I’ve talked about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments on the site before. Another oft-cited set of observations into the effects of authority on human behavior came from the Standford prison experiment of the 1970s, in which subjects quickly descended to a level of cruelty unexpected by the experimenters – and the experimenters were so captivated by what they were seeing that they let the experiment continue. Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who organized the experiment, has written a book and set up a web site devoted to what he calls the Lucifer Effect – the process by which our surroundings influence us to commit evil actions. Zimbardo applies the insights from the Stanford experiment and his subsequent work to current situations, including the Abu Ghraib scandal. (Zimbardo acted as an expert witness in one of the court-martials.) He also has an essay on the Web discussing the Milgram experiments. I’m giving serious thought to incorporating the book into some of my moral philosophy courses, but for now, the website provides a lot of material worth looking through.
Author Archive
Mapping the Road to Hell
Posted April 7, 2007 By Dave ThomerWhen April Fools Go Wrong
Posted April 6, 2007 By Dave ThomerI had been planning to write a whimsical post about April Fools Day at some point, inspired by seeing April Fools editions of the college newspapers at some of the campus where I teach. When I attended an overnight visit for prospective students at Fordham, The ram had just put out their AF edition, with a front page that proclaimed that condoms and beer would soon go on sale at the Student Deli. At least one of the editors I spoke to that weekend made sure to point out that it was just a joke. Once I got on the staff, I got to participate in some of the April foolery. We did a theme issue in which a giant asteroid was going to hit the campus and destroy the world, which allowed me to put an obvious R.E.M. reference on the front page, and sneak in numerous non-obvious references to Babylon 5 and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on the inside. I kind of wonder how many people actually found those editions funny, and how much of it was just a giant in-joke for our own benefit. At any rate, I got a smile out of seeing those AF papers this year, although I didn’t get a chance to look through all of them.
Which meant I was a little bit surprised when one school made the big city newspapers because some of the jokes about school and archdiocesan leaders were deemed to have stepped over the line. I can’t help but feel bad for those editors – I imagine all the hard work they’ve put into their journalistic careers, and this can’t be the kind of thing you want to be remembered for. Somehow I feel like the story shouldn’t have blown up the way it did, but I guess there’s no easy way to keep something like that purely in the school community.
Anyway, I was going to skip any mention of April Fools at all, since I was kind of bummed out about the subject. Then last Sunday, the comic strip Baldo – about a Latino teenager and his family & friends – featured a strip where the family’s Tia Carmen was dragged away by immigration agents. There’s been no followup at all so far in the weekday strips – they’ve continued the storyline that began before Sunday. But on the creators’ website, there’s a big April Fool graphic. And I’m sitting here wondering what kind of April Fools joke that strip was. It seemed like the creators had a point they wanted to make, but without any kind of context, it’s hard to be sure what the point was. And whatever point one might be inclined to draw from the strip is probably mitigated by the fact that it was, essentially, just a joke. I know humor and satire can make serious points, but you have to be able to tell that it’s satire. Instead, it just seemed like the idea was that April Fools meant that we should take the strip seriously, but not too seriously.
I’m not sure I have an organized point here, other than the notion that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what April Fools Day is good for and if most of us have lost the skill or the restraint to make effective use of it. But for the most part I think I just need to get some of this down on electrons in an effort to get it out of my head.
Disappointed in Disney
Posted April 5, 2007 By Dave ThomerI had seen the reports that Disney is going to add an African-American character to its Princess lineup. My initial reaction, as the father of a five-year-old girl, was, “Well, that’s more merchandise for me to buy.” As some of the plot details have come out, other commentators have pointed out that perhaps Disney hasn’t quite thought through some of the connotations of The Frog Princess. Here’s Larry Wilmore commenting on The Daily Show – the clip is worth a view.
Yep, It’s Baseball Season
Posted April 4, 2007 By Dave ThomerTwo Phillies games, two blown saves, two extra inning losses. It’s gonna be a long April.
And I’m not crazy about the three-man announcing booth, either.
I’ll try and have some positive thoughts once they win a game.
The Bacon I Bring Home
Posted April 3, 2007 By Dave ThomerOK, I’m under the weather, so I’m not getting too far with any extended blogging tonight. But I will say this: I cooked myself some bacon to make some sandwiches to try and feel better. And generally speaking, I was successful. Wellshire Farms has some excellent bacon and breakfast sausage – if you like that kind of thing, I recommend you try them out.
Dewey Watch: What about the Colleges?
Posted April 2, 2007 By Dave ThomerI’ve always been concerned about a disconnect between my college teaching and the Deweyan ideals I have in mind. I open every semester by telling the students that I want the course to be a dialogue, but if the students don’t feel like talking on a given day, things veer more toward monologue. (And in weeks like this, where I’m fighting a cold and losing my voice, that’s decidedly not good.) I use various assignments and examples to try to help students make the connections between philosophical texts and the contemporary world, but I’m not sure if it always clicks. I’ve really been thinking about this a lot since I started taking the education courses – in a fairly Deweyan way, they’ve been helpful in getting me to think about ways to implement some of the ideas I’ve absorbed from books like Democracy and Education.
