Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
Keith Hart wrote: It is these places [some universities] that are the guardians of intellectual lifeThey cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. But let us recall that the student movement of the sixties, at least in the US used as its chief anti-text The Uses of the University by Clark Kerr , then President of the University of California system. He did not see the institution as primarily in aid of intellect but rather as a tool for numerous elements of society -- including government and business very prominently. The ensuing student revolt wound its way through campuses, but in reaction, university funds were cut, curricula were redesigned, campuses were redesigned so that protests more easily could be controlled, and even at public institutions tuition rose from nearly nothing to ever-larger figures. (Under Thatcher, it's my understanding that something similar was begun in the UK.) Some of the student demands, such as black studies and women's studies were met, but those elements of identity politics helped balkanize the student bodies so that efforts for common causes, including the intellect in some degree, were no longer likely to get off the ground. Meanwhile, the private elite schools used their greater resources as means to increase competition for places in them, so that only students who ceaselessly were in motion while they were in high school had much chance to get in (except for the few legacy students) . Their (the elite students') sense of self-worth and entitlement, and their ferocious work ethic continued and was nurtured in college. Doing rather than thinking has become the norm and is what is most valued among this elite. Michael H. Goldhaber # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
Keith Hart writes: Whatever we think of the country's present government, it has a lot to do with the fact that America is the world's most advanced experiment in democracy. To call such a society anti-intellectual is perverse. To call America the world's most advanced experiment in democracy is to provide strong support for Brian Holmes's suggestion, from another thread, that... Unfortunately (I mean this last word in a strong sense) democracy also appears to be something less than what it has claimed. When Francis Hwang says: As institutions grow in size, they begin to crave predictability, and their natural habitat is a quiet, placid order. But education is personal growth, which is to say that it's change. At times it can even look like chaos. It makes me think, of course, of my own scholastic education--which at it's most outwardly formal stage was a fairly unstructured experience. That's not to say that it wasn't intense, because it was. But books and bongs, activism and lazy days, meetings with profs and baking bread for the first time...these were elements of equal importance in the experience, for me and the people around me. I now recognize my experience as having been shaped by the very tail end of the decades-long shadow cast by the experimental American campus environments that emerged in the Sixties. ...like chaos, then...for if we favor E.P. Thompson's quick one definition of democracy being the undoing of predictability in social behavior and social choice, then I must say, for all the problems associated with exclusivity and limited access, my experience in an American college approached the democratic ideal in intent if not practice. I fear that this particular manifestation of democratic spirit has ebbed almost everywhere in the US system of higher education. Two observations in particular I'd offer, one totally obvious, the other maybe less discussed. The first is the issue of cost. I attended what is and was a higher priced school. But when I started in the fall of '86 it cost my family not much more than $13k/year. Yeah, that's a lot. But, good god, the tuition for this same school now stands at nearly $30k/year, as it does at nearly all the so-called elite American private schools. My wife and many of our friends went to this school; they could not afford to go to this school today. The people who can afford to send their kids to these kinds of schools now often have zero interest in personal growth, whether that's through classroom debate or doing elaborate practical jokery or performing a campus job in the dining hall, it doesn't matter...what matters is marketability, the recouping of that $120k investment. To state the obvious, then: It is no coincidence that the dramatic rise in tuition costs (at all the different types of higher education institutions, really) rolled in at about the same time that the American university experience reformulated as a largely predictable exercise in job and career preparation, as opposed to education. The second point has to do with student culture and drug use. For several decades student populations formed the core of that segment of American thinkers who experimented with different states of mind. Based on comparisons of surveys of student psychoactive drug use now and even less than 15 years ago, the conclusion is that full-time students as a group are no longer playing this role. Rather, they are--as a group--playing the new role of young people who fully integrate the use of instrumental drugs (mostly anti-depressants) into their lives starting in late adolesence. The over-diagnosis (often a self-diagnosis) of depression is a problem in that many of the emotions that inform the education of an individual (in the sense of personal growth and change) are precisely those of rage, boredom, euphoria, etc--exactly those intensities that bring people to the point of making formative decisions about who they are and what they believe, sometimes even in real or imagined opposition to great societal pressure. Of course these are also exactly those intensities of emotion which are slightly dulled by the panopoly of instrumental psychiatric treatments now available. The trading in of one role for the other stands as one among many changes in the character of the American educational experience and academic environment--changes which are blunting the democratic spirit felt by significant numbers of students for a generation at least, and which are effacing the practice and transmission of intellectualism on campus. My general point is that I believe that the American academy, starting with the students, the pressures they face, and their methods of facing them, is no longer the home for intellectuals (broadly defined as thinkers who want to change things using ideas--and that includes left radicals, liberal reformers, and neocons) that it recently was. Francis is correct when he says that the Right is miles ahead in realizing this,
