Wednesday, January 14, 2004
(6:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Higher Education, cont.
In a previous post I wrote of my desire to find a way to participate in the "essence" of academic pursuits without also participating in the racketeering (scroll down to "PhD Program Attrition Rates") aspects of the current regime. Our conservative brethren may well have a point about a certain lack of vitality in academia, and I am beginning to wonder if we can trace some (if not most) of the problem to the increasingly apparent economic interests that converge around academia -- that is, professors have an interest in having their universities subsidize the highly specialized courses that best suit the professor's interests and also in having their universities get someone else to teach the boring classes (freshman comp is the supreme example of this). Thus, graduate students and adjuncts are brought in, and the number who get to the end and achieve a result that feels "worth it" (i.e., tenure-track positions) is relatively small compared to the number of people who wind up basically being used.
Part of the problem may well be a failure of the American education system -- that is, many of the boring, introductory level college courses seem like obvious candidates for "shit you should have gotten in high school." Composition in particular seems like an incredible waste of college time, as it seems reasonable to expect that high school graduates would be at least competent in grammar, style, argument structuring, and following a documentation style. Maybe our system is set up incorrectly if we have PhDs teaching glorified high school classes. Also, maybe, in addition to providing students with inadequate high school education, our system is putting too many people through college. Our grade-inflating society may well be cheapening every level of education by failing to provide more rigorous instruction at earlier levels. Thus, maybe all of us super-motivated people who lust after learning should go teach high school (since those are the kinds of classes we'd be teaching as adjuncts anyway and since at least that way we'd have a good salary and some benefits, albeit without the "prestige" of a PhD).
I think all of us with concerns about the "grad school issue" would do well to note that grad school does not exist in a vacuum.
Anyway, onto the important stuff: reading cool shit. Personally, I still think that my original proposal in the first "Higher Education" post is thoroughly workable, and talking to my new roommate Justin about it this evening only increased my confidence. For those who don't like "clicking links," here's the gist: a small group of people agrees to read something as a group and meet regularly (once a week, I would hope) to discuss it. This basic model could evolve to accomadate having various people agree to moderate the discussion or present papers they had written on their own.
I believe that, over time, a group of this nature could potentially produce significant literary, critical, or theoretical work -- all while basically working boring, 40-hour-a-week jobs. I would imagine that only the very upper eschalons of academics spend less than 40 hours a week on activities unrelated to their scholarly pursuits (teaching undergraduates, grading papers, various administrative issues, etc.). In addition, I'm sure that the "publish-or-perish" mentality contributes to the amount of shoddy scholarship that is published each year (whether from a "Theory" viewpoint or not). The people involved in a group such as the one I propose would be motivated primarily by a sense of community and solidarity and by a simple love of learning that is not complicated or compromised by being directly tied to one's tenuous livelihood.
There are some obstacles to forming such a group. First, many people who would be interested in such a pursuit are strongly wedded to the idea of being a part of academia. (For example, I, the proposer of this idea, am currently enrolled in a masters program, and I'm still pretty sure I intend to try to get a PhD if someone will pony up the cash for it.) More fundamentally, I think that people have difficulty participating in things that are not registered by the Big Other -- in other words, in our society, intellectual pursuits are increasingly cordoned off into "official" university settings (even things such as visual arts or music, which were formerly pursued mainly by freelancers), and overcoming that desire for official recognition is very difficult.
Reinforcing this tendency is the strongly utilitarian character of American society, which tends to push people toward identifying "hard work" almost exclusively with a career. Thus most people seem to be content to focus on their jobs and devote the rest of their time to mindless entertainment. Viewing work as a necessary evil to help finance one's true passion is regarded as naive at best, subversive at worst -- but I think that in the end, our society would be healthier and more truly participatory if more people thought that way. That is, I think that most people's tendency to put in their time at work and leave thinking to the professionals is, well, a bad thing, and I think that starting groups like the one I propose -- groups that seek after some real intellectual rigor, not just Barnes and Noble reading groups -- would be a valuable step in the right direction. Plus, it might make room for some different perspectives on literature that would help Winston not feel so lonely and afraid.
I say we try to start this some time in late June, or whenever Anthony is done with his insane schedule at school.
(On another note: Might the blogosphere provide a forum for something like this? At first glance, I think it can, but I also think that it might be more difficult to maintain rigor and genuine interchange in a time-delayed, highly abstract medium such as blogging. That is to say (in technical terms), a group of people who meet together face-to-face and are physically present to each other might give this kind of project more oomph. Blogs are certainly good for ephemeral thoughts and for spreading information quickly, and they do foster a certain kind of community, but still -- I have my doubts.)
