[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I'm very pleased to be here today with Hollis Robbins who was one of the leading Scholars of African-American
history and literature and she is also now Dean at Sonoma State University Welcome Hollis thank you opening question why were the 1840s the most Central and determinative decade in American history well the 1840s was a time of of of change as as as I've said uh publicly that the 1850s is actually my my decade I think very deeply about the 1850s widely across the world what
was happening so for me the 1840s were the decades that open the door to the to the decade that I study but it's the decade that saw Frederick Douglas it's the decade that saw the beginnings of um the postal reforms it's the decade you see political a beginning of of a real political understanding that slavery is going to have to end it becomes clear
America will be a very large Nation right for the first time yes and in there you see changes in Europe um that will Revolutions in Europe that will change the the makeup of of the United States you see gold being discovered gold is discovered in 1848 you see the end of the Mexican-American War um you see the the Mormon decade right it's the Mormon decade Road and canals decade yes
you see Bridges build being built everywhere uh the beginnings of railroads at the end of the in again in the 1850s so it yes infrastructure begins to be built and and uh the United States begins to think of itself as a uh as a as a as a nation I don't one doesn't want to talk very much about Manifest Destiny but in fact uh that is characteristic of of of the way we think
about the 1840s but it seems no one talks about the 1840s or am I missing out it's not a thing to think of that as the seminal decade in American history well because it's because the 1850s were so dominant because because of the Fugitive Slave deck because of the mo of the writing of Moby deck even though nobody knew it at the time because of uh
The Scarlet Letter ha Thorn's The Scarlet Letter because of Uncle Tom's Cabin um that the 1850s is is the decade that dominates and why is American literature so blossoming all of a sudden in the 1850s where is that coming from it's well with harri P Stow it's it's the uh it's the Fugitive Slave Act but we see you know it's a good question um is it is it uh
Hawthorne and Melville's relationship with each other provoking each other to write more is it newspapers Frederick Douglas uh a couple of years after uh escaping um in 1845 or writing his narrative in 1845 founds a newspaper the Northstar um because new newspaper culture was was thriving in the 1840s and 1850s so you see a real print culture in America and you see novelists
responding to that being published in magazines and in newspapers and would there have been a civil war without a Fugitive Slave Act absolutely not why not because the Deep moral and ethical dilemma provoked by the Fugitive Slave Act was that an individual was had to choose between eth between their personal morals and helping a fugitive slave Escape uh and being criminalized
for that very act stow and others thought that this was unconscionable how could the American government require um by law that uh an individual had to turn somebody in when their Christian beliefs and their ethics said no that we're against slavery and I'm going to help this person escape and Harriet beer Stow she's also objecting to so many slaves
having been bought and sold is that a practice that is being stepped up as the nation becomes more commercial as there's more infrastructure more Transportation I don't know the data on whether more were were bought and sold but certainly the slave market in slave economy um was such that you there was an infrastructure to support um buying
and selling on a regular basis the depictions of slave auctions were uh in the 18 by the end of the 1840s and the 1850s um uh common in depictions of slave narratives what did slave Traders try to do to make their slaves Aces peacefully into being sold well that's a anything that's anything that this is this is actually not my area of expertise particularly my are of
expertise is the literature of slavery but certainly you know any kind of psychological torment any kind of carrots and sticks uh blackmail not feeding slaves well you threats I mean you name it any kind of manipulation of human beings were inflicted upon the enslaved to cause them to acques and why was Uncle Tom's Cabin so effective in the fight against slavery it was a
bestseller ostensibly President Lincoln once said this was responsible for the Civil War why this novel well have you read it or how old were you how old were you when you first read it uh 57 oh how old are you now 57 you hadn't read it before that correct I i' looked at some of it I think in high school but not really that's so interesting actually when uh when John Updike
reviewed our our version in the New Yorker magazine he confessed that he had never read it before either and he also confessed to having uh put down our version because our annotations he said were too distracting uh which I thought was fun I mean but again why do you think you didn't read it no one told me to it is in fact one of the best
American novels and one of the three or four best of the 19th century yet it's become a school kids thing that you're supposed to read but nobody ever does it's gripping it's manipulative and interesting and informative ways well you've answered the question then I mean it's manipulative interesting I mean he she creates what stow's comparative expertise is is is creating these
