Results tagged “university” from Eccentric Eclectica

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.