On the Current State of Education (original) (raw)
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at any time, allowing me 48-72 hours to respond. I'm happy to meet by appointment, and especially happy to hold office hours after class, either on campus or in a café in the Claremont Village.
If You’re a Critical Theorist, How Come You Work for a University? (Critical Horizons, 3.2018)
Critical Horizons, 2018
How can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of the “undercommons”.
On the Presence and (Dark) Future of Academia and Humanities
I have a pessimistic view on the present and future of high education in general, and humanities in particular. As I see things, we face three main related problems. The second, what I perceive as a class-divide enterprise; and the third as an attempt to limit the freedom of expression. I should add that my general impressions are mainly based on what I perceived within the North American higher educational system and in Europe, especially in England. Furthermore, I do not claim to be discovering something sociologically novel. What's happening in in our neo-liberal capitalist society. My aim is modest. It mainly consists in highlighting how the neo-liberal higher education and research. The conclusion doesn't look rosy. Intellectuals, philosophers in particular, academia, and take a stance against the attack on the integrity of higher education.
British Educational Research Journal, 1999
The author observes that 'postmodernism' in its most widely used sense was born of disillusionment with the university's role in state-driven attempts at social control. Specifically, Lyotard saw the teaching function impeding the natural proliferation of research trajectories. And while he may have correctly identified the reactionary social role of the university in his day, the use of the curriculum to curb, reorient and channel research is not itself reactionary. In fact, it has been a potent vehicle for democratising social life by inhibiting the emergence of new knowledge-based forms of elitism. The author illustrates this point by considering the role of history across the academic curriculum today, singling out the humanities and 'softer' social sciences for their pedagogical attentiveness to the contingent character of research developments. If there is a role for critical intellectuals in academic life, it is in terms of spreading this 'prolescience' mentality in whatever discipline they happen to practise and resisting all attempts to sever the evaluation of research from that of teaching. This amounts to an extension of 'affirmative action' principles from disadvantaged groups to schools of thought.
The Critical University as Radical Project
Radical Philosophy Review, 2017
Tanya Loughead's new book is a substantial contribution to the counter-hegemonic critique of higher education. She discusses an array of radical philosophical and sociological perspectives that are absent from the generally prevailing, business-oriented views of U.S. higher education today. Extending the work of Herbert Marcuse, Henry Giroux, and Paulo Freire her book is a source of new critical theoretical and practical insight. It offers a timely assessment and a powerful, engaging, strategy for a change of direction moving to restore higher education's classic purpose, which Marcuse propounds in the tradition of Kant, as an education, not for the present, but for the better future condition of the human race. Prof. Loughead proposes the radical project she calls "freedom-work," and champions the critical university as a site of humanist activism and creative labor. Overall, she defends the thesis that the university needs to be a site where educators model the critical life through radical research, teaching, and service. She writes: "To fight for the scholarly meaning of the university nowadays is to be a radical" (CU 2). Loughead invites us to join her in questioning the overt and latent functions of U.S. higher education. We are invited via an elucidation of Althusser to challenge the tendency of K-12 and post-secondary education to reproduce the unequal social division of labor and the one-dimensional corporate ideology that we live in and through.
HUGH GUSTERSON Homework: Toward a Critical Ethnography of the University
American Ethnoogist
Toward a critical ethnography of the university AES presidential address, 2017 A B S T R A C T Anthropologists have not systematically studied universities, and ethnographies of the university focus too much on student life. The literature on the Cold War university, broadly concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge, could serve as a model for a critical anthropology of the neoliberal university. Such an anthropology would investigate various important issues-including the changing character of public and private universities, the rise of casual labor and corporate employment practices on campus, the student-debt crisis, the university's role in increasing socioeconomic inequality and class immobility, and the relationship that such disciplines as economics and political science maintain with the state and capital. [university, neoliberalism, Cold War, class, debt, adjunct, United States] Los antropólogos no han estudiado la universidad sistemáticamente, y las etnografías de la universidad se enfocan demasiado en la vida estudiantil. La literatura sobre la universidad durante la Guerra Fría, generalmente centrada en la relación entre el poder y el conocimiento, puede servir de modelo para una antropología crítica de la universidad neoliberal. Tal antropología investigaría diferentes temas importantes-incluyendo la transformación de las universidades públicas y privadas, el aumento del trabajo temporal y de las prácticas corporativas de empleo en el campus universitario, la crisis de endeudamiento estudiantil, el rol de la universidad en el agravamiento de la desigualdad social y económica y la relación que mantienen disciplinas como la economía y la ciencia política con el estado y el capital- .
