September 25, 2008Aletia;I have more to say, about the sort of persons who have lately (in the past twenty years) gravitated toward ‘managing’ our universities. The faculty have their own problems; with commitment, energy, and even with sometimes inadequate levels of teaching skill, but a larger problem is to be found among the burgeoning ranks of so-called ‘administration’, which is becoming noticeably and dangerously bloated, with no corresponding growth in ability, in feeling for the art and the science of teaching, or in seriousness of purpose. ‘Management’ seems to be an end in itself with these people. One of the signs of their existence at the university is their penchant for sending memos in which they pronounce and proscribe all sorts of demands upon us, directives to control our conduct, and rules and policies to circumscribe our behavior (as well as to coerce us into doing some of the work of administration FOR them).One of these administrators recently contacted me not only to fuss at me about my usual lack of enthusiasm for their constant directives, but also to insist that I be more ‘accommodating’ to a particular student.I am in constant conflict with administrators because I insist on continuing to act as if we work in a predominantly intellectual, not a predominantly business oriented environment. Because the administrators see students as ‘customers’ who should be ‘served’ and sold a ‘product’, for the sake of the institution's 'revenue stream', this administrator insisted that I make the pedagogy, assignment sequences, and schedule of tasks in my classroom more ‘efficient’ for the student, who has so many demands on her time that my way of teaching was too 'inconvenient' for the student. Sort of the McDonalds Drive Thru Theory of teaching, I suppose. In my opinion the issue is becoming not just one of ‘accommodating’ our students but of catering to them, which is out of the question, since we are intellectuals, not caterers. Cornell featured a hotel school and a service industries program of study for those who wished to enter the hospitality industry. When I was in graduate school I opted not to go that route but elected instead to study English, History, and Linguistics. I didn't see myself becoming a short order cook of ideas.Here are letters I wrote to the administrator, and to one of those students of mine who expected to be catered to:Provost___________;>> Below, please find a forward I would like you to> read. The forward is of one of the dozens of this> type of email I'm getting from students this past> week. It is an illustration I wanted to share with> you of the sort of outrageous thing we have to put up> with as professors--and I stress here as I have in> all my comments to faculty and to administrators, as> I say when I do seminars and present conference> papers on this subject, and as I have written in> some published pieces I've done on pedagogy: IT IS> NOT WHOLLY THE STUDENTS' FAULTS. Part of it is> because of the [misrepresentation of]...educational> concepts being fostered by colleges like our own> WCCCD, which try to make education> 'efficient' for students. Education should> not be 'efficient', it should be burdensome,> inconvenient, and ultimately difficult to achieve.>> One reason I always stress that a syllabus is not a> 'contract', is because the overtly fast-food attitude> students have toward me, you, the institution, and> education in general (and thus their will toward> illiteracy) is rooted in the 'business/corporate> model' of education. That model is pernicious, and> ultimately damaging to our students.>> Our students need to be encouraged to see college as> the hardest work they will ever do, carrying with it a> demand that they will postpone gratification, sacrifice> their short term desires, and accept the> inevitable possibility of sometimes experiencing failure> as part of a process of growth and development.>> Prof Waller>>>> ORIGINAL MESSAGE TO THE STUDENT SEEKING A CATERER:> Ms. __________;>> You had not told me which class you are in. You> have not missed a 'couple' of my class sessions, but> many of them. I have only three grades recorded for> you. That's three out of 15 assignments. You cannot pass> the course with only three grades and a final paper.> You cannot possibly even understand the final> assignment since you have not done the preparatory> work, gone through dialogue with the other students,> or gone through a necessary process of developing> the core skills of the course. I know you feel that the> course work should be 'boiled down to the basics' but> as I told you I do not teach that way, nor would you be> well served by a professor reducing the complexities of> this course in such a way. You cannot just fly in and do> assignments, you must participate in class, and do a> requisite amount of both the individual and collective> work. While I understand your being busy, having> other obligations, and finding the demands of class> meetings to be difficult, it is nevertheless what you> registered for. It would be unfair to other students> to treat you differently from the rest.>> Call me if you wish to talk about this.