characters that live and jump out of the page so and I wouldn't call Uncle Tom uh a character that jumps out of the page but his sort of stalwart forthrightness his devotion his his Clarity of thought about what is right and what is wrong guide and ground the novel but we have uh Little Eva who was patterned on uh a little bit on uh dickens's Little Nail
from the old curiosity shop we have Topsy who was just a a Sprite in imp suig generous uh really extraordinary character we have Simon lree who everybody knows is the Avatar of a cruel overseer and did the book convince more women or more men to oppose slavery well the point of the book was to appeal to white women frankly to to White christian mothers in the north who could
imagine their own child being taken from them as the the in the first chapter of the book Eliza who is a a light-skinned enslaved woman in Kentucky learns that her son is going to be taken away from her is going to be sold and she flees in the middle of the night and in that famous scene crosses the Ohio River on Ice flows uh which is a signal moment
it's in American literary history and in all of the illustrations and the paintings of this book she is uh very very lightskinned if you take a look at this at any of these illustrations white women readers would take a look and and imagine themselves in that position now Harriet beero is calvinist is this book actually a calvinist book in terms of
its implicit theology no and this has to do a lot with uh Harriet's uh Harriet beer stow's relationship with her father Lyman beer who was a calvinist preacher and whose doctrinal uh beliefs were so strong that he basically told his elder daughter cath Katherine that she was not going to be reunited with her fiance in heaven because he hadn't been saved
which I mean which is a cruel thing to say after your daughter loses a fiance and then say sorry you're not even going to be reunited in in heaven and Harriet thought that that was a little bit too cruel and so you see in her Calvinism in this in her novel tempered a little bit by emotion she thought um and there's free will in the novel and there's free will are there still Calvinists in
American politics today well it's a good question uh do you think most of the candidates running for president today would even be able to say what Calvinism is I tweeted this the other day mayor Pete perhaps right perhaps but most do can most uh can most Americans tell the difference between doctrines of Calvinism Lutheranism methodism Episcopalian I doubt it is the portrayal
of Uncle Tom in the novel in fact racist as is sometimes alleged well I mean Uncle Tom is the racial epithet and has been for almost from the beginning of the novel I I don't think he's racist I think he is a character who works within his belief system as a character and does not fight back um he's an avatar of non-violence and certainly if you're
going to say that nonviolence uh and those who uh espouse it are racist then you're going to have a little bit of a trouble thinking about where to put Martin Luther King why does she have this one novel that's so wonderful and so famous and so full of life just you know falling off of the page and then none of her other novels are read at all anymore well dread is pretty good uh or
dread dread has some good parts that are which and and a lot of fat but the good parts of dread are great and there's another way of reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and that's to read it through the illustrations and your Edition has a lot of those illustrations if you read the novel through the illustrations how is it a different story than just reading
it through the text well the biggest the biggest message I would say of most of the illustrations is to age Tom um he spends the whole middle part of the uh of the novel with little Eva and Skip and I uh talk about this quite a bit in our introduction to our edition how this is the central relationship of the book is Uncle Tom who has uh found himself on
a Plantation uh the St Clair PL Plantation uh in in Louisiana and sits and talks with this young girl about God about Jesus about uh heaven and most of the illustrations show the two of them together uh show him very old uh in in frankly to to ensure that nobody looking at these two has any sexual feelings one one way or the other I mean she's always sitting on
his knee and she's always bouncing in his lap and she putting things in his hair I mean the two of them are always together so the illustrations must show him as old now I'd like to turn to Modern culture and go through a number of portraits of slavery and you tell me how accurate or apprpriate you think they are the movie 12 Years a Slave some of it was pretty accurate um I would say
the biggest inaccuracy is how close the depiction of the slave quarters was to the main house um usually it was set at such a distance that nobody in the main house would be able to know or think about the fact of slave quarters nearby the Quenton Tarantino movie Django D Jango Unchained uh well I don't think it was designed to be accurate it was
designed to be a fantasy the emotional viance what in it is objectionable or proper or that's a crazy question I don't think I can answer that um I don't think I mean again it was it was designed to be it was a response to some movies that you probably not going to ask me about from the 1970s um a couple of Italian movies whose names I'm forgetting right now that tried to
depict slavery after after roots in ways that uh were realistic and and suggested that the slave owners today that there are people as cruel today as as were in the 1850s and he's responding to a kind of film depiction of slavery um in his film depiction of slavery he wants to give more autonomy and more uh agency to D Jango so in that in that case I would
