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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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FROM THE BELLY OF THE BEAST... …comes some tentative questioning of the management-guru wisdom that now dominates so much of the academy. A dean of education from an Australian University (I found her essay via Pedablogue) dares to wonder whether motivational speakers, Powerpoint powwows, and professional development workshops might not be ideally suited to professors. Erica McWilliam asks if “the sort of knowledge that is coming to count as worthwhile for all professionals, including academics,” is in fact as appropriate for medieval historians as it is for certified public accountants. The corporate model of university education would regard a professor’s “entire self,” McWilliam writes, as something that “must be completely made over as an enterprising individual.” The “enterprising individual” model rests on a psychological foundation. “The discipline of psychology is [an] important knowledge component of the professional development curriculum. This is an effect of the hegemonic status of psychology in defining and explaining everything about human beings and their behavior -- organizations, personal, relational, cognitive, and developmental. … [T]he sort of knowledge which counts as developmental is generalisable economic, technological, and management knowledge, underpinned as it often is by psychological models of human behaviour and organizational life.” Before UD would listen, much less grant a grain of assent, to the flagrante stupido that is psychology, she would disembowel herself. Which can be arranged. “Those academics yet to be ‘converted’ to Powerpoint use for lecture presentation are unlikely to hail from Information Technology [i.e., they‘ll be English professors like UD]. However this conversion experience is only a matter of time, given the speed with which Voluntary Early Retirements are being requested and approved in Australian universities. Exit Anthony Giddens, enter Bill Gates. …The new broom of enterprise is designed to sweep away the cobwebs of ivory-towerism, including any special pleading that higher education should have special (non-market) status in the cultural order of things. …Enterprising activity is very much at the heart of recent calls for the transformation of Australian universities along corporate lines. … We need to accept firstly that universities ‘are not intrinsically different from other organizations.’” This corporate model, with its close analogues in the United States, means the end of classroom teaching (the model assumes “that academics are deficient as teachers”) and its replacement by “flexible delivery” technology -- “online teaching, the use of Powerpoint, email and CD-Roms, multi-media and computer-assisted learning, and so on.” “The difficulty here,” McWilliam continues, “is not that any one of those techniques is not worth knowing. It is rather that ‘flexible delivery’ threatens to collapse the complexity of pedagogical process into a ‘technology will deliver’ quick fix…” McWilliam describes what the triumph of corporatism is doing to intellectual life. It is bringing to the university “mind-numbing simplicity,” “irony deficiency,” and ultimately the death of “radical doubt itself.” Or as Terry Eagleton puts it in a review of a book by Frank Furedi: "With the decline of the critical intellectual, the thinker gives way to the expert, politics yields to technocracy, and culture and education lapse into forms of social therapy. The promotion of ideas plays second fiddle to the provision of services. Art and culture become substitute forms of cohesion, participation and self-esteem in a deeply divided society. Culture is deployed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to tackle the causes of those divisions, implying that social exclusion is simply a psychological affair. That to feel bad about ourselves is the first step towards transforming our situation is thus neatly sidestepped." The happy shiny corporate world, in other words, really is different from the intellectual world. UD will now offer a personal example along these lines. UD’s husband, you recall, just won a local election. He will soon attend the annual Maryland Municipal League convention in Ocean City, Maryland (UD‘s going too! She‘ll be blogging from there!), where he will attend no doubt useful seminars on governance. The convention kicks off, though, with a motivational speaker who will gather all the attendees in a big room and share with them the following “compelling message.” They should “enjoy the true joy of life: the trip!” “Steve Gilliland has become one of the most sought-after speakers and trainers in America. His colorful background includes Major League Baseball, broadcasting, and eleven years of corporate management on three different levels. As founder and CEO of Performance Plus Professional Development, Inc., Steve owes his personal and professional success to using past challenges as opportunities. He is a speaker that doesn’t just challenge people to change; he motivates them to do it. In a style typically filled with wisdom, wit, and passion, Steve will provide attendees with a wealth of practical insights on what it takes to enjoy the true joy of life: the trip! Loaded with hope, direction, encouragement, and specific procedures, this powerful keynote address will show that true success is not a thing you acquire or achieve; rather, it is a journey you take your whole life long.” To UD, this is as nakedly obvious as it can possibly be an example of flagrante stupido. If she had to sit in a room with it she would disembowel herself. She worked hard at school and listened carefully to people like Paul Ricoeur so that she would never ever have to hear these things. If people entered UD’s office at her university and announced it was time to join everybody down the hall where hope, direction, encouragement, and specific procedures were being offloaded, she would react very badly. Maybe UD’s the only professor in America like this. Maybe she’ll be swept away in the tide of corporate history. That's fine. Death before surrender. |