Painting New Orleans, and Painting the Interior of America: The Art of Mitchell Long

The first time I saw Mitchell Long’s paintings displayed was at an exhibition held in a private home in 2008. I was immediately struck by the quality of his brushwork—by the way in which he could suggest so much with so few strokes of color. I was struck as well by his sense of line, and of depth; again and again he is able to configure the streets and the buildings of New Orleans in ways that I find my eye can’t help but keep coming back to. I was struck by the subtlety with which his layered oils capture the soft light of New Orleans. And I was struck by the utter absence of that touristy showiness that characterizes so many paintings of New Orleans by less distinguished artists.

In the years since then I’ve kept up with Long’s work—with the many paintings he’s done of the old industrial building that for many years provided studio space for him and for a dozen or more other artists; with the many luminous paintings he’s done of the French Quarter; with the paintings he’s done of churches; with the great series of paintings he’s done from the roof of a hotel in the Quarter, looking down and out over the roofs of Marigny and Bywater. Commercially, Long has had his ups and downs over that time—including more than a few lean years when he was able to get by only by selling small works for $50 to the tourists at Jackson Square. But to my mind he has always remained the finest living painter of New Orleans—and one of America’s finest living painters of city life.

Long has been enjoying greater success in recent years, but it’s been as much the result of new themes in his painting as it has been of people recognizing the talent he brings to his paintings of street scenes on Royal or Chartres or Decatur; a new Mitchell Long painting these days is as likely to be of a checkout counter at Costco or Walmart or IKEA as it is of a scene in the French Quarter or Bywater.

What’s behind these Mitchell Long paintings of the interiors of big box stores? In one sense, what’s behind them is thirty years of painting experience—the years in which Long developed his extraordinary techniques of brushwork and of building color and of painting light in depicting New Orleans street scenes. But New Orleans (and Miami) street scenes were never the entirety of what Long’s work was about. For years Long has also occasionally painted interiors with other foci—most frequently, kitchen scenes. It was during the pandemic that Long turned his gaze in a further direction and began to paint interior scenes in some of America’s largest big box retail stores—Walmart, IKEA, and, especially, Costco.

Long’s images of these ‘landscapes’ are arresting visually, and have to them a strange and quite original beauty. To some viewers they also hint at deeper themes—indeed, at some of the deepest themes of modern American life. They can be read as depicting worlds in which humans are dwarfed by their surroundings; worlds in which all light is artificial light; worlds in which little stands out against the steel gray except a few bright splashes of color. They can be read as worlds in which the wide aisles of capitalism and the ‘checking-out’ conveyor belts of consumerism are at the center of the life experience. Row upon row, the lines and the colors Long has chosen can be taken to suggest the shine and the blur of consumerism, and of capitalism itself. And, regardless of how much much one reads into them, Long’s Costco paintings give us a sense of reflected light—light reflected off the Costco floors, light reflected off the ceilings, light reflected off the COVID plastic barriers at the checkout counters. In these reflections it’s possible to read as well the suggestion that these are worlds from which we can never completely emerge; it’s possible to read into them worlds in which America itself is reflected, and (perhaps less comfortably) a part of the viewer is reflected too.

I’ll accompany this post with images of a few of the Mitchell Long works that Maureen and I have purchased over the years. You can check out many more Mitchell Long works on his website— https://www.mitchell-long.com/cityscapes .

Grammar, Punctuation, and Gun Violence: A Short History of the Second Amendment to the American Constitution

The Second Amendment to the American Constitution is a striking example of the eighteenth-century habit of placing punctuation marks almost at random—as a way of suggesting where one might pause in reading a long sentence rather than as a way of indicating grammatical structure. Here is the Second Amendment as it was commonly punctuated in early versions:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

To punctuate the sentence in that way is to give it two more commas than it should have should be done according to the rules of grammar and punctuation that have prevailed now for the past roughly two hundred years. According to those rules of grammar and punctuation, the structure of the sentence calls for just one comma:

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

When there is just one comma, the meaning between the two parts of the sentence becomes far more clear. Grammatically, the first part of the sentence (“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state”) is a participial phrase. The phrase as a whole acts to modify or restrict the meaning of the entire main clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”). The participial phrase provides the rationale for the principle set out in the main clause—and implicitly, limits its application. A more straightforward way of conveying the same idea would be to use a word such aslike “because”:

Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The historical context here was one in which a new nation had recently defeated the British army. The American states fought for the most part not with a standing army of their own (though the newly-formed Continental Army certainly played an important role) but with the militias of the various former colonies that had now become the states of the union. These militias were formed of ordinary citizens (most of them farmers) with limited training; they were assembled only when the security of the colony (or state) was threatened. The members of the militia were expected to provide their own arms and ammunition, as well as other supplies, and they were not paid a salary.

As is now acknowledged by the vast majority of military historians, these militias played a vital role in defeating the British. But what about after the war? What if America were under threat of attack by the British in the future? Given that the maintenance of a standing army of any size was an expensive proposition for a new nation, and that many Americans still worried at war’s end about their future security, it is not surprising that most states did not permanently disband their militias at the end of the Revolutionary War. (The worries were not all over the possibility of a renewed conflict with the British; many in some states worried that the federal gGovernment and its standing army might constitute a future threat to one or more of the individual states.)

The historical record here is complicated in several respects (for one, state militias after the Revolutionary War were supposed to be largely subject to control by the federal government). But some things are clear; one of these is that the phrases “keep arms” and “bear arms” were at the time used almost exclusively with regard to this sort of military context. University of Chicago professor Alison LaCroix and three linguists concluded in 2019, after a review of the entire database of texts from the era, that uses of the phrases “keep arms” and “bear arms” to refer “to hunting or [to] personal self-defence” were so rare in the late eighteenth century as to be “almost nonexistent.” Such phrases were used “almost exclusively in a military context.”

Until the 1980s, the American Supreme Court paid attention both to the grammar and to the history; the Court , and was of the view that the Second Amendment conferred at most quite limited rights so far as firearms were concerned. Then the National Rifle Association lobbying effort kicked into high gear. Nowadays, many Americans are unaware either of the grammatical issues at stake or of the historical context in which the Second Amendment was enacted; tens of millions take the NRA at its word when it argues that the Second Amendment to the Constitution should be interpreted as giving any individual the right to carry a gun of any sort, anywhere, at any time.

The Cost of Free

At many colleges and universities there has for years now been a push to encourage the use of free OER materials as course texts. At not a few institutions, faculty are being not just encouraged to consider free OER materials, but pressured to go this route. This post looks at the background, and assesses the degree to which the push for academics and students to rely on free online learning materials may be harmful to learning.

The Price of Textbooks: It’s not hard to see why the idea of providing college and university course text materials free-of-charge became very attractive in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries; many textbook publishers were setting absurdly high prices for their publications. Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s not a few textbook prices seemed to be driven purely by greed on the part of the publisher. Here’s one example: a bestselling textbook from that era, which was published in modest sized paperback format (providing an overview of its subject in fewer than 300 pages, with no color illustrations or “bells and whistles” that might add to the production cost), was priced for many years at roughly $100. The subject, ironically enough, was moral philosophy. Because the author was well-known and the book well-regarded, the publisher got away with it; a considerable number of academics kept adopting the book year after year, no matter the price, because they regarded it as the best book of its kind. But many other academics (and certainly many students) were outraged—and rightly so.

By the turn of the century, it was not uncommon to find many of the large multinational publishers pricing large, hardcover textbooks at $200 or $300. And in the 2010s the prices of the bound book versions of many university textbooks published by those large multinational publishers went even higher, as those publishers began to realign their approach so as to encourage book rentals and all-electronic delivery models. (As a byproduct, of course, the used-book market for course texts went into a steep decline.)

The Call for OER: It’s no wonder that more and more academics began to look for alternatives to traditional textbooks. One popular choice, as a sensible alternative to course text compilations that had done little more than bring together a selection of academic articles between two covers, was to abandon such textbooks in favor of posting the instructor’s own choice of articles (the rights for which are typically already cleared for university-wide use through the university library) on the institution’s learning management system. That’s an approach that continues to work well for many instructors in many courses. But there were and are a wide range of courses for which no collection of academic articles could possibly be an adequate stand-in for a textbook. Many people thus began to call for free textbooks to be developed—and that call began to be answered. The move towards OER (Open Educational Resources, as these free materials came to be known), steadily gathered steam. A number of state and provincial governments offered support, as did many foundations, and hundreds of academics began to make learning materials that they had developed available online, for free.

In some cases, these materials were electronic textbooks that professors had developed for their own courses but had been unable to find a commercial publisher for; in other cases, they were electronic textbooks by academics who had no desire to deal with a commercial publisher. And many bore little resemblance to the traditional textbook; some instructors posted point-form lecture notes to OER sites, and some developed sets of student exercises for use either with or without an accompanying textbook.