In light of those concerns, I think this essay in the Harvard Crimson is a well-done use of Dewey to criticize the reading/lecture approach that marks so much of higher education. Here’s the closing paragraph, but I’d say the whole thing is worth a read:
It is a telling truism about undergraduate life at Harvard that we learn more from our fellow students than we do in class. It certainly describes my experience, particularly when assessed against the classes I took in the Core. However, it is not simply that peer learning often trumps academic learning, but that the two so frequently exist in entirely separate spheres. A truly revitalized undergraduate education would adopt methods that more strongly involve undergraduates as collaborators in each other’s educations; to this end, the Task Force on General Education’s final report should mark the start of a larger conversation about how Harvard can ensure that its teaching methods are every bit as enlightened as the canon of knowledge it endorses.
Art of the Playlist
Posted April 1, 2007 By Dave ThomerI have finally saved up enough cash to order my own new iPod Nano, and as I eagerly await its arrival, I’ve been putting together some playlists within iTunes. Now, one of the reasons I want to upgrade to a Nano is that I want to be able to store the 1200 songs I have in my library on one device, rather than the 64 or so that fit on my current Rio Chiba. So I imagine I’ll spend a lot of my time listening to the entire library on shuffle (as I’m doing right now), or listening to specific albums, or perhaps all songs by a particular artist. But there may be times that I am in specific moods, and I figure it wouldn’t be bad to have playlists ready to go for those occasions. Now, almost as long as I’ve been making musical compilations, I’ve referred to at least one of them by the name Daves Rich Pageant. It’s a riff on the R.E.M. album Lifes Rich Pageant which a friend once coined for me, and once I like something I tend to stick with it. Right now I’m using the Daves Rich Pageant tag for a general Best of the Best compilation – my favorite song from my favorite artists. (I try to limit myself to one song per artist per compilation. These rules are somewhat random, especially now in the iPod age. Once upon a time they helped me make sure every mix tape had some diversity on it.) The heck of it is, my memory must be shot. Because when I later put together two themed collections, I kept sticking songs there that I had already put on the latest version of DRP. What can I say? I guess I have a lot of ties in the favorite-song category, and I don’t always remember which one I picked.
The themes I’ve picked so far are Sonic Caffeine, for when I just want to hear a bunch of up-tempo songs that’ll get my enthusiasm and energy level going, and Sunrise Walk. Since I never really am awake at sunrise to take walks, I’m going more for a certain vibe. When I used to be really nocturnal, I sometimes stayed up until after dawn. And when I would walk outside, watching the sun come up and the world stir awake, I would feel a strange mix of exultation and calm. It’s a certain feeling of reflection, taking stock of the situation and feeling hope for what’s to come. There are certain songs that fit that mood, and I’m curious to see how it feels when I listen to them all in a row the next time I’m walking to class.
iTunes’ smart playlists already let me organize my library by year of release, but I’m still wondering if I should put together a list of songs from, say, high school or college. That might be a bit too backward-looking even for me. We shall see. In the meantime I’m gonna need to think of some more themes.
Sometimes It Just Comes Down to Money
Posted March 31, 2007 By Dave ThomerChris Lehmann at Practical Theory recently wrote a post titled “School 0.5,” about the frustration he feels when he realizes that Philadelphia school just don’t have the resources to implement the technology-driven reforms that he and other education bloggers and thinkers refer to as School 2.0. He also has a follow-up post where he discusses the reasons that a strict comparison of the dollars a district spends won’t tell you what resources they have available to them. In addition to the cost of living issues I’ve mentioned before, there are also issues like interest on debt which mean that missing resources from the past have a negative effect on the present. It’s an interesting set of posts, and they tie into a concept that one prominent urban educator called the “education debt.” I get disheartened sometimes just hearing from some of my colleagues in the certification program about the conditions Philadelphia public schools face. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try and run a school in those conditions.
Corrected Info on Fattah
Posted March 30, 2007 By Dave ThomerPlease note an update to Wednesday night’s post on the Philadelphia mayoral election aand Chaka Fattah’s decision not to release his tax returns. Thursday’s Inquirer reports that there is, in fact, a confidentiality agreement that allows NBC10 to terminate Renee Chenault-Fattah’s contract if there is a breach of confidentiality. The Inquirer says that Chenault-Fattah provided a copy of the contract to the newspaper. On Wednesday the Daily News had reported that NBC10 refused to confirm the existence of such a clause, which led me to make my original posting. At the moment I can’t spot anything wrong with the Daily News’s reporting, and I’m a little uncomfortable at how a news outlet like NBC10 winds up having such influence over a story. But that’s the pitfall that comes with this situation.
Please note a further update to this story: NBC10 has waived the confidentiality requirement, and Chenault-Fattah says she still won’t let Fattah release the tax return information.
I’m starting to think that Chenault-Fattah is the one who comes off looking the worst in all of this. And I’m just cynical enough to briefly wonder if that’s the idea.
It also occurs to me that with Fattah in Congress, where he votes on defense appropriations and telecommunications policy, there’s probably more of a conflict of interest potential with GE (the parent company of NBC10) than there would be if Fattah were to win the mayoral race. What a world.
Philosophy Lost in USA Today
Posted March 29, 2007 By Dave ThomerI’m just going to throw up a link to an article in yesterday’s USA Today discussing Lost’s use of philosophical figures as namesakes for many of its characters. I’m quoted a couple of times in the article, but the real interesting discussion is probably in the comments thread. (There goes the online edition beating the print version again.)