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Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.

I went down to the Minneapolis Convention Center for day 1 of the National Conference on Media reform this afternoon. I skipped the Larry Lessig morning plenary and arrived at about 1 p.m. I wandered through the displays in the ballroom, ate half an over-priced burrito and then headed for the first afternoon panel session.

Panel 1 - Free Speech in the 21st Century

Josh Wolf kicked things off with his account of being imprisoned for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in 2006. Naturally he concluded his talk with a call to support a federal shield law protecting people who do journalism, not just people who are employed as journalists.

C. Edwin Baker made some short comments about First Amendment legal theory. The First Amendment only protects us from government interference with speech. If a corporation seeks to curtail free speech then you’re legally out of luck. Corporations also argue that the first amendment protects them from coercive legislation that might regulate their right to merge, etc. There are two clauses in the First Amendment: one protecting individual speech, the other protecting the institutions of the press.

Caroline Fredrickson spoke about the ACLU free speech campaigns. I was intrigued by the case of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act that is being promoted by Joe Lieberman. The bill attempts to prevent radical Muslim extremists from spreading their message in America. YouTube was asked to remove some videos as a result of this effort. Videos that violated the community terms of service were removed but others were not.

I was tempted to ask about the intersection/overlap between free speech and website terms of service. What is the case law on this issue? How easily can a website remove content that it deems inappropriate? Would this ever become a first amendment issue? If there are any constitutional lawyers who read this please feel free to leave a comment.

Panel 2 - Legislation 2.0: Self-Governance and Policy on the Open Internet

This panel was even better. Right in my personal bailiwick: open-government and all other open knowledge endeavors.

Micha Sifry kicked things off with a short movie showing a nifty use of Google Earth to display congressional earmarks for the defense industry. This was just the beginning of the cool stuff the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

Andre Banks began by describing his project Color of Change which was formed after Katrina to improve the presence of the progressive black population in government. He described the case of the Jena 6 as the perfect storm for online activism. From there Color of Change has made great strides to intervene in the criminal justice system on behalf of the black population.

Matt Stoller went next and talked about a blogging project that took place a year or two ago. Senator Dick Durbin agreed to participate in an online forum around a bill under consideration in Congress. I forget the topic of the bill but the upshot was that new internet tools could penetrate the conversation in Washington D.C. with enough work and persistence.

Russell Newman, a former staffer for Senator Durbin, recounted his experience with the public conversation about the bill from inside the sausage factory. He concluded by emphasizing the banality of policy making: it really is all about access, and a common sense evaluation of legitimacy.

Micha Sifry mentioned a few other projects of interest including qik for streaming video from a cell phone and Open Congress for tracking bills before Congress.

In the Q&A I asked about the sustainability of a project like Open Congress and the transfer of tools like it to the local level. The software that runs Open Congress is open source so it’s available for people to setup on a state or local level. I smell yet another potential project. Long-term sustainability is still up in the air.

One of the most interesting questions from the audience was about dividing resources between old and new institutions. Sifry responded that he would give most of the funding to new institutions. Liberals need to be more adventurous and stop giving to institutions because of sentimentality or past achievements. Others on the panel disagreed and discussion ensued.

One-on-one brainstorming

Instead of going to the Minnesota caucus I met with James O. in an ad-hoc session to discuss his ideas about communicating liberal ideas to the mainstream. He was full of very interesting proposals and thoughts, ranging from recasting the Superman story, creating a new form of found political poetry based on haiku, starting a new political party, and forming a new 24/7 news channel. It was a fun and interesting conversation. I showed him a couple of social software tools like delicious and Twitter. I wish him the best of luck.

Two ideas I really liked were doing a children’s book based on Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I replied that it would be great to make it into a stop motion animated video. I encouraged James to think more about cultural peer production as a method to get his ideas into the world. Perhaps we will work on it together.

I spent most of Saturday hanging out at Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus at MinneBar 2008. I must say that the union has a pretty nice suite of conference rooms for gatherings like this.

I started the morning at Social Search for the Enterprise. Rich Hoeg from Honeywell discussed a nifty use of ConnectBeam to create an internal social bookmark store that integrates directly with Google search results. So when people go to look up a topic they get a page of Google results and an in-line column of internal Honeywell links. The internal information can also list similar tags and users, thus creating an instant community around a search topic. It was easy to see that this was much more effective than the skills directories or yellow pages that so many knowledge management efforts created in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Jonathan Dahl led an interesting discussion on Consulting for fun and profit. I liked the Jeopary format he used, it got a lot of audience participation.