> Prof WallerSo you can see, Aletia, what the problem here is: some students take what we do, take the university, and take the classroom as less than legitimate, as something they do not need to be serious about or adhere to; and see the course outcomes and skills as just another commodity they can buy. Students even - some of them - see professors as a breed of short order cooks. Students pay to register for their classes, and in return they feel they should get the “A” they paid for. We simply cook the “A” and serve it up to them with a side of Power Point slides and a tasty beverage made of the fantasy that they are actually learning something this way.And again, can we really blame the students for this situation? No.The ultimate responsibility for this sort of destruction of literacy via the destruction of the very coherence of academic life, lies disproportionately with administrators who've recently arrived in the academy and who create this ‘marketplace’ image of education. It lies also with faculty who are too cowardly or too uncaring to challenge this development. All we need do is act collectively, in unity, to demand that our profession be taken seriously, and that our academic work on a real college campus be treated as being distinct from those fly-by-night, scam operations like the so-called “University of Phoenix” which offer matchbook degrees in their cheesy late night ads beckoning young people to take online courses, correspondence courses, and e-mail classes, face-book and cell phone and hell, text message lecture courses, I guess, or whatever absurd form it’s morphed into by now, which allow student-'customers' to pay money to con artists in return for bogus ‘degrees’ in bar tending, medical ‘support tech’, ‘paralegal research assistantships’, and ‘criminal justice associate techs’(??)The profit motive will drag anything and everything down into the dirt. If American culture has shown us anything, it has shown us that fact. The shameful destruction of New Orleans due to the total inability of professional and government organizations to do their jobs properly (FEMA for instance) is a testament to that...…Other things I'm thinking inasmuch as I just saw Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm being ATTACKED in an interview on MSNBC over the issue of education (how dare she talk as if educaton should be a priority when Michigan has to balance the budget and somehow also find a way to maintain essentials, like subsidies for corporations like COMPUWARE! What is this she's spouting? 'INTELLECTUALISM' or some such craziness?) As intellectuals we have to be willing to see ourselves as intellectuals, call ourselves intellectuals without any shame or hesitation, and we have to loudly, publicly reject the corporate ideology that situates us as 'entrepreneurs' and ‘contractors’ selling our 'wares' in the 'marketplace' to 'customers' who can complain when the 'product' being 'sold' to them fails to be entertaining enough, or fails to give them the ‘return on investment’ they anticipated. It is no coincidence that the ideology or more accurately the IMAGERY of the 'entrepreneur' has suddenly reemerged in the public discourse of western democracies.The model of the ‘entrepreneur’ is being foisted upon us by pseudo-corporate and neo-corporate institutions such as the university. The outlandish thing is how such a model has gained credence here on campus. Okay, it has been taken up by the mass media, the corponews industry, and by the advertising industry, but that’s to be expected, since those industries are essentially zombies by now anyway—vapid and useless, the walking dead of our society. But it is startling to see such a shallow, anti-intellectual model of behavior, value, and meaning make an appearance among academics, here and now, in the waning moments of post industrial social democracy. 21st century academic life is a context SO FAR REMOVED from mercantilist entrepreneurialism's original significance (having arisen in the 15th and 16th centuries at the time of the birth of mercantilism and of democracy), as to render our use of it, or our tolerance of its misuse as the case may be, senseless if not dangerous. “Entrepreneurialism” speaks to a time and place 600 years removed from us! The corporate educational institutions’ invocation of it—in our case the academy’s invocation of it—is in fact a mockery of its original historical meaning, as well as a mockery of the profession of teaching. For professors to tolerate a capitalist rationalization of what we do is not only foolish but in fact self destructive. We cannot to allow ourselves to be situated thus. This model, if taken seriously as an organizing principle for education and for educators, not only makes education dysfunctional (sabotages it, in fact) but is no less than a recuperation of the mentality of the slavocracy; professors, of course, are the slaves.Though we are encouraged to see ourselves as ‘sellers’ in a ‘marketplace’, we are in fact, the very commodity that is being bought and sold: the real sellers are the burnt out, former corporate middle managers who were expunged from the business world during the 80’s and 90’s downturn and ended up creeping their way into academic life as 'provosts'--administrators. Most of these people have never taught, have no knowledge of pedagogy or curriculum formation, know nothing about skills sequences, skills acquisition, or classroom strategies, and have no idea how to carry on or evaluate skill assessments or targeted instructional strategies.More and more frequently in fact, we are seeing the downturn, failure, and destruction of public and community institutions all across the country—such as community colleges, and of course, the other public institutions these corporate refugees have schlepped their way into, such as savings and loans, art museums, arts councils, etc—at the hands of these mediocre denizens of a managerial class, who have no feeling for or insight into the cultural and public institutions they are running into the ground. More and more frequently in fact, it is being demonstrated that too many of them not only lack feeling for the institutions they manage, but in fact care nothing about them, seeing them merely as cash registers. The fetish of the ‘profit motive’ incentive has ruined our newspaper