Category: america

university as creation of the future

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I was reading a post by Stanley Katz on the impending closure of the University of Florida’s philosophy department and saw that he’d written another article called “The Pathbreaking, Fractionalized, Uncertain World of Knowledge.” This article begins by quoting A.N. Whitehead:

“The task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.”

This strikes me as an interesting take on the way the university finds its place in history. There are so many other ways of imagining the university’s historical trajectory: It’s the proud offspring of Western Europe, spreading around the globe to bring enlightenment. (This sounds like Whitehead, but is oriented towards transmitting a prior civilization rather than creating a new one.) Or it’s the ruin of an elitist institution, bereft of its mission of teaching reason or national culture, a degraded victim of neoliberal processes of corporatization, privatization, and auditing. Or it’s a cyborg composed of part medieval tradition, part incoherent consumerism, part mega-scientific research, a patchwork of past and present struggling to stay in motion.

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the temporary morgue at the university of chicago

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I was stunned the other day to discover that my campus has plans for a temporary morgue in case of emergency. They read as follows:

The Hospital morgue has a limited capacity to store the deceased. If the Hospital is no longer able to accept the deceased they will contact the Chicago Department of Public Health to request refrigerated trailers. While waiting for the refrigerated trailer to be delivered, the following sites could be used as temporary morgues. The temporary morgues must be capable of being secured.

They are:

  1. Gross Anatomy (BSLC)
  2. First floor Henry Crown Field House
    • Batting practice room
    • Racket ball courts

The following supplies will be needed to store the deceased:

  • Body bags
  • Portable air conditioning units

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notes on a lively conference on universities

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The mood last weekend in Minnesota was sometimes fiery, sometimes like a storm about to break, with groves of raised hands waiting to be called on; other times a bit calmed, a bit weary from ten straight hours of sessions, or sobered by the complexity of the topic or even the complexity of the discussion. It was a conference called “Rethinking the University,” three days long, at first in a dark business school ampitheatre, and then in an old assembly hall with wooden beams and weak sunlight seeping through opaque windows.

The crowds ranged from thirty to ninety, I’d guess; panels dealt with everything from academic labor and grad student unionization to radical pedagogy, the liberal arts, academic knowledge with its marginal branches like theatre and design, Marxian theories of affective labor and Italian autonomism, and of course academic branding and corporatization. A high degree of political commitment, and widespread involvement in the labor movement, set the tone of debate; a number of participants were labor historians, union organizers turned grad students, past members of SDS, or “seventies feminists” (as one woman called herself). Only a few non-academics showed up, raising questions about how to bridge the gap between academic discourse and other kinds of organizing.

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American conferences on the university

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I was making a little list of conferences on the university and I thought, for quick historical reference, it might be good to post them here. When I try to make a list – and I’m sure this is a very incomplete one – it turns out that there’s a pretty continuous flow of scholarly interest in the topic. (And this is all ignoring the work of ASHE and other education research groups that I don’t know.)

increased American interest in philosophy

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An article called “In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined,” in the Times, reports that the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is climbing across the country. The interesting thing is that the reasons given for the increase in enrollment are far from traditional justifications for philosophical inquiry. A student at Rutgers, Didi Onejame, is said to think that philosophy “has armed her with the skills to be successful.” What are these skills? “It’s a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking,” says the executive director of the APA. Students also, apparently, find it “intellectually rewarding,” “a lot of fun,” good training for asking “larger societal questions,” and a good choice for an era when the job market changes too fast, supposedly, to pick a more reliably marketable field.

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student experiences of postmodernism, part 1

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One of the most interesting phenomena of post-Reagan academic culture in America is the student perception of “postmodernism.” Or of “postmodern theory” or simply of “theory.” Now, to be honest, I find ‘postmodernism’ useless as an intellectual category. Possibly it remains useful in thinking about art or architecture; I’m not sure. Of course, I recognize “postmodernism” as a term with a well-known, if fuzzy, referent. It designates such French intellectuals as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Lacan, and certain American academics like Donna Haraway or Richard Rorty or James Clifford (in anthropology), and more importantly a whole academic social world, recognizable by its characteristic concerns, idioms, arguments, and styles.

