A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
Practice Module on Hierarchy
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: October 10, 1998
Latest Update: August 25, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
academy frogs
by jeanne
frogs?
princes?
'tis arrogance all
watch them blow up and up
this colorful hiearchy
of privilege held not to account
not to recompense
the sweet commitment of truth
Duncan Kennedy's displeasure with hierarchy.
from Kairys, Politics of Law
From October 10, 1998.Duncan Kennedy's frustration with hierarchy is based largely on the educational infrastructure it fosters and supports, recreating itself in the manner of an auto-poietic non-learning subsystem. Those who have power at each level in a hierarchy tend to puff up like bullfrogs and bully those with less power. Research from preschool on has shown that when exposed to such behavior, students tend to imitate it. (Look at the educational literature on how elementary and preschool children imitate forceful and aggressive actions, such as hitting the table, when their teachers exhibit such behavior. Bandura and Walters.)
I think Kennedy is wrong in his frustration with his students. He establishes dyadic one-on-one relationships with them and is then frustrated when their response to the institutional system is not consistent with that dyadic relationsip. Susan Silbey's work on normative relationships within the legal system confirms that one cannot transfer one-on-one patterns of relationships from face to face groups onto institutional patterns. If professors aren't willing to deal with the puffed up bull frogs of bullying, then students are in no position to do so. But if Kennedy found measures of the relationships he has built with students and their effects, I don't think the evaluations would be nearly as unenthusiastic as he assumes. He is asking his students to measure the effectiveness of teaching within their rules, their system, not his, not his students'.
Notes for Study:
August 25, 2002.As I return to these notes almost four years later, I realize that many of you will no longer have access to Duncan Kennedy's article on first year Harvard Law School. So I need to fill in background. Harvard is still a relatively elite school, in terms of its economic foundations, and in terms of its scholastic standards. That certainly doesn't mean that all the students at Harvard are "A" students. Maintaining the endowment means maintatining the links with wealthy families who have funded that endowment for a couple of centuries.
But Harvard does have its pick of the elite of our students. Yes, there are still "Gentermen's C's," but those who do not fall in that category are admitted by intense competitiveness. If one doesn't want that competitiveness, one wouldn't apply to Harvard. So I always worried about Duncan Kennedy's complaint about the extent to which the liberal, left students catered to those of his colleagues who were arrogant and not the least concerned for the student's story or situation. He was actually hurt that sometimes the students gave lower evaluation ratings to the liberal, caring, professors who did see them as complex individuals with something important to say about their own education.
As much as I appreciate Duncan Kennedy's work (He writes eloquently, saying things like "the patina of consent . . ." ), I find it naive for the idealists of the left to believe that students in a traditional school will respond free of the constraints of competitivenesss. That's a lot like counting on the authentic subjectivities of our liberal students coming to the fore and carrying the forum. We know how difficult it is when you're young and challenged, even when you're lots older and still challenged, to find the authentic "you," and defend it in the public sphere. If we're smart, when we're young, we know how little we still know. Hard to stand up to an arrogant puffed up bull frog and tell him we know better, legally, philosophically, morally, whatever.
And the more we understand of colonialism, of dominance, the more we understand how hard it is for the exlcluded or exploited one to locate what is authentic in him/herself behind the colonization of the mind and the lifeworld. The more we look reflexively at our lifeworld, the more we realize the embeddedness of our knowledge in that part of the world which we know.
In light of theoretical trends today, I am even more convinced than I was four years ago that it is not our students we should expect to rout the hierarchy, but ourselves. We have had the time to protect our skills in securely reflexive egos, the time to learn the system ploys that can foil the arrogance of the puffed up bull frogs. And the students are our charges to whom we owe a special duty. By creating an intellectual climate that refuses the arrogance of hierarchy, that considers the changing conditions under which we live and their consequences for our students lived experience, and that recognizes the dignity and respects the validity claims of all, I think we'll find that our students really do arise to the occasion.
Puffed Up Bull Frogs Scaling the Academy Wall for a Great FallThe arrogant academy clung to the wall
The whole darned academy had a great fall
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum
What were ya thinkin' of, Mon?
Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.
