SeattlePrintmakersCenter

Ivory Tower 

A movie 

The local Redbox video dispenser at a Seven-Eleven offered a surprising movie titled “Ivory Tower,” a documentary (mis-labeled “drama”). The author watched it from beginning to end. It was deja-vu for him and reminded him of his forecasts of 40 years ago.  

Ivory Tower – the movie 

It’s a strange day when you find a movie outside your Seven-Eleven in the Redbox video dispenser. It’s like putting a dollar in a Coke machine and getting a potion that released memories for me. The movie is, “Ivory Tower,” and it is all about higher education in the USA.

Watching the DVD I saw a parade of experts talking about the problems of costly colleges, and how deep in debt people are going by using student loans to pay high costs of college. Occasionally they questioned the value of the college experience—was it worth the money it cost? Was it worth going into a debt you would never be able to pay off?

All the while, I sit miles from the university where I taught for 19 years—the University of Washington—the campus where I forecast what I saw the are the problems the experts today were describing in the film.

By “experts” I am referring to the usual host who are worried—college presidents, students, parents, and the most recent innovators in transmitting knowledge—computer programmers and artificial intelligence experts. In the film they all said what I said forty years ago: “We need to teach our students technology.”

It’s a funny feeling to be watching the president of Harvard and Stanford saying, “We need to teach our students technology.” I think to myself, “Duh.” Those are my words from 1970, and that was the talk I walked from 1970 and, fifteen years later, walked me right off the campus forever.

Today

I suppose that, today, I am still making forecasts based on what I can see right around me. An etching press sits on my workbench, almost ready for its beauty shot (a pair of photos I make of every press I send out to the owners). Alongside it, to “toy” wooden etching presses, too, also going to the owner in California. My domain-of-expertise is printmaking. It’s what I taught in the 60s, 70s, and 80s at the UW. I can see that production and service are what count, and if you can’t produce and you can’t serve, you’re dead.

What I taught in my 19 years at the UW was that printmaking is the ancestor of technologies as we know them—including the Internet and going back through history. Like rewinding history through computer graphics, TV, photography, printing and ending up hand prints on cave walls. I taught it all, and it all came down to production and service.

What was missing in college then was the vision to see what students would be facing after a college education in the arts. The art faculty preferred to keep technology on the back burner or non-existent. Some of my students went along with my forecast and they sampled the media arts; I think it was of some benefit as I see where those students are today because they produced and they served.

In the 1970s I said, “We need to prepare student with technology experience alongside the old-world arts, such as painting and the rest of it. Printmaking was a good launching pad, since it is the ancestor of technology.”

As I watched the movie, “Ivory Tower,” it was deja-vu for me to see a few professors and administrators mouthing the same words I said in 1970. It was disturbing to see, also, that when these experts got around to including technology in the curriculum, they concluded that it meant teaching coding as computer science; but they were teaching people to code—as if coding were to somehow keep them out of debt. It’s comparable to a religion—a few hackers made it big and changed the way we live by coding, so everyone should learn to code.

Coding is an activity that gives you the feeling that you are thinking on your feet when actually you’re sitting on your butt.

Occasionally in the film there was mention of the disasters of the financing scandals of a few years ago, but no mention of what made the disasters happen, namely, computer coding in the hands of people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty.

Where, in my days in college, technology was not included in the curricula of the arts and sciences, today it seems like the only thing; and never mind ethics and humanities and, no mention of Earth’s human life sustainability.

We seem to be living in a time when getting into an institution of higher learning is something like going to heaven without actually dying, but merely believing in a golden stairway. More often you end up with golden handcuffs.

If there are thirty years left to me (then I will be 102 years old) I hope I will see that my present pathway is still the right one, and I will take care that those presses for that woman in California get to her next week.