By some quirk I have been able to catch up with email, letters of
rec, guest lectures, meetings, and my own teaching long enough to catch
up, at least partly, with xmca discussions.
I found the Sunderland and Graham piece about commodification of
the Australian university sadly descriptive of the University of California.
What was once a PUBLIC university has become more and more privatized, a lot
of it on the backs of its students, with economic rationalism as the rationale.
The use of Jay's "three aspects of discourse" ideas applied as a
method of analysis for the purpose of making the case in this paper caught
my special attention not only because jay is a part of this community, but
also because it creates a natural focus on modes of communication as a
great locus for analysis in a widely apppropriatable way.
One consequence of the neo-liberal point of view which has struck
me in the past couple of years, but which does not get treated in the paper
(although it certainly fits) is that students who are socialized into a
client relationship want a particular kind of service from professors that
is antithetical to my views of what higher education is about: they get
resentful if they are not spoonfed to-be-remembered facts in easy-to-decode
multiple choice questions. They view pedagogical methods which do not
depend on known answer questions and require uncertain, sustained, thinking
as cheating on the professor's part. They routinely ask, "Will we be
tested on the stuff before the mid-term on the final?" (I do not want to
totalize here-- a lot of studcnts are thrilled when they get a smaller class
and can engaged in critical discourse/research/debate, etc -- but the
phenomenon I am describing is very pervasive).
Professors, for their part, have only their old time ethos to
motivate them from playing along. After all, faced with 300 students, who
wants to give weekly writing assignments of 1000 words?
Another very sad situation is developing at my university owing to
the severe economic downturn we are experiencing. As a way of dealing with
the outlawing of affirmative action programs and the clear social injustices
in our whole educational system, the state legislature provided faculty
who would engage in serious research and practice of academic outreach
resources to do so. But in a letter from the top sent around last week,
administrators started a campaign of distinguishing the "core mission" of
the university from its "peripheral" missions. Guess where outreach got
placed? And, of course, in the budget for the university, outreach is
defined as "service." Multiple marginalization for values I hold dear.
On the other hand, there was also talk of a new early retirement
program-- this time I will be old enough to qualify. And, if the past
predicts the future, they will pay me to come back and teach, legalized
double dipping. And if my teaching involves practicum courses that put
students into the community to figure out how to combine theory and
practice of HUMAN education, well, I might just get a raise in pay for
being marginalized. Wouldn't that be nice!
mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Dec 01 2001 - 01:00:58 PST