Sponsor at Patreon (click image)
Recent Comments
Incite Seminars (click image)
Books inspired by the blog (click images)
Registration link at bottom
An uncanny anticipation fills the halls of American higher education today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that “the university is in ruins and higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis,” as one expert opines, or only that we are headed in that direction, many college professors and administrators can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss.
Most higher ed reckoning scenarios revolve around the unsustainable capitalist economics of perpetual growth. Inexorably tied to the omnipresent ideology of neoliberalism, such “growth” has rendered higher education a mere vassal to its corporate masters. The manacles of the university’s capture are visible in the rise of the all-administrative institution and the subsequent weakening of the faculty; in the creation of a massive class of precariously underpaid instructional non-employees called “adjuncts;” in the intelligence-mocking usurpation of the culture of assessment and its attendant mode of surveillance; in the life-long burden of student debt, and so on and on.
As crucial as such economic considerations are to an understanding of the situation, in this seminar we will focus on the pedagogical aspect. Our aim is not an analysis of the current neoliberal corporation known as the university. Our aim, rather, is to give thought to how we might actively disrupt the process at its very heart: in the classroom. The logic behind this goal is that there is a direct line from the instructor’s management of the class—with its contractual syllabus, its smothering semester-long work plan, its threat of punishments (points deducted), its promise of potential rewards (a good grade), its final payoff (credits)—to the acquiescent, if debased, capitalist subject who, on “earning” her degree, the student becomes. The conviction informing our call for classroom disruption has its roots in a venerable pedagogical tradition: the Kantian Enlightenment appeal to overturn self-induced forms of immaturity and stultification.
Our discussions will be initiated by excerpts from two texts: Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation and essays in punctum press’s new book The Pedagogics of Unlearning.
This seminar is intended for instructors and administrators in higher education. However, it will also be accessible and stimulating to anyone interested in education generally.
Facilitator: Glenn Wallis holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University. He is the author of six books and numerous articles on various aspects of Buddhism in contemporary society. Since 1992, Wallis’s life has been entwined with higher education as a graduate student, adjunct and tenured professor, program founder and chair, faculty senator, member of numerous committees, M.A. and Ph.D. advisor, and corruptor of the (undergraduate) youth. He has taught at Brown University, Bowdoin College, and the University of Georgia. He is currently an adjunct at Penn State, Abington.
This is what obsesses me lately. As adjuncts (who teach over 70% of all university classes for an income below the poverty level) we can’t change the business model of education. We can’t stop the increasing class sizes and ballooning tuition. We can’t change the fact that administrators need to increase student populations and keep costs (faculty salaries) down to justify their mid-six-figure incomes. Changes in these things will need to be demanded by the students themselves.
So, in the meantime, what might we do in our positions as the majority of teachers of the majority of young Americans? How might we work against the grain of the obsession with quantifiable pedagogical techniques (and its horrifying use of “point-system” grading, and demand for exhaustively detailed syllabi and for quantifable ‘results”)? How do we respond to the assumption that the “A” needs to depend solely on effort put in, on amount of “work” done, and never on insight, understanding, or originality?
None of my strategies have worked, and I’m trying to give up the impecunious life of the adjunct. I’m going to order this book from punctuation press, though, and maybe it can give me some inspiration to make it through this year. (As i’ve said here before, although I think Ranciere has some interesting and important ideas on aesthetics, The Ignorant Schoolmaster seems to me a dangerously midguided book).
Hi Tom, those questions you pose are the very kinds of questions fueling this seminar. The seminar won’t provide any answers, at least not in the form of “try this, it works;” but it will certainly stimulate the participants to consider actual possibilities. My own experience has convinced me of the near-impossibility of creating an enlightening environment within the current structure of higher education. I try anyway.
For readers who might be interested in joining us in Philadelphia on Sept. 29th, you can buy The Pedagogics of Unlearning at punctum press.
Tom,
I can relate to your critique of ‘exhaustive syllabi’ and the point system. I recently took a graduate course in school counseling and the syllabus was ridiculous. The reading list was an after thought. We were required to do a ‘reading guide’ for each article or book chapter. The questions were insulting. For example, “List 3 new ideas you learned from the reading”. Of course, as you’ve said many times before, the course basically taught how to not do counseling and actually had a reading focused on how detrimental humanistic and psychodynamic theory have been to the entire profession.
I’m definitely curious about unlearning vs. unschooling.
Thanks, Craig.
Besides the boilerplate bullshit, here’s what I have where the usual exhaustive weekly plan goes:
COURSE OUTLINE (for Asian Philosophy)
Themes
What does “philosophy” name? How does language work?
