analyzing where the university is in the classroom? -- it's a start
Reading Inside Higher Education I am struck by the amount of (wilful?) denial about the mess that higher edu and edu in general are in. A good beginning might be to have all undergraduates read something about the current crisis of the university. My bias and I think the bias of many academics is to try to "protect the kids" from the awful truth. But I think this is a mistake. The whole point of the university is to exercise critical thinking, and what better way to start than with a critique of the institution we are in?
Stanley Aronowitz's book THE KNOWLEDGE FACTORY is short and quite easy to understand. What if all undergrads had to read it? I plan on implementing this in my classes -- all of them -- next year.
I think it will be uncomfortable, but that may well be productive.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
The grad school racket
It’s like this: see . . . You tell the kids they gotta get a Master's degree, see… and then you tell them they got to get a PhD… and then they got to publish. . . and then they got to go to conferences. see.. and then if they DON’T get a job you tell them that they just didn’t try hard enough and you quick lose their address and you go after the next bunch of kids, and you tell them, it’s like this: see . . .
It’s like this: see . . . You tell the kids they gotta get a Master's degree, see… and then you tell them they got to get a PhD… and then they got to publish. . . and then they got to go to conferences. see.. and then if they DON’T get a job you tell them that they just didn’t try hard enough and you quick lose their address and you go after the next bunch of kids, and you tell them, it’s like this: see . . .
Friday, December 08, 2006
This is a copy of my comment on INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION, referring to an MLA report on tenure
THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER
The MLA is composed of very smart people, making a sincere attempt to deal with the dysfunction and bias that plague academic hirings, promotion, and tenure. But as both Stanley Aronowitz, and the late Bill Readings have noted in their substantive books, the problem is bigger than tenure procedures and starts earlier.
Both Aronowitz and Readings write about the corporate university, where students are processed like so many "widgets" (Theda Shapiro's term). In such an environment, faculty are becoming increasinlgly positioned as "seasonal workers" (Aronowitz's term), and so tenure is in fact disappearing as academics are separated into workers and a much smaller cadre of "managers". If you think about it, this is indeed happening at many colleges and universities.
This state of affairs places grad students and recent PHD's in the position of being almost like migrant workers, and THIS, I would argue is a problem that departments and graduate programs need to look at very seriously. What can be the intellectual and ethical justification, for recruiting people to work as our assistants, all the while training for them for jobs that do not exist?
Should we downsize voluntarily and/or should we radically rethink what the Masters and Doctorate degrees signify?
How can we educate those who want to pursue higher degrees, and at the same time be honest with these students about their "professional" future?
And finally, how can we rethink and resist the corporatization of the university from within it? These are, in my estimation, some of the questions we need to be asking.
THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER
The MLA is composed of very smart people, making a sincere attempt to deal with the dysfunction and bias that plague academic hirings, promotion, and tenure. But as both Stanley Aronowitz, and the late Bill Readings have noted in their substantive books, the problem is bigger than tenure procedures and starts earlier.
Both Aronowitz and Readings write about the corporate university, where students are processed like so many "widgets" (Theda Shapiro's term). In such an environment, faculty are becoming increasinlgly positioned as "seasonal workers" (Aronowitz's term), and so tenure is in fact disappearing as academics are separated into workers and a much smaller cadre of "managers". If you think about it, this is indeed happening at many colleges and universities.
This state of affairs places grad students and recent PHD's in the position of being almost like migrant workers, and THIS, I would argue is a problem that departments and graduate programs need to look at very seriously. What can be the intellectual and ethical justification, for recruiting people to work as our assistants, all the while training for them for jobs that do not exist?
Should we downsize voluntarily and/or should we radically rethink what the Masters and Doctorate degrees signify?
How can we educate those who want to pursue higher degrees, and at the same time be honest with these students about their "professional" future?
And finally, how can we rethink and resist the corporatization of the university from within it? These are, in my estimation, some of the questions we need to be asking.
Monday, December 04, 2006
thy life's a miracle
In the middle of these commentaries about the ruin of edu, I want to comment very briefly on the death of a Beverly Hills High Junior on December 3rd 2006. The male student, so the story goes, got into a car with a very drunk, older male driver in order to look after two female sophmores, who wanted the driver to purchase them alcohol. All of them were inebriated to begin with, and this young man's gallantry had, to say the least, a catastrophic outcome. It is at this point unknown which, if either, of the young women survived, nor do i know whether the driver lived or not.
I will dispense with the usual cautions against taking drugs and operating machinery.
I hope that whoever reads this will think twice and three times about the value of their own lives -- which is, to put it mildly, considerable. In the end all debates are futile if you aren't alive to engage in them, and I hope you'll stick around to be a part of the fray. Being a young person is actually dreadfully difficult (this is Robert Gross' observation), much more difficult, i think, than being an older person. And yet, your charge as a young person is to survive into adulthood, so that you can bring your vitality, your uncertainy, and even your suffering into the realms of work, politics, love, art, and of course education.
