Internet Memory, SnapChat's CEBro, and Bad Things I've Said In the Past

As Ben Folds so eloquently put it in "Rockin' the Suburbs": you better watch out, because I'm gonna say 'fuck'."

Less than a year ago, I made a huge deal out of locking this blog and starting a new one. That post remains one of my favorite things I've written anywhere, blog or no, and I still firmly believe the things I said regarding social networking and the changes it's working in how I communicate, how it's negatively effecting my ability to have meaningful conversations and interactions online and elsewhere, and how it's making talking at length and in depth online, publicly, a very scary proposition.

Yet, here I am, making Defiantly, Maybe public again. So, what's changed?

Well, two things, really. First, I realized that nobody really cares what I write about and where I write about it because I'm not an important person.

Brad knows how I feel.

I don't mean that self-deprecatingly. I just mean that I don't post enough and don't have enough interested followers to make a private blog a hub for conversation and debate (and, by extension, for unintentional controversy). Being able to post to a broader audience again might mean that I'll occasionally get a response that isn't a) nothing or b) "tl;dr." But I'll also be slightly more likely to get a response that's something like "OMG HOW CAN YOU THINK SUCH THINGS I HATE YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW." Which brings me to my next reason...

I've recently become sort of incensed* by the culture of judgment I've seen growing exponentially on the internet, and somewhere in my mind the best way to combat this sort of thing seems to be to go online in front of everyone and say whatever the fuck** I want.

So, it seemed appropriate to "celebrate" making this blog widely accessible again by writing about internet memory and potentially saying things that people could later take out of context and use to decide that I'm a Bad Person. Because that's apparently all we do on the internet, now.

I didn't have to dig far to find some examples of what I want to talk about. One is a bit close to my heart and the other requires me to try to empathize with a guy who is almost definitely a hardcore misogynist. So this should be interesting.

I present case number one. If you don't like clicking on things or looking at webpages other than this one (good on you), case number one is the story all about how Jack White and the Black Keys got flip-turned upside down. The story, as it's been propagated across the internets, is that some private letters*** of Mr. White's were leaked as part of his custody battle with his ex-wife, and in these letters it turns out he said some things about not liking the Black Keys.

So, to recap thus far: a man gets divorced and in addition to having to deal with probably a pretty shitty situation involving falling out of love with his wife and all, there's also a custody battle, adding an extra-shitty legal dimension to the already-existing shitty emotional dimension of divorce to create a pulsing quadrilateral of personal shittiness.

This was the first result for "shit quadrilateral."

And what do we take from this? Oh, right. That he wrote in some letter to someone that was never intended to be seen by everyone that he sort of doesn't like another band that some other people who are reading this letter that they shouldn't be reading like. And oh my god is that so much more important than the marriage-ending thing and the sadness thing and the custody-battle thing, not to mention the give-the-poor-guy-room-to-suffer thing!

To be fair, though, Jack White is probably pretty good at suffering. Just look at that vulture.

Right. But Jack White is a celebrity, which means that it totally makes sense that his private words were made public and scrutinized ad nauseum by lots of people who don't know him or his private circumstances at all, who don't know the context those comments were made in. Right?

No. It's not right. I'm not even going to explain to you at length why it's not right. If you don't know, then go away and think about it until you figure it out on your own and then come back and finish reading.

So, now we've got things like this assholish A.V. Club article (and I usually love the A.V. Club) that explains that White has for some reason issued a very public apology to the people who read his private writings against his (implicit) wishes, but makes sure to cast White as the bad guy before you even get to read the story by using the title "Jack White tries to pull his foot out of his mouth with lengthy apology." We, the culture, have clearly decided after rifling through this guy's personal mail that he is guilty. Jack White is a bad guy, and we should not like him now nor should we purchase his records. Why again? Oh, yeah, because he doesn't like some other band in private, and somehow that is an unpardonable offense. To us. Whose souls are as pure as the driven snow.

Okay, well, let's graduate to a case where the thing the bad guy did actually matters, and is probably worthy of widespread criticism and ridicule, as least when looked at a certain way.

So here we have Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, a guy who is also rich and famous and thus has implicitly agreed (according to us) to make his entire life available for public scrutiny. This case is a little tougher to me because Spiegel's past-comments are pretty terrible and misogynist. And in criticizing the way that we've gone after him for them I don't want to imply that I condone the comments themselves, because I don't. He said some pretty terrible things (in the past, under the assumption that he was saying it to a small, discrete audience).

