Arielle is a college student living in Philadelphia. In her spare time, she writes a ‘zine, works at an anarchist bookstore, drinks lots of coffee, and fights the patriarchy one day at a time.
In many ways, I am a model college student (never thought I’d say that!). I have straight A’s, I am passionate about my major (Women’s Studies, soon to be changed to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies which I strongly prefer), and still find time for activism and a social life. So it was surprising, then, that I should find myself looking at the website of Goddard and other alternative college options, and wondering if my decision to go to college hadn’t been a mistake altogether.
The main catalyst of this sudden crisis in my education was learning that my university, Temple, was phasing out its Women’s Studies program due to budget cuts. Or maybe just phasing it out because it’s convenient, I’m not really sure anymore. I don’t want to get into the whole mess but to give a brief rundown: several departments were subsumed into other ones. This meant the Women’s Studies Program was subsumed into Sociology, the Latin American Studies Program into History, the Jewish Studies Program into Religion, and so on. At first the students were told the reasons were financial, then practical, and finally that the changes were really to “strengthen” the departments. Never mind that the head of the Sociology department had no training in Women’s Studies and did feel equipped to advise or make decisions. Never mind that teachers were expected to pick up extra advising duties for less pay and the position of department head was eliminated. It was all very complicated, sudden, bureaucratic, and hidden. There was a lack of transparency by administrators and in meetings all the animosity of faculty against students and professors was laid bare. The whole situation was frustrating, to say the least. The dean made it very clear that she was not going to change her mind about the decision and that while students and professors had a right to speak their minds, she was not really willing to take into account anything they said. No one wants to hear that they’re just a number, but in this instance it became painfully obvious that students were considered little more than potential paychecks for the university. It was also clear that programs about minorities and marginalized people, along with arts and social sciences, are the first to go on the chopping block when cuts have to be made. I guess what was most shocking about it was that it wasn’t really shocking at all— this kind of tactic is widely accepted and normalized at every level of education.
I find the very idea of a department centered on a marginalized group troubling in some ways, because it excuses the university from having to deal with the discrimination in other areas. While having a Women’s Studies department is incredibly important in one way as an outlet for protest and examining things through a gendered lens, the university is basically indicating that this is the only place where challenging sexism is welcome. For instance, in Temple’s required course Mosaic, (essentially an English course focused on crucial texts in our society) there were hardly any books included in the syllabus by women or people of color. When I brought this up to my professor, he stated that the university was aware of this, but was not going to do anything to change it. Programs centered on identity politics and resistances to systems of oppression are extremely vital to any university, but I worry that these programs have become tamer since their inception and now serve mainly to placate groups that would otherwise be fighting for more inclusion throughout the university.
The subdued nature of many once strong social justice programs is symptomatic of what colleges have become: “education” machines. Students go to get degrees so that they can find jobs (and then find that they have to go to grad school because a Bachelor’s degree isn’t enough), professors are all trying to get tenure so they spend most of their time researching and leave their teaching assistants to pick up the slack, adjuncts barely scrape by on meager pay and are easily fired because the university can always find someone else willing to fill the position. College is still mostly for the wealthy and privileged, but schools like Temple are made up mainly of working class students that go because it’s what they can afford. They shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice the quality of their education because of their income level, but it is glaringly obvious that most colleges operate with a capitalist philosophy—that is, the end goal is to produce the most degrees (which have become a commodity) for the cheapest price, to ensure the greatest profit.
It is maddening to be a current college student, and know that your opinions and unique characteristics, dreams, and goals, matter so little to your chosen university. It is also maddening to know that there is no place for dissent within the university (so much for the stereotype of the liberal college), and if there is that you are given essentially a box within which to make noise, and are not allowed to go outside that box.
I was at a friend’s house reading some poetry when it hit me. I don’t even generally like poetry that much, but looking over Theodore Roethke, Cheryl Clarke, and Allen Ginsberg poems I was truly moved. And that’s when I remembered: I came to college because I love to learn. I decided to go to college because I have a great hunger for books, stories, and different ways of thinking. I came to Temple to seek out the voices on the margins that are every bit as brilliant and inspired as the ones our society privileges.
I am not giving up in that goal. But I want to know that whatever college I choose to go to will support me in that quest and not hinder it in the name of financial gain.
Very moving, Arielle. After a (sort of unintentional) year off from the education system, I’m about to start grad school in the US. I did my BA in the UK, and – while I think that the current upheavals in UK higher education make this an ideal time to be leaving the UK system – I’m aware that the US system is chockablock with similar problems. I’m lucky enough to be going to a small, very progressive school whose minorities programs are its cornerstone, but I know how rare that is.
Higher education is extremely money-driven, and it seems to be getting worse. :(
I definitely agree with what Rainicorn and you said. Being a college student myself, I’ve come to realize that I’m attending my “not so ideal” school because it is financially more affordable. Although it is a great school and I’m learning a lot, I’m just not happy there. Although there aren’t any cuts of budgeting at my school, I do understand your grief. I’m looking into schools that have my specified major/interest, and it seems that there’s becoming less and less options and college is becoming more and more expensive. Higher education is practically becoming unattainable because of the raising prices. I really do hope things work out Arielle and it’s amazing to see how you’re still fighting for your dreams.
I totally agree–addressing marginalized voices across a wide range of classes and subject areas is a very good solution.
The same thing happened to me where I got my undergraduate degree. Social and Behavioral Sciences had always been the smallest in the university based on enrollment, and a decision from up top was made to consolidate them together. The school itself was driven by the Sciences, particularly the top-tier Medical School, so we tended to get the scraps off of the table.
Anthropology was squished together with History, which was not an especially welcome, nor especially helpful decision. Anthropology students and professors are usually very different from History students and professors.
But, in some ways, having a relatively limited number of content areas where one could attain a degree was helpful. There wasn’t a formal Political Science major, but often History classes were taught as Poli Sci/History hybrids. Sometimes they were combined with an even more specialized field, American Studies.
At least when I was there, Women’s Studies/Gender Studies/Queer Theory, et al were not degree-bearing. At best, they could be selected as electives. My minor was English, but I could have selected Creative Writing instead, and because I focused more on it than on literature, my minor might as well be in Creative Writing.
I went to a hippie college (as I call it). It had less than 500 students, orientation was a backpacking trip, classes were hands-on (my sexuality class went to a strip club and put on a drag show). It was paradise in many ways. Teachers were very involved and had a lot of freedom. However, this also meant that if you wanted to learn about something that was outside of your professors’ areas of expertise, you had to teach yourself or find an outside teacher. Small school are very limited in some ways. Though I learned what I wanted to learn, it took work and some creativity to get it. I wish there was a way for students to have the personalized education of a small school with the diversity offered by a large institution. Large schools, however, seem to be battening down the hatches and reducing the academic freedom of their students and professors, while small schools are struggling to get the money to keep their current programs going. It is a worrying situation.
[...] material that also incidentally sounds like a feminine hygiene product, featured an article, “The Tyranny of Education” to talk about how oppressive universities are to marginalized groups. The writer expresses [...]
I feel ya. I’ve been pointing out instructors that we don’t read enough female writers or writers of colour (or focus on women or people of colour besides MLK Jr. and Susan B. Anthony…) since middle school, and as an undergrad am still doing so. It’s completely exasperating.
For context, ALL the interdisciplinary programs at Temple are being “relocated” to other departments: for example, American Studies is being housed in the English department. And it is largely a financial decision. There is, quite bluntly, not enough money to sponsor so many departments. Just as there is not enough money to hire scholars as professors, so they are hired and exploited as adjuncts instead, and the grad students have been phased into “gradjuncts.” (That last transition, which came last year and was another top-down, comments-are-closed decision by the dean, is what spurred my decision to leave my graduate program at Temple and pursue other work – though I have since found that the staffing situation is no less dire in other institutions I care about, such as publishing and museums).
My reason for bringing this up is to illustrate that basically, universities are borked. Totally screwed. If Temple’s dean’s decisions are tyrannical and not informed by the students’ and staff’s needs – which is true – it’s also worth noting that the decisions are made in the face of ever-mounting debt and ever-shrinking support from the state government. (Living in Philadelphia, the OP may also have noticed that the arts and culture funding have been seriously slashed as well.) Without external support such as government funding, the university has to generate revenue and cut costs by acting like a business – which results in pretty much the antithesis of a creative collaborative learning space, as the OP frets.
tl;dr: I basically agree with all of the OP’s concerns, but wanted to point out that the troubles of the this university are much broader than the university itself and emerge from a place much higher up than our dean.
Thank you for this post, Arielle. It reminds me of the book “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs, which discusses the decay of 5 key pillars in our society, one of which is higher education.
I think while the system of higher education is becoming more and more corporatized, it is lucky that we have the internet, and blogs such as this, where we can seek higher knowledge without the tyrrany of departments and deans and whatnot. Although, the tyrrany of Google may be no better :P
To contextualize this, a great read on the increasingly top-down nature of decision-making in universities is Wannabe U by Gaye Tuchman.
I think Tanglethis has hit on the underlying issue: Universities just don’t have the open-ended funding they used to. And that’s because the oligarchy is skimming everything above the bare minimum that’s required to keep society functioning, which was the essence of the banking meltdown and subsequent “bailout.”
It really is all connected.
Marc Bousquet’s book _How the University Works_ is really useful for understanding the larger dynamics catfood mentioned. It’s not just Temple (and it’s not just universities).
The B.A. today is the high school diploma of a couple of generations ago, its the proof that an employer looks for that an potential employee is reasonably skilled and educated enough to manage the range of tasks that your average, entry level position is going to expect. More and more people are going to college because college has been sold as a means of making more money, of getting a better job, of having a certain social status. It isn’t about being educated, its about being able to prove to others that you’re a college graduate.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this at all. College has suffered an inflation. Now the generally accepted bare educational minimum is a high school diploma, so thats what the people who want the bare minimum get. For people who want to be in the class above bare minimum, and for the employers who want to hire that perceived middle intellectual class, a B.A. is the way to go. Colleges then become a means of creating the kind of docile labor that is most useful for the society which they serve: people who can read, generate reports, regurgitate information, give presentations. Departments focused on liberation aren’t just not a priority, they’re actively hostile to the goal of our educational system. Capitalism is just the context here, but the underlying process is that people in power (be they presidents or prime ministers) want the proles to be able to do what they’re told without asking too many questions. Elementary education is about providing day care so the proles can go to work, secondary education is about separating the obvious fuck ups and criminals and dissidents from the useful workforce and grinding as much individual thought out of them as possible, and college is about making them ready to do the directed reading and writing that a skills based economy demands. Teaching people something is just the lie that keeps the machine moving.
Look, I love to learn, but most of what I’ve learned I’ve had to learn on my own with very little guidance or expectation of reward. I have more formal education under my belt than 99% of the US population and I can honestly say I didn’t really find a space open to free inquiry until graduate school. Even then only about half of my classes were safe spaces to ask real questions and learn, they other half existed almost exclusively to ready me for a licensure exam and keep the APA happy. Education is vitally important but we have to get past this idea that schools are here to educate rather than to discipline. With the proliferation of digital storage and streaming media technology one can become educated on their own with relatively little expense.
Thanks for writing this! I decided last year to take an online Sociology class that is required for my degree (Classical Theory) and I was pleasantly surprised when I read the course outline and I found that I would actually be learning about the early women classical theorists! They are never given credit even though they did as much or more work in developing sociological theory than their male counterparts. Had I taken the class at my main university, they never would have been covered at all.
Its crap that I have to be pleasantly surprised that a class will include theorists who deserve to be there.
Thank you for this post, Arielle. I am also a student pursuing a degree in Gender Studies. I feel for you, but your comments also make me feel insanely lucky. My college phased out the Women’s Studies program and after one year the faculty begged administration to let them create a Gender Studies program, which is what I started. They have successfully justified it to our legislature by saying that people with a solid background in Gender Studies preform better in the professional world.
Ugh, I totally feel you here. My school doesn’t have a dedicated Gender Studies professor; the closest is one sociology professor with a concentration in gender, and a French professor. Our sociology department doesn’t have anyone with a concentration in race or ethnicity, because there isn’t enough money to hire a new professor after the last one left (soc students have to take classes with the anthro department, which itself is highly understaffed to the point that no one can take anthro who isn’t a declared anthro major or a very lucky soc major).
On the other hand, most of the students are poor/working class/lower middle class, and the tuition fees are low enough that they won’t be in horrific debt when they graduate. It’s a sort of a devil’s bargain: by providing skimpy services for most marginalized groups, they can provide services at all to one of the most marginalized.
These sorts of cuts are also happening in the natural sciences. I recently left a graduate program in biology while watching my department get dismantled piece by piece, first the library, then the office staff, then course listings. Since I left, they’ve apparently moved some of the core coursework of the department into online-only format, and graduate teaching assistance are being replaced by undergraduate TAs for some of the intro-level coursework.
