It’s official now.  The Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (formerly known as the Writing Program, now WRDM) and the College of Communications and Information Studies will collectively spearhead a major curricular shift and create a combined course sequence in composition and communication, which will ultimately ask students to participate in new media technologies.  Eventually, new courses designed specifically to teach students how to write on and for the Web will be offered.  As instructors of writing (and other forms of communication), we will have to become more aware of how communication is changing.

There will be more sessions on the intersection between writing and new media forms (photography, video, audio recording, video casting, and blogging).  For now, we’ve decided that blogs are the baseline tool that allow students and instructors to explore converging communication patterns.  Without blogs, we’ll be unable to circulate much of the multi-media work (podcasts, essays, photojournalism, audio files, documentaries, videocasts, etc.) that we do and that we’ll ask our students to do.

Beginnings

One of the major goals of the new curriculum, or at least I hope it’s one of the major goals, is to equip students with communication skills that transcend two timeworn genres that are often practiced and preached in college:  the 5-page composition essay and the 5-minute in class speech.  As our hammering colleague Colleen Glenn so eloquently puts it in an Arts & Sciences publicity article,

We live in an age of communication. From writing to speaking to texting to social networking, we are constantly communicating with others. The way that we communicate — the words that we use, the style with which we deliver them, and the mode of delivery — determines the impact and effectiveness of our messages.

We all assume that our students are tech savvy, and some of us might feel like the students should be teaching us how to blog, podcast, and videocast.  However, it’s been my experience that our students are generally less prepared to communicate effectively with new media and social networking technologies than we might imagine.  Students are typically great consumers of Web 2.0 content, but they often don’t know how to produce it.

Ostensibly, one major reason why we want to bring students up to speed with social networking and communicating on Web platforms is that doing so would provide students with a chance to become engaged in their communities.  I urge everyone to read Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article, which argues that “the revolution” won’t be tweeted.  Social networks, blogs, Twitter, and other avenues only fragment knowledge and information, Gladwell says, and such activities could constitute a kind of false consciousness-style community activism (for a great local example of Gladwell’s argument, see ProgressLex).

The question of whether or not blogging and online communication is effective activism has also compelled other large universities, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to make curricular changes.  The University of Michigan, which has formed a Digital Environments cluster in its faculty and is moving toward offering a major in this field, asks similar questions:

Social networking, viral marketing, data mash-ups, hypertext, collective intelligence, “googling” –the new coinages heard in conversations across the campus and on blogs across the nation attest to the digital revolution’s transformation of social identity, work, education, politics, the economy, and the most foundational interactions of everyday life. We increasingly live in and through a variety of capacious and dynamic digital environments, and this revolution has already made a host of practices, from academic research to journalism to establishing new forms of community, easier, more collaborative and more inclusive. And yet this revolution also poses serious, fundamental problems for the university, society and world affairs. How do we know what information is credible and reliable? In virtual environments with often unknown, unseen participants, how can we assess expertise? Who and what should we trust? At the same time that information has proliferated as never before, there has emerged a crisis in accountability, authority, intelligibility — indeed, in epistemology itself. Our students and the general public have not yet developed the critical literacies to negotiate these new environments for information, communication, ethical exchange, and social identities. They and we have not adequately explored the implications of digital environments for the production and dissemination of knowledge. (Source:  University of Michigan)

As we begin to think about teaching writing and communication in this brave new world, we need to consider ways that we can map out the landscape for our students so they can evaluate information, aggregate it, and participate in public conversations.

The Rhetoric of Blogging

Blogs shift the way we read, understand, and disseminate information.  Calling attention to the transience and immediacy of information, blogs change the way we consume information, and they even changing the way we write, as an early forum on blogging argued.  Furthermore, blogs are replete with software technologies that are designed to link to other information sources, and these technologies are being refined and improved daily.  Here are some examples of new writing conventions:

Embedding links in post:  This is in effect a new way of citation that serves a dual purpose (and even encourages writers to place themselves in dialogue with other voices and perspectives).  It is a way of acknowledging other ideas and helping people see your own engagement with those ideas.

Nestling photos and videos:  It’s become extremely easy to engage with commercials, television clips, shows, or any other visual medium.  Having the clip nestled within the writing should help student move away from summary and description and toward analysis.

Polls:  User interaction is one  hallmark of the Web 2.0 experience. WordPress has followed Facebook and other sites by making the action of “liking” and responding an integral part of the reading experience.  Now, one doesn’t even have to formulate a coherent thought to interact with online media (this was always the policy on the Herald-Leader comments section).

Immediacy:  Timestamps and instant publication make it possible for students and writers to get an audience before anyone else, including mainstream news sources.

Intertextuality:  Via linking, blog writers can make connections to knowledge and situation themselves within a community of ideas and information.