say there's a lot of accuracy that but if there's a kind of pornography of violence which yes is used to show slavery is horrible but is nonetheless a kind of pornography of violence which cannot help but stimulate some parts of us which may in some ways enjoy violent movies is that itself objectionable well this was a question that came up in the
1850s in fact or perhaps going back to your question about what was important about the 1840s is after after Frederick Douglas's narrative and after William Wells Brown's narrative um there was a circulation of a certain kind of uh pamphlets uh depicting slavery and there was a concern among abolitions that some of the depictions of of undress and wh
uh were a kind of Pious pornography they circulated and you you you could read Tales of of bondage and uh punishment SNM in a way that uh there was concern that many people were buying and circulating these slave narratives not for abolitionists but for AR titilation Steven Spielberg's Amistad good or bad movie it's a good movie um there's a butt in your voice what's the butt well
the butt is that it I I mean it's romanticizing it you know that as typical of films about slavery and I think D Jango is is uh could be criticized for this too only one heroic enslaved person is given agency when everybody else sort of Falls away so sink becomes this you know is the spokesman for everybody because he's descended from Kings Herman Melville's
short story bito Sereno fantastic and and a good depiction and why is it better than these other options we've been discussing because of agency and because of uh the idea that that individuals under ins slav M can be heroic oppressed manipulative sneaky humans just like everybody else do Chinese readers have straussian insights into African-American literature well
it's a good question I I was asked to give a keynote speech at an ethnic literature conference um a couple of years ago in in uh in China actually about a year and a half ago and I think they had uh reached out to me as a as a white scholar of African-American literature with the interest of how to how to think about ethnic literature in
a way that doesn't necessarily become separatist or doesn't necessarily require that the individuals studying the literature uh identify with the literature and so the questions and thoughts I would get from uh graduate students and other faculty had a kind of distance about how African-American literature how ethnic literature should be read I'm not sure it was necessarily
straussian but uh was was different and more interesting what do they see that we don't do they see it as more conservative or more radical or I think they are well different text in different ways I think the the they see the narrow narrowness of what gets studied uh and why I had a really interesting conversation with with one one scholar about Neil Simon um why the
playright why don't we study Neil Simon in graduate school so the the the questions are just outside the box and the questions about African-American literature I mean it was in conversation with a Chinese scholar that I I I finally saw in all its Clarity the ways that uh Melanie wils and uh Ashley wils are implicated in the Klux Clan uh and this still doesn't
seem uh this doesn't this doesn't get reported or or or emphasized in in posters of Gone With the Wind um the Klux Clan I mean the only person that really stands up for the clan or has nothing to do with the clan in Gone with the win is Scarlet O'Hara I mean she she thinks it's a ridiculous organization and you know again I looked through all the scholarship on Gone With the Wind
which is not a book that I've written about uh until recently and it's not emphasized and part of the reason it's not emphasized is that gone with the wi isn't taught in African-American literature classes where African-American literary Scholars would take a look at it and say well of course this is about the clan or at least the second half of the book is about the
clan um so most of the scholars who are Scholars of the South just sort of uh push it to the side no I've tried reading Margaret Mitchell but to me it was unreadable I'm not sure why how can you sell me on Gone With the Wind novel I should go back to I'm not going to sell you on it I mean again I mean like like Stow well I mean Stow wrote several
very good books uh Mitchell only wrote that one it's you know it's it's it's melodramatic and it's a love story um and the last time I taught the film in a in a um in a black Cinema class uh several years ago at John's Hopkins we began with Gone With the Wind and we began with a Gone With the Wind because all black cinema at at some level engages with that film it is the
foundational film film for depictions of slavery against which later films like 12 years of slave like d Jango and chained have to contend now you're a white woman studying African-American literature you have a kind of Outsider perspective of your own what does that help you see that maybe is obscured by other parts of people working in your field well I got into the field
accidentally because I had uh been reading about I I had read excerpts of a Slave narrative that skip Gates had found in 2001 called the bonds wounds narrative and had excerpted it he it was he found it at an auction or he bought it at an auction it was a it was a manuscript called the bonds with's narrative by Hannah crafts and we didn't know anything about the author we didn't
know anything about its date we didn't know anything about its Providence and he went to work trying to find it through things like you know what was the ink It Was Written in and what were the Illusions were there Illusions to Uncle Tom did it fit in with a slave narrative genre launched by Frederick Douglas anyway he had excerpt it in the
