The Letters of C.S. Lewis

 On December 27th, I finally finished the third volume of The Letters of C.S. Lewis (Walter Hooper, ed.). I bought the Kindle versions in January 2023, so I've had a yearlong journey in this work alone. I'm going to have to write another blog about the rest of the year with Lewis, but I also set myself to read all of Lewis's book-length literary criticism that I haven't read, so I've read through the OHEL volume, The Personal Heresy, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Discarded Image (again), An Experiment in Criticism (again), and am finishing up Arthurian Torso and Studies in Words. Earlier I'd also read The Allegory of Love and Spenser's Images of Life.

But back to the letters: I feel as though I have immersed myself in a sprawling autobiography. Since I've spent the last year, off and on, reading through the volumes, I have, I believe, a sense of the more personal Lewis behind the published persona. That's not to say that the letters are not rhetorical, but they are more individualized. Here are some preliminary observations:

1. The early letters point the centrality of Lewis's relationship with Arthur Greeves, a relationship that continued throughout his life. The pre-Christian Lewis was warm and open to Greeves, sometimes in ways that are disturbing. The general warmth of letters to friends throughout his life, however, is prefigured in these early letters.
2. He seems (from a contemporary American perspective) to be unfailingly polite, even to his father (though, given that he was being supported by his father during the period of his higher education while he himself was secretly supporting Mrs. Moore and Maureen with those resources, there is a high degree of rhetorical hypocrisy in those letters, of which he repented later). I may, however, be misreading a kind of crisp "businesslike" tone with his father as polite, when it was actually more distant and disconnected. (In fact, after also immersing myself in English TV and contemporary fantasy over the past year and a half, I've come to realize the high degree of icy politeness in many exchanges is actually aggression. If anyone ever says, "May I have a word?", it's never good.) Very soon after his father's death, Lewis begins to confess his guilty feelings about his treatment of his father, and ultimately writes to correspondents evaluating his behavior as instances of sinfulness.
3. The recorded correspondence does little to dispel the mystery of his early relationship with Mrs. Moore, nor does it clarify elements of his relationship with Arthur Greeves. [Greeves apparently censored some of Lewis's letters that he (Greeves) gave to Hooper for the first volume]. The letters do make clear, however, that as the 1940s progressed, Lewis wrote publicly about Mrs. Moore as "his mother." In the same way, he often characterizes his brother's troubles in the letters as "illness." Is this prevarication or a strong wish for privacy? By the late 1950s, however, he was beginning to speak publicly about his brother's alcoholism to some correspondents.
4. As Lewis was writing apologetics for publication, he anticipated and rehearsed many of the arguments he would put more formally in published works in his letters to various correspondents, most specifically Dom Bede Griffiths, and occasionally to Owen Barfield (outside of the "Great War" correspondence). His "apologetic" correspondence continues even after he transitions from published apologetics to children's fiction.
5. His long-term warm correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, and Sister Penelope belie any real deep misogyny. It is clear that he seems to have had a sense of "gender" as a spiritual category, rather than a social construction; I do remember reading that Sayers had made at least one response to his statements about gender before her death in 1957.
6. He had a significant correspondence with many of the literary figures of his generation, including T.S. Eliot, but also Sayers and even E.R. Eddison, whose fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros, he highly praised. In fact, he carried on a relatively lengthy correspondence with Eddison in a stylized version of fifteenth-early sixteenth century English. He corresponded several times with Arthur C. Clarke, not only about science fiction, but about the place and role of science and scientists in modern thought (of course, they strenuously disagreed with each other). When Clarke published Childhood's End in 1953, Lewis highly praised it, both to Clarke personally, and to Joy Davidman (before she became his wife). Clarke's publisher used a passage from one of Lewis's letters to Davidman about the book as part of a blurb in a later edition. It's probably significant that Lewis's earlier fictions were in the genre of science fiction/fantasy, which explains the more frequent correspondence with other writers of science fiction and fantasy.
7. His early correspondence, especially, gives many clues about the kinds of works he did like (medievalist fiction and historical fiction, as well as novels, dominated his earlier reading for pleasure). He also read in a specific way (or for a specific purpose) that foreshadows An Experiment in Criticism.
8. I was, however, completely startled by the literally hundreds of thank you notes he wrote in response to the Americans who donated so much food to him and his circle during the postwar years (1946-the early 1950s). Just a few further observations about these letters and the donations: my impression is that he must have received hundreds, maybe a thousand or more (!) pounds of American food and other items over the years of rationing in Britain; he is conscientious to answer with a thank-you each parcel (which he seems to have kept numbered records of in most cases); these answers were invariably graceful and often quite witty, as he struggled to find fresh ways to communicate his gratitude. There's a noticeable shift in his attitude toward the U.S. in these postwar years. Circa WWI, he and his correspondents are relatively dismissive of Americans and the U.S. After the outpouring of American generosity, he often comments that he would gladly visit America, except that Mrs. Moore needed relatively constant care.
9. I noted a progression in Lewis's attitude towards T.S. Eliot in correspondence between the early post WWI years and his work with Eliot on the Prayer Book revision of the 1950s. I'd been struck when reading the Personal Heresy that Lewis's comments about the "subject" of an author's writing and the relationship between that "subject" and the individual author's life paralleled in many ways Eliot's assertions in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It is clear that it's literary modernism (the literary movement) and "modernism" (the intellectual movement) that Lewis objected to. What Lewis seems to have objected to most in literary modernism was the lack of poetic form, and the aesthetic unpleasantness of many of its characteristic images.
10. In The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis had much to say about the reductionism of the Freudian view of the human personality, but he also had several things to say in the letters (not all of them negative) about Jung and archetypes (which he spells "archtypes"). Given Lewis's views on myth, it's not surprising that he might have had some affinities with Freud's erstwhile disciple.
11. Whatever one might say about Joy Davidman's motivations for marrying Lewis, it is clear that from his perspective, they enjoyed an amazing few years of marriage. Lewis mentions their happiness and compatibility in many letters, and in one letter calls this the happiest period of his life.
12. The timetable of Lewis's writing of A Grief Observed was also a revelation. After Davidman's death in mid-July of 1960, it was barely 2 1/2 months later that Lewis showed a draft of the book to Roger Lancelyn Green under pledge of secrecy.
13. It is clear that from about the mid-1950s, Lewis's books, but especially his children's books, began to make significant money. His primary publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, began to collect the multitude of essays Lewis had written for some collection volumes after the success of an American-published collection.
14. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s Lewis gained an understanding and appreciation for some existentialist thinkers (Buber and one French thinker), though he claims to have read little of Kierkegaard and understood less. In the early 1960s, he begins to mention Thomas Merton with appreciation, and is reading him.

