Education

In discussing the applicability of neoclassical economic thinking to the university, Derek Bok points out that in the university — and, by implication, elsewhere — “the incentives of commercial competition do not always produce a beneficial outcome; they merely yield what the market wants” (103). Indeed. One hopes that in the new year, more people might come to question the conventional wisdom of market-as-god, and understand that in a democratic society, we may do what the majority wishes, but we also protect ourselves against the massive invisible hand of the majority. It would certainly be more competitive to open up individual liberties and protections to the whims of the market, but I think capitalism has demonstrated that beyond a certain point, such practices lead to greater and more inequalities rather than lesser and fewer. In the new year, I think I’ll opt for a more hopeful perspective.

Zeugma investigated candles last night, and I’m afraid her whiskers are a little shorter this year, but she’s otherwise fine. Hope your New Year’s was better.

And, yes, I’m back, and looking forward to being here on a much more regular basis. Happy 2004.

Grades are in and the semester’s done. I’m relieved and a little regretful too, and like I said, I’ll miss the students. (I’m very tired, as well, but that’s largely due to the pneumonia.) I’m also almost entirely done with my Christmas shopping, which is a happy feeling (did I already say I’m tired?); the one thing left is to pick up something for my dad that my brother asked me to get, for which I’ll have to travel down to the big mall tomorrow — not looking forward to it.

Anyway: I made some good progress through Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace today. Bok contends that “whatever value consumer demand may have in deciding what goods to produce, it is not a reliable guide for choosing an appropriate curriculum or constructing an ideal research agenda” (29), with which you may accurately imagine that I happily agree, and much of the book examines the complicated intersections and interactions between universities and markets. He goes on to point out that “efforts to adapt the corporate model by trying to measure performance of ‘manage by objective’ are much more difficult and dangerous for universities than they are for commercial enterprises” (30), which again strikes me as apt: why is it that so many people so easily think that corporate capitalism is an ideal model for every aspect of society? Do we perform a sort of mental syllogism by which most humans today like and need money, corporations are all about producing more and more money, hence in a democratic society corporations and things that imitate them can produce the greatest good by producing the greatest amount of money?

OK, so it’s a rhetorical question, and a reductive and rather silly one at that. Bok goes on to offer chilling accounts of the collision of corporate and university agendas in the arena of high-stakes academic research and concludes that the corporate privatization of research is genuinely dangerous because of the demonstrable ways in which corporate interests contravene human interests: “using the promise of financial gain to bring about socially useful results is a risky enterprise” (77). I was happy to see, as well, that Bok has some of the same reservations I do about the contemporary hyper-privileging of efficiency: “efficiency is not a very helpful guide for teaching and research. A corporate trustee will periodically make news by calling for greater productivity through heavier teaching loads and fewer faculty members per student, but such measures can easily damage the quality of education. Similarly, an efficiency expert can identify redundant positions in science departments, but eliminating the positions may gravely diminish the value of the research effort. As James Watson is said to have remarked: ‘To encourage real creativity, you need to have a good deal of slack.'” (31) [Somebody help me out here: what do you do with MLA style and punctuation and citation in that last sentence, aside from the block-quote cop-out? ‘Cause I’ve got Gibaldi’s 6th edition of the official Handbook and two other handbooks — Hacker and The Everyday Writer — and none of them help.] Again, the contemporary trend seems to be to see corporate America as utopia — but do we really want to live in a world where efficiency is the crowning virtue?

Is an efficient lover a good lover? Or would we rather take, as Supertramp puts it, the long way home?

More tomorrow.

OK, enough of the navel-gazing woe-is-me I-have-the-sniffles foolishness already. I’m supposed to be doing work here.

Derek Bok (interesting link on race, admissions, and SATs) cites Veblen’s remark that “the ideals of scholarship are yielding ground, in an uncertain and varying degree before the pressure of businesslike exigencies” (Veblen 139, qtd. in Bok 18), pointing me once again back towards someone who I probably really ought to read. He then contrasts the supposed efficiency of the corporation to the “anarchy” of academe, but notes that despite the apparent administrative weaknesses common to “American research universities”, “they are the best in the world at what they do” (21), and details many of the non-market motivations that drive professors. The difficulty I have here with Bok’s reasoning is that he still predicates everything upon the rational and competitive actions of individual actors, whether those actors be professors or students. Is rational and individualistic competition really the only thing that makes universities good? Bok himself notes that “the ethos of the university keeps [administrators] from earning sums remotely comparable to those of top business leaders” (24): so apparently, university administrators are not the rational profit-maximizing beings familiar to us from neoclassical economics. While I don’t disagree with Bok that universities could benefit from more efficient governance, and even that they might learn some things from corporations about efficiency, it strikes me as odd that he seems to miss his own point that universities, unlike corporations, do not hold as their primary mission the wholesale pursuit of ever-increasing efficiency. In universities, there are things more important than efficiency.