Self-Reflexivity:  Blog writers can connect their own ideas to earlier explorations of a similar topic.  For example, I already hosted one PDS on blogging last fall.  This one is better.

Content is King:  Preparing Students to Blog

It used to be the case that many people had good ideas for programming, but not many people had the money, time, or expertise to circulate their ideas.  Now, the opposite may be true.  It’s very easy to circulate ideas.  The way to ensure an audience is to develop and maintain good content.  This is an important part of the process.  In order for students to conceptualize a web presence, they need to be aware of what other voices already exist.  Then, they need to find a way to access those voices regularly and quickly.  Here are some ideas to get this process started:

Choose a theme:  Have a vision for a project or blog that foresees what might happen in the future.  Think about the niche your blog can have in the public audience.  Will you eventually expand your content?  Does your format provide space to do that?

Develop a strong RSS subscription list:  Find efficient ways to know which blogs are influential and to whom.  I suggest Google Reader, but there are other RSS readers out there.  This can be used for all media, including podcasts and video.

Get on Twitter and make lists for yourself:   Use the list feature on Twitter to keep tabs on emergent conversations.  You can save searches and keep tabs on these as well.

Success Stories

I believe that as we begin to present our students with the possibilities of participating in our information revolution, we need to show them some success stories.  How have people with the technologies and knowledge that is comparable to theirs generated an audience?  In short, students would be encouraged by proof that good writing can lead to an audience and maybe even a job.

Christian Lander was a graduate school dropout who started a satire blog on WordPress called Stuff White People Like.  Within a few months, the site went viral, and Lander was offered a $3o0,000 advance from Random House to essentially publish the contents of his blog in book form.  Jeanne Devon was a concerned citizen in Alaska who wrote about local politics.  Her blog, The Mudflats, exploded in the fall of 2008, when the world wanted to know just how crazy Sarah Palin is.  Devin Rossiter, an avid sports fan, budding sports broadcaster, and graduate of Northwestern University, decided that he’s fed up with our gladiatorial obsession with football, NFL and college.  In protest, he vowed to go one year without watching football or following it in any capacity, and he documents his experiences on A Year Without Football, one of many “year-long experiment” blogs to gain a substantial audience.  Another is the Julie/Julia project, the account of one disaffected twenty-something who decides to cook one recipe from Julia Child’s iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking each day.  The blog earned Julie Powell a book, a movie deal, and bitter disdain from Childs (who died in 2004).  A few local fratboy jackasses started a WordPress blog called Kentucky Sports Radio.  The site has launched its writers into national fame, and their podcast became the number one download on iTunes last fall.

Uses

The second step is to catalog the ways that blogs can be used.  Here are a few ideas:

Pedagogy:  As instructors, we can use blogs for class discussion, participation, announcements.  See, for example, The New Testament as Literature, a blog for my current class.

Writing:  Traditional writing, experimental writing, aggregating links, surveying cultural landscapes, commenting, or whatever.

Photo blogging or photo journalism:  Disposable Words

Video journalism or citizen journalism

Podcast or audio project hosting:  Et in Arcadia Ego.  WordPress has extensive podcasting features available on the WordPress 3.0 platform.  It costs $10 per year, or somewhere around there. But don’t students spend more than this on textbooks?

Ideally, blogging can become a forum in which students integrate multiple manifestations of their web presence.

Strategies for Broadening an Audience

Tags v. Categories

Social bookmarking services

Pingback/trackback

Twitter

Link

Like

Comment

Good Examples

Pigs in the Parlor: Note the work done with photographs.

Lowell’s blog analysis of CentrePoint proposal

The Well Wrought Urn:  By linking to other major news sources, writers can insert themselves in a public conversation about situations that matter.

Fix Buffalo Today

Renderings of Proposed CVS

Recently, a group of well-intentioned public activists have formed ProgressLex, a group dedicated to social justice and “smart and sustainable economic development” in downtown Lexington.  Thus far, the group’s bailiwicks have proved to be upholding the architectural aesthetics of certain downtown buildings, eradicating one way streets in Lexington’s downtown, and branding Lexington as an epicenter of brainpower and social industry.

If anything, ProgressLex is a testament to the fact that if you rally enough well-connected people who are proficient with Web 2.0  media, you can elevate any personal pet-peeve to the level of community crisis.  During the last few days, ProgressLex has demanded that the chain drug retailer CVS, which is currently building a drugstore at the nexus of Main Street and Vine Street, reconsider its decision to construct a suburban-appearing unit that is would “be a blight” on Lexington’s downtown.  Here’s a blurb from the call to protest:

In fact, the design reflects a far greater effort to stamp the building with the CVS brand than to respect and respond to the downtown context. The synthetic stucco arches, for example, have no architectural integrity, make no reference to any architectural idea or form, yet they are dominant elements. Simply put, the arches are CVS signage, without the letters. This may be acceptable in the more vulgar environment of a strip mall, but not in a downtown environment where a higher degree of dignity is expected.