Do remember, not only do you need to live, but more importantly, we, the older ones, we need you. I have felt this many times as a teacher and I continue to feel it as a writer and as a parent and as an older person with much younger friends. Young people are actually crucial to the world -- not in the sense of being "the future" or the "hope" or whatever -- but in the sense of who you are right NOW, with all your questions, and discomfort, and your incredible aliveness.
i'm sorry you do not have an educational community or set of communities that serves you better. But in the end, still, you need to live. Everything else is ultimately negotiatable.
So please stick around, and take care of yourself so that you can live as long as humanly possible.
In the middle of these commentaries about the ruin of edu, I want to comment very briefly on the death of a Beverly Hills High Junior on December 3rd 2006. The male student, so the story goes, got into a car with a very drunk, older male driver in order to look after two female sophmores, who wanted the driver to purchase them alcohol. All of them were inebriated to begin with, and this young man's gallantry had, to say the least, a catastrophic outcome. It is at this point unknown which, if either, of the young women survived, nor do i know whether the driver lived or not.
I will dispense with the usual cautions against taking drugs and operating machinery.
I hope that whoever reads this will think twice and three times about the value of their own lives -- which is, to put it mildly, considerable. In the end all debates are futile if you aren't alive to engage in them, and I hope you'll stick around to be a part of the fray. Being a young person is actually dreadfully difficult (this is Robert Gross' observation), much more difficult, i think, than being an older person. And yet, your charge as a young person is to survive into adulthood, so that you can bring your vitality, your uncertainy, and even your suffering into the realms of work, politics, love, art, and of course education.
Do remember, not only do you need to live, but more importantly, we, the older ones, we need you. I have felt this many times as a teacher and I continue to feel it as a writer and as a parent and as an older person with much younger friends. Young people are actually crucial to the world -- not in the sense of being "the future" or the "hope" or whatever -- but in the sense of who you are right NOW, with all your questions, and discomfort, and your incredible aliveness.
i'm sorry you do not have an educational community or set of communities that serves you better. But in the end, still, you need to live. Everything else is ultimately negotiatable.
So please stick around, and take care of yourself so that you can live as long as humanly possible.
Monday, November 20, 2006
please don't shoot the kids
This post is a work in progress, as I do not know all the facts and figures pertaining to the tasering of a student at UCLA during the week of November 13th 2006.
My first reaction is to think that we are living in a very different collegiate world than we did even a few years ago. Pre 09/11, and pre Patriot Act it was -- arguably -- still possible to think about the university as a counter-space, a utopian space. I have posted about this in the teachers with and without guns essay. I think it is clear with the tasering of Mr. Tabatabainejad that we can no longer lay claim -- even in theory -- to such a space. The university is in the process of becoming, if it hasn't become already, something like a shopping mall -- a seemingly public space where private and/or semi-public security forces do in fact have the legal right (I think) to demand identification and cooperation. and if you don't cooperate, god help you.
Notably, the student's response and that of many of the others there resembled the reactions of folks still operating in the utopian-post hippy mindset. How dare you and ooh those pigs and there goes your patriot act. the outrage is undoubtedly justified, but the responses feel to me -- oddly -- nostalgic, as though they were produced by a time-warp, and the students thought it was 1970 and not 2006. I think such outrage comes too late -- it's an anachronistic emotion -- this outrage, this defiance.
That being said, students, professors, and all staff who care, need to put pressure on their campuses not to shoot the students -- with bb guns, bows and arrows, tasers, or bullets. i think this needs to happen through allied student organizations, the union, and the faculty senate. You can't shoot the kids.
In the meantime, students, professors and staff need to remind themselves that we live in a time, when -- like it or not -- racial profiling exists and is not going away, and we are all suspect. Empty rebellions against authority are just that, and we need to put our energies to more productive, more sophisticated use.
This post is a work in progress, as I do not know all the facts and figures pertaining to the tasering of a student at UCLA during the week of November 13th 2006.
My first reaction is to think that we are living in a very different collegiate world than we did even a few years ago. Pre 09/11, and pre Patriot Act it was -- arguably -- still possible to think about the university as a counter-space, a utopian space. I have posted about this in the teachers with and without guns essay. I think it is clear with the tasering of Mr. Tabatabainejad that we can no longer lay claim -- even in theory -- to such a space. The university is in the process of becoming, if it hasn't become already, something like a shopping mall -- a seemingly public space where private and/or semi-public security forces do in fact have the legal right (I think) to demand identification and cooperation. and if you don't cooperate, god help you.
Notably, the student's response and that of many of the others there resembled the reactions of folks still operating in the utopian-post hippy mindset. How dare you and ooh those pigs and there goes your patriot act. the outrage is undoubtedly justified, but the responses feel to me -- oddly -- nostalgic, as though they were produced by a time-warp, and the students thought it was 1970 and not 2006. I think such outrage comes too late -- it's an anachronistic emotion -- this outrage, this defiance.