But here's the thing. I've said some terrible things, too. You've said some terrible things. We've probably both thought even more terrible things and had the good sense not to utter them out loud so that they wouldn't come back to haunt us. Does this make the things that Spiegel said okay, because we're all jerks sometimes? No. But I'd like to try to put into perspective the idea of going after someone you've never met for a few comments he made years ago in a context that you aren't aware of because I believe that the judgmental ways we choose to respond to these stories about people we don't know (which seem to be happening more and more often lately) don't just have consequences for which records we buy and which apps we download, but also for how we treat the people we do know.

First off, context is important. Because this is a hill I'm absolutely willing to die on, I'll use examples from my own life. I have had, on occasion, good Asian-American friends. A part of my friendship with one such friend in particular consisted of us trading racial jibes and jokes: me tossing Asian stereotypes at him and he tossing white-guy stereotypes at me. It was part of our rapport, and we were both comfortable with it. Now, had we talked like this over, say, email, and one of those emails came to light years down the road and was made public, I would not want the same "consideration" that Spiegel has received from us over the last few weeks. If I were to issue an (unnecessary) apology for my once-private, now-public communication, I would not want to be met with the cynicism that Jack White's seemingly earnest apology has been met with throughout the rock music blogosphere. What I said was acceptable in context because in that context it had a certain meaning, granted it by that very context. Because I am a semi-intelligent and considerate human being, outside of that context, I would have said things differently, or not at all. That's how context works.

When it comes to this sort of thing, your example, I'm sure, is different, but I'm equally sure that there is an example, at least one, for each of us. Think about that before you roll your eyes at White, before you shake your fist at Spiegel. You don't have to not condemn them, but at least think about it.

Second, people grow old, if not up. They change, and maybe even learn. I try. I hope I succeed from time to time. A lot of people attacked Spiegel for his recitation of what seems to be the required response to these ever-more-popular situations: "[The messages] in no way reflect who I am today." The general internet response was "These messages were sent 3-4 years ago; how much does one person change in 3-4 years?! I call bullshit!"

Really?! How much does one person change in 3-4 years? Have you ever grown up before?

The variations on this response and the frequency with which they seemed to pop up blows my mind. To me, it communicates a very deep cynicism toward the idea that others can change, grow, and most importantly, learn. That we can make mistakes and still turn out okay, overall, in the end. I have bad news: mistakes are what learning is made of. What do we become when we stop allowing others to make them?

I've been an NFL football fan my entire life. I grew up watching every single game I could, collecting trading cards, memorizing player rosters, the whole ten yards. For the longest time, the Washington Redskins were just one of the teams in the league. It wasn't until I got to grad school and spent a few years studying critical race theory and assorted/related other cultural theories that I gained a real appreciation for why calling your team "the Redskins" might be insulting to Native Americans (or others). But I still didn't really see why anyone was bothering talking about the name of a football team when there were so many other, seemingly bigger problems in the world to worry about.

I don't even know what changed my mind, but it was a few weeks ago that, in the midst of grading student papers, it finally really, decisively hit me how shittily racist the team's name is and how stupid and backward we are in general as a culture for not demanding it be changed back in, oh, 1890 or so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to understand. It's embarrassing to write about in a blog post that I'm going to post to Facebook. I want people to think I'm understanding, and nice, and considerate, and smart, and after reading this, some people might think the opposite.

But hell, we're learning all the time, a lot if we're paying attention, a little even if we're willfully trying to pretend that we can stay the same person for our entire lives. This is just one of my many, many examples. There's not, but what if there was an email from a few weeks ago in which I'd written something like "Oh, I don't see what the big deal is about the Washington Redskins, people should just get over it!" and someone read that email and was upset at me and I tried to explain myself by saying "Those messages sent 3 weeks ago don't reflect who I am today"?

It would be absolutely true, and I suspect that a great many people wouldn't care.

Honestly, my worry about our propensity to judgment, especially on the internet, has less to do with who we're judging and more to do with us. Evan Spiegel is going to be fine. Jack White will probably survive. But what's the cost to us of this kneejerk cynicism, this rush to judgment, this assumption that a few lines of text or a few moments of speech tell us all we need to know about a person?

