In researching the Fall of Rome and early medieval Europe I have come across some interesting websites. Regnum Francorum Online is a website that presents in cartographic form information on the Kingdom of Francia, the predecessor of France ruled over by the Merovingians and Carolingians. If you want to follow the routes of Charlemagne or Carloman or find out how much land was owned by the crown or various monasteries and church establishments, this is a very handy website.
Another excellent set of maps, with ancient place-names, can be found on the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization. And, if you want to check out original documents (mostly in Latin) about the early history of the Germanic peoples, you can check out the digital version of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. I am reading Gregory of Tours at the moment, the Penguin Classics edition, and this definitely helps in figuring out what the ancient names of these cities were. I much prefer Arvernum to Clermont-Ferrand, at least when I am considering the pre-Medieval city.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
The Deification of Constantine
Photo by Jean-Christophe Benoist, courtesy of Wikipedia. |
1674 years ago today the Emperor Constantine the Great died; May 22, A.D. 337. Constantine is famous for being the first Christian emperor and beginning the Christianization of the Roman Empire. What is ironic is that after his death the Senate of Rome actually deified him. The Senate of ancient Rome did this not infrequently, whenever they felt an emperor had been extraordinarily beneficial to Rome. However, given Constantine's promotion of his new religion, one has to view this move as misguided at best and deluded at worst. Given Harold Camping's spectacular failure at prophecy yesterday I wonder what kinds of rationalization and special pleading his followers will engage in to maintain their faith in the face of such an embarrassment.
In the meantime, check out the amazing work at Byzantium 1200, where the buildings of Constantinople have been recreated through the wonders of modern computer graphics and you can see what this, one of the greatest cities of antiquity, would have looked like ca. A.D. 1200.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Angkor and the Ancient Maya: Complementary Civilizations?
Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, courtesy of Wikipedia. |
The Angkor, or "Classic", period of this civilization begins traditionally with the assumption of the title of chakravartin, or "universal ruler", by Jayavarman II in A.D. 802, and continues to A.D. 1431, when, according to the Royal Chronicles, a 19th century official history of dubious reliability, the Thai sacked the capital city of Angkor. Unfortunately, the tropical climate of Cambodia has meant that all written documents that date back more than 200 years, inscribed traditionally in palm-leaf books, have rotted away, leaving historians having to reconstruct Angkor's history from laconic monumental dedicatory texts on stone temples, which obviously give a very distorted view of the past and were never meant as the basis of histories, either. These dedicatory texts do provide the basic outline of a history of the Angkor period, however, and what is interesting is that despite later kings reckoning the foundation of their kingdom from Jayavarman II's ritual in 802, there are no contemporary inscriptions until 880, when the Preah Ko temple was dedicated. The last inscriptions at Angkor that can be dated are from the reign of Jayavarman IX (also known as Jayavarman Paramesvara), who took the throne in 1327.
Thus the Ankgor period begins in 802, and is in full gear by 880, continuing to ca. 1330/1340 and finally fading out in the 15th century. Interestingly, this corresponds very well to a 'Dark Age' in ancient Maya civilization. The Classic Maya civilization is pretty much defined by the use of the Long Count calendar, and the earliest Long Count date in the Maya Lowlands dates to A.D. 292 and the last to A.D. 909. However, the Classic Maya world went into a major crisis shortly after A.D. 800 and the next century saw sites fading out, with the final population in most cities gone entirely by A.D. 1000. The Early Postclassic period is attested at hardly any sites and not until the rise of Mayapan and other sites, such as Topoxte, in the 13th and 14th centuries do we see much evidence of Maya civilization. Thus, at just the time that the Classic Maya went into the crisis that would ultimately consume their civilization, we see the rise of the Angkor period in Cambodia.
This inverse correlation exists even for the earlier period of both cultural areas as well. The height of the Classic Maya civilization is the Late Classic period, especially the 8th century. This period in Cambodia, however, is one in which few temples were constructed and inscriptions are few and far between. There are a number of pre-Angkor inscriptions found throughout the rest of Cambodia. The earliest are undated but appear to date to the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. Dated pre-Angkorian inscriptions are relatively abundant from 611 to the beginning of the 8th century, but are almost non-existant for the subsequent century and a half. The period of most intense carving of pre-Angkorian inscriptions in Cambodia, then, is during the 7th century, which corresponds quite closely to the famous hiatus period of the southern Maya lowlands.