That being said, students, professors, and all staff who care, need to put pressure on their campuses not to shoot the students -- with bb guns, bows and arrows, tasers, or bullets. i think this needs to happen through allied student organizations, the union, and the faculty senate. You can't shoot the kids.
In the meantime, students, professors and staff need to remind themselves that we live in a time, when -- like it or not -- racial profiling exists and is not going away, and we are all suspect. Empty rebellions against authority are just that, and we need to put our energies to more productive, more sophisticated use.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
A teacher for president
As often happens, sf -- that sneered upon genre of boy astronauts, smart talking robots, renegade computers, and scary monsters in space -- poses some of the most pertinent and unspoken questions of our time. Slavoj Zizek argues that movies like Independence Day and the Matrix rehearsed 09/11 and subconsciously understood that the catastrophe was coming. His contention is that pop culture -- and my riff on this would be sf in particular -- unleashes the return of the repressed, and the issues that can't come into consciousness in the public sector(s) can come "up" literally and find expression here.
The new and improved Battlestar Galactica resonates strongly to me as such a subconscious-busting narrative, and watching Season 1, I am struck by the ruckus that is raised by the character of the minister of education who, through a quirk of fate, becomes president of the colonies. That she is a woman is compounded by the fact that, to quote one character, she's a "school teacher." The general view is that a school teacher cannot possibly be equipped to handle matters of state, that a school teacher cannot possibly be expected to make life or death decisions, or be "tough" enough to lead. The genius of the series (and it is brilliant on many levels) is that in the first several episodes it is made abundantly clear to us that the school teacher, to use the parlance our times, knows her shit, and is more than ready and able to do what is necessary. She can also keep a state secret, and she is adept at working with others.
What the show makes visible to us is this country's absolute scorn for teachers, a derision "informed" by the sense that teachers are weak, "feminine" (hysterical, overly emotional, illogical and so on whether physically female or not), unrealistic, and unable to take charge.
The problem/repressed knowledge offered here is that a teacher really SHOULD be president. She has all the requirements: sympathy/empathy with/for others, the ability to read the emotional needs/dynamics of the group, the ability to keep order, as well as convey information in an efficient and clear manner, and in a time-appropriate fashion. Just think how different our international relationship with the rest of the world would be if a teacher were president, or even, if more teachers ran for public office. Just think about the management of Iraq. Play fair, don't speak out of turn, Halliburton, or you'l be sent to the principal (what a GREAT idea THAT is).
I hereby nominate a teacher for the office of President of the United States. Not a business person, not a military person, not an attorney.
A teacher.
But the fact is we don't WANT teachers out and about and being civically and politically active. And in this prejudice, we, the professorate, are at least somewhat complicit. Because we don't believe -- really -- in what teachers do. We think, heck we KNOW, that we are better, smarter, more educated, more intellectual, more refined thinkers, more theoretically sophisticated, and so on and so on.
If we don't believe in what teachers do, we need to tell them that. They may not, actually believe in what WE do, and that confrontation might yield to an interesting discussion, of where both professional groups fail, where we connect, and what we might need to do as a consortium, rather than as fragile and oppositional "allies."
I still think I'd rather have a teacher as prez than a professor.
As often happens, sf -- that sneered upon genre of boy astronauts, smart talking robots, renegade computers, and scary monsters in space -- poses some of the most pertinent and unspoken questions of our time. Slavoj Zizek argues that movies like Independence Day and the Matrix rehearsed 09/11 and subconsciously understood that the catastrophe was coming. His contention is that pop culture -- and my riff on this would be sf in particular -- unleashes the return of the repressed, and the issues that can't come into consciousness in the public sector(s) can come "up" literally and find expression here.
The new and improved Battlestar Galactica resonates strongly to me as such a subconscious-busting narrative, and watching Season 1, I am struck by the ruckus that is raised by the character of the minister of education who, through a quirk of fate, becomes president of the colonies. That she is a woman is compounded by the fact that, to quote one character, she's a "school teacher." The general view is that a school teacher cannot possibly be equipped to handle matters of state, that a school teacher cannot possibly be expected to make life or death decisions, or be "tough" enough to lead. The genius of the series (and it is brilliant on many levels) is that in the first several episodes it is made abundantly clear to us that the school teacher, to use the parlance our times, knows her shit, and is more than ready and able to do what is necessary. She can also keep a state secret, and she is adept at working with others.
What the show makes visible to us is this country's absolute scorn for teachers, a derision "informed" by the sense that teachers are weak, "feminine" (hysterical, overly emotional, illogical and so on whether physically female or not), unrealistic, and unable to take charge.