I've had 30-odd years of issues with the vast majority of the Bible, but John 8:7 has always been near to my heart, the part where Jesus says "Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone." This certainly hasn't kept me from judging all my life, and it certainly hasn't kept me from doing things that have been, at times, likely deserving of a harsh judgment from others, but I often think of it when I read about people like Evan Spiegel and realize that I really do want to believe that he's learned something in the last 3-4 years, to think that there's more to him than a few nasty emails. And that's just as much, if not more, for my own sake as it is for his.

Would we rather live in a world where it's just understood that every single thing you put out on the internet (or elsewhere) is immediately available for public scrutiny and any statement that could be even mildly misconstrued should be kept to ourselves, or a world where we still live with the (potentially illusory) idea of different audiences and treat each other with that understanding in mind when one audience unexpectedly bleeds into another? Because based on how we're treating each other right now, we're definitely creating the former, but I'm pretty sure just about everyone, given a choice, would prefer the latter.

* Is it possible to be "sort of incensed" by something?
** Told you.
*** What's a "letter"? I think they meant "emails."

Why I Won't Feel Guilty Occasionally Sitting On My Ass This Summer

The end of the school year always brings conflicting emotions for me. On one hand, it's great to be wrapping things up, the weather is in that perfect not-too-hot, not-too-cold spot, and (mostly) all I have to look forward to now is three months of (mostly) not working.* I'm excited to have some time away from my teaching job, for which I'm not able to take any vacation days at all and can only take sick days if I'm able to make up the work I miss by working nights and weekends, for nine months of the year.

It's usually once I start thinking about all the awesome things I'm going to do over the summer that I start feeling guilty for not working. Especially now that Lindsey works at a "real" job, it's weird to have the entire summer "to myself" when everyone else is at their job, (supposedly) working away. I've lost track of the number of times over the last decade that others have explained at length to me exactly how I've got it better than them, able to just not work three months of the year. The implication is twofold: 1) they're jealous of my long "vacation," and 2) they simultaneously think that taking such a long vacation is lazy, slothful, and that somehow I don't work as hard as they do. It's number two that, in my weaker moments, makes me feel a bit like shit. So I decided that during my lunch break today (literally the first lunch break I've had, honestly, since October when my boss took me to lunch to talk about...work) I would figure out if I actually work less than Hypothetical Jealous/Contemptuous Joe Schmoe.

I'm working on the assumption that during a year of perfect attendance, Joe works 48 weeks out of the year, for forty hours a week. Joe takes his four weeks of vacation. This totals out to 1,920 hours of work a year. If Joe is an absolute maniac and takes no vacation, he works 2,080 hours a year.

After almost ten years of working as a university instructor/teacher/professor, I estimate that I average about 60 hours a week per work during the school year. This includes about 50-55 hours per week plus 5-10 hours per weekend. At my current job, this amounts to 60 hours a week for 30 weeks, or 1,800 hours. When you add to that the (unpaid) 15 hours average per week I do the rest of the year (during Christmas break, spring break, and summer break), you add another 330 hours to that to come up with 2,130 hours.

So. Mathematically at least, I have nothing to feel bad about.

Anyway, this was an interesting little experiment to me, and I wasn't at all assured of the result as it came out before I started.

Because this is going on the internet now, I suppose I'm obligated to add a little note to say I don't mean this as a complaint; clearly, there are more lucrative and, frankly, easier-to-get jobs than a tenure track professor in the humanities in 2014, and if I was dissatisfied or wanted to be doing something else instead, I sure as hell would be. Instead, this is my way of responding to all those "Oh, so you don't work all summer" sneers.

Yes, actually I do work (a bit) all summer, and even if I didn't, I still likely work about as much as you do. So pffffffftthhhhhht.

Back to grading.

* And, notably, not getting paid. So, you could say that in addition to working as much or more as "full-year" employees, I only get paid for 75% of my work. Yes, now that I'm tenure track I make a decent amount of money (an amount that is, by my standards, extraordinary), but no, we don't get paid "extra" over nine months to be compensated for the three months we get "off."

It's Almost Summer

I can tell because I was looking over the notes I'd taken on a student's presentation yesterday and partway down the page I'd apparently just written "Human hive-mind hobo Jesus, mass hallucination, robo-priestess."

It's like Anthony Kiedis took over my body for an instant.