It should be emphasized that some OER resources were and are highly innovative in nature and absolutely first rate in quality. A high percentage of the best ones seem to be in the Pure and Applied Sciences, but there are numerous examples in the Humanities and Social Sciences too. In Philosophy, the for all X textbook, for example, is very highly thought of, as are some other OER resources in logic and critical thinking. OpenStax textbooks appear to be developed through a professional process of review and editing that resembles that of traditional publishers, and to be generally of fairly high quality. In English Studies, a good example of a high quality free online educational resource is surely the For Better for Verse prosody site developed by Herbert Tucker, a University of Virginia professor who has long been one of the world’s leading authorities on poetry of the Victorian period. The site accurately describes itself as providing

an interactive on-line tutorial that can train you to scan traditionally metered English poetry. Here you can get practice and instant feedback in one important way of analyzing, and developing an ear and a feel for, accentual-syllabic verse.

In other words, students can use the site to improve their skill at scanning poetry—a talent that has become relatively rare, but one that remains one of real value in understanding and appreciating the vast majority of all poems written in English between 1550 and 1900.

Not All Publishers Are Alike: The policies of the large multinational publishers that charge hundreds of dollars for a few months’ access to a single textbook get a good deal more attention than do the policies of smaller publishers such as Broadview Press. But Broadview is far from alone in its commitment to providing books and other learning materials of high quality at very reasonable prices. Other leading publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences—among them Hackett Publishing (which for decades has been renowned for its commitment to fair pricing), W.W. Norton, and Oxford University Press—have similar principles. The prices charged by many large multinationals have risen far faster than inflation over the past several decades (as, it might be added, have post-secondary tuition costs for students—at least in the United States). But the trend has been in the other direction with publishers such as Norton and Hackett and Broadview and Oxford; the prices of books from those presses have typically lagged inflation over the past several decades; in real terms, they have typically edged downwards.

Professors and students still sometimes complain that the price of a large anthology from Norton or Hackett or Broadview is, at $60 or $70 or $80, too high. But these volumes typically run to over 1,000 pages and cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to develop. If Norton or Hackett or Broadview were to demand the sorts of profit margins that many larger publishing and media corporations look for, those anthology volumes would be priced at $200 or more. By comparison, prices of $60 or $70 or $80 for such large volumes represent extraordinary value.

But that’s $60 to $80 more than zero. Why should students pay $70 for, say, an anthology of American literature when they can get an American literature anthology for free?

The Example of American Literature: Let’s look at some examples of what you get for the price you pay. Compare, for example, the ways in which some of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau are summed up in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, and a leading OER anthology of American literature:

Norton:

By the middle of the twentieth century, Thoreau’s literary reputation equaled or surpassed Emerson’s with Walden regarded as one of the masterpieces of American literature. It is a work that powerfully affected environmentalists like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, who greatly admired Thoreau for his concerns about the natural habitat; contemporary writers like Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard also cite him frequently. As crucial as environmental concerns, and even anti-slavery, were to Thoreau, however, he always insisted that all principled action had to be undertaken by the individual rather than through groups. …

from the author introduction to Henry David Thoreau, The Norton Anthology of American Literature (edited by Robert S. Levine et al.)

Broadview:

Thoreau remains a vitally important reference point in discussions of the place of individual humans in human society as a whole, and of the place of humans (both individually and collectively) in the natural world. Walden—its status now secure as a foundational text of American nature writing and of twentieth- and twenty-first century environmental movements—continues to strike a sympathetic chord among a wide range of readers. Thoreau at one and the same time posits Nature as a magnet attracting all that is best in humanity and presents a compelling vision of Nature as standing apart from humanity—even in opposition to human society. “I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him,” wrote Thoreau. “None of his institutions control or pervade her.”

from the author introduction to Henry David Thoreau, The Broadview Anthology of American Literature (edited by Derrick R. Spires et al.)

American Literature I (a leading OER American literature anthology):

Henry David Thoreau sought to live an essentialist life, one devoid of the unnatural excrescences loaded upon individuals by society and societal institutions. By realizing self-unity and being true to his individual self, he sought to realize his true selfhood as an organically-rendered microcosm of the macrocosm that is the world in nature. For Thoreau, nature has subjective value and meaning and shapes not only the body but also the mind and spirit. When such external institutions as the church and the government divert the individual from the overarching unity of themselves and nature, then Thoreau thought the individual should prefer integrity over conformity. Thoreau distills philosophical thought—such as Transcendentalism—and objective, sensory, scientific collection of concrete facts—such as Darwin claimed as his methodology—into a unique expression of integration: of self with nature, of self with culture, of culture with nature.

from the author introduction to Henry David Thoreau in American Literature I: An Anthology of Texts From Early America Through the Civil War, edited by Jenifer Kurtz), a free online anthology published with support from Affordable Learning Louisiana

It’s hard to know how to begin to unpack the muddle that we are offered in this passage from an OER textbook. And this is not a particularly egregious example; if anything, the introductions in the American Literature I text may be rather above average among the various OER anthologies of American literature.

If texts such as these become the norm, we will as a society have paid a very steep price. When one makes direct comparisons of this sort between the available OER learning materials and the learning materials that are so often denigrated by OER advocates—the learning materials provided by established publishers—the costs of free start to become clear. If academics are pressured into choosing OER with no concern for issues of quality—as happens with distressing frequency nowadays at many North American colleges and universities—the result will frequently be that students and faculty are denied access to high quality course texts. And when that happens there must surely be a domino effect; those who have had to make do with substandard learning materials in university courses in such subjects as English, History, and Philosophy will inevitably be at least to some extent less likely to achieve high levels of reading and writing skill themselves, less able to contribute at a high intellectual level in the world of work, less able to draw upon a large and well-constructed body of general knowledge, and less able to contribute intelligently and coherently to society as citizens.

There is no reason to be too hard on the authors of American Literature I, or on any of the other authors of the introductory material in this and other OER anthologies. As those at Broadview, Norton, Hackett, and other reputable Humanities publishers are aware, it is extraordinarily difficult to create a comprehensive anthology of consistently high quality that meets the pedagogical needs of students and professors. To do so requires years of work by a large team of academics and editors, and it requires a very large financial commitment as well; budgets for developing multi-volume anthology projects typically run will into the millions of dollars (investments that are typically not recouped for many years). Extensive editorial and market research is required. To ensure accuracy, introductory materials and annotations need to be rigorously reviewed not only by one or more of the main editorial team, but also by specialists in particular areas where the main editorial team may not have expertise. To ensure readability and consistency of style, everything needs to be carefully copy-edited and proofed repeatedly—by professional editors and proofreaders. There must be a substantial budget as well to pay copyright permission costs; even for anthologies focused on earlier periods, there are always materials that deserve to be included but that for one reason or another are still under copyright protection. With the best will in the world, it is almost impossible for a small group of academics, working on their own (without the many decades of experience that any professional publisher brings to the table, and without the help of professional researchers, editors, proofreaders, and designers) to create an anthology of high quality covering a subject as vast as all of American literature. With a project of much more limited focus, or with supplemental resources, leading academics such as Herbert Tucker have shown that it is possible to create truly outstanding learning materials that can be made available for free. But, as the example above illustrates all too well, it’s a tall order to replicate that sort of success with a textbook covering a topic as vast as all of American literature.

The Example of American History: A considerable number of OER options are available in History, but the quality of the material is for the most part highly suspect. Here, for example, is how slavery in early America is described in American History I: Colonial Period to Civil War, a college-level OER textbook by J. Franklin Williamson and Thomas Aiello, both of Gordon State College in Barnesville, Georgia:

...[A]s the profit motive for the colony was being borne increasingly by tobacco farming, settlers intensively sought after increasing amounts of farmland. By the late 1600s, “free” land in Virginia was becoming less and less available to these English colonists. Consequently, England attracted fewer indentured servants. At this point, slavery became more attractive and more desirable to the larger and wealthier tobacco planters. This was partly due to the need to grant land to emancipated indentured servants; it was also due to tensions between poor former indentured servants-turned-farmers and their wealthier former masters. With the increasing presence of Africans and African-Americans in the late 1600s, Virginia began passing laws that made hereditary slavery binding on all African-Americans in the colony. Those who had once served as indentured servants alongside whites, and could own land and even their own slaves once their contracts were up, gradually found themselves discriminated against. Increasingly, the African-American population in Virginia became slave-based.

Though the writing here is in need of a good editor (the authors presumably mean to say that the economy became “slave-based,” not that the population became “slave-based”), it’s certainly not as obviously muddled as that of the OER American Literature text discussed above. In this case, the more serious problem is the way in which the writing disguises agency. Slavery “became more attractive.” People “found themselves discriminated against.” The population “became slave based.” It’s written as if no actual human beings ever made a decision to enslave other human beings.

