ABSTRACT:

This paper is a theoretical and empirical analysis of sources of excluded identities within mature institutions, with a focus on understanding the importance of the exclusion and the opportunities for institutional deterrence of such exclusion. The issue was highlighted by the eruption of violence at in the high school in Colorado. But adults preceded the children in such explosions of anger and frustration. We document the phenomenon in a traditional institution of higher education. This study focuses on both the professional identities within the academy and the student identities as affected by the overall climate of the institution. "Structural violence" is the causing of harm by inflexibility and rigidity of the rules of the structure in dealing with difference. Through the analysis of gender, race, and class, we have become much more aware in recent years of the harm that can be caused without any given perpetrator, by the holding to rules that do not allow for differences. Labeling is an example of the structural violence of the language of the social system. In school and in the system of juvenile justice, students are labeled "delinquent" or "deviant." It is structurally violent because it defines someone's identity with respect to another's rules and perceptions of behavior.

Outline of Issues

Time and Space Constraints

Higher education becomes increasingly expensive in terms of cost to both the educator and the student.
• Jobs, families, and education in conflict over both time and space.
• Traffic and problems of distance. Including use of technology.
• Economy of size considerations for most institutions. The reification of bureaucracy and large scale management of production and consumption.

Rigidity of Bureaucratization

Within a bureaucracy there is very much a rigid hierarchy, altered primarily through intensive competition at the site of tournament mobility. The competitive aspect of struggle for position in the hierarchy, where only winners compete in the next round, tends to heighten the adversarial compulsion. The hierarchy tends to retreat to moral authority when challenged, and those who are not excluded from the higher ranks of tournament mobility are pretty much colonized by those who are included.

The rigidity of the hierarchy is felt by the faculty and students who are excluded, but the students are those who were never even permitted to compete in the tournaments. They must obey the rules of the hierarchy, in order to maintain the hierarchy as it exists.

• Felt in the enforcement of rules as morally binding.
  • Being on time.
  • Lockstep progress, in which all jump the same barrierss, read the same materials.
  • Cost and constraints. The more you pay for the education, the lesser the constraints, as education is increasingly privatized.
• Felt in relationships in which students are to be seen and to read, but not given a forum to include their thoughts and validity claims in the intertextuality of academic discourse.
  • Academic discourse forum offers way to include student pieces in intertextuality. As such offers a means of transforming some of the rigidity of the hierarchy by redefining exclusion.

Transforming the Adversarialism of the Dominant Discourse

Jean Paul Sartre says in the Preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth:

"And when you have read Fanon's last chapter, you will be convinced that it would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be a former settler. . . . It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name, it's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself."

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