Since when has suburbia been coded as “vulgar” while downtown maintains a “higher degree of dignity?”  I guess this distinction depends on which part of downtown one is talking about.  The complaint here seems to be that CVS, which will pour lots of its own money into this project, wants its building to reflect the experience CVS customers have come to expect.  In other words, Lexington’s downtown, not the private corporations that do business there, should be allowed to fashion a single brand image.  And that image must conjure an aura of Southern gentility, equine fantasy, and quaint hospitality, not drab suburban predictibility.  No other private interest should impinge upon this dreamscape without first aligning its business model or design plans with the aesthetic sensibilities of a select few citizens.  If only Lexington had previously proven itself as a town that refuses to let corporate interest hold sway, this argument might hold some water.  But Lexington has always allowed the interests of a wealthy minority to dictate how its space is used.

I just don’t get the complaint raised by Rowland and ProgressLex.  We daily and freely subject ourselves to corporate advertising and branding by watching television shows, listening to radio programs (yes, even NPR), and attending (or teaching) university classes that could not take place without the revenue generated by advertising.  Advertising isn’t ideal, but it’s currently the de facto system, a series of quid pro quo agreements, in which we participate every day to be informed, entertained, or invigorated.  But when a company decides to build a building and advertise itself on that building, ProgressLex speaks up with pious outrage?  There are much bigger fish to fry in Lexington, such as the fact that we currently don’t have a downtown drug store that can serve the people who live here.  From what I can tell from reading this massive document, CVS isn’t in violation of Lexington’s retail design zoning laws.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not arguing that Lexington should let corporations run roughshod over its citizens (indeed, I’ve spoken up before when I see this happening).  But if corporate-financed infrastructure can improve the quality of life in our community, we might want to consider seriously the place of the buildings they produce in our eclectic, stable downtown landscape that serves many interests and increases the functionality of many peoples’ lives.  An example is the gaudy, bright red bench behind the Thomas and King downtown offices (off Short Street).  The bench says “Wow,” which reflects the company promise to “wow” its customers.  It looks like something you’d see at an amusement park, but it’s clear that the bench serves a dual purpose.  It’s shameless advertising for Lexington’s most annoying restaurant company, but it’s also intended for public beneficence; the bench gives people a place to sit and enjoy downtown where no place had existed before.

A better, and more obvious example is the newly-minted Fifth Third Pavilion that occupies the street adjacent to Cheapside.  There is no structure in downtown that comes close to resembling the cold, industrial steel buttresses that uphold the pavilion.  I’d be cruous to hear ProgressLex’s interpretation of this architectural wonder.  The Fifth Third logo that has been placed prominently at the head of the pavilion also might seem to be gratuitous advertising, but I think over time we’ll realize that this structure will make the Farmer’s Market better.  It will allow for festivals, fairs, concerts, and other events that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible, or at least wouldn’t have been as enjoyable for everyone.  And the pavilion certainly wouldn’t have been built without the $750,000 donation from Fifth Third Bank.  At the least, I’d like to see a consistent attitude toward branding from Lexington’s power elite.

One of the reasons why ProgressLex thinks we “deserve better” than what CVS has pitched (see their website for design drawings) is because the nexus of Vine and Main Street has been a particularly contested space for at least 25 years in Lexington.  As this WKYT news story suggests, what gets built on this corner is important because it visually sets the tone for people as they drive into downtown Lexington.  It’s a prime space to inflect Lexington’s brand.

The folks at ProgressLex might already know that the space across the street has already been branded.  Twenty years ago, the Triangle Foundation, a private group of wealthy philanthropists (yesterday’s rendition of ProgressLex) permanently linked Lexington to horse racing.  Ignoring public sentiment, the Triangle foundation designed and privately funded Thoroughbred Park, a striking paean to the equine industry and Kentucky’s rolling bluegrass hills.  Rich Schein, a Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky has argued that while Thoroughbred Park is a deliberate attempt to beautify Lexington, it advances a brand that depicts a highly selective picture of downtown Lexington’s past and future.  The park is a racialized landscape because it promotes an idealized civic image that has been built upon Lexington’s racial inequalities.  The racing horses and artificial bluegrass hills sequester the poor, historically black East End neighborhood, hiding it from view as people move down the Main Street corridor.

What people don’t see when they drive into downtown, thanks to Thoroughbred Park, is a neighborhood that needs access to a drug store.  The heart of ProgressLex’s complaint here boils down to the same questions of image, aesthetics, and branding that produced Thoroughbred Park.  As someone who lives 0.4 miles away from the new CVS, I’ll have no problem walking or biking there to pick up supplies.  And I know that many other people who live near me, behind Thoroughbred park, will also walk or bike there as well.  They deserve a drug store.