It's important here to note that the best American history survey textbooks are not exorbitantly priced. The options for buying an ebook of the first volume of the leading commercial American history textbook, Give Me Liberty, start at $30, and you can purchase a copy of the bound book for $62. For the full, two-volume set prices start at $45 for the two e-books, and just $75 for the two bound book volumes—this for large format, heavily illustrated volumes that total over 1,400 pages. Published by W.W. Norton, Give Me Liberty is written by Eric Foner of Columbia University, who has for decades remained one of the most distinguished of America’s historians and also one of its most lucid prose stylists. And the Foner is not the only option of extraordinarily high quality; it’s not even the only option of extraordinarily high quality from Norton, which also publishes Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a 960-page overview of American history that’s as lively as it is insightful, and that retails for just $19.95. That university administrators would be pressuring faculty to assign a free OER American history textbook for their students in order to save them the $19.95 they would spend for a copy of the Lepore, or the $30.00 they would spend for a copy of the relevant Foner volume, flies in the face of all the educational values that a university is supposed to stand for.

The Issue of Quality, and the Money Behind OER: In Williamson and Aiello’s defence, it’s worth pointing out that quite a number of students at Gordon State University may indeed find it hard to afford $20 or $30 for a high-quality American history textbook. Williamson and Aiello may well have been acting with the best intentions in the world towards their students; the average household income in Barnesville, Georgia is just $37,688. Their text, though, was subsidized by the Georgia government; the website was “created under an Affordable Learning Georgia G2C Pilot Grant.” The site does not say how much money was provided to the authors, but it’s public knowledge that numerous state and provincial governments in the Unites States and Canada have been encouraging such projects with large subsidies. Surely in this case the money would have been better spent on providing book vouchers to hard-up students (so that they could purchase the high quality $20 or $30 textbook) than on subsidizing the creation of free but substandard learning materials.

Where no learning materials of high quality exist, or where publishers are charging truly exorbitant prices, it no doubt makes good sense for governments to encourage the creation of OER learning resources through subsidies. But in the Humanities generally—and certainly in areas such as the American history survey course, where established publishers offer learning materials of outstanding quality at reasonable prices—governments would surely be far better off spending taxpayers’ money by providing students with book allowances—or by simply buying a copy of the Foner or of the Lepore for every student.

It’s also worth paying attention to the funding sources through which instructional resources are developed, and the potentially pervasive effects those sources may have on content. For traditional publishers such as Broadview, Hackett, and Norton, funding comes directly through sales: ultimately, a textbook is viable only if it fits the needs and preferences of the instructors who assign it and the students who buy it. With OER texts, on the other hand, funding is allocated up-front, without any accountability to the instructors or students for whom those works are intended. As a result, many OER texts are transparently lacking in fitness for the classroom, with little to no research done to structure content and no mechanism for tracking effectiveness or usage (and no incentive to do so). Some OER projects exhibit strong biases of a sort that is clearly aligned with the ideological orientation of their funders. The content of Business Ethics in a Box, for example (a recently-released OER website of resource materials for business ethics courses) shows a strong partiality toward free markets and against unions—biases that seem to align with those of the Templeton Foundation, which provided funding for the project.

Many proponents of OER use language that suggests that OER products, unlike the publications of commercial publishers, are free of the grubby taint of money. The Power Point presentation that Creative Commons provides in its efforts to make “The Case for OER” enthuses that “open licensing is the critical lever between modern education and the collaborative culture of the Internet.” And it’s true that the authors of many OER projects have prepared full course texts and made available online entirely without financial compensation; indeed, some OER advocates seem to recommend a “work for free” model of textbook creation (which may not have much appeal to instructors burdened with a 4/4 teaching load, or for academics whose teaching load may be lighter but may face onerous demands to produce research). The reality of OER nowadays, though, is that it’s often far from free of the taint of money—whether the money be grants from large foundations driven by political ideology or, in not a few cases, intrusive advertising. As an example of the latter, it’s worth looking at one more example: the OER site most often recommended by writing instructors in English Departments—the Purdue Online Writing Lab (universally known as “Purdue Owl”), on which it has become impossible to avoid the “partner content” inviting students to purchase Grammarly, or to “get a real writing expert to proofread your paper before you turn it in,” or to subscribe to “Citation Machine, a Chegg service.”

The Example of English Grammar and Usage Learning Materials: If you ask English instructors what they recommend as a reference guide to grammar and usage, the most frequent answer nowadays is “I send them to Purdue Owl.” And Purdue Owl is—despite the intrusive advertising—almost certainly the best of the free grammar and usage resources. But it’s very far from being one of the best grammar and usage resources. Compare the way in which Purdue Owl treats any given topic in grammar and usage that gives students real trouble (dangling modifiers, say, or the complicated issue of what makes a sentence grammatically complete) with the way in which the same topic is treated in any of the leading writing handbooks from respected Humanities publishers (A Writer’s Reference, say, or The Broadview Guide to Writing, or The Norton Field Guide to Writing). The treatment accorded each topic in the texts from the respected publishers is in every case more thorough and more accurate than that provided in Purdue Owl.

One might as well be blunt: Purdue Owl is often simply incorrect in what it tells students. “In English sentences,” it tells us as it tries to explain the issue of dangling modifiers, “the doer must be the subject of the main clause that follows.” The site’s authors are trying to explain what has gone wrong with hypothetical examples such as this one: “Having finished the assignment, the TV was turned on.” But neither the examples nor the advice is of much use in helping students recognize and avoid this sort of error in longer, more complex sentences of the sort in which such errors are usually made. And what Purdue Owl tells the student is also flat-out wrong as a generalization about the English language—as is demonstrated, ironically enough, in one of the examples of a correct sentence that’s provided by Purdue Owl itself a few lines further down:

They failed the experiment, not having studied the lab manual carefully.

Here the “doer” of the participle “not having studied” is “they”—the subject not of “the main clause that follows” (as Purdue Owl has told us must be the case in English sentences) but of the main clause that precedes the participle.

If all the good guides to grammar and usage from respected publishers were priced at $200 or $300—or even at $100—recommending Purdue Owl to students would arguably be the best way to go. But that’s simply not the case. A new paperback copy of The Norton Field Guide to Writing, purchased from the publisher, costs $58.43; ebook options start at $35.00. A new paperback copy of The Broadview Guide to Writing, purchased from the publisher, costs $44.95; ebook options start at $31.56. These are both reliable, comprehensive reference texts that run to roughly 800 pages.

The Research: What about the research? Sites that promote OER are awash with claims that “the research” has shown OER learning materials to be equal to or even superior to “traditional course materials.” Those who use Open Educational Resources, it is claimed, are likely to actually improve student performance compared with those who use textbooks from established publishers.

Dig a little deeper.

First of all, such research is overwhelmingly focused on courses in the pure and applied sciences—areas where the problem of exorbitantly priced textbooks has always been most acute, and areas in which (no doubt not by coincidence) available OER learning materials tend to be of far higher quality than they are in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Second, much of the research is based on subjective reports—on students and instructors self-reporting, saying that they felt the OER learning materials were at least as good as learning materials that the students would have had to pay for.

Third, where the research uses objective criteria, those criteria are often strangely limited. Studies will conclude, for example, that OER learning outcomes were just as good on the basis of a similar percentage of students having achieved a passing grade, or a grade of C- or better. But what was the average grade? In most cases we are not told.

Fourth, the available research in almost all cases has been conducted by those already committed to the cause of promoting OER (and, in many cases, has been published in journals such as Open Praxis, the Journal of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, which are as devoted to the cause as are the authors). Given the degree to which educational administrators seem eager to find reasons to expand OER, it is perhaps surprising that there have been any truly open-minded studies published. But there have been some; one example is Regan E.R. Guring’s review article, “Open Educational Resources: What We Don't Know,” which concludes that “free, accessible curricular materials may have many benefits for students. But the research conducted so far hasn’t delivered the required proof.” Here’s an example of the sorts of observations Guring makes:

One of the first reviews of OER efficacy tests included 16 studies (Hilton, 2016). The abstract stated that “ … students generally achieve the same learning outcomes when OER are utilized.” If you stopped there you would be remiss. By the time you get to the results section, you note only nine of the 16 articles that made it into the review analyzed student learning outcomes. The other seven focused only on self-reported perceptions of the material.

All nine studies had major confounds such as method of instruction (e.g., comparing OER sections that were taught online or blended versus traditional texts used in a face-to-face class). Some studies switched exams between comparisons and some changed course design (e.g., went to a flipped model). Most study authors acknowledged that the type of textbook was not the only factor that changed. One study of the 16 minimized confounds by using a common pretest and exams and showed no statistically significant differences in use of an OER for chemistry (Allen, Guzman-Alvarez, Molinaro, & Larsen, 2015).

Astoundingly to the critical reader in me, many studies did not conduct statistical tests on differences (Hilton, 2016)…. Perhaps the biggest issue is that many large-scale studies of educational innovations do not use comparable exams.… In the one national multisite study using a common exam across classes, OER users did worse than traditional book users (Gurung, 2017).

