Education

Getting Local with Larry

preterite Education

I’m a wicked man. I’m a wicked man who recalls library books other graduate students are using, and I won’t apologize. Now, in my defense, I know it was another graduate student because when I checked the online catalog in the summer, it showed up as out with the same due date it had for the intervening months until last week when finally my patience slipped and I said to myself, “It’s only 200 pages and I’m almost done with Crowley; if she hasn’t read it in these months, she can wait a week til I burn through it and return it,” and undergraduates don’t get to keep books out nearly that long here. And I’m not a total quisling: I know it wasn’t anybody from my own program who had it out. (In fact, I requested it from the library of the fancy and exclusive small college down the road a piece, rather than my own Big State U, which — due to the state of public higher education in our state — hasn’t bought many new books lately.)

After such an admission, of course, there’s no longer any point in attempting to disguise my baseness and rapacious bibliophagy. No sooner had I my filthy hands on the defenseless thing’s cloth covers than I creased its spine and spread its leaves to whatever spot was most convenient. Imagine my shock — O dismay! — when these words on page 87 greeted my eye:
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Education, Vocationalized

preterite Economics, Education

Kerr warns that universities “will become even more of an appendage of the labor market. American higher education began as an effort at moral uplift. It continues as an effort to get a good or better job. A life of affluence is replacing a philosophy of life as the main purpose of higher education” (221). I think Kerr’s perception is dead-on accurate here; the trend is undeniable, and while we give lip service to some tweedy ivy-clad ideal of the university, the reality is that the disciplines in the university getting the most money and the most attention are the not those disciplines grouped around philosophy in the original liberal-education constellation, or even the original professions of theology, medicine and law, but precisely the disciplines that promise students that “life of affluence”.
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Clark Kerr After Sushi

preterite Class (Meta), Education

I love Amanda’s semi-anonymizing habit of referring to her town as “Collegeville”. The town where I teach certainly has that rep, but the town where I teach is 20 miles away from the town where I live. And halfway in between, there’s a small city that houses another college and a huge array of boutiques and restaurants on its two main drags. I love the bookstores, but I could do without all the trustafarians and fauxhemians and Saab-driving yoga moms who make sure you know just how much they recycle and can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to vote republican. I’m pretty dang liberal, but that kind of myopic elitism just bugs the heck out of me. Which is why — despite coveting Amanda’s name for her town — I’ll choose to instead steal from the good Dr. Thompson and refer to the happy municipality where I had sushi tonight as Fat City. And tonight, with the weather gorgeous, the flow of students on the sidewalks swelled to capacity: if there’s patchouli in the air, it must be September in Fat City. We had a really excellent dinner, and I later came back here to finish off Clark Kerr.
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Free and Equal

preterite Class (Meta), Education

Many have commented on Bush’s frequent rhetorical deployment of the word “freedom”. One wonders how we might pin down a specific meaning for Bush’s usage: clearly, it’s a catch-all, a universally positive term meant to discourage rather than encourage critical thought, but we can try. What kind of freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what one likes, we might suppose from Bush’s foreign policy agenda: freedom as supreme self-determination. But such self-determination does typically imply a freedom from certain things as well; things in the administration’s case usually constructed as concrete and specific agent-driven oppression: the bad guys holding you down. The market is free, or wants to be free, and so cannot be bad. We are told that lessening restrictions on the economy — making it more free — will make it more efficient, and therefore better. We hear, as well, that trade must be free in order to be fair. But, unlike the recent unfortunate case of Fox’s fair and balanced phrase, there’s a word many historically associate with freedom that we rarely hear these days. Whatever happened to the phrase “Free and equal”? Have we forgotten our historic privileging of the conjoined terms?
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Education, Wealth, Research

preterite Class (Meta), Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue came in the mail today. I’ve barely made my way into it; tonight I’m looking over the page 4 table that shows, by state, educational attainment, per-capita income, and poverty rate. (The “Attitudes and characteristics of freshmen” table on page 17 looks pretty interesting; the “Attitudes and activities of faculty members” on page 20 less so.) To do some initial rather unscientific work, I looked for the three states with the combination of highest per-capita income and lowest poverty rate, and the three states with the combination of lowest per-capita income and highest poverty rate. (A few states were anomalous: Massachusetts combines a high per-capita income with a moderate poverty rate, D.C. combines a high per-capita income with a high poverty rate, and Iowa combines a low poverty rate with a low per-capita income. Note also that some of the percentages below don’t quite add up due to rounding.)
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Instrumentality and Economies

preterite Computers, Economics, Education

Tink is one of the two kittens I adopted a few weeks ago (she’s the orange one; her sister, Zeugma, is the tortie), and I’m kinda worried about her: she’s got something wrong with her left eye so she’s squinting with it a lot of the time. The vet gave me some terramycin ointment to put in her eye three times a day, which she doesn’t like much, and I’m impatient — after three days, yes, I know, not long — for her to get better. She and Zeugma play rough, but she — Tink — is very much the hesitant, shy, and klutzy one, so much so that I wondered if she might be deaf when I first adopted her. (Easy to test. Nope.) So I worry — I mean, it’s totally obvious to me what kind of gut-level emotional needs are being fulfilled: my mom died of ALS last September, Christa and I broke up after four years this Spring, and she moved out and took the two cats she and I had adopted with her — and, yeah, I’m kind of overinvested in these two.

