Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Had to stop reading at the lukewarm green juice yoga contextualisation, it hadnt been explicitly judgemental enough so i bailed.

Under a previous ideal, one that drew on terms such as “affirmative action,” students like Eosphoros and Bautista would have been made to feel lucky just to be in school. Today, they are told that they belong there, but they also must take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity. They move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that might mean. They bear out the school’s vision. In exchange, they’re groomed for old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class. An irony surrounds the whole endeavor, and a lot of students seemed to see it.

“Oberlin does a really good job of analyzing intersectionality in the classroom—even in discussions, people are aware of who’s talking, who’s taking up space,” Kiley Petersen, a junior, told me. “But there’s a disconnect in trying to apply these frames of intersectionality and progressive change to departments and this school as a whole.” Some students have sought their own solutions. Earlier this year, a sophomore, Chloe Vassot, published an essay in the college paper urging white students like her to speak up less in class in certain circumstances. “I understand that I am not just an individual concerned only with comfort but also a part of a society that I believe will benefit from my silence,” she wrote. She told me that it was a corrective for a system that claimed to value marginalized people but actually normalized them to a voice like hers.

This is good stuff imo

“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

this on the other hand is a nightmare

I think some of the quotes from students that are supposed to come across as reasonable, earned dissatisfaction with the system just come across as thoroughly petulant to me. Obviously I had a lot easier time empathizing with the old white people in the article but like, I was an angry kid in college! I was right about most of the stuff I was angry about! The way to fix any of those things is NOT to pitch a fit and leave.

Also nobody gives a shit if you stay up until 2 am and then go to class at 9 am the next day and do that over and over and over. You are a senior. Regularly getting five or six hours of sleep is good stuff for a grown up.

Eosphoros' analogy of trigger warnings to nutrition labels is a good one.

(to be clear, I did pitch a fit, and left) (we were still right about the shit that was fucked up)

i liked the new yorker piece. my own concern with these developments (and im not overly concerned about them) is the extent to which, for all their talk of being political, how little these students seem to value the political--politics as (schmittian) conflict, compromise, etc. they seem to have very little tolerance at all for the political as a distinct sphere in the social life of modernity (they speak of how "tired" they are of it--arent we all!) and seem to want to be done with it, to "solve it," leave the country, etc. (go where you want, and politics will find you, however) and so while i wouldnt go so far as to say they are anti-democratic they are definitely against the conflictual political basis of liberal democracy. i think you can see this in the emphasis on "activism" rather than politics--it's clear which side of that distinction is the pure or immune one--everything else is tainted with power, "capitalism," etc. activism is the way out, the way out of a despoiling and frustrating politics and towards some kind of self-affirming purity of intent and freedom.

in some roundabout way this represents the hidden heart of the enlightenment political project as the achievement of an immune and absolute moral basis for criticisms of society, politics, etc. (if you follow koselleck..)

similarly with the complaints that sound probably hella bizarroworld to people far outside these circles - 'i'm doing all this work being radical or being oppressed, i should be getting paid for it', and 'my education should be meeting every need i insist on the legitimacy of and should not waste any time on anything i reject' (that one's more perennial, but has a new tone to it).

for the former the older traditions of civic engagement, religious service, literal moral action in the sense of selfless help to the worst off, are maybe sufficiently distant/broken now that it's practically impossible to conceive of engaging in radical work if it does not directly benefit you personally (no surprise when much of it is caught up in identity-construed politics), so that there's an enormous amount of resentment and recrimination circulating around the work.

for the latter there's some residual acceptance of self-education as a thing, within the shell of the more traditional idea that in education you and 'your' culture meet up and wrangle, with some give to the process contingent upon your serious and passionate engagement in it, mostly to be made good later as the byways of culture and knowledge-production feed back into the university (so maybe 10, 20, 50 years later, education has been slightly remade in the direction of you and your cohort, the concerns that caused you friction with the formal education you received). but it's not really self-education, in that it still addresses itself to institutions and their credentialing/legitimizing function but claims the right/power to detail the terms of the education to be given.

perform their identities

is this English

I'm guessing it's meant to mock Butler ideas of gender as performance.

