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Friday, July 01, 2005
GOOD THINGS, AND HOW INSTITUTIONALIZING THEM FUCKS THEM UP. UD would like to bring three recent academic controversies together - involving collegiality, diversity, and historical understanding - in this post. The general point she’d like to make about all of them is that the troubles these excellent behaviors and ideas are running into comes from the tendency of institutions to corrupt and trivialize cultural goods. It just seems to be the nature of institutions to want to incorporate complex cultural goods into reductive bureaucratic structures. Yet the more they do this, the more people become cynical and resentful about these goods, or the more people exploit them for illegitimate ends. Let me be more clear by listing the excellent social and moral ideas and behaviors that I have in mind: 1. Collegial relations with other people. 2. The ability to educate students who come from a lot of different cultures. 3. An understanding of one’s racial history. These are all obvious goods. We all want them, for ourselves and for others. They are also complex and sensitive goods -- there’s a lot of wriggle room within each of them, and each of them can easily be damaged or destroyed. Culture, to quote Lady Bracknell on the subject of ignorance, is like a delicate rose -- dry and press it and the bloom is gone. Here’s an example of wriggle room. Christopher Hitchens’ idea of collegiality is profoundly different from, say, that of the college president in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (“His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put out your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get something more comfortable. … He wanted you to like him, he wanted everybody to like him… .”). Hitchens, with his love of conflict and his relative indifference to your comfort level, would not be considered at all collegial by many people. But in fact Hitchens is just the sort of serious intellectual serious universities should want to have around, warts and all. That’s why Berkeley invites him there for visiting stints. Once institutions start telling you in more and more rule-bound ways what collegiality must be, you begin to lose Hitchens and gain President Robbins. I 15 Pro-Collegiality Rules There are always a few news stories floating around about people like Robert K.C. Johnson, an impressive scholar at Brooklyn College. Johnson’s for the most part less impressive colleagues, citing collegiality, almost managed to fire him. He has a post up at Cliopatria on the subject, from which I’ll quote: As someone with a painful first-hand experience with the criterion, I oppose the use of collegiality in personnel matters. In theory, of course, it's better to have a department peopled with professors who work well together. But in practice, I don't see any way to structure a system that can ensure that the criterion won't be abused. UD doesn’t much care about motives here - professional jealousy, politics, whatever. She cares about outcomes. Any university should want to encourage interesting and productive scholars, not drive them away. Formalized collegiality criteria allow departments to look away from what matters - good teaching, interesting writing - and toward what doesn’t -- being liked by everyone. More than that, rule-bound collegiality criteria, as Johnson suggests, make for cozy departments with unchallenged students. There is a direct line between collegiality mandates and grade inflation. II “The workshops and events listed in this announcement offer important opportunities for faculty and staff to have a better understanding of how to interact appropriately and respectfully with others on campus.” All university professors should be insulted by this childish language in the University of Oregon’s announcements of seminars they can take to learn how to communicate better with a diverse range of people. The intellectual content of seminars like these is often little higher than an episode of Barney. They share with Barney the assumption that you are a moral moron who must be led in small slow steps, with much smiling encouragement, around the basic building blocks of human life in groups. Blown up, these seminars become the University of Oregon’s notorious Diversity Initiative. Teach your students. Do your best with all of them. Concentrate on the content you want to teach rather than the personalities in front of you. Tell your students that who they are is, for the purposes of classroom instruction, less important than what sort of brains they have and how responsive their brains are to new and challenging ideas and forms of mental discipline. Assume your students are as smart as you are - or smarter - and act that way. If they respect you, they’ll want to rise to your assumption about their intelligence. The worst thing you can do pedagogically is get everybody all self-conscious about themselves. The best thing you can do is free them from themselves so that they can enter different worlds. Diversity mandates corrupt the impersonal pursuit of knowledge by making professors as well as students self-conscious about irrelevant and trivializing elements of the classroom theater. [Joanne Jacobs also talks about Oregon's diversity mess today.] III Understanding One’s Racial History UD’s initial response to the Philadelphia high school system’s decision to mandate courses in African-American history was positive. She still thinks that it’s a good idea, actually. She’s keen on requirements generally, and this particular history is central to our understanding of ourselves as a nation. So she was a bit surprised to read Timothy Burke’s hesitations about the idea: You might think I’d be enthusiastic about the proposal. All the Africanists in the region could certainly contribute a lot of pro bono assistance in the development and implementation of the program, and if they go ahead with the plan, I’d certainly be willing to pitch in. Note the basis of Burke’s reservations: “But I already sense that this course is so freighted down with competing and contradictory missions from consciousness-raising to self-esteem improvement, to being a subject aimed at producing critical thought in all students to being a subject intended to do identity work for only the African-American students, that I suspect this justification won’t play out in practice." Burke is suggesting what I began this post with -- when bureaucratic institutions get hold of cultural goods (in this case, serious historical self-consciousness), they tend to dress them up in trivializing and personalizing ways (self-esteem, identity work, consciousness-raising). They freight them down and lose precisely the primary goal of schooling -- to convey significant content in a way that produces dispassionate, analytical, open-minded intellects. You do not derive a sense of your own value from hagiographic versions of your past. You derive a sense of your own value from being able to understand nuanced and uncompromising presentations of the truth of history. |