This week, I told one of my classes that if they responded to a reading we are doing in their papers by saying "the characters in this novel symbolize the evils of imperialism," they would be on their way to a very poor grade.
The reaction I got was stunned, silent, and hostile. At first I was confused--why was my statement so controversial? It was only after the class and in the course of some discussions that I realized that many of my students had jumped to the totally illogical conclusion that my statement meant that they had to now write that imperialism was wonderful and just hunky-dory, whereas what I had meant to imply was that the sample statement above is so general that no one could possibly dispute it, and academic papers should not consist of the parroting of conventional wisdom.
This problem epitomizes a frustration that I am having with the general level of critical thinking at WestConn. In the past, I have assumed (correctly to some degree, I think) that most WestConn students can't write critical papers because high schools only teach them facts, and the faculties and contexts needed to question the interpretation of those facts are not taught. But I also think that there's another problem: students are getting the impression that merely repeating a mildly left-of-center line in their papers is an easy avenue to relatively quick success. As long as they write that "We need to understand other cultures" and "need to be tolerant of other people's beliefs", or "we need to reject the bigotry and prejudice that caused the Holocaust, slavery, etc," or that "I learned a lot through my exposure to x person or y event," they'll do well.
Obviously, I think that diversity is a good thing. My point is that, if you ask students why
these things are the case--for example, why "we need to understand other cultures"--you'll either get no answer at all, or you'll engage in a conversation that will be comical in its tautologies and circularities. It will go something like this:
Professor: "What's the most important thing a university can teach us?"
Student: "To accept multiculturalism and learn to understand different points of view."
Professor: "And why is that so important?"
Student: "Because we live in a multicultural society."
Professor: "What do you mean by that?"
Student: "Everyone has a different point of view."
Even the slightest problem with this line of reasoning will stop the average first year WestConn student in their tracks and keep them there.
Professor: "If we have to understand different points of view, how do we choose between them?"
Student: "We should appreciate everyone's culture, not make a choice between them. Each should be valued equally."
Professor: "But what if they conflict with each other?"
Student: "Huh?"
Professor: "European political theory says that individual rights are fundamental, but some African and Asian societies hold that you must think of the good of your family or community first before you think of yourself. Which is correct?"
Student: (Tuned you out 30 seconds ago and is listening to Maroon 5 on his/her ipod)
I've come to understand that the problem here is that the statements made in high school and even college curricula about diversity are so broad and meaningless that their net effect is probably negative. Since the focus of student's minds is on extreme examples, it will be too easy for students to simply disavow bigotry by saying "that's not me. I don't do that." That's why the only time there's really a controversy about racism is when a textbook or teacher tries to implicate students in it. I'm thinking here of the incident at the University of Delaware last week in which the residence life office used a diversity training manual steeped in critical race theory that argued that all white people are implicated in racism. They were eventually reported to FIRE, a group trying to stop the enforcement of liberal political belifs on campus. This is unfortunate, because showing how whiteness is still around and how it gives privileges to all light skinned people is perhaps one of the more valuable lessons students can learn, because then they are implicated.
We have to do a better job teaching students why this stuff matters. If anything, we need to force them to make or read controversial or even offensive arguments so that they can better understand why these arguments are wrong. The problem is that we don't go far enough.
Another prime example of this problem is Banned Books week. Every year, professors trot out in front of the student center and read from books that had been banned--that is to say, at some point of time, in some area of the world. Very few people seem to listen or care, chiefly because these books rarely expound ideas that are banned or censored here. They may have been controversial at some time in the past, and may still be controversial somewhere in the world, but not at WestConn in 2007. If professors really want an honest discussion about censorship, they should stand outside the student center reading hardcore porn or hate speech. But no one's going to do that, because the truth is we don't want to have the real discussion.
That might make our students actually have to think. We wouldn't want that, would we?
Friday, November 2, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Overreactions from Virginia Tech
How do university campuses respond to a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech? In general, at WestConn, the response has been very well thought out. We have been informed of our security procedures, reminded of our counseling center, and memorials have been set up. These are all good steps.
But there is also evidence of more dangerous steps being taken. In and around the campus, what has been on people's minds the past few days has been "is there a Cho Seung-Hui in our midst"? Some conversations have occurred and even some actions taken to make sure that there are no psychologically troubled people in or around WestConn who might contemplate the same actions. In general, the conventional wisdom emerging from Virginia Tech is that the school there did too little to head problems off at the pass, and that more should be done to remove potentially dangerous people from a university setting.
Universities know how to do little better than to have a witch hunt. And that's the issue: what's lost in these discussions of how to prevent people from acting like Cho did is that these kinds of discussions (and the persecution complex that subtly undergirds them) are precisely the reason why people like Cho feel they have to act. It has always amazed me that while incidents like Columbine or Virginia Tech spark heated discussions about gun control and campus safety, the discussions almost never get to the obvious heart of the issue: why some people on America's high school and university campuses feel so ostracized and excluded in these environments as to feel they need to take to terrible and bloody violence to sort it out.
