Coming to Terms: On the Discipline of Building Theory

Once again, I am blowing the cobwebs off this project. Over the next weeks I will try to weave together some new (to me) thinking about what it means to build theory about education. At one level, this is fairly tedious work. The aim is to reign in my own experience as a teacher and program developer and try to see the space of the classroom/college from the standpoint of a sociologist or anthropologist. For better or for worse, a career in teaching rhetoric and literature appears not to have involved this sort of discipline (or it did and I resisted).

At another level, this work is what interrupted by career as a teacher of rhetoric and literature and convinced me to be a student again. Over the past week, I have been squirreling away hours to (re)read Jameson’s 1991 book on postmodernism. There, in the machinations of a philosopher/literary critic/linguist/cultural critic, I am circling back on my assumptions about imagining a project now here in the 21st century. Jameson’s willingness to thinking aloud about thinking from where he stands is, for me, evocative. He wonders about being a Marxist in a postmodern setting (not himself able to engage in good pomo reification); I wonder, with a good deal of guilt and even less facility with reification, about noodling with philosophy in order to think about spaces for teaching and learning. My knee-jerk response is simply to teach and learn and figure out the space as the activities happen (my current guilt grows from doing this writing instead of the work of teaching and learning). On reflection, though, I am haunted by the limitations of spaces of teaching and learning. It is a foregone conclusion that a social arrangement (dare I still say, a culture) constitutes what can and cannot be talked about and perhaps what relations between things can be imagined—the open question really is to what extent “individual freedom of movement” is possible within these spaces. I suspect that movement or resistance or what Jameson calls “permanent revolution in intellectual life” depends on an examination not of static notions of truth and validity but on the historical conditions of possibility. Just teaching and learning absent such reflection is reproductive. It can lead where we want to go, where individuals want to go, but it can as easily lead us down paths we had not expected. Habermas notes that the fascist Karl Schmitt was a legitimate student of Weber.

And so, I plan to spend some time coming to terms with what it means to theorize teaching and learning spaces (to arrive at propositions concerning the relations between important factors) without violating the human practices of teaching and learning. My initial guide is Kris Gutierrez and the thinking that she has done concerning “third spaces.” She and her colleagues made a careful study of California classrooms and began to tease out “differences in involvement, participation, and learning” because they were attuned to interactivity (rather than static measure of development) and took as axiomatic that interactions involve “multiple social spaces with distinctive participation structures and power relations.” Explicit in this axiom concerning interaction are two basic assumptions. First, learners and teachers bring their worlds with them into the classroom and that learning (and by extension teaching) involves changes in the horizons (organizations of meaning including notions of what counts as knowledge) of learners and teachers but also in the horizon of the classroom (and the discipline itself). Second, sense making is triggered by unresolved tensions and dilemmas. Gutierrez has acknowledged that these assumptions are the result of riffing on Vygotsky to account for intersections of diverse activity systems and not simply individuals.

What my friends who approach social reality with numbers in mind might call “factors” come into view here: involvement, participation, and learning but also multiple and irreducible “activity systems” and power relations and dilemmas. How are they related? Gutierrez offers metaphors (a struggle for intersubjectivity that can be seen in Wells’s semiotic apprenticeship or Gee’s tool kit or Gutierrez’s own notion, “social dreaming”).

The determinate relations between variables remain fuzzy for me. Gutierrez’s data comes from groups that I do not study. Still, there is a brash attempt at totalizing here that I like. I am taking it next into more directly Marxist thinking about social space to see if I can push the assumptions closer to the economic and to history.

Democratic Intellectual Resources

A month or so ago, I finished Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard, 2008). At the center of Newfield’s argument is a pair of assumptions. First, in the U.S. context, public universities have made available intellectual and cultural resources for negotiating the American democracy (see for instance pp. 6-11, 47, 125, 126, 273-275). This basic premise likely finds broad acceptance (though I can imagine some think tanks muttering about elitist university sorts and a lack of common sense). The second assumptions is less plain (and likely would cause Bill O’Reilly to go apoplectic): “The culture wars discredited the cultural conditions of the political and economic ascent of . . . college-educated, middle-class workers. The culture-war strategy was a kind of intellectual neutron bomb, eroding the social and cultural foundations of a growing, politically powerful, economically entitled, and racially diversifying middle class, while leaving its technical capacities intact” (p. 6). The book is a selective (Newfield knows the California context best) social and intellectual history that rereads the culture wars of the early 1990’s and traces rise of supply-side economic and cultural analysis and policy that argues relentlessly that cultural and economic explanations of phenomena are neither mutually exclusive nor hierarchical in explanatory power.

