William Pannapacker wants to destroy higher education in the humanities.

Yesterday, I was reading CAA’s year in review newsletter and was drawn to the title of Pannapacker’s July 27 article, Over Educated, Underemployed: How to fix higher education. Pannapacker received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1999 and is now an Associate Professor at Hope College. Given that he is an academic, I wasn’t sure what to expect upon reading the article. But I can tell you that I wasn’t expecting to be absolutely infuriated. Pannapacker seems to forget that he was, at one time, a graduate student. He singlehandedly manages to insult prospective and current graduate students everywhere.

The article begins by Pannapacker agreeing with journalist and writer Anya Kamenetz “that graduate students are ‘really smart suckers.” Already off to such a pleasant start, Pannapacker continues by stating his view on higher education in the humanities: “higher education in the humanities exists mainly to provide cheap, inexperienced teachers for undergraduates so that a shrinking percentage of tenured faculty members can meet an ever-escalating demand for specialized research.” He proceeds to tell us that he cannot recommend graduate study in the humanities unless prospective students are independently wealthy, have an extensive network, or are considering graduate school to advance up one’s current career ladder. His first suggestion for improving graduate school in the humanities is that there should be an organization that focuses on assisting and preparing graduate students for the working world. His article thus far didn’t provoke me into a rage, but everything after this point did.

Pannapacker’s second helpful hint for improving graduate studies is – and I quote this verbatim because it was shocking – Expose who’s really teaching undergraduates.

“Reliable, up-to-date information should be available about the employment practices of individual universities. Prospective undergraduates and their parents should be able to choose institutions on the basis of who is actually doing the teaching: tenured faculty with a long-term relationship to the institution and the protections of academic freedom (necessary for honest grading), or an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations). This information should have an impact on institutional rankings and the standing of graduates. Eventually, that might begin to reverse the trend toward gutting undergraduate teaching (now about 80 percent off the tenure track). If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.”

Let’s start with the first ridiculous claim, who is “really” teaching our undergraduates: “an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations).” Honestly? Dear Mr. Pannapacker, if graduate students aren’t teaching while in graduate school under the guidance of their more experienced professors, how else are they supposed to learn to teach? And in such a specialized manner? What graduate program would even think of letting its students graduate without teaching experience? How can you assume that TAs would happily and shadily give out high grades in exchange for or in hopes of high evaluations, and that they have low expectations? If any of my TAs at UCLA had low expectations for their students, I would not have done half as well in my “actual” (actual being work done for the high and mighty professor) coursework. My TAs would have been doing me, and themselves, a disservice by not having such high expectations. I would be disappointed because I wouldn’t be challenged enough in my education, and TAs would be disappointed because their teaching skills wouldn’t improve by clinging to the training wheels that are low expectations. One of the main reasons students enter graduate study is to learn how to become a teacher of that field and how to balance research with teaching.

The final claim in this paragraph simply made me feel sad after I read it. “If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.” Shortchanged? Why would graduate students be graduate students if they were not extremely knowledgable about their field? The word shortchanged assumes all of the above – that TAs have low expectations of their students and are lazy enough to not bother to try to push their students to excel. Graduate students more than anyone know the value of their field, and they can disseminate that knowledge on a more digestible level than professors often can. Parents should be grateful that their students have an “army” of graduate students whose purpose (aside from research) is to teach, share their knowledge, and along the way, to make their field more relatable and easily understandable to anyone who might be struggling with the coursework or the attending professor’s teaching.