The problem/repressed knowledge offered here is that a teacher really SHOULD be president. She has all the requirements: sympathy/empathy with/for others, the ability to read the emotional needs/dynamics of the group, the ability to keep order, as well as convey information in an efficient and clear manner, and in a time-appropriate fashion. Just think how different our international relationship with the rest of the world would be if a teacher were president, or even, if more teachers ran for public office. Just think about the management of Iraq. Play fair, don't speak out of turn, Halliburton, or you'l be sent to the principal (what a GREAT idea THAT is).
I hereby nominate a teacher for the office of President of the United States. Not a business person, not a military person, not an attorney.
A teacher.
But the fact is we don't WANT teachers out and about and being civically and politically active. And in this prejudice, we, the professorate, are at least somewhat complicit. Because we don't believe -- really -- in what teachers do. We think, heck we KNOW, that we are better, smarter, more educated, more intellectual, more refined thinkers, more theoretically sophisticated, and so on and so on.
If we don't believe in what teachers do, we need to tell them that. They may not, actually believe in what WE do, and that confrontation might yield to an interesting discussion, of where both professional groups fail, where we connect, and what we might need to do as a consortium, rather than as fragile and oppositional "allies."
I still think I'd rather have a teacher as prez than a professor.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
A letter from Robert Gross, November 2nd, 2006
Dear Stephanie,
Have I ever told you my strange thought about teaching, which recurs more and more often to me, as a sort of broody fantasy, though perhaps really not a fantasy at all?
I think education in our society is cursed, much like the Nibelungen horde.
I think it is cursed because we sell something that shouldn’t be sold, but should be freely shared.
And all the insanity and greed, the power trips and rivalries and backstabbing come from that basic distortion of human values.
I’m supposed to go up to …. University tomorrow, and visit …. about the journal. The journal isn’t going well, and …. isn’t in good shape either.
Another good teacher on the pyre, I’m afraid, completely consumed by the insanity and dishonesty of it all. One who, I think, will persevere and sacrifice herself to the end, never quite admitting that she, like so many of us, have made the service greater than the god.
From Starbucks College, this is Robert Gross
Dear Stephanie,
Have I ever told you my strange thought about teaching, which recurs more and more often to me, as a sort of broody fantasy, though perhaps really not a fantasy at all?
I think education in our society is cursed, much like the Nibelungen horde.
I think it is cursed because we sell something that shouldn’t be sold, but should be freely shared.
And all the insanity and greed, the power trips and rivalries and backstabbing come from that basic distortion of human values.
I’m supposed to go up to …. University tomorrow, and visit …. about the journal. The journal isn’t going well, and …. isn’t in good shape either.
Another good teacher on the pyre, I’m afraid, completely consumed by the insanity and dishonesty of it all. One who, I think, will persevere and sacrifice herself to the end, never quite admitting that she, like so many of us, have made the service greater than the god.
From Starbucks College, this is Robert Gross
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
The Sad Professors
My short short was published at 400 words in the middle of October:
The sad professors
I am one of the sad professors. We came to the university at the tail end of the 60’s or like me in the early 70’s and we had seen the STRAWBERRY STATEMENT and gone to Woodstock (I went with my boyfriend, but his parents wouldn’t let us stay, because the scene seemed too chaotic and dangerous, so we went home to his penthouse on the upper east side and went out for a fancy dinner instead.). We read about the student revolts in Paris and we figured ooh goodie the university will be JUST LIKE THAT – a utopia, a place where you don’t have to sell life insurance or heck sell anything at all, because the revolution is happening and it’s going to happen here.
Well, as you know, it didn’t. We went to grad school – we, the not yet sad but not as happy as we were about things almost professors -- and we worked hard to prove we were smart and talented and disciplined and committed as the job market shrunk and shrunk, particularly in the humanities and particularly in literature – which is what some of us do.
And now we are at the corporate university, where students are clients and the suits aka the administrators control everything, and indeed things were better, or at least more honest when some of us worked at the Strawberry Stores in Manhattan, and the battling cousins who owned the concern would totally yell at us (me) about the stupid mistakes they made with the kork ease shoes inventory. But now the dean yells and it’s not about teaching, it’s all about development, and recruiting grad students for programs that either have no faculty or else don’t prepare them to do anything practical – which is ok, but we are supposed to lie and pretend that we DO (have faculty and prepare them for something practical, which in the humanities just isn’t possible).
And so that’s why we are sad. And I am sad, because I really used to like teaching, but as I get ready to talk about utopia, about the imagination as a country without borders or limits, I look into my undergraduates’ eyes. Then I understand what the theorist Frederick Jameson meant about the decline of “affect” because when my students look at me, I think, I know, they are really already sort of emotionally dead.