What is thinking? Reason
What is going on? Reality
Who am I? Self
How should I act? Ethics
How can I live in good faith? Authenticity
What is awareness? Mind
How does it end? Death
Texts
Upanishads
Dhammapada
Mulamadhyamakakarika
Analects
Daodejing
Zhuangzi
Xunzi
Shobogenzo
That’s it.
Glenn—Wow! Your department chair let you get away with that? I remember the old days, when I was an undergraduate, when my syllabi often had no reading list at all—just a single page of expectations, and all readings to be decided on as the class progressed. These were the best classes, always. But I’m always told that iI must have a week-by-week specific list of readings, I cannot ask students to read anything not listed on the syllabus. A couple years ago, I gave a student a poor grade because her paper contained not a single grammatically correct sentence, and I had no idea what she was trying to say. I was told, by a dean, that this was unfair because my syllabus did not specifically state that papers must be written in grammatically correct English.
Craig—I had the same kind of insulting experiences in grad school in psychology. Literally lists of how many “points’ would be deducted for things like coming to class late or not using proper APA format. In graduate school. And we also had to read essays about how terrible psychoanalytic therapy was. We had to “agree”with it, by listing the things we had “learned” from reading it…but disagreeing or critiquing it was not allowed. I was told that being critical is “not part of the culture of counseling.” In graduate school. (They seemed unaware that the article itself was being critical, and in the worst way, like Donald Trump).
What a fascinating and refreshing approach to learning in the classroom–also Tom’s undergrad experience of a syllabi where the reading list was to be determined as the course progressed. In Lacanian terms, this is the Discourse of the Analyst; it does not adopt a position of power like the Master’s Discourse or of knowledge like the University. Thinking about this led me back to Glenn’s post Spectral Discourse, very applicable here and an explanation of Lacan’s four discourses as clear as you’ll find anywhere.
Hi Danny. I should add that (i) we don’t necessarily get to those texts, (ii) we often read stuff not on there because it makes sense in the course of things, (iii) we read in no particular order–again, depending on what makes sense after the fact of creating a syllabus.
If anyone wants a sense of the deep shit mainstream academia is in regarding a totalitarian approach to education, have a look at this piece in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Mis-Education.
If anyone’s in the Philadelphia area, we’ll be discussing these matters, and more, on September 29. Go here for info.
This piece from the Chronicle is troubling for many reasons. It would be nice to follow their advice and leave out all the lists of “don’ts” we need to put in. But we aren’t allowed to do that. It would be nice not to view a syllabus as a contract–but as my example above indicates, we are required to do just that.
This is what I found shocking in your example above, Glenn. I am told I have to put a detailed, day-by-day reading list on the syllabus. If I deviate from it, students complain, and I am them reprimanded–and this occurs even if we fall behind the schedule and cut things out! This becomes a justification for not doing the work–and one I am told, by those above me, I must accept. I fell behind in the reading, so students can no longer be required to submit papers at any particular time, etc. So, having a syllabus with an enormous list of works you can’t possibly expect to read all of, well, I can’t see being allowed to do that. But, of course, it would be much better for actual education if we were allowed, if the responsibility were put on the students much more than it is.
However, the thing that troubled me most, the thing I think really prevents any hope of real education occurring, is the suggestion in this essay that if students are opening their laptops and surfing the net or shopping or whatever, we should not require them to stop this. Instead, is is the task of the teacher to make the class more interesting, to remove the cause of the distraction.
Seems like a good idea, at first…until you think about it. Because as a student myself, I had no real interest in the kind of thing that would get those students “engaged” in the class. I was taking a class to learn about psychoanalytic literary theory or the modernist novel…and I was just didn’t care that this subject bored most of my classmates, who wanted to talk about movies and popular fiction and the tired platitudes in which they thought about the world. Sure, to do this would have ‘engaged’ them, and solved the professor’s problem (this particular professor, who taught both these classes, consistently got poor student evaluations), but it would have been of no use to the few of us who were there for an actual education.
Education demands a shift in understanding of the world, a fundamental change in the structure of our thinking. This is unpleasant at first, and for many people the response is just boredom–they feel boredom in the face of frightening change, they respond to it by being bored by it. We can’t get educated by learning lots of new “information” that we commit to memory, or by rehearsing the cliches and truisms of “common sense.” We get educated by making conceptual transformations…
The Chronicle, as always, with its offer of practical good sense advice, tries its best to put a stop to any real learning that might go on in higher education.