This experience has given me a new perspective on Lewis's life, and unsettled my perceptions of his career and motivations for writing. Lewis certainly seems to have made a careful distinction between the kinds of writing he did: poetry, allegory, science fiction, supposal, apologetics, myth, children's fantasy, and literary criticism, but outside of the children's fantasy, which had a definite beginning and and end (that is, the first and last books of the Chronicles of Narnia), he wrote all of the other kinds pretty much throughout his life. He often talked about the genesis of his books in biological terms (he called it "being big with book") and their occasions, and continued to do a kind of pastoral apologetics until the end of his life in his correspondence. It is as though writing was a labor that became completely natural for him. He was also a quick and prodigious writer, judging from the volume of letters, diaries, lectures, books and essays of all kinds that issued from his pen.

The Fibonacci Moons Project

 

This project was conceived just after I had finished the "Month of Moons" project, about the time I was teaching HUM 201HN, a Grand Canyon University course on intersections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. The main student project in this course was to present a project that described some kind of intersection between art and science, using some artistic medium.

The scientific concept I was trying to describe was the Fibonacci sequence, which is connected to the Golden Ratio. It happens that the Fibonacci sequence, in which succeeding numbers are the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), describes a spiral which can be seen in many natural structures (do a Google Images search on the Fibonacci sequence, and you'll see what I mean).

I'd intended to finish this project in a month (since I only needed 14 images), but in practice, it took me over a year.

