If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?)

Faux-populism aside, most school garden advocates would agree with Flanagan that, whether early education is cultivated in vegetable plots or those of Shakespeare, college is the ultimate goal, and the argument that the university isn’t for everyone runs a real risk of elitism. It’s easy for a tenured faculty member, or a first-year graduate student enjoying the first fruits of fellowship, to wax poetic about the art of mechanical production. But, as Rustigan argues, recognizing the abilities of those who show promise in shop class isn’t just empty praise; it might help steer would-be dropouts in a positive direction. Our educational system tends to give short shrift to those with neither the desire nor the skill set to don white collars. If the push for equal education put more emphasis on vocational programs, like the Regional Occupational Training offered in cooperation with the Santa Cruz public school system, we might give otherwise unmotivated teens a reason to stay in school by showing them there are multiple paths to success. Manufacturing may be cheaper in China, but home improvement and electricians’ visits will continue to be made in America, and such expertise comes with a certain job security. As Rustigan quotes a retired plumber, “No one is going to outsource your local repair guy.”

And let’s face it: not all of us in academia have the luxury of condescending to the service sector. Plenty of plumbers make more money than assistant professors, and grad students flush with funding now might not find such a plum situation on the job market – to say nothing of undergraduate humanities majors who try and fail, as I did last year, to score jobs in marketing or magazines and end up waitressing (and earning more than some office-bound peers) instead.

This isn’t meant to suggest that anyone is deciding between a mechanical engineering PhD and a career as a shop mechanic, or to deny the fact that college education can indeed be a powerful force for social change and personal gain. As the current controversy at Berkeley High attests, the misguided assumption that non-white students can’t excel in college-prep courses comes perilously close to proving Flanagan’s point. But it’s about time we realize that learning skills for manual labor, like learning critical thinking, is good for everyone, whether it’s part of a formal curriculum or not, whether as the basis for a vocation or as a supplement to one. The best education would teach how to use all the basic tools: reading, writing, arithmetic, and a hammer.

On Wednesday, February 24, from 12-2 pm, there is a workshop on surviving oral exams in the Tilden Room of the MLK Student Union. It will cover organization, planning, stress management, and what to expect from your committee.  Learn how to prepare while enjoying free lunch and refreshments. Brought to you by the GA’s Graduate Support Services Project in collaboration with UHS’s Counseling and Psychological Services.

On Thursday, February 25, the Grad Social Committee hosts its first event of the spring semester, a Graduate Assembly open house at Anthony Hall from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. Stop by for free food, drinks, and music and to get acquainted with the GA delegates and executive board members.

And on Friday, February 26, attend the graduate student health insurance plan town hall meeting on the ground floor of Eshleman Hall from 12 -1:30 pm. Go to learn more about a proposed UC-system-wide initiative to make graduate student health insurance more affordable and comprehensive as well as possible changes to our health insurance.

Located about 3.5 miles northwest of the Berkeley Campus (take the Buchanan exit off 80 and head west), The Albany Bulb was an active construction landfill until 1987 and is now part of the Eastshore State Park.  It’s not marked on Google Maps, but you’ll recognize it if you follow the coastline up from Gilman until you see, well, a bulb extending into the bay.  Take a nice, meandering walk (or ride) from the parking lot and you’ll be treated to breathtaking views of San Francisco and the bay as well as giant sculptures by local artists and graffiti-covered construction debris.  Head leftish on the path to Mad Mark’s castle, then wander north along the shore to find large murals and amusing uses of the large chunks of concrete scattered throughout the island.  On the north shore you’ll encounter huge sculptures by artists Osha Neumann and Jason De Antonis–I like to get to this part of the bulb by the late afternoon, so I can watch the sunset light up the city and the sculptures.

On any given day you will run into dog walkers, mountain bicyclists, anarchists, graffiti artists, photographers, and people who might rather not be disturbed.  The east side of the bulb is where there are more permanent encampments and the dogs who guard this area are not particularly friendly.  Stick to the well-trod paths and you’ll have a blast.  I bet you didn’t think that the apocalypse could be this fun!