Over the noon hour the big panel discussion was on the state of the state (of technical development in Minnesota). It had the usual rah-rah, we really are as smart as those people on the coast moments along with some exhortations to stop being afraid of risk and to get out there and form more startups. I thought the most salient point was that Minnesota has plenty of talented developers and designers but the networks between them aren’t as strong as they need to be. Another lack is business talent. Dan Grigsby called for product managers to become CEOs at startups. We shall see.

Curt Prins gave a rundown of the “7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing” from which I left early to see the tale end of the Distributed Teams panel.

Charles Gimon led a very interesting discussion about reputation. I’m not sure we were even able to define what reputation is, but we all agreed that it is transforming in the online world. I jotted down a bunch of interesting questions: do we have multiple reputations? how about reputations from inside and outside of networks/communities? is disemvowelling create liability for site owners because it is a type of editing? A couple of sites were mentioned: Naymze, iKarma, claim-id.

Jeramey Jannene talked about making money from blogging. He cited most of the typical ideas: stay focused, get ads, jobboards, sponsored posts, etc. I heard one person ask about investigative journalism techniques. Might be worthwhile as a niche blog topic.

Tim Erickson concluded the day with a discussion about E-Democracy and the challenges of online community building, outreach to under-served communities, and other miscellaneous topics.

I had a good time and had a chance to meet some very interesting people.

I went to the University of MN today to see Mary Poovey speak in the last lecture of the IMPACTS series. Her book, A History of the Modern Fact, was one of the standout readings in my science, technology, and society class last spring.

Her topic tonight was “Reflections of a Worried Feminist, 30 years on.” She outlined the impact of feminist theory and activism on literary studies since the late 1970s and questioned how much benefit it has really had on the disciplines, especially the humanities.

She started with a personal anecdote about her first job at Yale. Soon after her arrival, a colleague pulled her aside and told her she needed to publish a book quickly if she had any hope of getting tenure. She panicked; she had never thought about publishing while she was a graduate student. Today that attitude would be naive. Graduate study has become very professionalized since the 1970s.

Her first project was a study of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the late 1970s and 1980s writing about women was a novel approach to scholarship. But throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the women’s studies movement, feminism, French literary theory, and liberal politics pushed gender into the center of literary studies. And by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural wars were in full swing.

I saw Donald Kaagn fire one of the major volleys in the PC wars at my freshman convocation in 1990. I remember thinking the speech was a bit of a shock to the system, what did we know about the cultural wars raging in the academy. Some background on the “Great Political Correctness Panic.”

According to Poovey the theory wave of the 1980s had two outlets during the next 15 years. One outlet was a broadening of literary scholarship that began to look critically at institutions. Her book on the modern fact was one of the outcomes of this wave and moved away from direct literary sources to examine broader cultural trends. The other outlet was an elaboration of the leftist critique of gender. Gender became the central ideological issue for some literary scholars. She cited Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick and Colonial Desire by Robert Young as two examples of this second outlet.

The two groups had different scholarly approaches and outlooks. The first group - the culturalists - tended to work on 18th and early 19th century topics and focus their literary arguments on broad changes to large categories, such as genre. The second group - the politicists (my terminology for both camps) - tended to focus on the later 19th century and the early 20th century when the problems of colonialism began to come to the fore and would often use literary scholarship to discover the telling allegory that confirmed their existing theoretic positions on the importance of gender.

During the same time period there has been a continual decline in the institutional power of the humanities within the university. The humanities don’t make money or bring in grants like the sciences and so they are marginalized by administrators.

Recently, Poovey has begun to question her belief in the transformative politics of the classroom. She and many others believed that the wave of ethnic and women’s studies departments started during the 1970s would have a liberalizing effect on student politics. If only we taught students how to think like the liberal professorate then the world would become a better place. But this didn’t happen. During the Q&A this was described by an audience member as the “narcissism of the classroom.” Today she has turned her teaching away from political topics to studies about the development of genre and the history of the discipline.

She concluded that we are faced with a choice between teaching as a political activity, which doesn’t seem effective and contributes to the marginalization of imaginative studies, or teaching as a disciplinary act.

In another anecdote she described a recent forum at NYU on the close reading requirement for undergraduate courses. Almost everyone agreed that close reading was useful. But near the end of the discussion one of the graduate students spoke up and said that everything that was said up to that point was useless to her as a radical lesbian teacher. The spirit of the discussion quickly chilled. Many of those who supported the political form of teaching were 20th century Americanists. During the Q&A this bias toward recent American studies seemed to be indicative of a general arrogance on the part of Americans seeing the world and literary studies through their own ideological blinders.