Rethinking Studies in Higher Education in the Face of the Other
Canadian journal for the study of adult education, 2017
In this essay, I share reflections on what it meant to teach my book of poetry in an introductory English literature class. The book took inspiration from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his studies on encountering the other person. Engaging with this text (both the poetry and the philosophy), I consider some of the nuances of a pedagogy of creativity and its potential for lessons in engaging with the other on the basis of ignorance of the other. The essay is a response to Anna Herbert's The Pedagogy of Creativity (2010), in which Herbert, on the other hand, defines the other as a location within the self. Résumé Dans le présent essai, je partage mes réflexions sur l' expérience d' enseigner mon recueil de poésie dans un cours d'introduction à la littérature anglaise. Le recueil tire son inspiration de la philosophie d'Emmanuel Levinas, notamment de ses travaux sur la rencontre de l' autre. En travaillant avec ce texte (à la fois la poésie et la philosophie), je me penche sur certaines nuances d'une pédagogie de la créativité et sur son potentiel en matière de leçons relatives à l' engagement avec l' autre fondé sur son ignorance de l' autre. Cet essai constitue une réponse à The Pedagogy of Creativity par Anna Herbert (2010), dans lequel Herbert, au contraire, définit l' autre comme étant un lieu à l'intérieur de soi.
Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education
It is an exciting time of possibility as research approaches continue to be contested, disrupted, and broadened to include a wide variety of promising departures from orthodoxy. What has been labelled, in various instances, posthumanism, new materialism, the ontological turn, the affective turn, and/or post-qualitative research join ongoing developments in community-engaged, participatory, decolonizing, place-based, and Indigenous research approaches. Yet, just as these enticing possibilities invite us to expand our research in ways unimagined just a decade ago, a parallel counterbalancing shift towards a ubiquitous neoliberal and accountability-focused culture – both in the academy and in society – imperils these promising developments. As audit culture and governmentality spread, they give rise to a new managerialism set on measuring us against rigid conceptions of research and impact, regardless of how inappropriate, unethical, or deleterious such constricting measures may be to ourselves and our communities. Ultimately, at stake, is the very notion of what can be considered knowledge itself. The book is the result of the symposium, “Public Engagement and the Politics of Evidence in an Age of Neoliberalism and Audit Culture,” held on July 23–25, 2015, at the University of Regina (http://www.politicsofevidence.ca/). Guiding questions for the symposium interrogated the politics of evidence: What counts as scholarship and why? How do we measure research impact? Impact for whom? Who determines and how do we determine whose evidence and what research is legitimate? What can be done and how do we effect change to university practices? For three intense days in 2015, two hundred concerned and committed scholars—together with a field of internationally renowned presenters from Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States— responded to a pressing call and convened at the University of Regina (https://www.uregina.ca) to discuss colonialism, neoliberalism, and audit culture in the academy. The present collection is intended to serve as a tool for new and seasoned scholars alike who are seeking to navigate, critically resist, and collectively reclaim and reimagine the academy. You, the reader, are now an integral part of this gathering and will help shape the future as you engage with these and other texts and groups. The future is on all of us. Time to resist, organize, and act in concert with initiatives, collaborations, affinity groups, and movements within and well-beyond the academy at both local and global levels—it is incumbent on us to expose, provoke, and tear down these systems of illegitimate authority and power. Even the harshest critics and most prominent scholars cannot easily escape our de-funded, highly individualized, hyper-competitive, and perversely incentivized moment. As Patti Lather in the collection asks: How does all this shape, reinvent, and construct life for faculty when the institutions in which “…we function serve as both harbor and tyrant.” To help us examine these and other questions, Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education features contributions from the following internationally-renowned scholars: Marie Battiste, Noam Chomsky, Norman Denzin, Michelle Fine, Rosalind Gill, Sandy Grande, Budd Hall, Patti Lather, Zeus Leonardo, Yvonna Lincoln, Peter McLaren, Christopher Meyers, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and Joel Westheimer.
Reflections on the Educational Crisis and the Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist
Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk, 2015
This is a time when education has become even more of a site of struggle. Dominant groups in a number of countries have attempted, often more than a little successfully, to limit criticism, to control access to research that documents the negative effects of their policies, and to deny the possibility of critically democratic alternatives. At the same time, critical perspectives have been built to challenge dominant understandings of education and the larger society. In this article, I want to do three things: 1) provide a general picture of the ideological situation we are facing; 2) publicly reflect on some of the critical perspectives in education that have grown in influence over the past years, since I have some worries about these perspectives if they are not more adequately* and actively*connected to counter-hegemonic movements and struggles; and 3) suggest a set of actions that more adequately deal with the responsibilities of critical educators in a time of crisis and of the growing influences of conservative modernization. In order to do this, I will also need to ground some of my points in a series of personal reflections.