What I am left mulling over, though, is how to embed this narrow history in broader economic and cultural histories. Newfield mentions John Kenneth Galbraith several times but seems uninterested in James Galbraith’s ongoing work on inequality. He pauses now and again on the ecological implications of the supply-side orientation of the culture warriors but never quite jumps into a consideration of the way that ecology informs and perhaps underlies both economic and cultural arguments. I finished the book thinking that early in the 20th century (prior to the period that concerns Newfield), the university took over the role once played by land. In the American context, the “availability” of land supported the myth of providential development but also required elaborate rationales for violating basic values (respect for property, respect of persons and a concomitant abhorrence of slavery, respect for nature, participation in community life, among others). As the public universities began to draw growing numbers of students between the world wars but especially after World War II, research and the development of an entire society stood in for the chance to go west and start over. At a university, “anyone” could take up a profession and find her way into the middle class (or become one of the lawyers and surgeons in her pedigree). Again, the myth of American growth had to cover over the denial of access to college to various Americans and to the radically different experiences available along lines that seemed to imply a class system. But the means were there for boundless growth.

Historians of U.S. higher education (Newfield included) celebrate the period between 1945 and about 1972 as a time of growing equality, a time that suggested a potential for a multi-racial society with a majority middle class. They also either explain or cover over a redirection of this trajectory. The university seems, since the 1970’s, to have begun producing inequality and self-interest in various stripes. Relatively few link this redirection to a toxic media environment, an energy crisis, leveraged redevelopment of properties, and public investment in a military industrial complex that would soon have to hope for enemies in order to justify its budget. The American myth of growth had by 1980 exhausted its ecosystem, could not continue to produce at current levels without doing serious cultural, economic, and ecological damage, but the myth insists on growth, more this generation than last.

I started a B.A. in 1981 at a regional Midwestern university that seemed still to consciously aim at gathering together the (largely white) children of Wisconsin and provide them opportunity to go where their interests and efforts took them (the economy willing). While I was at school, though, my campus voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in its history, for a candidate who had declared that government (one that in my state still supported a collegiate experience for the top 75% of a high school class) was a problem. My classmates voted for Reagan at a point when the culture warriors were still working out their white papers (Friedman’s important stuff was already in circulation but just finding significant application to policy). We (I was not at that time knocking on doors for the Green Party) voted for Reagan for cultural and economic reasons but not those, I think, that Newfield considers. My classmates jammed TV lounges to see episodes of General Hospital and loved MTV (I myself cannot be blamed for these 1980’s legacies). In the year I graduated, Dire Straits released “Money for Nothing.” The culture warriors clearly did sit in smoke filled rooms and think through political and economic and cultural strategies (Newfield’s argument is compelling for me), but they too were products of cultural and economic forces themselves and they found willing audiences for their arguments. They simply declared, You can have your MTV (and vacation in Hawaii) but only if you make sure to protect your interests. We obliged and went on a shopping binge of biblical proportions with little regards for energy, water, food, and real estate policy that was on any measure short-term and on most measures insane. Divorced from any interest in thinking about habitat and community in ecological, truly democratic terms, we followed the easiest credit.

I like Newfield’s remedies (develop public universities that 1) aim at racial equality (of opportunity and outcome); 2) aim at a synthesis of access and quality; 3) redefine development as not primarily economic; 4) increase public funding; 5) publish research describing societies as something other than markets). I finished his conclusion wondering how he might find an audience for these remedies beyond the readers of Harvard Press books on higher education. The elitism of the culture warriors seems largely to define his analysis. The university will produce the knowledge needed. Networked societies are not without need for such universities (and indeed, there are reasons to believe that universities will continue to provide intellectual resources and leadership), but the intellectual resources that will matter will, I suspect, come more and more rarely out of English departments. Wendell Berry has long produced such resources well away from the university (and there are 20 and 30 somethings doing close to subsistence farming on his advice). James Gustave Speth managed a book like Bridge at the Edge of the World only be stepping outside of the discourse of the university. It is figures like Naomi Klein and projects like Witness.org or the Human Rights Video project that will recycle ideals about global human rights into resources.