She said that the humanities are being squeezed between an antithetical administration that sees no value in them and a diffuse politics of identity that has no lasting effects. Politics in the classroom, a place that is already highly privileged, does not equal politics in Chinatown or Bed-Stuy. If we continue to politicize the classroom then the discipline of literary studies will lose its value.

For further reading and evidence I offer this commentary at Evolving Thoughts and two recent columns by Stanley Fish on French Theory in America.

A recent forum on information ethics for the Minnesota Special Libraries Association prompted me to think about privacy.

Assume that individual privacy is undergoing a massive shift because of the advent of large aggregate databases, technical innovations like the web, and, perhaps, a changing attitude among younger generations. The discussion at the meeting centered on social web applications like Facebook, Google, and LibraryThing. A lot of people are sacrificing privacy for the perceived value of a service like GMail, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Librarians have long defended the privacy of patrons by destroying circulation records as soon as possible but in the new social web world patrons are sharing the information librarians protected by posting it on LibraryThing or elsewhere. In order to compete on services libraries may have to reconsider the bedrock ethical principles surrounding the analysis and storage of patron information.

But the even bigger question I wonder about is how organizations will respond in this brave new privacy world. So far most of the erosion of privacy has taken place on the part of individuals. But the organizations and institutions that we all interact with continue to profit from that data and zealously guardt data from being used openly by others.

From a commons perspective this might be another form of enclosure. Individuals choose to contribute to the public commons and then that information is enclosed and “monetized” by companies. Leading to ideas like digital sharecropping and crowdsourcing.

A countervailing trend for public companies are the securities regulations promulgated by the SEC. Here the explicit bargain is in exchange for access to capital markets the company must disclose a certain amount of information to the public. After the Enron scandals the Sarbanes-Oxley bill increased the requirements for public disclosure. But there was, and continues to be, a lot of opposition to that.

It seems we may be headed into a world where privacy becomes more and more a matter of financial resources. Companies can afford to pay the lawyers and technicians needed to keep information locked up behind closed doors. Individuals don’t have that luxury.

When it comes to professional responsibility SLA and other organizations are in a bind. A lot of professional ethics statements protect the privacy of the organizations where people work. Should this continue to be the case? If a significant part of the public gives up its privacy to organizations then why can’t we expect the same openness in return?

I didn’t make it to the final day of Rethinking the University. But here are some concluding notes from day 2. I hope to have more to say about this topic during the upcoming days.

Panel - Surplus Value And The University In Crisis

Morgan Adamson - “Student debt and the finacialization of academic life” Since the early 1970s students have been at the center of experiments in financial life. This trend is in direct reaction to the student movements of the 1960s. with the goal of moving funding for education from state to student. In response to the student activism of the 1960s financial institutions and government created Sallie Mae in 1972. Today this quasi-private company gets an almost 37% profit from student loans. Since the 1970s the university has built an infrastructure to facilitate connections between students and lenders. Moreover, student debtors are exceptional because they can never get away from debt through bankruptcy.

Ellen Messer Davidow - “Situating higher education” Not much to add here. My notes are too sketchy because I was starting to get tired. Will academics ever stop reading papers in front of large audiences? Do these same people read their lectures to students in classrooms?

Elizabeth Kissling - Branding is what you do when there is no difference between your product and others. Kissling is from Eastern Washington University. A few years ago they introduced a new branding campaign - “Start something big and the big red box.” She showed the video to much laughter. She then showed a great editorial cartoon of a student talking to the big red box - “what are you”, “im a metaphor for all your dreams and expectations…”, “man my dreams suck ass.” At the same time as the marketing campaign was being unveiled the university was in protracted contract negotiations with faculty. So the end result of these years is more continget faculty, a costly branding campaign that is an embarrassment, and hiring practices that diminish the distinctiveness the branding campaign promoted.

Jeffrey Williams - “Debt Education” in Dissent 2006. 1982 avg debt $2000, 1992 avg debt $9200, 2002 $18900 from the National Council of Education Statistics, project on student debt. Academia justifies teaching as a progressive endeavor but the rise in student debt teaches different lessons. Two possible solutions might be free higher education which would take a little more than $30 billion to cover all current students or income contingent loans. What academics need to do about debt: develop new methods - ethnography, statistics (ah, methodology, the clarion cry of the academic) ; analyze; propose solutions. Williams concluded by comparing student debt to indentured servitude in early American history.

qa - frameworks: middle of a shift between episteme (Foucault), enveloped by global capital; enfolding of big science by military/industrial complex after ww2 - mentioned from Andrew Pickering; indebting is a political strategy; trilateral commission 1975 - governability, how to control citizen students

The conference continues on from yesterday. I got here late today, in the middle of the second morning session.