New Yorker magazine and I immediately recognized some of the borrowings or some of the excerpts as borrowings from Charles dickens's Bleak House and I had been trained as a Dickens scholar at Princeton or 19th century American and British literature and most of the scholars that he had shown this book to hadn't recognized those those Echoes and from the very beginning skip thought
what I brought to the field when I started working with him and when I began to transition from an American literature scholar to an African-American literature scholar was that I was trained in the very books that most African-American writers in the 19th century were themselves reading um and in fact if you're really going to take 19th century African-American
literature seriously you need to read the books that they were reading and they were reading Dickens and and they were reading Tennyson and they were reading Carlile and Wordsworth and sonnets also right and sonnets and sonnets though though the first good African-American sonnet writer uh was Paul Dunbar and um that was much later in the century now very often black
history is brought into American politics rather directly but bringing indigenous Native American history that has very different effects on political discourse how does that contrast work well it's uh it's going to be difficult I think the uh Native American studies is is the fastest growing ethnic studies field in uh the United States right now
in about time I mean after Canada's Truth and Reconciliation uh work I think the United States I the can Canadian universi uh Native American studies programs are are growing and we have one of the best programs here in California at uh UC Davis and I was recently at a conference with a number of humanities Deans um from around the country and we
were racking our brains about how we are going to get enough Native American study Scholars to be launching the classes that students are beginning to demand I think there's a real question of why why Native American studies isn't a programing department at most most universities I think I don't I came from uh John Hopkins I don't think there was a Native American studies uh scholar uh
in the history of literature Department there politically there's no upside right there's not much of a chance of redemption there are hardly any good guys and I mean that word guys literally there's not any president you can in a major way praise for how Native Americans were treated on net so it makes everyone look bad and then you're not sure what to do about that next
right well that's part of the issue the other issue is why is there uh black studies programs at at universities is because there was there were protests that led to them in the 1960s there was student demand saying we need to study this as a discipline as a scholarly discipline we demand a Canon we demand uh professors we demand funding and we
haven't seen that um with Native American studies um so we haven't the the scholarly infrastructure hasn't been there to support Scholars working on the on the subject so you have a a a variety of of of reasons that um it hasn't happened yet and will happen and I think the question is how does the framework of examining the Native American history
how is that going to conflict with the paradigms for studying black history and I think I think you're right there's going to be conflict what needs to be achieved so that a protected class no longer needs to be protected how do we know when we're there well that's too big a question I I don't know the answer to that what's the best argument in favor of reparations based on the
history of slavery the best argument I think coat's argument uh a couple of years ago in the Atlantic was the best argument which is that systematically property and value was taken away from The Descendants from slave families and from the descendants of the enslaved um around the country and I think writing the wrongs of redlining writing the wrongs of of incarceration errors
writing the wrongs of family separations his his argument still as far as I'm concerned is the most convincing now you've written a good deal on the history of the Postal Service how did the growth of a postal service change romance in America well everybody could write a letter the um in 1844 this was the other exciting thing that happened in the 1840s Roland Hill
in England changed the postal service by inventing the idea of prepaid postage so you anybody could buy a stamp and then you'd put the stamp on the on the letter and send the letter prior to that you had to go to the Post Office you had to engage with the clerk after 1840s and a after prepaid postage you could just get your stamps and anybody could send a
letter in Fr Frederick Douglas loved the idea of of prepaid post for um the ability to for the enslaved to write and send letters you know after that people wrote letters to each other and letters home letters to their lovers letters to when should you send a sealed letter because it's also drawing attention to itself right well I mean envelopes it's
interesting that envelopes sealed envelopes came about 50 years after the post office became popular so you didn't really have self-sealing envelopes until uh the end of of the 19th century and that was technology or people didn't see the need for it technology um the idea of folding the envelope and then having it be gummed and self-sealing um there
were a number of patents um but they kept breaking down and uh but technology s finally resolved it in the at the end of the 19th century prior to that you know you'd write in code and also paper was expensive so you know you often wrote across the the page horizontally and then turned it to the side and crossed the page writing in the other direction so if somebody was really