I find it useless, myself, for three reasons. For one thing, it’s too vague to be useful in academic work. It elides all the intellectual, disciplinary, and institutional differences between, say, Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze and Lacan, or Rorty and Haraway. Second, it’s typically used as a term of abuse, a brand of shame that designates others rather than selves. No one I know self-identifies as a postmodernist (in the same way that there are no self-identified “hipsters”). And finally, it’s seeming like a rather obsolete category at the moment; its famous controversies are behind us and its leading figures are long tenured or deceased. (1971: Foucault debates Chomsky on human nature; Allan Bloom sparks the Canon Wars, and Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi writings surface; 1996: the Sokal Hoax; 1995-1998, the Bad Writing Contest.)

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Contradictions of graduate education in anthropology

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I’ve recently been thinking a lot about socialization of graduate students in anthropology, and on Friday just had a very exciting session at the AAA Annual Meetings, which I titled Trauma, tactics and transformation. I won’t repeat here what I’ve said elsewhere about the ethical need to analyze our own profession and reckon with our own moral contradictions. But I do want to report on some of the major issues I left thinking about:

  • At an abstract level, how should socialization of graduate students look as a process? Should it be auto-socialization, self-socialization, where we mostly do the work of socializing ourselves into the professional world? Or should it be faculty-directed, top-down, a process of being led into the promised land of scholarly pleasure? Or should it be group-organized, a process in which students socialize each other and form a kind of social collective that learns from and teaches itself? Of course it is all of these, but I think that often our dissatisfactions have to do with the proportions between them. Each has its disadvantages: loneliness, authoritarianism, peer pressure.
  • Thinking about graduate education is a form of reflexivity, but reflexivity has its disadvantages: it can waste time that could be better spent elsewhere; it can be a means through which we end up resigning ourselves to the present; it can even become a weapon turned against our colleagues. Still, the first question in the panel, and one that I like very much, is: what are the costs of not being reflexive? As Anneeth Hundle pointed out, these can be very concrete: the perpetuation of bad racial dynamics in a department, for instance. And it seems to me that the ethics of the status quo are inherently bad ethics, because they seem to presuppose that the actual world is as good as it can ever get.
  • But the thing about reflexivity is that you have to be reflexive even about your reflexive moments: a potentially infinite regress. And one of the new questions that comes to my mind is: what kind of recognition and reward are we looking for in questioning graduate education? Do we expect to be pleased through the validation of our peers? The panel wasn’t perfect, in those respects; everyone surely had to walk away without feeling like their concerns were fully answered.
  • Dominic Boyer argued (gently) against me that reform is impossible, and that thus we should settle for therapy. My first thought here is that even doing therapy is already a kind of reform, and that he’s understating his own accomplishments in teaching theory reflexively. (Though the crucial question might be: does he believe in therapy that cures? Or just in therapy that helps us cope with what we can’t change?) My second thought is that I don’t really care if we call it “therapy” or “reform” as long as the underlying ethical and psychological issues are being addressed. But my last thought is that I wonder if it’s worthwhile for us as graduate students to try to reform the current system at this exact moment. What if we ask instead: how will we do things differently when we are in a position of institutional power, when we have our own students; how does graduate education look when we dream of ourselves as the professors? The status quo has so much inertia that I think we need to look for hope partly in the future rather than in the immediate present.
  • Finally, a major issue, raised by Anneeth Hundle but not finished, is: how are we silenced by academic institutions? And how are these silences structured and distributed? It’s a question with no immediate answer.

american academic politics

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A recent Harvard study reported in Inside Higher Ed indicates that a majority of American professors are moderates, rather than liberals. The most unexpected trend within this overall finding is that radicals and activists tend to be older faculty – which may suggest that newer faculty are less political than a 60s generation of profs, and that the academy in general is getting less political. However, it may also mean, as various commenters pointed out, that it’s easier to be an activist once you get tenure, or that you can get more politicized as you get older, or that it’s tempting to call yourself “moderate” in an era when “liberal” is stigmatized.

