Teach the University!

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13.

One of the sessions will feature Jeff Williams, Heather Steffen, David Cerniglia, and Eric Leuschner on the importance of engaging undergraduates in debates about the meaning, purpose, funding, and nature of higher education.

This is a persuasive position since undergraduates are the largest group of stakeholders in the institution, yet draw their information about it from a hodgepodge of under-informed and often mendacious sources.

I’m particularly interested in Steffen and Cerniglia’s paper, “Composing the University,” which reflects on their experience of teaching the university in a first-year writing course. Ultimately, they are making the arguments made by Jefferson and Dewey. “The university as a topic for composition courses makes sense for both their humanities gen ed content goals and their writing goals,” Steffen says:

Our ultimate objective in teaching the university and in thinking about its potential as a pedagogical move is to discover whether knowing more about the institution in which they spend four — or often more — years of their lives can help to make students more critical, active citizens of the university and, by extension, other communities in which they participate.

Steffen and Cerniglia are Jeff Williams’s research assistants for minnesota review, a widely-respected humanities journal that may soon discontinue publication due to the quality-management of Carnegie Mellon University. (By continually pressing for such “quality improvements” as asking one graduate student to do the work of two, or for the editor to edit without summer pay, etc.)

Williams’s own paper draws on his recent article for Pedagogy (Winter 2008), and makes a series of arguments against continuing the notion that the university is a transparent or neutral place from which to accomplish other things.

“Next to healthcare,” Williams says, higher education

“is the most significant public institution of our day that speaks to the distribution of resources and the welfare of citizens. Prompting students to reflect on how they are formed, where modern institutions come from and how they work, is, I should think, a primary pedagogical goal of higher education and especially of criticism.”

The Pedagogy article offers many suggestions for courses fulfilling this ideal — from a course in the academic novel, to a historical survey of the changing idea of the university, to courses treating “the student” as an anthropological, sociological, or internationally comparative subject, or a course on particular themes relevant to student life — such as the growing problem of debt or the hyper-exploitation of the undergraduate as a source of cheap labor. More on the latter tomorrow with respect to my own contribution, Extreme Work-Study.