Procedural Generation and Emergent Gameplay as Storytelling Devices

This post originally appeared in Recomposing the Pines on 5/3/14: 

I've been sitting on this one for awhile, with a pile of hyperlinks to various articles about procedurally-generated worlds in gaming stacked up in a post titled "Drafty Draft," but it was finally starting to play Minecraft seriously again this week after not playing much since, oh, 2010 that helped me figure out what I really wanted to say. Which is, briefly, that procedural generation in gaming is mostly awesome.

Not entirely awesome, mind you. As I ranted about at length previously in my now-locked personal blog, "procedural generation" has recently gotten roped in with "retro aesthetic," "roguelike," and "RPG elements" in the quadfecta (?) of current gaming buzz-qualities that ensure that it ends up in a lot of games that don't really use it effectively, just because it looks good on a feature list. For instance, taking out procedurally generated worlds in something like Teleglitch might actually add to the tension of the game, because you'd have some idea, at least, of what's coming, precisely what to be afraid of. Not procedurally generating the worlds of Don't Starve might actually lead to the player's accumulation of knowledge about a world's consistent geography and how to use that to his/her advantage when they next respawn, creating a situation not unlike the amazingly effective respawn mechanic at play in Rogue Legacy. But then there are games like Terraria and Minecraft, which arguably wouldn't work at all without the procedurally-generated worlds that their play takes place in.

The game that taught me not only to embrace death, but to look forward to it.

But what I wanted to write about today has less to do with how procedural generation plays into a game's mechanics and more to do with how it might factor into a game's story.

I got my start writing legitimately (if you want to call it that) about games by writing about how narratives and stories function (and fail to function) in gameworlds. Given that most modern video games are a complex combination of pre-scripted "storytelling" through cutscenes and/or "events" that eliminate 99% of player agency paired with spur-of-the-moment player interactivity, I believe that games create unprecedented possibilities for cooperative storytelling/worldbuilding (they're the same, I'd argue) between the "authors" (developers) and their audience, but that they also contain unprecedented pitfalls. The only reason most people would scoff at the idea of a "Citizen Kane of video games" is because currently the pitfalls are like sinkholes and potential peaks are fragile, windswept pinnacles.

Like this one.

In this article, Beraldo argues that "the main point is that games are a shared authorship experience. You will better remember that time you managed to evade cops opening fire at you by diving into an air duct in Deus Ex than the fact that one of the bosses was an ubercyborg with an accent." And this is what really got me thinking. I'm a huge Deux Ex fan, and this describes me completely. I remember, and appreciate, the game's Gibson-influenced cyberpunk story as something engaging and interesting and fairly audacious for a video game, especially in 2000. But I remember and appreciate it precisely because it was a very effective wrapper within which my role as a player interacting with and reacting to the gameworld around me played out. I cared about the story because the unexpected moments of air-duct-diving that emerged through gameplay were so compelling. I cared more about the air-duct-diving than I would have otherwise because the story wrapped those moments in a sense of fictional gravitas that is lacking in a game like, say, Tetris or Super Mario Bros. So it's a symbiosis, in a way. But it's a lopsided symbiosis that's unevenly reliant on the strength of the gameplay. A game without a compelling story can still be a fun game. A good story without compelling gameplay is just a slow, QTE-ridden low-budget movie.

It's unequivocally true.

But I'm oversimplifying. The reason Beraldo's example works so well for me is that he's not just talking about Deus Ex as a game that contains both story and gameplay, but a game that contains both story and emergent gameplay. The reason diving into an air duct to escape gunfire in the game is such a tense, compelling, and ultimately fun experience is precisely because there is no particular "level" or scripted scene in the game in which this occurs. Instead, it occurs as a result of the player's behavior in the world, the reactions of a guard or enemy robot to that behavior, and then the by-the-seat-of-your pants improvisation the player must undergo to escape what is likely a much better armed and armored (and thus unbeatable by main force) enemy. The scenario emerges from the way the game's rules and its world are designed, not as a discrete, pre-plotted encounter, the outcome(s) of which are already predetermined by the game's code (at least, not in a direct sense).