That’s all on the level of just trying to interpret the survey data itself. It seems to me, though, that Diana Relke, in her comment on the InsideHigherEd story, gave by far the most perceptive critique of the whole project. Initially she says, “I’m still not convinced that you can say anything about an institution by toting up how its faculty votes on particular issues,” since “the sum [of the institution] is always greater than its parts.” Which is exactly right: the politics of the institution and the political effect of the institution aren’t reducible to the ways that faculty consciously choose to classify themselves on surveys. (Case in point: according to the comment by “Unapologetically Tenured,” “people with college degrees vote Republican in higher numbers than their less educated counterparts. Thus, either indoctrination is not occurring, or it is failing miserably.”) On the contrary, all kinds of political dynamics can operate beyond the level of conscious belief – or for that matter, beyond any clearcut political metrics.

And Relke makes another major point, which is that “in my experience, the academy is rivaled in its conservatism only by the Church. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with the voting habits of the faculty.” In other words, even a single person’s politics are highly contextually sensitive — I think of those old white male Marxists who are purportedly committed to revolutionary human liberation but who are deeply authoritarian classroom teachers. One can still ask, of course, whether there are ethically troubling contradictions between their ostensible values and their practices, or whether there’s something intrinsically objectionable about these values or practices.

At any rate, a purely descriptive response to this whole debate would be that the university is complex and politically contradictory, and that those who are trying to find a single coherent political description are doomed to self-deception. And moreover that political descriptions of the university might be context-sensitive too. For instance, sometimes I’m tempted to say that academia really is not very liberal, but other times I freely acknowledge that it does have some thriving leftist subcultures, and obviously much social and literary theory has historical connections to left politics. And there are other times when what most needs saying is that the American university is also an instrument for the reproduction of class status through educational credentials – in fact, this might be its most sociologically important function. But the point is that a political analysis of the university has to account for the proliferation of contextually specific discourses about the university’s politics.

Finally, even if we had a perfectly accurate political analysis of the contemporary American university, the normative implications would remain far from obvious. If universities are dominated by liberals, is that some sort of structural necessity or a  mere historical accident? Would a predominance of liberals be intrinsically bad, and ought the faculty (or students) to be a perfect political mirror of society at large? (Do the likes of Horowitz long for the kind of affirmative action for Republicans that they might reject if it were based on race or ethnicity?) Or if universities are dominated by their donors and boards of trustees, and indirectly by the politics of the status quo and the desire for institutional self-preservation and prestige, then what are the political implications of – in short – depoliticization? What about the politics of academics’ claim to privileged truth, knowledge and expertise? Or the broader politics of “knowledge production,” of academic research into esoteric, unprofitable, seemingly socially useless topics like the structure of dark matter, or the techniques of medieval cathedral building?

If there’s anything I’ve learned from talking about the ethics of education in my own department, it’s that the morality of scholarship is fraught with troubling and only sometimes inevitable institutional compromises. I don’t know where this leaves us, except with the sense that the demographics of the political spectrum aren’t the best place to start thinking about academic politics. That said, however, the actual text of the study is much more analytical and interesting than the news coverage — it analyzes degrees of “cosmopolitanism” among faculty, for instance, and generally conveys a more sophisticated view of faculty politics than the news coverage would suggest. Moreover, it has a fascinating bibliography that I recommend, especially to myself, wholeheartedly.

American universities and class anxiety

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Sometimes you hear claims that Americans don’t discuss social class. That it’s not a topic of public discourse. That it’s absent from our collective consciousness. (The late Molly Ivins, or else it was Barbara Ehrenreich, once claimed that ‘class’ was the one taboo topic in the op-ed pages.) To me it seems more accurate to say that class provokes collective anxiety in Americans. Certainly, this anxiety is unevenly distributed across the population; there’s a lot of rejection of class as a category, a lot of individualism, coupled to the ideology that “hard work has its just rewards.” But the anxiety keeps streaming through the social body, and occasionally it forms more pronounced eddies and ripples here and there.

