Comments to Jeanne Curran
Latest draft uploaded: April 16, 1998.
Back to Table of Contents for Dear Habermas
As California continues to discuss the "privatization" of technology, deals are considered with IBM, Microsoft, and other such large corporations. This is perhaps in keeping with the concept of the university student as a "client" and the marketing of degrees. That, in turn is fully in keeping with the concepts being thrown about of "distance learning." Suddenly every publisher and media mogul is hustling a "better" product to "can" and market.
The potential is scary for a lot of reasons, and some of us who are disadvantaged by our position on the playing field are angry at the monopolization and the arrogance of the way the game is being played. This paper is a first attempt to put the anger aside long enough to gain some critical distance that could let us begin discourse in which we at simple second and third tier universities might be allowed to present our validity claims in good faith. That's hard. It's hard because we really are angry, and it's hard to put that anger aside. It's hard because we don't have enough technological support at most of our institutions to afford us adequate experience, so that we can base our remarks on the kind of expertise to which we became accustomed (as doctoral students at the research institutions.)
Frederick Jackson Turner, in his oratory on the University of Wisconsin, heralded the state colleges as the hope of this nation. Critical theory contests some of Turner's conclusions on the frontier theory today, but his promise of the potential of the state universities has proven prophetic. For many years the state systems offered affordable higher education. But Turner cautioned us against abdicating our professional responsibility to determine a curriculum that would meet the needs of genuine educated thought. He warned us not to allow the popular culture to choose the curriculum, the canon, on the basis of short term or popular training. Technology and "distance learning" are indeed being touted now as popular choices, the degree that can be awarded from an institution that has no classrooms, merely administrative offices. And privatization speaks also of state schools partnering with corporations whose stated objective is "profit." These are frightening developments to those of us who believed in liberal arts education as requisite to solid thinking and preparation on the part of our future leaders.
Where most college students have been granted free accounts for access to the Internet, some colleges, like ours, are making deals with private Internet Providers to recognize the provider in return for a uniform (relatively) lower fee to the students. Perhaps the provider gave something in return for the extra help in cornering this lucrative market, but, if so, in all the budget and computer committees I sat on, not only was no such return ever reported to us, our questions on this were brushed aside and not directly and fully answered. This is one of the sources of our anger – the extent to which such information is kept from us, unless we have the extra measure of energy to separately and carefully follow the issue. Most of us teaching four courses have no such excess of energy in the last decades of our teaching careers.
When you consider the importance of faculty governance to the healthy development and growth of the university, this poorly disguised form of management by information control can only portend disastrous results for the university. Uninformed "administered" faculty become workers who often make the ultimately depressing choice of giving no more for a fair day's wage than a fair day's work. Education is lost as a goal in exchange for a focus on fair exchange.
This awful bargain may indeed be typical of the whole attitude of the "administered" society of which Craig Calhoun speaks in describing how we have moved from genuine representation in governance to supervision. This may be argued as fitting on a workshop floor, where work is readily assessed. It is ludicrous as measure of the work of teaching, which of necessity goes on in the more private sphere of the classroom. The proliferation of administrative titles and excuses for not teaching have grown steadily on the university campus, at least all of which I know. The operating theory seems to be that teachers won't teach unless we make them do so, so we have to supervise them closely to see that they do. Of course, that brings the situation in which the graduate student who entered the profession to contribute to the frontiers of knowledge sees himself as having been lied to, having been promised what society has never provided – the respectful use of the knowledge he struggled so hard to develop, and as now being recast in a role in which he is "supervised" as he might have been as a factory worker. Why are we surprised when he thus refuses to be so supervised and uses his well trained ingenuity to find ways to perplex the supervisors, many of whom have had by far less rigorous educations than his own? He knows his graduate study wasn't bargain basement priced, and maybe not bargain-basement earned. The more promise he had, the more bitter he is likely to be.