Universities across the board are institutions which handle a lot of money in tuition, in grants, in state subsidies, in federal subsidies, in foundations, and in patents. Unless there is some sort of oversight that guarantees this money is going to go towards fair pay for laborers and a quality education for students, we’re just going to see this sort of downward spiral in standards as successive CEOs and Boards of Directors take what they can and run.
it is glaringly obvious that most colleges operate with a capitalist philosophy—that is, the end goal is to produce the most degrees (which have become a commodity) for the cheapest price, to ensure the greatest profit.
Just to point out, no university is making *anything* even resembling a profit from your tuition. Most universities are nonprofits and operate at a loss from tuition. The wealthier ones have huge endowments, whose interest and investment dividends make up most of the operating budget of a university, and other universities rely on federal and state funding. However much you pay at Temple, the university is probably shelling out around twice that much to educate you. Whatever a degree is, it is *not* a “cheap commodity” being spun out so universities can maximise profits.
Not that universities don’t make bad decisions, but universities are in SERIOUS trouble, and are looking to stay afloat in a difficult environment where they must cater to their students, faculty, federal and other grant overseers, legislators, alumni, other wealthy donors, etc. It’s not that your arguments aren’t valid, but you are seriously oversimplifying a complicated issue and directing all the blame at someone who at most has partial control over the issues of your concern.
So much agree with Elisabeth and tanglethis! I am as angry as anyone about the cuts that are happening to all sorts of colleges and universities, especially since I’m in a fairly unpopular field in the humanities that has been getting cuts at lots of institutions, and I’m very much afraid that I won’t be able to find a job once I finish my PhD because of these cuts.
BUT, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with protesters both at the liberal arts college where I did my undergrad and at the large state university where I’m now in grad school, because they always seem to be blaming the university administration for something that really is a structural, societal issue, when the blame lies in a huge range of things, from Wall Street and the financial meltdown (many college endowments took a huge hit; a few schools had Madoff investments and lost even more money) to the ever-increasing availability of financial aid and openness of college to lower-income students (unequivocally a good thing, in my view– but educating students at a reduced cost (that is, when the financial aid comprises grants, not loans or work-study) is expensive for a school, and does require sacrifices in other areas). And at the state university where I am now, add to that the fact that students tend to protest the administration of either our campus or the university system, rather than the governor, who is the one deciding how much money gets allotted to education and how much goes to prisons, etc., instead.
Yes, the way administrators handle cuts, and the areas they choose to cut, are often subjects of legitimate criticism. I don’t know much about the situation at Temple, but I do know that at my undergrad college I was certainly upset that the administration had decided to continue funding expensive building renovations while cutting back on educational programs and firing adjuncts. But my annoyance at them was at how they were cutting and what they were cutting, not the fact that they needed to cut, because colleges are not profit-earning entities trying to make a dime off their students; they’re educational institutions making economic decisions (which are often the wrong decisions) in order to keep offering their education into the future.
Also, a nitpick (I hope this doesn’t come across as a call-out or anything; it just jumped out at me as an error and I wanted to gently point it out):
Great post.
In regards to the comment by Elizabeth – I’m not sure I would so easily disregard criticism the OP makes about the specific cuts, and it does not seem like “all the blame” is being directed a “someone” (assuming you’re referring to the comments made about the Dean and her response to questions regarding those cuts).
The students who are directly affected by the departmental changes should feel more than welcome, if not obligated, to question why certain departments get absorbed into others without proper adjustments made to ensure minimal damage to the strength of a particular study. ESPECIALLY studies that have in context been historically marginalized (even if there are other departments being affected as well).
And all the equating of university as business is very justified, and it should be noted that Temple specifically is undergoing a 1.2 billion dollar expansion – they have no excuse not to take every single measure to ensure all departments have their fundamental needs met – And that includes at (at a minimum) a clear explanation of how changes are being made to ensure no field’s representation and integrity will be compromised. Something Temple is failing to do.
Wake up sheeple! You’re just a cog in the machine!
(Sorry, I actually was just being sarcastic there.)
Thats not necessarily true. A lot of flak gets directed at for-profit institutions because they’ve often been diploma mills but, at least at the graduate level, my experience with a for-profit school was pretty good. The program had an enormous diversity in faculty, both in terms of identity and in terms of professional interest. It offered classes that were more interesting because the school had to maintain students. It was one of the few programs in my field that was actually committed to diversity as a means of inquiry and an aspect of human experience and is probably 10-15 years ahead of any other program I’m aware of when it comes to putting that commitment into practice in the classroom. I did my undergrad work at a medium size, private, very expensive, very well endowed university and I can say that my graduate experience was better on pretty much every axis except community (it was a single major institution and existed to teach you that major, not to provide a life experience). Academic standards were rigorous because of serious external accreditation and there was a near lack of the academic hazing present in a lot of traditional universities due to tradition or a need for cheap research assistants to keep the grant money flowing. Yes, it was something of a unique situation, but profits can be made from tuition.
I think thats at the heart of why a lot of schools are struggling. We have a romantic image about what the college life ought to be. That means nice campuses and student centers, good cafeterias, wood paneled offices for deans, expensive sports teams and facilities to accomodate them, funding for student organizations to buy pizza, movie nights, student affairs staff, arcade rooms, and on and on. Schools spend a lot of money on things other than professors and basic facilities. A well lit room in a warehouse out on the edge of town with folding tables and decent chairs is going to be a great place to learn if you put a luminary in your field in that room. I know from experience that you can provide an excellent education, free of bullshit and on the cutting edge of of a field, with class sizes under 10 students in a major metropolitan area for funder 30 grand a year and still turn a staggering profit. Allow for the fact that you’re doing undergrad work instead of advanced graduate work, double class sizes to under 20, move to a less expensive location than a vanity address in the business district of one of the biggest cities in the country, and account for the savings that comes from having a program with a few thousand customers instead of one with under 100 and there is absolutely no reason for a program to be struggling financially. Sure, you don’t get ivy covered stone walls, ultimate frisbee fields, or a Big 10 football team, but you could get an affordable get a quality, student-driven education.
William,
Right, I wasn’t talking about for-profit universities because they seem like a different kettle of fish. Also, professional training programs seem pretty different too, but then, they’re not going to offer women’s studies programs.
I think “what should a university look like” is a valid question and one that we’re going to have to collectively answer as a society in the next couple of decades. The move away from a traditional college campus environment might be part of it, with a move towards commuter campuses and online learning. There also might be a move away from humanities and softer social sciences taught anywhere but the wealthiest campuses, since they are less “career oriented” and don’t really pull in large grants the way the sciences do. In other words, we might see the re-vocationalization of all but the very top of higher ed, reversing the trend of the 20th century. This brings up the issue, of course, of what the role of higher education is: is it to train people in careers, or to provide some sort of edification of the mind?
It sounds like the response to budget cuts at your university was seriously fucked up. Clearly better funding for education should be a priority. It’s also true that some disciplines are still resistant to diversity.
That said…I just can’t feel you on the urgent tone of the piece. A lot of the problems you talk about vary vastly by the type of school we’re talking about. I don’t think you can group together Ivy League private schools, public academic powerhouses like the U of Michigan and Cal-Berkeley, small liberal arts colleges that don’t even give grades, state schools, community colleges, junior colleges, etc. into one lump. Different schools have different focuses, principles regarding how funds should be spent, student needs, state standards, and administrators. Different types of schools have different strengths and weaknesses. I would be careful not to generalize your experience at one school to that of all schools.
Overall, I think my college education has been high quality. I had a couple of radical professors (including a seriously awesome women’s studies prof), a few liberals, a few who try to be as ideologically neutral as possible, and a few conservatives. The majority of them at all points on the political spectrum have been very qualified and cared about my education. There have been some budget cuts, which decreased the number of classes available per semester in my degree, but it has not been terribly burdensome if still disappointing.
A big part of the problem is students’ attitudes towards education. A good class is seen as one you can breeze through with easy As rather than one you actually learn something in. People skip class, don’t do the readings, and tank the reviews of the professors who don’t let them get by with it – thus leading lecturers and adjuncts to water down their courses because they have to keep their review scores high in order to keep their jobs. If the business model of the university positions the students as consumers, and many students are perfectly happy to attend degree factories with some binge drinking thrown in, that has an impact. We shouldn’t neglect our own responsibility in shaping the institutions we attend.
addendum: those two last things aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but a focus on one over the other would lead to different styles of university.
I went to an all-women’s college, so removing Women’s Studies (ostensibly for financial reason) was not seen as a big deal by the administration because the whole school was women studying. Granted, we do have a stronger number of women included in our curriculum, but the fact that women are everywhere is not an excuse to not study women’s history!
Keep up the search to follow your dreams and keep learning, Arielle.
The universities were useful and necessary in the former era where information was rare and expensive, when books and learning were the property of a small number of teachers and institutions with libraries and laboratories. If you wanted to learn you had to go there and learn from them. That is not true any more. All the books and journals and information you might want is available, mostly for free. You can learn on your own, and if you need somebody to talk to you can probably find people on your own also.
The only real reason to go to college is to get that certificate to hang on the wall. If that is important to you, then you have to go there and play their game. The more expensive the school, the more valuable the certificate as a ticket to social and economic success. After you get it you will forget 85% of what they taught you anyhow.
William — your easy cynicism about education is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Let the kids edumacate themselves! On the internet! Or at best in a cinderblock room with folding chairs and a single light bulb and a REALLY DEDICATED TEACHER WHO IS MAGICAL THERE SHOULD BE MORE OF THOSE PLEASE ASK THE SPARKLE UNICORNS TO SEND MORE MAGICAL TEACHERS PLEASE. But no extra lightbulbs who needs ‘em when the teachers really care!
Schools can and should be physically beautiful. Welcoming and full of natural light. Children need spaces where they can interact with other children and adults other than their parents. Society can be a structure of mutual investment and care, in which one of the many things we provide to one another is the opportunity to talk and learn and teach one another across many years and in many ways, from childhood to old age.
The idea that it’s somehow progressive to do it cheaper, do it yourself, or not do it at all — that all educational structures are necessarily soul-crushing disciplinary nightmares — that vision is more libertarian than liberatory, and no thanks.
Rae — the central problem of higher ed really is not student laziness. It just isn’t.
In William’s defense, I don’t think it is unrealistic for schools to cut shit that doesn’t matter before they cut education.
Instead it sounds like we need lots of natural sparkling light and bubbling springs and prancing unicorns and tulip beds before we can consider calling it a school. Right.
I didn’t say it was the central problem. I said it was a big problem that people don’t talk about much. There are a lot of students who *like* the business model of education which causes a lot of structural problems in the university. They like being treated as consumers because they do not want to do the difficult task of deep thinking, or because they see a degree as a means to an end of a job just like the administrators do, or because it gives them more power over how class is conducted (not inherently a bad thing, but it is a bad thing if the student body is not interested in learning).
It’s worth investigating why students relate to education the way they do. A lot of it probably has to do with the way students are treated in K-12. The rote memorization, the emphasis on the end products of grades rather than the process of learning, the inadequate resources for both students of very high aptitudes and very low aptitudes, and many other things contribute to students forming toxic relationships with education.
I’ve experienced this myself. When I was in middle school and high school, I was not challenged at all and I completely disengaged except for when I had teachers whose teaching styles and interest in me broke through that. As a result, I had piss poor study skills and a flippant attitude going into college. I had to un-learn a lot of my bad habits before I could really engage with my college coursework. Now I’m doing really well and about to go to grad school. I saw this with a lot of my friends and I also see it from the perspective of my friends who are already in graduate school and teaching classes.
Learning is a collaborative endeavor. It requires both student and teacher engagement as well as institutional support. A lot of times these things intersect – if the institutional structure is poor, it does not facilitate productive student-teacher relationships. One particular way this manifests is by producing disinterested students, shifting faculty towards non-tenure track, and using student reviews in hiring decisions. That’s not me making shit up, its something a lot of adjunct and lecturers have to deal with – how do they create a challenging, productive learning environment if that’s not what the student-consumers want? It’s another problem with the business model.
To be more concise, students:university as American public:US government. Part of the reason why our government functions so poorly is because many of our citizens are racist, sexist, and poorly informed. It’s not the only reason, and clearly there are broader structural issues which produce this type of body politic…but pretending people aren’t ever bigoted or ignorant does not solve the problem. Part of the reason gender studies programs get cut is because there’s not enough student interest, for example.
Rae — typically there is a lot of student interest in gender studies programs. They get cut because they aren’t productive of grant funding and other “measurables” that matter in external evaluations. The blame-the-student approach is really counter-productive in discussions of higher ed; it feels really satisfying cause it lets one lament the types most visibly irritating to students and faculty but they don’t have much causal impact. Student evaluations have not *caused* the flexibilization of academic labor. The damaging forces are elsewhere: in decisions about how much public funding to allocate to higher ed, and then within educational structures how much money goes to admin vs. research and teaching.
rae – I taught a few years as a graduate student then as an adjunct at Giant State University with Top 10 Football Team, and I definitely agree with you re: the business model of education. Grade inflation was an unspoken pressure in my department, since classes in it were supposed to be “easy A’s.”
Still, I can hardly blame them. Graduate and professional schools have adjusted their admission standards since they know grade inflation is rampant, so it’s only natural that undergraduate students are bitter about that hard-earned B.