Roundtable - inside/outside: the university and the public intellectual

I arrived in time to hear Naomi Scheman make some interesting comments about objectivity as the creation of trust in expertise. But before my thoughts could rush through Galison, Daston, and Giddens her comments were over and it was time for Q&A. There was some interesting back and forth about open access and academic publishing. How are we going to get beyond the current publishing regimen?

Roundtable - labor in neoliberal university

Paula Rabinowitz - Addresses her experience as a department chair during the recent strikes and how it intersected with academic freedom. Academic freedom for research is largely unquestioned, but the current challenge to freedom is in the classroom. Three anecdotes from the strike: she told her dean that she would not cross the picket line so he told her to work from home, she compromised by working at an off-campus cafe — but in one of her classes she got a complaint from a student in her lecture class who staged a sit-in protesting the class being off-campus; then there was a creative writing professor who was challenged with an ethics complaint for teaching/reading literature about work during the strike; and finally a graduate student getting grief for teaching off-campus from another department chair.

Jess Sundin - union worker at UM for 9 years. Neoliberalism is savage capitalism = global capitalism. The tax payers fund plenty of private endeavors - 10 year coca-cola franchise, TCF bank stadium, 3m - guidant - medtronic make billions based on research from the UofM, food services run by aramark, sale of the university hospital, pharmacy benefits make money for self-insured university health plans. Maximizing the profit of the university by eliminating general college, top-3 research university. 2003 strike in the wake of massive layoffs, wage freeze, and health care cuts. 1. workers unwilling to accept terms 2. no way to compel work 3. union willing to fight. Lessons: timing of strike in October was too late, better to walk out at start of school year. 2007 walked out early meant there was less time to build coalitions on campus. 2003 afscme walked lines alone, only union on strike. 2007 coalition of unions. 2003 worked with community partners, this work was fearful to other unions in 2007. Universities will not work with labor, we need to go outside the structure of the university to make change.

Jeff Pilacinski - What will it take to win? We suffer from a failure to organize ourselves. What is the disconnect between academics and activists? Product for activists is also education and the divisions between groups are established by the state and the employer. And they only come together when there is a labor stoppage, between strikes there isn’t much working together. In 2007 more groups participated but still the strike was crushed. We must change how we fight together. What is the difference between on and off campus classes? The production of education continues despite the strike.

Eric Jensen - steward from the teamsters. Mobilizing the neoliberal ideology against the workers by the administration see health care, wage bargaining. In 2003 there was a massive assault by the state government against workers. The university administration complained at the time, by appealing that the university is a public good. It’s not the employers fault, something in the environment causes the problem. Examples from 2003 - claim by administration that the U has no ‘free’ health care, claim that copays are “behavioral modification” to keep people from abusing doctor visits despite the fact that Americans visit doctor’s less than other countries.

QA - product of university is credentialing; teaching during the strike - learning from the struggle. in class teach-ins. faculty governance is meaningless. ; professors conceive of their jobs as a calling, end of the goal is tenured position, a lifetime position — this makes it harder for professors to strike, academics have bought into meritocracy from the start ; most academics do not think of themselves as workers but academics are asked to work more and more today, we are willing to expand our work because we (academics) realize that their lifetime job is a rarity and is in jeopardy ; living wage avengers - trying to build coalitions on a regular basis ; need to defeat the idea of collegiality in faculty governance.

The after lunch panels and discussions.

Roundtable 3 - Valuing the Liberal Arts

Jigna Desai kicked things off with “no time for fancy titles” about her experience in Asian and Women’s studies. She made a few good points about knowledge production as a form of social change, the “driven to discover” U of Mn branding campaign that subscribes to the positivist goal of more creating more facts, and the fact that marketing campaigns always have pictures of diversity. She also observed that the College of Liberal Arts is the center of teaching activity at the University of MN but it is furthest from the the areas of massive financial support. c.f. the recent donation to the medical school by the Masons, and the massive Carlson School of Management where the first day of the conference took place.