Two essays in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education serve as excellent examples of this anxiety. One is a statement of overt class guilt by William Pannapacker (pseudonym Thomas Benton). He tells us he dreams of going back to his old neighborhood, only to comment that:

I also know the old neighborhood is the Tahiti of the former-working-class imagination: a dream of unselfconscious authenticity, acceptance, and deep familiarity with the rules of social interaction. Of course, it is a self-serving myth.

I know that I don’t belong in the old neighborhood, either. I made my choices long ago; or perhaps others made them for me. No one is awaiting my return. I think I can hear what they’d say: “You seem to like playing the working-class hero for rich people. Whatever. Do it if it works for you. You never belonged here anyway, even when you were a kid. If I could get out of here, I would. So get on with your life. We’ll be fine without you.”

Meanwhile, back on the job as a tenured professor — certifying the inherited status of his middle-class students — the self-proclaimed “academic class traitor” romanticizes his alienation and mocks his own naïve posturing. He realizes there are no people whom he can serve without some inner conflict.

I like this as an analysis of the dynamics of class fantasy. The professor with working-class roots (a) romanticizes his past; only to (b) reject his fantasy as a dream of acceptance; followed by (c) fantasizing his own rejection by his old associates; and finally concluding (d) with the thought that all social life involves psychic conflict and contradiction. Which is true; but it’s a conclusion that entails resignation, depoliticization, disempowerment. Pannapacker ends by remarking that he tries to deal with these contradictions by keeping an eye out for working class kids and encouraging them as he can. This is certainly better than wholly abandoning academia to the affluent, but it will never lead to political change. After all, to aid working class kids in becoming upwardly socially mobile is to presuppose the existence of class divisions that one can only cross on a purely individual level.

Whereas if we read Gary Lavergne’s “College Admissions as Conspiracy Theory,” (a book review of recent work on the inequities of higher education,) we get the opposite, a rejection of class guilt, but one that also seems to lead towards naturalizing economic privilege:

It irks me to read four books telling me that my children are “privileged” or that I’m part of an “alliance of equals” oppressing the poor. In these books my children are “privileged” because my wife and I stayed married, have good jobs, paid attention to what our children did, bought them books, got involved in their schools, and shared the benefits of an education we earned — all of which resulted in our kids’ not being poor and not getting Pell Grants (which apparently makes them rich). I don’t remember seeing any distinction drawn between a “privileged” family like mine and one with five generations of Yale graduates in its lineage.

Lavergne comes from a poor Louisiana background and made his way “upward,” I gather from the surrounding paragraphs. Needless to say, there’s lots of social differentiation that doesn’t directly correspond to wealth or class status per se, and he’s right to point out that there’s social differentiation among the affluent. And an interesting theme here is the importance of intense parental labor in helping their children to reproduce their class status – by helping them to get suitable educations. (Educational institutions remain central to the social reproduction of elites, as they have been for a long time. Apparently medieval monasteries got a substantial fraction of their members from the unwanted children of the nobility.) But the key move here is the claim that Lavergne’s poor origins make him less a member of the upper middle class. In other words: his past becomes a way of disavowing his class privilege in the present.

Lavergne goes on to argue that:

All parents, even the rich ones, want what is best for their children. The parents considered “privileged” in these books aren’t spending their time forming alliances to oppress others. What are they supposed to do? Not use what they have, nor do what they can, to achieve what is best for their children?

And consequently he suggests that the fundamental problem isn’t that elite students are overrepresented but that there simply isn’t the institutional capacity to give good educations to all qualified applicants. He rightly points out that there isn’t the political will to fund public universities at an adequate level or capacity. He concedes, of course, that “elite colleges are overpopulated with affluent young people,” but he ends by arguing that:

Every day I see thousands of “privileged” students sent to our campus by their once-underprivileged parents. It wasn’t easy for many of them to get there. They don’t deserve a guilt trip. For millions of us, social mobility is alive and well in capitalist America.