Now, I would not take these correlations too strongly - the hiatus at Tikal ends in the 690s while at sites such as Palenque and Copan it ends even earlier, by the 650s. However, it is interesting to see that the general ups and downs of Maya and Angkor civilizations do seem to be the inverse of each other. Michael Coe has written about comparisons between the Maya and Angkor civilizations and while he thinks there may have been direct contacts between the two regions, I do not see any evidence for such contacts. Therefore, I cannot see this inverse correlation between the two regions' cultural histories as being directly related. However, I do wonder whether general trends in climate change around the globe might not be at least partially responsible. Last year Brendan Buckley and his colleagues published their study on the ancient climate of Cambodia, and have proposed that Angkor was hit by two severe droughts, one in the mid-14th century and a second in the early 15th century, which were followed immediately by extra-severe monsoons. These extreme climate disasters overtaxed the civilization of Angkor and led to the abandonment of the city's famous irrigation network of canals, and ultimately to the move of the capital city to the southeast. You can read a popular article of their research here, and you can see their more academic publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here. In my dissertation I argue that the Classic Maya Collapse was largely due to similar changes in climate and that while there is evidence for accompanying warfare and social changes, these were more results than causal factors of the Collapse.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Smenkhkare: The Phantom Pharaoh
Photo of the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin by Philip Pikart, courtesy of Wikipedia. |
This last semester I taught a class on deciphering ancient writing systems. In preparing my classes on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs I bought a couple of new books by Aidan Dodson, a popular British Egyptologist working out of Bristol University. I eagerly await his forthcoming book on the Third Intermediate Period, which is essentially the eleventh through the eighth centuries B.C., and has proven to be one of the most confusing and poorly understood periods of Egyptian history. In the meanwhile, he has two recent books that have been published by the American University in Cairo, both of which address other difficult periods in Egyptian history. The earlier of these two, published in 2009, is entitled Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation. The full citation can be found below.
First, a few basic notes. I have the hardcover version and it is printed on high quality paper, and is an attractive volume. However, the book itself is relatively small, rendering the critical details in the illustrations oftentimes difficult to see and evaluate. The book appears to have been published in some haste as there are a number of typos and grammatical mistakes, especially in the early chapters. The maps at the beginning of the book also leave a lot to be desired, and certain places referred to in the text (eg// Isuwa, p. 54) are not found on any of the maps. A series of helpful appendices are provided at the end of the book. I most appreciated Appendix 3, which provides examples of the hieroglyphic names of the major royal characters in the book. Unfortunately, these are produced at such a small scale that one’s eyes are strained badly in trying to examine them.
On to the actual contents of the book: the “counter-reformation” referred to in the subtitle is the response to pharaoh Akhenaten’s attempt to do away with the cult of all gods other than the object of his own devotion, the Aten, the physical manifestation of the Sun God as a solar disk. During his 17 year reign this king overturned two millennia of royal tradition, shutting down the numerous temples for which Egypt has been so famous, and even moving the capital city away from Thebes, home of massive state temples dedicated to the local god Amun, in his fifth year. The new capital city was established in the virgin territory of Akhetaten (today known as el Amarna), in the middle of the country. At the same time this pharaoh changed his name to Akhenaten (meaning “Spirit of the Aten”, or “Effective for the Aten”), from the previous Amenhotep (which means “Amun is content”). Akhenaten’s great royal wife was the famous Nefertiti, and she gave birth to at least six daughters – in order of birth, Merytaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Jr., Neferneferure, and Setepenre - who in ubiquitous scenes found throughout Akhetaten, are shown in intimate, familial scenes with their parents. The intimacy appears to have extended well beyond these idyllic scenes, however, for Akhenaten seems to have fathered two further daughters – Merytaten Jr. and Ankhesenpaaten Jr. – named after their mothers, his own first and third daughters.