Arielle – I don’t agree with everything in your article, but I understand why you feel so strongly about what’s going on at your school. At GSUwTTFT, my (old) department is about to be integrated with another one or two (not sure yet) to form a new, consolidated department within the college. Classes are going to be cut, people are pissed, and the department chair is most certainly going to lose her job. I just recently flew up there to visit my old friends from grad school, and everyone is eager to bail before the ship sinks. But what then? How will it look on their CVs when their potential employers at another university see that the applicant graduated from a department that doesn’t even exist anymore?
Sorry, I just don’t buy into the theory that in a deeply unjust, oppressive society which actively fights any social program spending education is some kind of magical exception to the rule rather than a thinly veiled promotion of the same shit we see everywhere else. More than that, I still remember my experiences in school as a disabled student. I remember, vividly, the kinds of responses I faced from teachers and administrators when my existence became inconvenient. I remember being called an “uppity retard” by a principle at a relatively privileged when I was out of earshot because I knew about the ADA and had the gall to speak up for myself.
I’ve worked in an inner city school and seen not only the way students are treated and discussed in public but the things “educators” say behind closed doors. I’ve seen the kinds of discipline that are used against students for what reasons and in what contexts. You’re damned right I’m a cynic. I’ve also seen enough cops beating citizens not to operate under the comfortable illusion that the police are here to help us rather than fuck up undesirables so they don’t bother productive folk.
Yeah, if only I was less cynical, all that would go away…
God knows the racist, greedy, authority obsessed agents of social control we hire to teach revisionist history and the kinds of basic math necessary to make change at Walmart aren’t going to do it. School performance has gone down, enrollment and funding have gone up. Either our students are getting stupider or the people who are there to educate them aren’t doing their damned jobs. I wish we lived in a society where real education was valued. We don’t, so I advocate people educating themselves so they can call out bullshit when it hits them in the face.
What I was saying is that you don’t need an Ivy League campus to learn. Four walls, a white board, a projector, and a teacher who gives a shit about their subject is all thats really necessary. I fail to see how a sports team with a million dollar coach helps anyone learn anything. On the other hand, it does get a lot of alumni donations that pay for a nice office for the Dean.
Why? So long as the environment is safe and free of distractions aesthetics are luxuries. They’re great if we can afford them, but when we’re trying to balance shitty funding, good education, and affordability you need to work with what you have.
Universities do not serve children.
Don’t confuse pragmatism for ideals. I wish we lived in a different society but we don’t. We have what we have. We should work towards changing that but we cannot pretend its changed because we’d like to envision the change we desire. The truth is that our educational system is almost irrevocably broken on all levels. We have to do something about that and we have to do it now. We don’t really have time for a generation to get fucked while we argue with republicans, property owners, greedy teacher’s unions, privileged white folk, and traditionalists who still year for the days of school prayer and corporal punishment. Thats a fight worth having, but something has to be done in the mean time. If that means advocating actual independent inquiry and putting up with an ugly university that spends it’s money on professors instead of semi-pro sports or landscaping, so be it.
My university was affordable but didn’t really have much going for it, the pull was that it offered a lot of courses not offered by other universities. Although a very average (in some cases, below average) university it had the top human rights centre in the UK, which also placed 5th in Europe. And in typical fashion, when cuts were made, the human rights centre was the first to go, along with non-european languages (sanskrit, arabic and hebrew) and social anthropology.
In addition, with the new UK tuition fees the university decided to set the highest annual price for attendance. Ridiculous. Although i didn’t university a particularly enlightening experience, i’m so glad i’m not going into the system now…3 times the price and half the choices of subjects/majors.
William — I mentioned children because you offered a blanket denunciation of K-12, plus universities. You might want to ask yourself why you find Rumsfeldian rhetorical forms so satisfying, and whether you are going to get any place good with them. Aspiring to nothing is neither idealistic *nor* pragmatic.
The prime question I get from other students in my current graduate program (masters) is “what are you going to do with that?” in reference to my focus in Political Theory and Gender/Queer Studies. Even at the graduate level it is often seen as a business in which students are customers paying for a service. That service is not the education mind you, but that service is the future wealth that your diploma grants you.
I think education has largely become a product. Like a product universities now have to market their education like they would any other product. What that really means is advertising everything but the education itself. It means advertising the school’s campus, the opportunities to make money afterward, and the social life of the university. The advertising sometimes feels more like a theme park than a university. The diploma is a means to an end of making more money not the end in itself. The other “benefits” of university life are more pressing. Most people in my grad program are quick to whine about how we should be getting more parties with free booze.
This is of course only my experience at the graduate level and am in no way taking the blame off of the administrators. My undergrad institution, which used to be focused on teaching is now cutting the best educators because their work does is not “profitable.” This is even though they are not technically a for-profit school. However, knowing people working at the university the prime concern is pushing enrollment numbers up to the limit of what can be handled by the faculty and the staff without hiring more or paying more. You spend any amount of time in a meeting with the faculty and the administrators you see quickly how professors get disillusioned.
Yet they still want to be a “prestigious” university and not a diploma mill. Which may sound like a contradiction, but as has been mentioned before the B.A. is now the high school diploma, so really what the students learn is less important than their ability to get entry-level white collar jobs. There is not just one problem here but it’s systematic. The function of universities has changed much under neo-liberal logics, but the meaning we attach to them (education, learning) is still in place in much of these debates even though that focus obscures the present shifting techniques by which universities operate. The prime concern for me is the way in which this shift widens the gap between rich and poor even further and shatters any argument about capitalism today being a meritocracy (as if it ever was).
I’m where I’m at today because of my social standing, because college was “just the thing you do.” Sure I love the access to education I have now, but I can’t ignore that scholarships are scarce because of the pushing up of enrollment and the drawing down of the existence of scholarships. There are exceptions sure, but the direction that universities are heading makes me worried that they will eventually (at least on the undergrad level) function sort of like a “pay to play” system and not an education system.
and your continued recourse to “magical teachers are the answer” — that’s what the education-gutting Republicans say, too. In *every* field, in every enterprise, most participants are average. Most teachers are average! That’s life! A magic supply of fantabuloso teachers is not going to spring up from the earth and turn those bare bones at-least-not-hazardous-to-health whiteboard rooms into centers of rewarding learning. An honest and loving approach to education takes into account the inevitable mix of human beings at the heart of it (which means, yes, spending a lot of money on all kinds of stuff). It doesn’t engage in magical thinking of the “let’s balance everything crappy out by making sure all the teachers are way above average!”. That’s the opposite of pragmatic because it proposes the impossible as a necessary solution. It’s totally cynical (when it’s not just silly).
People cling to the ivy-clad vision of higher ed for similar reasons: there’s a lot of beauty, and leisure, and reflection, and embrace of eccentricity (something like difference) in that vision. Why shouldn’t everybody get to enjoy that? Why shouldn’t K-12 look like that too?
I’m actually 100% okay with this so long as a B.A. is available to everyone regardless of economic status and without accruing major personal debt. The B.A. used to matter more because it was a rarer commodity, and the devaluation of the B.A. in terms of job prospects is directly related to increased access to education across the board. In my opinion, anyone who complains that too many people are getting a college education should be considered suspect.
In my opinion, the bigger concerns are the quality of education, the economic and social justice concerns of education workers and facilities maintenance workers, the economic and social justice of land acquisitions by universities, and the social and economic justice concerns with respect to student debt.
I’m currently in Medical Assistant school at a small technical college. When I applied to go there, the admissions rep wanted to know why I wanted to go there. I had a 27 ACT score, and I aced their screening exam. I could be a doctor, he said.
I told him because I can’t afford it. I can’t afford to study Biology or Chemistry at a four-year university that will give me all my pre-med courses. I can’t afford to not work so that I could study day and night for the MCATs. I can’t afford to spend four more years also not working so I could focus on medical school. There was no job I could get before I passed boards that would let me keep up with that massive debt.
I am going to get my Medical Assistant so I can work through my Associate’s in Nursing. Then I will work as an RN as a bridge over to a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. Then I will apply to a Nurse Practitioner Master’s program, probably while working at least part-time and caring for children by then. But with the American Nurse’s Assocation pushing for all NPs to have their Doctorate in Nursing, I will probably have to go on to post-graduate school in order to practice by then.
My point is, is education just a commodity for me? Yes, yes, and yes. I go to school so that I can get a job so I can go to more school so I can get a better job and on and on. I will probably still love every minute of my education, I love medicine and nursing. But still, it’s for a job. I will instead read, learn, and indulge my thirst for knowledge outside of school.
I consider my path to be the very best one for me. I will acquire skills that I love to learn, chase my dreams, and help people while still coming out with an actually marketable skill that I can take to the bank. Life doesn’t get any better than that for me.
This is a dangerously ignorant assumption. And I don’t want to say that it is racist, but it ignores the intense community service that many HBCU’s engage in. The school district I live in has a high percentage of underperforming public schools (almost all directly linked to lack of parental income and low home-ownership). I cannot give enough props to the School of Education at NCCU for the many mentoring programs that they have initiated at these schools. They not only provide tutoring and life skills mentoring, but they also cover other less obvious issues such as personal grooming (elementary aged students), healthy diet education, and urban gardening.
I am working with my advisor in tracking a group of fifth graders who she made this promise to: that if they graduate from high school, she will make sure that they don’t have to pay a dime for the first two years of their college educations. Trust me, it’s a challenge; but without the university’s support, it wouldn’t happen at all.
These are all very good comments and I feel like most of what I’d like to add has been said better than I could say it. But I am going to put my two cents in, which is that educated people are dangerous because they can think for themselves but also extremely valuable because they can innovate and increase economic productivity. If you are privileged and want to stay that way, the ideal is to have really educated citizens within a narrow band of applicable knowledge who are also ignorant and disengaged from the deeper questioning that leads to genuine social change. And I think that’s a lot of what we have today.
I actually think it’s a pretty big problem that BAs are considered the new high school diploma. There’s a real sense that trade school or community college are inferior options for people who aren’t smart enough to get a “real” degree. It causes parents (and kids themselves) to view not getting a BA as a failure — which discourages kids who aren’t well-suited to/couldn’t get in to college/university education from checking out the other options. And many employers have that same belief, including those who are hiring for positions that might be much better served. I know people with the equivalent of accounting or engineering degrees from community colleges who are much better prepared for a lot of those jobs than people who got a BA, but many employers won’t look twice at them.
College/university education is expensive — not just in terms of the tuition, but also because the degrees usually take longer (which for most people, is time that you aren’t working enough to support yourself and thus are going into debt for living expenses) and because (at least from my anecdotal experience) fewer people live at home while attending college/university than community colleges or trade schools, which tend to be smaller and thus more numerous and which are much less concentrated in urban centers.
That is not in any way to say that I think cuts to education are a good idea or that the measure of who goes to college should be based on ability to pay rather than whether one is suited for it. But recognizing that college/university is there not as a necessary step but rather as one option would probably help to focus some of the discussions about how their resources should be spent. I absolutely got as much value out of the “extras” at my schools — the extracurriculars, the student groups, the events that were hosted, and yes, the beautiful campus — as I did from my classes. But I was there strictly to get a qualification that I needed to get a job, I might have been upset at all of the money being “wasted” on those things.
All the blatant lack of pragmatism here is so depressing. What universities should be about? Society is about mutual comfort and caring? Jesus Christ. This may shock you but, everybody would like a life of ease doing what they want and not having a care in the world. Even super right ring fundie christian conservatives. The fact of the matter is that you have to pay for it. It doesnt matter about whether having gender studies is right. Its actually pretty hypocritical to whine about gender studies as a feminist since the ability to have a gender studies since its the product of white, middle/upper class, 1st world, global north privilege. much like college in general but actually even worse based on its sustainability economically and its productive output. its on par with gloria steinham saying that women of color voting for barack instead of hillary are traitors to feminism.
This, completely. I’m in a graduate program for chemistry. Yes, I love chemistry, but it’s a means to an end, the end being a job in chemistry that will allow me to have more freedom in my work and make more money. I think that if we want to promote a culture that prioritizes learning, it would probably be good to offer more flexible learning options. 4 year college is great if you have the time/money to dedicate 4 years to learning. But if you can’t, there should be plenty of other (inexpensive) options. Subsidized courses, museums, and extensive library programs are pretty awesome.
I’m also SO in favor of making community college and trade schools more respected and more of an option. I know a bunch of smart people from high school who went to community college because they couldn’t afford university.
Then the problem is with how we as a society view 2-year and community college degrees, not with the higher percentage of people getting 4-year degrees. If employers are ruling out highly-qualified people because they didn’t have the privilege of going to a four-year university, that’s an employer problem, not an education problem.
Yes, and that’s a problem. The rise in tuition prices especially is absurd and that’s being driven by things other than the cost of providing that education. The manner in which universities interact with the geography of cities is problematic, as I stated above. That doesn’t, however, mean that a university education couldn’t be provided that wouldn’t result in these same problems.