It’s simply not true, then, to claim that “research” comparing free OER resources with textbooks from established publishers has conclusively shown OER textbooks to be of equal or better quality—shown (to use the language of the researchers) that OER textbooks “enable equal or improved learning outcomes.” No doubt more research is needed—particularly if it is conducted by researchers not already committed to promoting one side of the OER debate. But it does not take more research for an English professor to know that a textbook made up of sentences such as By realizing self-unity and being true to his individual self, he sought to realize his true selfhood as an organically-rendered microcosm of the macrocosm that is the world in nature is not conducive to learning. It does not take more research for a History professor to know that a textbook made up of sentences such as Increasingly, the African-American population in Virginia became slave-based is not conducive to learning. Academics should never be pressured by university administrators to choose such textbooks as learning materials for their students. At the post-secondary level in particular, the quality of textbooks and other learning materials is a matter of vital importance to learning itself; students will typically spend at least as much time reading their course texts as they spend in class. If textbooks and other learning materials are substandard, it makes it extraordinarily difficult for instructors to make up the difference.

The Future: Let me again make plain that I have no desire to demonize OER. Like Guring, I fully accept that free, accessible curricular materials may have many benefits for students. And there can be no doubt that many large multinational publishers have long made a practice of charging exorbitant prices for their products. But no one has demonstrated that free materials are inherently of higher quality than learning materials made available by traditional publishers. And—particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences—there is abundant evidence that available OER materials are very often of far, far lower quality than are the course texts published by established publishing houses. There is abundant evidence too that—again, in the case of the Humanities and Social Sciences in particular—many of the course texts from established publishing houses are very reasonably priced. To spend large amounts of government funding in order to subsidize the creation and widespread use of inferior OER alternatives to these high quality, reasonably priced Humanities and Social Sciences course texts is, in effect, to waste taxpayers’ money, and to do a real disservice to students. A world in which governments and administrators continue to push for OER to replace traditional course texts, and in which the advocates of OER continue to ignore or downplay the issue of quality in Humanities and Social Sciences learning materials, will before too long become a world without the course texts that publishers such as W.W. Norton, Hackett Publishing, and Broadview Press have for many decades been proud to issue. That may seem like no great loss to those who persist in ignoring the cost of free. But the loss will be a very real one on several fronts. It will surely be a loss for scholars and for future scholars; the outstanding Humanities and Social Science scholars of today became outstanding scholars in part at least because they had access to outstanding learning materials. It will be an ongoing loss to instructors forced in course after course to cobble together learning materials from a range of deeply flawed free options. Most importantly, it will be a loss for students; a world in which students have far less access to high quality learning materials is a world in which educational opportunities are very substantially diminished.

What should be done to address these issues? Clearly, governments and university administrators should be taking into account the cost of free when they are shaping policies regarding OER. If the creation of OER learning materials is to continue to be encouraged, and subsidized, focus that encouragement and those subsidies on subject areas where the leading texts are priced exorbitantly, and/or on subject areas where there is a lack of high-quality learning materials—not on areas where high-quality options at reasonable cost are readily available. Take quality into account in all decisions as to the authors and projects that qualify for subsidies. Allow qualified publishers (those with a long track record of publishing high quality learning materials at reasonable prices) to become part of the process of creating, updating, and revising subsidized OER materials, lending their expertise in editorial and market research, copy editing, and design to the process. Apply mechanisms of assessment and accountability to government-funded OER projects, so as to ensure that such projects are of high quality and well-suited to course instruction.

Above all, stop encouraging academics to use inferior learning materials simply because those materials are free; don’t make students suffer by being forced to use inferior learning materials when much higher quality ones are readily available.

Full disclosure: Some of those who follow this blog are no doubt aware that I am the CEO and Company Founder of Broadview Press. I want to make very clear that this post expresses only my personal views, and not those of the company as a whole. I do not know how widely or how deeply the concerns I express about OER may be shared by others at Broadview; I do know, however, that all those in Broadview’s management group are persuaded that if any change on this front is be brought about, it is far more likely to be brought about by individuals (and in particular, by individual academics) drawing the attention of governments and of university administrators to the matter than it is by public statements issued under the imprimatur of publishing companies.

Crediting the Creators of Public Art

Maureen (my partner) and I have often noticed in our various travels that it’s very unusual for cities and towns to acknowledge the artist(s) in any way when statues or other artistic works are erected in public places. There is usually a plaque (often two or three plaques) crediting the city and whichever companies may have contributed to help fund the creation of a work of art, but almost invariably there is nothing to identify the creator. During the holidays we came across examples both in Victoria and in New Westminster of statues whose creators were entirely unacknowledged, despite the presence of various plaques noting when the statues had been erected and which local bodies or organizations had provided financial support. Back home in Nanaimo, we then noticed that the wonderful totem pole that the city put up not long ago in Maffeo Sutton Park by the waterfront was also unaccompanied by any information as to its creator. To be sure, information as to the creator has been available on the city’s website: “the Welcome Pole is a 49 foot tall carving by Snuneymuxw Master Carver Noel Brown, located in Spirit Square at Maffeo Sutton Park / Sway'a'Lana.” But it would be great to see credit given onsite to the person who actually designed and carved the pole.

This one has a happy ending. When I emailed the mayor and the city councilors a few days ago to raise this issue, the Mayor (Leonard Krog) responded promptly with word that in this case a plaque crediting Noel Brown was already in the works.

Here’s hoping that city officials elsewhere can be similarly responsive--and that the creators of works of public art in cities everywhere can be similarly credited in the future!

[Update, 4 April 2023: Interestingly, even the most renowned creators can still go uncredited when it comes to art in public places. Maureen and I were in Seattle last weekend, and were struck by a three-piece sculpture in front of a building at 1001 4th Ave. We thought the work was probably a Henry Moore, but there was nothing at all identifying the artist; only by googling afterwards did we find out that it is indeed a Henry Moore (one of eight casts made of a 1968-69 work entitled "Vertebrae").]

Long Story Short: The Issue of Abridgement Revisited

It is now more than fifteen years since Adam Gopnik took issue with abridgements in the pages of The New Yorker. Responding to the 2007 publication of Orion Press’ abridged versions of Moby-Dick and Vanity Fair, Gopnik argued that, however much such editions might present a “taut, spare” narrative, they did so by sacrificing much of what makes great works of literature great—passages of reflection or of description, digressions, “philosophical meanderings,” even

metaphysical huffing and puffing. [In Moby-Dick, for example,] the entire chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” where Melville tries to explain why white, the natural symbol of Good, is also somehow the natural symbol of Evil, is just, well, whited out.

Such an abridgement, Gopnik complained, “turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious, self-consciousness: it is all Dick, and no Moby.”

Gopnik was right on all counts.

Why, then, have my colleagues and I at Broadview Press decided to publish in 2023 abridged editions of Moby-Dick and of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Don’t we agree that it’s far better to read the entire work? Don’t we get it?

We do get it—and for all the reasons Gopnik points to, and more, we have proceeded towards publication of these abridged editions with a certain amount of reluctance, and a good deal of caution. We are painfully aware of the pitfalls of abridgement—and we are aware too of how debased the appeals made by publishers of the abridged editions of earlier eras have sometimes been. (In the early twentieth century, for example, advertisements for abridged editions were often aimed at ambitious young men who wished to simultaneously save time and develop an ability to impress young women of a higher social class with the breadth of their reading.)

We also feel, though, that we cannot ignore the pedagogical realities of the 2020s. When I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s and when I started in academic book publishing in the mid 1970s, works such as Moby-Dick and Vanity Fair appeared very frequently in their entirety on the required reading lists of university courses. And—for all that some of us sometimes tried to bluff our way through, pretending to have read all of Bleak House or The Brothers Karamazov when in fact we had run out of time and never made it past page 135—most students did actually read the works assigned in full most of the time, even if six or seven long novels were assigned for a single course. Nowadays, that’s simply not the case—and it hasn’t been the case for some considerable time. I don’t say this as an old curmudgeon decrying change—I say it as a simple statement of fact. The debate as to why such a change has occurred remains unresolved. Many have suggested that it results from a decline in attention spans associated with the rise of the Internet and of social media. Perhaps so, but it seems to me just as plausible that the change results very largely from the simple fact of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century diction and syntax being so much further removed from the language of today than they were from the language of fifty years ago. Whatever the cause, though, no one doubts that there has been a significant change. For university instructors in the 2020s, assigning half a dozen or more 500-page novels for a course is simply not an option; in the small number of courses where Middlemarch or Bleak House are still assigned, the norm is increasingly to assign only a single novel for the entire course. In most contexts, longer works have simply ceased to be considered as candidates for inclusion on required reading lists at the undergraduate level.

While the issue of abridging continues to provoke lively discussion in English departments, opinions have clearly shifted in recent decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, academics overwhelmingly deplored any move towards publishing abridged editions of literary works—or towards excerpting them for anthology purposes. Two decades into the twenty-first century, the practice of abridging or excerpting remains unloved, but it has come to be widely accepted as representing, in some cases at any rate, the least bad of a range of imperfect pedagogical options. Broadview’s abridged editions of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are both drawn from the recently-published first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature; when, in the course of preparing that anthology, we sounded out a wide range of academics on how they felt about excerpting certain longer works in anthologies, there was considerably less resistance to the idea of excerpting or abridging longer works than I remember in the English departments of a generation or two ago.