Margarat Werry discussed “value, liberalism, the arts: arguments for a viable future.” Arts have historically been underfunded, counter to the central work of university. Arts are activities as opposed to the creation of knowledge. Performance art, especially, is ephemeral and difficult to commodify. The arts appears in the public relations materials for universities but this doesn’t result in increased budgets or salaries. There seems to be an ornamental logic at work, arts add to the capitalist university by showing prospective students, donors, and alumni that self-fashioning can happen in the corporate university. Arts = collective inquiry through doing/action. The arts may be at “vanguard of the neo-liberal university” through the employment paradigms of the creative industries: performance epitomizes the service, or “experience economy,” artists are the ultimate flexible labor, modulating themselves to the current conditions.

Jani Scandura made some general comments about the value of the humanities and mentioned a recent column by Stanley Fish Will the humanities save us?. I particularly liked her comment during the question period about the faculty no longer being a monolithic class or interest of its own. Nowadays the differences in salary between professors can be 5 to 10 times depending on discipline.

Panel 4 - Radical Re-framings

Isaac Kamolo and Eli Meyerhoff on “Creating Commons: divided governance, participatory management, and the enclosure of the university.” Meyerhoff began with a description of the commons as those things that are recognized as accessible to all members. He proposed three types of commons: non-capitalist, capitalist, and anti-capitalist. Enclosure of the commons occurs through the identification of limits to capital, destabilization of commons, struggles over restablization, and the failure of political recomposition. Kamolo applied these ideas to the university. In the 1910s the AAUP reached a bargain with the administration to leave professors alone to publish any work they wished in return for professors leaving the management of the university to the administrations. Today the mantra is participatory governance in which a huge number of committees are created to give the faculty and students the illusion of input into the processes of the university. Some responses to this problem might be to create deeper alliances between workers at the university. So instead of saying “we support university workers” during a strike we should say “we are university workers.” A lot of interesting material here to think about. I didn’t have a chance to ask about open courseware or other technological/electronic commons that are beginning to develop.

Tim ?? from the Counter-Cartographies Collective presented “Mapping the 21st century university.” What does it mean to be a great, 21c, global university? We need to critique corporatization and knowledge factory metaphors. Consider research triangle park in North Carolina, conceived as literally a knowledge factory. During the development of RTP in 1960s university administrators criticized the plan by claiming that corporations wanted universities to be prostitutes for research. The plan was to create a route from pure research, to applied knowledge, to factory floor. Look at the RTP website 4 years ago, focused upon maps, research, triangular geographies. Today the website is focused on people, a transition from factory to affective labor. Companies are now after relationship goals - getting updates at local universities, working over time with grad students. Patent incentives are less salient, they’ve never really made much money for universities and have functioned mostly as a management technique. The largest growth in physical office space on campus has been administrative. Consider Tony Waldrop, whose job description has changed from promoting individual scholarly activities (the knowledge factory model original to research triangle), to a new mission to support interdisciplinary activity and promote economic progress. New spaces are being created that allow collaboration and show, through photos or large open windows into conference rooms, collaboration in process. These photos of students working together end up in marketing brochures, raising enrollment, and pushing the whole edifice forward.

Jack Jackson concluded on “Imperial Knowledge” but I’m afraid my mind was beginning to wander. I did catch some intriguing comparisons between the perceptions of suicide bombers today as terrorists and the writings of Winston Churchill celebrating the sacrifices of potential sticky bombers during WW2.

I had to leave before the day conclude. The rest of the schedule can be seen online.

I rode into Minneapolis today on Metro Transit to attend the first day of a conference entitled “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, and Value.” The conference is a graduate student production that grew out of the AFSCME strike at the University of Minnesota last fall. The strike prompted a lot of questions about the various labor groups that make up the modern university: faculty, students, technicians, clerical workers, etc. so in the best academic tradition the grad students decided to host a conference on the topic and this is what they came up with. Overall the presentations were good.

Panel 1 - Labor in the “Knowledge Factory”

Randal Cohn started off the morning with a paper, “Artificial Discipline,” on the history of design education by listing three broad movements that have characterized design education since the start of the 20th century. Starting with the design history of Nikolaus Pevsner in Pioneers of the Modern Movement, then moving forward to the design method school exemplified by Herbert Simon and Christopher Alexander, and culminating in the design research school. The final part has fully institutionalized itself as a separate academic program, with the attendant research program and a distinct mode of inquiry. Cohn asked where these developments have left art/design education in the university. The art/design distinction naturalizes the scientific authority of design education over artistic inquiry and leaves us asking whether art has been left behind, and feminized, as the creation of beauty and wonder.