I had several issues:

1. The lens I was using (the M.Zuiko 14-150mm f4.0-5.6) proved difficult to focus in the dark. Since it didn't have a scale on the manual focus ring, I attempted to focus manually on the moon using the magnifying viewfinder, as suggested by sources. That method sometimes did not produce focused images. So, I used auto-focus whenever I could, but the autofocus was constrained by the position of the moon in the frame (if the moon were too close to the edge of the frame, it was impossible to get the AF to target the area). I didn't understand the magnitude of this problem until I began the compositing process.
2. To get the images to composite correctly (using the Olympus Workspace feature), I shot at two focal lengths (150mm and 100mm), so that I could resize in Workspace. That issue, plus the limit on the number of photos that could be composited in Workspace, limited my options unacceptably.
3. A few days per month, even in Arizona, were cloudy, plus, using my ephemeris program to plot the position of the moon in the sky sometimes made me miss the optimum dark time for shooting. Therefore, even the initial phase of the project took more than a month.

I discovered these issues in full during the compositing process, which I unwisely left until after the shooting process. Because of that, I spent a couple of months compositing in Workspace, then reshooting the out-of-focus images. Over the next several months, I continued to have problems 1 and 3 during the reshoots.

I finally was able to composite a complete image in GIMP, using the RAW files generated by my shooting process. Using GIMP gave me more control over image enlargement and placement. So, the end result is not optimal--I'd prefer to have the phases of the moon show more consistently throughout the spiral, and I would like to shoot these images in sequential order as well. So, let's call this project a first draft.

Review of C.S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

I had written this review for Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, but it turns out they had already published one. So . . .

Robert Boenig, C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent, OH, 2012).  Viii + 181 pages.  ISBN: 9781606351147.

Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), takes an outsider perspective on the careers of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, painting them as nostalgic for the zenith of the British Empire, and seeing their primary importance to medieval studies as their fiction.  Robert Boening, by contrast, takes an engaging insider’s view of C. S. Lewis’s personal and professional relationship to the medieval world.

Boenig’s introductory overview attempts in miniature what Cantor attempts in a mid-length volume, and does an excellent job of explaining the milieu of medieval studies from the mid-sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, to contextualize Lewis’s career.  His description of the initial interest in the Middle Ages by the early English Reformers (resulting in the preservation of many Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) connects Lewis’s religious concerns to the field of medieval studies itself.  His explanation of the roots of the current academic discipline—its origin in Victorian cultural and literary fashion, and the political appropriation of the Middle Ages by some of the authors Lewis appreciates (especially William Morris)—contextualizes not only Lewis, but also the vogue for medievalism that animated Lewis’s early reading.

Chapter one, “Lewis the Medievalist,” focuses on Lewis’s academic career and activities relating to the Middle Ages.  The point of the chapter can be summed up by saying that Lewis’s scholarship attempted to colonize the Renaissance with the Middle Ages.  Boenig makes the case that Lewis found a great worldview affinity with the Middle Ages, and took as his scholarly project the contemporary explanation of the worldview itself for his contemporary audience, showing the interpenetration of the Renaissance with medieval modes of thought and literary expression.

The subsequent chapters connect Lewis’s understanding of the medieval worldview with his notion of Joy, and with both the images and structures of his fiction.  One of the most fruitful insights of these chapters is that Lewis conceived of medieval creativity as dialogic, in which an author appropriates and remakes prior texts.  One sees this most easily in such works by Lewis as The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce, but Boenig makes the case that medieval modes of creativity permeate Lewis’s creative writing in a variety of ways, which he describes in detail.

The comprehensive discussion of this mode of medieval creativity provides the reader with an important support for the arguments of Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia; one problematic element of Ward’s argument involves his assertion that the medieval cosmological pattern that he sees was intended by Lewis.  Since Ward himself makes the point that Lewis never explicitly mentioned such a pattern, one might ask whether the pattern resides in the mind of the reader only, rather than the author’s intention.  Boenig’s discussion provides a context to argue that Lewis’s mode of creativity could easily accommodate an implicit “dialogue” between Lewis and medieval cosmology in terms of his Narnian fantasy world.

The book is well-structured and written, engaging to both the layperson and the academic with an interest in Lewis.  It paints an excellent portrait of Lewis as a medievalist and an appreciator of the period.  Boenig’s conclusions and analyses are fruitful to further scholarship on Lewis’s relationship to the medieval period and are interesting in themselves, making this volume well worth reading.