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
Dan Wang wrote: To state the obvious, then: It is no coincidence that the dramatic rise in tuition costs (at all the different types of higher education institutions, really) rolled in at about the same time that the American university experience reformulated as a largely predictable exercise in job and career preparation, as opposed to education. The trading in of one role for the other stands as one among many changes in the character of the American educational experience and academic environment--changes which are blunting the democratic spirit felt by significant numbers of students for a generation at least, and which are effacing the practice and transmission of intellectualism on campus. Putting this in the context of global corporate liberalisation, it would seem that the purpose of higher education in the US - today - and everywhere, tomorrow, if the WTO via GATS succeeds in privatising education everywhere - is to create a docile elite, one which sees its debt to society no longer in terms of social engagement, but in terms of loan repayment. Insofar as consumerism is the dominant ideology, the powers that be see this as morally correct. As far as (leftist?) intellectuals see their role as questioning this state of affairs, they are the enemy, to be scorned for their impracticality in the face of a materialist world. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
All these attacks on intellectualism seem to my partially valid, but generally a little too easy. The same can be said for generalizations about the American school system. The US higher education system is extraordinarily vast and modulates depending on its structure. They are not all career-building machines and they are not radical pedagogians. But of course, we all know this deep down anyway. I still would like to throw out there the hope that everyone isn't absolutely cynical about the idea of the public intellectual. I guess I could say left intellectual for the sake of argument (although it's not exactly what I have in mind). On that tip, I would call Edward Said (rest in peace) a public intellectual. I would call Gayatri Spivak a public intellectual. I would call Coco Fusco a public intellectual. Chomsky of course as well. And maybe even some of you on the list. And I do believe that many of these folks provide a great service in producing criticality and thoughtful reflection on contemporary issues. Some have more visibility than others, and this interests me. These are not just flurries of rhetoric. I believe Said's contribution to the situation in Palestine has had legitimate material affects. I do believe that developing critical constructive dialogue is a key component of radical democracy and an important part of radical social movements. I don't find it particularly painful, nor humiliating to believe in the thoughts of people who have thought carefully about issues. In my experience, I have grown from such things and I believe other people do as well. In that vein, I am always keen on figuring out what are the spaces for these type of folks? Where can this type of speech happen? What are the infrastructures necessary to support them? What type of legitimation and distribution is necessary for a type of speech to have strategic potential? Please don't re-iterate that the author is dead. That is just hogwash. The author isn't dead. We can problematize it, sure. But lets not do so at the point of negating a constructive discussion with material consequences. These net inspired post modern desires have got to gain a little pragmatism paleese! It isn't as though the Right wing believes in such de-centered virtuosity. Folks like Clear Channel take a particular interest in controlling the spaces for speech and are far more successful. Chippy chip, Nato Art and life have finally merged. The only problem is Life sucks. -Gregory Sholette # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
Some of the items in this thread are quite disturbing, such as the thought that many people are insufficiently intelligent to go to university, but should rather go to polytechnics or the like: Public universities are packed with students who simply should not be in college. This policy that everyone's son or daughter should be able to go to college is ludicrous and devalues the degrees of those of us who belong, says David Patterson. It strikes me that much anti-intellectualism stems from many students' being led to expect from early on that they just can't cut it, that they are essentially unworthy, and that there is nothing they can do about it. At the same time, in our society, it is repeatedly claimed that education is the key to a good job and thereby a good life. Naturally this combination breeds resentment and resistance to being told either to read, write or think, in many cases, even though many who end up resisting formal thought are perfectly capable of thinking, and indeed, outside the academy often do it well. (Today, Gramsci's organic intellectuals of the working class might well be rap singers, e.g.) To pursue the discussion, a definition of intellectual might be worthwhile, so I will start with my own idiosyncratic attempt: an intellectual is a person who never gives up trying better to understand the world and her place in it, and continues to attempt to live according to that. This definition doesn't particularly favor the written word, nor scholarship, but it also cannot be satisfied with narrow expertise of any sort. It strikes me that the role of a teacher should be in part to help find ways to honor and encourage each student 's best forms of being an intellectual , in this sense, without necessarily using the label. Even better would be to help all the members of a class recognize each others' ways of being intellectuals. I am not saying that in my own teaching I do any of this very well. Michael H. Goldhaber # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