Berea College President Larry Shinn

A shrinking endowment is a particularly worrisome problem for a college that funds all of its undergraduate students and is committed to social justice and equity in higher education.  According to the Berea College website, the school was founded by ardent abolitionists who took seriously the scriptural premise that “God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.”  It admits students, many from Appalachia, who come from a limited economic background.  The mission and premise of the college has always been to promote equality through justice.  Berea was founded by people who recognized the arbitrariness of injustice and how unjust societies wreak violence when they refuse to take consistent moral stances that show grace to all people.  Its leaders despised a society that discriminated according to social, gender, or racial difference, and it has always provided a curriculum that has demanded its students to think about the patterns that perpetuate poverty and hatred.

Alessi’s article shows just how far Berea has now deviated from that ideal.  Recently Berea has held several forms, in which President Larry D. Shinn and other university administrators collaborated with the student body to reshape the direction of Berea.  Here’s a record, from Alessi, of one conversation that took place at these forums:

Student Elizabeth Vega, a 43-year-old grandmother majoring in sociology with a social justice minor, approached him to seek permission to address Berea’s board of trustees. She wanted to present her petition calling for Shinn to cap administrators’ salaries to no more than six times that of the lowest-paid college employee.

Her idea — an offshoot of the broader debate over Berea’s future, mission and financial situation — is in line with one of Berea’s key principles of plain living, she said.

Shinn disagreed, calling her plan arbitrary and potentially harmful to hiring future campus leaders.

“The question is: How do we put ideals and reality together,” Shinn told her, as the auditorium emptied out. “I think we’re doing pretty well.”

“We could do better,” Vega responded.

Even if we assumed that the lowest-paid college employee makes $20,000 per year, which is almost below the poverty line, such a policy would ensure Shinn a six-figure salary.  Berea should set itself apart from the status quo in higher education.  It always has, and Elizabeth Vega should be commended for her concrete model of justice for Berea College.

Chapman simply asks us to create a video that captures what Lexington is all about.  He’s interested in how we “brand” ourselves as a city, what we do, and what images we perpetuate about ourselves.  Since this is a jury project for the Gaines Center, I presume that there will be some synthesis and answer to how the humanities can help us think about these challenging questions. If you’re an expert filmmaker, give this challenge a shot.

What a great job, right? John Stewart jumped on this one last night in his opening sequence to The Daily Show. A job that requires expert knowledge of the Grateful Dead and top-flight organizational skills?  Stewart’s monologue is nothing more than a string of pejorative conceptions about what it means to be an information professional.  Clips like this are why there’s so much professional insecurity and meaningless backpedaling in LIS graduate courses.

Still, I’m seriously thinking about applying for this job, and I hired an interview coach to grill me on possible job interview questions.  I’ve got the educational credentials (and more) plus some experience.  Here’s a top three list of potential questions I could hear.

1.  So, Mr. Battista, do you feel that Jerry became a little too attached to the mixolydian riffs in the “Scarlet Begonias/Fire on the Mountain” medley during the Summer ’72 tour?

2.  What’s your favorite “Dark Star?”

3. How do you account for Donna’s inconsistent vocals in the Summer ’77 tour?

Should I apply?

U.S. forces approach a camp that appears to be in a desert landscape.  It’s not clear whether we’re to take this desert camp as being in Afghanistan or Iraq, but since the commercial unfolds as a paean to troop support during this holiday season, and troops are being sent to Afghanistan, rather than Iraq, by the thousands, I suppose we’re meant to believe that this is the Afghanistan desert.

A magical music score begins to play as the soldiers look to the heavens with a sense of awe and wonder.  It’s snowing in the desert! An impossibility.  A miracle, and a sign that somewhere a prayer has been answered.  And it has.  In some undisclosed shopping mall back home, a thirty-something mom and her son leave the Santa booth and the mother stoops to ask her son what he wishes for.  “Something for daddy.”

Whatever emotions this commercial seeks to evoke have to be based on the fact that most United States citizens are completely oblivious about what happens in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  Sure, it doesn’t snow much in Iraq, but it does happen, as we discovered earlier last year.  And when it does, there certainly isn’t any accumulation (like this Wal-Mart spot depicts).

And, of course in Afghanistan, brutal winters, dry, cold temperatures, and snowfall aren’t the sign that some magical Christmas spirit has been appeased by the wish of a spoiled rotten brat in New Jersey.  Snow happens every winter, and it can be extreme. All of this is to say that the commercial “works” because Wal-Mart’s target audience doesn’t know much about Afghanistan weather, just as it knows little about the perilous war in which our country is becoming increasingly entrenched.  There’s nothing magical or festive about snowfall in the Afghani desert when U.S. troops are there.

Of course, the real repulsive aspect of this ad spot is the way in which Wal-Mart takes its slogan, “Live Better,” and attaches it to U.S. imperial conquest.  Yes, the United States military does help us live better in situations like this, perhaps because it protects existing systems of capital economy.