Interestingly, Bok uses his thoughts on efficiency to arrive at the conclusion that “very few universities make a serious, systematic effort to study their own teaching, let alone try to assess how much their students learn or to experiment with new methods of instruction” (26). I’ll point out here that, to the best of my knowledge, composition is a rare discipline in the amount of devotion it gives to pedagogy. From personal experience, I know the lit side of English doesn’t do half the thinking about teaching that composition does. Classics doesn’t devote much disciplinary thought to pedagogy; neither, to judge by the journals I’ve waded through this semester, does economics. (Check out Brad DeLong’s wonderful post on math problems, and note what he has to say about reading and writing. Is there a pedagogical connection here?) What about other disciplines? And, finally: are better ways of teaching always necessarily more efficient — or are there better ways to characterize them?

I heard the term “left melancholy” used for the first time the other day. It startled me. I’m familiar with the concept of racial melancholia, but had never thought to extend it to politics, and as soon as I heard the term “left melancholy” my ears kinda burned, because it’s an easy and habitual (and, I think, learned) stance for me and a lot of other people. “Left melancholy” is a perspective that assumes all progressive agendas to be somehow ideologically or methodologically co-opted or tainted from the outset, and so results in considerable energy being devoted to a critique of any possible progressive project before it even gets underway. I do that a lot, and it shuts down avenues for productive change.

At the same time, I can’t believe there’s no place for critique, and especially not in so relentlessly positive and instrumentally-minded a field as computers and composition. Critique, while it shuts down avenues for agency, simultaneously establishes an alternative language within which one might imagine possibilities for positive change. I think about Christianity in the West and what it offered in terms of a space for redemption and rehabilitation, and the connection of that space to what Foucault talks about in Discipline and Punish, and what the combination of both of those factors mean for my brother as he serves his sentence. One couldn’t enact prison as rehabilitation if one hadn’t thought it. This is the problem for those who contend that theory is meaningless, and that practice and policy are the only ways to make change: you can’t think outside the current problematic situation if you don’t theorize it in some way. Those who would contend otherwise would do well to revisit Plato and Aristotle, Erasmus and More, Hobbes and Descartes, Kant and Rousseau, Marx and Rawls.

So, well, OK, that’s all highfalutin and whatnot. Here’s the small thing I’m working on tonight: Colin Williams, in “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis” (2002, The Sociological Review), sets as his mission the pointing-out of “large economic spaces [. . .] where alternative economic relations and motives prevail” (525) in order to demonstrate that “there exist large alternative economic spaces of self-provisioning, non-monetised exchange and monetised exchange where the profit motive is absent” (526). Once again, there are other ways to think about things — and what Williams is talking about applies to the university, too, Bunky.
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I feel like I should be cueing that old Aerosmith chestnut here: I’m ba-aack. . . Blogging has been intermittent lately (and I’m feeling guilty once again at seeing really helpful comments that I haven’t yet responded to or acknowledged) because I’m trying to revise an article for publication, put together a proposal, and have had that perpetual boomeranging paper pile. Which I did manage to get back to students today, happy for the most part with their publication (i.e., final) drafts or perhaps it’s more accurate to say happy because while there were the usual early-semester difficulties I was also pleasantly surprised by more than the expected number of highly ambitious papers, all in all making for another good teaching day in gorgeous fall weather. Even managed to connect the weekend’s couch-burning car-flipping cop-confronting bottle-hurling high-rise dorm riots (yes, the home team won — but it probably would’ve been the same result if they’d lost) to the day’s lesson plans.

That said, with all my busy-ness lately, the prospectusward reading plan seems to have hit a patch of black ice and is spinning across four lanes of traffic as I write. I’m aiming for the median, but, well, I’ll let you know how I do once I get this article revised. In the interim, some brief notes.
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