Pannapacker’s next suggestion is to Tell the truth about graduate school. He argues that many faculty members see themselves as heroes who have “‘saved’ a student from entering business.” But faculty members, Pannapacker says, are also academic parents of sorts. They

Pannapacker’s grammar makes it difficult for me to understand if the people who have “little to no experience” in the real world are the faculty or the students (sorry, children) or both – but either way, it’s unfair of Pannapacker to assume this for either party. Professors aren’t ignorant to the goings on of the real world, regardless if they’ve ever worked in corporate America. Students are getting more experience working “outside of higher education” with each year that budgets are slashed and they are forced to enter the working world. I personally have been out of school for a year and a half, and it is not something that I relish. Some days, my brain cells feel as though they’re turning to mush. Pannapacker, this is not what you want for the smart and able graduate students of America! American is already full of enough people outside of higher education and the next generation is getting stupider as K-12 education in America slowly dies. This is not the time to be preaching that students should not become graduate students and should instead abandon academia for the drudgery of the real world, leaving their knowledge to waste in the dark gutters of their minds.

And how about the nice pat on the back for those graduate students who are lucky to be such. Pannapacker doesn’t think getting accepted into a graduate program is something to be proud of – but don’t worry, your professors do! And they’re wrong to do so. Faculty foolishly ”regard a graduate-school placement as an accomplishment…” It doesn’t matter that you’ve slaved away on your senior or Master’s thesis and produced the foundations of what likely signifies you as a promising scholar. It doesn’t matter that you paid hundreds of dollars in application fees and spent weeks hunting down, researching, and talking to prospective advisors. You wasted your money visiting schools. And when your acceptance letter came, with whatever degree of funding offered to you, you should’ve shrugged it off. Got into Harvard? Full ride? No big deal. They’re just letting “inexperienced” and “really smart suckers” in, and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on them. (Yes, I’m using Harvard because it’s Pannapacker’s alma mater.) Bah humbug, I say! If you got into graduate school, no matter if you attend an Ivy League or a small state school, congratulations! And to those of you hoping for a nice crisp envelope filled with good wishes in your mailbox in the next couple months, I hope you get it.

Pannapacker argues repeatedly for free information, and I have nothing against making information, especially statistics about job placement, readily available to prospective and current students. This brings us to Pannapacker’s fourth and fifths points: Disrupt the graduate-school labor scheme and Train students for real careers. The fourth point of this article doesn’t appear to represent any real threat to morale in the same way the previous sections have. However, it is erroneous. I have spoken to professors from Ivy Leagues, small schools, and public but privately funded schools across the nation over the past year and a half, and not one of them let me off the phone without telling me about their department’s success or difficulties with job placement, whether I asked or not.

Pannapacker’s fifth point is more problematic. In one of the longest run-on sentences ever, he writes:

“Graduate programs must stop stigmatizing everything besides tenure-track positions at research universities that almost no one will get. They should cultivate an “alternative academic” sensibility by redesigning graduate school as professional training, including internships and networking opportunities, and working with other departments and programs, including partnerships with other institutions, granting agencies, government, and business to cultivate humanists who are prepared for hybrid careers in technology (“the digital humanities”), research, consulting, fundraising, publishing, and ethical leadership. … The largest challenge [facing these reforms] is the misguided investment of most tenured faculty members in the current system combined with the passivity of most graduate students and adjuncts, aggravated by the fear of unemployment that is now a permanent characteristic of academic life.”

In the four years of research I’ve done about graduate school and various programs,  I’ve never had the sense that graduate school as a whole was just going to train me for a life in academia. I realized that in a way, graduate school is what you make of it. It was obvious to me that if I wanted to gear my studies more toward curating, I knew I’d need to have internships in museums or galleries and coursework in conservation and museum studies before I’d be truly prepared for a curatorial position. If I wanted to simply be a professor, graduate school was already going to prepare me for that through teaching assistantships. It’s difficult for me to think of a single person I’ve talked to considering graduate school in the humanities who wants to use their humanities degree in the corporate world. This isn’t because they aren’t aware of their options. It is because an advanced degree in the humanities signifies something deeper than just wanting to build a career in the corporate world. It means that the person getting the degree has decided to devote a significant portion of their life to the detailed study of whatever field they’re in, and that they hope to continue that curiosity once they obtain their degree. Certainly there is nothing wrong with using one’s degree in any of the areas Pannapacker mentioned; I just think there is a disconnect between his idea that current graduate programs stigmatize “alternative” career options.