going to Snoop on your letters they had to work for it onette what were the social effects of the Postal Service well communication um I mean the post office in the need for the Post Office you know is is is in our constitution but it was egalitarian it was Winter take all it liberated women it helped slaves or what all those things I mean but yeah I mean d toille mentioned this
in in in his his great in the 1830s that um anybody some farmer in Michigan could be as informed as somebody in New York City when was the post office truly bureaucratized truly bureaucratized what do you mean by that well it's nominally a bureaucracy quite early on but it seems very often it was an informal place in a small town people would go in
there do their social business spit their Tobacco on the ground whatever and get on with things and then at some point you have a very formal set of civil service requirements in a postal post office is more or less a known predictable thing or no well I mean you still have it as the social space I don't remember that that uh big study some years ago that if two people were
supposed to meet someplace in a town with no other information where would they end up meeting and the always the answer was at the post office um so it's still a social place and I mean the real real bureaucratization came with UN unionization in the 20th century and with the with zip codes uh in the' 60s and when was the Postal Service racially
integrated it had been racially integrated it was unintegrated under woodro Wilson and then after that reintegrated so that you see um Richard Wright writes about uh working at the post office and LS of Mercy I think was is is the book but there were famously black postal delivery men um through the 20th century even in the south I don't know as much about the south why is the
post office so productive of tales of suspense well if you send a letter it's going to get delivered it's going to happen one way or the other um there's this great scene in Lolita when the Mom finally figures out what Humber Humbert is up to and she writes these letters outing him and she's about to cross the street to put them in the mailbox and
she gets hit by a car and it's the dramatic scene if those letter had gotten into the envelope into the mailbox his schemes would be over but he reaches down or some kid says oh here are some letters and he's saved for better or worse now you now live in in Northern California uh what would you say that people in Silicon Valley do not understand about teaching that's a real
jump I'm gonna have to sit and process that for a second well you know I've I've been a a professor for a long time and and uh you know I I think about how how to scale things up I think about how how to teach to thousands or tens of thousands rather than to the 20 20 people in the classroom I I'm not sure that it's possible that the process of
Education which is the process of learning information mediating mediated by uh a trained educated individual to uh students which is the way teaching has been taught you know since Socrates time I mean certainly there are things that that we we do now differently than were done in Socrates time but the delivery and cogitation and discussion
and synthesis of ideas and learning has to happen or I don't I don't see it scaling up what do you think it is exactly that makes in-person face-to-face teaching more effective than say teaching over Skype it's not just the inperson I think it's the it's the dynamic of the individuals the the individual Professor or multiple professors in the and team teaching and
the dynamic of of the students sitting together and when I teach poetry I might just we might spend the entire class period on one Sonet and everybody around the room has sees something different and convinces laterally the others in the room to see something students choose something over with each other they affect each other it's it's a dynamic
process what's your view of bundling teaching with income sharing agreements so I invest in the student I get a share of the students income as a company I then have an incentive to teach and place that student is that going to work is that going to solve our teaching problem is it fundamentally an issue of incentives it might um I do you know there is I don't see anything more wrong
with it than any other kind of loans uh I think it has a burden on the uh graduate The Graduate certainly can't take a gap app year after graduation and go to France and fish or something like that you know the the but the burden is the same in an Isa as it is with a student loan so I don't see it as as fundamentally different another Silicon Valley question which are the good
artworks about Founders there aren't any um why not well it's a good question I I you know I don't understand why why finders don't have more operas about them why why we don't see operas and and uh movies about Steve Jobs about Peter teal about Jeff Bezos I mean there's the the David Fincher film of uh the founding of Facebook but that's pretty
much it I mean the founders entrepreneurs today are Titans oh the dick count that's a whing venture it's backed by something like Venture Capital well that would be yeah that's a good example but we don't actually see the founders after the the pquad set sale what's it like having been the child of a founder well that's a complicated question my dad was a was an
entrepreneur before it became cool I guess and so we were always he founded uh electronics firms in New Hampshire and I have three siblings and we worked at the company I spent Summers soldering microchips and being yelled at to stay out of the clean room and making cataloges and understanding the industry a little bit the 1970s were a hard time for uh High tech companies and uh so he
