Category: Education

I find nearly all editorial writing about waves of unruly campus activism frustrating because even the most regrettable and objectionable episodes are ultimately isolated events. Blips on the radar of American higher education, a system that includes twenty-plus million students attending nearly five thousand degree-granting institutions. Over at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin seems to share these frustrations about essays of this genre and their limited, un-representative subjects:

I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.

I’m writing some thoughts about the topic here only because one recent essay spoke directly to my own anecdotal experience as a university educator. In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald cites the Facebook protestations of Columbia students against the university’s Contemporary Civilization course as examples of the “tantrums” and “victimology complex” at the center of campus activism. Having taught four sections of this very class during my doctoral work at Columbia, I am struck by the disconnect between the vitriolic language of this virtual shouting and the unfailing civility of each and every student I ever taught in my analog, low-tech classroom. These outraged Facebook posts, in other words, in no way reflect the consistently mature, critical, intelligent discussions I witnessed among my Columbia undergraduates.

Perhaps this rift shouldn’t surprise me. It is obvious to anyone who has ever read Facebook, Twitter, or even the comments on Mac Donald’s essay that the technological ease and pseudo-anonymity of on-line writing brings out our least charitable selves. I imagine the hostility on campus catalyzed by social media is a phenomenon parallel to the technology-enabled “smug style” that pervades America’s mutually incomprehensible political parties.

Connecting the dots, Nicholas Carr explains in a recent essay at the Boston Globe how Facebook’s goal of “universal self-expression”

reinforces the idea, long prevalent in American culture, that technological progress is sufficient to ensure social progress. If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It’s a pleasant thought, but it’s a fantasy. Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Civics and reasoned debate. Appreciating contrary perspectives. Self-examination. The well-honed, time-tested technology for effecting these outcomes is the seminar table, not the news feed.

But those who write fiery op-eds denouncing the excesses of campus culture continue to blame studious humanities seminars—rather than algorithmic feeds that reward bombast—as the engine of campus incivility. Mac Donald, with Columbia in her crosshairs, demands that professors “start defending the Enlightenment legacy of reason and civil debate.” What more, really, can we ask of the very educators who are already teaching Mill’s On Liberty, Plato’s Republic, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to over a thousand Columbia undergraduates every year? If the caustic Facebook posts she cites and my own intellectually robust classroom sessions are any indication, perhaps she should demand more defense of civil debate not from faculty but instead from Mark Zuckberburg and Jack Dorsey.

A recently sent some tips to a colleague about using plain text for typing up everything from lecture notes to seminar handouts to dissertations, and I thought it would be wise to re-post some of those tips here for other academics. While some of this advice will sound very techy—and admittedly, it is to a certain degree—it may be helpful for you if you share my frustration with Microsoft Word. Bearing that techno-disclaimer in mind, I write the following advice from the perspective of a humanist whose primary task is writing prose efficiently, whether for myself or others.

• In my last two years of graduate school, I made a habit of writing all my teaching notes in plain text—that is, in a .txt file without any formatting. You can make such a .txt file by typing something up in Windows Notepad or NotePad++ instead of, say, MS Word or Apple’s Pages. Perhaps the most significant advantage of using plain text files is that any device can reliably read and edit them: your new laptop, the clunky desktop next to your department’s printer, your phone, your parents’ dusty Bondi Blue iMac. In New York, for example, it was very useful to be able to review and revise teaching notes on my phone whether on the subway, in the park, or waiting in line at the supermarket. This kind of portability is not possible with PDFs or even Word files.¹

• While your phone can handle .txt files much better than it can handle, say, a .doc or PDF, there will come a time when you’d like to distribute a document in a format more handsome than the Courier New typeface allows. That is, you’ll want to share files as Word files or PDFs. To help you here, you’ll want to download Pandoc, an incredibly useful piece of software written by John MacFarlane of Berkeley’s Philosophy Department. This software lets you convert pretty much any document type (text, Word, ePub, HTML, you name it) to pretty much any other document type.

• Converting your .txt file to a Word document (for example) is straightforward. Open Terminal/PowerShell, move to the folder where you saved your .txt file, and run the following command:²

[code lang=text]
pandoc YourDocument.txt -o DocumentOutput.docx
[/code]

• And you’re done! You should have a Word Document version of your original text file in the same folder.

• A little bit of computer sorcery in these next tips, but: I love using LaTeX, a piece of software that produces beautiful academic documents even when faced with complex citations, strange typefaces (like Polytonic Greek), or mathematical formulas. If you’re familiar with LaTeX and already have it installed on your system, you can use Pandoc to create very nice PDFs quickly from your plain text files. For example, I produced this PDF of paper-writing guidelines for undergraduates from a plain text file with the help of Pandoc.

• The section headers and footnotes in the above PDF were formatted with Pandoc’s extension of Markdown. Even if you are making a Word Document or HTML file instead of a PDF, Markdown is helpful for formatting your text with bold or italic characters (for example) using only the text editor on your phone or old computer.

• To convert my text file of paper-writing tips into the PDF linked above, I include the following specifications at the top of my text file (including triple-dashes)…³

[code lang=text]
—
title: How to Write a Paper for Contemporary Civilization
author: Charles J. McNamara, Columbia University, cm@charlesmcnamara.com
date: July 2016
geometry: margin=1in
mainfont: Linux Libertine O
—
[/code]

… and then run the following command:⁴

[code lang=text]
pandoc document.md –latex-engine=xelatex -o document.pdf
[/code]

• This is as complicated as I let things get for my own work. Again, the point is to facilitate writing and reviewing prose, whether notes or handouts, with whatever technology you have on hand. For more information on writing full academic articles with Pandoc and tweaking the appearance of your documents, see Kieran Healy’s extensive documentation at http://plain-text.co/.

Columbia University now hosts a PDF of my dissertation, Quintilian’s Theory of Certainty and Its Afterlife in Early Modern Italy on their open-access repository, Academic Commons.

The dissertation also has a permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8KP8293.