I’ve spoken to a lot of professors over the years, and I had one professor tell me that one of his active goals is to check his graduate students’ C.V.s after each semester. They discuss how professor and student could work together to make the C.V. as attractive as possible, be it through publication of a recent paper or co-authoring an article together. He also told me he actively seeks out internships and other opportunities for his students and has had incredible success placing them in jobs after they graduate because of the personal attention he gives his students. He’s assisted in placing his students happily in traditional teaching positions, conservation, curatorial work, non-profit work, and even, if memory serves me, government work.What a teacher! After that conversation, this professor became one of my academic heroes. He represents a unique case in the professors I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to – but only because he went so in depth with me about his concerns and efforts. Another professor was candid with me and told me that their department had tough luck placing students in recent years, and that I should take that into consideration. In my experience, professors do absolutely care about the placement of their students, wish for their success, and strive to assist their students in discovering what the best career option is for them.

Finally, we arrive at Pannapacker’s sixth point, which is equally disturbing as the second: Just walk away.

Pannapacker’s article ignited such debate in the comments section on Slate that Slate published a followup article with responses from current graduate students. What do you think of Pannapacker’s ideas to improve graduate school in the humanities?

Tags: Academia, Essay, Grad school, Higher Education, Humanities, News, Opinion

Donatello, Mary Magdalene, late 1430s?

This Mary Magdalene was sculpted by Donatello. Artistically and materialistically, the sculpture departs from his smooth bronze and marble work. Mary stands over 6′ tall, made of wood and gesso.  More than stone or marble, I believe the wood and gesso enabled Donatello to sculpt something staggering, unique and psychologically telling. The piece is a slight enigma to the art history world — we don’t know exactly when it was made, for whom, and where it was originally placed.

Mary’s face is the most telling psychological part of the sculpture. Her lips are parted, as if she’s caught in mid-action or sentence. Her hands aren’t quite joined together, and she gazes outward with intensity. She seems to be completely, introspectively fixated on Christ; meditating with an awestruck expression at the things he did for her.

It is evident from her facial features — her hallowed cheeks, missing teeth, sunken eyes, mangy hair — that her both her sinful life and her reformed life as an ascetic have each taken their toll on her soul, manifest through her physical appearance. This was a deliberate choice on Donatello’s part. He could have easily created a seductress for his Magdalene, a strong and capable woman with long, flowing hair and unsurpassed beauty. But he didn’t. Donatello sculpted Mary’s appearance to tell a story of repentance and redemption. Her body bears witness to the physical deprivation she endured as an ascetic after her Lord ascended to heaven. She stands before the viewer as a penitent follower of Christ.

Donatello, Mary Magdalene, 1430s?

It is Mary’s hair that tips the viewer off as to who exactly she is upon first viewing. Her hair, now tangled and ratty, covering her whole body, tips the viewer off: this Mary anointed Christ’s feet with oil and tears, dried them with her hair, repented, and eventually became an ascetic. As told in the Gospels, Mary Magdalene once poured precious perfume on Christ’s head and washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair (Luke 7:36-50). (There is a dispute among scholars as to which of the many women Christ knew did this, but for our purposes, it is Mary Magdalene.) Mary Magdalene was, by tradition, a beautiful harlot who later became an ascetic. According to the Golden Legend, she left her sinful life to become an ascetic in the south of France because “Jesus wished to sustain her naught but with heavenly meats, allowing her no earthly satisfaction.” Her past and present are wrapped up together in one image and her entire life is out in the open for the viewer to see.

Donatello, Mary Magdalene, 1430s?

In the moment that the viewer sees her, Mary appears to be caught up in a personal moment between her and Christ. She doesn’t confront or invite the viewer directly with her gaze, but the openness of the form of the sculpture invites the viewer into her space. The viewer is taken into this moment of quiet and internal conversation, if not to pray with her, then to contemplate her story — and more importantly, perhaps, one’s own spiritual life.