My short short was published at 400 words in the middle of October:
The sad professors
I am one of the sad professors. We came to the university at the tail end of the 60’s or like me in the early 70’s and we had seen the STRAWBERRY STATEMENT and gone to Woodstock (I went with my boyfriend, but his parents wouldn’t let us stay, because the scene seemed too chaotic and dangerous, so we went home to his penthouse on the upper east side and went out for a fancy dinner instead.). We read about the student revolts in Paris and we figured ooh goodie the university will be JUST LIKE THAT – a utopia, a place where you don’t have to sell life insurance or heck sell anything at all, because the revolution is happening and it’s going to happen here.
Well, as you know, it didn’t. We went to grad school – we, the not yet sad but not as happy as we were about things almost professors -- and we worked hard to prove we were smart and talented and disciplined and committed as the job market shrunk and shrunk, particularly in the humanities and particularly in literature – which is what some of us do.
And now we are at the corporate university, where students are clients and the suits aka the administrators control everything, and indeed things were better, or at least more honest when some of us worked at the Strawberry Stores in Manhattan, and the battling cousins who owned the concern would totally yell at us (me) about the stupid mistakes they made with the kork ease shoes inventory. But now the dean yells and it’s not about teaching, it’s all about development, and recruiting grad students for programs that either have no faculty or else don’t prepare them to do anything practical – which is ok, but we are supposed to lie and pretend that we DO (have faculty and prepare them for something practical, which in the humanities just isn’t possible).
And so that’s why we are sad. And I am sad, because I really used to like teaching, but as I get ready to talk about utopia, about the imagination as a country without borders or limits, I look into my undergraduates’ eyes. Then I understand what the theorist Frederick Jameson meant about the decline of “affect” because when my students look at me, I think, I know, they are really already sort of emotionally dead.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
"PUBLIC EDUCATION IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR." Erin Aubrey Kaplan, Los Angeles Times, October 11th, 2006
This is the first time that I have seen the word "war" used to talk about education. Is this the war for education or the war against it? Or the war within it? But, for those of us involved in edu, it certainly feels like a battle zone. Whether you're a part-time or full-time student, a grad student, a t.a., an r.a., a fellow, a teacher's aide, a teacher, a lecturer, a professor, or a staff member working at a school/univeristy, you know there's a fight going on. A big one. A sustained one. And the odds against us...
Who is fighting whom and for what? Against what? What is at stake?
Does anybody know?
This is the first time that I have seen the word "war" used to talk about education. Is this the war for education or the war against it? Or the war within it? But, for those of us involved in edu, it certainly feels like a battle zone. Whether you're a part-time or full-time student, a grad student, a t.a., an r.a., a fellow, a teacher's aide, a teacher, a lecturer, a professor, or a staff member working at a school/univeristy, you know there's a fight going on. A big one. A sustained one. And the odds against us...
Who is fighting whom and for what? Against what? What is at stake?
Does anybody know?
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Teachers with and without guns
It is always noteworthy when an absurd idea strikes a cultural shiver in a national community. The proposition that teachers carry guns at school provides a powerful example of such a cultural _frisson_ . Why does the idea seem at once horrifying and attractive to both students and teachers alike? Why does the thought of toting an Uzi send a thrill through high-school students? A devout pacifist, I laughed when Stephen Colbert suggested that principals should be packing. But clearly, he is fascinated by the idea too.
How might such a rule play out at the university? One can conjure up countless gruesome and silly scenarios: Professors in campanile towers with long-range rifles, picking off the graduate students who've accused them of harassment, or whom they just plain old don't like. Student posses roaring through departmental offices, wasting the prof who flunked them or refused to write a recommendation. What about a campus civil war between the administrators and the faculty, with the students playing the role of contentious coalition of the willing? Different groups could be offered diplomas, fellowships, parking spaces, computer-time, for joining a particular side. Interdepartmental guerilla warfare? Raids on Sociology by French. History attacks Economics.
We can afford to laugh at the university about such things. We know, of course, that schools aren't "safe." But we like to think that we are quite secure at the university. Crime may be committed in the parking lots, in the dorms, in the deserted offices, and on the street near campus, but crime and violence AT the university? No.
There are reasons for this assumption. From its inception, the university has -- to some degree -- resembled the monastery in a removal from the sphere of worldly concerns and it has maintained itself, often successfully, as an intellectual refuge from that world and the violent struggles that shake nations and states. Accordingly, the University of North Carolina remained open during the entire Civil War, although there were virtually no students to attend, and more to the point, there was fighting occurring at its very doors. There are indeed ways in which the university has provided scholarly sanctuary. But to whom? Men. Christians (and in this country, predominantly Protestants). Whites. The privileged. As the university has become democratized, integrated, and diversified, it has struggled to maintain its character as monastic, pastoral site of learning.
Whether or not this position is worth maintaining is an open question that should be considered in and of itself. _Should_ the university be a refuge? Why? And if not, why not, and what SHOULD the university be? What spatial-political relations should/can exist between the university and/in late capitalism?
