COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 Perhaps we should assume that Alison Schneider has tongue firmly in cheek when she writes: "Learning for learning's sake, scholars maintain, has flown out the window. Today's students are more interested in finding a job than in debating the fine points of Foucault." After all, wouldn't Foucault regard even the concept of classroom decorum (let alone its enforcement) as merely another ideological apparatus of social control and domination? No doubt this comment seems trivial or off the point to many readers. Yet Ms. Schneider chose Foucault's name for a reason, which is that it would be recognized. This suggests, accurately, the popularity of his work among academics. And is it not reasonable to inquire whether or not the content of the books of the most popular thinkers on American college campuses may have some relationship to how people behave on those campuses? Indeed, there are many, many scholars in the humanities who explicitly argue that the point of what they are doing is not "learning for learning's sake," and should not be, as that is a reactionary concept which masks a program of political indoctrination. Instead, they advocate various forms of resistance, subversion, disruption, and political action. Indeed, a recent volume (1996) published by none other than the MLA is called Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities, and many of the contributors clearly feel that such advocacy ! of the kinds I have described is not only admirable, but necessary. One wonders how they run their classrooms. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that disruptive students are curled up with Michel's tracts late at night; and I'm not suggesting hordes of humanities professors are advocating disrupting classrooms (though this has happened); and I'm not suggesting we shouldn't read Foucault ourselves (I do). I'm also not suggesting that people shouldn't engage in subversive behavior if the spirit moves them (it has moved me plenty of times). What I am suggesting is that the incivility which Ms. Schneider's article accurately documents may bear relation not only to extramural phenomena, but to an intellectual world in which Foucault is taken more seriously as a social thinker than, say, Max Weber. Ideas matter, even to people who do not understand them, and may not have ever even heard of them. The culture of entitlement which exists in many colleges and universities today, and leads directly to current standards for appropriate behavior, is due at least in part to the ideas and attitudes held dear by so many professors and administrators. I have no suggestions whatsoever about how to change this state of affairs, if change is what is in fact desired. I only wish to argue that my description of it is true.
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