nice to hear from you, though I may have to think differently about this blog now that your comment provides evidence of it having a readership! Of course you are right — as a matter of empirical fact students come in all shapes and sizes, with different, divergent, even contradictory desires, expectations, interests, solidarities… and in keeping with this, I think that no, non-solidarity isn’t just an effect of false consciousness distorting some purportedly “actual” or even “material” ground for solidarity. I would read non-solidarity as more an expression of the real state of student social (non)relations, and the achievement of student solidarity not as the retrieval of what should have been there all along, but as an emergent outcome of a new set of social relations generated internally in the classroom. At least, that seems to be what happened in the PAR class here.

So whatever the prior interests are, it seems that they ought to be transformed through the pedagogical process — and although I take your point also, completely, that there are different kinds of classrooms, I am very skeptical that a graduate seminar can be something that comfortably accommodates an authoritarian banking model of education. Even on an old-fashioned Humboldtian ideal, it seems like the basic pedagogical presumption of a seminar is one of intellectual equality in inquiry on the frontiers of current scholarship. (William Clark has an article on the origins of the research seminar, I should re-read.) OK, so there are times when students just want to assimilate a body of literature — if they’re grad students I would argue that they don’t need a *seminar* to do that since they ought to be able to teach themselves, or do a reading course. Also, I’ve seen some students invert their sense of intellectual inferiority into a kind of fantasy of the genius professor who knows everything, a person whose very presence is intellectually sanctifying even as it constantly reconfirms the impossibility of being like them. Not sure that that kind of “student interest” is something to encourage!

I agree that there’s something inadequate about my basing my analysis of why pedagogy isn’t more radical on regimes of deference alone. Incidentally, I don’t think that deference expresses anyone’s interests very effectively at all, other than the incredibly pessimistic interest of navigating an already authoritarian status quo without changing it. Sometimes I think deference can be a vestigial adaptation from other, more authoritarian contexts that lingers and obstructs; sometimes it expresses other kinds of uncertainties and social dynamics (eg, anxieties over departmental/disciplinary membership). Haven’t worked through this at all yet.

But do you think that the variation in student interest, as legitimate as it is, ever *ought* to entail traditional, authoritative pedagogy? That seems like something you might be saying. And I’d love to hear you expand on the “few exceptions” in which students are interested in metapedagogical experimentation. I want to add something more also about my personal attachment to this kind of pedagogical utopianism — and btw I actually do think there are settings where hierarchy is effective and relatively unproblematic, theatre production for instance — but anyway, I recognize that generalizing my desire may be problematic, but I feel like I can’t help wanting to.

My experience (with a few exceptions) is that students are not interested in metapedagogic experimentation unless it will advance their career aims. Just installing a rotating chair is a nightmare, and has to be enforced top down (top down democracy is very unpleasant, as your anecdote suggests).