Throughout the art of Amarna Akhenaten and his family are shown being bathed in the life-giving rays of the Aten. Late in his reign Akhenaten carried out a wave of oppression against the god Amun (and presumably his powerful priesthood in Thebes), destroying this god’s images and gouging out his name, even when found in the personal names of his royal ancestors. Akhenaten died shortly thereafter and was ultimately succeeded by the boy king, Tutankhaten, who a year or two later expressed his return to orthodoxy by changing his name to Tutankhamun. (His name was actually pronounced something like TawatanakhamAN.) Tutankhamun had a short reign of a little less than 10 years, and upon his premature death was buried in his famous tomb, KV 62 in the Valley of the Kings. His burial was overseen by his probable maternal grandfather, Ay, who acceded as the new pharaoh. Ay ruled only 4 years before he was succeeded in turn by Horemheb, who subsequently damned the memory of all of these kings by erasing their cartouches and usurping their images, and later Egyptians simply counted their regnal years as those of Horemheb himself.
That is the basic picture of this era of Egyptian history. However, numerous questions remain about this period, caused in no small part by the damnatio memoriae inflicted upon pretty much everything associated with Akhenaten, who to later Egyptians was known simply as “the criminal of Akhetaten” or even just “the Enemy”. The biggest question has been over the royal person known popularly as Smenkhkare. Since this person takes a royal praenomen (the “royal name”, taken only upon accession) and included his personal name inside a cartouche, he was clearly a pharaoh.
However, the question remains of who this individual was and how he was related to his predecessor, Akhenaten, as well as his successor, Tutankhamun. The debate over the identity of this pharaoh has been heated for a century now, with speculation ranging from the younger brother of Akhenaten (and thus another son of Amenhotep III), an older brother of Tutankhamun (and thus either the son of Amenhotep III or of Akhenaten), Akhenaten’s homosexual lover, the Hittite prince Zananza (more on him in a later post), or even the famous Queen Nefertiti or her daughter Merytaten, disguised as a male pharaoh.
The Royal Name, Ankhkheperure |
The Personal Name, Smenkhkare (Djoserkheperu) |
However, the question remains of who this individual was and how he was related to his predecessor, Akhenaten, as well as his successor, Tutankhamun. The debate over the identity of this pharaoh has been heated for a century now, with speculation ranging from the younger brother of Akhenaten (and thus another son of Amenhotep III), an older brother of Tutankhamun (and thus either the son of Amenhotep III or of Akhenaten), Akhenaten’s homosexual lover, the Hittite prince Zananza (more on him in a later post), or even the famous Queen Nefertiti or her daughter Merytaten, disguised as a male pharaoh.
Obviously, very little is known of this pharaoh. Only one known image of the sovereign exists, a scene found in the tomb of Meryre II at Amarna, where he is shown along with his consort, Merytaten, rewarding Meryre himself. This image was only painted on the wall, and had not been carved before the tomb was abandoned, along with the city of Akhetaten as a whole, when the court relocated to Thebes and Memphis, the traditional capital cities of Egypt. Apart from this image there are half a dozen royal seals and a single wine jar label bearing this name. The latter bears a reference to “Year 1” of a pharaoh, but while this could refer to Smenkhkare’s own regnal count, it could as easily refer to Tutankhamun, who appears to have been Smenkhkare’s direct successor and in whose reign the estates established by Smenkhkare just a few years earlier would have still been functioning.
A crucial part of the puzzle, and source of the controversy, surrounding Smenkhkare is tomb KV 55 in the Valley of the Kings. This tomb was discovered in 1907 and excavated by Theodore Davis, who found the jumbled remains of a number of different objects originally from separate tombs. This material included parts of a gilded wooden shrine inscribed for Queen Tiye by pharaoh Akhenaten, her son. At some point this chamber was broken into and the image and cartouches of Akhenaten were destroyed. The tomb also contained a gilded wooden coffin, inlaid with glass and badly damaged by rot. The anthropomorphic coffin had had its face ripped off, and a hieroglyphic text naming the owner with royal titles had had the cartouches gouged out. There were also four canopic jars, with stoppers in the form of human heads in the same style as the coffin.
As with so much of the material in this tomb, the names on the canopic jars had been abraded and are essentially illegible, although they have been argued to represent Kiya, a junior wife of Akhenaten. Four “magical bricks” were found arranged around the tomb, and at least two of these did bear the name of Akhenaten himself. A few wooden boxes in the tomb, ransacked in antiquity, had originally been sealed in the reign of Tutankhamun, informing us when this eclectic assortment of objects were moved into this tomb from their original location in Akhetaten.
