Good Offense = Good Defense ???
I am going to continue to draw our attention to the attacks on the University because I think we need to engage in an aggressive internal debate about defending the Enlightenment values and ethics that HAVE indeed fared poorly in recent years among humanists.
Indeed one could say that since right-wing blogger Roger Simon is so ready to trash his own Ivy credentials, he and the Jerry Falwell law-schoolers are choosing to be marginal and to play on a politics of resentment that one of the commentators on Simon's blog attributes entirely to the "post-modern academy." Who doesn't like to make fun of the Ivy League?
What is at stake here is the destruction of the public sphere, which has become more like a hall of distorting mirrors -- and left and right are ready to cast each other in the role of the "mentally ill" or those whose discourse should be entirely ignored or discounted.
I don't think we can leave this problem to University Administrators or MLA presidents and their ilk to figure out --
This is where the problem lies as I see it:
1. We cannot just defend the University as such because there IS something wrong with the way in which they are administered, but it has nothing to do with postmodernism! It has everything to do with the nature of the undemocratic, corporate structure of management -- i.e. Lawrence Summer (President of Harvard) and Steven Rosenstone (Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnestoa) are basically not accountable in their decisions to either their faculty or their students. (these are cases that are the most obvious to me from my little corner of the world...)
We should therefore begin an aggressive campaign to demand reforms in the bureaucratic structures of University governance. Students, faculty and staff can participate in various ways to create different forms of public debate where questions of University life FOR EVERYONE are addressed.
2. Initiatives like Multiculturalism, Diversity, etc. have become entirely bureaucratic. If you have the right bright faces of minority professors and students at your University, you as an administrator assume that this reflects well on you and your job is done. How do we address this bureacratization of progressive issues and civil rights as problem of democracy and representation and not identity politics and representation?
3. The University IS an Enlightenment instituition, based upon a Utopic model of self-governance and liberal arts that has seen itself increasingly diminished by instrumental thinking and drive for profit. If the role of the humanities within the governance of Universities has been diminished, it certainly has not disappeared -- not for all the baleful predictions of Allan Bloom's or Stuart Hall's followers. If we indeed face a "university in ruins," do we appeal for reform, are we to be perpetually on the defensive? Do we abandon the institution, or do we demand reform?
The University permits the work of people who criticize both Humanism and the Enlightenment to take place within it. If deconstruction is a form of anti-humanism, it certainly is not for the destruction of all value, despite all the popular caricatures.
I invite all interested parties to take up these questions in public debate.
Indeed one could say that since right-wing blogger Roger Simon is so ready to trash his own Ivy credentials, he and the Jerry Falwell law-schoolers are choosing to be marginal and to play on a politics of resentment that one of the commentators on Simon's blog attributes entirely to the "post-modern academy." Who doesn't like to make fun of the Ivy League?
What is at stake here is the destruction of the public sphere, which has become more like a hall of distorting mirrors -- and left and right are ready to cast each other in the role of the "mentally ill" or those whose discourse should be entirely ignored or discounted.
I don't think we can leave this problem to University Administrators or MLA presidents and their ilk to figure out --
This is where the problem lies as I see it:
1. We cannot just defend the University as such because there IS something wrong with the way in which they are administered, but it has nothing to do with postmodernism! It has everything to do with the nature of the undemocratic, corporate structure of management -- i.e. Lawrence Summer (President of Harvard) and Steven Rosenstone (Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnestoa) are basically not accountable in their decisions to either their faculty or their students. (these are cases that are the most obvious to me from my little corner of the world...)
We should therefore begin an aggressive campaign to demand reforms in the bureaucratic structures of University governance. Students, faculty and staff can participate in various ways to create different forms of public debate where questions of University life FOR EVERYONE are addressed.
2. Initiatives like Multiculturalism, Diversity, etc. have become entirely bureaucratic. If you have the right bright faces of minority professors and students at your University, you as an administrator assume that this reflects well on you and your job is done. How do we address this bureacratization of progressive issues and civil rights as problem of democracy and representation and not identity politics and representation?