How does Wal-Mart get away with exploiting foreign war against “terrorism,” hijacking the pain of real people who are dying there every week, and using the emotive force to enhance its brand image for the upcoming holiday sales rush?  Wal-Mart says that it cares about the plight of U.S. soldiers, yet it throws chicken scraps at veterans hospitals and programs.  In 2008, the retailer donated $3.6 million to veterans educational programs.  This is great, but it’s chump change for a business that profited $12.73 billion dollars in 2008.

Yuck.

The Writing Program will be offering a series of PDS(s) on the intersection between writing and these new media forms (photography, video, audio recording, and blogging).  For now, we’ve decided that blogs are the baseline tool that will allow students and instructors to explore and test the limits of converging communication patterns.  Without blogs, we’ll be unable to circulate much of the multi-media work that we do and that we’ll ask our students to do.

The Rhetoric of Blogging

Blogs are changing the way we read, understand, and disseminate information. By calling attention to the transience and immediacy of information, they are arguably even changing the way we write.  Sites like the Huffington Post are able to offer a diverse range of writing, commentary, news, analysis, and information.

Blogging Success Stories

• Stuff White People Like
• The Mudflats

Rhetorical Functions of Blogging

• Embedding links in post
• Nestling photos and videos
• Polls
• Immediacy
• Intertextuality
• Self-reflexivity

Pragmatics

Choose a theme.  Have a vision for a blog that foresees what might follow whatever project or position you’re currently tackling.  Think about the niche your blog can have in the public audience.

Develop a strong RSS subscription list.  Find efficient ways to know which blogs are influential and to whom.

Fix Buffalo Today

Barefoot and Progressive

Uses

Pedagogy:  We can use blogs for class discussion, participation, announcements, etc. – The New Testament as Literature

Photo blogging or photo journalism- Disposable Words

Video journalism

Podcast or audio project hosting:  Et in Arcadia Ego

Writing and media

Techniques & Terms

Tags v. Categories

RSS

Pingback/trackback

Good Examples

Pigs in the Parlor: Note the work done with photographs.

The Well Wrought Urn:  By linking to other major news sources, writers can insert themselves in a public conversation about situations that matter.

As expected, the Board of Trustees didn’t spend much time worrying about the ramifications of their decision and quickly voted to accept the gift and move forward with plans to build the new “Wildcat Coal Lodge.” There has been a great deal of buzz on campus the past few days, and now national media outlets are turning to cover the incident, and not without an attitude of condescension and pity either.

Check out what Dave Zirin, a sports editor at The Nation and the host of Edge of Sports Radio, has to say on the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC).  The clip is interesting, even if misguided in its guffawing focus on the idiocy of naming buildings after coal, but Maddow does ask a good question about the role that private industry now holds in college athletics.  This five-minute interview is yet one more sign that we need to supplement our news diet with more sources and more information than what appears on television.

Joe Craft has already donated millions of dollars to the University of Kentucky Athletics Association so it could build a new practice facility for the men’s basketball team.  This project, while largely funded by Craft’s own pocketbook, did force the university to dip into its coffers (which, by the way, come from state tax payers), even though university administrators protested and said that UK is suffering from a “crisis in undergraduate education.”

Now, Craft has organized a group of influential coal barons, bankers, and other Lexington figures to form a group called “The Difference Makers.”  The Kentucky Kernel features a story with a list of these people.  These are precisely the people who exploit Kentucky’s land, people, and economies.  They have access to the highest percentages of concentrated wealth in the state, and they could use their financial clout and resourcefulness to raise money for the university’s general education fund instead of its already bloated athletics department.

Craft’s group had the audacity to announce their plans during an on-campus forum on coal and the university last week.  Almost all of the university’s electricity comes by way of Kentucky coal, and various university leaders met to discuss the future of this energy resource and our responsibility as an institution to seek alternatives.  Instead, it became another forum for Kentucky’s coal industry to advance its agenda vis-a-vis UK programming.

Back to Maddow’s point.  Doesn’t this decision by the Board of Trustees constitute some sort of egregious violation of the line between corporate advertising and educational endeavor?  It does, but she should have focused on the fact that such uneasy collaboration has been going on for a long time, mainly out of sad necessity.  I’m currently sitting in the William T. Young library, writing in the Toyota Reading Room, a space that’s been subsidized by a predatory multi-national automotive company that’s done more to dismantle union labor in Kentucky than any industry except coal mining.

Universities like UK willingly turn to corporate deals and agreements because they feel as if they need the money.  They are underfunded by state legislatures to be sure, but more often than not, universities simply allow billion dollar companies to profit off of their clientele.  They get little in return.  A good recent example is UK’s decision to allow Apple Computers to build a store in its Student Center.