Campus Affairs Vice President, Philippe Marchand, sought feedback on the changes that are being made to the Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship (DNTF). The DNTF is available only to students in certain departments and provides one year of funding for students who advance to doctoral candidacy within normative time. The changes to the award stipulate that if you accept the DNTF, you will no longer be eligible for financial support from your department after normative time for graduation. (Normative time has two dimensions: the time between entering a program and advancing to candidacy, and the time until the dissertation is filed.) This change will take effect for the 2010-2011 cohort. If you have comments or concerns, please email Philippe at cavp@ga.berkeley.edu.

Finally, UC Office of the President Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, Steve Beckwith, spoke about his position and answered delegates’ questions about budget cuts and decisions about how to allocate funding. His office distributes research funding and oversees research policy for the UC system. They also communicate to the outside world about the value of graduate training; as he said, learning to research is learning to produce knowledge. Some of the challenges his office faces currently are maintaining support for graduate students while the budget is in decline and maintaining an adequate balance of funding across the disciplines.

The Graduate Assembly delegates meet the first Thursday of every month and the full minutes from their meetings are published on the GA website.

Despite the cool temperatures and intermittent rain, spring is on its way.

A recent news feature in Nature Biotechnology asked some of the most prominent synthetic biologists how they define their field. The diversity and vagueness of the responses highlighted the difficulties the community has had centering itself on a set of focused objectives. Because Synthetic Biology is such a new field with no central discovery to mark its launch point, and because the application of systematic engineering to biology is so fraught with problems, the Synthetic Biology community has had trouble defining itself in concrete terms. This comes despite such efforts as the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), an NSF-funded consortium of faculty across various universities that is intended to facilitate joint research efforts within Synthetic Biology. Some responses in the article suggested that Synthetic Biology had become more of a buzzword meant to garner federal research dollars than a productive field. For those of us in the field at the moment, this hit painfully close to home.

I enrolled in the UCSF/UC-Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering largely because it boasted the largest and most promising Synthetic Biology faculty in the world. Before that, I worked for a year with a prominent member of the field at MIT where I started to get a sense of the field. As a biochemist, I was taken aback at the engineering jargon and oversimplification I felt was being applied to systems I knew were very complex and incompletely studied. But the positive efforts I witnessed far outweighed the negatives. One tremendously successful Synthetic Biology effort has been the International Genetic Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which challenges teams of undergraduates, graduates, and even high school students to undertake a genetic engineering project over a summer. Arguably the only “biology competition” in the world, the masterfully executed iGEM competition and jamboree thrills both students and participating faculty with the potential of Synthetic Biology. The iGEM competition relies heavily on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a large, open library of genetic engineered parts, largely submitted by iGEM students. The idea behind the Registry is that students and scientists can use the submitted parts in the Registry to build upon other groups’ work and thereby avoid replicating efforts. It was impressive efforts such as iGEM and the Registry, together with excellent work by highly reputable scientists and engineers that convinced me to stay and contribute to synthetic biology.

Though Synthetic Biology is facing increasing criticism, I readily defend it as the most promising approach to engineering biology. Though there are many difficulties with engineering biology, Synthetic Biology has made the most prominent and daring attempt at solving some of these challenges. Having worked in the field for several years now, I am consistently impressed by the dedication with which Synthetic Biology’s proponents approach its challenges on a daily basis. Most are serious scientist and engineers, tackling and slowly solving real problems. Synthetic Biology should tone down its promises and refocus itself on solving key issues with engineering systems, but it should not be dismissed. Harnessing the powers of biology will take more work than even Synthetic Biology’s critics realize, but Synthetic Biology has made the first few steps, and the payoff should be well worth the struggle. We should be patient and let it struggle onward.