It strikes me that Lavergne, who manages admissions research for the University of Texas-Austin, has to confront the ugly facts of class stratification in America more than most, and we might view his book review as an attempt to manage the same class anxieties that Pannapacker articulates more clearly, the anxieties that seem to accompany upward mobility in America more generally.

But it bears notice that, in the same issue of the Chronicle, an article describes a rampant sense among academics that they’re imposters, that they don’t deserve to be there, that they’re constantly afraid of being found out as fakes or phonies. Apparently such feelings befall people from many social backgrounds: as the journalist sarcastically comments, “we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.” Valerie Young, who is on a lecture tour to publicize her findings, seems to send the message: relax, and accept your success! “We couldn’t have all gotten here for crap reasons,” a graduate student apparently commented after Young’s lecture.

These articles reveal an active ambivalence about the social order of American academia and one’s individual place in it. But they also portray an active struggle to naturalize the status quo, to get one to accept one’s role, to stop worrying, to put an end to anxiety. To me, it’s a relief that these struggles aren’t successful, that anxiety persists, and that restlessness may ultimately lead to reform.

academic writing in common english

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Sometimes you hear people, non-academic people, telling you that postmodern writing is gibberish. But remember the old Yankee saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?”

Likewise with writing: what’s gibberish to my parents is, I must admit, pretty comprehensible to me. This is because academic language is a tool of social differentiation, used to separate academics from laypeople. But even so, translation is possible. Take the following snip of academic language I saw in an email:

Hi Everyone,

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating. Landscape is often implicated in power relations. Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership. The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project. In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I would translate this banal bit of prose as follows:

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating.

“I am an academic, and I am fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live.”

Elaboration: “I enjoy taking common words like “place” and “power” and treating them as major conceptual problems. I consider this activity truly fascinating. “Place” and “power” could mean any of a huge number of things, but I’ll probably just talk about them in connection with some minor research problem of my own. However, I will make sure to distill any particular places into the abstract, general idea of “PLACE.” Likewise with “POWER.” What I mean by ‘power’ is basically what kids in the street call “the Man” — it has dim connotations of the government, or big corporations, or colonialism, or parents, or all of these and more… And now, an additional twist! Since we’re supposing that there’s some kind of general relationship between POWER and PLACE, we can then ask what happens to POWER when someone or something is ‘out of place.’ Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, they mean that being ‘out of place’ is also being made into a rarified academic concept, disconnected from popular usage. But wait — one final note! Since other scholars have also been talking about these abstractions for some time, I will be able to make myself matter by joining their discussion.”

Landscape is often implicated in power relations.

“The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together.”

Elaboration: ” ‘Implicated in’ just means ‘related to.’ And ‘often’ is completely meaningless in this context — I don’t really mean that most power relations involve a landscape, because a moment’s thought suggests that lots and lots of power relations don’t have much to do with landscapes. I just stuck in the ‘often’ to make it sound like I’m doing work on something important, and to make myself sound legitimate — which is an important part of making yourself a good academic, OK? so get off my back!”

Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership.

“People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it.”

Elaboration: “I live in South Africa, and people down here naturally tend to think about academic questions from a South African perspective. We used to be a colony, but now we’re a post-colony, so we consequently have a post-colonial point of view. One of the things we study is how people try to prove their rights to own land by using certain ideas about land. These ideas have been changing since the colonial era.”

The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project.

“People think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I wouldn’t want to say what exactly.”

“Again, the words ‘often’ and ‘closely’ have no meaning here aside from making me sound important.”

In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

“I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in connection with those.”

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

“Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out?”

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

“If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”

So, if you put the whole translation together, it looks like so:

“I am an academic, and I am truly fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live. The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together. People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it. Also, people think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I’m not saying what exactly. Anyway, I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in that connection. Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out? If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”