The body within the coffin in KV55 was badly damaged through water seeping in from flash flooding, and was mostly just poorly preserved bones, as well as the skull. The gilded shrine suggested to Davis that this should have been the body of Lady Tiye, but Arthur Weigall, who had been working as an archaeologist for Davis, thought it was Akhenaten himself, not least because the preliminary investigation of the osteological material indicated the occupant was male. However, Grafton Elliot Smith, the renowned anatomist of the early 20th century (and one of the key men involved in the Piltdown Man controversy), declared that his analysis of the bones indicated the person was only 25 or 26 years of age at death. This was problematic if this was to be Akhenaten as this pharaoh had a 17 year reign and the dramatic and forceful events he oversaw in the early years of his reign, including his proscription against the old gods and the building of and transfer of the capital to Akhetaten all suggest the actions of an adult and not a boy. Douglas Derry carried out another examination of the bones and his estimation of age at death was even lower than that of Smith; 23 years at the oldest. This definitely put Akhenaten out of the running and so many if not most scholars identified the body as that of Smenkhkare, especially after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb (KV62) in 1922, which included the latter pharaoh’s mummy. This left Smenkhkare as the only remaining male pharaoh of this period as a viable candidate. However, it is important to note that not a single item within KV55 bears any of Smenkhkare’s names or titles, a point that is often overlooked or glossed over by scholars.
While the specific name “Smenkhkare” is known from only a few surviving references, his praenomen Ankhkheperure is associated in a number of other texts and inscriptions with another nomen, that of Neferneferuaten (see below). This would normally be interpreted simply as a name change, where a pharaoh changed one of his names (for uncertain reasons). Akhenaten did just this, changing his nomen from Amenhotep to Akhenaten but retaining the praenomen of Neferkheperure. However, as with so much of Amarna’s history, things aren’t quite so simple.
The cartouches of Neferneferuaten indicate an intimate connection with Akhenaten, as his names regularly include the epithet “beloved of Akhenaten”. In the examples below we see the royal praenomen, Ankhkheperure, is suffixed with mery Neferkheperure, “beloved of Neferkheperure”, the latter being the praenomen of Akhenaten. Neferneferuaten’s nomen reads Neferneferuaten, mery Wa’enre. The latter, meaning “the sole one of Re’”, is a ubiquitous moniker of Akhenaten, and so this name means “Neferneferuaten, beloved of Akhenaten”.
Ankhkheperure mery Neferkheperure |
Neferneferuaten mery Wa'enre |
Akhenaten’s chief queen was the famous Nefertiti and it so happens that when her husband changed his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten she changed her own name to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti. Could Nefertiti be the real identity behind Smenkhkare? Certainly this would handily explain a whole series of puzzles about the end of the Amarna period in Egypt. It would explain the Pase Stela depiction, which would show Akhenaten and Nefertiti, both wearing royal crowns, in a loving embrace, typical of how this royal couple was depicted at Amarna. In addition, it explains why some pharaonic statues, found usurped from an earlier ruler in the tomb of Tutankhamun, clearly depict a female ruler. (Sadly, this was one of the statues damaged in the recent vandalism in the Cairo Museum.) One can also note that some seals of Ankhkheperure are actually spelled Ankhetkheperure, which is a feminine version of the name.
It would also explain why Nefertiti seems to have disappeared without a trace after Year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign. At the same time as references to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti cease there emerges the coregent of Akhenaten, Ankhkheperure. While coregent this ruler bore the nomen of Neferneferuaten, the same as taken earlier by Nefertiti. Probably after Akhenaten’s death this nomen was changed to Smenkhkare, perhaps to signal her independent rule as sole pharaoh.
This is the conclusion of Nicholas Reeves, and he in turn is following the pioneering work of John R. Harris. This is not the conclusion, however, of Aidan Dodson. Dodson, like many, seems to be in thrall of the osteological age-estimates for the body in KV55, and, by eliminating Akhenaten as a possible candidate for this individual, is forced to accommodate in his reconstruction of the dynastic history of this period a young, male pharaoh named Smenkhkare. However, unlike many earlier scholars who saw only one, male, ruler bearing the praenomen of Ankhkheperure, Dodson accepts that Nefertiti was a coregent with Akhenaten under the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten, but one that ruled after the earlier coregent, the male Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare. (I will leave the reader to investigate in Dodson’s book why he places these two coregencies in this order.)