Lisa Disch asked us to “Rethink the place of politically committed academic labor in the corporate university.” She outlined the typical progressive academic labor curve started by committed students and faculty. Establish an academic program, then a get greater legitimacy through an official department, create academic journals around progressive topics, form professional associations, etc. But who does the work to get these programs started? Most of the time it is uncompensated labor that is work beyond the normal burdens of faculty and students. And yet this labor is often appropriated by management/administrations to promote the diversity of a school or some other marketing program. Furthermore, these new fields are institutionalized on unequal grounds from programs that are perceived to be financially useful to the university. There is a de facto separation between well-funded, private sectors of the university and underfunded, progressive/public sectors. So what should we do? We could abandon the uncompensated labor behind these causes as was done with the advanced feminist study program at the UofM or we can continue to raise questions from within the university.

Barb Winkler “Laboring in the Knowledge Factory” described her experiences at South Oregon University in the women’s studies department. In the 1970s and 1980s the problem was legitimizing women’s studies as a scholarly activity. Now the challenge from administrations is to be more profitable, and entrepreneurial. Over the last year she has been working on a program to show the value of women’s studies to the administration of her school by bringing community members together for a conference/review of women’s studies. Again this work is largely uncompensated by the administration and carried out during her sabbatical.

Frank Donoghue concluded the first panel with “Against Publication,” which I thought was the most interesting paper of the panel. According to Donoghue and drawing on the recent report of the MLA about tenure, the current academic publishing system has gone crazy. Since 1968 the number of institutions that have ranked publication as central for hiring and tenure decisions has doubled. The MLA links this to the labor shortages of the 1970s; publication was an easy metric to measure, seemingly objective, and easily incorporated into reports and tenure decisions. Over the same time period the university press has been in serious decline. The result is a discipline that only has the time to read monographs in order to evaluate hiring, and tenure. The abundance of publication encourages all of us to read far more narrowly than we would like. A third factor, the contraction of library budgets, may make the entire system unsustainable. We need to rethink what authorship means to us. I particularly enjoyed his quote from a university president around 1910 that said “scholarship [publication] was a professors private endeavor” and shouldn’t be managed/considered by the university.

Panel 2 - Fictions of Autonomy

Kathleen McConnell introduced us to “Advanced Fantasy, a brief history of free universities.” In 1971 there were approximately 110 free universities, on average they had been in existence for 2.5 years. A few years later most of them were gone. Lichtman (sp?) characterized the content of these schools as one-half “craft” work, one-quarter academic, and one-quarter “head trips.” They free universities appealed to students desire for self-discover and self-invention. The neoliberal university coopted many of the free university inventions, including some of the radical academic programs such as gay or women’s studies, but also the rhetoric of education as a form of self-discovery. Education was, and still is, conceived as a form of personal enlightenment. Left behind, or ignored, were the questions of public goods and community. These schools were reluctant to impose problems of communal activity on their students because it was all about freedom. If we replicate any of these experiments today we may have to change this aversion to imposition.

Chris Roberts talked about “The university as temple of truth and Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation.’” For Weber, writing at the end of WW1, the state was no longer adequate as a support for research or education, a new justification for science needed to be found. The keys to this new alignment were objective scholarship and political non-alignment. Weber didn’t want science to be sucked back into the disastrous passions that had led to World War 1. He called for an ascetic rejection of the outside world with the goal of keeping the lecture hall a sacred space, like a temple. The result has been the skepticism of modern scholarship that studies the beliefs of people outside the academy, and, at the same time, claims to not partake of those beliefs.

Eli Thokelson asked about the “Will to knowledge and the university.” Where did the university come from? How do we reconcile the contradictory visions of the university as a reproducer of hegemonic culture and the site of intense cultural protest? Today we have committed to a fantasy of the university as a repository of all human knowledge. Knowledge is reified and commodified in the knowledge economy, but it is also unfinishable. There are three categories of definition of the university: functional - the university commodifies knowledge, maintains social class; nominalist - the university is a heterogeneous collection of unrelated departments kept together only by its name as an institution; and idealist - a realization of universal knowledge.

Ingo Schmidt concluded the morning sessions with “Manufacturing Capital Fetishism” which was basically an attempt to understand why people continue to support neoliberalism when it has no benefit to them. Economics has become the new religion of the contemporary world. Self-fulfillment has been reconceptualized as economic fulfillment and consumption. Class has been unmade or discarded throughout the world. And the Chicago Boyz, in economics, have convinced university management that economic decisions are paramount.