Tolkien and Borders

On September second, 1973, the day J.R.R. Tolkien died, I was "sitting here on a mountain top in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I can hear the wind sighing through the trees, sounding like the distant ocean as it breaks upon a sandy beach. The clouds are red with the light of the sun, which has not risen above them yet, and the carpet of green trees spreads out in a rolling expanse that looks like an endless sea of forest. The light fog has lifted just enough to show the blue streak of distant mountains on the southwestern horizon. This lichen-covered rock on a half-bluff rising from the Ontonagon River is part of a large grey rock face that stretches brokenly from east to west. The ferns, grasses and delicate purple blossoms wave gently in the breeze, giving the impression of the last wavelets of a breaking sea of forest foliage which has dashed itself against this lonely outcropping of rock. I feel insignificant here, but I feel good."

I was beginning my freshman year of college, on the seventh day of an ultimately-16-day Outward Bound style experience. I'd been introduced to The Hobbit as a fourth-grader, when an otherwise-hated teacher read the story aloud; I must have been taken with the story, since my mother has saved a picture I drew at the time, of the dwarves and hobbit being led in chains by goblins. In 1970, a friend introduced 9th-grade me to The Lord of the Rings. By the time of this program, I'd probably read the trilogy through four times, en route to the more than 20 times I must have read it through now. Eight or nine years later (1980 or 81, I can't remember which), I taught Tolkien to undergraduates for the first time, as a teaching assistant in a large class led by a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan. In it I met people more immersed in Tolkien than I was--I received essays written in Elvish, and got a glimpse into the (then new) world of Dungeons and Dragons.

In the meantime, during my undergraduate experience, I would meet Clyde Kilby, who had attempted to help Tolkien arrange his Silmarillion material close to the end of his life, and who would help establish the Wade Collection at Wheaton College.

I'm not sure where this is going, except to say that I'm teaching the works of Tolkien again, and am now reading up on Tolkien and the Inklings, having just finished Colin Duriez's Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. It's a nice, readable piece of popular literary history and criticism, with some interesting insights about influence and the importance of literary groups. It's also got me thinking about my connections (indirect) with Tolkien the human being.

I remember when we hiked out of the woods after 16 days away from any media but print and handwriting. At some point almost immediately upon reaching civilization, I heard of Tolkien's death. I (with apparently every other hippie in the world) had been eagerly awaiting the Silmarillion. Now it would never appear (I thought). The disappointment of that realization is one that has been mirrored a number of times since, in much the same way--whenever one hears of the death of a favorite author (one that a person reads over more than once), the first thought is--"Now there's no more about . . ." (The death of Tony Hillerman also hit me this way.) But I reckoned not with Christopher Tolkien, and now we have a plethora of continuing Tolkien material. The flow has almost stopped now, 10 volumes into the history of Middle earth, and The Children of Hurin later. This will be a literary conundrum for the next century: how to deal with this close posthumous collaboration of father and son.

Also today (and somewhat related), in the Arizona Republic, Laura Trujillo published a poignant look back at Borders Bookstore, most locations of which are closing soon. She remembers it as a gathering place, though a huge chain. During my time in Arizona, I also remember it this way (Chris and I being the bookworms we are), but I remember it as something more.

When I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1979, Borders had maybe three total locations in the Detroit metro area, the flagship being on State Street in Ann Arbor. At the time, it was unique--a spacious bookstore, with a good booklist inventory in almost every area, and benches. At the time, expresso drinks were just catching on (Cafe Expresso was just opening [early 1980s] on State Street just south of Borders), and I remember thinking that the pairing of books and coffee would be perfect--prescience without action. But I'm certain to have spent several thousand graduate-student dollars and weeks of hours in that store, just perusing books over lunch hours, and in the intervals between and after classes. When I got to Tempe, AZ in 1990, Changing Hands bookstore was still on Mill Avenue, and still collecting bookmarks from specialty bookstores, which they mounted on their walls. There was an Ann Arbor Borders one up.

But that counter-cultural graduate school version of literary bliss was gone by 1995, after Borders went corporate. That booklist and inventory-shipping system served them well for as long as distribution remained physical, but I heard the death knell when I bought my first book on Amazon in the late 1990s. Amazon always had any book in stock, and even had a rare and used volume search. My book-buying habits changed. Now, my reading and buying habits look to change again--as soon as there's a color screen I can read in daylight (and there is--Pixel Qi) on a tablet, I'm reading electronically. But there are still yards and yards of bookshelves in my home.