All identity is performance.

all hatcats are cats

The New Yorker article kind of beggars belief, writing about Oberlin as is this stuff was brand new and changing the place. They INVENTED this shit.

I think I instinctively reject all this 'students are safe space censors' stuff because of the sneer it's presented with.

the interesting thing is the article sort of does highlight how the strange-looking demands of the students are an aspect of them actually taking the promises of the campuses seriously. on their own they're strange demands. as responses to precisely the claims of campuses they make sense, and point to this gap between the rhetoric of the campuses and what they actually do, and it would be great if more coverage picked up on that.

i forget if we discussed this robin kelley piece from the boston review on this thread (maybe it was the other?)

feels germane https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

i keep wanting to start a thread about the collapse of academia. i think even if these students' specific demands are unreasonable or seem silly they are being made within institutions that are deeply + catastrophically flawed. i'm not sure exactly how to connect seemingly disparate phenomena like the abuse + poverty of adjuncts + TA's, the reams of superficial jargon-laden worthless critical theory from celebrity academics, students making bizarre demands, the rise of activism academia as a replacement for scholarship, the funding crises and exploitation of students through student loans and obscene tuition spikes... but they all seem to be a part of a similar thing - an institution that has become completely dysfunctional.

Also stop charging ppl to learn hobbies and opinions

it's hard to figure out what a normative ideal of higher education would even be at this point unless you want to go back to teaching the classics to the well-to-do. (which, maybe we do?)

i think what a lot of us value or valued about academia (critical thinking, a roadmap of the canon, exposure to new ideas) is at this point not really "institutionalizable" anymore, at least in way that's not gonna perform some massive exclusions.

i keep wanting to start a thread about the collapse of academia. i think even if these students' specific demands are unreasonable or seem silly they are being made within institutions that are deeply + catastrophically flawed. i'm not sure exactly how to connect seemingly disparate phenomena like the abuse + poverty of adjuncts + TA's, the reams of superficial jargon-laden worthless critical theory from celebrity academics, students making bizarre demands, the rise of activism academia as a replacement for scholarship, the funding crises and exploitation of students through student loans and obscene tuition spikes... but they all seem to be a part of a similar thing - an institution that has become completely dysfunctional.

this seems too broad, esp. when you're talking about oberlin, which i doubt relies on adjuncts much.

is academia really that bad? if anything, campuses seem like they're better at recognizing and accommodating the needs of students now than when I was a student. there are a lot of institutional problems related to the money churn (the adjunct instructors/TAs taking over more of the teaching load, tuition going through the roof) that are a result of dried-up funding and increasing student populations but again, that's about recognizing schools aren't being allocated funds commensurate with their current needs

there might be huge battles about how academically rigorous programs should be, but every person I've talked to in the engineering and sciences who is either in grad school or recently left undergrad doesn't report an experience that's greatly different from what mine was fifteen years ago

xpost

i mean, yes, those are all problems, but i think it'd be too tidy to wrap them up in one package labeled "collapse" (though some of my friends would label that bag "neoliberalism," which also seems too neat)

Academia has its problems but it basically rules when compared with any other institution or workplace

there's a bit in the new yorker article about how some of the students, particularly less privileged ones, have begun to see higher education as a false bill of goods. left unsaid, i think, is what they expected from it.

im not economist but the current student-debt bubble and deracination of the humanities suggests that the current status quo is teetering. many people i've talked to in academia seem convinced that the future will essentially involve technical and trade schools with a handful of elite schools still providing a "liberal" education.