Right, and that’s what should be discussed, IMO. With the sheer number of PhDs we produce nowadays, we can certainly afford to provide small-scale, small-classroom, inexpensive, high-quality college education to anyone who wants it. I’m not saying we should force it on people who don’t have the interest, but I’m saying that anyone who wants to go to college and has the basic high school education necessary to succeed in college should be able to get a B.A. or a B.Sc. in the subject of their choice if they want to, and at an affordable price, if not for free.
But this requires first recognizing that the current educational system is one which protects and reinforces existing economic privilege and taking steps to change that. And that’s going to require confronting some of the institutional privilege present in the entire university system.
If you are privileged and want to stay that way, the ideal is to have really educated citizens within a narrow band of applicable knowledge who are also ignorant and disengaged from the deeper questioning that leads to genuine social change. And I think that’s a lot of what we have today.
That actually sounds like a critique that has been made of academic feminist/women’s studies stuff… Even with a flourishing department, how well does it serve the community? Which is not something I can speak to at all (having gotten my degree in biology) but which I’d love to hear Arielle et. al’s opinions on. Would returning to the kind of gender studies programs we used to have actually be beneficial to the world, or are we still all just complaining about losing a favorite room in the ivory tower?
This place needs a pos rep/karma/like system so i can give you a +1
Bagelsan — why don’t you tell us why gender studies has to answer that question and biology doesn’t?
I’m not sure you understand the functional problem with a meritocracy. Economics is not cyclical. There is no reset. There is a fundamental limit on the amount of money. People who do well become better off. Their children start at the level of wealth. Even if they are only equal to their parents, they automatically make more money because they have more money to invest and access to better education. Because a person who starts with more money invariably ends with more money, that means that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the upper classes. And this my friend is an IDEAL meritocracy. Where we set everyone to equal and let merit carry them from there over generations, rather that start with a fundamental imbalance.
So you see, saying that something isnt a real meritocracy is incredibly moronic because a real meritocracy inherently produces uneven starts. In the ideal meritocracy the multiplicative factor over a lifetime from base funds may be even no matter how much money you start with, but the end result is not equal. Further, we arent even dealing with the fact that a meritocracy creates a bell curve of wealth distribution. Some people really are less productive and would thus over generations, drift to the bottom.
Matt — what are you getting by buying into the idea that we can’t make life better for one another? And who sold you on that idea?
A degree in biology is economically valuable. It translates into medical and research jobs which means wealth for the individual. The vast majority of gender studies degrees not not only dont produce anything economically, but they arent even used to provide tangible benefits to minorities.
Matt — all the economical metaphors up in your head, they are not helping your thinking.
The cost alone makes higher education kind of a joke in the States. And hey – Duke was worth it for me, even if I am about to become a sad statistic on the student debt issue. The Soviets still had a better approach to education overall. Too bad the baby was thrown out with the bathwater – instead of having the chance to adapt to modern times.
And then when you graduate, you realize that this applies to most institutions!
I offered a blanket denunciation of the way K-12 education works in this country today. Just because I think that what we pass off as education in this country is little more than oppression and social control doesn’t mean I don’t think learning is worthless. I just don’t think we’re doing it.
What, exactly, does the invocation of an irrelevant and failed secretary of defense have to do with anything? If you’d said Foucauldian or Nietzschean your might have had some traction…
I’m not aspiring to nothing, I’m saying that what we have doesn’t work and isn’t meant to work and while we try to build something that does we need to find a way to educate ourselves within the context of an oppressive society that is often actively hostile to critical thought.
Constantly accusing me of being a Republican is a lazy substitute for argument. I’m not arguing for magical teachers, I’m arguing that we need teachers who know material and are passionate about it. I’m arguing that we ought to spend the limited resources we have on teachers first and other things second. I’m arguing that an educational system that works needs to be decentralized and give teachers the freedom to teach what their pupils want to learn rather than what those in power would like them to believe. Most of all I’m arguing that parents, families, friends, mentors, and community leaders need to be ready to help people (regardless of their age) educate themselves when an inherently racist and oppressive centralized educational system fails them as it historically has. If that makes me a Republican then get me my fucking elephant and Ronald Reagan memorial cod piece, but I’m pretty sure I won’t have much support in that camp no matter how loudly I blast the ‘Nuge.
You’re confusing the mean with lowered minimum expectations. Maybe if we had a teacher shortage in this country it would be a different story, but the fact is there are a lot of people in this country who are passionate about a subject and very good at it who will never be teachers because we don’t hire historians to teach history or writers to teach English. We hire teachers who are trained to teach. I think that that pedagogic outlook is a big part of why education in this country is utter shit. We don’t try to get kids to love history, we teach them the names and birthdays of Great White Men and the dates and places where they interacted with other Great White Men. We don’t try to get kids to read, we give them Charles Dickens and then test them on how much they remember about Fagin (with the hopes that maybe they’ve learned that Jews are villains in the process). We don’t explain to kids that the average is really a word that expresses three different statistical constructs useful for understanding broad trends in data, we tell them that the average is the middle and thats normal so its good enough (and don’t you go getting any uppity aspirations, thats for the kids in the suburbs, you get to be a ditch digger).
True story: when I was in high school I had a literature class. The teacher was union and tenured. Some teachers arranged their classes alphabetically, he arranged his classes by cup size. He once physically grabbed a student by the throat and slammed him up against a locker for being mouthy. The kid ran with the drug crowd though so no one much believed him.
When I graduated college I had a very good friend. She wanted to be a teacher, she got her degree in education and literature, she loved reading, she liked kids and wanted to share stories with them. Five or so years after college she moved back in with her parents and took a job in a call center because she couldn’t find a teaching position. That same year I was working at a poor high school as a therapist and I heard a tenured English teacher say, and I quote, “for those of you who won’t be pregnant or in prison by the end of the year, I expect you to have read Great Expectations by the end of the semester.”
Find me a way to divert the DoD’s budget to schools and I’ll get on board. Wait…theres that magical thinking again. I’m sorry, I’ll try to be less cynical and I’m sure the sheer weight of our positive thought will make everything all better.
I think it should, but theres a long fight in front of us to get there. Until then we’ve got kids being taught in ways that actively harm them and universities following the same path. Until thats fixed we need something, and I think giving individuals the resources they need to follow their own interests is a lot more likely than suddenly fixing a system thats been broken since it was adapted from the prison in the 19th century.
Basically what Matt said; degrees in biology and chemistry and the like have proven to have a tangible benefit to society. Even though they could stand a lot of improvement, they still put out doctors and drug researchers and people with professional skills directly applicable to world problems. But I don’t think gender studies has yet shown clearly why it’s valuable — I personally think it can be valuable, and loved the few classes I had in it, but there is no obvious link between gender studies and improved women’s health or anything like that. Biology has given us really blatant advances like vaccines, but things like the vote weren’t obtained by a bunch of Ph.D.s, and I know there’s a lot of doubt about whether that style of learning is even very relevant to feminism on the ground.
I am very blessed to be taking a genders studies course in masculinities this summer a Webster University home campus. There are campuses all over the globe for anyone interested. My college will never ever in a million years phase out gender studies, human rights, or arts programs! Check it out!!
Matt,
Well, you could argue a real meritocracy would have a “reset” button, where we lived in some sort of “The Giver” style community and were assigned our jobs based on aptitude and where the child of a CEO could be a janitor, but my guess is few Americans want that. A real meritocracy would require as much downward mobility as it would upward mobility, unless you think those at the top form already some sort of innate hereditary superior class. I think this is one problem with rhetoric on education. The “anyone can be CEO or president” type language ignores the fact that a) not everyone actually has the skills to be president, and anyways, even if everyone did, only one person can actually be president at a time, so we might pay more attention to making sure jobs for the other 99.999% of us are livable, and b) that people will always have to be janitors or work in slaughterhouses, so again, making those jobs much better helps society more than encouraging everyone to get an BA in English (even with significant debt), with the assumption there are great high-paying jobs out there for anyone with a degree in anything from anywhere. To put it more simply, instead of working to collapse the gap between highest and lowest paid in society and provide a social benefits for all, we instead encourage everyone to try to get into the top 20% (which is mathematically impossible) by bootstrapping themselves up there through study or entrepreneurial skills. Along the way, technical training (along with blue collar work) gets denigrated as the last ditch for those who society has given up on, rather than a place to train skilled workers who are essential to society.
Finally, bachelor’s degrees still do provide gate keeping, except instead of it being predicated on having one or not having one, the prestige of your institution now matters. A BA in Ancient Greek from Harvard still unlocks doors in a way a BA from an obscure institution doesn’t. As such, even speaking about “college” or “higher education” doesn’t even make sense because what someplace like Harvard should be and is doing is different from what Temple is doing which again is different from U of Large State or Small Religious College or Local Community College, etc. “Education” isn’t actually a monolith run by evil plutocrats (though there are some of those) but a network of sometimes not even connected institutions with different goals, resources, functions, and restraints.
Oh, and finally, Bagelsan, I just want to let you know I pretty much agree with everything you say, including this.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter when it comes to reforming education. We think of teaching as a career, as a job that people we call teachers have. We’re producing enough Ph.D.s that small class room college should be possible for everyone. We’re producing enough Masters degrees that flexible, small class room high schools with quality experts teaching should be available for everyone. We’re producing enough people with BAs and BSs that small class rooms with expert teachers at every level should be possible. As a society we’re producing huge numbers of highly skilled, well-educated, people. I’m sure many of them would be willing to teach at least part time. I’d love to take a day a week and teach intro psych to high school students. I’d even be willing to do it at substantially less than my normal wage because variety in a schedule is fun and because I honestly love getting people thinking about human behavior and motivation. Theres just no system in place for making this happen. The same is pretty much true at the university level unless I want to eat all the shit that goes with being an adjunct. Teaching part time is really only an option for me at the graduate level.
William — again, “giving individuals the resources they need” — can you really not hear the bootstrappy goodness? Also, the single anecdote about the super-turrible unionized teacher: straight from the Republican playbook.
Perhaps your friend would have been an amazing teacher. But invocation of “excellent teachers” as a panacea is as I said before, either silly or cynical. Spectacularly gifted teachers are as rare as spectacularly gifted dancers, musicians, painters, and athletes. Most of us have been lucky enough to encounter a few in our lives, and we remember these experiences with a lot of joy. But they are inherently rare. They can’t be magically conjured up by changing hiring rules.
Education is not like the Olympics — it doesn’t happen every 4 years and involve a specialized elite. It happens across many years, in every community in the country, and involves pretty much everyone at some point or another. To succeed, it has to be undertaken with those facts in mind. Most of the students and teachers involved in it are going to be just okay at most of its aspects. That’s not a bad thing. That’s an inevitable thing. Something beautiful can emerge anyway (sort of like out of the whole human enterprise).
Look at what rich parents do for their (mostly average) kids: they pour money into their raising and education, because they know it helps. They pour more money into whatever issues their kids have. Because it helps. Treating everybody like the scions of rich families will work. Pretending that there is some magic work-around that can be done for cheap or for free won’t.
jjuliaava — :)
In biology, if you’re not doing grant-fundable work, you don’t get tenure. The avenues of inquiry are highly constrained by the decisions of funding agencies.
Not saying this is “good” but this is the reality of the sciences. If you’re not doing work with justifiable economic or medical benefits (and this includes conservation programs associated with economically contentious species or habitats, and some broader-level work concerning developmental biology, biomechanics, etc) you’re more or less in the same boat as humanities departments. Biological disciplines that don’t fall within major scheduled funding categories or are unable to solicit private funding are just as subject to the sorts of budget cuts, departmental cuts, and so on as fields like Gender Studies.
Even then, we’re forced to answer for serious economically important funding by politicians looking to score points against government waste. So you have stuff like Palin railing against fruit fly (tephritids, not Drosophila btw) research, because apparently studying ways to handle a major agricultural pest is a waste of money. Or you have McCain’s “paternity tests for bears” crap, which was actually a noninvasive population monitoring program for grizzly bears, a protected species.
I’m not trying to disparage humanities programs at all, but I think perhaps the humanities need to be more aware of the sorts of rhetorical attacks are being levied at the sciences as well. Scientists and social scholars shouldn’t be enemies here; we should all recognize that the enemy is the devaluation of scholarship across the board.
William — many people love tennis. Few people make it to Wimbledon. Excellent teaching is exceptional, and it’s not a matter of “love” — it’s a matter of real talent. Educational policy has to deal with this, not fantasize against it.
JDP — exactly. I think Bagelsan (and Matt especially) are quite confused about what research universities are about; basic research is central to all the disciplines, including (doy) the sciences. And it’s actually not true that “if you don’t get grants you don’t get tenure” in the sciences — it still comes down to publications — but most scientific research is too expensive to do without grants. But the money arguments confuse people about what universities (ideally) value.
Are the only things worth pursuing tangible benefits, though? You loved the classes you had in it, given your post history here its pretty clear that you learned new ways of thinking, you’re clearly interested and engaged in the subject, I’m sure you’ve inspired others, aren’t those real values themselves even if you can’t say that your Gender Studies class provided an X% decrease in Y negative outcome?