would do well then they would fail or then he'd start another one and maybe do well for a while and then would do something else it was it was a hard life but it was fun it was exhilarating and if you study the history of dams you know dams that hold back water what will you know that maybe the tech people don't I'm not sure I I'm I I'm interested in in dams I'm interested in
the history of California's water I worked for a while with the Metropolitan water district of Southern California so I got to know a little bit about the water about the importance of the dams and and how California wouldn't be California without the system of dams and water but I'm not sure I I'm an expert uh that could tell anybody more
than more than the current experts uh the problem of daycare and taking care of children why is that so hard to solve and is there a tech Solution that's a good question I was on this commission um this was in Colorado in the 199s uh the governor of Colorado Roy RoR wondered as asked these questions I think I was on two commissions now that now that I remember it you know again is
this something that could be scaled is there something that government should do to ensure quality uh Child Care look anybody can have a child and the conditions under which most children are raised I mean we we think about even the ideal of you know two income parents one staying home being with the children somebody's got to take care of the kid before
kindergarten the variety of conditions for these children around the world I don't think most people think about I worked for a while for Planned Parenthood of the rocky of the Rocky Mountains and the woman that ran Planned Parenthood got into it I guess uh devoted her life to to Planned Parenthood to contraception after seeing children with Mal mtici that were just
left alone to die or were uh not taken care of well and and realizing that you know education was required in a tech obsessed world do scent and perfume matter more or less well I I think scent is the underrated I I wondered if you were going to ask me this in underrated overrated scent is underrated in the tech World sent is alterated in in entertainment I think there's only been
one film by John Waters which attempted to bring scent into the theaters uh and that was what 30 40 years ago does that film you know perfume from the Patrick's skint book but that's still mainly a novel right and does it come with scratch and sniff uh not that I know of I think it was a Franco German film I'm not sure ah okay we now get to
underrated versus overrated are you game sure okay first one out tap dancing underrated or overrated underrated tap dancing is excellent what makes it interesting well I was just actually having a conversation with a with a dance faculty at Soma state which does not offer for tap dancing they're it's a very avanguard program it's a very edgy program and the uh example given of of
being edgy uh was oh we don't do tap dancing and I thought well I I I like tap dancing it's um it's fun it's uplifting it's I just I just find it fun the Thomas man novel Dr fers uh totally underrated uh more people should should read it there's this great scene when's the last time you read it oh 20 years ago there's a wonderful scene where methos
brings grapes to Dr Fus out of season and he's like wow how could there be grapes out of season and in these days when we have Whole Foods right around the corner I mean I don't I don't I can't imagine most people in America imagining that you would sell your soul to the devil to get grapes out of season worrying about rabies overrated or underrated underrated rabies it's all
underated it's all underated there there should be more discussion of rabies or most people don't know that that in fact public policy has has eradicated something that had been a real concern for uh most Americans there's great scene in um To Kill a Mockingbird when attus fidge is called uh home because there's a rabid dog walking down the
street and it's the scene where he takes his gun and with one shot puts the puts the dog down and is the one man in town that can do it Amir Baraka formerly known as Leroy Jones overrated underrated well I think he's underrated I it it is unsettling to me that that so many students don't know him um and I try to teach him and and uh teach his poems when I can he's featured
in one chapter in my uh book on sonnets because he has two extraordinary sonnets he didn't call them sonnets but they are sonnets uh he was a really good poet Tiger Woods I don't know too much about uh well I know that that he's golfer and I golf uh but I don't watch him so overrated comparison from the Bible Genesis or Exodus Genesis why well in
the beginning it's it's the beginning U does it have the better stories it's got the better stories uh Exodus is is you know has has too much of the list about it um we don't we we we don't have to deal with the lists in Genesis Margaret Mitchell or Ein Rand well it's interesting that two of the best-selling novelists of the 20th century women are both equally uh ignored by English
departments and universities I mean Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind is is paid attention to a little bit just because as I said it's it's something that uh literature and film works against uh but not irran at all and what's Herman Melville's second best book Billy Bud why Billy Bud well like Antony um like the C Mutiny Court Marshal it's um the trial scene are is
is Sparks extraordinary conversation in the classroom and if you're going to read one book by Chester heims what should it be I don't remember all the names of them he's he's worth reading what's interesting in it the two detectives um and the patter between the two detectives in the way these detective novels operate different than other differently and the same as uh
