drifting, drifting toward a BA

is what is happening to most of undergraduate education as fewer and fewer faculty can come to a consensus on what should be taught, what should learned in the four, five, six years it takes now to get a BA.

Read this for a brief historical overview of how University education in the US -- How much for that BA? is not the title of this New York Review of Books piece, but it's part I of II articles on the state of higher education in the US and it accounts for what has been lost in our vision of University education as the University has become more business-like in its processes of democratization.

As I have written here, University administrations are much more interested in attracting "stars" to their faculty than making real changes in improving the quality of undergraduate education. Even in business, the hiring of stars has been proven to be less than effective in improving a company's performance.

See where Rakesh Khurana author of Searching for a Corporate Savior blogs.

Not only are University Administrations imitating businesses, they are imitating bad businesses that overpay executives who are treated like minor godheads at the expense of the regular payroll and stockholders alike -- until the magic wears off -- as in the cases of Carley Fiorina or Michael Ovitz.

As in the case of invisible government subsidies of private enterprise when public cultural institutions are turned to corporate and private interests as took place in the 80s and 90s with Reagan's and Thatcher's encouragement of business giving to the arts, private Universities are receiving all kinds of tax breaks, even though as in the case of Harvard, they are for all intents and purposes private enterprises with brands and investments to protect.

big pharma and schizophrenia

I've been wanting to blog about Robert Whitaker's book, Mad in America, and this is as good a time as any. This sobering study of the history treatment of schizophrenia in the United States makes a few points about the formation of the American attitude toward mental illness that translates to all forms of psychic life. From a psychoanalytic point of view, Whitaker's criticism of the very diagnosis of schizophrenia makes absolute sense -- the symptoms of schizophrenia are so vague and so unscientific that it may very well apply to anyone who has ever been deeply depressed or had intensely anti-authoritarian impulses,

Cold baths, straight jackets, solitary confinement, lobotomy, electric shock and the battery of drugs (from the neuroleptics liek Thorazine to the new atypicals) available for the "treatment" of schizophrenia are actually treating the symptoms in the same way -- they have the goal the pacification of the mentally ill -- but with the drugs that are now available, they have the added incentive of creating great profit margins for pharmaceutical companies. New drugs like Eli Lilly's olanzapine marketed under the name Zyprexa are hailed as medical "breakthroughs" and priced accordingly, but in an atmosphere when drug testing is increasingly taking place in for profit laboratory environments, side effects, long term consequences and rates of remission are left out of the picture.

What does this have to do with the recent posts about USA Next? Well, it seems that Big Pharma has really had a very successful track record in the past two decades at maximizing its profits and gaining government support for its less than above board business practices.

But the successes of Eli Lilly and Pfizer in hijacking public discussions of national healthcare has also had its effects on our understanding of mental health. Those most marginal to the public sphere, the mentally ill have had few advocates (with the exception of NAMI) the marketing of the drug solution has exploited our national intolerance for symptom in general -- total medication-induced pacification is offered as the solution to mental health disturbances and national security concerns. When R.D. Laing offered his systematic critique of anti-psychiatry, he proposed that in order to treat a schizophrenic, you had to look at the entire family system. This hardly seems radical, but in our trust in pharmacological solutions to psychic life, this kind of attitude is completely marginalized.

Whitaker shows that humane treatment of schizophrenics without drugs produced better rates of recovery during the nineteenth century. Treatment of schizophrenia in the US today has worse outcomes than treatment of the mentall ill in countries like Thailand where the mentally ill tend to be much less medicated.

Foucault wrote passionately about the institutionalization of the mentally ill and described its historical significance: Deleuze and Guattari drew upon the figure of the schizo as an allegory of experience under capitalism. Whitaker is no theorist, but his examination of American treatments of schizophrenics does not make for any easy generalizations -- the mid-nineteenth century turned out to support "humane treatment" of the mentally illy from a paternalistic point of view, but early twentieth century attemtps at modernization introduced a whole set of "improvements" that created the mare's nest of problems endemic at the massive state institutions we know as hulking ruins or terrifying brick buildings on the outskirts of large cities.

Contemporary students, theorists and clinicians have to go further in order to challenge the absolute exploitation of mental illness: we have to wonder why we as Americans are so intolerant of the symptom. Pierre Fedida wrote in last book, The Benefits of Depression (that I am hoping to translate into English) that psychopharmacology wants to destroy psychic life in order to master the symptom -- which will be eliminated from consideration in treatment as imbalances are treated as purely chemical matters.

Le Rant

Indispensable: the technorati rant collection!

council for national policy

Let's get to know the Council for National Policy, let's try to get to know them as well as we can...Americans United: Behind Closed Doors

read this!

This is a genealogy of United Seniors Association/ USA Next, and offers an instructive lesson about how the Right 'funds' reaction against the alleged liberal establishment. Initially, the United Seniors Association offered itself up as an alternative to the too far to the Left AARP. But it was never a 'popular' alternative. It was well-funded, shameless publicity machine for conservative interests. Blogpac reveals that it is actually well funded by Big Pharma and energy companies (including Enron) depending upon the political issue at hand. Read it here -- at the intelligence briefing.

Now there is real intelligence in its dastardly modus operandi -- , a reptilian intelligence perhaps, but relentlessly predatory and uncompromising in its desire to exploit the fears of the misinformed in favor of the top of the food chain. They have exhibited a ruthless opportunism and deep desire to deceive Americans, distort public discourse in order to further the interests of Big Business -- either Pfizer's or Enron's.