What Maddow and Zirin also neglected to mention is that the Board of Trustees’ vote today is just one example of a longstanding partnership between the interests of big coal in Kentucky and University of Kentucky athletics.  Last week, Friends of Coal sponsored a men’s basketball practice, which UK students could attend if they subjected themselves to watching women’s volleyball and men’s soccer games.  Friends of Coal also sponsors replays at home football and basketball games.  The formula for the coal industry, and a lot of other industries in Kentucky for that matter, is simple:  find the product people in the state care about more passionately than anything (Kentucky basketball) and find ways for them to associate their positive passion toward it with their own product (in this case, coal.)

Zirin hits the nail on the head again.  Lee Todd won’t do anything to stop this because he see all things university related as a business transaction.  He hasn’t actually taught in a university since the early 1980s, he’s a former board member of IBM, and he’s hopelessly skewed by the values of the marketplace.  The sun is not shining bright on my old Kentucky home today.

Rejecting Nobel’s Audacity of Hope:  Why We Should Not Appreciate Barack Obama’s Peace Prize

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it would give President Barack Obama the 2009 Peace Prize, I, like many people, reacted bitterly.  Having won a Peace Prize, Obama stands alongside Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Henry Kissinger, political figures and past Nobel Prize winners who have perpetuated military and economic violence in the name of national security.

U.S. citizens should not continue to uphold the Peace Prize as worthy recognition for leaders like Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, or Mother Theresa, Nobel Laureates whose legacies of sacrificial reconciliation and peacemaking have been hijacked by an international community who is enamored with Obama’s charismatic appeals to Hope and Change.

The fact remains that President Barack Obama is a warmonger.  I don’t think this is an overly-pejorative term.  Obama has merely taken the Bush-era foreign policy of violence and conquest in Iraq, where the United States military industrial complex sponsored a relentless pursuit of oil, and transferred it to Afghanistan, where we are now waging another amorphous war against terrorism and spending billions of dollars in the name of “national security.”  The Huffington Post reported this week that our exploits in Afghanistan are far more dangerous than the Iraqi campaign has been.  At least 800 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and many more civilians have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. military aggression, which has indiscriminately chased Taliban forces through the rugged Afghani landscape.

President Obama no more deserves a Nobel Peace Prize than does George W. Bush.  Yet so many political pundits and uncritical liberals give Obama (and the Norwegian Nobel Committee for that matter) the benefit of the doubt.  This is a preemptive award, they say, one that may compel Obama to steer U.S. military policy in such a way that would make him a worthy Peace Prize recipient.

I think this is magical thinking.  Since his administration took office, President Obama has selected hawks like General Stanley McChrystal to further entrench the United States in overseas combat.  We may remember McChrystal as one of the brass responsible for the Army’s shameless cover-up after the Pat Tillman friendly fire death.  Obama has increased the troop level in Afghanistan by 33 percent; he has sent an additional 21,000 men and women to fight in 2009 alone.  General McChrystal, whom Omama handpicked to head the campaign in our new rendition of the war on terror, has asked for at least 40,000 additional troops, and Obama, even as he accepted the Peace Prize with humility, refused to rule out the possibility that he would grant McChrystal’s request.

Now, thousands of U.S. soldiers, many of whom have already served multiple tours in Iraq, are preparing for lengthy deployment in Afghanistan, where they face the insurmountable task of creating a democratic order ex nihilo.  According to the Nobel Committee website, the Peace Prize is bestowed upon those individuals who “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”  Obama has precipitously increased the standing army of the United States, and his actions have encouraged other world leaders to do the same.

We should not be proud of our President as he accepts this award.  His unwavering financial support of Israel’s military aggression has not fostered peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Obama kept his critic (and former Peace Prize winner) Jimmy Carter away from the convention and allowed him only a brief video message.  Obama’s underlying fear was that Carter’s role in Middle East peacemaking would cost him votes.

By default, the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military should be ineligible for a Nobel Peace Prize, if that award is to signify anything meaningful.  Of course, an award is just an award, and Barack Obama can bring about peace in ways that most world citizens cannot.  But the aftermath of the 2009 Peace Prize award is a familiar echo of an international trend.  We support Barack Obama without holding him accountable for his actions.

The Cost of Replacing Rupp Arena

Corporate Welfare and Lexington’s Basketball Tradition

Every time I watch a home University of Kentucky basketball game that broadcasts nationally on CBS or ESPN, I hear announcers regurgitate the same platitudes about Rupp Arena.  It is a cathedral, a sacred space, the epicenter of the basketball-crazed Bluegrass Region.  Glory, honor, and heritage ooze out of every nook and cranny in the arena.  Rupp’s rafters bear witness to an unparalleled tradition of excellence, and its court has been graced by college basketball’s all-time great players and coaches.  Such reverence from these announcers makes it seem as if Rupp Arena is Lexington’s most functional building, or at least a space good enough for its rabid fan base.