I am glad to have read Newfield’s book. I wonder if he is prepared to have English departments embrace access and develop cultural and intellectual resources.

Ideas of the University: Common Goods

Over the next several weeks, I am going to work through a series of views of college. While I have recently read through Declining by Degrees, a 2005 collection of essays that serves as the backdrop for a PBS documentary, I want to start with Clark Kerr’s 1963 revision of the moral virtues that Robert M. Hutchins believed necessary for a university president. Hutchins at the University of Chicago at the height of American Modernism believed in courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence; Kerr at the University of California on the cusp of the Postmodern, in judgment, courage, and fortitude. Prudence and justice. What have these ideas to do with higher education, with advanced learning in the 21st century?

First, prudence. Kerr removed (perhaps was pressed by his context to remove) the deliberations of the wise from the enterprise of learning. I will avoid bringing up Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of phronesis (as I would surely misrepresent it). But I will turn to Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the “Self and the Ethical Aim” (from Oneself as Another, 1992). At the beginning of his “little ethics,” Ricoeur argues that ethical practice has its roots in the trajectory of a human life. Rather than cycling between ends and means, he looks for the constitutive rules (always socially established) that give a game (a chess match, a soccer game, a human life) its direction. For a human life, it is phronesis or more importantly the phronimos that or who give voice to the constitutive rule. Ends and means cannot help to determine the aim; the community works it out in a place at a time through a dialectic between self-esteem and self-interpretation (a search, as Ricoeur puts it, for “adequation between our life ideals and our decisions”) done in the view of others (p. 180). Living a good life (and I will argue against notions of higher learning that consider living a good life irrelevant) entails reflecting on phronesis and engaging the phronimos in public. The smart and courageous student, researcher, university president who is not also prudent is likely to lose her way.

At what cost? The cost of justness. The choice here (still channeling Aristotle by way of Ricouer) is between power in common and domination. A just president (or student or teacher or researcher) is continually confronted with the equality of the other, of all others. Arguments grounded in means (this will be possible or cheap) and ends (look at what will be accomplished) that dismiss as significant the cost to another are, on this definition unjust. I am not so naïve as to believe that university presidents can make an endless string of win-win decisions. In fact, I believe that in a social space where there real conflicts, the win-win decision is a myth (a wise mediator once told me that if the conflict is real, no win-win decision is possible). I content that a president has to acknowledge that decisions enable some stakeholders to be agents and other to suffer. A just president offers reasons for making decisions (these will involve means and ends) but also an analysis of impact. The community (that is, the phronimos) already knows which impacts, whatever the ends, are unacceptable.

These reflections raise for me questions about human development and the place of learning within that development. The process is inherently risky and historically contingent (where one can go is dependent on where one is). There is in Cardinal Newman (as Kerr tells him) and the models of Robert Paul Wolff a Romanticism that I find a bit annoying. The belief in the individual in isolation strikes me as wrong-headed and not especially useful thinking. What Wolff does that seems critical, though, is to push a materialist/political-economy analysis far enough to notice the conflation of need, felt need, expressed demand and to consider the causal structures that link those quite distinct concepts. He (and Newman for that matter) argue for a space for normative discourse that makes no recourse to profitability. They wrestle to get to a constitutive rule that might take the place of profitability.

What is unsettling for me in Kerr and Wolff is their belief in . . . professors. I, like the students that Wolff describes, love the university. But I struggle to see it as a progressive institution. I look to figures like Will Allen and . . . Deborah Pontillo and Brian Bansenauer for progress. They find themselves at odds with late capitalist institutions (though they cling to the edge of colleges).

What idea is in view here? The urgent need for spaces where a phronimos can practice and my commuities—in and out of college—in pursuit of common good. I can hear the howls about that final phrase. That may be compelling proof for the assertion.