industry, our once august network news dynasties, our public broadcasting system, and our formerly magnificent national public transportation system—AMTRAK. The managerial class at the university, which used to be a relatively small coterie, and was at any rate made up of former professors who knew what teaching was about because they themselves were teachers, are a veritable cancer on our national life, and they have already significantly crippled our public education system at the secondary level. They are working away now at out post secondary system—state universities and community colleges.They often seem not to even know how to credibly or successfully manage an educational institution in a manner that facilitates sustainability, long term growth, and marketability.Which brings us back to slavery, though my insistance on raising it in this context might seem on the surface to be odd. As I said above, the profit motive and its attendant values reduces a professoriat to mere menial vassals--slaves. Now, from our vantage point in the 21st century, we have to see the slave trade as having been not about race, not about Africa, and not about ante bellum America's southern states. Only a small percentage of the slaves taken from Africa ever ended up on American shores. MORE of them ended up in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Another small percentage ended up spread across the colonial world. The meaning of the slave trade was its rootedness in the nascence of corporate wealth, corporate power, and corporate ideology--the profit motive.For all the five hundred years of the rise of bourgeois humanism (contemporaneous with the birth and rise of corporations, remember!) corporate power has been steadily working at its own project, which is not the public good, not egalitarianism, not sustainability, and not humanism at all. Humanism has had phenomenal success since the Renaissance, but on the back end of the Laffer curve as we now are, for the past 100 years the battle between humanism and corporations has been the most pitched, and despite huge wins on our side (the enlightenment, the overthrow of church dogma, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the American Revolution of 1776, the end of slavery, populist democracy, the GI Bill and the end of working class pauperism in the US, the rise of the Green movement in Europe, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, anti-globalisation, etc.) we are nevertheless now in a period of triumphalism for corporate realism, which proclaims its own triumph every day in every way, and has certainly scored a huge success in stealing the mass media away from us (the Iraq War has not gone the way of the Vietnam war precisely because we have no more news media to expose the realities of war to citizens, no more independent news media, no more investigative journalism, with only Columbia University's journalism program as the last real champion for teaching non corporate journalism in America).With the turning back of the educational project in America as it was re conceived after the GI Bill, the steady advance of illiteracy has only one possible result: a return to feudalism and the creation of a neo-peasantry in America. We as teachers are crucial in any resistance to this wave of stupid about to follow the ebb tide. The ultimate goal of corporate realism is a return to monarchy, but with corporate heads not kings and queens as the monarchs.Granholm began speaking about campaign issues (she's working for the Obama campaign) and the interviewer ignored her every word and attacked her with questions about the 'racial hostility' between white Michigan residents and Black Michigan residents (??). MSNBC put up pictures of Kwami Kilpatrick and implied that her state is in economic ruin because of the lawlessness of Blacks and the poor and the unwillingness of Democrats to 'crack down' on social freedom and to support war. She was clearly shocked, and so was I. She caught her breath though, and stood up to the crap. She's a smart, articulate woman.Th Macarthy rampage in the fifties was only broken by people who stood up to it. Fascism can only be countered by courage and the willingness to fight. When that woman in my class last summer tried to destroy my right to speak, to teach, and to exercise academic freedom, she failed because I stood up to it. I stood up even stronger for freedom, intellectual integrity, and humanist values--education being one of the humanist values that are now under intense attack. Under the surface of our students' discontent and boredom is a very frightening reactionary backward ebb tide that would, we must make no mistake, sweep you back into the kitchen and sweep me back into the cotton fields, while sweeping all our students back into roadside ditch gangs and standing in line inside temp employment agencies waiting on sub minimum wage jobs.Well, I can't wait to hear what you have to say; your theory. I'm still shook by my sudden realization last week of the true implication of what you said about people outside the city NEEDING for Detroit to be a broken, litter-strewn, and impoverished place. I realized that indeed, this is all just COLONIALISM, of the very sort that I am teaching my Africana Studies students about. I hadn't stopped to think about it in those terms until I wrote that essay I sent you, and I remembered your words. Duh. I sometimes don't put two and two together as well as I could.Keep writing to me. I need to hear from you, sister. We've got a fight on our hands, and we can only win it if we have the courage to speak, fight, struggle, refuse......and resist.In Solidarity,Rayfield
I hope there will be enough of us to support those that will gather and strive.