The best bargain approach lends itself readily to the university trying to palm off the cheapest product it can for the price it can command. I, for one, am tired of hearing the president of my campus whine that we, the liberal arts faculty, simply cost too much. Only in the last decade or so have entire departments been "tenured in" with no new growth funds to support their hirings. Of course, we are more expensive now that we have spent "our best years" in the same institution because the economic phenomenon hit most universities at all levels at about the same time. That is one side of the coin which moves the university toward part-time faculty with no benefits, and no commitment to the university, the department, or the students. Fifty-two percent of the faculty on our campus are non tenure track. Why then should the administration be surprised when that fosters an attitude amongst some beleaguered and worn out faculty that the university would be a nice place to work if it weren't for students? Customers don't hold the corporation responsible for having their best interest at heart. Students traditionally have done, and should do.
The traditional promise of the American frontier and individual achievement held at least through the 50s. The Ph.D. was for many of us a "first in family" degree. For many of us the B.A. had been that, too. But then, in our eagerness to market degrees that would sell, we promised much more than we could deliver. By the early 70s (and for women, who followed their husbands to jobs across the country before jets were popular) that was when many of us were finishing the long trek through to the doctorate. But musical chairs had suddenly become stationary. Professors were no longer so free to move about as departments lost students and workload. By the late 70s the career trend to the doctorate was over. Law and medicine offered greater promise of "success." And many were even learning that the doctorate no longer promised the freedom to push back the frontiers of thought and knowledge. They sought careers in writing, journalism, other fields where they hoped to move.
But for many of us who had accepted the promise as it was undoubtedly genuinely made, began to discover that movement between universities was far less than we had expected. Many had to accept part time teaching positions when tenure track positions were no longer offered. We developed into "freeway fliers," teaching where and when we could. This was nothing like the dream.
Through all those years of the 70s I bought into the language of the non-traditional student. Takata and I and many others of us developed "non-traditional" teaching techniques. We took seriously the promise Turner spoke of in the state universities. But now, as we look back in retrospect at what happened to many of us, we find that we simply bought into the language offered us by the system. We were the ones who were non-traditional, not our students. Our students were the very people Turner had dreamed of educating.
Takata and I write by phone, by e-mail, by whatever means can get us together. At this point, I want to include an e-mail she sent me as we talked about this phenomenon. It's important that her words be used. For she was my student 25 years ago. Her expression of what we are feeling is one you need to hear first-hand, as she felt it.
"I do think we need to focus on the nontraditional teaching/teachers (rather than the nontraditional students). It's not necessarily first generation PhD's though. There are many, many more first generation Ph.D.s than nontraditional teachers, but when you combine the two-- nontraditional teachers who are first generation Ph.D.'s then you're "out of the loop," in terms of publishing, the kind of university/college one teaches at, etc. etc.
Why is it that we manage to connect with the Craig Calhoun, the Derrick Bells, the Stanley Mosks – those on the very top want to play with us, but all those in between create hierarchical structures from the middle trying to make their way up. Hmmmm.
Yes, we are like "supermoms" in many ways. Or in race relations, they call it the "Jackie Robinson syndrome," the first African American in major league baseball (where he not only had to be far superior at bat, but in fielding the ball and everything else)."
Many is the time, since Takata and I have been chairing departments at UWP and CSUDH for the last two years, that I have lamented to her that perhaps I taught her the wrong things. When she replicated my non-traditional teaching, I felt terrible. I despaired of any new faculty member getting tenure with such an approach. It is significant that I never expected the Ph.D.s and J.D.s who have returned as professionals to work with me. After all, I wasn't at their degree granting institutions, and I respected the class levels amongst institutions as much as the institutions did. There were even times when I resented the extra work with no promise of reward. (Talk about fair day's wages!) I had never been given the opportunity to publish. I didn't understand that manuscript networks even existed. I had been a wife all my life!
Now, I look to Takata's way of expressing what we're up against, and I see how much I've learned from those professionals who came home to CSUDH. Craig Calhoun e-mailed me at CSUDH from our Web site. Derrick Bell came to CSUDH for our moot court performance. Stanley Mosk graciously came to judge our moot court and grant it his name. And Takata describes these events with an obvious sharing. Yes, the site is up and available at Wisconsin. But we haven't managed enough grants yet to buy her the equipment she needs, let alone the time to play more actively. Yet we've managed to get around that. We've managed to make OUR activities, OUR writing, really ours, with poor equipment and less support.