Warren Spector believes that games that enable these types of player-driven experiences are "the only thing that sets us apart in any meaningful way from other mediums." But it's not just a matter of being able to claim a niche: he refers to games that depend on emergent play as "engines of perpetual novelty." Not only do these games offer novel play scenarios in the short term (like Beraldo's example), they also focus more in general on the player's interaction with and experimentation within the gameworld than on herding the player along one developer-curated path, the only possible "right" experience. As Spector says, developers interested in emergent gameplay should "[e]mbrace the idea that your job is to bound the player experience, to put a sort of creative box around it -- but you don't determine the player experience. It's not about 'here's where every player does X.'"

Yeah, no more of this, please.

To me, emergent gameplay adds not just moment-to-moment novelty, but potentially limitless replay value (in games like Don't Starve, for example) that isn't reliant on new DLC and achievements that require you to replay the exact same content over and over again to achieve some esoteric level of mastery. Replay values comes not from the desire to hone your skills in a vacuum to become really good at doing one specific thing, but from the near-limitless possible permutations of your gameplay and its results and your reactions to those results that can occur in the gameworld.

Of course, non-emergent types of games just are fine (Spector and I agree on this, and I recently had a hell of a good time playing ), but I've also found that his claim that "once players get a taste of [an emergence-based] game, it's very hard for them to go back" to be very true in my experience. This really started for me with Minecraft way back in 2010. There were a lot of other things that were unique about the game to me at the time, but what really stuck out (and what still does, honestly) was the experience of trying to survive the game's nights early on while slowly learning the rules of the world and building a primitive shelter. This was emergent gameplay at its finest, determined entirely by the rules of the world and my actions within them rather than the limited gameplay dimensions of reaching a particular, required goal or the need to complete a particular level.

I think that this type of emergent gameplay is something that procedural generation can mesh with quite well. Where the effect of procedural generation is perhaps blunted in something like Risk of Rain, where the ways in which you interact with the world around you are necessarily very limited (in this case by a Contra-esque sort of gameplay), in a game like Minecraft (or Deus Ex) there are enough gameplay possibilities that randomized worlds, and randomized content within those worlds actually force a much wider variation in gameplay experiences than "Oh, I'm the purple guy that shoots the big green guy with the grey gun" or "Oh, I'm the red girl that shoots the little black dogs with the yellow bow...so that's different!"

I hope you like finding the teleporter.

And this is where story comes back in. In games with emergent gameplay, procedurally-generated content does even more to encourage players to make their own compelling experiences with the "creative box" by making sure that every player's experience is unique in its details while taking place in a gameworld that would still be recognizable to other players who are familiar with the particular game.

This is how you end up with pieces like Quintin Smith's "Mine The Gap" or Tom Francis' "The Minecraft Experiment," both "virtual travel narratives" that I examined during my dissertation work.

When a player's experience is unique in the details but relatable more generically, it makes their story simultaneously more personal and more shareable, makes it seem more like a compelling narrative that they are invested in and have helped create instead of just some game that they're playing simply to pass the time. Any Deus Ex player understands Beraldo's example immediately, and likely has a similar example of their own. But, because of emergent gameplay, their own example is also importantly different, importantly personally theirs. Any Minecraft player understands the broad strokes of Smith's narrative immediately, but because of emergent gameplay and procedurally generation, they necessarily have importantly different, importantly personal stories, because it's not only their gameplay experience that's fundamentally different, it's also the world that that gameplay takes place in.

And, well, I think that's neat. 

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

This post originally appeared in Recomposing the Pines on 5/2/14:

So, when I started this new blog, I was really excited by the prospect of being able to write publicly and semi-officially (though not too officially) about teaching, researching, and so on, in the hope that what I had to say would both help other people who might be wrestling with the same or similar problems and encourage other people to suggest solutions for me.

Well, for the last four months, apparently I haven't actually had anything to say. Well, that's not true. Let's just say instead that expecting to be able to blog about academia regularly while also taking on a load of committee service work, teaching four classes a term, and trying to get an entirely new minor program off the ground in my first two terms as a faculty member was a fool's errand.

My workload is a bit lighter now, but I'm not going to guarantee it's going to stay that way for long. In the meantime, though, I wanted to write briefly about one of the biggest stumbling blocks I've hit in my first few terms here; again, both in the hope that it might be helpful for potential readers to read and in the hope that someone out there might have some solutions of their own that can help me reframe and better understand the issue(s) I'm facing.

