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.