Perhaps people don't raise this issue because the minute anyone voices any concern about the social structure of a university campus as a potential cause of these violent acts, it takes the onus off of Cho. Or perhaps people with this point of view are afraid to raise it lest they get carted off to the paddywagon themselves. Yet raising this question does not excuse his actions or apologize for him. What Cho did is horrible, and I fervently hope that nothing like it ever happens again. Yet it is ironic that when it comes to identifying "problem behaviors" or "problem students," I'm convinced that what universities like WestConn do only further ostracizes the already stigmatized students and staff and makes such attacks more likely rather than less likely in the future. The focus on university campuses needs, rather, to be on making people feel more included in their environment.
But there is also evidence of more dangerous steps being taken. In and around the campus, what has been on people's minds the past few days has been "is there a Cho Seung-Hui in our midst"? Some conversations have occurred and even some actions taken to make sure that there are no psychologically troubled people in or around WestConn who might contemplate the same actions. In general, the conventional wisdom emerging from Virginia Tech is that the school there did too little to head problems off at the pass, and that more should be done to remove potentially dangerous people from a university setting.
Universities know how to do little better than to have a witch hunt. And that's the issue: what's lost in these discussions of how to prevent people from acting like Cho did is that these kinds of discussions (and the persecution complex that subtly undergirds them) are precisely the reason why people like Cho feel they have to act. It has always amazed me that while incidents like Columbine or Virginia Tech spark heated discussions about gun control and campus safety, the discussions almost never get to the obvious heart of the issue: why some people on America's high school and university campuses feel so ostracized and excluded in these environments as to feel they need to take to terrible and bloody violence to sort it out.
Perhaps people don't raise this issue because the minute anyone voices any concern about the social structure of a university campus as a potential cause of these violent acts, it takes the onus off of Cho. Or perhaps people with this point of view are afraid to raise it lest they get carted off to the paddywagon themselves. Yet raising this question does not excuse his actions or apologize for him. What Cho did is horrible, and I fervently hope that nothing like it ever happens again. Yet it is ironic that when it comes to identifying "problem behaviors" or "problem students," I'm convinced that what universities like WestConn do only further ostracizes the already stigmatized students and staff and makes such attacks more likely rather than less likely in the future. The focus on university campuses needs, rather, to be on making people feel more included in their environment.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Don Imus, Travis Cuddy, and Racial and Gender Discussions on Campus
Even though it has little to do with the goings-on at WestConn (except for perhaps the way that discussions on race--rare as they are--go), as the Don Imus controversy fades into memory, I feel an urge to put in my two cents about the whole thing. As far as WestConn is concerned, the Imus issue is relevant, too, because of the way that it has become folded into the controversy over Travis Cuddy's use of crude and potentially sexist language in a music review (calling a female singer a "c**dumpster" in WestConn's student newspaper, The Echo).
The one thing that's clear about the whole Imus thing--and Cuddy's piece as well--is how typical it is. This sort of language has produced outrage in some and mock outrage in many more several times in the short memory of American popular culture. One thinks of Joe Biden's "clean" comment about Barack Obama, the controversy over Michael Richard's stand-up routine, and the Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" as prominent examples.
While remembering the feigned outrage that these events produced, it's also instructive to remember what actions, over the same period, have not produced outrage. Over the past several years, the current United States President, former congressman and Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchison, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, have visited Bob Jones University, the venerable South Carolina institution that has denounced Catholicism as "satanism," prevents female students from having "manly haircuts," prevented black students from enrolling until the 1970s, and until just recently banned interracial dating.
From even this one example, we see where American culture is in terms of racial and gender relations: you can be as racist and sexist as you want in your actions, as long as you avoid racist and sexist words.
And this fits perfectly well with the hypocritical priorities of the white upper-class liberal academic elite. White elites in the United States have always been perfectly comfortable in scapegoating others as long as they don't have to change their own behavior. This is particularly true when it comes to being the language and culture police. From the Salem Witch Trials to Hester Prynne's "scarlet letter," the idea of repressing people for violating a puritanical code of ethics is as American as Apple Pie. Today, this tradition is carried on by the white academic elite, who make more and more considerable efforts to extend "hate speech" to broader categories of discourse. Since they are too upper-class to ever have used this speech before (and what need would they have to engage in racial discussions anyway, considering that few of them actually interact with minorities in the first place), scapegoating others for using foul and nasty words provides them with a nice alibi for changing their own actions. After all, they support affirmative action and condemn the likes of Imus and Cuddy with impunity.