English Serendipity

In my video blog, I mentioned two things, that I'd gone to Oxford, and that I'd seen the Codex Mendoza (above). I pointed to both this, and a picture of Shakespeare that I'd seen exhibited last year, as examples of serendipity--useful blind luck of the find.

Anyhow, I'm interested in the Codex Mendoza because sometime around 1587, Richard Hakluyt, my research subject, who was working in France at the time (spying for Sir Francis Walsingham?) received this manuscript from Andre Thevet, the Geographer Royal of France at the time. Interestingly, around this time, Thevet and Hakluyt may or may not have had a falling out, because Thevet accused Hakluyt and Martin Basanier of essentially stealing a narrative about a French colony in Florida from him. But they must have worked it out. The Codex Mendoza is an important Aztec manuscript: in fact, if you could see the writing on the illustration on the left page, it's Aztec spoken language in Roman characters at the top, the Aztec ideogram in the middle, and Spanish on the bottom. But Hakluyt couldn't get anyone to engrave the illustrations, so he didn't print it before his death in 1616. It came to his self-appointed literary heir, Samuel Purchas, with the rest of Hakluyt's manuscripts upon his death, and Purchas printed it in his collection Purchas his Pilgrimes. From there, the manuscript came into the possession of Robert Selden.

So imagine my surprise, when on just an informal visit to the Bodleian Library exhibit room with no idea that it was there, I see the codex on display in an exhibit of the donation of Robert Selden, an exhibit which was to close on the next day. One doesn't always get that kind of luck.

That was just like my luck with the Shakespeare portrait last year, when in walking around Stratford, I came to the mini-exhibit of this portrait and its provenance (narrative of transmission). The portrait had just been in the news at that time, and I got to see it in detail. I wasn't supposed to take pictures in either case, as it turns out, but I did. It's better to apologize than to ask for permission beforehand.

Meeting Jesus at University

The first thing that strikes the reader about this book is that this is a graduate thesis or dissertation in sociology. That being the case, Edward Dutton uses plenty of academic terminology and attempts to cultivate an objective stance. But he’s clearly engaged in a sociological project, unlike Samuel Schuman in Seeing the Light. I would say that Dutton is less sympathetic to Christian and religiously-based collegiate life than Schuman seems to be. But he is looking at different things.

Dutton is interested in the subculture of evangelical Christian groups at European universities; he looks specifically at Oxford, Aberdeen University, Durham University, and universities in Holland, the U.S., and the Caribbean.

The gist of his question is this: he had been exposed to and participated in the activities of an evangelical student group at his university (Durham), and wondered why these groups seemed much more active (as he saw it) at universities like Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, than at the other colleges his friends had gone to. His hypothesis is that there is something different at the three universities above that encourages the development of “fundamentalist” [his term] evangelical Christian groups. The analysis is going to depend on a number of somewhat arcane terms: “leveling” rituals, liminal experiences, rites of passage, communitas, contestation. Some definitions might help here: leveling rituals bring people of various backgrounds together in a single experience, or set of experiences, during which the differences of these backgrounds (especially in terms of social status) are broken down. “Liminal” (in psychological terms) has to do with threshold or intermediate experiences. “Communitas” is a “feeling of togetherness and bonding in which social distinctions break down, often brought on by a rite of passage” (6). Rites of passage end up being rituals designed to bring people through a liminal phase in their lives. The other possibility in a rite of passage is contestation, in which participants in an experience create new boundaries, which the experience of “communitas” attempts to break down.

The most interesting part of Dutton’s book is his description of the evangelical groups he studied at Durham and Oxford. He doesn’t really have enough information about U.S. and Caribbean universities to make any firm conclusions, since he relies on others’ research for it. For the rites of passage he has experienced, he describes well the things that evangelical student groups do, concluding that the more intellectually and socially demanding the environment, the more students gravitate to groups that will re-establish some kind of structure for their lives. Other students are also attracted to religious groups, he theorizes, because of the innate stress of this “liminal” experience and rite of passage that college is perceived to be.