Mary Magdalene is currently displayed in a circular enclosure that one can circumambulate. Whether or not that is how she was originally displayed, art historians don’t know. However, this current display is important because the sculpture can be seen from every possible angle, and every angle of Mary’s face yields new insight into her psyche and the psychological fervor of the moment . Her disheveled appearance and the tortured expression on her face are the result of not only the physical demands of her penance (life as an ascetic), but also the result of the memory she’s reliving—the moment when Christ forgave her. She is caught in a moment of thankfulness, of receiving grace, and glimpsing hope. This moment is also expressed through her hair (which covers and clothes her whole body) because it serves as

What other works that you’ve seen call the viewer to piety and introspection?

Tags: Art History, Artistic Intention, Catholic, Donatello, Essay, Interaction, Mary Magdalene, Renaissance, Sacred Art, Sculpture

I remember the first and only time I’ve experienced Stendhal’s Syndrome. I was traveling in Rome. It was 2007, and I was 18. I had just seen the Pantheon, eaten chocolate gelato for a refreshing treat, and was walking down a dusty street. As I walked past the facade of La Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio, I felt the cool air sweep by me from the church’s open doors. A cold, Baroque church seemed like a great place to rest. I soon discovered it was more than that – it was treasure of a building. I was floored as soon as I stepped inside. The magnanimity of the art and architecture stirred a deep need in me to sit down lest I lose my breath or faint. This was not the most ornate church I had or have ever been in, but it certainly is one of the more impressive, imposing ones. It demanded a certain reaction from me – awe and wonder. It compelled me to look up and meditate on the life of St. Ignatius above me, caring nothing for my own religious creed. All this from a church, a place set apart as sacred space.

Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of St. Ignatius, late 1600s, Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio, Rome, Italy.

Berini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1647-52, Cornaro Chapel, S.M. della Vittoria, Rome, Italy.

I have since seen and experienced art and architecture by my favorite artists and architects, but no matter how excited I got, no matter if I cried or did a little happy jump or stood quietly in contemplative reverence, the breath was never knocked out of me nor my mind so held captive the way it was when I stepped into Sant’Ignazio. One of my most-loved churches is Santa Maria della Vittoria, which I visited on the same trip to Rome. I was expecting to be amazed. Yet, I didn’t swoon under its kaufers or become overwhelmed when I at last saw the great masterpiece I had been anxious to see, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. I was absolutely thrilled and enamored, but I was not breathless. I was moved to emotion and pensive thought, but not because of the force of the sculpture before me: because I had read and committed to memory the powerful, mysterious story behind this sculpture, its artist, and its church.

I cannot satisfactorily attribute my reaction to Sant’Ignazio to mere surprise: I have been surprised by many wonders of architecture, some much more complex and detailed, such as the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, which is one of the most admirable and artistically expansive buildings I have been in. The magnificence of the Palazzo Ducale made me wonder if the way I was feeling about the frescoes and the ornateness around me was something intentional, or if I was so used to concrete and dry wall that I was merely impressed by anything. What do artists intend when they create art? Do they create art so that it invokes certain feelings and reactions in its viewers? In themselves? Why does some art sway us and other art does not? Is it possible to approach art too rationally?

Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale. Center: Tintoretto, Paradise, 1587-90. Venice, Italy.

Perhaps these questions are best answered on an individual basis. For me, knowing the background behind a work of art and knowing a little of the life of its artist increases the effect it has on me. I get a giddy sense of fulfillment when I can pinpoint, either from previous knowledge or by mere observation, how an artist achieved a certain effect or how they portrayed events and/or people. For me, viewing a work of art is more than looking at something pretty. Each artwork has a history, tells a story, and has a message. Far be it from me to ignore these vital parts of art, to not get involved in what is being displayed.