Oddly, mainstream African-Americans have largely embraced these strategies even as they solidify their continued oppression. Language policing is a smokescreen for the banal, everyday deeds of racism that people accept. Why hasn't Al Sharpton succeeded in making sure that the average dark-skinned man can hail a cab in New York City? Well, because he's too busy getting Don Imus fired. Yet this is precisely the structure of American racism. As long as the powers that be can assure themselves that racism is "not their fault" because they're not white trash like Cuddy or a shock jock like Imus, this mollifies African-Americans and ensures that no substantive discourse about race and no substantive social or political changes in the real race issues that confront us (like the fact that African-American men are disproportionally dying in Iraq, or that inner-city schools can't get funding and the average African-American student can't get a decent public education in this country) get forgotten.
The most disgusting part of this all is that in truth the reason that these actions get so much press is not because people are concerned but because they are secretly fascinated by it. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction got so much play because those condemning it could secretly get off on it. Cuddy's language got so much play, in reality, not so much because people were actually disgusted by it but because those same repressed liberals who condemn it have a secret masturbatory fascination with naughty language. This is something that few will admit is the case, but since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne, good cultural critics have known it.
This is not so say that we should all go out using the hateful words of Imus or the tasteless vocabulary of Cuddy. It simply means that if we want to have a dialogue about race, we cannot do it by muzzling one side of the dialogue. What we have now is a monologue about race. And that's precisely the problem.
The one thing that's clear about the whole Imus thing--and Cuddy's piece as well--is how typical it is. This sort of language has produced outrage in some and mock outrage in many more several times in the short memory of American popular culture. One thinks of Joe Biden's "clean" comment about Barack Obama, the controversy over Michael Richard's stand-up routine, and the Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" as prominent examples.
While remembering the feigned outrage that these events produced, it's also instructive to remember what actions, over the same period, have not produced outrage. Over the past several years, the current United States President, former congressman and Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchison, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, have visited Bob Jones University, the venerable South Carolina institution that has denounced Catholicism as "satanism," prevents female students from having "manly haircuts," prevented black students from enrolling until the 1970s, and until just recently banned interracial dating.
From even this one example, we see where American culture is in terms of racial and gender relations: you can be as racist and sexist as you want in your actions, as long as you avoid racist and sexist words.
And this fits perfectly well with the hypocritical priorities of the white upper-class liberal academic elite. White elites in the United States have always been perfectly comfortable in scapegoating others as long as they don't have to change their own behavior. This is particularly true when it comes to being the language and culture police. From the Salem Witch Trials to Hester Prynne's "scarlet letter," the idea of repressing people for violating a puritanical code of ethics is as American as Apple Pie. Today, this tradition is carried on by the white academic elite, who make more and more considerable efforts to extend "hate speech" to broader categories of discourse. Since they are too upper-class to ever have used this speech before (and what need would they have to engage in racial discussions anyway, considering that few of them actually interact with minorities in the first place), scapegoating others for using foul and nasty words provides them with a nice alibi for changing their own actions. After all, they support affirmative action and condemn the likes of Imus and Cuddy with impunity.
Oddly, mainstream African-Americans have largely embraced these strategies even as they solidify their continued oppression. Language policing is a smokescreen for the banal, everyday deeds of racism that people accept. Why hasn't Al Sharpton succeeded in making sure that the average dark-skinned man can hail a cab in New York City? Well, because he's too busy getting Don Imus fired. Yet this is precisely the structure of American racism. As long as the powers that be can assure themselves that racism is "not their fault" because they're not white trash like Cuddy or a shock jock like Imus, this mollifies African-Americans and ensures that no substantive discourse about race and no substantive social or political changes in the real race issues that confront us (like the fact that African-American men are disproportionally dying in Iraq, or that inner-city schools can't get funding and the average African-American student can't get a decent public education in this country) get forgotten.
The most disgusting part of this all is that in truth the reason that these actions get so much press is not because people are concerned but because they are secretly fascinated by it. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction got so much play because those condemning it could secretly get off on it. Cuddy's language got so much play, in reality, not so much because people were actually disgusted by it but because those same repressed liberals who condemn it have a secret masturbatory fascination with naughty language. This is something that few will admit is the case, but since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne, good cultural critics have known it.
This is not so say that we should all go out using the hateful words of Imus or the tasteless vocabulary of Cuddy. It simply means that if we want to have a dialogue about race, we cannot do it by muzzling one side of the dialogue. What we have now is a monologue about race. And that's precisely the problem.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Tenure and Promotion Process
I recently had a conversation with a good friend and colleague at a Research I institution about all of the frustrations she was experiencing with the tenure and promotion process. Even though she was already the author of three books with outstanding university pressess in her third year at the University, and even though she is an outstanding teacher, she still has to worry about getting tenure, because she is required to publish a book within a year of the time she is up for tenure. In the meantime, she has had to justify whether books published by Ivy League presses are sufficiently well reputed to meet the standard of her university.