Above all, we at Broadview want to make clear that these abridged editions are not published in the hope that they will provide an enticing alternative to reading the full text of Moby-Dick or of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They are published rather in the hope that they will make it feasible for academics to include such works on reading lists at all. Our hope is that the editions may at least give some sense of the whole to every student—and that more engaged students will go on (perhaps in graduate school, or perhaps long after they have finished university) to read these works again, this time in their full form.

But if the hope in choosing an abridgement is that students may still read the entire work years later, wouldn't it be better for instructors interested in trying an abridged-edition approach to include the complete novel on the text list, and then do the abridging themselves? Surely they could make their own choices as to exactly which chapters or sections they would like their students to read.

They could indeed, and arguably that would be a better way to go, though I can see at least a couple of obstacles in the way of academics who might contemplate taking this route. One is simply the instructor's time. To make good choices as to which chapters to include and which not can take a surprising amount of time. And, where there may be a substantial gap between assigned chapters, it makes obvious sense to provide at least a paragraph summarizing the movement of the story in the 'omitted' chapters; such paragraphs can easily be inserted in square brackets in an abridged edition, whereas instructors doing their own abridgements while asking students to buy an edition of the complete novel would need to write any such bridging material themselves. Given the time pressures on academics these days - at many colleges and universities full-time faculty have a 4/4 load, and many adjuncts teach even more courses than that, often travelling back and forth between institutions to do so - I can imagine that adding one more item to the to-do list ("prepare an abridgement so that I can try an abridged-edition approach to teaching Moby-Dick") may simply not in many cases be realistic. I can imagine too that some students, no matter how clear the instructions, might not get what was required quite right ("I never read Chapter 52; I guess I must have misread that list of chapters you gave us" or "I did start reading the book, but I couldn't find that list of chapters you gave us; then I thought maybe I'd just read the whole thing but I got bogged down fifty pages in and couldn't go any further"). These are not insurmountable obstacles, though, and it may well be that most academics who are interested in trying an abdidged-version approach with some novels will prefer to make their own choices; that would be very much to their credit.

Gopnik rightly observes that “all abridgements … are part of their period.” He goes on to suggest that the Orion edition of Moby-Dick is, in the context of 2007, not at all “defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgement, improved,” since it “adheres to … the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel.” I’m not at all sure that 2007 standards of “good editing and critical judgement” did in fact point unequivocally to a “taut, spare” narrative as a novelistic ideal; within academe, at least, standards of critical judgment were in 2007 surely placing quite a high value on the elements of fiction that can enable a novel to provide a wide-ranging and open-ended sense of a psyche, or of a society. At any rate, our 2020s approach at Broadview has been substantively different from those of the Orion editors in 2007. If the nineteenth-century novel is, as Henry James famously claimed, a “large, loose, baggy monster,” we at Broadview have striven to retain at least some of the baggy bits. We include, for example, the entire “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter that is omitted in the Orion edition.

It is worth pointing out that every novel is different, and that there may be different reasons for abridging different novels. The case for offering an abridged edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, is substantially different from that for offering an abridged edition of Moby-Dick. Readers may differ as to whether they feel Moby-Dick to be a great novel despite its oddities and long digressions, or whether they feel it to be a great novel in large part because of them. But few have argued that it is not a great novel. Many, on the other hand, have concluded that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a great novel. What everyone agrees on is its historical importance; Stowe’s novel fueled abolitionist passion (and infuriated supporters of slavery) as no other work proved able to do. Any abridgement must thus aim to include not simply main threads of the narrative, but also chapters that proved particularly effective in arousing the passions of readers in the 1850s. The criteria for excerpting are inevitably rather different from those for excerpting Moby-Dick.

In earlier eras, abridged editions often tried to hide the fact that they were abridgements; the words “abridged edition” might appear in very small print on the title page or copyright page—or sometimes might not appear at all. Such editions would rarely provide any indication when passages or entire chapters were omitted; the intent was to provide a seamless reading experience, in which readers would not be reminded (and perhaps might never be aware) that they were reading only a portion of the whole. Broadview’s forthcoming abridged editions of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in contrast, indicate clearly where excerpting has occurred, and that is the case as well with the handful of abridged editions already on the Broadview list (among them Don Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella's 2017 edition of The Decameron: Selected Tales, Maureen Okun's 2014 edition of Le Morte Darthur: Selections, Ian Johnston’s 2019 edition of The Odyssey: Selections and Toni Bowers’ and John Richetti’s 2010 abridgement of Clarissa*). Rather than disguising from readers the fact that they are reading an abridgement, our intent is to make them continually aware of that fact—and to make it convenient for those who wish to do so to check into what has been left out.

Orion’s series of abridged editions seems to have fizzled in the marketplace; their website lists only eleven titles, all issued in either 2007 or 2008. Perhaps their “taut, spare” approach was less in tune with the times than Gopnik surmised. Perhaps their editions were simply not that well edited; regardless of the criteria one starts with, one may do a better or a worse job of excerpting. And perhaps their editors were at a disadvantage as a result of lacking experience in editing complete works; so far as I’m aware, Orion has never published editions of the complete novels that they offer in “compact” form. Broadview, in contrast, has of course made its name largely on the basis of its hundreds and hundreds of excellent unabridged editions of literary works, complete with full introduction, explanatory notes, and appendices of contextual materials. Regardless of how successful our abridged editions may be in the marketplace, we will never look for them to replace our editions of complete works.** Indeed, our hope is that, regardless of how many abridged editions we may eventually publish, they will be outshone and outsold in each case by our editions of the full works.

*Samuel Richardson’s 1,500-page epistolary monster has long stood as one of the very few English novels for which most academics agree there is a strong case to be made for abridged as well as complete editions. It’s a good example of how criteria regarding abridgement may change from one era to another; George Sherburn’s 1962 abridgement for Riverside is drastically different in its emphases from Toni Bowers’ and John Richetti’s 2010 abridgement for the Broadview Editions series.

** We plan to keep Christopher Diller’s fine edition of the complete Uncle Tom’s Cabin in print in perpetuity, as we do all Broadview editions. And, though we do not yet have a complete Moby-Dick on our list, I and others at Broadview certainly hope we’ll be able to publish a complete edition before too long.

“Indians,” “Braves,” “Redskins,” “Eskimos”—and “Black Hawks”: The Sports Team Naming Controversies

By the end of the nineteenth century almost every Native American culture was either under severe threat or had been wiped out. But images of the supposed fierceness and savagery of “Indian braves” still retained a strong hold on the imaginations of white Americans, and in the early twentieth century it began to be common for sports teams in American cities to draw on that imaginative legacy in a context in which it was desirable to have an image of strength and courage, even of fierceness. In baseball the Boston Braves (later the Milwaukee Braves, and later still the Atlanta Braves) acquired that name in 1912; Cleveland’s baseball team was renamed the Indians in 1915; in football another Boston Braves team moved to Washington and became the Redskins in 1937. For decades now many have argued—with good reason—that there’s a strong case for changing team names of this sort, on the grounds that they stereotype Native Americans in one-dimensional fashion as fierce warriors. Arguably even more offensive are gestures such as the “tomahawk chop” of Atlanta Braves fans (along with its accompanying chant), or team mascots such as that which used to be pictured on the Cleveland Indians’ logo, Chief Wahoo, with his tomahawk eyes and ludicrously demonic grin. Tara Houska, an Ojibwe lawyer, expressed the view of millions when she called the image “a blatant racial caricature.”

Many school and minor-league professional teams that formerly had names such as “Indians” and “Braves” started changing those names in the early years of this century, but as late as 2015 no major league franchise had done so. Some claimed that such a move would entail renouncing a long, proud tradition in local sports. But—to take Cleveland as an example—Chief Wahoo had been part of the Cleveland logo only since 1947. Even the name “Indians” did not date to the beginning of the franchise, which before 1915 had been known successively as the “Lakeshores,” the “Bluebirds,” and the “Blues.”

The resistance to names that reference stereotypes of Native Americans grew slowly but steadily. Toronto Blue Jays announcer Jerry Howarth was one of the first within the major league baseball world to become persuaded. Howarth reported that he “stopped using team names like Indians and Braves and terms such as tomahawk chop and powwow on the mound after receiving a letter from an aboriginal fan after Toronto defeated Atlanta in the 1992 World Series.” Howarth described the letter in an October 2016 interview:

[It was] one of the best fan letters I’ve ever received. He said “Jerry, I appreciate your work but in the World Series, it was so offensive to have the tomahawk chop and to have people talk about the powwows on the mound, and then the Cleveland Indians logo, and the Washington Redskins.” He just wrote it in such a loving, kind way. He said “I would really appreciate it if you would think about what you say with those teams.”