As a moving targets, its has eluded public criticism, and was remarkably successful at scuttling Clinton's plans for National Helath Care-- remember that there were fears of "rationing" medical care? It was USA who branded the word "ration" in the hearts of average Americans when the issue came up: if healthcare were nationalized, Americans thought they would be offered proctological examinations by Soviet-style Nurse Ratchits, but only at the brink of death. Instead, most of us have had to use grotesquely bureaucratized HMO's whose CEO's have cashed in on the fact that Americans are paying more out of their paycheck for less healthcare. That is what is known as "management" in the business world -- less service for more pay. The family physician in private practice has gone the way of the dodo bird: instead, we find ourselves getting the "personalized' care offered by paper work afflicted doctors who barely remain long enough in a managed health care practice to remember how to pronounce our names.

The Right has been salivating over the chunk of change that is Social Security, forged out of the Progressive Era's sense of collective responsibility for the elderly, the orphaned, the disabled.

junk mail for social security privatization

I just have to salute the people on line who are going after USA Next -- and I'm hoping that Karl Rove will have gone too far this time. For some serious research on the long-term campaign, funded by money scared up by conservative activists look here --
Social Security - Is the privatization scheme just a junk mail operation?

The leftie blogosphere is following the trail of slime to discover that Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans have been instrumental in sowing fear loathing in the American mind -- this time of course, with the notorious ads against the AARP -- who have come out against Social Security Privatization. What the Right successfully did with Kerry -- that is 'poison' his reputation (the idea comes from Jeff Wallen) and smear him with their false allegations they may have a harder time doing with the 55+ crowd. First of all, the target is a great deal complicated. It may be easy to bring one man down with their misinformation and venom -- but the AARP????

Has Rove's success gone to his head? I hope so. I hope he picks the American Automobile Association next. But the bloggers know that it isn't enough to wait for Karl to hit the self-destruct button...I'm not exactly in the business of political blogging and research likeDaily Kos or Josh Marshall, but let's follow this story and give them what they need for the take down!

What's wrong with Violence Against Women Action Day?

"We need your help. Rally for Violence Against Women Action Day." I just got the call from the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. I guess I'm still on their mailing list.

Something is very wrong with this slogan and with this "Day". I've talked about the political inefficacy and ineptitude of demanding an "end to violence" since violence does not address EXPLOITATION and violence against women does not address what is particularly political about violence in general, but this slogan has got to take the CAKE for stupidity.

March 3, is the date to Rally for Violence Against Women....I mean to Rally Against Violence Against Women? or is to Rally Against Violent Women? Action! Action?

I am a fan of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, but this is a BAD BAD way to honor their legacy.

Global blogger action day called

BBC NEWS | Technology | Global blogger action day called: "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day" (bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran).

Bitch. Ph.D on Larry Summers

I can't stand it any more. OK, here is a link to transcript, discussion and commentary about Larry Summers on women... (see Bitch, Ph.D.).

To some he is speculating -- to others, he is discriminating actively. Once again, we pose the $64,000 question nature or nurture, but somehow, something in all these discussions is terribly, terribly awry.

I actually think that Summers' statements cannot be simply described as "sexist," but I do think that, in general, the University's hiring and workplace policies are incredibly discriminatory against women who want to have families.

I'm speculating, thinking out loud to a much smaller audience than Summers, but I think that 'success' is never an individually determined phenomenon. Perhaps it is the question of agency that Summers neglects to clarify here -- is he really saying that the career choice of minorities is determined by the minorities themselves?

It seems that institutions 'choose' those who are most compatible, who identify most seamlessly with administrative and bureaucratic imperatives.

My years at Minnesota afforded me ample examples of of the 'fakeness' of administrative initiatives to cultivate diversity. What wasn't addressed was the dignity and conditions of labor of ALL employees at the University - from the janitors on up.

AAUP statement on political intrusions into the academy

Academic freedom is the topic of this statement here and I think it is important to note that what is at stake is the "political independence of colleges and universities." AAUP statement

We know that there is no such thing as perfect autonomy and I remember that the sixties protesters, SDS and the like called the University just another part of the military industrial complex, or what Adorno described as the "monopoly," but in today's climate, the University is a vital institution of dissent in a climate where the Republicans are less and less tolerant of anything that is not completey line with their positions.

academic bill of rights in ohio?

Inside Higher Ed, an alternative to the Chronicle of Higher Education, earns high marks for paying attention to the Right's fake call for "Academic Freedom." The pretense of Academic Freedom is the basis for the introduction of a "Bill of Academic Freedom" in Ohio's State Legislature. See the
Rise of the Postmodern Right . Steigerwald, the author of this article, has written a book called Culture's Vanities which is a critique of what passes as academic leftwing thought and I'm eager to read it.

the international bourgeoisie

Here is where Marxism-Leninism got it all too right -- there was going to be an international sense of class interest that would begin to dominate our consciousness above and beyond national identity and national boundaries, surmounting the ancient ties that bind -- the proletariat may have paved the way with its call to internationalism, but it is the international bourgeoisie that appropriated the proletarian ethos of class struggle around sickle and hammer for its worship of the FENDI "F" or the Louis Vuitton LV logo woven into its luggage, the more discreet PRADA triangle.

You know what I'm talking about! Even if you are more "progressive" and carry that Jansport or REI backpack!

The brand name is a language the international bourgeoisie understands -- it is a lingua franca of commodity fetishism, conformity, anxiety, fearfulness, competition, and finally slavish celebration of the money power.

And just because the logic of its Internationale has been triumphantly imposed upon the world as "branding," the bourgeoisie is restlessly critical and anxious about any area of life that has not been thoroughly dominated. Hence, the intra-uterine tapes expectant mothers are told to buy in order to enhance fetal development.