time to stop pretending:

that you are anything but the ANTI-PROFESSOR
that you think the system works
that you think the system is salveageable
that the university system itself can make the necessary changes
to idealize your job -- which you do for the money, primarly
you believe in phd programs
that you despise community colleges
the learning is somehow a messianic experience delivered from you or your associates into the minds and souls of your students

time to start:

telling the truth, your truth about what it's like and how it feels to teach at the ruined university
to resist fetischizing, heroizing, or idealizing what you do
to pass down the learning you know, the skills you have amassed, the truths you have discovered.
stopping feeling guilty that you couldn't save the world of the university all by yourself like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies.

it fails.

it fails because students come in to the room always already beaten. always already they see the teacher as a gendered, aged, raced, icon on an always already very boring screen. an icon that waves its head in the air about women and art and literature. click click. the icon grades you. unfair. this isn't even real, and this doesn't even matter. why do i have to do this?

answer: you don't.
counter answer: but i do. i go to a school where there are breadth requirements.
counter counter answer: um, yeah. sorry

like i said, it fails.

THE CLASSROOM IS TAINTED

i don't think anything happens in the classroom. i think teaching and learning happen just about anywhere else. the best place it happened this fall was outside the library waiting for students to come in. seeing them walk was such a pleasure. real live students!

i'm not sure i'm even a decent teacher anymore. i think somehow all i'm doing is holding the container for students -- not giving them information -- but holding the vision of their having the power to figure it out. and if they can't to ask the right questions and get where they are going. this isn't teaching any more -- it's something else. bearing witness perhaps? i don't know. but it's all i can do now here these days.

Do We Deserve to Fall?

Observing the endless discussions on Inside Higher Education, the ongoing overwork of lecturers at my home campus and at other places, I come to the dreaded question, the question posed by one of the cyborgs on Battlestar Gallactica.

Do "we" in fact deserve to survive?

Does the ruined university merit this much attention? isn't the siege over? hasn't the corporation won, and if it hasn't won, hasn't it transformed forever the way the university will function and how the counter-university, the anti-university or whatever its binary opposite is -- isn't already clear how that functions too?

Knowledge must continue, sure. Education must continue, sure.

But the university?

Maybe not.

What will/ should take its place?

virginia tech or zardoz redux: no escape from the vortex

we return, despite everything, to guns, to vortices, to the loss of the university as sanctuary, in short, to the valley of dead ed.

we have to go on.

but how?

what do we tell students?

what do we tell ourselves?

i love you

i really do. i love students. i love the ones who are angry, curious, frustrated, amused, and sometimes even enthused. i love the former students who have not given up trying to make art and trying to be decent people, who haven't ceased trying to love, and make children, or not. people who try to read books and think even though books are expensive and they haven't much time. students who publish important books, and students who publish nothing that is famous or well known (yet)-- who parade their difference and their specialness behind the counters at borders or in tutoring offices in community colleges. i love students who go back to grad school because they always want to learn more, and i love students who drop out to write a novel, take care of a sister or parent. students who have said fuck academics and have gone to work for surprisingly green companies, and who are teaching in the interstices of the private sector. students who say there is no job for me in academics but i will stay and cling to the raft of adjunct teaching anyway, because i love it so much. i love students in rock bands, who share their performative genius and still have more energy to burn. i love the students who take it upon themselves to learn in impossible conditions with administrators who just wish they'd flunk out and go away.

but they won't they won't they won't. because these are people who have abandoned apathy, and as a result dare to hope, dream, and act.

dulce et non-utile/staying too long at the fair

Reading about the uproar surrounding UC Santa Cruz's decision not to stage their annual "job fair" for fear of students protesting military recruitment, I am struck by the ways in which the university, the public one in particular, has become -- not a market place, in the sense of an agora where free speech is practiced and heard -- but a shopping mall where students try out majors and submit their applications to the mall itself, hoping for some kind of career.

What would happen if the university renounced altogether any hope of "utility" on the undergraduate level? What kinds of outrage would emerge, if any? Would people miss the job fair? Because if there is no job fair, then the military can't recruit on campus, and neither can Walmart. Is it so crucial, that students have the "freedom" to interview at a table on campus, rather than at a table in an office? Couldn't students sign up for get-to-know sessions with a company at their site, at career services and have done with it?

Besides -- since when, is looking for a job like going to a carnival? Isn't job FAIR something of a misnommer? Where's the cotton candy?

or is it meant to say something about the ethos of the company's hiring practices??

naah.