Howarth wrote in reply that he would indeed stop using the offensive terms—and he did just that. Soon more and more sports people started coming round to his point of view—but many still resisted change. And, much more surprisingly, so did many Native Americans. Few if any Native Americans defend the use of the Chief Wahoo image by Cleveland, but an astonishing 90% of Native Americans surveyed by The Washington Post on this issue some years ago responded that they were not offended by the team name “Washington Redskins,” while 70% of Native Americans reported that they did not find the term “redskins” disrespectful to Native Americans in any context:

Across every demographic group, the vast majority of Native Americans say the team’s name does not offend them, including 80 percent who identify as politically liberal, 85 percent of college graduates, 90 percent of those enrolled in a tribe, 90 percent of non-football fans and 91 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 39.

Could this survey have been flawed in some way? Might it have been that respondents to questions posed by a Washington newspaper were so keen not to give offence to the questioner that they were reluctant to say that they found the name of the Washington team offensive? Certainly when asked what terms they themselves prefer to be called (rather than what terms they find offensive), Indigenous Americans did not and do not put “redskins” high on the list. But the survey certainly gave pause to those who had been confident that virtually all Native Americans would find team names such as “Redskins” offensive.

Many Native activists nevertheless argued that, regardless of what the polls might say, the use of names such as “Redskins” tended to indoctrinate North Americans—including Native Americans themselves—to think poorly of Indigenous peoples. An article reporting on the poll results also quoted Oneida Nation representative Ray Halbritter and other activists arguing strenuously that the NFL should not “continue marketing, promoting, and profiting off of a dictionary-defined racial slur—one that tells people outside of our community to view us as mascots,” and that can have a harmful effect on Native American children.

I have for years sided for the most part with Halbritter and Howarth on this issue—but I have also long felt that it’s an interesting issue deserving of full discussion. Was it patronizing for those in the white majority to call for the team name “Redskins” to be dropped when a clear majority of Native Americans are evidently not offended by it? Or are such terms offensive in themselves, even if a majority of Indigenous Americans are not offended by them?

Over the last few years a good number of the teams bearing these names have finally made the change. In 2022 Cleveland’s baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians, and Washington’s football team became the Washington Commanders. In 2021 Edmonton’s CFL team (formerly the Eskimos) became the Edmonton Elks. In Atlanta, though, the Braves have kept their team name—and the controversial “tomahawk chop.” Major League Baseball has supported them, arguing that “the Native American community in that region is fully supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop.” In discussions of team names, it’s arguable that “Chicago Blackhawks” (or, as the team name was officially until 1986, “Black Hawks”) should be treated as a special case. Far from being an undifferentiated stereotype, the team name “Black Hawks” derives from a specific WWI military unit, the name of which was in turn derived from one of the most famous Native Americans—Black Hawk (or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) of the Sauk Nation, whose 1833 autobiography has become a classic of Native American literature.

I’m a bit torn on this one, so I’ll end with a series of questions. Should this Chicago team name be treated as a special case? Or does the name “Blackhawks” still partake of some of the same stereotypes of Native Americans that so clearly are involved in names such as “Braves” and “Redskins”? The Sauk were forced from Illinois by white settlers; is it hypocritical for the descendants of those settlers to honor a Sauk historical figure now in that way? Or does that history make it all the more appropriate for fans of all backgrounds to pay homage now to a great leader of the past?

N.B. This is an updated 2022 version of a post from several years ago.

"Ag Gag" Laws: What Values Do We Value Most?

In many areas of the world trespassing is a relatively minor offence under the law—a misdemeanor rather than a felony—and offenders are liable to relatively minor punishments. The maximum fine for a first offence in the province of Alberta, for example, was until recently $2,000; for a second offence the maximum was $10,000. (Penalties for trespassing are typically the same regardless of whether the premises are a private individual’s home and yard, a business owner’s warehouse and parking lot, or a farmer’s field or farm buildings.)

But under the provisions of a bill rushed through the Alberta legislature by the Conservative government in 2020, an individual in that province who has been found guilty of trespassing is now subject to a fine of up to $10,000 for a first offence—plus six months in jail. A second offence is now subject to a fine of up to $25,000, plus a further six months in jail. An organization involved in sponsoring or directing an act of trespass is subject to a fine of up to $200,000. If one is deemed to have gained access under “false pretenses” (for example, by falsely saying as you start a job at a pig farm that you have no intention of taking photographs of any animals being abused), one is subject to the same penalties.

Why prescribe such harsh punishments for such a minor offence? The key is in another part of the bill, where it is specified that such penalties apply even when property is not fenced off and no notices forbidding trespassing have been posted—if the offence occurs on farmland or “on land that is used for the raising of and maintenance of animals.”

Alberta’s Bill 27 was the first Canadian example of a type of legislation familiar to many Americans as “ag gag legislation”—legislation intended to gag those who would inform the general public of what goes on behind the closed doors of the agricultural operations where the 10 billion or so mammals and birds killed every year in North America for human food live out their brief, unhappy lives.

As in many other North American jurisdictions, such operations in Alberta are in practice exempt from almost all provisions of animal cruelty legislation. Typically, such legislation prohibits only the causing of “unnecessary” pain, suffering or injury to an animal, and in many jurisdictions any practice, no matter how cruel, is allowed if it can be classed as part of “generally accepted” practices of animal management or animal husbandry. For those who may imagine that the industry would not allow cruel practices to become “generally accepted” in the industry, it should be pointed out that such practices have for decades included (to pick only two well-known examples) the confining of sows in crates so small that the animals can never turn around, and the confining of egg-laying hens in cages that allow them no more than 67 square inches of living space per bird.

It’s all too clear that allowing the industry to follow “generally accepted practices” leaves a vast amount of room for cruelty. But not enough room to satisfy the animal agriculture lobby. Over the past two decades and more, undercover operations at animal agriculture facilities across North America have revealed horrific examples both of what constitutes “generally accepted practice” and of abuses that exceed anything that could possibly be described as “necessary cruelty” or “generally accepted practice.” As Camille Labchuk, executive director of the organization Animal Justice, has pointed out, “whistleblowing employees are often the only way the public has to monitor the conditions animals endure on modern farms.”

Alberta is now only one of four Canadian provinces that have moved to criminalize such whistleblowing; Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government has passed similar legislation, as have the governments of PEI and Manitoba.* In some cases the penalties prescribed are even more draconian than those in Alberta. Constitutional challenges have been launched, but for the moment, the ag gag laws of all those provinces remain in place—and Quebec is considering enacting its own legislation.

At the federal level, ag gag legislation has twice been introduced in Parliament. In 2021 Bill C-205 had passed second reading (with the Bloc Quebecois and—remarkably—the New Democrats joining the Conservatives in voting to give priority to private property rights over any concern for cruelty to animals). In the spring of 2022 Conservative agriculture critic John Barlow introduced a new ag gag law, styling it as a “biosecurity” measure. The powerful animal agriculture industry lobby continues to press both at the federal and the provincial level for ever more draconian measures against animal advocates.

I have touched already on what it is that the animal agriculture industry so determined to hide. It’s worth taking a longer look. Organizations such as the BC Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Farm Animals, Mercy for Animals, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals all provide on their websites descriptions and images that give a visceral sense of the lives these animals live. Many of these images, as you would expect, were obtained through undercover operations. Here is a description from the organization, Animal Justice, of what’s shown on video footage shot in Excelsior Farms, an Abbotsford pig farm in 2019:

The footage from Excelsior Farm showed mother pigs trapped in gestation crates with dead and dying piglets; pigs prodded in the face with electric current; untreated injuries; and workers castrating piglets without anesthesia. Although the footage was provided to law enforcement officials, no charges were laid against the farm. Instead, four animal advocates were charged with dozens of offences for allegedly entering the farm to expose suffering. [What’s shown on the video is far less sensational than the abuses captured on numerous other undercover videos of animal agriculture facilities, but it certainly has the potential to be shocking or disturbing, especially for those unfamiliar with the realities of today’s animal agriculture operations. For those who do wish to watch, here is a link to the Global News clip: https://globalnews.ca/video/5214345/disturbing-images-captured-at-abbotsford-pig-farm.]

More recently, Animal Justice has made public another video—this one revealing appalling abuses at a BC slaughterhouse. The same cautions apply as to the material being disturbing to watch: https://animaljustice.ca/exposes/bc-slaughterhouse

An update on the Excelsior case: in October of 2022 two of the animal advocates were sentenced to jail terms—jailed for a non-violent act of civil disobedience, the only goal of which was to bring to light horrific cruelty that otherwise would have remained hidden. In provinces with ag gag laws, advocates in similar circumstances could have been subject to a $50,000 fine in addition to jail time.

At stake here is not only the treatment of non-human animals, important though that is; it is also freedom of speech. A society in which whistleblowers are prevented from drawing the attention of the public to horrific abuses is a society that gives license to the powerful to do anything they please.