That said, I can think of one very large (if somewhat idiosyncratic) tangible effect gender studies have had: the critiques generated by major writers in that discipline fundamentally changed the way many clinical psychologists practice. Its no secret that psychology in general, and psychoanalysis in specific, has a bad history when it comes to women. We’ve been agents of oppression, we’ve done real damage, we’ve advocated and advanced narratives which have hurt people. Starting in the 1960s you had feminists (who would later become major names in Women’s Studies departments) critique psychoanalysis and psychology pretty hard. They called us out and we resisted and thrashed and complained but they kept doing it. Starting in the 70s and 80s Freud started being read in Women’s Studies departments and used as a method of inquiry, it lead to conversations, to fights, and ultimately to major changes in the way psychoanalysis works. Some analysts became feminists, some feminists became analysts. The ways of thinking and the theory that came out of Women’s Studies departments in the 80s and 90s became part of psychoanalysis and, as a result, a big part of clinical psychology. Major, mainstream names in psychoanalysis are deeply involved in Gender Studies today. I’d argue that the interest and openness to the queer movement you see in analysis is largely due to the influence that Women’s Studies had on us.
Ideas like privilege (which is not the sole realm of Gender Studies) are now part of most major clinical training programs. The most emotionally draining class I’ve ever taken was an intensive and required course designed to provoke and examine my own privileges. Thats because, in large part, of the influence that the critiques of the various X Studies departments have produced over the last two or three decades. Changing the way people think and the ways they interact with data can have pretty significant effects.
Where was that post that Latoya Peterson wrote about “closed-loop” feminism? Or the lack of “applied” feminism”? Because that applies here. I unfortunately can’t find it.
Kathleen,
Between the constant ad hominem of accusing me of being a Republican, the bizarre belief you seem to hold that I think incredible teachers are the answer to all questions at all levels and all points, and your seeming unwillingness to hear that I see a difference between an ideal we should be working towards (better funding) and what to do in the mean time I’m going to disengage from the discussion with you. Best of luck.
And it’s actually not true that “if you don’t get grants you don’t get tenure” in the sciences — it still comes down to publications
As a tenure track research scientist at an R1 university I beg to differ with this. It was made very clear to me when I started that No grants = No tenure. The same with all of my colleagues that I know of.
Dunno. I think that there’s definitely serious scholarship in the humanities that has the potential to inform other fields. For example, I think that gender studies and cultural anthropology are basically critical in designing action plans for handling epidemics and pandemics, especially with respect to HIV. And with the anti-vax movement in the West, serious scholarship of anti-medical movements within a humanities context is also critical to questions of public health. Social sciences and humanities can also inform us about how societies interact with wilderness and wildlife, for example, and can contribute greatly to our ability to propose inexpensive and effective conservation approaches. And so on.
I don’t have a problem with scholarship for the sake of scholarship. Yesterday’s “useless” study on urban Ugandans’ perspectives on marital infidelity can be vital to tomorrow’s HIV prevention plans, in the same way that Gregor Mendel played around with peas 100 years ago may have seemed self-indulgent, but nowadays no one would disparage the importance of genetic research.
At the same time, I think it’s important that humanities scholars recognize that science funding comes at the cost of significantly less freedom to pursue research topics solely because they interest you, and at significantly greater accountability to funding agencies and private funding sources. If Classics departments want to start instituting rules where you are categorically denied tenure unless you bring in over a half-million dollars in major grants, that’s cool, but recognize that a significant percentage of science profs never make tenure, not because they’re bad researchers and not because they don’t write enough papers, but because they don’t bring in enough cash.
Many tenure committees will categorically reject tenure applications if the professor has not raised grant money equal to twice their startup. Period. End of story.
Kathleen -
Obviously, there are multiple causes of the restructuring of the academic job market. I’m not trying to assign students sole responsibility for the state of universities. What I am trying to do is express a similar point to the one you made about teachers. Students are mostly average, too. Any answer to the question of what higher ed should look like needs to takes into account that the “inevitable mix” of the student body. Students can be rich or poor, quick-witted or slow, perceptive or ignorant, passionately empathetic or selfish, motivated or lazy, etc. Some students are racist, sexist fuckheads. My friend who teaches at a college in Georgia has to deal with students who make overt, unabashed racist comments. We have to realize that the college student population reflects a lot of the problems of the public at large, and that’s not something profs can magically fix.
JDP:
Exactly. Most administrators have very little against Women’s Studies Depts, or any other specific discipline. Public schools are under intense scrutiny to trim the bottom line, and unfortunately as it turns out, people and agencies are willing to channel billions of dollars into certain types of research and not into others. At my university, the university pays the stipends of grad students in the humanities, most social sciences, and some parts of the natural sciences. In most hard sciences, professors pay the stipends of their grad students through grant money, plus the students have to do more TAing. As a school looking to cut back, do you eliminate almost free students who provide teaching, or do you eliminate students for whom you must shell out $60,000 each a year for in tuition and stipends alone? If X department brings in 20 million a year in grant money, are you going to cut it or the department that gets no outside grant money? I really really wish this was not the case. I wish people cared as much about knowledge that benefited the world in less tangible ways and cared as much about French poetry or the history of gender as they do about robotics. But as it remains, society as a whole is far more willing to invest in things seen as “practical” in a narrow sense. Given the current political and economic climate, this has been rapidly compounded. The Republican budget has slashed funding to things like the NIH, NSF, NEH, dept. of education etc, so much of the money schools were getting to fund things like modern languages and lit departments is now gone. Fellowships for students outside of the hard sciences? Getting rapidly slashed (the gov. CANCELLED the Fulbright-Hayes DDRA, a grant for students to do do research in non-western countries, since their budget was slashed and that was the only funding they hadn’t already promised.) States that used to pride themselves on having great flagship universities and invest heavily in them are now broke and have to choose between cutting funding to universities or police departments or providing upkeep on roads. When you have angry people screaming about bridges falling down, justifying a department of Gender Theory gets difficult, especially when you ALSO have angry conservatives railing against your department. Chances are, the people making have nothing against gender theory (though sometimes they do), but when something’s gotta give, a whole host of reasons (including caving in to conservatives and taking the path of least resistance, unfortunately) make humanities programs some of the first to go.
Also with respect to the cost of scientific research, not all scientific research is expensive. It depends on the type of study you are conducting, the materials you have to acquire, equipment, reagents, etc. Given the sorts of searchable curated scientific databases available (e.g. Genbank, but there are plenty of others) and freeware analytical programs, there is literally endless scientific research that can be conducted by an individual with minimal funding support. There are also plenty of fields where minimal equipment is actually necessary.
The pressure for scientists to acquire large amounts of funding comes from the administration of R1 universities, which see high-tech, expensive research as a means of bringing in large grants and a means of improving the brand of these universities. In other words, the pressure is not coming from the scholarship itself, but rather from the administrators looking to improve their bottom lines. Within the sciences, you have to both be a competent scholar AND a businessperson. If you only do research on the cheap (even if that research is very high quality) you won’t stick around very long.
I…don’t think I am confused. And I was trying to mainly address undergrad degrees in the (hard) sciences, which are not under attack in the same way the gender studies etc are. Basic research is hugely important in biology, as is a college education, and the importance of both of those are fairly easily demonstrable to the public. However, it’s less obvious to me (and to chunks of the public) why an undergrad degree is necessary to feminism or gender studies or improving the world in a gender-related fashion. Which I think is a bit of a weakness in the argument — and a weakness that I think can be fixed with a little more examination of gender studies and real-world applications. (Like the examples below!)
William and JDP, absolutely agree! That’s why I went to a liberal arts school even though I’ve known I wanted to study biology pretty much from day 1. And I’ve been told that pre-scientists/med students can often do really well in gender study classes (and their ilk) because having several different perspectives is really helpful to any kind of analysis — ditto the reverse, with non-hard-science majors often making really excellent doctors and researchers. (Frankly, a few gender/minority-centric classes should be a requirement for an degree in any kind of health field.)
But if you’re asking for tangibles — money and facilities — then it’s best to produce some tangibles, or at least have something very convincing to point to to justify your work. I think the humanities does this to some degree, but could do it better. (‘Cause like I said, I think there is a lot of value — or could be — but it isn’t currently very well demonstrated. Convince me harder, you sexy gender studies, you! ;p)
Well, the idea that tuition waivers for TAs actually cost as much money as they’re valued at is a laugh riot. And by a laugh riot, I mean it’s bullshit. A full time graduate student with a TAship is only taking half-time course credit (typically 8 hours of course credit). Of that course credit, most is independent study, which requires minimal professorial oversight, no university-funded course materials, and no classroom space. There’s also “thesis” which basically means “sit in your office and write.” Your average graduate student is maybe taking four to six credit hours within an actual classroom. So I’m not really all that convinced that graduate student tuition is actually costing universities remotely as much as they claim. In my experience, it’s a tactic to “prove” that grad students don’t need to be paid a living wage, and that graduate student labor isn’t being as ruthlessly exploited as it actually is.
Also:
You loved the classes you had in it, given your post history here its pretty clear that you learned new ways of thinking, you’re clearly interested and engaged in the subject, I’m sure you’ve inspired others
1st) Aww, you’re too sweet. :p
2nd) More substantively, I liked my classes and got a lot out of them, but I’ve honestly probably gotten a lot more out of reading blogs and getting into arguments about this kind of social justice stuff. And many people seem to get the most out of a mix of lived experience and discussion, only one of which (at best) college can reliably offer you.
JDP — the point about grant money equal to twice startup — here I think you need to start specifying which departments you are talking about. Because there are disciplines where if you haven’t gotten at least this much money, you aren’t doing good research (because you simply can’t, without a lot of money) and there are disciplines where it is possible to do excellent research without money, and you will get tenure if your record shows that — even within the sciences. In my experience, departments and disciplines are very aware of these factors and the idea that there is an across the board target number for tenure in “the sciences” (whatever that baggy category means) just is not true.
Bagelsan — what exactly would the “tangible” of a scholar of medieval philosophy look like? Should that entire enterprise simply bugger off if it can’t “convince you harder”? What do you enjoy about living in the crabbed little universe of immediate utility?
Rae — the point, though, is to deal with that, not just to lament it or blame it. An educational system that sits around feeling sad about its less than exceptional students and less than exceptional teachers is not one that understands the task at hand.
I’m talking about the biological sciences. As far as “you’re not doing good research if you’re not getting grants,” that’s strictly bullshit. Some subfields of biology have award rates below 15% for major NSF and NIH grants. That means 85% of grant applications, which are extensive and time-intensive documents that involve significant laboratory research as well as extensive equipment pricing, training, etc, are denied. Not because the application isn’t high quality, but because the agencies don’t have enough money. Every spring, you hear the various groans of disappointment about how such and such grant got excellent reviews but wasn’t funded, although the PI was encouraged to resubmit for the next award cycle.
What benefit does your research provide outside of your tiny corner of academia? This isn’t meant to be an attack, but rather a question that any and every scholar should ask themselves and should be able to answer for. “I really like Chretien de Troyes” shouldn’t be the answer. On the other hand, “my research provides critical social context for a variety of documents that are considered foundational with respect to western legal structures and, as a result, can help us recognize which legal conventions are critical to democracy and which are holdovers of feudal privilege” very well could.
If that makes any sense.
Well… yes. Because being good at doing something and being good at teaching it are two completely different skill sets. I studied Electrical Engineering at a faculty where professors were chosen based on their research. I was taught by a lot of people who were very good at what they did, and very passionate about it. And many of them were terrible teachers. Some of them just straight up didn’t give a fuck about passing on their knowledge – to them anything that took time away from their research was just a distraction. Others did care, but just didn’t have the slightest idea of how to communicate to students in a way we could understand. It was very frustrating for all parties. I had some pretty bad K-12 teachers, (as well as some great ones and many ok ones) but none of them completely failed to teach me anything at all the way some of my brilliant, passionate university profs did. So my opinion is that yes, we should hire people who are trained and skilled at teaching to teach.
Well I agree with everything you said, except that the only way to create value in jobs is prestige or cash. So, if the job as a janitor is just as prestigious and well paying as being a CEO, why would anyone ever go to the trouble? A lot of your post just repeated what i said, about requiring as much downward as upward mobility, which is what i was saying with a bell curve. But remember that we are assuming that generally a childs natural capacity is equal to a parents. People with equal skills but different amounts of money would end up separated even further because of the almost exponential way money grows. So no, the upper class isnt hereditary, but money and skill are multipliers of each other.
I am not using a metaphor. I am discussing the way a meritocracy works very specifically and directly. Learn basic english please.
BTW the “twice your startup” works like this (for the nonscientists):
In the sciences, when you are hired, you are given a chunk of money by your department with which to pay for research, equipment, graduate student tuition and stipends, etc. Depending on your field, this may be as little as a few tens of thousands of dollars to as much as several million dollars. You are then expected to pay this back into the department’s coffers by acquiring grant money. The department takes about 50% of your grant as “overhead,” which essentially pays for your startup costs and pays TA stipends and stuff like that. The rest of your grant can be spent on research, research technicians, postdocs, etc, depending on the way the grant is structured and your budget has been justified. All equipment, of course, is property of the university and, if you leave for whatever reason (e.g. like not getting tenure) is retained by the department.
