep space colonies where they were deployed, in search of their creator and answers about the nature of their existence.

BY CYRUS R. K. PATELL
FACULTY FELLOW-IN-RESIDENCE

By now you've probably heard our president, John Sexton, talk about how we who spend our lives in the university live not in linear time, but in cyclical time. True, our lives move forward, as yours do, but each fall we begin again, welcoming a new crop of first-year students; each spring, we bid adieu to the year's graduates. The summer, in that sense, is our winter, as we wait for the rebirth of the academic year that autumn brings.

If you're a rabid team sports fan, you live in cyclical time too. For the baseball fan, the year begins not on January 1, but when catchers and pitchers report to spring training in late February. It begins in earnest in April, wends its way through the hot summer months, and comes to a close in the chill of late October.

For fans of New York baseball, like President Sexton and me, one kind of year has just ended. When Jorge Posada struck out last night, the baseball year came to a close in Gotham. For the Yankees and their fans (like President Sexton), it may be the end of an era. We Mets fans, however, hope that we are still at the beginnning of a new era.

Teams, too, move in cycles. The Mets won a championship in 1969, were decent until 1973, were miserable through the late seventies and early eighties, had a renaissance in 1986, were terrible again in the early 90s, and now we hope there's a new renaissance a foot. Hard to say about the Yankees: they had a renaissance in the late 1990s, winning four World Series, but some might argue they've been in a downward spiral since they lost the 2001 World Series and are now due for a rebirth.

In any case, I now have a new cycle beginning: it's hockey season, and I'm a New York Rangers fan, and that'll carry me through to the start of the next baseball season and (if the Rangers can fulfill their potential) even beyond.

Meanwhile, President Sexton will be teaching his Gallatin seminar on baseball, "Baseball as a Road to God," again in the spring. Applications are usually available from Gallatin around registration time and due back on December 1. We've invited him to come talk to us about baseball in late March or early April. We'll let you know if he can make it.

I've posted a few thoughts on New York baseball on a couple of my other blog sites:

"The Crypto-History of the Historic Fall of the New York Mets" on patell.org;

"What Can We Learn from New York (Yankee) History" on ahistoryofnewyork.com; and

"Unsubsumed Virtuosos and Solo Operators" (on the Yankees), also on patell.org.

If you're a fan of the Mets or Yankees, let me know what you think -- here or there.

You asked, and we listened! In response to the comments left here on the post entitled "Videos at the Front Desk," the Faculty Fellows have purchased the following DVDs for the U-Hall Video Collection (click the links below to read the corresponding IMDB entry):

Amelie (2001)

American History X (1998)

Les Choristes [The Chorus] (2004)

Downfall [Der Untergang] (2004)

Friday Night Lights (2004)

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)

The Graduate (1967)

Jeux d'enfants [Love Me If You Dare] (2003)

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Run, Lola, Run (1998)

A Very Long Engagement [Un long dimanche de fiançailles] (2004)

All of the discs suggested were purchased. And we're still listening! Leave a comment on this post to suggest other additions to our DVD library. You can find the complete list of U-Hall videos by clicking on the "U-Hall Video Collection" link to the right.

And remember, each non-anonymous comment left on a Common Room post constitutes an entry in our end-of-semester iPod Nano giveaway!