The problem I have with Dodson’s interpretation is that it is entirely dependent upon the age estimates for the body in KV55 being so young. Dodson does try to bring in the only surviving image of Smenkhkare, from the tomb of Meryre II, which shows this ruler in typical male garb, but this cannot be considered anything like conclusive proof, since the earlier and certainly female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, also had herself portrayed regularly as a male. Given that the office of pharaoh was traditionally that of a male, the notoriously conservative artists of Egypt typically portrayed all pharaohs in very stylized poses and costumes and an image of a ruler as a male does not exclude the possibility that the individual was actually female. This leaves the body in KV55, and Dodson is not alone in taking these age-estimates, most of which were done half a century to a century ago, as solid and accurate data.
The trouble is that estimating the age of bodies, especially ancient remains, has always been at least as much an art as a science, and the field is fraught with examples of estimates that were subsequently proven to be quite wrong. Ironically, in Dodson’s subsequent publication, Poisoned Legacy: The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty (2010), he admits as much, pointing to the famous Spitalfields studies as reason to be wary of accepting the estimated ages of the mummies of Merenptah and Seti II (Dodson 2010:29, 80-81). When the Christ Church cemetery in Spitalfields, London, was excavated, osteologists had the chance to compare their estimates of the age of the interred against the actual burial records. Only 30% of the age estimates were correct to within 5 years, and only 50% to within 10 years (ibid). In Mesoamerican archaeology a classic example is the tomb of Pakal at Palenque. While the hieroglyphic texts indicated that Pakal was 80 years old when he died, the earliest estimates for the age of the body in his tomb were only 40 – 50 years. However, fifty years after they were first examined a more recent study has concluded that the bones are indeed those of an elderly man, and while it is very difficult to precisely age the bones of a long-lived person (they are old because their bones are comparatively young), this new examination concluded that an age of 80 is indeed consistent with the actual bones (Tiesler Blos and Cucina 2006).
In fact, just such a re-examination has occurred. Under the direction of Zahi Hawass a reanalysis of the KV55 mummy took place, indicating that this individual could indeed have been much older than previously thought. Hawass also oversaw a DNA study of a number of Amarna period mummies, but I won’t get into those details here. They can be seen in his 2010 article for the Journal of the American Medical Association (see bibliography below). Hawass has concluded from these studies, though, that the body in KV55 is none other than that of Akhenaten himself. For me the evidence regarding Smenkhkare is, while not absolutely conclusive (and circumstantial archaeological evidence never can be), very strong that this is just another guise of Nefertiti. She has long been renowned as a great beauty but can now be credited as an ambitious woman who ruled as pharaoh, likely first as a coregent under the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten in the later years of her husband, Akhenaten, and then (probably quite briefly) as an independent ruler under the name Smenkhkare.
Bibliography
Dodson, Aidan
2009 Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation. The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, Egypt.
2010 Poisoned Legacy: The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The American University in Cairo Press, Egypt.
Hawass, Z., Y. Z. Gad, et al.
2010 Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family. Journal of the American Medical Association 303/7: 638-647.
Reeves, Nicholas
2001 Akhenaten: Egypt’s False Prophet. Thames & Hudson, New York.
Tiesler Blos, Vera, and Andrea Cucina
2006 Reconstructing the Life and Death of a Maya Ruler. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Another Death Knell of Civilization
My colleague Annabeth Headrick, professor of art history at the University of Denver, has reported that her university's library is moving 80% of its volumes to an off-site holding facility, to make room for an "Academic Commons", which will feature "more seating, group space, and technological capacity". This continues a trend in academic institutions away from traditional libraries and towards a more "digital" environment, as exemplified by James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing Academy, a Boston prep school, who a few years ago decided to do away with 100% of his school's library in favor of digital readers and e-books.
As an academic, I am truly horrified by these developments. As Headrick points out in the first article, one of the greatest things about libraries are the serendipitous finds one encounters by just going through the stacks. Some of the greatest books I've ever read I only found out about because I just happened to see them in the stacks. Furthermore, many of the books I thought I wanted to read I quickly realized were irrelevant to my research or interest based upon cursory examination in the stacks. To force students to make requests to have these books brought up hours or even days later is a body blow to academic research and learning. It is clear that those who are instituting these changes are not academics themselves and this highlights one of the ugliest sides of this new academic-institutions-as-businesses model, in which professional CEOs are brought in to head these universities and make them profitable. While universities can't function by losing money, they don't need to be run as Fortune 500 companies if their product, which is so hard to quantify, suffers in the process. The trouble is that since this product is so difficult to quantify it will take years, even decades, before the negative aspects of this trend in academia becomes truly apparent. And by then we will have regressed intellectually to a staggering degree.