I was recently speaking to a friend who told me that he is only emotionally swayed by one artist, Ilya Repin. He finds the history and emotional force behind Repin’s paintings to be unparalleled. I found it interesting that by my friend’s admission, only this artist moved him. All other art is merely art for its own sake.  Someone else I know traveled to Paris recently and relayed that they found the architecture and art (specifically, Notre Dame and the Louvre) to be an extreme bore, and they couldn’t wait to get home. My first reaction was complete shock. My second reaction was more intellectual. Why and how could this person find the arguably great art and architecture in Paris to be boring? Is it because, as Melinda says, my acquaintance maintained a sort of “mental immunity” to the art before them? What form of artistic expression captures their attention and admiration, if not even Paris can do so? If architects and artists do indeed intend to provoke a reaction from their viewers, they are not successful with the aforementioned people. Is it their fault that they are unsuccessful? The fault of the architectural style, artwork,  or iconography?   I doubt I will ever have an answer for these questions, but they are worth asking.

How do you approach art? Does it matter to you if a work of art tells a story, or is art its own entity created solely for aesthetic enjoyment?

Tags: Art History, Art Theory, Artistic Intention, Bernini, Essay, Experience, Jesuits, Sant'Ignazio, Stendhal's Syndrome

This brief exploration stems from a conversation I had with an art history professor earlier this year. “Well, what is resemblance?” he mused. Ever since he asked, I’ve had it nipping at the back of my brain, waiting to be at the least explored and at the best, powerfully and philosophically answered. I cannot explore it as in depth as I would like – I lack the time and resources to give it justice – but nevertheless, I wanted to try to scratch the tiniest surface of this question.

What is resemblance?

We are caught, when asking this question, in the never-ending “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” paradox.

Da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489-1490)

The pipe pictured is in form a pipe, but it is merely a depiction. As a painting, not a material object, the pipe lacks function. Does the painted pipe resemble a real pipe? It resembles a pipe in its form and shape, and yet, in functionality, dimension, and physicality, it does not. This begs the question whether pipes are only pipes if they are tangible objects. For instance, in Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine (Ferret), we call her ferret such, but using Magritte’s logic, the ferret is not a ferret at all – it is a series of brush strokes on canvas. The same can be said of any object or thing depicted in art: this is the maddening dilemma that the question of resemblance raises.

The question, I think, becomes more complex when its focus it turned to humans. Do paintings and photographs truly resemble their subjects? Resemblance is tied to representation, which David Summers describes as consisting of three parts: “a thing, its actual image, and a mental image. … So we say that paintings correspond not so much to things as to sensations, perceptions, and conceptions; or that they are, in equally mental terms, ‘fantastic’ or ‘ideal.’” Art represents its subjects in the best, neutral, or worst light based on the skills of the artist, ideologies, and styles of the time. This is especially true of paintings whose subjects were status figures – represent Patron X in the most moral, beautiful (powerful, handsome) manner, in such a way that all who look at this painting will understand that Patron X contains these moral, outward, and/or elite qualities. Exterior representation evidences the inward state of the pictured subject. As Alain de Botton discusses in The Architecture of Happiness:

De Botton believes the opposite is true in the modern day, even as we look retrospectively at works of past centuries:

I agree with regards to modern day photography – we want truth from our photographs, which freeze events and speak of the truths, be they horrid or joyful, of the world around us – and perhaps some street artists. There is a yearning for naturalism/realism today: ‘honest’ images have become the ideal. However, idealism in the traditional sense doesn’t necessarily constitute physical or, to borrow from De Botton, moral resemblance to a real person, place or thing: ideal art portrays only the best qualities of its subject based on the morals, artistic styles, fashions and aesthetic guidelines of the time.

Limbourg Brothers, Saint Paul the Hermit Witnessing a Christian Tempted, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, early 1400s.