In other words, when you have acquired grant funding equal to twice your startup, you have paid the department back in full for their initial investment in your research, and have used the remaining funding to pay for the research that goes into your publications (which, themselves, serve to improve the university’s brand and attract other researchers who are likely to acquire significant funding, which will further enrich the university).
Perhaps you are the one who is confused. We never said anything which would give the impression that we dont know what research schools do. Typical straw man argumentation.
I’m not arguing that we can’t make life better for each other. I am arguing that we have limited resources and that its not possible for all people to have equal life outcomes, or even equal life opportunities. I never said we cant raise, in some cases, the bottom to a higher point. Further my posts at the time you made this post were directed at the myth of a meritocracy being a system which should be advocated by activists and that cutting gender studies is the result of lack of funding for the university which is trying to save its main programs. I’m also amused by the rich, white, global north bias evident in the article and the comments. Hypocritical feminists amuse me.
JDP — it may be sad, but it’s not bullshit. A lot of cell and molecular biology is impossible to do without a ton of money. Other kinds of research can be done on no money, but there are fields in which if you aren’t bringing in a ton of cash, you really can’t get anything done. This is inarguable.
I am not, personally, a scholar of medieval philosophy. But I think the idea that they should have to justify their research by recourse to present relevance has many of the same kinds of consequences that “will it cure cancer?” has for the sciences. Archival research can turn up all kinds of unexpected things, and it’s better in my view to leave funding decisions about basic research in that field in the hands of peers who have a sense of where the surprises and intrigue might be found, not via general appeal to “here is the thing to which it is immediately relevant in the present context”.
I think that applies across the board; you don’t get the lovely intriguing results any other way, and you have to defend that model *against* the demands for immediate relevance, not buy into them (and certainly not do what Bagelsan does — say oh, one set of rules for the field I know about, but the field I know almost nothing about? It really has to prove to me it’s worth something in “tangibles”.)
this is an absurd concept.
JDP-
There is no absolute model for how grad student tuition works, so you can’t counter that I’m wrong when talking about my specific institution with “all grad students do X.” In my school, the division has to pay the university $40,000 for each grad student in academic residency (i.e. the first five years). We (grad students in my field and all related fields I know about) are also required to take a full course load (3-4 per quarter) of classes for the first 2-3 years. Very few students do independent study, some classes are also very lab intensive. My first year, I had 20 hours of classroom time for the first quarter, which is far above and beyond what most undergrads get. So yes, I thought it seemed like a joke that the university would charge itself tuition for me, but it turns out at my institution I am costing my division that much in tuition, and the school is definitely shelling out for professors, classroom space, TAs, etc. I imagine that my university is not unique. It sounds like you’re in the natural sciences, no? If so, they usually work on a very different model from the social sciences and humanities, so experiences are rarely generalizable across the two.
I’m certainly not applying a different set of rules to each field — in fact, isn’t that what you object to, that I’m asking for tangibles from everyone? And actually, I’m not asking for tangibles from everyone; my original question was whether Gender Studies programs are actually valuable as they currently exist. Biology clearly is — because it turns out doctors and researchers, which is (part of) it’s desired function — but I’m not convinced that gender studies as an undergrad degree serves the social justice functions we would like it to.
If i had to choose between have a medieval scholarship department and biology i would take biology. kathleen are you saying you would rather have an MSD? So i am fine with gender studies, not that i consider taking a class in it to be that useful, getting a 1 person perspective is silly, but if we a re making choices biology comes first. Do you not understand that utility is what allows you to have a society? the entire existence of gender studies in private colleges is predicated on global north exploitation of developing nations for resources, labor, and such. thats how we get the money so you can talk about how you feel pressure to use a lot of make up and have sex before your ready. As opposed to the 3rd world where rape is common and legal, sometimes a tool in war, and girls are married to 50 year old men as young as 11. I’m so sorry you felt shy in math class. You live in your little western democracy bubble and complain on blogs on the internet while women AND men in some countries dont have lighting or clean water and work 16 hour days in the fields. So dont pretend like youre life is so terrible because you cant take gender studies in college when you have an almost infinite amount of free access to books, discussion groups, recorded lectures and articles on the web and in public libraries. Save yourself 20000 dollars a year and learn it on your own.
Is it? Do you know how the economic structure of America evolved and where a lot of our wealth comes from? Do you understand that just living in America is worth something like 400k$ of intangible wealth compared to mexico or some places in Africa? Do you realize how many times we went to war over a countries refusal to allow us to exploit our resources? That the CIA installed dictators in many countries that were favorable to American policy? That we import oil cheaply from less developed countries and sell the refined products back to them at many times the price of what it would cost for them to refine it themselves if they had the industrial and scientific capacity? The reason that colleges had Gender Studies in the past is because our nation is so god damn wealthy due to this kind of exploitation that they can charge incredible tuition to make up for the difference between the cost and profit of a Gender Studies major. Honestly its like you dont even go outside…
Sure. But, once again, how much work you can do depends in part on the kind of work you’re doing. There’s a hell of a lot of molecular evolution work that one could easily do with published sequences mined from GenBank, and there are in fact plenty of people out there who do exactly this. It depends on the research you’re doing and how flexible your research is. Additionally, how much money is “a ton” is questionable when it comes to which precise equipment you need in your lab vs. what you can share with other labs. Not every lab needs their own confocal station, for example.
The point is that a lot of research in the humanities is not funded in the same manner as research in the sciences is funded. Humanities scholarship has a lot less responsibility to funding agencies and humanities scholars have a much greater opportunity to do engage in study without asking big picture questions. I’m not criticizing this per se, but the difference in accountability between humanities departments and science departments is significant and frankly contributes to the perception by scientists that the humanities is full of useless navel-gazers. I don’t think there’s a problem with asking that any scholar, be they a scientist or a medieval studies scholar, be able to offer even a tenuous justification for their research.
whatever we might disagree on, I think we can all thank Matt for raising the intellectual tone of debate here.
Sarcasm?
ETA: You’re not going to get a grant before you start your research program up. You’re basically expected to have a significant research program that is already generating data before you will receive a grant that will allow you to complete the project and/or start the next project. Given the way startup funds are distributed, you can get a good 2-4 years of research across some number of graduate students and undergraduate research assistants before you’re going to be strapped without additional grant funding, and possibly longer if your students themselves land small grants and/or fellowships. But the reason that universities want you to get grant money is because they want to make sure that your research isn’t costing the department money, and that you are actually bringing in more money than the department has invested in you.
The idea that no good research can come out of a lab until they receive NSF, NIH, NASA, or DARPA funding is completely ass-backwards.
A lot of graduate programs are specifically based on the model of having people actually in the field doing the work do the training. The program I went to simply doesn’t allow professors who don’t practice in the field (with perhaps one very idiosyncratic exception out of dozens of core faculty) to have core faculty/full-time status. Clinical practice is even strongly suggested for people in upper-tier administrative roles. A professor at that program works somewhere between two and four days a week for the school and spends the rest of the time maintaining their clinical skills. That doesn’t mean that all psychologists are going to be good teachers, but there are enough psychologists who are that a lot of clinical programs only hire professors with active clinical work and teaching skills. I can honestly say that in my program I personally encountered only one bad professor and even they were adjunct. Much as it would stroke my ego to think it, I doubt that there is something special about psychologists that makes us good teachers. I think its an idea that would almost certainly work at the undergraduate level and is worth experimenting with at the high school level. Its not perfect, but I have trouble imagining a system that works worse than the one we have now.
JDP — a lot of humanities research can be done much more cheaply than a lot of research in the sciences. That actually has nothing to do with “accountability”, which is across the board measured the same way: peer-reviewed research. To produce peer-reviewable results, a lot of work in the sciences needs huge cash inputs, so researchers in the sciences have to spend a lot of time chasing money. That does keep them busy in ways that makes the lives of (some) humanities profs look enviably less constrained. But it doesn’t have anything to do with measures of accountability — scientists don’t keep winning money if they don’t publish. And, anyway, humanities profs chase money, too — just much smaller pots of it.
The idea that humanities researchers don’t have to look at the “big picture” is silly, because it is irrelevant. What both scholars in the sciences and humanities have to do is persuade their peers that they are on to something. Sometimes this involves the “big picture” (“I’m going to cure cancer!” “After my book, we will never look at democracy the same way again!”) and sometimes it is eensy-teensy picture (“this inhibitor of x kind of biosynthesis functions in the following ways under the following conditions” “the transformation of animal symbolism in Romanesque architecture in the Iberian peninsula is consequential in following ways”).
I don’t actually know many practicing academic scientists who consider their humanities colleagues useless navel-gazers. That’s a notion that is out there in the public discourse a lot, but I don’t see it inside the academy much at all.
William @34:
God knows the racist, greedy, authority obsessed agents of social control we hire to teach revisionist history and the kinds of basic math necessary to make change at Walmart aren’t going to do it. School performance has gone down, enrollment and funding have gone up. Either our students are getting stupider or the people who are there to educate them aren’t doing their damned jobs. I wish we lived in a society where real education was valued. We don’t, so I advocate people educating themselves so they can call out bullshit when it hits them in the face.
Amen, preach it! Best comment in the thread.
Matt, several places: I’m not sure you understand the functional problem with a meritocracy.
That it doesn’t really exist?
Yeah, I’m developmental bio. My old department worked more or less like yours, but with fewer coursework requirements for graduate students. Basically our coursework was capped at 8 hours a semester, with two hours of research and an additional two hours of seminars. Obviously laboratory coursework means you spend a lot more time in the classroom than the listings suggest, but I’m talking credit hours, not physical hours. In the sciences, the department paid the university full tuition and also paid our stipend (which was something like $10k/semester and was reasonably generous).
For my friends in the humanities, tuition waivers worked differently. No actual money changed hands between the department and the school; the administration offered a number of paper waivers to the department, which the department then gave back to the administration to cover tuition for TAs and RAs. Stipend for humanities TAs was paid by the administration at a collectively contracted minimum, which was something like $4.5k/semester for half-time appointments. Humanities TAs who worked through the summer and who worked 66% time during the school year could be expected to make about $15k annually.
In other words, there’s a major difference in how the system works if you’re in the sciences (which bring in significant external funding) vs. how they work in the humanities, which don’t. In both cases, the university makes bank off of graduate students, but the manner in which that bank is made differs depending on the department.
But when so much of American life is the result of oppression, why single out Gender Studies?
Well it doesn’t exist. But i was referring to the fact that it doesnt produce equality of outcome or opportunity and the results wouldnt be much different from our current society. the super rich would still exist and would still be slowly getting richer.
I think requiring degrees so rigidly for most of our job openings is pretty problematic in the first place. I get that it ensures that we have at least minimally qualified people in certain situations, but it really screws people that are really interested and passionate about certain things, not to mention knowledgeable and experienced.
It means that talented people are blocked from contributing because of being unable to afford to pay for a degree that does nothing to define their ability, it means excluding people who don’t fit into a large educational institute’s framework, whether because of disability, or prejudiced faculty, or even inability to find a college near them that offers the program they want to study in.
Why stop at making tech & community colleges more acceptable? Why do we all have to play into the same narrow, rigid system of rules just so we can get a piece of paper so we can be hired if we’re already qualified? Why aren’t there better alternatives, more apprenticeships or just plain ability testing for professional jobs? You can gain skills and knowledge outside of colleges, but you can’t get paid to use them unless you’re one of the lucky people that can attend college.
I’m sure Kathleen will accuse me of “Republican bootstrapping rhetoric” for daring to suggest we work to make society more open to people who can’t go to college.
Single them out for what? Universities are private institutions. I allow them the right to close down any major which doesnt provide a benefit to the university. If Biology didn’t help to keep the school open, they could close it if they wanted. I would have no objection. Nobody is entitled to receive a service from a private concern that does not want to provide it. If they want to complain about state universities not having gender studies fine, but private schools can do as they please.
Sacrifice at the altar of the points you’ve been making this whole thread? There’s a global north and a global south (and a lot in between); we get it. But some of your comments in this thread could be directed towards any conversation; they’re not particularly pertinent to this topic at all. They could be levied at every aspect of American (or Western) life. These schools aren’t cutting Gender Studies so they can give more to AIDS victims in Africa. It’s like you have a giant water cannon that you just have to shoot somewhere, so you’re shooting it here, because there just happens to be a target here.
Temple is a public university. Again, ( you & giant water cannon ) actual discussion. Even if we were talking about a purely private university that received no public funding, as a paying student, Guest Blogger (or whomever) would have the right to complain. The right of the university to exercise its rights is not in question, but we’re also free to discuss the merits of their choices, and also of trends in our society that may be reflected through one person’s experience.
Worth pointing out that the government puts a significant amount of money towards even “private” universities via a combination of grants, scholarships, etc., and private universities often don’t pay property taxes so long as they retain non-profit status. So There should be some degree of public accountability and accountability to the academic community.
At the same time, I’m not convinced that churning out hundreds of thousands of B.A.s in specialized sub-disciplines of critical theory is the answer though.
