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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
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Recent Posts
Adjuncts Take 'a Long Course in Poverty' | Comment [16]
AAUP Completes Dream Team | Comment [6]
Downwardly Mobile | Comment [62]
30 Seconds From Humiliation | Comment [61]
Certify, Retool -- or Stand and Fight? | Comment [9]
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.
Posted at 01:30:12 PM on April 8, 2008 | All postings by Marc BousquetComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Yes, MB. Indeed. Most important. But….
The problem is that the faculty need to be taught about the structure of the university in order to be able to teach it.
Most faculty come into the university on a daily basis like an airplane landing on its assigned runway. Nothing else matters except that runway.
And those runways are all on discipline-specific islands — so the only way in and out of them is from the outside; there are few if any bridges to take you from one island to another, one discipline to another, one segment of the university to another, one office to another.
And most faculty are contingent faculty, so they need to have the time to figure out the universities (pl.) that they work at — and where will they find that time?
Again, one returns to the responsibilities of the tenured faculty. It is one of their responsibilities, as part of shared governance, to inform themselves about the nature of the university. Do they? We all know the answer to that question.
Your book, which makes for a compelling read, pre-supposes some knowledge of the beast for its greatest effect.
Time for the tenured faculty to step up to the plate and actually earn their salaries by their research on and participation in shared governance — before it (shared governance) disappears completely from the face of American higher education.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 8, 02:04 PM · #
At the risk of shocking the readership, I have to say, AHA, I’m in complete agreement with you.
The biggest obstacle to Jeff’s idea—and I’ll raise it with him this weekend—is that the tenured faculty are not in a position to teach the university and many are deeply, willfully, astonishingly, unwilling to learn it.
Solidarity, M
— Marc Bousquet · Apr 8, 02:23 PM · #
Well, MB, I learned this the hard way early on.
As a dissertating grad student (at a nameless elite university, long, long ago) I was recruited to teach two residential college seminars — but when the students tapped me for a third: to teach a seminar on the structure of university governance, all hell broke loose.
No way, Jose; it is not “in your field”, said the representative of the faculty committee that vets college seminars (even though I had sat on the priorities and planning committee of the whole university for two years!).
Of course, that was the whole point: It’s everyone’s field in higher education. And it was the tenured faculty, not the students, who did not want it taught.
(P.S. As for our “agreement”, I daresay some of your readership is shocked on those rare occasions when you don’t agree with me. In fact, my refrain about the responsibilities of tenured faculty is found in many of your threads ;-).)
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 8, 02:56 PM · #
I recently graduated from Case Western Reserve University where the arts and sciences faculty passed a vote of no-confidence in the last president. The whole event was somewhat difficult for the university as a whole, by creating differences between students, faculty, administration, and alumni.
As a history and anthropology major I was fortunate enough to have professors (some of them the leaders of the dissenting faculty) who bothered to take the time to teach their students about what exactly was happening and how it affected us. As I understand it, the major battle was against the advancing corporate nature of the administration (which was hemorraging funds) and the lack of continuity with the legacy of the institution (the administration had “rebranded” the school to the point where many alumni felt forgotten).
As students we learned how everything is connected within the university, from stock holdings to professors to students to alumni. Personally I’ve gained a much broader understanding of how such enormous institutions, such as universities, function and affect the lives of more than just the people who work there. If it hadn’t been for professors willing to educate us on the subject, the vote of no-confidence would have been extremely alienating as a student. The way it worked out however, students, alumni, and faculty felt more connected than before and gained a strong sense of ownership over “our” university.
Unfortunately the subject of the university is difficult to fit into one field. Who is responsible to teach it? Most professors already feel they lack enough time in their classes to teach anything but the subject at hand. And finally, teaching the university often involves some ugly truths, such as the financial background, that some non-tenured faculty may be worried about teaching for fear of sounding divisive. Indeed, teaching the university is a difficult subject, but a necessary one.