The part that really gets my goat, though, is that the freed-up library space is going to be used for group study space. Having taught as a teaching assistant and professor now for the better part of a decade I have come to see a steady and continuous decline in the abilities and interest of students in their academic work, and I blame in no small part digital media and group study. The internet should provide students incredibly more opportunity to research and educate themselves but I have found that the vast amount of time students spend online is not in pursuit of educating themselves. I always include research papers in my courses and so many of these kids simply do not know how to research, nor have much interest in critically evaluating what they read. Most of their time online appears to be spent on either facebook, youtube or on popular media gossip sites. They know all about the latest reality TV stars and their troubles with the law or with the bottle, but haven't a clue where India or Pakistan are located, or what language they speak in Brazil.
Since fewer and fewer professors assign research papers the students only go to the library for group study sessions. So, while the books get dusty, the edifying solitude of the library is now broken by kids loudly chatting about the latest antics of Snookie or who got kicked off of American Idol. This is the real problem with group study; while students consider this to be "study time" they actually spend little time at all on actual studying and most of it chatting with their friends, either in person or online. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published this year (2011) the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and they document many of the problems of modern academia. Inefficient group study and students who cannot disconnect from the addictive online world for even a 50 minute class are in no small way contributing to the crisis in education the United States is facing. University administrators trying to "modernize" universities by tossing the books out of libraries and replacing them with more group study space and more technology isn't going to help a wit, mark my words. It is only going to further the problem.
As an academic, I am truly horrified by these developments. As Headrick points out in the first article, one of the greatest things about libraries are the serendipitous finds one encounters by just going through the stacks. Some of the greatest books I've ever read I only found out about because I just happened to see them in the stacks. Furthermore, many of the books I thought I wanted to read I quickly realized were irrelevant to my research or interest based upon cursory examination in the stacks. To force students to make requests to have these books brought up hours or even days later is a body blow to academic research and learning. It is clear that those who are instituting these changes are not academics themselves and this highlights one of the ugliest sides of this new academic-institutions-as-businesses model, in which professional CEOs are brought in to head these universities and make them profitable. While universities can't function by losing money, they don't need to be run as Fortune 500 companies if their product, which is so hard to quantify, suffers in the process. The trouble is that since this product is so difficult to quantify it will take years, even decades, before the negative aspects of this trend in academia becomes truly apparent. And by then we will have regressed intellectually to a staggering degree.
The part that really gets my goat, though, is that the freed-up library space is going to be used for group study space. Having taught as a teaching assistant and professor now for the better part of a decade I have come to see a steady and continuous decline in the abilities and interest of students in their academic work, and I blame in no small part digital media and group study. The internet should provide students incredibly more opportunity to research and educate themselves but I have found that the vast amount of time students spend online is not in pursuit of educating themselves. I always include research papers in my courses and so many of these kids simply do not know how to research, nor have much interest in critically evaluating what they read. Most of their time online appears to be spent on either facebook, youtube or on popular media gossip sites. They know all about the latest reality TV stars and their troubles with the law or with the bottle, but haven't a clue where India or Pakistan are located, or what language they speak in Brazil.
Since fewer and fewer professors assign research papers the students only go to the library for group study sessions. So, while the books get dusty, the edifying solitude of the library is now broken by kids loudly chatting about the latest antics of Snookie or who got kicked off of American Idol. This is the real problem with group study; while students consider this to be "study time" they actually spend little time at all on actual studying and most of it chatting with their friends, either in person or online. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published this year (2011) the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and they document many of the problems of modern academia. Inefficient group study and students who cannot disconnect from the addictive online world for even a 50 minute class are in no small way contributing to the crisis in education the United States is facing. University administrators trying to "modernize" universities by tossing the books out of libraries and replacing them with more group study space and more technology isn't going to help a wit, mark my words. It is only going to further the problem.
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