But surely, many may say, property owners have a right to do as they please on their own property; should we not do everything we can to protect that right? To be sure, we should recognize that a conflict of rights is involved here. If someone trespasses on land owned by someone else, private property rights are indeed not being respected. The question is, do we as a society hold private property rights to be our highest value? Or do we consider certain other values—and certain other rights—to be sufficiently important that they may trump private property rights?

Let’s imagine a situation in which those being abused are not calves and piglets and chicks but puppies and kittens—or human children. In any such scenario it becomes clear that we instinctively feel private property rights to be far outweighed by the rights of those being abused—and the right of the general public to know of the abuse. We probably feel as well that anyone who has reason to believe that such abuse is taking place has a responsibility to do something about it—to report the suspected abuse to the relevant authorities, or—if there are no authorities in a position to stop the abuse in a timely fashion, to take action themselves. We would regard it as irresponsible for anyone who comes across a parent beating up his child, or a dog-walker repeatedly kicking a dog in his care, not to take some action.

Perhaps many would prefer not to know the details of the cruelty routinely inflicted on farm animals. But the vast majority (even of those who eat animal products) say that they would prefer that farm animals be treated humanely up to the moment when they are killed. They are the consumers, and surely all those who wish to know have a right to know how the food they consume is produced. The public has a right to know—and, I would argue, the public and its representatives have a responsibility to do everything possible to stop the abuse. That’s particularly the case given that agricultural operations enjoy the benefits of considerable government subsidies—substantial expenditures of taxpayer dollars—in almost every North American jurisdiction. Yet governments in four Canadian provinces, just like governments in many American states, are doing everything possible to keep the public from knowing what’s going on, and are doing nothing whatsoever to stop the cruelty.

Animal advocacy and free speech groups are challenging the constitutionality of the Canadian laws, just as such legislation has been challenged in America. But the efforts of the animal agriculture industry lobby are outpacing those of the animal advocacy groups. In America, ag gag laws have been attempted in a total of at least 28 states; they have become law in a total of at least 11. Even in Iowa, where the state ag gag law was ruled unconstitutional in January 2019, the legislature within two months managed to pass a new ag gag bill. And in some states with ag gag laws—notably, North Carolina—the legislation is worded so broadly as to deter whistleblowing in almost any industry in almost any context.

Today’s media pay a good deal of attention to alleged threats to freedom of speech coming from progressives on university campuses; it’s time more attention was paid to the far more serious threats to the free flow of information that are coming from industry and from government.

*It’s worth noting that the provinces which have not passed ag gag laws win no prizes for cracking down on cruelty to animals or for treating whistleblowers fairly. Indeed (as the Excelsior Farms case discussed below goes to show), some of these provinces treat whistleblowers at least as harshly as the provinces with ag gag laws on their books.

The Sonnet at Salford: A Case Study in the Spread of Falsehood

How does misinformation germinate in today’s charged political climate, and how does it grow? A controversy that blew up in May of 2022 over the teaching of sonnets at the University of Salford in Britain provides an interesting case study. Here is some of what Rex Murphy (a columnist for Canada’s National Post newspaper) had to say on the topic as the manufactured controversy spread around the world:

Within the strict and limited form of the literary sonnet may be found some of the most exquisite and artistic creations of the poetic mind. They are the exhalations of literary genius. … To take these triumphs of the creative poetic mind out of consideration, and to lay on them the brand that they are “products of white western culture” and as such need to be “decolonized” (whatever that murk of a verb can possibly mean) is to commit a sacrilege against poetry and art. But such are elements in the idiot days we live in, that there is a university—at least that’s what it’s called, but names mean nothing in many cases—Salford, in England, where Shakespeare flourished and where Milton birthed his imperishable genius, which is doing just that.

Murphy’s 21 May column bears a combative headline (“How ridiculous is it for universities to sideline sonnets? Let me count the ways,”—and the subheading is even more ideologically charged: “In its wokeness, Salford University is pushing young minds away from some of the greatest artistic expressions the world has to offer.”

Murphy was one of several commentators who deplored this supposed “sacrilege against poetry and art.” The problem with these commentators’ claims? They were deploring something that had not in fact occurred.

What had in fact happened? Those in charge of a single course at the University of Salford—a second-year course in creative writing entitled Writing Poetry in the Twenty-First Century, not a survey of English literature—had decided to place less emphasis on the sonnet. Yes, this single course had indeed noted that such forms “tend to be the products of white western culture” (as they surely do indeed tend to be). But the sonnet had not been banished—not even from this one course. Previously, students enrolled in the course had been required to compose sonnets as part of both of the course’s two assessments (the work on the basis of which they were graded). After the change in the curriculum, they would still be required to compose sonnets (as well as sestinas and tankas), and one of the two assessments would still require students to submit both a sonnet and a tanka for assessment (with students having the option of submitting a third poem in a form of their own design). As Scott Thurston of the English and Creative Writing Department made clear, the only difference was that there would be slightly less emphasis in the assessments on the sonnet and especially on the sestina—though even in the case of the sestina students would still be required to compose in that form as part of their exercises. This was merely, then, a slight change in the way students would be assessed when it came to calculating grades for a single Creative Writing course. Far from taking the sonnet “out of consideration” across the entire university, Salford had not even banished it from this single creative-writing course.

How is it possible that such a thorough distortion of the facts could become so widespread? Part of the problem can be attributed to news media headlines, which are often written by a headline writer, not by the author or editor of each article. The first piece on the matter seems to be have been a 14 May 2022 report in the Daily Telegraph (often described as among the more respectable of Britain’s right-wing newspapers). The Telegraph piece was wrong or misleading in several respects, but it was far less misleading than the headline it was given: “University Sidelines Sonnets as ‘Products of White Western Culture.’”

Similarly, the article that followed a few days later in the Daily Mail (often described as among the less respectable of Britain’s right-wing newspapers) was correct—if misleadingly incomplete—when it quoted “Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford,” as having said that “students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.” You wouldn’t guess any of that from the Daily Mail headline, which blared out a more extreme story: “University of Salford Cancels Sonnets from Writing Course because they are Products of White Western Culture.”

When Google picked up the Daily Mail headline, it adopted it in an edited form. What you see first with respect to that Daily Mail article if you Google “Scott Thurston course – Salford” (as of 30 November 2022) is not the full headline but rather this shortened version: “University Cancels Sonnets over Concerns They Are “Products of White Western Culture.” The omission in the Google version of the phrase “from Writing Course” clearly suggests that the policy change was university-wide. Presumably the Google headline is more likely to have been crafted by Google software than by any human headline writer employed by Alphabet Inc.; either way, the result is pernicious.

But neither the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail headline writers nor the Google headline software should shoulder the bulk of the blame. The most egregious acts of irresponsibility here are surely those of writers such as Murphy themselves. Could it be that the writers who followed up on the original Telegraph piece with their own articles deploring the University of Salford’s supposed change of policy did not actually read much more than the headline? Such carelessness is surely within the realm of possibility; many people have plausibly suggested that there’s more and more skimming and less and less actual reading in today’s digital world.

It’s hard not to conclude, though, that ideology often dovetails with carelessness in such cases. Take, for example, the coverage accorded the incident by Maggie Kelly in an online publication called The College Fix—a publication that appears to be very largely dedicated to the fight against “political correctness.” Kelly begins her article with a sentence that references the Telegraph report and that, though somewhat misleading, is at least limited in its claims: “The University of Salford, a public university in Greater Manchester, England, removed sonnets and other “pre-established literary forms” from a creative writing course assessment, The Telegraph has reported.” Again, the headline above goes much further: “University drops sonnets because they are ‘products of white western culture.’” Could The College Fix be a publication large enough to have a staffer dedicated to headline writing? It hardly seems likely. Kelly is identified not only as the author of the article but as the “assistant editor” of the publication, which leads one to believe that at the very least she would have had to approve the publication of such a grievously untruthful headline. Evidently The College Fix is so concerned with attacking alleged political correctness that they can’t be bothered with the old-fashioned sort of correctness—the sort that regards it as important to get one’s facts right.

How difficult might it be for anyone who is interested in this matter to establish the facts? As is often the case with such outbreaks of disinformation, getting at the truth of the matter simply by Googling is not that easy. It’s far, far easier to find the misinformation repeated* than it is to find at least partial information about the second year Creative Writing module where it is posted on the University of Salford’s English and Creative Writing website. Even if you have the patience to go four or five pages down when you’re googling “Salford – sonnet controversy,” you’re not likely to find online the information that gives the lie to the screaming headlines of the right-wing publications.

Fortunately, the Internet isn't the only source of information. The University of Salford is a public institution, Scott Thurston’s email address is easy to find, and, as I discovered myself, Dr. Thurston responds politely and helpfully to inquiries. But it's surely something of a grim commentary on the state of the media today that it can be almost impossible to access anything like the full truth about certain news items without going directly to the source.

*The following were among the sites that were spreading the false information as of 30 November 2022: the Best American Poetry blog; the Classical Poets.org website; the Redstate news website; the headline USA.com website; flipboard; the European Conservative.com; MSN (the Microcoft news portal); and Res ipsa loquitur (the blog of Jonathan Turley).