• When: Wednesday, February 3, 2010 from 5:30-7:30 pm.
• Where: Anthony Hall

Photo by brianwallace

L.A. has a reputation for being a cultural and intellectual wasteland, but at the 8^th Annual West Coast Law and Literature Conference, held January 13 by USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and Department of Comparative Literature, I found a welcome oasis. I came across it by accident; I happened to be in town, I knew one of the professors participating, and parking was provided (probably the deciding factor). Since the papers were accessible online, I already knew that the panelists – Bernadette Meyler of Cornell Law School, Julia Lupton of UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn – would be presenting work on topics ranging from England’s 1660 Act of Oblivion to joint-stools, Hannah Arendt, and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I was anxious to find out just how all this (most pressingly, the joint-stools) could be connected under the proclaimed theme of “Early Modern/Post-Modern: Inventing the Political Subject.”

For some, the field of Law and Literature is symptomatic of the American university’s fetishization of interdisciplinarity, geared more towards marketing appeal than genuine intellectual inquiry. Depending on your perspective, it’s a way to make literature more relevant by relating it to the outside world, or a way to pretend to be engaging with the outside world while still remaining comfortably ensconced in academia. Debates over intellectual jurisdiction often ensue.

To my relief, the presenters at the one-day, single-panel conference didn’t waste time making the case for Law & Lit, opting instead to close-read and cross-examine each other’s arguments. All three panelists questioned the emphasis placed on “historicism” – briefly, the idea that texts should be understood in their historical contexts – and what the over-determined and often undermined term even meant. At one point, Kahn wondered whether “thinking with Shakespeare,” the project proposed in Lupton’s book of the same name, could really be called “historicist,” or if it could better be called simply “thinking.”

The relevance of this particular disciplinary intersection – between early modern law and literature and post-modern law and literature – was perhaps most aptly articulated by Kahn, who, in discussing her paper on “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza and Arendt,” posited that because early modern texts created the conditions for modernity, looking back on these texts can help us diagnose contemporary problems and give rise to alternative modes of thinking about the present. We might not be so flummoxed by current crises of political theology, from Islamic jihadism to Christian fundamentalism, if we paid better attention to how influential writings on the topic have been read and misread in the past.

The event’s format deviated from the norm of scholars reading their papers and fielding audience questions. Each of the three papers, copies of which were available at the conference, was introduced by another panelist’s commentary, to which the author could then respond; additional comments from other legal and literary scholars followed before the forum was opened up for questions. While feedback was delivered mostly as prepared remarks, the proceedings were enlivened by a spirit of collaborative openness. Kahn’s discussion of Lupton’s paper noted the early modern simultaneity of common law – in which the wife was considered her husband’s property – and canon law, under which a suitor must earn a woman’s consent through courtship. Using this legal lens, Kahn proposed, could lead to an alternative conception of Kate’s personhood in The Taming of the Shrew. Lupton said she found this idea useful, but pointed out that canon law didn’t necessarily endow women with any real agency: a “woman’s consent” to marriage often had little to do with the woman herself, but was instead used as a rhetorical strategy by men (like when Capulet waxed moralistic about his daughter’s consent in Romeo and Juliet).

I didn’t quite follow all this, and I’ve probably grossly misrendered whatever problematic was being (re-)problematized. But I did get the impression that the attendees were really, for the most part, engaging with each other. As someone new to the conference circuit and still at sea in my own field, I found the conversational, mutual-presentation format extremely conducive to, well, not zoning out during talks. No matter how eminently readable, the most riveting arguments can be difficult to follow when recited in monotone; by the time a paper is deemed worthy of sharing, I’ve sensed, the author is already weary of it. Having someone else explain, or question, what the papers were about kept things fresh for both the authors and the audience. For those who hadn’t read the material beforehand, the co-panelists’ commentary – which included both summary and critique – helped both focus the articles’ salient aspects and make them accessible to a diverse audience. I study French and English literature, and I attended the conference with my mother, a recent American History PhD and recovering lawyer, and we both came away invigorated by fresh ideas – this despite her wariness of Comp Lit jargon and my usual response of catatonia when confronted with legalese.

I hope to attend more conferences that work like this: interactive and well-organized, interdisciplinary but intellectually focused on the timely and the timeless, putting literature in conversation with politics without putting it on trial. Though I admit, I never quite figured out how the joint-stools fit in.