Oh, were it that simple.  Lexington taxpayers should be suspicious next month when the London sports marketing firm IMG/ISG releases a feasibility study to determine whether or not Lexington can replace Rupp Arena, which is now 33 years old.  The study, authorized by the Lexington Center Corporation and endorsed by the University of Kentucky, will detail the logistics behind financing and building an arena that, for many people, seems to be superfluous.  Worse, it smacks of corporate welfare, an all-too familiar scenario in Kentucky, where politicians divvy out tax breaks, subsidies, and preferential treatment to profiteering entities that least need a helping hand.

The prospective new Rupp Arena raises several questions for Lexington, a city whose leadership has shown itself exceedingly willing to spend public money in ways that benefit private enterprises.  Each year, taxpayers in the United States spend over $2 billion on privately-owned sports stadiums and arenas.  How much public money will go toward building a new arena in Lexington?  Who will profit from a new arena?  Can the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG), which faces a $27 million budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year and is obliged to provide its citizens with infrastructure upgrades, justify contributing any money toward a new basketball arena?

These questions are complex, and since IMG/ISG (the prospective investor) stands to profit from a new arena with luxury suites, more seats, and top-notch amenities, their feasibility study may not address these issues directly or honestly.  UK Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart and Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry have already said that tax dollars will not support a new arena if it were built, but that promise, and the prospect that private financing will come through in a global recession, is fleeting.

To me, building a new Rupp Arena seems like a profound misappropriation of public energy and ingenuity, if not money.  Lexington has many problems that take precedence over upgrading its basketball arena, and they are problems that will require long hours of work to ameliorate.  In anticipation of IMG/ISG’s feasibility study, I offer a tale of three cities:  New York, Seattle, and Lexington.  Each tale provides a radically different example of how a community can decide to treat the relationship between sporting venues, corporate profit, and public assets.

New York

Those who want to finance sports venues with public money have long argued that new stadiums boost local economies by providing jobs and fostering business.  This logic, which has been proven false, dictated financial policy in New York over the past several years, when the city financed two new baseball stadiums.  The New York Yankees and Mets, the two wealthiest baseball corporations in the world, demanded public support for their new venues, and George Steinbrenner, whose Yankees franchise was worth $1.2 billion in 2007, even threatened to move his team to New Jersey if New York didn’t pony up tax dollars to defray the cost of building a new stadium.

After much political posturing, city officials, led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, approved New York’s stadium projects.  The Yankees seized land in the South Bronx and began building on a plot where Macombs Dam Park once stood.  The park, a recreational area where many of the poorest residents in the Bronx played tennis, basketball, and baseball, was sacrificed so the Yankees could benefit.  The stadium construction project included plans to replace Macombs Dam Park, but when the city announced that a lack of funds would delay the park’s relocation, Mayor Bloomberg downplayed the hiccup by telling reporters that “you don’t have progress unless you inconvenience a few people.”

It’s hard to see the progress in New York, though.  In the end, the New York Independent Budget Office calculates, city and state taxpayers contributed over $528 million to the new Yankee Stadium and at least another $234 million for the Mets’ new park, Citi Field.  A good deal of that money comes from tax exempt bonds and other inscrutable subsidies programs, which means that the Yankees and Mets can take the city and state taxes they’ll owe New York and use that money to pay off their construction debt instead.  Because of the stadiums, the city and state will not receive millions in much-needed tax revenue over the next decades, and so far, the new stadiums have generated little to no new jobs or economic growth.  Meanwhile, Steinbrenner and Mets owner Fred Wilpon reap the profits that come with their new digs.  The entire New York stadium episode shows how far a city will travel to assist private corporations that do business in it, regardless of the economic and social cost to the community.

Seattle

In Seattle, a much different ethos has prevailed over time.  There, the NBA’s Sonics played in the undersized KeyArena (built in 1995).  When Howard Schultz, the billionaire team owner (and co-founder and CEO of Starbucks), could not procure tax funding for a larger arena, he sold the team to other local investors.  Voters denied Schultz because they were already frustrated that the Seattle Legislature had committed over $800 million to new baseball and football stadiums during the 1990s.  So when the Sonics came looking for money, Seattle residents formed a task force called Citizens for More Important Things, a group that turned public opinion against subsidizing billion-dollar sports corporations.

Finished with doling out money to already-wealthy sports franchise owners, Citizens for More Important Things focused efforts on getting funding for healthcare, education, and affordable housing initiatives.  On their website, they ask a compelling question: if city officials can pay for stadiums, why can’t they pay for the things Seattle needs.  Today, Seattle has an ethic of separation between sports and public money so stringent that the city recently passed a federal rule forbidding its publicly-funded Metro Transit from running direct shuttles to and from baseball and football games.  Seattle citizens hardly blinked in 2008 when the Sonics, under new ownership, asked for money once again and threatened to leave if they did not get it.  When taxpayers refused to subsidize a new hoops arena, the Sonics packed up and moved to Oklahoma City.