If you want the most efficient way to read this book, the chapters to focus on would be 1, 2, 4 (because of the research he cites on American Christian colleges), and 8, his short conclusion. In addition, his bibliography shows some interesting titles that might be worth pursuing.

The interesting thing is that this research doesn’t “go anywhere.” Dutton doesn’t do any more than note that this type of thing happens in situations that constitute rites of passage. One might theorize (if one were an evangelist) that this study suggests the specific receptivity of campus students, away from home for the first time, to making significant changes in their behavior and worldview, simply because of the nature of the experience. Whether one would see that as good or bad would depend on the nature of one’s own commitments.

Musings—COLA Humanities and Social Sciences Majors

As Director of Academic Excellence for the College of Liberal Arts (COLA), I have the chance to collect statistics on the number of students in our majors on campus and on line. My own field of study is English Language and Literature, and I also head up the Humanities Department. Though we talk about COLA as the “foundational” college of the university, we don’t often think of ourselves as a “liberal arts university” the way we used to. We don’t actively promote, for example, our undergraduate programs in English Literature, History, or Communications, though courses from these majors are part of our General Education and College of Education programs (as emphases).

So, imagine my surprise when I found out that in the early Spring Term of this year, we had 244 Communications majors, 167 English majors, 155 Interdisciplinary Studies majors, and 125 History majors. And this is just listed majors, not including College of Education students who are taking these subjects as emphases within their Education majors. Most of these Humanities majors are online students. These numbers are growing, all without a coordinated program of promotion for any of these majors; in fact, these majors are sometimes thought of as less important because they don’t lead to a specific job immediately upon graduation.

It’s clear though, that many students know what most employers tell us: traditional liberal arts majors are in demand, because they teach students how to think, how to read and interpret texts, and how to express themselves. Added to that, liberal arts majors are often more motivated learners, because they’re concentrating on something that they love for its own sake, rather than just for the sake of getting a diploma. Because a student of (say) literature or history interprets many kinds of writing (including writing by authors who are sometimes trying to lie to the reader), and because a student has to make arguments (both verbal and in writing) about what is being said, a liberal arts major is prepared for the kinds of reading and writing that are a part of higher-status professions like law, and upper business management (by the way, the higher one progresses in an organization, the more one has to write and communicate in other ways).

The interesting thing is that Canyon is a national leader in online liberal arts offerings; we are one of the relatively few universities across the country to support a range of liberal arts majors delivered entirely online. Students value that, and other major universities are now developing online humanities programs. We are working to keep our lead.

The SNL University of Westfield Online sketch

Unfortunately, Blogger can't load the link (or I can't figure out how to load it) that will take you to the Saturday Night Live "University of Westfield Online" sketch of two weeks ago. It's a thinly veiled reference to a university that you may recognize.

The fake advertisement says or implies a number of things about online education: that one can get one's degree in one's pajamas, that employers are not keen to hire graduates of an online college, that what one "learns" there is how to cover up one's education, and that it only takes four months to graduate.

As friends of mine have pointed out, none of these statements is necessarily true. But that's not the point, any more than CNN fact-checking SNL's sketch about President Obama's lack of accomplishment is relevant. It's not the truth of the statements, but the perception that they represent that should interest us, and that we should listen to.

Basically, why people laugh is because they tend to believe that 1) online education is easier, 2) online education is less rigorous, and 3) that because of these two things, online education doesn't take as long. If one believes (as I do) that online education can be as rigorous and interesting as campus education, then one should ask where these perceptions have come from.

The university being parodied now has hundreds of thousands of graduates, many from online programs. How many of them are talking about the quality (or lack of it) of their education? Intel has discontinued financial aid for MBA students from this university--why is that? Now it's not as though the players and writers of SNL are actually academics; some of them probably haven't even gone to much, if any, college. They may be the voice of the East Coast, but they are in touch with the urban culture there. Maybe they're like Gary Trudeau, a social liberal but educational conservative, who for years has decried what he sees as slipping standards at Yale (parodied in Doonesbury as Walden College).

It might just be the case that it's the real-life experience of online college students, and the experience of their employers, that's giving the material here. As in any educational situation, it's all in the execution, not in the medium. If those of us in online education do it right, then these satires will go away (or at least change their form).