In my attempts to define the various axes and vectors of class for myself, I’ve raised another definitional problem, one to which I’m not sure how much attention I should devote. I mean, I think I’ve done a decent initial job of laying out most of the initial ways in which compositionists define class, but then I think about the contexts within which class works, and I’m all of a sudden uneasy, and my uneasiness springs from having started Derek Bok’s book on Universities in the Marketplace. Here’s why: I met with a group of fellow dissertators this week, and one of the innovative approaches someone had taken was to not pin down her terms with definitions. She gave herself some serious flexibility, because she was using a vexed term. Maybe I’d do well to do the same: maybe I don’t need a single all-encompassing definition of class that takes into account whether it’s a hierarchy or a relation or how much its various components matter.
On the other hand, it raised new questions for me. Derek Bok’s book takes on the intersections of American capitalism with American universities, but the interesting thing with what I’ve read so far is that universities are constructed in heterogeneity, while the economy is not. We assume that the community college can differ from the small teaching college, which can differ from the exclusive four-year liberal arts college, which can differ from the small branch of State U, which can differ from the big flagship campus of State U, which can differ from the big private alternative to State U, and so on. But we are to understand that all of these hold a many-to-one relationship to The Economy in terms of funding and in terms of the ends they are supposed to support.
Suppose you ask your students “What does a degree from your college do?”: what would they tell you? Does your teaching reflect that? I think it’s a tough question. It gets even more difficult when you start trying to define other terms, as well. Class. Composition. Writing. Education. But don’t you assume that the economy is always the same, for all these things, for all these purposes?
So far, I’ve studiously avoided any talk about computers or technology, because it gets even worse when I try to define those terms. Liz’s recent notes on an aoir presentation (which fascinated me in all sorts of ways) offer useful insights for interrogating the metaphors with which we think about the Web, but I think such metaphors taken as a collectivity may point towards the dearth of insights that have so far been offered for defining our interactions with these machines themselves. (Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s article is a notable exception.) “The university” is not monolithic, nor is “the marketplace”, despite Bok’s title. Neither are “computers” or “the internet”. All these things are obvious, but I would argue that we talk about such socioeconomic concepts in very particular ways, save “the marketplace”, to which we offer conceptual transcendence.
This is a problem, and perhaps the central problem of my dissertation.
If you were on my committee, would you accept that as a problem, or would you demand more detail? If so: where?
Yikes.
I’m tempted to suggest that much of what they would say to me (I’m currently teaching at an urban CC campus) would be of the same flavor as the marketing materials the college itself provides. That suggests that the tail is wagging the dog. (I’ll elide the possibility that the hype is uncannily accurate).
There’s an intersection here with notions of class ascendancy and instrumentalist approaches to both the provision and securing of what we call an education. The relationships between/among those phenomena seem to me vexingly complex at first glance. Speaking from the perspective of teaching at a campus where “minorities”, immigrants, and first-generation college students make up the bulk of the enrollment, I suppose that can’t be avoided easily. That seems tied to the notions of both the conceptual transcendance of “the marketplace” (or at least so vis-a-vis one’s participation therein) and narratives of “getting over” a la Rodriguez, Rose, et al.
I wonder if class in the university (or the comp class, or in a computer classroom) is easier to define in situ, precisely because of the wildly different manifestations of the inconveniently un-monolithic words you cite above.
Chris, re the “vexingly complex” “intersection”: I’ll second that. And I think your insight re defining class in situ is right on target, especially given the insights John offers here and here (towards the end on that second one).