Sounding on the Academy for May 2, 2011
May 1st, International Workers’ Day, is my favorite holiday. I yearn for it all year long, and watch the sun set reluctantly in the evening, sad to see it leave. May Day was yesterday, and here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, we had flurries. God, apparently, hates parades.
There isn’t a lot of religious studies-field news this last week, so I’ve decided to focus, instead, on the academy. There are lots of new changes affecting educational institutions across the US. Lots of us have various opinions about these changes, some of them quite complicated, but few have a sense of how things *should* change, or reasonably *could* change. The winners in this transformative moment for the academy will be the group that manages to arrive at a consensus on these issues, and institutionalizes them on the basis of their collective power. A few stories I’m watching. Both longtime readers will be thoroughly unsurprised that I have chosen to focus on class issues – both in terms of academic culture, and in terms of collective employee rights – as the most important changes to watch in the academy:
- Why the United States is Destroying its Educational System, by Chris Hedges
- How to destroy your political enemies with video the Breitbart way: lie
- Separate and Unequal: two-tiers of instructors?
- Is Being Transgender a Promotion Problem?
- Why Academic Publishing Sucks, by Larry Lessig
- Anthropology Professors reflect on Fieldwork
- Take Better Notes! (please)
Why The United States is Destroying its Educational System, by Chris Hedges.
Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and an award-winning journalist, needs to be described as more of an agitator than an organizer. Heavy on description and even heavier on characterization, the shrill tone of much of his writing undoubtedly turns many otherwise-sympathetic readers off. It turns me off, but I also recognizes that when he concentrates on agitation and description, he’s usually dead on (when he turns to prescription, I part ways, usually). The key paragraph from this essay is the following:
The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities. (via wobblygoblin)
How To Get Your Political Enemies Fired: Lie With Video
Breitbart is at it again. With heavily edited video, the conservative gadfly has now taken on adjunct instructors in labor history classes. He’s managed to get one of them fired, even though the university in question now says that the videos are not representative of the class content, and were taken completely out of context. After Breitbart’s now-clear lying via this method to destroy ACORN, get Shirley Sherrod fired, etc., you have to start wondering when somebody is going to finally call Breitbart on the mat for a reckoning.
Videos posted by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart appear to have ended the teaching career of an adjunct at the University of Missouri — even as university officials issued a statement backing the contention of the two instructors of the labor studies course that their comments in the class had been edited to present an “inaccurate and distorted” picture of what was said.
This sort of behavior is expected from slimebags like Breitbart, who clearly cares so little for the actual facts that his personal animus against strangers of different political approaches feels like justification for dishonorable attacks, but the really disheartening response is that of the adjunct professors’ employer, the University of Missouri. To fire these instructors after a known charlatan like Breitbart releases videos like this is frankly, just shockingly lazy. They should apologize to the instructors, and hire them back immediately.
More to the point, academic administrators around the country need to gear up for a new set of assaults on academics: “Breitbart may be on the lookout for other academics. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox last week, he said that “we’re going to take on education next, and go after the teachers and union organizers.””
AAUP statement on the situation.
How the academy’s own hiring practices undermines the academy’s fifty-odd year practice of promoting itself as an instrument of meritorious class mobility. This is particularly the case with adjuncts – non-tenure-tracked instructors who normally focus more on teaching, less on research, and frequently perform the bulk of less-desirable, foundational, courses. The existence of a two-tier system in the academy, especially in academies that give lip-service to ‘faculty governance,’ appears as a significant contradiction. Arguments in favor of the two-tier system exist and should not be dismissed without examination: these arguments posit the necessary existence of a tiered system in order to make tenure and academic freedom in general, possible for even the few tenured professors. Even more sympathetic arguments point out that many adjuncts exist as full-time, continually-employed, instructors, whose adjunct and non-tenured status is a double hardship – they teach an immense amount, have lower job security than tenured professors, and simultaneously, often have additional burdens (such as enforced breaks from teaching), which are intended to circumvent AAUP requirements or suggestions. In such a situation, long-serving adjuncts may indeed benefit from the establishment of a second-tier, job-secure, line of positions which focus on teaching to the general exclusion of scholarship, and do not require the additional burdens. On the other hand, institutionalizing (or, at the very least, formally acknowledging and legitimizing an existing situation) this inequality seems like a retrograde move. My general sense is that faculty governance has rarely meant much, in most schools, beyond a sense that ‘good faculty’ should be involved in ‘making good decisions,’ rather than in an acknowledgement that faculty, as a class, have class interests that separate them from other decision-making powers in the academy.
From Bathrooms to Board Rooms – Is Being Transgender a Promotion Problem?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is ‘yes, being transgender is a promotion problem.’ But even those who find themselves feeling ambiguous and uncertain about whether it should be a problem will likely find themselves horrified by the way in which this case played out. Such discriminatory ridiculousness, treating highly-educated adults as if they were slow, immature, children, is the norm in workplace gender prejudice, and additional protections – and even more importantly, direct solidarity in the workplace in defense of co-workers – is necessary to combat it.
Why Academic Publishing Sucks So Badly, by Larry Lessig
The great practitioner of the powerpoint arts (he has a style of presentation named after him, for gods’ sake), in a greatly-compressed version of his talk on Academic Publishing in CERN, Switzerland. Kerim Friedman of the anthroblog Savage Minds performed the compression, for which all of us are, I’m sure, deeply grateful (he basically turned a 50mn piece into a 20mn piece).
Three MIT professors reflect on Fieldwork
What it means, how it means, and why it’s done. This charming, short, roughly 8mn video includes three professors of anthropology discussing, well, fieldwork. For those of us fascinated by fieldwork (both as a category, and as an actual practice, or set of practices), such reflections are really important, and often quite lyrical.
http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/_203822/uiconf_id/1898102/entry_id/1_ogaus7am/
My early years of teaching have been quite an education. While my students are inspiring, creative, and often, very cool, they are rarely, and never consistently, prepared to do even some of the most basic forms of academic work when they arrive. As such, one of my duties is to help instill habits of attention, work, and discipline, as appropriate in academic work. Things like reflecting on why we take notes, how we use them after they are taken, and what notes to take, should be more explicitly discussed. Here’s an excellent method – the famed “Cornell Note-taking” method, which divides a piece of paper into three sections, each with a different notational function.