Well i didnt know if temple was public. thats my bad. my water cannon as you call it is aimed at a feminist site ironically complaining about loss of privilege. I’m not sure how thats unclear. The school is cutting gender studies because it doesnt support the schools budget, as ive said. They had to make cuts and if they cut programs that made money they would need to make more cuts. Perhaps i didnt properly separate my opinions on feminists decrying a lack of privilege from the economic reasons for why specialized humanities classes are always the first victim of budget problems.
So the global north thing, global north being a feminist concept which is part of the privilege category of feminist topics, is aimed at feminists wanting special treatment for gender studies, and its separate from the economic reason for WHY gender studies was cut. What else would they cut? Some other humanities course. So don’t those other courses have the same validity as gender studies? One posted even asked why natural sciences was more important than medieval scholarship. And the answer is biology pays for itself and for other majors. If you cut biology than you lose the money that biology generates for the total budget of the school.
Okay, it looks like global north is a political term based on human development index, but personally ive never seen it used in a non-feminist context, my mistake. the point remains the same regardless of etymology though.
Isn’t that obvious? I mean, it’s clear in this context that the original poster has the right to complain, as do other people have the right to criticize the OP.
I think the most interesting part of this topic, however, is the discussion surrounding the diminishment in value of bachelors degrees.
I agree and disagree with this sentiment.
I think that many people envision a degree from a 4 – year university as a commodity that holds equal value no matter what kind of degree it is. It is more typical when speaking of education to categorize people according to vertical levels of achievement – high school dropouts classified below high school graduates, before people with degrees from 2-year institutions/technical and community colleges, before people with bachelors degrees, before masters degrees, before PHD’s. What is also true, however, is that horizontal classifications carry extreme distinctions in relative earning potential after finishing education.
Someone who has a B.A. in philosophy will have a very different outcome in career and earnings potential than someone who earned their B.S. in computer science or engineering. Coming back to my original point – this means that someone who comes into college with a passion for an individual field of study with oversaturation or anemic demand in the job market might have a rude awakening when it comes to finding a job after graduation. Thus, the common remark about “useless degrees”.
This isn’t to detract from the fact that gender studies, or philosophy, or medieval literature, or X is an interesting and worthwhile field. It speaks more to the fact that what is useful, what is demanded and what is necessary for people to do in the job market doesn’t always align with people’s natural curiosity or inclinations of learning.
I still think that people should follow their passions and try to work in the area that sparks their innermost creative fire. But at the same time, I think it is realistic to concede that the path of creativity and inner passion can be harder than getting a degree just for cash after graduation. Someone’s got to do the dirty, drudgerous, or highly technical job – and chances are that person is going to get paid more.
I wonder if that opinion isn’t wholly a product of values, though. There are a lot of things which education can potentially do: train people for specific tasks, ensure that they’ve learned specific protocols, prepare them to create a certain kind of technology, or teach them to think in a certain way. These tasks are going to produce different outcomes and whether we consider them “the answer” or not is going to depend pretty heavily on what kinds of outcomes we want to incentivize.
For a long time our society has been oriented towards jobs which create material things. Churning out people with B.A.s in sub-specialties of critical theory doesn’t help make a new iPad or contribute to to the development of 4th generation atypical antipsychotic medications. If you’re measuring value based on objective, easily observable, material production a B.A. in Gender Studies is pretty much useless; 50,000 B.A.s in Gender Studies starts to look downright wasteful. If you’re interested in, say, changing the way society looks at itself the possibilities of a critical mass of people conversant in radical critique might make you salivate.
The thing is, though, grand social planning tends to fail because there are a lot of variables we don’t even think of. There are good, high value, statistically sound, peer reviewed, Cohen-standard studies which show simple talk therapy to have an effect size two to three times larger than even the best antidepressants. Similarly reliable studies on psychodynamic psychotherapies, a field in which critical theory is actually put into practice, have suggested that psychodynamic therapies have even larger effect sizes which increase over time after therapy has ended. Even for notoriously treatment-resistant disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder and Schizophrenia you have pretty strong efficacy from the utterly unscientific (despite the protestations of our PR folks) field of clinical psychology.
The bottom line is that its very hard to predict what kinds of education, with what subjects and goals, are going to produce what kinds of outcomes. If we all agree with the basic premise that learning (any learning) tends to be valuable I don’t see why we shouldn’t let people pursue the things that interest them in the hopes of running across something nobody was expecting. Science isn’t the only world in which Kuhn’s revolutions can happen. More than that, I think that if we’re really going to be committed to the idea of a liberal society we have to be very careful about the kinds of inquiry we tend to favor. Theres a lot of oppression in our world and a lot of people stomping about trying to defend their power. I tend to believe that anything which increases the range of choices in front of an individual is a good thing. I believe that liberty, the ability to choose without penalty or coercion, is the best means of challenging oppression. I believe that helping people develop the skills to identify, critique, challenge, and agitate against oppression is a fundamentally good thing for our society. Thats especially true when that development seems uncomfortable or counterproductive.
One nitpick…
Biology isn’t some magical major with obvious positive externalities. Gender Studies isn’t some extraneous and frivolous major that produces useless juice. An undergraduate degree, outside of certain degrees, like engineering, really isn’t for any sort of job pursuit. If you try to study for the job as an undergraduate, I can promise that you’re just wasting your money. You’re there to learn how to learn. That is best done by studying things you care to study about, with teachers that you like and respect.
The weirdest thing about all of this is that we’ve seen the result of such outcomes-based education. All those physicists from Soviet Russia that didn’t have a productive outlet for their abilities and without the intellectual flexibility to do something else seriously. All those engineers in China who aren’t worth a damn. Thinking that people with biology degrees are an objective good is a great way to get badly trained and badly motivated biologists. People with Gender Studies degrees who don’t enter into academia will have other ambitions, other banks of knowledge and ambitions, and we see such people with MBAs, JDs, and other graduate degrees. We see people with such degrees open shops with a certain touch–many of them will fail, but some will succeed, precisely because they studied something they loved, whether that had any direct impact on future success or not.
So much of this damned world is meta. Let’s not be autistic.
zeitgeist strikes again, I see.
What an absolutely horrifying way to close an otherwise great post.
This is why i went to california public universities to study video games, because i love them. They have many classes on the economy of starcraft and champion balancing in LoL. Thank god for scholarships from tax payers so i could do that. Had no effect on my job as a schnucks bagger, but i deserve to study something i love on someone elses dime. Btw, this isnt a joke. Those classes are real and you can actually do that.
I know what I am saying when I use the word, William. I am not using the word in the sense of the permanent condition, but as a better, broader, and more specific word than something like “tunnel vision”. I also am not only person who has ever used the word in this fashion, and I do believe a very common variant, coined by the show Ghost In The Shell SAC–autistic mode–is in general currency. My use only differs–slightly–in a more proactive, continuing sense than the on/off dichotomy suggested by “mode”.
Just to be certain, I do understand why you would have a serious issue with my use.
And yet…that doesn’t make it any better.
Which is every bit as ableist as using “schizophrenic” to describe something that doesn’t make sense, “bi-polar” to describe something that seems to shift quickly, “insane” to describe something you don’t understand but really dislike, or “retarded” to describe something you seem foolish.
BUT EVERYBODY DOES IT!!!!
Well if it was in anime it must be progressive and acceptable!
Keep polishing that turd.
Well if things that are in common use that we don’t mean to be offensive are now good, let me say thats mighty white of you.
/vomit
because ghost in a shell is just the most popular anime ever and everyone in the world should be expected to know about words they “coined”. Using autistic that way wasn’t “coined” by anyone anyways. Its commonly used(not that commonly dear friend) by the ignorant and stereotyping.
You are implying a negative and divisive connotation for a word which refers to a certain group of people who should not be treated as sub human. Using the word as you do implies that autistic people are wrong, broken, something to be ashamed of or despised. Further, autism isnt even one thing, there are dozens if not more variants. Just in case you dont understand what ableist means, which you probably dont, if you think thats an acceptable use of autistic.
The interesting thing is, that is mighty white of you, William. Browbeating brown people about how they should care about some such issue you’re into because of, you know, ‘cism and all that…
First of all, I have never bought into being anti-negative label. I think they are mostly a do-nothing, but feel good way to be “supportive”. The obvious stuff like retard and mongo and other clearly denigrating words, yes. However, going much further into more ambiguous terms is counterproductive in a way that feeds victimizers. There are reasons people reclaim ugly words for personal use, if not for whites, or for nondisabled, or whathaveyou.
Second, and I hope you attend this point, people use the word like the way I have even in published papers (albeit wrongly by psychoanalysts), let alone urban dictionaries. The cover of Hannu Ranajemi’s book depicts an action scene that is explicitly described as a person in autistic mode. Iain Banks also uses it as such. Those two are pretty sophisticated people, and they are what comes off the top of my head. It’s not *that* widely used, but it’s been used since before Ghost in the Shell made it popular and specific. It has never had a particularly generic definition they way people use “schizophrenic”. You really could call this a “polishing a turd” defense, but I’m not convinced I should care what you think.
Oh good, shah8 killed the thread. -_-
Actually, I had not known Ghost in the Shell popularized the term before I googled autistic mode. It’s in Urban Dictionary, and in many threads. Google is your friend. I also googled autistic insult, too.
But I believe I’ll end this discussion here and not respond further. The two of you, and whoever agrees with you can discuss “Autism in literature, metaphor or insult?”, and maybe do it better than some stupid NYT article. Because you’ll have such a fun, sisyphean task! But now you guys know, and start that job before it becomes entrenched in the very depths of our software!
Oh, wait…
It’s late at night, so I’m a bit loose…
Why do you even care, Bagelsan? If you like, you can put the topic back in sharp focus with an incisive comment. I can’t kill a community activity by myself. You have to help. I’m certainly not going to continue the derail with Matt and William. That’s pointless farce.
If it’s about setting boundaries of who’s the in-crowd and who’s the out crowd, believe you me, I’ve always been with the out crowd and I’m still flapping my lips…keyboards…whatever. Say something real, that we can properly be angry with each other and have fun slinging tirades or something…instead of some kind of half-arsed Daria-ism.
shah8: Biology isn’t some magical major with obvious positive externalities. Gender Studies isn’t some extraneous and frivolous major that produces useless juice. An undergraduate degree, outside of certain degrees, like engineering, really isn’t for any sort of job pursuit. If you try to study for the job as an undergraduate, I can promise that you’re just wasting your money. You’re there to learn how to learn. That is best done by studying things you care to study about, with teachers that you like and respect.
Agree completely.
But learning how to learn – teaching everyone how to learn, how to think about what they read – is a really subversive activity. Our political masters would generally much rather that only people they trust to be on their side get the kind of education that means they can question and learn and think about the information made available and ask about what’s not available.
“Education for jobs” is much easier.
I think the OP is a vast oversimplification.
Part of the problem, as a New Yorker piece talked about recently, is that we don’t know what we want higher ed to be: do we want it to be more vocational/lead to specific jobs/weed out students who are not capable of higher-level coursework or do we want it to be lifechanging/learn to love learning/get a broad base of knowledge? The latter is your typical liberal arts curric, and that’s where gender studies fits in. The former argues for students to essentially choose a path (some students) perhaps as early as high school, and not bother with the liberal arts stuff, on the idea that being, say, a mechanic or an engineer will not require you to have read Shakespeare.
Personally, I love the theoretical concept of a liberal arts education for everyone. I also recognize that sometimes I am very idealistic, and I believe books can save. This may well be true, but I’m not sure it’s true for everyone.
Also, quite honestly, by the time many students get to university it’s…I don’t want to say too late, because I don’t think that’s true, but they may be missing a large amount of the knowledge and skills that they need.
For example: I took four years off between HS and college. My HS was a very small, very liberal Quaker school in which we were all treated as individuals, given tons of personal education, could take as wide a variety of courses as our 10 faculty could offer, etc.
My university is DC’s public university. A couple years ago, UDC split into 2 colleges: community and flagship (4 year). Before that, UDC functioned essentially as a community college/4 year college together. And in fact, there are many many students in the flagship who would be better off in the community.
As a result, a lot of professors have to spend WAY too much time teaching the basics. Many students come from the DC public school systems and some are, essentially, functionally illiterate. I’ve done some tutoring in the Writing Center and plagiarism is rampant, as are students who simply *don’t know* very basic rules of grammar, spelling, syntax etc. They also have not been taught to think critically, which is hugely problematic. So professors spend way too much time putting out fires. And some professors don’t give a shit, while others are tremendously passionate. I suspect this is true everywhere.
All this to say: the idea of education, especially higher education, as we want to think of it is so appealing. SO appealing. The idea that everybody could go to campuses with wide, tree lined walkways and handsome brick buildings and learn a great deal about a lot of different things is just lovely. It is not, however, the world that we live in, and I am increasingly convinced that maybe it shouldn’t be. I’d love to see everyone achieve basic competency in writing, reading and maybe even math (although I haven’t really done that last!) but I’m just not sure they need to. As a friend of mine said when I bitched about this recently, “I work in construction. Those guys don’t need to know how to write well.”
