From my notes on the ugly, ugly draft of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, some further thoughts on composition’s relationship to mainstream neoclassical economics: with the focus of neoclassical economics on commodified market transactions, it’s understandable why the classroom work of students in higher education is seldom seen itself as a scene of genuine economic activity. The only market transactions readily apparent to neoclassical economics are the student’s exchange of cash for tuition, in payment for the service of instruction, or the institution’s exchange of cash for faculty salary, in payment again for the service of instruction. In such a context, the labor of faculty is the nexus of exchange, rather than the labor of student, and if the student’s labor in the classroom is to be exchanged for any gain, that gain is always constructed by neoclassical economics as existing necessarily in the future, in the exchange of a degree (and its attendant qualifications, one assumes) for the value-added salary of a post-college occupation.
Such constructions are the most common instances of neoclassical economic thought in the discourse of composition, although they are often fragmentary or observed only in passing, as in Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s essay “Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types,” where they describe a course “devoted entirely to written argument, out of our conviction that written argument brings together other writing skills and prepares students for the kinds of writing tasks demanded in college courses and careers” (186). The work of students is here constructed as carrying long-time value in preparing them for work in the market-based information economy. Upon careful analysis, such an ideology is also implicit–although rather less visible–in the work of David Bartholomae, whose famous essay “Inventing the University” suggests that the student must invent the university in order to be able to adapt her writing to the university, so that she might later make the subsequent step of adapting herself to the larger capitalist order. In Bartholomae’s words, “The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do” (589), and even if the student adopts the critical stance Bartholomae later suggests, to do so is to acculturate oneself to a way of thinking and speaking in the service of future gain. The value of such intellectual labor is deferred rather than immediate. Consider how Bartholomae, in his conversation with Peter Elbow, expresses a desire for “students to be able to negotiate the ways they are figured in relationship to the official forms of knowledge valued in the academy” (503): those “official forms of knowledge” are a component of the authorizing discourse of market capitalism, and the value of the student’s language inheres in its deferred nature as a currency for exchange.
Hepzibah Roskelly, in “The Risky Business of Group Work,” offers a similar example of the construction of the value of student writing as deferred for future exchange, but also offers additional complicating examples of neoclassical economic ideology. In her initial characterization of the problematic nature of certain instances of group work in which one person performs most of the labor while others stand by and let that student pick up their slack (141), the problem is understood to be the unequal distribution of labor in the group and the therefore unfair distribution of the rewards of that labor: in other words, an unequal and inefficient mode of compensation for labor, or what neoclassical economics might characterize as a “market failure.” Although Roskelly describes a “clear link […] between social interaction and learning” (141), the risks and flaws of its dysfunction is posted in deferred or future terms. Furthermore, the neoclassical privileging of risk-taking and the ideology of economic winners and losers is present in the concluding analogy Roskelly draws to the Tom Cruise movie Risky Business, with the movie’s climactic confrontation between Cruise’s character and Rutherford, the Princeton admissions officer played by Richard Masur: the admissions officer is highly impressed by Cruise’s suburban-pimp capitalist drive and rewards him with admission, and Roskelly sees this as a teaching moment, the deferred gratifaction of capitalist behavior while engaging in “Risky Business” (146). As I argued earlier this week, the neoclassical valuation of student work in first-year composition is always a distant rather than a present horizon.
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