In the meantime, the question of "safety" haunts the university. But usually not directly. One receives police reports about crimes committed near campus. One is asked to take a computerized harassment course, so as to know what harassment is. Professors and students are enjoined to be "civil" when we all know that the most exciting debates between individuals are rarely unemotional and often border on the impolite. Radical right students complain -- with some justification, perhaps -- that free speech is somehow straight-jacketed in the classroom. Professors, for their part, hesitate to reveal their own ignorance, their own pain, and their own difficulty with a question -- be it in Mathematics or Studio Art. The appearance of expertise, the glamour of mastery must be maintained.
But, is it safe to express your ideas at the university? If it is, there will surely be debate and argument. If it isn't, then there will be paranoia, frustration, and most importantly, rage.
Might it be possible to bring back uncertainty, free questioning, and a controlled anger into the university? Might it be possible to talk about the role of such emotions -- anger, rage, frustration, and despair -- without setting off a Trenchcoat Mafia of students or faculty or upper level management? I suspect that this kind of initiative is precisely what needs to happen, but I also supect that it is not a "safe" choice.
Because there are indeed real dangers to fear. I think, more often than I'd like to, about the murder of two German professors who taught at Dartmouth, and who opened their door to two young men pretending to be Dartmouth students. The murder happened off campus, the killers were local kids, and so the event cannot be construed exactly as a "university crime." But the issue raises questions hiding under the obvious fears, the blatant worries. At time of writing, noone knows exactly why these professors were killed. Absurdly, and in action-movie fashion, one can wonder what would have happened if Half Zantop had answered his front door with a Smith and Wesson, and surmise how things might have played out if his wife had had a shotgun at the ready while she was making sandwiches in the kitchen. We return again to the fantasy of the teacher empowered by fire-power. But more pertinent questions (among others) might be these: Would the Zantops have been killed if they HADN'T been professors? What if they had been high-school or elementary school teachers instead? Did their status as academics somehow precipitate the killings? Finally, did the Zantops think that being professors would automatically protect them from the wrath of young people, and is this why they calmly let young strangers in the house? Perhaps. After all, Socrates was never attacked by the kids. It was the adults -- the government -- who did away with him.
The Zantop murders suggest that the university may not be alot more safe than the school, and the public visibility of academics, their claims to cultural capital, may make them vulnerable within their own communities.
But, if there is absolutely no refuge any longer in the school or in the university, if the Ivory Tower is either a fascistic bunker or a danger zone (or both simultaneously), then how do we safe-guard learning, while at the same time, giving free-play to ideas?
This seems to me to be an absolutely crucial and fundamental question.
Meanwhile our fantasies about guns at school run wild, and underneath them, some hidden provocation, some wish lurks and glimmers -- maddeningly, columbine-like -- eluding our consciousness.
It is always noteworthy when an absurd idea strikes a cultural shiver in a national community. The proposition that teachers carry guns at school provides a powerful example of such a cultural _frisson_ . Why does the idea seem at once horrifying and attractive to both students and teachers alike? Why does the thought of toting an Uzi send a thrill through high-school students? A devout pacifist, I laughed when Stephen Colbert suggested that principals should be packing. But clearly, he is fascinated by the idea too.
How might such a rule play out at the university? One can conjure up countless gruesome and silly scenarios: Professors in campanile towers with long-range rifles, picking off the graduate students who've accused them of harassment, or whom they just plain old don't like. Student posses roaring through departmental offices, wasting the prof who flunked them or refused to write a recommendation. What about a campus civil war between the administrators and the faculty, with the students playing the role of contentious coalition of the willing? Different groups could be offered diplomas, fellowships, parking spaces, computer-time, for joining a particular side. Interdepartmental guerilla warfare? Raids on Sociology by French. History attacks Economics.
We can afford to laugh at the university about such things. We know, of course, that schools aren't "safe." But we like to think that we are quite secure at the university. Crime may be committed in the parking lots, in the dorms, in the deserted offices, and on the street near campus, but crime and violence AT the university? No.
There are reasons for this assumption. From its inception, the university has -- to some degree -- resembled the monastery in a removal from the sphere of worldly concerns and it has maintained itself, often successfully, as an intellectual refuge from that world and the violent struggles that shake nations and states. Accordingly, the University of North Carolina remained open during the entire Civil War, although there were virtually no students to attend, and more to the point, there was fighting occurring at its very doors. There are indeed ways in which the university has provided scholarly sanctuary. But to whom? Men. Christians (and in this country, predominantly Protestants). Whites. The privileged. As the university has become democratized, integrated, and diversified, it has struggled to maintain its character as monastic, pastoral site of learning.
Whether or not this position is worth maintaining is an open question that should be considered in and of itself. _Should_ the university be a refuge? Why? And if not, why not, and what SHOULD the university be? What spatial-political relations should/can exist between the university and/in late capitalism?