Lexington

Lexington is not like New York or Seattle because its team, the Wildcats, is a collegiate franchise, not a professional one.  The Wildcats are not privately-owned like the Yankees Mets, and Sonics, and Big Blue fans do not have to worry about the team relocating to another state at the whim of greedy entrepreneurs.  However, in many ways, Lexington parallels New York and Seattle.  We stand to learn a great deal from how these cities financed sports and entertainment venues.  Lexington faces, like most U.S. urban areas, significant financial challenges and social inequalities, so stories like what happened in New York and Seattle may be able to help us hold our leaders accountable as we try to figure out how they spend public money.

My tale of three cities is complicated by an entangled web of allegiances and financial interests that links UK basketball to Lexington’s government and businesses.  UK is not unique among top-tier college programs in that it lets external corporate entities profit from its most lucrative product, athletics.  Television companies generate billions from advertising revenues, clothing outfitters make millions from merchandise licensing agreements, and the list goes on.  However, UK is virtually unique among colleges in that it does not own its own arena.  Most universities own on-campus venues, where they play the majority of their games, but UK pays rent to the Lexington Center Corporation, a non-profit 501 c4 corporate agency of LFUCG.

Until the mid-1970s, UK played in its on-campus arena, but downtown merchants, in search of revenues, strong-armed the university administration into signing a lease at yet-to-be-built Rupp Arena.  As Betty Boles Ellison claims in her book, Kentucky’s Domain of Greed, Power, and Corruption, “The practice of protecting downtown Lexington at the university’s expense is so ingrained and incestuous that it continues today.  Few people ever give it a thought, and if they do, surely ask no questions.”  Ellison estimates that since moving into Rupp Arena in 1976, UK has lost millions of dollars in advertising and concessions revenue.

It’s almost impossible to tell whether or not citizens of the Commonwealth are getting screwed over because UK rents space at Rupp Arena.  Basketball revenues are funneled into the Athletics Association coffers, not general education funds.  Ellison’s bombast journalism notwithstanding, it’s likely that UK’s arrangement with Rupp is mutually beneficial—the city and its non-profit corporate arm make money they wouldn’t otherwise generate, and the university doesn’t have to worry about maintaining its own facility.

Similarly, it’s almost impossible to say who benefits from a new arena, and to what extent.  Rupp Arena is currently backed by the Lexington Center Corporation, the Downtown Development Authority, the Downtown Lexington Corporation, and other abstruse hierarchies who benefit financially from UK basketball.  And if IMG/ISG has its way the University of Kentucky would become the first major collegiate program to have a privately-financed stadium.  IMG/ISG therefore stands to become the next foreign corporate conglomerate that makes money off of Lexington.

It could be that the cost of a new Rupp Arena should be measured in what would get ignored in Lexington, not how much tax money (if any) gets spent.  I’ve found that such an opportunity cost analysis is much easier to work though than figuring out the trail of public and private dollars that flow in and out of Rupp.

In 2007, when rumors surfaced about a new Rupp Arena, Mayor Newberry suggested that the project would be funded by TIFs (Tax Increment Funding).  When Kentucky Legislators approved the TIF model for all counties within the Commonwealth, they intended to legalize a funding mechanism that allows cash-strapped municipalities to revive blighted urban areas and decaying infrastructural systems.  TIFs offer the illusion that we can create money out of thin air; they are breaks that excuse businesses of the tax they would owe if the value of their property were increased.

All too often, when TIFs are used to fund sports and entertainment venues, they turn into tax breaks for corporations.  TIFs are a ruse, a way that politicians and arena proprietors can claim that the public won’t have to pay for a new arena.  The truth is that the public does pay, often for 20-30 years after a new arena is completed because local governments lose out on tax revenues.

Until IMG/ISG releases its feasibility study, we don’t know whether TIFs will be part of the new Rupp Arena equation.  But we can ask, however, whether a new arena the most appropriate implementation of the TIF model.  Should we not use our imaginations and establish a project that helps local affordable housing programs get off the ground or revives substandard city sewer systems?

Sources

For estimates of the amount of public money spent on stadiums and arenas, see Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan’s Field of Schemes:  How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit.  I obtained information on the LFUCG budget deficit from Eric Patrick Marr’s Ace Weekly blog story on the Lyric Theatre (Feb. 17, 2009).  The worth of the Yankees and Mets is as reported in a 2007 Forbes story.  Mayor Bloomberg’s comments on the stadium come from a report by ESPN’s Outside the Lines reporter Jeremy Schaap. All information about IMG/ISG’s involvement in Rupp Arena comes from press releases that are posted on their company website.