I mean:
the reams of superficial jargon-laden worthless critical theory from celebrity academics
not an issue in most majors?

students making bizarre demands, the rise of activism academia as a replacement for scholarship,

students and a subset of faculty have always pushed demands on to institutions, more so in times of greater social change. mistakes are made in the handling of these situations, but it's an open dialog? no idea what "activism academia" means outside of the grading curve, but I have friends who went to schools with non-traditional curricula (Evergreen and its lack of grade system, other schools with block scheduling instead of the traditional credit-hour system) and I don't see that becoming much more widespread

some of the problems morbs mentions have to do primarily with public/state schools which are losing financial support, and yes, many of those schools are in crisis. and that's a huge issue for higher education as a democratic institution.

i'm not as convinced that the bulk of private schools are in crisis.

i think mordy is reading too many think pieces on this stuff.

sorry, i typed "morbs" above when i meant "mordy." they are not to be confused. :)

this is good on how horrific the adjunct situation is (probably worse than you know): http://gawker.com/dont-stay-in-school-kids-1778187475

i can speak from personal experience that the college debt experience is terrible as well.

it's true, though, that people have been decrying the collapse of academia for some decades now...

the idea that a college education guaranteed you a spot in the workforce seemed to be on the rise when I was in school -- the offices for career placement and churn of job fairs seemed to get more larger and numerous every year, with this expectation that even in fields without traditional internships that you needed one in order to succeed

it's a bit chicken little of me, but i think the next big economic crisis will do a number on the humanities (as the last one did). part of my decision to try to get out of academia is to get a head start on that.

I think that when combined with the greater debt load, it's resulted in more people feeling cheated. Graduating with an expensive degree followed by an uncertainty about the ability to find a job, let alone have a career path, is nerve-wracking

im not economist but the current student-debt bubble and deracination of the humanities suggests that the current status quo is teetering. many people i've talked to in academia seem convinced that the future will essentially involve technical and trade schools with a handful of elite schools still providing a "liberal" education.

i think this is probably otm and honestly the role of humanities or a "liberal" education at this pt should probably take place in the context of autodidacticism or maybe some pre-modern monastery format bc it's irresponsible imo to charge students a hundred thousand dollars for a degree that qualifies them for nothing (and again, this is speaking entirely from personal experience - should i have been bright enough to know that my humanities degrees would be worthless? yes. did any responsible adults tell me that at the time, though? no.)

oh, i know all about the adjuncting problem.

it's a combination of:

- declining state support for public higher education
- swelling of administrative class
- overproduction of PhDs in most fields

the interesting thing is the article sort of does highlight how the strange-looking demands of the students are an aspect of them actually taking the promises of the campuses seriously. on their own they're strange demands. as responses to precisely the claims of campuses they make sense, and point to this gap between the rhetoric of the campuses and what they actually do, and it would be great if more coverage picked up on that.

― are you ellie (s.clover), Wednesday, May 25, 2016 10:08 AM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I should have just said "s. clover otm"

and i'm one of the lucky ppl who had a family business to fall back into that pays me enough that i can actually afford to pay my $1,000 a month college debt obligations. i do not imagine that the vast majority of graduates are as lucky.

Mordy some of those things are connected (adjuncts + funding); the others may be connected to each other but they're part of an academic world I don't experience or recognize. & certainly just an american academic world, because those issues, to the extent that there's anything there save hype, don't register outside the usa (maybe canada).

by contrast my department this semester worked out a scheme by which we could accommodate students who've been participating in social movements against the new work law; students who didn't turn in enough work to get a passing grade got the opportunity to turn in a supplementary assignment (obv we didn't ask if they'd "really" been at Nuit Debout etc). & the university has been giving students space to organize. some of them have taken over lecture halls over night & so we've had buildings closed for a couple of days here & there. the activist energy is pretty strong but it's focused on pretty practical issues, like changing the government / government's mind. of course we don't really do identity politics here, except for gender, for better or for worse.

biiiiig xp

of course the whole thing is a question of finance, since programs produce PhDs essentially because

1) w/o enough graduate students they can't fund programs
2) w/o graduate students they lose an entire stratum of undergraduate teaching

schools need to deincentivize (sp?) programs from producing PhDs. what we need is a larger stratum of good full-time jobs teaching low-level undergraduate courses, jobs that currently go to grad students (at r1s, etc.) or adjuncts. maybe those jobs aren't the traditional tenure-track professor jobs.