In the meantime, the question of "safety" haunts the university. But usually not directly. One receives police reports about crimes committed near campus. One is asked to take a computerized harassment course, so as to know what harassment is. Professors and students are enjoined to be "civil" when we all know that the most exciting debates between individuals are rarely unemotional and often border on the impolite. Radical right students complain -- with some justification, perhaps -- that free speech is somehow straight-jacketed in the classroom. Professors, for their part, hesitate to reveal their own ignorance, their own pain, and their own difficulty with a question -- be it in Mathematics or Studio Art. The appearance of expertise, the glamour of mastery must be maintained.
But, is it safe to express your ideas at the university? If it is, there will surely be debate and argument. If it isn't, then there will be paranoia, frustration, and most importantly, rage.
Might it be possible to bring back uncertainty, free questioning, and a controlled anger into the university? Might it be possible to talk about the role of such emotions -- anger, rage, frustration, and despair -- without setting off a Trenchcoat Mafia of students or faculty or upper level management? I suspect that this kind of initiative is precisely what needs to happen, but I also supect that it is not a "safe" choice.
Because there are indeed real dangers to fear. I think, more often than I'd like to, about the murder of two German professors who taught at Dartmouth, and who opened their door to two young men pretending to be Dartmouth students. The murder happened off campus, the killers were local kids, and so the event cannot be construed exactly as a "university crime." But the issue raises questions hiding under the obvious fears, the blatant worries. At time of writing, noone knows exactly why these professors were killed. Absurdly, and in action-movie fashion, one can wonder what would have happened if Half Zantop had answered his front door with a Smith and Wesson, and surmise how things might have played out if his wife had had a shotgun at the ready while she was making sandwiches in the kitchen. We return again to the fantasy of the teacher empowered by fire-power. But more pertinent questions (among others) might be these: Would the Zantops have been killed if they HADN'T been professors? What if they had been high-school or elementary school teachers instead? Did their status as academics somehow precipitate the killings? Finally, did the Zantops think that being professors would automatically protect them from the wrath of young people, and is this why they calmly let young strangers in the house? Perhaps. After all, Socrates was never attacked by the kids. It was the adults -- the government -- who did away with him.
The Zantop murders suggest that the university may not be alot more safe than the school, and the public visibility of academics, their claims to cultural capital, may make them vulnerable within their own communities.
But, if there is absolutely no refuge any longer in the school or in the university, if the Ivory Tower is either a fascistic bunker or a danger zone (or both simultaneously), then how do we safe-guard learning, while at the same time, giving free-play to ideas?
This seems to me to be an absolutely crucial and fundamental question.
Meanwhile our fantasies about guns at school run wild, and underneath them, some hidden provocation, some wish lurks and glimmers -- maddeningly, columbine-like -- eluding our consciousness.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Welcome to ZARDOZ U
In the 70's cult film ZARDOZ, a group of eternally youthful geniuses inhabit semi-ritzy, low-tech kibbutzim called "vortexes" where they conduct scientific research (like studying the sex drive -- a drive they no longer possess), and where they also archive artistic masterworks of the past. The vortex we see contains an impressive repository of the past. Van Gogh's sit side by side with chandeliers and 18th Century baroque clocks in a vast museum. The inhabitants "know" all of human culture: languages, sciences, music, arts, history, literature.
At first glance, the vortex seems "utopian." The people here dress like hippies, they meditate on intellectual matters, and remain connected to each other through a crystal implanted in their foreheads. That crystal in turn connects them all to a supercomputer that they can ask questions of or feed data into. Moreover, the place is completely democratic and everyone votes on everything all the time. This apparently Rousseauian community makes every decision by discussion in committee. Eternally. For these people never die.
But beware of launching a critique of your peers. We see a serious young man on trial for intimating that there is something "rotten" in their society. The punishment for such treason? Aging. A lead character in the film decides to vote in defense of the critiquer, even as he observes to the "brutal" invader (played by Sean Connery), "It won't do any good. It never does." The vote is almost unanimous against the defendant, and the guilty critiquer goes off to get aged several years. But, his solitary defender ends up getting aged too, for hurling insults at the group over luncheon. He is relegated to a nutty emeritus space where the men wear top hats, the ladies wear fancy dresses, and there is dancing to old scratchy records all the time. In this house of exile, there is another room where the founder of the vortex lies in a hospital bed. He is on life-support; he is dying, but can never die.
What critiques against the genius community has he committed, we wonder, to have been condemned to such a fate?
On the outside of the vortex, a brutal post-apocalyptic anarchy reigns, and one is tempted to feel sorry for the vortex-inhabitants. But at the end we discover that the vortex citizens are indeed the children of the rich, the powerful, and the "clever" who walled themselves into their pastoral hiding place, as those on the outside starved and struggled to get in.
ZARDOZ is a silly movie in many ways. But looking at the film in September 2006, I recognize the social dynamics of the vortex.
The vortex is the university. It is the besieged place where intellectuals forestall and bracket the important questions -- some (but not all) of them being:
What IS our relationshop to the outside society we serve?