I hope they will be willing to listen and hear what wisdom is offered.
I'm thinking about Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", Black Star's "Respiration", Kanye West's "College Dropout", Cornell West's role in the "Matrix" trilogy and an edition of "Nova" that addressed the relationship of the Mofu people of Cameroon and an ant they call Jaglavak
And I am hoping that I am prepared to serve for the benefit of the whole
I was and am not surprised by lack of response. I have come to expect that when we are the most diect and the most honest about the most fundamental issues crucial to people's lives, is when silence is often the response. Sometimes I think it is fear, but often I think it is the desire to push away the most painful aspects of all we have lost in the past 25 years. It makes people feel overwhelmed to dwell upon the incredible amount of work we will need to do just to remain free.
But then maybe it is not even for this generation to take up the fight--there is a younger generation (about 14 years old right now) who are very energetic, aware, and strong. Maybe its they who will reclaim the Earth, our freedom, and our democracy. History has a way of sending us who and what we require at the moment of greatest need.
I'm a little more than disturbed by the lack of response to the last few installments
"Though we are encouraged to see ourselves as ‘sellers’ in a ‘marketplace’, we are in fact, the very commodity that is being bought and sold: the real sellers are the burnt out, former corporate middle managers who were expunged from the business world during the 80’s and 90’s downturn and ended up creeping their way into academic life as 'provosts'--administrators. Most of these people have never taught, have no knowledge of pedagogy or curriculum formation, know nothing about skills sequences, skills acquisition, or classroom strategies, and have no idea how to carry on or evaluate skill assessments or targeted instructional strategies."
Because it is too common.
I learned a while back one of the easiest ways to pick a fight these days is to simply ask them (people) what do they want
How do you train a people to only desire what they are actively being denied or / and actively being offered? For the right price.
https://theblacklist.net/
Comments
I hope there will be enough of us to support those that will gather and strive.
I hope they will be willing to listen and hear what wisdom is offered.
I'm thinking about Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", Black Star's "Respiration", Kanye West's "College Dropout", Cornell West's role in the "Matrix" trilogy and an edition of "Nova" that addressed the relationship of the Mofu people of Cameroon and an ant they call Jaglavak
And I am hoping that I am prepared to serve for the benefit of the whole
I was and am not surprised by lack of response. I have come to expect that when we are the most diect and the most honest about the most fundamental issues crucial to people's lives, is when silence is often the response. Sometimes I think it is fear, but often I think it is the desire to push away the most painful aspects of all we have lost in the past 25 years. It makes people feel
But then maybe it is not even for this generation to take up the fight--there is a younger generation (about 14 years old right now) who are very energetic, aware, and strong. Maybe its they who will reclaim the Earth, our freedom, and our democracy. History has a way of sending us who and what
La Luta Continua,
Ray
I'm a little more than disturbed by the lack of response to the last few installments
"Though we are encouraged to see ourselves as ‘sellers’ in a ‘marketplace’, we are in fact, the very commodity that is being bought and sold: the real sellers are the burnt out, former corporate middle managers who were expunged from the business world during the 80’s and 90’s downturn and ended up creeping their way into academic life as 'provosts'--administrators. Most of these people have never taught, have no knowledge of pedagogy or curriculum formation, know nothing about skills sequences, skills acquisition, or classroom strategies, and have no idea how to carry on or evaluate skill assessments or targeted instructional strategies."
Because it is too common.
I learned a while back one of the easiest ways to pick a fight these days is to simply ask them (people) what do they want
How do you train a people to only desire what they are actively being denied or / and actively being offered? For the right price.