So, I'm currently teaching a lot of different courses. In two terms, I've introduced six entirely new courses, and next term (starting in a few weeks!) I'm going to introduce three more classes, for a total of nine new classes in my first year. Logistically, this is a ridiculous amount of work to juggle, but thematically, it's pretty coherent. At least in my head it is.

All my courses, however they are listed in the catalogue, are under the aegis of "the humanities," and this, combined with the specificity of my own training and research experience, means that all the courses have some elements in common. Students read stuff, and write stuff. They work in groups to discuss the issues that arise in the processes of reading and writing. They make arguments, and (hopefully) back those arguments up with evidence, source synthesis, and critical thinking. Whether we're reading novels or poetry or comic books, playing video games, or watching documentaries, our approach to the material is, generally speaking, a pretty straightforward literary analysis one. This is, at least for now, a limitation of my training, but also an expression of my belief that literary analysis gives one the tools to basically and fundamentally analyze and question all works that fall under the rubric of what I call "culturally expressive media." People write novels, film movies, and make video games to be expressions of their personal and cultural experience of the world (sometimes more intentionally than others). By studying these works through this lens, I believe we can simultaneously better understand the creators' cultural situations and how various media can implicitly and explicitly make arguments, while interrogating our own assumptions about society, or what-have-you.

Pretty straightforward cultural-studies-literary-analysis-humanities-type stuff, right?

Well, it's totally not working. Which is weird, because it worked before.

I find that my students are asking variations of "Why do we have to do this?" much more frequently than they ever did at WSU and I'm finding it much harder to convince them (on average) to become invested in what they see as squishy, non-objective, non-quantifiable work beyond the level of "If I don't work sort of hard, I'll get a bad grade and hurt my GPA."

Now, the problem certainly isn't that I'm incapable of addressing the value of the humanities in today's university environment. In fact, sometimes that seems like all I do. Sometimes it feels like 90% of my job is to explain to other people why my job is important. So, I've gotten pretty good at it.

I also realize that when you're teaching at a technical institute, you're going to get a certain kind of student, to whom learning about the cultural significance of The Illiad might pale in comparison to things they do in their other classes, like build robots (no, seriously, they do).

But. I guess it's difficult for me to understand precisely how a student goes from thinking one of those things is preferable to the other to thinking that one is useful and the other one is pointless. I can throw all the statistics I want in the face of many of my students, proving that graduates with humanities knowledge are going to further down their career path than those who don't have it, and thus make more money in the long term. That employers look for critical thinking skills and cultural awareness in addition to your "piece of paper." That many of the professional associations that eagerly await our graduates to fill their open positions specifically contact us regularly to make sure that their future hirees are getting an appropriate education in ethics, logic, critical thinking, and global citizenship. And, yes, that there's really not that big of a gap in employment between those who have humanities degrees and those who have science degrees.

None of it seems to make any difference, though. Which leads me to believe that there may well be a profound shift occurring right now, not just away from liberal arts education, but from education in general. The kind of "education" many of my students seem to want to get at this school is actually what we'd call "vocational training" if there wasn't such a stigma attached to that term. And that's fine, I guess: college has become such an expensive, loophole-ridden process while simultaneously becoming so necessary for employment that it's easy to see why students want to know what they're paying for before they pay for it, and a $70,000/year job at the end of four years is a lot better return on your investment (that lands you in massive debt) than "being a better person" or "understanding other cultures."

So I get it. But, I think there are a lot of hidden costs to replacing universities with huge job-training factories, and if we continue to go down that road as a culture, I think there are a lot of potential dangers specifically in continuing to call what we're doing "education." Because I believe education should extend beyond just job training, regardless of whether students can immediately see the value in more learning more ephemeral subjects and skills or not. And I think every students who can afford it will reap the vast benefits of this broader kind of education throughout the rest of their lives whether they go on to manage a McDonald's or work as the CEO of a corporation, or do anything in between.

But when I say these things to many of my students, they just roll their eyes and settle in to suffer through 10 of their 30 hours of (30 hours in-class, our of four years of school!) of humanities education.

So, I guess my question is: with so little time in the classroom, how do we convince students that there is more to education than just skill-based training and certification? How do we convince students that sometimes it's worthwhile to invest money in something other than getting more money?

I have a lot reasons that I could share convincingly with, say, the audience of The Chronicle, but I don't have any reasons that 18 year-olds  who have already chained themselves to massive, possible lifelong debt, want to hear.