What are we supposed to be doing?
What alternative space should we/can we offer?
What should education be now? What should it look like? How should it be conducted?
Most of us are not asking these questions, because -- in ZARDOZ terms -- it is too dangerous. The university has become the vortex -- the place where we deny in order to go on, in order to maintain the status quo -- at best, to expand, to have vast graduate programs, or at worst, to just survive -- in order to just continue, because, well, because, it's what we do.
Perhaps, as happens at the end of the film, the vortex-university will be destroyed. This is, I believe, a risk that we need to run, if we are to make any sense at all of who we have become and what we need to do in order to be a living community of learners rather than a moribund collection of individuals incased in a ruined bunker. A dead institution is of no use to anyone -- except the few top administrators who profit from the proceeds. Or perhaps the university will become something else. Many students believe it has to. Some staff and faculty secretly think so too.
Here's another thought: Somatic Therapy practitioners call traumatic recall, a "vortex." Don't all of us at the university inhabit a traumatized space, where fear, paranoia, and the fight-flight impulse prevail? This is no place/way to get work done. Knowledge can't happen in such a space. Not really.
Here's to pulling the curtain from the face of ZARDOZ U. What will we see behind the curtain? The wizard? Or some bureaucrat pulling levers, and using a special effects sound system to make scary sounds?
Let's find out.
In the 70's cult film ZARDOZ, a group of eternally youthful geniuses inhabit semi-ritzy, low-tech kibbutzim called "vortexes" where they conduct scientific research (like studying the sex drive -- a drive they no longer possess), and where they also archive artistic masterworks of the past. The vortex we see contains an impressive repository of the past. Van Gogh's sit side by side with chandeliers and 18th Century baroque clocks in a vast museum. The inhabitants "know" all of human culture: languages, sciences, music, arts, history, literature.
At first glance, the vortex seems "utopian." The people here dress like hippies, they meditate on intellectual matters, and remain connected to each other through a crystal implanted in their foreheads. That crystal in turn connects them all to a supercomputer that they can ask questions of or feed data into. Moreover, the place is completely democratic and everyone votes on everything all the time. This apparently Rousseauian community makes every decision by discussion in committee. Eternally. For these people never die.
But beware of launching a critique of your peers. We see a serious young man on trial for intimating that there is something "rotten" in their society. The punishment for such treason? Aging. A lead character in the film decides to vote in defense of the critiquer, even as he observes to the "brutal" invader (played by Sean Connery), "It won't do any good. It never does." The vote is almost unanimous against the defendant, and the guilty critiquer goes off to get aged several years. But, his solitary defender ends up getting aged too, for hurling insults at the group over luncheon. He is relegated to a nutty emeritus space where the men wear top hats, the ladies wear fancy dresses, and there is dancing to old scratchy records all the time. In this house of exile, there is another room where the founder of the vortex lies in a hospital bed. He is on life-support; he is dying, but can never die.
What critiques against the genius community has he committed, we wonder, to have been condemned to such a fate?
On the outside of the vortex, a brutal post-apocalyptic anarchy reigns, and one is tempted to feel sorry for the vortex-inhabitants. But at the end we discover that the vortex citizens are indeed the children of the rich, the powerful, and the "clever" who walled themselves into their pastoral hiding place, as those on the outside starved and struggled to get in.
ZARDOZ is a silly movie in many ways. But looking at the film in September 2006, I recognize the social dynamics of the vortex.
The vortex is the university. It is the besieged place where intellectuals forestall and bracket the important questions -- some (but not all) of them being:
What IS our relationshop to the outside society we serve?
What are we supposed to be doing?
What alternative space should we/can we offer?
What should education be now? What should it look like? How should it be conducted?
Most of us are not asking these questions, because -- in ZARDOZ terms -- it is too dangerous. The university has become the vortex -- the place where we deny in order to go on, in order to maintain the status quo -- at best, to expand, to have vast graduate programs, or at worst, to just survive -- in order to just continue, because, well, because, it's what we do.
Perhaps, as happens at the end of the film, the vortex-university will be destroyed. This is, I believe, a risk that we need to run, if we are to make any sense at all of who we have become and what we need to do in order to be a living community of learners rather than a moribund collection of individuals incased in a ruined bunker. A dead institution is of no use to anyone -- except the few top administrators who profit from the proceeds. Or perhaps the university will become something else. Many students believe it has to. Some staff and faculty secretly think so too.
Here's another thought: Somatic Therapy practitioners call traumatic recall, a "vortex." Don't all of us at the university inhabit a traumatized space, where fear, paranoia, and the fight-flight impulse prevail? This is no place/way to get work done. Knowledge can't happen in such a space. Not really.
Here's to pulling the curtain from the face of ZARDOZ U. What will we see behind the curtain? The wizard? Or some bureaucrat pulling levers, and using a special effects sound system to make scary sounds?
Let's find out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)