Anyway, I finished Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe’s History today, and also checked out Hawisher and Selfe’s February 1991 College Composition and Communication essay, “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class” (CCC Vol. 42, No. 1). Not much new in the History from what I talked about yesterday, save the concession that “By the advent of the 1990s, it had become clear to computers and composition specialists that technology would not automatically increase the opportunities for the democratic participation of less privileged segments of our society” (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe 257). This assertion, while one familiar to me and one that forms a part of my own ideology, seems to not go far enough; what I’m looking at in this dissertation are some of the possible ways in which the technological components of economies of writing and education may shut down opportunities and reproduce inequalities.
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Finishing Wolff and Resnick

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Class (Meta), Education

Some useful clarifications from the last bit of Wolff and Resnick. I wondered recently who the capitalists were; here’s my answer: “In modern capitalist enterprises, called ‘corporations’ for historical reasons, the role of capitalist is played by a group numbering typically between 9 and 20 individuals: the board of directors” (211). Interesting that our universities have similar boards who meet on a similar quarterly basis, but the objection might be that the university (at least the public institution where I am, and where many composition programs are: as pointed out before, elite private institutions often don’t have first-year writing requirements) isn’t yet a corporation harvesting surplus labor. But I think there’s still something to be said for the construction of education as commodity, especially give the insightful discussions about instructor exploitation (streamlining the workplace, harvesting surplus value from academic or so-called “immaterial” labor) at Invisible Adjunct.
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Education as a Nonclass Process

preterite Education

According to Resnick and Wolff, “In most capitalist societies the state provides a set of conditions of existence for industrial capitalists and typically receives in return subsumed class payments. For example, certain high-tech industrial capitalists may require productive laborers with extensive university training in various skills. Those skills constitute conditions of existence for the appropriation of surplus value in the production of high-tech commodities such as computers. The state can build and operate schools that accomplish the requisite training. The state thereby performs a nonclass process — the cultural process of imparting knowledge — which secures a condition of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process in computer production. The state obtains in return a distributed share of the surplus appropriated by industrial capitalists”: taxes (201). Several interesting things to note here: education is constructed as skill-based and vocational, serving only to give people the knowledge they need to produce computers. Knowledge is “imparted” a la Freire’s banking model. And the educational structure seems to be explicitly planned for the purpose of reproducing class hierarchies. Resnick and Wolff’s ideas about education seem to me so monolithic and one-sided as to be almost cartoonish, and their example fails to consider the fact that not all higher education is state-sponsored. Still, their naming of education as a nonclass process — one that involves no production or distribution of surplus value — usefully clarifies matters for me. Is it accurate, though? What are the ways in which surplus value might be produced and distributed in education?

Educause: Throw Tech At It

preterite Computers, Culture, Education

Cross-posted as a response at Kairosnews in slightly abbreviated form.

cel4145 at Kairosnews has posted an interesting story featuring two links (PDF warning on both) from Educause, an organization that I feel really ought to have a .com domain, or at the very least a .org, but definitely not a .edu: after poking around their site for a bit (check out the corporate stuff), it’s pretty obvious these guys are total shills for corporate technology in education. Not that it’s really surprising, given the tenor of the articles, or even the organization’s motto (“Hello, tech support? Yes, the state has cut our budget, there’s a cheating scandal in the Physics department, the adjuncts are trying to unionize, the English faculty has been snacking on continental philosophers again, and our quarterback’s in jail; we’d like our university bugfix service pack 4.8.3b, please”), but worth noting, since both articles demonstrate unproblematic alliegance to the philosophies that (1) technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods is an independent and value-free force driving social change, (2) universities in providing education qua consumable good must respond to that technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods, (3) universities in their responses to that technological advance should serve corporate/consumer culture. To be even less surprised, check out what Educause says about their readership and their corporate sponsors and advertisers.

Maybe you can tell that I didn’t much care for what either article had to say.
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The Uses of Dragon’s Teeth

preterite Economics, Education, Politics

Initial note: I wrote this yesterday, but in my runnings around all day, I didn’t get a chance to post it. On the good side, I spent some time in and around Maryland and DC with family and with Jennifer and Jason. Jennifer and Jason and I got to goof off and take some pictures, which was great fun and which I won’t post here, partly because I worry that having any pictures of myself on the Web might invalidate me to a search committee (in the early wake of EEOC, racist employers managed to get around laws forbidding them to ask potential employees about race by asking for pictures with resumes, and so some employers have made a habit of discarding any resumes or vitae that come with pictures attached: more ways for the Web to complicate our lives), and partly because, well, while Jason’s good-looking and Jennifer’s stunning, chronically non-photogenic is the kindest way I’d put it for my own grill. But it was a fine day and a fine evening, and I didn’t make it back downtown until late, and subsequently really didn’t feel finding public Web access at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night. Which is actually part of what this post is about.

I’m going to start in a roundabout way, though. In 8 Mile, Eminem/Rabbit has problems with transportation that make it hard for him to get to work on time. One could say that this is a simple, uncomplicated problem that means nothing outside itself, or one could talk about the ways people with less money are more vulnerable to and concerned with changes in their material circumstances. Keep it simple or make it complicated.

The simple way to get underway would be to say that time and money affect the way I write, especially when I’m traveling and paying for internet access. Call time and money “materialities” and I’m suddenly risking accusations of obfuscatory language, but I don’t think that makes what I want to say any less valid.

In the past two days, I’ve run into the problem of metered internet access imposing restrictions on the way I write. The materialities of clocks (the time at which Jennifer and I agreed to meet on Saturday) and money (paying six dollars for an hour online) led me to compose significant portions of my entries before going online to post them, and have kept me from doing any more than skimming other peoples’ words. They’ve also kept me from the sort of deliberative Web surfing that I find useful and pleasant while I’m trying to refine an idea and see how it interacts with other ideas, to the point where yesterday’s post had no links whatsoever. I intend to remedy a lot of this when I get home — I’ll go back and edit these entries, add links, devote some much more careful attention to what other folks have been saying, and so on — but even the way in which this relatively insignificant change in my material circumstances has a large effect on my Web writing practices gives me slight hope that all this might have a point and a use for students, too.
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