All this to say, yes, universities have to cut programs. It sucks. It really genuinely sucks. My first major was basically cut at my university, and although I would have switched anyway (the dept was a disaster) I was pretty pissed. My current dept, History, has three profs because they cannot afford to hire any more. Cuts are made EVERYWHERE, not just for majors that focus on oppressed people. I’d love to see some sort of Ways of Seeing the World class required for all freshman everywhere (anti racism, feminist lenses, etc) but that’s a pipe dream.
Also, I wonder why William was attacked for suggesting that terrible tenured teachers exist. This is not a Republican idea. This is a hard cold fact. Have you spent much time in a K-12 environment? A great deal of the public school teachers I know are in it for the money and do not like kids. And we SHOULD encourage our teachers to be great. Teaching is an incredibly undervalued profession, which means that we do not get the same caliber of people as, say, the medical field (and yes there are evil doctors, too). Obviously, not every teacher is going to be great. But there is SO MUCH evidence that especially early childhood ed influences adult outcomes very strongly that we really need to push for great teachers.
Dear Moderators:
I seem to recall somewhere in the commenting rules that prohibits
- personal attacks/ad hominem attacks
- attacks based on racism and race
- ableism (ie “this thread is so autistic”)
With indignation, I ask:
Why hasn’t shah8 been banned from this site yet???
Also, wow, you do not get to use the word autistic like that. I mean, wow.
Right, and I’m not arguing against critical theory as a general rule. But I do think that maybe faculty ought to consider the merits of proposing larger “multidisciplinary” Critical Theory departments rather than try to sustain all these small gender studies, ethnic studies, etc departments. You can still offer advanced degrees (masters and doctorate) in these subdisciplines, but instead of offering undergraduate degrees in those same subdisciplines as you offer graduate degrees, the undergraduate degrees offered would be more general Critical Theory degrees, and would require more diverse study of social criticism and intersectionality of oppression. It also would establish a large centralized critical theory department on those campuses that would be able to perhaps better negotiate with the administration, and would likely also be able to fundraise and provide research resources to graduate students in a much more sensible way. Additionally, while an undergraduate may not get quite the same depth of learning about critical race theory or feminism, they will have a much more diverse background in the various ways that social critical theories have been employed by historically oppressed peoples and a better idea of which movements are out there right now and how they interact. I think that such a structure of study would also better-equip students to recognize new forms of oppression and discrimination within social discourse and oppose them in novel ways. Once again, this wouldn’t change anything at the graduate level, but could give undergraduates a broader education as well as a more flexible degree.
What I’m saying is that departments should be proactive when it comes to modifying undergraduate listings. If, for example, you’re the departments in the OP, perhaps what the departments in question needed to do was look and say “these are not really appropriate places for our departments, but what about a Crit Theory department? It’s not like this isn’t something that science departments did decades ago; if you look at bio departments, you’ll see that most modern bio departments have some godawful list of letters associated with them, stuff like MCD or ECE or whatever, and that indicates a whole range of subdisciplines, such as molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, or evolutionary biology, conservation biology, or ecology. Environmental science and physical geography have typically been subsumed into geological sciences, as has a lot of planetary science. Chemistry is an amalgam or organic chem, biochem, and various inorganic chem disciplines. Physics departments are similarly amalgams of subdisciplines. So is Psychology. And so on.
If Crit Theory departments don’t get with the picture, and would prefer to have their tiny little dominions, then they’re going to have little say when universities squeeze them into larger departments basically at random. This isn’t an attack on the research, but it is an attack on the way those departments handle themselves in the university system.
Your oppression olympics can kiss my entire ass, Shah. You made an utterly indefensible ableist comment, you tried to defend it, and now when its set down next to a phrase thats more easily identifiable as over the line you’re still thrashing about how you’re being browbeaten. What you said was appropriative and oppressive. You should have known better. There are a lot of reasons why, but you should have. I’m done with the derail. ‘Ta.
bhuesca: I seem to recall somewhere in the commenting rules that prohibits – personal attacks/ad hominem attacks
Really? Wow. That seems so unlikely on this vicious blog, but presumably it’s only exercised when someone from the out crowd bites back, because the in crowd get to make personal and ad hom attacks whenever they like.
I think that I’d agree with you in a lot of similar situations, but I think that the various Critical Theory subspecialties need their own spaces because I worry that some areas will be swallowed up by others in large undergraduate Critical Theory umbrella departments. Having a Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and African American Studies department (at minimum) means that you’re going to have a place for each of those groups to do their critique. Academic politics being what they are I worry that general Critical Studies departments are going to lead to departments with clearly dominant subspecialties (X Universities is for Queer Studies, Y is all about Latin@ critique, Z focuses on White Feminism) with other subspecialties being tokenized. That might be OK/marketplace of ideas if we were talking about different subspecialties of physics or economics, but I think that when we’re dealing with fields that grow from oppression we need to be aware of how that oppression is likely to play out in the academic world.
I think theres a very good chance we might be there in 20 or 30 years, but I’m not sure we’re going to be able to focus on intersectionality well now. There are still big names in the various fields who fight it and I’ve run into very intelligent, extensively published, thoughtful folks who likely would end up chairing big departments like that who’ve said things like “queer studies is for white people who want to appropriate black oppression” and “I’m not interested in talking about racism until we’ve overthrown the patriarchy.”
I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but I’m guessing that Feministe skews young. I think its important to remember that the people who will be in leadership positions of new Critical Theory departments will be people who are already tenured, senior staff with theories to protect and old wounds from other times. Human beings end up with huge blind spots even under the best of circumstances, and I think that the various fields of Critical Theory are going to be made very vulnerable by being lumped under one heading.
The advantages you’ve suggested are awesome, I just don’t know if we’re there yet. I’d definitely like to see a school try it, but I’m personally uncomfortable with getting behind the idea on a large scale.
I can’t speak to other disciplines, but I’d argue that collapsing disciplines in Psychology has done some real damage to the field as a whole. Right now we have two different doctoral degrees in Psychology. Significant numbers of clinical psychologists are being trained in professional schools rather than universities, a lot of university trained psychologists are poor clinicians, and our professional organization is having a lot of trouble because of the tension. Part of the damage comes from different groups within psychology fighting to define what psychology is.
I’m not sure how much you know about psychology, but there has been an acrimonious and on-going battle within the field about theoretical orientation and what therapy ought to look like. A lot of that is the product of academic psychologists pursuing grants and publications in order to get tenure at universities with absolutely no intention (and often very little experience) of actually going out and doing therapy with real patients outside of the university setting. Real people have been caused real harm by the discipline collapse in psychology.
Matt at 6.17.2011 at 12:48 pm
Matt at 6.13.2011 at 6:09 am in the “How do men have so much fun shopping for swimsuits” thread.
Okay, player.
JDP-
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if many universities operate the way you describe. Full disclosure, I’m not in the humanities either, but I’m in a discipline that in some ways shares similarities with hum depts, especially early on in our program. I’m at a wealthy (slightly evil) private university. We have decent stipends (I’ve seen better, but I’ve also seen a lot worse), and we have no teaching obligations our first 2 years. Basically, we really are dead weight to the university for that time, and then the teaching obligations are so minimal for the next 3 years that we probably cost more than a post-doc when we do teach (years 3-5 involve a decent stipend + payment for each class at a rate higher than many adjuncts I know. Though I don’t think it’s that we’re paid especially well, but rather some adjuncting jobs are so abysmal). After year 5, that’s when the university can start using us as cheap labor, so at least we get a bit of a reprieve.
On the more general issue raised in this post, I agree that looking to women’s studies majors as a way to conduct radical activism is kind of flawed. Going to an institutional credentialing system to learn how to dismantle the system seems a bit counter productive. I do think that you can learn to be more subversive in a women’s studies department than in a conservative econ department, but ultimately, I’m not sure how a bunch of people learning critical theory (which is itself problematic for its navel-gazing ways) really helps change the system. The point that then you can continue on with your women’s studies degree to get a JD seems to support the idea that the degree serves as a stepping stone to success in the status quo. Like the peace corps, it seems like the main benefit of xx-studies majors is to enlighten the person who engages in the process. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t see how women’s studies is then actually more radical than majoring in something like history. My point is, if you want to be a professional activist, I don’t see how a women’s studies degree is necessary, and if you use your degree to get a white collar job, I don’t see how it’s radical. I DO think that education can be (and hopefully is) life changing and enlightening, and a women’s studies etc. degree could really make a difference in what someone does in the world, but I think taking the study itself as activism is kind of fooling yourself.
Also, to get back to the specific points raised in the post, the OP seems to assume that activism is something a university would see as one of its goals, and thus her department should be preserved as is due to its function of providing activism. Again, I really doubt Temple sees activism, rather than education, as it’s purpose, and I’m not sure that activism really should be the goal of a university.
I think this really gets at an interesting issue, in that, by a university having a women’s studies dept. and a physics dept., there is implied equivalence between the two. If there are majors offered in both, then a women’s studies major is presented as merely a different from like choice than a physics major (esp. if both are BAs). If queer-studies and gender-studies are qualitatively different from geophysics and biophysics, then the question is, is a university the right place for xx-studies? Would it be better to have some sort of separate institution outside the world of academic credentialing or career training for training in these subjects? Is there something that a women’s studies department can uniquely offer that then reading groups wouldn’t, beyond the academic credentialing? (I mean, if the importance is on the ideas, are universities really the best place to share and disseminate ideas, or are there more democratic ways with less of an initial barrier to entry?)
What an awesome idea.
This, just all of this. ^^ Thanks for stating it so nicely!
To an extent, I think this might actually be a positive thing, though. There might be some degree of conflict in these sorts of departments, but I think maybe that conflict has the potential to also increase dialogue instead of just sequestering each of these individual subdisciplines into repurposed residential buildings on the edge of campuses.
But will this matter if universities start subsuming Crit Theory into fields like Sociology? IMO, it seems like a better idea to start dealing with the problems now.
I also have to say, you’re more likely to see future academics who study and recognize intersectionality if you have more crossover in coursework. Not only does this require crit theory undergrads to take coursework outside of their very narrow focus, but it also encourages graduate students to assemble multidisciplinary committees.
Maybe, maybe not. Keeping them separate isn’t fixing the problem, and honestly those changes both of us want to see aren’t going to get better unless there’s more interaction. If some of that interaction is negative, that’s going to be part of the price to pay to fix the whole oppression olympics problem.
[quote]The advantages you’ve suggested are awesome, I just don’t know if we’re there yet. I’d definitely like to see a school try it, but I’m personally uncomfortable with getting behind the idea on a large scale.[/quote]
Right. But I think people should start talking about it in a serious way, rather than hosting symposia to talk about how to keep universities from closing down their specific departments.
Seems like an ivory tower problem rather than a co-administering subdisciplines problem. I know it’s unpopular to say, but there’s something to be said for viewing academics as people who are doing a set of jobs as opposed to some sort of bastion of higher knowledge. There’s a point where academics need to be able to suck it up and stop with the pissing contests about pet theories and learn to get along with their colleagues, including colleagues that they disagree with.
I’m not really sure where you are going with that. Be more clear next time.
There is a most efficient order to follow in dealing with the current large scale, recognized kinds of oppression.
The oppression olympics are just the same as the psych anthro socio subsumation olympics, or the subsumation olympics between bio chem and phys. (“Chem explains biology! You’re just a sub-discipline of us!”"Well physics provides the laws for the way particles in chemistry interact! So clearly you are both just specialized disciplines of physics!”)
Every person in the world cares about their problems and passions more than anyone elses. Just as those more recognized fields always fight over who is more important the oppression deconstruction fields will always fight over which is more important. And which one is ACTUALLY more important varies based on your sample. In America white oppression is huge and a defining factor in who has to work the hardest to succeed. But in Africa/Middle East its split along religious or geographical lines. Who has oil, Tutsi or Hutu, Sunni or Shi’a and what not. And in Asia its largely about caste systems.
And of course you face the whole cultural relativity issue. Should we interfere in oppression in other countries? After all, America is largely white, so they will scream Global North/White/Western oppression if we attempt to stop genital mutilation, for both genders, the more pervasive and blatant female oppression, religious oppression and what not.
So sort of digression aside, cooperation between oppression critiquers is not going to happen anytime soon.
I honestly think that is an incredibly cynical statement there. While there is a hint of truth to it, I would challenge people here, you in particular, to try to overcome it.
The subsumation crap has more to do with misunderstandings of scale and scale-specific processes. It’s very different from arguments about which form of oppression is the most severe and the most damaging, which people engage in to justify their place at the table of critical theory studies. Denying someone a place in the crit theory discussion serves either to erase their identity entirely or to assume they are just part of some other identity, oftentimes in a way that appropriates their culture and suffering for more privileged groups.
Well, it certainly isn’t if crit theorists are rewarded with separate facilities and budgets for rejecting any sort of interdisciplinary approaches. I mean, who’s gonna opt to share office and bench space when universities give them nice little clubhouses for not cooperating?
[...] Feministe.us – The Tyranny of Education [...]