Forgive me if I use some of art history’s classics (and not-so classics) in the following image comparisons. Pictures say more than words, sometimes, especially in the complex question of resemblance. I do believe that resemblance depends on the skill of the artist, which, as we’ll see from the following images, isn’t necessarily developed in a way that we might say is “realistic” by today’s standards until at least the (High) Renaissance. Although, of course, during the time in which they were produced, it could be said that such artworks did indeed resemble their models or subjects: artistic skills and/or devices to suggest otherwise (such as skill in realism or use of camera obscura) hadn’t been discovered yet or were not in popular use. In painting, resemblance also hinges on the space the artist is given (large scale work vs. small scale), their skill-level working within that space, their materials, and most prominently, the ideals of beauty and artistic aesthetics that surround an artwork’s creation.

Duccio: Madonna & Child, c. 1333; Simone Martini, The Annunciation (detail), c. 1245-1300; Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck, c. 1535

Perspective was still being developed at the time of Duccio and Martini. In the Madonna with the Long Neck (and other art in the same period), art was approaching figural representations much more realistically, although there were still some points of exaggeration, as you can see in the Madonna’s long neck. Parmigianino was part of the Mannerist movement, which elongated and exaggerated humans.

L: Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Caravaggio, c. 1620; R: Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (Detail), c. 1610

These two portraits were painted in the 1600s. Perspective and modeling (shading of figures/objects) were now roughly two centuries in the making and had been wonderfully developed in that time. With the push for realistic art from the Baroque movement, we see here two examples of the face of the same man: the master of surprise, drama, and emotion, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. On the left is a portrait of him by Ottavio Leoni, painted ten years after his untimely death. On the right, a self-portrait of Caravaggio, self-cast in the character of a freshly decapitated Goliath. These portraits present two different versions of Caravaggio. The Ottavio portrait displays him as arguably healthy, distinguished, and “normal” in appearance and countenance. The Goliath self-portrait yields a much more sorrowful representation: a dead man, still aware, as John Varriano masterfully discusses, of its awful situation. The painting was made at a desperate time for Caravaggio. This will not be discussed here except to observe that mood, circumstance, style, angle, and light are all factors that distinguish appearance and thus, resemblance.

Resemblance can also be a choice made by the artist, for instance, to make a statement, as is the case with the Goliath self-portrait and the following images by Willem De Kooning, who painted wild, fascinating, and I daresay erratic paintings all his career, and Pablo Picasso, whose artistic skills were diverse, and whose ‘symbolism’ or ‘messages’ and Eastern influences were often prevalent.

De Kooning, Marilyn Monroe (1954); Photo: Marilyn Monroe; Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Mme. Soler (1905)

De Kooning reduces Marilyn Monroe to a series of brush strokes signifying her hair, lips, eyes, and body. In other words, she isn’t represented in an easily recognizable manner, especially to the untrained eye, as Marilyn Monroe. Rather, his painting resembles more merely a series of strokes on canvas than a person. But this was De Koonings style – Abstract Expressionism – and within the limits and guidelines of this style, perhaps his painting of Marilyn can be considered a resemblance of the real woman. Picasso, on the other hand, had variegated style periods. As you can see from his Mme. Soler (1905), he was capable of painting what we might call a “normal” looking woman. However, Picasso was heavily influenced by new discoveries and new fascination with the Eastern world, and this is evident in his art, as you can see in Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was painted two years later. Modern art historians read into Demoiselles and discuss it in terms of Picasso’s perspective on the psychological state of women: they’re wild, unpredictable, even vile; and yet, he is fascinated with them, and the strangeness of it – the masked women depicted in graphic, obscurely cubist poses – nearly demands that we be fascinated with them, too, because they do not outwardly resemble any woman we would encounter in the world.

I hope this brief discussion and the above images have given you some perspective on the question of resemblance. I will be returning to the question of resemblance with regards to photography in another post. To close with these perfectly fitting words from Pablo Picasso:

What do you think, dear reader? Feel free to let me know. I am definitely interested in exploring the question of resemblance further, and would love to hear your thoughts and start a dialogue.

Tags: Art, Art History, Art Theory, Artistic Intention, Essay, Resemblance