Why We Call Other People -phobic—and Why We Shouldn’t

Why do we use the terms that we do to describe different forms of dislike, or prejudice, or hatred? The most straightforward are terms that use the Latin prefix anti-, meaning against. Beginning in the seventeenth century (with the term anti-Catholic), making use of the Latin prefix anti- in this way was the standard English-language approach to describing speech or behavior expressing prejudice against a specific group. By the nineteenth century, as discussion of prejudice grew, the language correspondingly expanded; anti-Jewish, antisemitic, anti-Negro, anti-black, anti-German, anti-Muslim—these and other such terms were all coined in the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, a new trend arose—the practice of employing in such contexts words with -phobia or -phobic embedded within them. We began, in other words, to use words meaning irrationally fearful of to denote language or behavior that is expressive of hatred towards. Particularly since 9/11, a common term for those engaging in anti-Muslim speech or behavior has been Islamophobic. In similar fashion, homophobic has (according to Google Ngram) come to be used roughly twice as often as anti-gay as a term used to describe those engaging in anti-gay speech or behavior. And transphobic is used roughly ten times more frequently than is anti-trans.

With the exception of xenophobic, words using the -phobic suffix did not take root until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first known appearance of the word homophobic in print was on 5 May 1969—just a few weeks before the Stonewall uprising. As the New York Times has reported it, Dr. George Weinberg (who has claimed to have thought of the term some years earlier) was in touch “with the gay activists Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, who used the new term in a column they wrote for Screw magazine, … discussing the fear felt by straight men that they might be gay.” By the end of the year the word had appeared in Time magazine as well, in a feature article entitled “The Homosexual in America,” and by the early 1970s these ideas were being widely discussed both in psychological circles and in the broader community. Everyone was suddenly aware of the degree to which the most virulent forms of anti-gay speech and behavior could often be found among men who had repressed or denied within themselves a powerful desire for sex with other men; their hatred for men who did express such desires was plausibly said to be rooted in a fear of having to confront the full nature of their own sexuality (this in an age when same-sex desire remained largely taboo). Before long the term homophobic had come to be widely used not just of men who were conflicted about their own sexuality but of anyone who expressed anti-gay feelings—and that remains the case today.

The rise of Islamophobic is similarly understandable. Until the late 1990s (again, according to Google Ngram) Islamophobic was a word almost never used; anti-Muslim was used more than a hundred times more frequently. Starting in 1994 (just after the first attack on the World Trade Center) Islamophobic began to be used with increased frequency, and usage began to soar following 9/11. By 2020 Islamophobic had still not overtaken anti-Muslim, but it seemed well on the way to doing so. Once again, hatred was plausibly linked to fear—in this case, fear not of suppressed desires lurking within, but of external threats. Much as the voices of reason pointed out again and again that the terrorist acts were the work of a tiny minority, and should in no way be taken to reflect on all Muslims, fear of terrorism came to be linked in many minds with negative feelings towards all of Islam, and all Muslims.

It’s easy to understand, then, why we have come to use words such as homophobic and Islamophobic so frequently to describe hate-fueled language and behavior. But should we? Are they in fact better terms to use than are anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and so on? Or are they—as they seem to me to be—deeply problematic?

It’s on two grounds that they seem to me to be the wrong words to use as umbrella terms describing deep feelings directed against a particular group. The first is accuracy. The suffixes -phobic and -phobia in words such as homophobic and homophobia are, like so many words relating to medical or psychological conditions, borrowed from ancient Greek—in this case, the ancient Greek word for fear. But a phobia, as the word has taken root in English, is not just a fear; it’s an irrational or unjustified fear. Someone who reacts with extreme fear when they see a large spider is not considered to suffer from a phobia if they live in an area in which tarantulas or other deadly spiders are common; it’s if they exhibit such fear when spiders pose no danger to them that they are considered to suffer from arachnophobia. And, it may well be added, a good many people who do not fear spiders nevertheless act towards them in an unnecessarily cruel fashion, killing them upon encountering them inside their homes when they could as easily (and almost as quickly) shoo them outside. Where spiders are concerned, then, the negative attitudes and behaviors that humans so often display toward them are not always linked to fear.

We should ask this, then: do people whose behavior is expressive of hatred towards Muslims always behave in that way out of fear of Muslims? Do people whose behavior is expressive of hatred towards gay people always behave in that way out of fear of gay people or gay sexuality? That some people act in such ways largely or primarily out of fear is unquestionable. It may indeed be that fear is at the root of such behavior most of the time, for most of the people who act in such ways. But for all of the people who act in such ways? And for all of the time when they act in such ways? We know that there can be various other motivating forces for such behavior. Disgust, for one; the deep-rooted disgust among many humans regarding a variety of sexual practices that are foreign to them has surely been to at least some degree connected to anti-gay feeling. The teachings of a variety of Christian denominations, for another: over the course of many centuries Christians of many stripes were taught that God disapproved of the sexual acts that gay men practiced, and that God would send the heathen Muslims straight to Hell. To be clear: prejudice based on disgust or on the wrong-headed teachings of certain religions is no more defensible than is prejudice based on fear. I raise these examples merely to show that it is inaccurate to use terminology that suggests that fear is at the root of all such prejudicial behavior, all of the time.

But even if it were the case that all such behavior were motivated by fear all of the time, using terms that imply hatred to be based always in fear seems to me to be unwise, simply because it seems likely to be counterproductive. Our aim should surely be to reduce anti-gay sentiment and behavior, anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior, and so on—to persuade those who hold such views and who act in such ways that they are mistaken in doing so. But if the terms we use to name such behavior carry within them a presumption as to its motivation, that is surely likely to make persuasion more difficult. Those who are accused of Islamophobia rather than of anti-Muslim behavior might, not unreasonably, ask How can you presume to know my psyche? And they might go on to ask, not unreasonably, Isn’t that typical of the arrogance of the university-educated liberal elite—presuming to know what motivates the beliefs and actions of anyone who does not hold the same set of beliefs that they do?

As a test case, it is worth considering a situation in which strongly negative feelings towards a particular group are clearly appropriate. Let’s take the feelings that our parents or grandparents typically held towards Nazis, and that most of us today hold towards the members of neo-Nazi groups. In holding such feelings and in speaking out against or taking action against such groups, we are expressing anti-Nazi feelings and behavior. How appropriate would we feel it to be if we were described as Nazi-phobic for acting in these ways? Surely we would feel it to be highly inappropriate. It might well be that our parents or grandparents did fear that Hitler’s Nazi regime would succeed in taking over much of the world. And it might well be that people today in France or Italy or America do fear that neo-Nazi movements may take power in those nations. But however much our opposition to Nazism or neo-Nazism may be accompanied by fear, our fear is not the reason for our opposing them. If we were termed Nazi-phobic instead of anti-Nazi, our response would surely be, Fear is not the point! I’m not against Nazi movements because I fear them; I’m against them because I believe what they do to be wrong.

The substance of anti-gay feeling and anti-Islam and anti-trans feeling is of course very different from the substance of anti-Nazi feeling. But there can be no question that many who speak and act against gay and Muslim and trans people do so because they believe it is right to do so—just as we feel that it is right to speak out against Nazism and anti-Nazism. If we are to have any hope of persuading them that they are wrong—and, to be clear, I believe we should try our utmost to do so—we are unlikely to further our cause by using terminology that focuses not on their words and actions in themselves, but on our presumption as to the underlying psychological state that motivates them.

Some who have argued in favor of using terms such as homophobia and Islamophobic have suggested that we should choose homophobic over anti-gay because the use of the latter represents a misguided effort to find a neutral term to describe something hateful. But we can make it clear in myriad ways that we find certain sorts of speech or behavior repugnant and immoral. When we use a neutral descriptive term such as violence in a phrase such as violence against women, it surely does not imply that we are taking a neutral stance in response to such violence. No more so can it be taken to imply that we are taking a “neutral” stance in response to anti-gay language or behavior if we condemn anti-gay slurs and anti-gay violence. We do not have to label it homophobic to make it abundantly clear that we oppose anti-gay speech and anti-gay behavior.

Others have suggested that to use any other terms than homophobia and Islamophobia is to deny that such things are largely rooted in fear. It is no such thing; to use anti-gay instead of homophobic (and anti-Muslim or anti-Islam instead of Islamophobic, and anti-trans instead of transphobic) is not to deny that these things are very often based in irrational fear; it is rather to acknowledge that they are not always rooted in such fear. And—perhaps most importantly—it is also to acknowledge that using terms such as homophobic and Islamophobic can be counterproductive. The practice of using language that associates all hatred with fear tends inevitably to infuriate and alienate those we say we want to persuade (or to “educate”). If we say we want to foster greater understanding and tolerance, we should strive to use terms that do not work against our declared aims—terms, for example, such as anti-gay and anti-Muslim, which presume nothing about psychological motivations. Using such terms may not do anything to make us feel more righteous, but it will be more accurate—and it will have the practical effect of breeding less hatred, not more.