Until recently, I felt quite fortunate not to be in her situation. WestConn is a Master's level teaching university. Our primary function is to be the best teachers we can possibly be. And WestConn professors (if any students ever read this blog, you may be surprised by this, but trust me that it's true) work incredibly hard on improving their teaching. Not to mention that we teach a 4-4 load of courses every year. But for a lot of us, this is extremely rewarding. We know that we are teaching a lot of first-generation college kids and that we have a real chance to make a difference for people. At least for me, teaching at WestConn is very much preferable than teaching at a place where all of the students were born with silver spoons in their mouth, because at those places the students will be fine anyway, since if they fail out mommy and daddy can always get them a nice job at daddy's multimillion dollar firm.
But the shenanigans of this year have caused me to think twice about my opinion. In the interest of decorum and people's privacy, I can and should only talk in general terms about this.
(In retrospect, this is precisely the reason I decided that this blog should be anonymous, even though I'm convinced I'm writing to myself and no one actually reads it). Suffice it to say that there is a prevailing campus opinion that the University's Promotion and Tenure Committee made a number of highly political and random decisions about promotion and tenure this year, denying some of the best professors tenure and forcing them out of their jobs on the slightest pretext. In many ways, it is a shame that these professors and the AAUP simply lie down on these issues, because if the students knew more about who was on that committee and who was denied, they would raise a major fuss.
Why did this happen? The truth of the matter is that the reason that the Promotion and Tenure committee can reward their friends and act punitively toward those that aren't their friends is because WestConn doesn't have the kind of promotion and tenure standards that my friend at a Research I university has. Since no one has any idea what is really necessary to achieve promotion and tenure at WestConn, the P and T is free to make it up, horse trade, and make subjective decisions, and the rest of us are left to scratch our heads. The fate of scores of university professors is left, in essence, to what faction of faculty wins a faculty popularity contest every year.
Without discussing individual cases, this is an absolute travesty. There should be concrete standards for promotion and tenure at WestConn so that faculty can protect themselves against P and T members who have an axe to grind. The truth of the matter is that if the P and T members applied their standards to themselves, most of them would not have received promotion themselves.
WestConn's students and administration are great, as are many of the faculty. The worst thing about this university is the continued prevalence of cliques and backroom deals among the faculty. This problem needs to be addressed in a systematic way.
Until recently, I felt quite fortunate not to be in her situation. WestConn is a Master's level teaching university. Our primary function is to be the best teachers we can possibly be. And WestConn professors (if any students ever read this blog, you may be surprised by this, but trust me that it's true) work incredibly hard on improving their teaching. Not to mention that we teach a 4-4 load of courses every year. But for a lot of us, this is extremely rewarding. We know that we are teaching a lot of first-generation college kids and that we have a real chance to make a difference for people. At least for me, teaching at WestConn is very much preferable than teaching at a place where all of the students were born with silver spoons in their mouth, because at those places the students will be fine anyway, since if they fail out mommy and daddy can always get them a nice job at daddy's multimillion dollar firm.
But the shenanigans of this year have caused me to think twice about my opinion. In the interest of decorum and people's privacy, I can and should only talk in general terms about this.
(In retrospect, this is precisely the reason I decided that this blog should be anonymous, even though I'm convinced I'm writing to myself and no one actually reads it). Suffice it to say that there is a prevailing campus opinion that the University's Promotion and Tenure Committee made a number of highly political and random decisions about promotion and tenure this year, denying some of the best professors tenure and forcing them out of their jobs on the slightest pretext. In many ways, it is a shame that these professors and the AAUP simply lie down on these issues, because if the students knew more about who was on that committee and who was denied, they would raise a major fuss.
Why did this happen? The truth of the matter is that the reason that the Promotion and Tenure committee can reward their friends and act punitively toward those that aren't their friends is because WestConn doesn't have the kind of promotion and tenure standards that my friend at a Research I university has. Since no one has any idea what is really necessary to achieve promotion and tenure at WestConn, the P and T is free to make it up, horse trade, and make subjective decisions, and the rest of us are left to scratch our heads. The fate of scores of university professors is left, in essence, to what faction of faculty wins a faculty popularity contest every year.
Without discussing individual cases, this is an absolute travesty. There should be concrete standards for promotion and tenure at WestConn so that faculty can protect themselves against P and T members who have an axe to grind. The truth of the matter is that if the P and T members applied their standards to themselves, most of them would not have received promotion themselves.
WestConn's students and administration are great, as are many of the faculty. The worst thing about this university is the continued prevalence of cliques and backroom deals among the faculty. This problem needs to be addressed in a systematic way.
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