Adjuncting is the worst. I've been lucky enough to do it steadily so I always have a berth but if I didn't have another full time job w/benefits it'd be hellish.

that gawker piece, i had second thoughts about emailing it to a friend who is finishing a ph.d in creative writing and was just cut out of her assistantship (:X). academia is a plague.

that was what was clear when I was leaving school, and even more so after speaking to people who have worked as adjuncts -- undergraduate classes are just too large to expect the majority of them to be taught by professors also doing research and publication, but there's no allowance for hiring people outside of contract positions. having a large percentage of your staff be contractors who have no incentive to stay in the community and little say in departmental affairs is not sustainable

it is true that academia functions on a neoliberal model insofar as it assumes perpetual growth

programs produce phds that become professors who train phds who become professors...

you've got geometric growth built into the system

and while the increasing emphasis on "non-academic employment" for phds comes from, i guess, a sincere place, it's a big joke since you're not spending 5–10 years being trained for "non-academic employment". the entire model of graduate education would have to shift radically if they really think they are training you for something other than becoming a version of your advisor.

sorry for furious xposts

i should have added, to clarify, that while geometric growth is built into the system, obv the real world can't accommodate that growth

i can actually afford to pay my $1,000 a month college debt obligations. i do not imagine that the vast majority of graduates are as lucky.

Unless I'm completely confused, vast majority of graduates are much luckier than you, in that they have nowhere near $1000/month in college debt obligations. I mean, it sucks really hard to be in that position and I'm sorry that you are, just saying it is not the norm? This paper says median monthly payment for households that owe higher ed debt is $160/month

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/06/19-typical-student-loan-debt-akers

and that fits with what I've generally been hearing

academia is basically the most sociopathic and checked-out industry in america outside health care.

"the entire model of graduate education would have to shift radically"

in the usa. there are other models. for instance, in order to teach high school in France (or even middle school) you need to pass a national exam (the "aggregation") in the subject you want to teach. normally you train for this during your masters or doctorate. the pass rates are around 20-30% in general, it's a tough system, but the idea is that secondary school teachers should be experts in what they teach. our doctoral students seek higher academic positions but many of them will take middle or high school positions for 5-10 years while they stay semi-active in research. we have something like adjunct positions but they're contractual, either 50% or 100%, and you can't pick up extra classes here or there like american adjuncts unless you have some kind of contractual position already. we also have lots of post-docs and you can add courses on top of those for a little extra dough.

we still have plenty of students who don't find jobs like the ones they'd envisioned, but it's not like the usa. obv our welfare state helps.

xp wau 4 million new posts, this was to mordy re 'keep wanting' above

i think a materialist-historical look at the curriculum since the GI bill/boomer influx and takeover might cover a lot of that, since it's the site of pressure from above and below and characterizes what the official core structure of the university is supposed to be over time.

for instance at my alma mater there was a cultural studies department, obviously the 'theory' department, but only a remnant of a shell of a traditional humanities department at the time i was around. apparently that was the legacy of political shifts within the university around curriculum more broadly:

http://rbtapp.com/files/HumanismToday_files/htvol11tapp9.html

a lot of the major changes in curriculum, faculty composition, etc. since the 60s have been effected in similarly political terms, capture of resources or shifts in institutional clout rather than (as the ideal would have it to still be possible) just through shifts in the conversations internal to disciplines or across humanities disciplines. when you combine that with specific formations or moments within/across disciplines which can present themselves as politically active/effective, you can easily generate all kinds of incentives (for researchers to posture as 'intervening' with their articles, for students for demanding course content which pretends to political relevance to be actually relevant, etc.) with volatile consequences.

i recall reading an account of the origins of 'moral problems of society' courses, of the style that are often taught by philosophical ethicists but could in theory be open to other faculty/disciplines, in the influx of students demanding 'relevant' curriculum in the 60s. the account commented on the bias toward the contemporary public moment and its debate frames, on the political salience of the most popular choices of issues, but also on how the whole thing lent itself to 'theory/applications' construals, which is why such courses (e.g. as shows up in their textbooks) so often take the form of a vestigial summary of kant-mill-aristotle-(plus feminist critique as an afterthought) plus a series of topical pro-con articles. in philosophy a lot of the latter might come from or be heavily influenced by the rise of the journal 'philosophy and public affairs'.