September 15, 2008Aletia;I read your last letter during a union council meeting, which is still going on. At the moment Bryan is talking; he’s like a pit bull—really chewing into some issue or other, and thank the gods Ogun and Obatala that we’ve got him as union organizer to do that for us. I have my laptop with me. I loved your letter and I’m taking a break to write back right now because later I’ll be too busy—I’ve been buried under work. In addition to teaching, I’m writing; finally getting overdue work done for journals and newspaper editors. I’ve attached a piece I just finished for the journal, “Italian Americana” though I don’t know if or when they’ll publish it. Also a near final draft of my piece for The Panopticon Review. My next piece, now in a preliminary draft, for the journal, Tikkun, is on the history of anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism (the piece we discussed recently after one of the union meetings you attended). You remember: I was thinking that I can probably support my contention that the history of anti-intellectualism in America is interchangable with the country's history of anti-Semitism. In my research I'm looking at a historical scope: from certain aspects of neo-monarchist Hamiltonianism to the 1920's Klan lobbies within government, business, and labor sectors of society viz-a-viz The United Auto Workers, The Union of Southern Tenant Farmers, and The Akron Rubber Workers - all of whom possessed Klan affiliated memberships; to the reactionary newspaper editorial boards and blatantly anti-intellectual state supreme courts of the 30's; to the American primitivist period in California State, pro-Hitlerist, William Randolph Hearst, and the Charles Lindbergh pro-Hitler community who along with the anti Bolshevists, the anti-internationalists and the 'Khaki Shirts of America" - American equivalent of the Nazi Brown Shirts - were blaming Jews for the international monetary crisis; as well as the Hoover presidency and then of course McCarthyism, etc. This entire history can be tracked as being synonymous with anti-Semitism.As you'll be able to tell when you read the article on anti-intellectualism, my Africana Studies class at Wayne State (the one you sat in on in which some of the students are up in arms and complaining to administrators because I don’t use Power Point presentations and because I give essay rather than ‘true or false’ exams) was an inspiration in writing this piece because I’ve been thinking about how anti-intellectualism is becoming an accepted reality among college students and is making itself felt on campus by influencing college administrators to cater to the hostility students have been displaying toward thinking critically, toward reading, and toward writing. My sense is that most people, if they are paying attention at all to what's happening on university campuses, assume that universities are still the kind of centers for research and objective, rational knowledge that they were in the 50's and 60's, and as depicted in Hollywood films such as "Paper Chase" and such. But the truth is, that the university is suffering the same fallout of twenty years of crazed Republican social and political backwardness as every other sector of American society. The economy, the energy industries, infrastructure, the banks, the electoral system, the health care industry, public arts, public education, etc., all are showing the worn edges, pock marks, and disintegration of twenty years (with the short interegnum of Clinton) of backwards, reactionary, conservative, anemic policies and dried up funding--social abandonment I once called it in some daft or another of my doctoral dissertation back in the 90's. The universities also, are now suffering through the trauma and dysfunction which are the result of the Reagan/Bush//Bush demolition derby. Americans, despite having dug deep into the last of their optimism to elect Barak Obama, are, in the wake of twenty years of trauma and loss, followed by economic collapse, a nation of walking wounds.I agree with your observation that one thing going on with Americans is their assumption that America gives everybody ‘an equal opportunity to be king’, thus, nobody wants to get rid of monarchy or by extension, feudalism, because we all think we are going to have a turn at being the king some day.It is definitely a case of cognitive dementia, isn't it?Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville was confused about this very characteristic in Americans when he traveled around our country just after the revolution in the 1700’s: how, against their own interests, many Americans, in a society which had just waged a revolutionary war against Great Britain, supported causes, politicians, and social policies that strengthened the ruling classes and weakened the power of workers—he puzzled over it in his book, "Democracy in America." He surmised that Americans believe the United States is uniquely able to guarantee all its citizens a turn at power and wealth no matter what their social origins.…Those were interesting examples you sent me of conflicts with your students. I can relate to what you went through because I struggled last winter through teaching non symbolic logic (third time I’d taught it when the college was short of instructors—I was a philosophy minor in undergrad). This was in Detroit, at Wayne County Community College and my inner city students (most of them Black, working class, and/or Arabic-speaking) came into class with low expectations of themselves. The class averaged a thirty percent failure rate before I started teaching it, and I was able to get that down to only 10 %. The college offered me no support, and gave me no thanks for that achievement. They have low expectations of the students when it comes to advanced math and science, abd they don’t appreciate professors who alter or disregard their policies and procedures even if doing so leads to higher pass rates. The point, though, is that I realized while teaching logic that, It is a startling discovery, like you say, to realize that undergraduate students often don't know what we are talking about as we lecture, cannot follow our vocabulary, don't make associations that we assume they are able to make, don’t know how to take notes effectively, and have language challenges, making it necessary for us to be mindful of how we explain things to them, the language we use, and the way we express directions and explanations of the material. We sometimes have to admit to ourselves that it is OUR FAULT when they have trouble assimilating material because we are not using an effective enough pedagogy to meet them where they are.National statistics are showing that attention span is waning among college students, and that they are distracted by everything from part time jobs to I-phones, to walkman Mp3 players permanently stuck in their ears. University, despite the escalating prices to register, is to some of them a formality that they have to sit through passively until it’s over. Some of my students sit through an entire class meeting without ever even taking off their coats. They sit and stare at me as if they were watching television, without even taking notes. Often, television is the only model they have for the ‘spectator-like’ arrangement of a classroom. Something about the structure of it is part of what makes them reluctant to speak, to question, to argue or debate, and to give me feedback. They simply wait to obey orders and to find out what they will be ‘tested’ on. The elementary and high school ‘testing regime’ that arose out of the Reagan years, and the long running destructive effects of “No Child Left Behind” funding whose demands on schools to throw out fifty years worth of curriculum in favor of mindless drills in preparation for tests, created a generation of young people who have had social skills and social development stripped from them by a social milieu replete with electronic devices, video games, and the internet. Now that this generation is showing up in the colleges and universities we find them in our classrooms demonstrating a nearly autistic persona, resistant to dialogue and to the process of effort, revision, growth through experimentation and interpersonal communication. They are terrified of making mistakes, of being wrong, and of looking bad in front of their peers. These are of course the very values inevitably inculcated by a conservative, robotic, impersonal zero-sum regime of ‘true-or-false testing. Everything to them is either right or wrong, with no sense of ambiguity, nuance, implication, subtlety, or insight. Thus, they cannot easily grasp the subtleties of rhetoric, ideology, interpretation, or implication in the texts they read.Many of our students are unable to think critically and analytically. We have to keep them interested, and inspire them to go through the struggle they need to go through to grow and develop academically in a country that does not value growth and development but that values image, costume, and vapid titular posturing through consumption (the Beonce Knowels Syndrome—phony identity, depthlessness, mediocrity in sequins; all dressed up and nothing to say, no talent or content to speak of, but looking android good and cyborg ready to consume with a vengeance).Most of all thanks for the observation that as University professors we tend to teach as we ourselves were taught. This seems so obviously true, yet it had never occurred to me until you said it. We need to maybe challenge ourselves to be conscious of how we teach, witness others teaching, and certainly periodically go through some seminars every now and then to learn to be better classroom facilitators.In solidarity,Rayfield
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