3. The University IS an Enlightenment instituition, based upon a Utopic model of self-governance and liberal arts that has seen itself increasingly diminished by instrumental thinking and drive for profit. If the role of the humanities within the governance of Universities has been diminished, it certainly has not disappeared -- not for all the baleful predictions of Allan Bloom's or Stuart Hall's followers. If we indeed face a "university in ruins," do we appeal for reform, are we to be perpetually on the defensive? Do we abandon the institution, or do we demand reform?
The University permits the work of people who criticize both Humanism and the Enlightenment to take place within it. If deconstruction is a form of anti-humanism, it certainly is not for the destruction of all value, despite all the popular caricatures.
I invite all interested parties to take up these questions in public debate.
6 Comments:
hmmm, yes, I cannot count the times that a (generally male) peer has asked me if I support female genital mutilation. Actually the term female circumcision is used more often than not, but the significance of this polite gesture can be discussed another time.....
I think that you raise a number of important points. The empty symbolism of beaurocratic multi-culturalism is particularly interesting to me in light of the racism that often characterizes both sides of the affirmative action "debate."
You fail, however (as do most engaged in the conversation concerning ethnic difference at the university level) to address the undeniably prohibitive cost of higher education. It seems to me that discussing the potential elitism of academic language or the frivolity of non-programatic philosophy is more of a diversion than a debate. The cultural elitism of the university lies in its cost. After we have taken care of this material problem then we can begin a debate, which would then ideally include at least a few members of every class, concerning language and the political purposes served by the maintenance of the literary canon.
Nonsense. The cost of education can be directly tied to the increasingly corporate aspect of most universities. The level of bureacracy and pet projects here at the University of Minnesota are the bigger issue, something Catherine already highlighted.
I think what needs to be done is just a lot of PR to counter the conservative blitz of, "universities breed leftist hippies." We all know it's ridicolous, but no one is going out attacking back. Most of these cons come from the Ivy League system ad are just being silly if they think Universities influence a person's politics one way or the other.
I find the the Columbia situation bad for everyone in the academic community. You clearly have a situation where a professor IS abusing there power and it's bad for everyone in the academic community.
-Thomas
I actually had the distribution of university funds in the back of my head while writing that- you are absolutely correct. I merely wanted to point out that it would be productive to talk about the redistribution of available funding in the context of greater financial accessibility. i.e. reducing/abolishing application fees as opposed to building monstrous post-modern performance arts centers, as a step towards the opening of the university system and the actual diversity of its future members.
I couldn't tackle EVERYTHING at once, so I left out the MONEY-- but I think the best way to battle the high cost of higher ed is to support really, really good public universities and to help them keep costs down. That way, no one in fact has any reason to choose the expensive private ones.
Of course, we know how difficult the line of argument will be for public universities in the present climate.
In the meantime, however, those of us on the left have really failed to deal with egregious misuse of funds at public universities because the conservatives have been using this as an excuse to punish these institutions.
I think the way to counteract this is to demand not GREATER bureaucratic schemes for accountability -- BUT to institute more democratic processes at PUBLIC universities.
Private universities and colleges where I've been/taught are run like private fiefdoms, where the top is accountable to no one. So you have distinguished professors, but a feudal mentality.
Then at public ones, you have onerous bureaucracy...and now an increasingly corporate, or private university management style. At Minnesota, you have this totally enfeebled thing called the Faculty Senate, with now legislative powers...
What is up with that?
(more soon, Leo, the about to be four year old is out of the bath...)
So here is the link to the Daily News article . It is so inflammatory, and a debate about its content would be a diversion from the issues at stake in the strategy of attacking the University. Professors are being attacked for stifling disssent and making inflammatory remarks -- about controversial political issues.
In my memory, the last time this much journalistic ink was spilled about professors, it was about deconstruction's supposed secret collaborationist past.
As a class, the professoriate is always in the wrong at a moment of populist, and here pseudo-populist insurgency.
But what the Daily News and the Right really want is to stymie debate an dissent -- which may not mean that their putative enemy is innocent of that particular intention.
Here is Professor Massad's response to the film "Columbia Unbecoming" released by the David Project. The Daily News article seems in large part to have been instigated by the film.
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