other classic detective novels film music another topic you've written on why are hit songs and movies not so much a thing anymore the the 1960s parts of the 70s it's very common for the songs on the top of the charts to come from movies like Mrs Robinson that seems to have vanished what happened well well has it I mean I hear Frozen everywhere um so I don't know uh I'm not sure I I'm
not as much an expert on change over time um I expect that there will always be songs from movies oh there was that song from um A Star is Born that that was all over uh so so I'm not sure I'm I'm not sure I agree with your question I think film music has has uh changed but but but not that much can you think of a potentially good movie ruined by a
bad soundtrack I'd have to think about that what's a paradigmatic example of a movie made better by a good soundtrack um The Pink Panther Henry Mancini score I mean the movie it's ridiculous but the the score Henry manini score is I mean you're going to be humming it now the rest of the day overall all and I don't hear mean the music but just the use of
sound is the use of sound in movie soundtracks improving or declining in quality how much it's making the movie better well I read something recently that in fact the sound has never been better but primarily in TV sounds because um there's so many channels I mean people write about this there are so many amazing shows um that what draws uh and people are doing many things
while the TV is on in the background if they're cooking and this and what drop draws people to to uh put down their knife while they're chopping things and look at the TV or change when they're changing channels to stop is sound uh not visuals um so that music theme songs uh have improved movies seem too loud to me these days maybe I'm just seeing the wrong movies
but it seems harder to hear subtle sounds and there's more Blair the sound quality has never been higher well I think that's true if I apparently you're seeing too many Transformers films though Han Zimmer score um in in many films he's very very loud but also very good is Neil Stevenson correct that the Western as a genre doesn't exist anymore and if so what
happened to it you know I think about this a lot you know growing up in the 60s and 70s uh the Western was what what you'd see on TV I was thinking about the number of Native Americans I would see in a week you know watching Bonanza or whatever westerns happen to be on the on The Late Show um and these depict depictions of Native Americans were were
not accurate and were stereotypical and were deeply problematic but at least they were present because the Western was was a dominant form on television and film and I asked some students today like what what TV do you watch that features you know cowboys and Indians or Native Americans and and there aren't any Hans Christian Anderson Emperor's clothes what's the straussian reading of
that story well The Emperor's New Clothes is is a is a everybody knows the story what most people don't recognize is that was a happy flourishing town the short story says time passed merrily in that town so while the King was trying on clothes in his wardrobe and while all his ministers um were bringing him clothes and he was he was trying them on
and perhaps he was a little vain the town was doing well it was economically thriving there were no problems um and Anderson wrote this during a time um changing to a constitutional monarchy the question being you know things are pretty good when uh you have a benevolent Monarch who's who's not paying any attention and you is it still a happy town by the end of the story no
because once uh once the king once these Weavers Swindle the the emperor and you know the the little boy cries out but he has nothing on everybody's very upset everybody's sad um so the ministers and the um the ruse of of having a king who isn't paying attention is requiring that we're going to have a king that does pay attention I find the the story very
conservative what if the alternate original ending had been kept that's a good question and and I think uh the alternative ending is a benevolent monarchy is the best form of government Thomas Carlile sorter resartus why is that an interesting book it seems unreadable to so many people it's about clothes who would read carile on German idealism ISM and clothes and none of it
makes sense what's the bottom line on that I totally agree with you it's overrated and I've never finished it myself what is the straussian reading of Babar the elephant when's the last time you read it not long ago okay I I teach it I used to teach it I used to teach it alongside um Edward s's orientalism because in this story Babar the elephant comes to town is dressed by the lady
he's gets this green suit of clothing which is not not exactly right it's not good enough to be uh with a elite of the town but it's good enough for him then to go back to the elephants and be king there so he is a kind of uh subaltern in the dominant uh Colonial hierarchy but then can go and be oversee the elephants but still be in sway to the colonialist
Enterprise so it's reactionary in your reading why don't science fiction writers focus on clothes more I wonder about this I mean the the Star Wars you either have the sort of yoga or this sort of Irish knit um stuff with leather jackets that that Han Solo wears um and color is used in such literal ways right yeah red uniform the guy's going to die
exactly I mean in both Star Trek Star Wars I mean I I look around with all the technological advancements and I wonder why people are wearing just throwaway clothes people buy hundreds of things a year throw them out they're badly made workers in bad circumstances are making them I don't understand why there hasn't been real disruption in attire in Your
