I very much appreciate your remarks. If I read them correctly they remind me of
what the editor of WIRED magazine calls "critical optimism." As I think I have a
more optimistic view of what is becoming than do many members of this list, your
remarks also make me think of John Holland's (1994) line, complex adaptive
systems often have to "unlearn" what they know best, or "let go" of what they
know best, in order to learn new ways to make the system better.
I doubt that I will make many friends with this, but I do believe downward
mobility is staring us (faculty) in the face and we do need to learn some new
ways of functioning in the world, perhaps learning to use new tools, that will
make the system(s) better. What I have enjoyed most on this list are the
contributions regarding "learning." What if Fifth Dimension practices were to be
more extensively applied? Forge partnerships to create new forms of schooling.
Become prepared to go out on our own, beyond the halls of traditional academe? At
the very least begin to prepare students to do so.
Events at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association this past week
illustrate how "radical" graduate students are arguing for an old model, from a
former set of circumstances. They are kicking and screaming because they don't
want change. From the perspective of this graduate student of the 60's and 70's
today's radicals are like "the reversal of spin of the waterwheel or in a
convecting fluid," they have become conservatives. They only want employ in the
"traditional" tenured, vertically stratified university. Or, they don't
understand that the employ they seek is pretty much interdependent with tightly
bounded disciplines, where open inquiry or diversity of thought and expression
among students and faculty has not been so highly honored. For more information
on the MLA meeting see the January 8 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed, or
visit http://chronicle.com.
Just for fun, try doing a search on the Chronicle of Higher Ed site for "faculty
fear."
M. Freeman
Alfred Lang wrote:
> Dear XMCA-community,
>
> a bit late, if you take 01-01 to be one of those ritual passages from a bit
> of past into a bit of future, I wish everybody a good past when looking
> back at it after another year. Mike's story of us walking backwards into
> the future provokes me as being actually descriptive of our factual
> behaving rather than as a reasonable "should". Even if we imagine ourselves
> as holding hands and straining to turn heads, the single angelus given
> company. Because we can do that only with our immediate neighbors and it
> forces us somhow into an overconforming group.
>
> So I like to propose another story to feel oneselves temporally involved in
> past and future and fully present. It is simply the situation of
> cultivating guests and scouts.
> Guests bring glimpses into other worlds and so do scouts going and bringing
> back of their experience. The interesting thing in what they say and
> demonstrate in the form of stories and artefacts is for us to find out
> whether such presents us with models or similes of our past or of our
> futures. Any mixture thereof has to be taken in consideration. So it
> amounts to a task, the ordinary task of being alive: to compare and
> valuate, to bring it in relation what we already are. And to construct out
> of that bewildering diversity our own decent future.
>
> Have a good time, Alfred
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch
> Website: http://www.cx.unibe.ch/psy/ukp/langpapers/
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------