Hypothesis: suppose the academy is not solely a market economy. Suppose that, in college courses, especially those with small populations, students exchange ideas rather than merely take them in. Paulo Freire proposed a similar idea in his essay on “The Banking Method of Education”, but I’m talking about a fundamental opposition to the commodification of ideas, a way of thinking about intellectual work that doesn’t define it as property. Step one, of course, would be to define “market” and “economy” and “property”. But I think you follow me: right?
In which case, as much as I admire Bruce Horner’s Marxian work investigating the use value and exchange value of student papers, I think he’s on a fundamentally wrong track: while he’s explicitly Marxian, he’s also buying into a fundamentally neoclassical economic interpretation of the academy, where all labor is commodified and semi-monetized. Horner’s binary view of the instrumentalized ends of education — use or exchange — holds no hope for change.
But what happens if students produce papers not only for a grade, and not only for the use value of those papers, but for the consumption and circulation and re-use of a larger community? What happens if the academic community is actually partially a gift community, where instructors do uncompensated work, and students do uncompensated work as well? What if we were to let go of clinging to the minute-worked / minute-paid lawyer-billing model?
I’m fully aware that I’m considered a member of the barking moonbat left as soon as the words “gift economy” leave the keyboard. But consider: how does one value or quantify the academic labor students perform? How are professors compensated for the conference papers they give? In other words, Greg Mankiw’s attempts to construct everything as exchange are, to say the least, myopic.
The important connection here is that via the digital extension of Walter Benjamin’s textual reproducibility, the academic gift economy can only grow. Why does this matter to writing teachers? Because first-year composition is the sole across-the-university site where all students produce digitally reproducible texts. We’re in the middle of it, where students make and exchange and circulate texts.
What are the practical consequences here? Obviously, writing teachers need to pay more attention to open-source models of development and circulation. Furthermore, writing teachers and theorists of rhetoric need to involve themselves in open-source fora and discussions: at present, such discussions are largely instrumental or technical in nature. As such, they will present a large entrance barrier to humanities scholars.
Here’s what needs to happen, then: the open-source movement needs to help educators re-think their ideas about intellectual property. Educators need to start thinking about economics. And we all need to figure out how shared resources might be an alternative to the market; an alternative that in itself might help to reduce economic inequalities.
I think you are perfectly right, Mike. The gift economy of academia is not just a really good and bright and egalitarian thing, though. This informal structure of exchanging information, opportunities and assistance is the underpinning of a system that keeps “old boys” networks in power and the glass ceiling firmly in place, whether it excludes women, certain ethnicities or people from certain social strata.
Yes, the gift economy of Academia is the academic world at its best – but also its worst.
Absolutely, Torill. And I’m not saying that gift economies are inherently better than market economies, but rather that the gift economy model more accurately represents what goes on in the academy and allows us to think about the academy in ways that may open up possibilities for progressive action — possibilities that may be hidden when one thinks about the academy solely in market economy terms. As you point out, such a way of thinking is not a panacea for all the academy’s ills, and to think that it would be would be like thinking that moving from a dictatorship to a democracy would end political corruption.
I’m curious: does Volda College — or Norwegian colleges and universities in general — have a universal first-year academic writing requirement? My understanding is that, aside from Australian universities’ “English for Academic Purposes” requirement, freshman composition is a uniquely American phenomenon; is that accurate?
Canada followed the first-year writing requirement for many years, but my understanding is that after debate, it disappeared 20-25 years ago as a universal requirement.
I haven’t seen you reference Evan Watkins WorkTime. He is (tediously) Marxist, but does explore the whole dimension of the work time demanded by English classes and departments. His work seems to bear directly on your concerns, though I don’t think he dealt with the technology dimension.
And let me encourage you in challenging Bruce Horner’s work. Partly because he never addresses two-year colleges, I’ve always been wary of what he says about basic writing. I recently reviewed an prospective article that cited him uncritically. There’s too much politeness around rhet/comp, sez me.
Universal writing requirement? Huh?
In the universities there used to be, I think it still is, required half a year of philosophy and logic. This is to learn the academic approach to theory and to rational arguments. Colleges, such as Volda, never had that requirement, although that first semester of philosophy, logics and science theory was given 10 “vekttall” or 30 points in a cand.mag. degree in colleges and universities alike.
I don’t know about other studies and courses, but one of the things I spend time on is teaching academic writing. It is however done largely through supervision of individual students, and a student may very well avoid learning it at all, if he or she can fake it well enough to pass and doesn’t care about turning in work for comments before the final deadline and the exam.
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