At first, of course, I took credit for this being a gender issue. Women had been "supermothers" as I had pointed out to her. We had simply encountered the glass ceiling. We were and should have been proud of getting partially around it. We were by no means alone. We all stay in touch, and there are many of us. But then our attempt to explain all this theoretically, to gain some critical distance for our anger and frustration, led me to listen more carefully. I had male colleagues who had been through many of the same disappointments. The dream had failed to flower for lots of us. And most of us, for whom this despair set in, were trying through the better part of our careers to develop non-traditional approaches to achieve solid critical thinking in a context we had known as students. Susan had found one of the keys even as I ranted to her over e-mail or over our Web site.
This exchange on non-traditional faculty occurred just a couple of months after we set up our Web site, Dear Habermas. That site grew directly out of sociology of law and theories classes. We had decided that if our students didn't read original text (translated) Habermas now, as undergraduates, they might never get a taste of it, for there surely wouldn't be much time in a doctoral program or in law school, and most of our students wouldn't pursue their studies that far anyway. The site grew out of our attempt to give our students confidence in thinking about the major social issues of our day and theirs. We translated, we interpreted, but we sent them always back to the original. And they were ever so proud of that.
And then we began Dear Habermas in hard copy to answer their questions like a Dear Abby column. We stopped apologizing for not being philosophers, and we tried seriously to create discourse with our students. The role we played in that discourse was to respect their validity claims, hear them in good faith, and then join them in trying to communicate better what their claims really were. We found that often they said things in the only words we had given them, just like we said things about non-traditional students because that's what it was socially acceptable and maybe publishable to say. But if we listened past those words, we found that we could help them discover ways to discourse that didn't give us more than we could do to listen and respond. It took the Web site. But with the Web site, we could do it.
Then we found Fox's article on intertextuality, in which he talked about how important were the notes he had taken that he left out of his dissertation. He spoke to their importance to understanding text. And we got it. We and our students were writing text. We weren't writing professionally publishable stuff because we were too busy creating discourse and teaching. And we had always discounted that, because everybody knows that what students write is just drudgery to be graded. Finally, thanks to Fox, we asked "who says so." And when we answered, we pulled out our e-mails and discovered that we had been writing the only kind of text we had the discretionary time for.
The grinch that stole language. We wrote about him in one of our papers. The arrogant and fixed hierarchy had stolen the language of value. The language of text. I had despaired of every finding the time to write or even read like Craig Calhoun, and I had accepted that as my failing. But when we took back our language, and we saw ourselves as the non-traditional ones, we found why we didn't like being relegated to poster sessions and roundtables when we couldn't find the time to put together major papers. Depends I think on the organization and its attitude, but lots of times those are for those who just couldn't compete in the major sessions otherwise. I remember a part-time teacher in our department who told me that she realized that now after a few years of "freeway flying" that she wasn't as marketable in a tenure-track position. It was, she said, her own fault for not "publishing more." The grinch again. And we were buying it, perhaps even more than our students had.
It didn't take long to discover that when we wrote for our students, with our students, and when we granted that discourse the status of text, we stopped feeling apologetic for "not having done more research and published more." And that seems appropriate – that we should have found our own texts through trying to provide them for our students.
Conclusion
We still don't have much discretionary time, and no discretionary support. Takata couldn't make it here today. And I couldn't really afford it. But, hey, I've been a "Supermom" before. I'm just not buying that it's OK anymore. And I heard myself say to a male colleague who had been swamped with legitimate crises, and from whose benefit on their behalf I had personally benefitted, "Well, I've read X, and Y, and Z" and I puffed up like a research institution bull frog, as he said, "Well, you're ahead of me." But I listened in good faith, and was ashamed of myself.
There wasn't enough room at the top in the 70s, and there certainly hasn't been anymore since then. But we don't have to buy into a system that says you have to be at the top to have your validity claim heard. I mean, if we can't get discourse going across universities, does Habermas really have any hope for a future? We're the ones to whom they made the promises. If the take the language back from the grinch, and if we listen to each other in good faith, we've always found, as Takata said so well, the people at the top listen in good faith. For the first time since I started to put the site up last December, gee, I wish Habermas would take a look. I think it might give him a lot of insight into discourse.
If you'd like to visit our site, you're welcome. We guarantee we'll listen to your claims in good faith. Try us at:
http://www.csudh.edu
You'll find us at the Dear Habermas link under the Sociology Department. See ‘ya.