PS – It’s been a while since MLA in Philadelphia, but it seems like you’re doing well Marc. I’ve been trying to find a copy of How the University Works, but I’m living in the mountains of France and there aren’t a lot of English-language bookstores around.
— Graham Steffen · Apr 9, 08:02 AM · #
I want to raise very important question. Iam staying in India.We are independent from British Raj 61 years ago, all our politicans, educators social scientists, crying again and again that we must change our education system. Today our education system is based on whim of British educationists, we are crying but no one actuly lchange it..
Recently I read a complient from one of the eminant educationist of U.S.that same problem is in U.S.also. All intelligent people complient that we must change education policy of U.S.
My question is why we do not actuly change the policy and only crying?
— Ramesh Raghuvanshi · Apr 9, 10:59 AM · #
For an entertaining (if it weren’t so tragic) gander at how little faculty actually seem to know about the history and legal underpinnings of academic freedom and tenure, go to the CHE blog thread at http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/times-up-for-tenure
Quite an eye-opener. How would these people “teach the university” when there is confusion about even what the First Amendment is and protects?
Of course, www.aaup.org has a repository of documents that would assist in “teaching the university”, but it’s pretty doubtful that the majority of faculty ever read them.
Only in America does one find a Senate that votes to give up its Constitutional right to declare war to a President — and only in America do tenured faculty ask to give up their academic freedom to their administrations.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 12:29 PM · #
The Adjunct Advocate’s Part-Time blogger has this fascinating analysis of the AAUP financial report from the US Department of Labor’s Website, which reveals that the AAUP spends more on itself than it does on its activities to support the membership, organize and educate the faculty:
http://www.adjunctadvocate.com/blog/archive/10164/
That’s perhaps part of the reason why the AAUP Website mentioned above gets so little traffic these days.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 02:43 PM · #
It was refreshing to teach at the University of Chicago, which, at the time I was there, had the epitome of administrative organizations—that is, an academic administration that left faculty entirely alone. When I went to an assistant part-time subordinate adjunct deputy dean for advice about what courses to put for the two course numbers entrusted to me upon hire—he replied “it is none of our business, we hire bright people and we leave them to hell alone”.
I liked that at the time, but came to love it, when, at later institutions, I found an abiding social layer of petty people, called “administrators” with ill-formed, trivial, bigotted, nasty ideas they kept interrupting faculty research with. If you install a dictator because you like what he does for the institution, do not be surprised when his replacement (or a contract-renewed version of himself) runs the entire organization into the ground in Mugabe-ism.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 11, 06:46 AM · #
AHA:
First Amendment issues haven’t been an obstacle at our institution, at least not yet. However, as a group that isn’t organized and doesn’t have a contract, a few of us are aware of how precarious a position we’re in.
Ramesh:
You ask a good question: :”. . . why we do not actuly change the policy and only crying?”
The very successful conference at Minnesota this past weekend proved that there are many people in the university—from janitors to clerical workers, to students and faculty—who are working very hard to effect real change.
At this conference at least, there were more people working on concrete solutions than crying.
— David Cerniglia · Apr 13, 10:07 PM · #
On Comment 9:
Yes, I agree: the “chilling effect” of de facto “at will” employment is itself a coercion against the exercise of free speech.
And an aside on the “tenure issue” (since it’s now fashionable for some professors to seriously discuss eliminating it to correct its abuses):
At the Minnesota conference, I assume that other university unionized workers — “from janitors to clerical workers” — also have personal stories to tell about the abuses of their own (often civil service )versions of a “tenure system”— but I’d bet not one of them would consider giving that up and expect to have any form of free speech left — or right.
The tenure system is the central issue: its guarantees of academic freedom and job security are precisely what administrations find “inconvenient” in the university — and why they are increasingly relying on contingent labor (and contracting out, BTW).
Thus, it is precisely the dual guarantees of the tenure system which must be secured for the exploding numbers of contingent faculty.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 08:03 AM · #