Vision how do you think clothes will differ 50 years from now well unless somebody steps in and does something um they're going to be exactly the same and they're going to be horrible so I'd like to see Fabrics that that you can wash at home that that last over time but what do you want from say smart clothes with embedded sensors do you want the clothes
to carry memory should they do some functions of your smartphone what can they do that they're not doing for right now well just having this conversation would be an improvement I mean right now those who are in who are dominating the clothing industry it's just about style about what color um I I think there there hasn't been a conversation yet about what happens in Paris and what
happens in Silicon Valley why isn't there more good science fiction well I think there is what do you mean more I'm en I'm enjoying I just I'm reading Ted Chang's uh short stories right now i' I've read Neil Stevenson there's great stuff what's the bias in mainstream media coverage of higher education what do they get wrong they get well inside higher ed and Chronicle and I I write
both of them individuals I know there to say you know study stop focusing on the elite schools spend some more time on um I'm in the CSU system at Soma State University there's 23 uh Cal State uh schools I think it's the second largest Public Public University system in the country schools like ours should have more coverage it should not be Harvard
Yale swathmore Amherst as emblematic of what's happening in highered or even Oberlin so at schools like yours the best students typically are very very good but they're not necessarily readily discovered because it's not Harvard or Stanford so if someone is coming along and they want to try to hire the very best students from say a California
state system School how should they find them what are the empirical corlet of those people who are the very very best students it's good question and it's something that I'm actually thinking on and working on one of the reasons I wanted to come to California and and work at a state uh University is students at a place like John's Hopkins there's already a pipeline to to go to
the best uh to go to Google or Facebook the problem at it's not a problem or the challenge at a place like Sonoma State with first gen students is that the opportunity Horizons the idea that oh I could go work at Facebook or I could go work at Google or I could go create an app hasn't isn't something that that first gen students often Embrace so the
first thing that we need to do um in classrooms is open up opportunities is to say have you thought about this is this a possibility to bring speakers to campus to to say this is something you can do to have recruiters come to campus and speak to our students and that and that's what we're doing to improve the job that you're trying to do if you could have better data on something what
would that something be I have to think about that I'd like to know what makes a really good teacher um in looking at the literature the teachers the quality of teaching is is measured primarily on student outcomes on student test scores um but there's there it's hard to say that that is the best measure or that's uh the best measure of how a teacher
teaches there's an Alfred North Whitehead quote he said sometimes I give a student uh an A or a b instead of a c or a d because they'll earn it 20 years from now that that a good teacher will Lodge education in a student's mind uh that may not bear fruit for 10 15 years how do we measure that is it possible to be measured how do we measure uh the delivery of information
per hour per com comment how do we how do we figure out who's good and who isn't good and right now the only way that we can study teachers are studying the students the the those who have decided to go into the field of teaching and what what are your intuitions so there'll be some obvious correlates such as putting time into being a better
teacher but the obvious correlates aside what do you think are the hidden correlates with people ending up being excellent teachers there's a a way of finding the uh channel of communication between the teacher and the student uh to be always open you know the teacher has uh a number of students in front of him or her and is constantly opening that channel and delivering information
individually to each in to each student all the time at the the in the manner that the student needs it I I I can't believe I'm about to to to gesture to Malcolm Gladwell but his comparison of Ed of elementary school teachers to quarterbacks I think is fruitful in a way um being Nimble being quick on one's feet being able to respond um uh to be
able to call an audible and so a teacher if a student asks a question and the teacher can pivot and answer that student um at that moment there's that quality of pivoting quickly that I think makes uh a really good teacher and having raised two very successful children what did you learn about teaching from doing that well I I raised two successful adults and I think that's
actually the question I I was not going to raise children I was going to raise adults and I told them that from the very beginning act in ways that you would like to see the world act not just a do unto others or do not do unto others but is the way you are being right now um the way you would like to see the world run and that you know speaking to to young people as if
they're adults um is something that that I've brought into the classroom Hollis Robins thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show