Nato Thompson: For intellectuals. I suspect this issue is larger than the classroom. It is. For a full accounting of anti-intellectualism, I think we'd have to go back thousands of years. At least as far back as Plato, who in his dialogue Theatetus tells what was already an ancient story about Thales of Miletus, founder of Greek philosophy: Theodorus, a witty and attractive Thracian servant girl is said to have mocked Thales for falling into a well while he was observing the stars and gazing upwards; declaring that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but that what was behind him and just by his feet escaped his notice. The most basic reason for the anti-intellectualism of all periods and cultures is, I suppose, that intellectualism is nothing more than a relatively rare condition rooted in a physical and/or psychological abnormality. Intellectuals are often persecuted for the exactly same reason that albinos are often persecuted in Mali. For a vivid description of the principle involved here, see The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. It is true that those so afflicted are often considered in some cultures to be in contact with higher truths and pursuits, or touched by God in some way. But the same applies to mental deficients and the insane, and I think history shows that the common people have never quite been able to distinguish between these three categories. All of them are, to use an old American dialect word, tetched. I don't think it is possible to argue invincibly against this view that intellectuals are truly more creative than others, given that most intellectual production tends to be so utterly predictable. Tired cliches like fill in the blank and its Discontents are the norm, not The Exception insert the usual Agamben citation here. And every one of the thousands of times I have heard some pundit intone that the Chinese characters for crisis mean dangerous opportunity, I am tempted to respond with the equally valid observation that the Chinese word for nerd is written using characters that mean book idiot. In the rare instance that some intellectual does actually come up with something truly new, her professional colleagues usually attack with a ferocity that would have put Kosinski off his lunch. Examples are too numerous to be worth citing, but the first one that comes to my mind (perhaps because of Arnold Schwarzenegger) is the case of a now- famous geologist from Graz, Austria named Alfred Wegener. His radical new theory of continental drift got him banished from academia. If the United States of America is to be singled out for its anti- intellectualism, as it has been here, I would suggest the obvious reason that certainly did not escape de Tocqueville but that seems nevertheless to have escaped us so far: America, at least at the time de Tocqueville wrote, was a democracy. Democracy means, literally, rule by the common people, and the common people do not employ intellectuals any more than they employ court jesters. As I suggested recently in another post, intellectuals as a class are the product of patronage. Patronage is an affair of the élite. If their employees, the intellectuals, have higher prestige among the common people in Europe than they do in the USA, that is probably because titled nobility and aristocracy are still present there as they are not in the USA, which was in fact founded by a revolution against that sort of thing. But take heart, fellow intellectuals. The American counterrevolution is just about complete, and a hereditary dynasty of Georges is back on the throne. That long nightmare, the American Revolution, is just about over. Magazines like The Atlantic, which once published the likes of Mark Twain, are now praising time-honored institutions like nepotism and the British nanny, squeezed in between ads for Lockheed-Martin, wealth management services, and timesharing arrangements on Gulfstream jets. The market for other expensive toys, like American intellectuals, has clearly never been better. There may soon be opportunities in America even for a court jester or two. Kermit Snelson # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Sat 10/04/03 at 04:32 PM -0400):
New Media Education and Its Discontent
there's something hilarious about the proposition that, were it not
for andrew jackson -- author, they say, of the quintessentially
all-american 'OK' ('oll korekt!') -- this country would be more
inclined love its intellectuals. in the service of this theory,
examples are offered which assume that what's needed most in the
discursive prisoners who are our 'leaders' -- the figureheads who
sit atop baroque administrative empires -- isn't 'personality' but,
rather, intellect. one needn't endorse the outcomes of recent or
current elections to be skeptical about that argument. reigning in
these vast apparatuses requires an 'unproblematized' attitude toward
exercising power, but over the last few decades american intellec-
tuals (such as they are) have devoted staggering amounts of energy to
'problematizing' power from every perspective -- and then they wonder
why they have so little of the damn stuff. hey, we've got to blame
*someone* for this sorry state of affairs, so let's pick on a dead
white autodidact autocrat who 'hated...Jews, homosexuals and immi-
grants'! uh, but he died twenty years before the civil war. 'yeah,
well, it *would* take a lot of time for his ideology to propagate,
wouldn't it?!'
the plaint that intellectuals don't get the respect they deserve
emanates, of course, from those who would 'be' intellectuals. i'm not
sure what that's supposed to entail (and it'd be hard to find a better
way to describe what i've been doing for the last decade and a half),
but in the specific context given (the classroom) the telltale signs
of anti-intellectualism were diagnosed as 'not reading assignments,
not contributing to class discussion, complaining about a high work
load, skipping class, giving low evaluations to instructors with high
standards, not bothering to do extra work, [and] by dispassionately
condemning intellectual debate as boring.' luckily, the obvious
response -- that in some very intellectual circles these signs would
be seen as a healthy disregard for the authoritarian hypocrisy of the
classroom -- was saved by the bell, as it were: a pious invocation of
bell hooks, untertheorist of self-consciously intellectual cant about
'sites of resistance.'
weirdly, though, in trebor's recount, the people doing all this 'res-
isting' in the classroom seem to be the teachers, not the students.
like many mysterious inversions of logic, the truth of this proposi-
tion is hidden in plain sight: in a classroom, students *do* rule --
directly, through sheer number, and indirectly, through procedures
such as teacher evaluations (which definitely weren't developed by
anti-intellectuals). and how, he asks, can teachers be 'courageous'
when those darned students get to speak their mind out-of-band, as
it were, by saying mean stuff about teach to the boss? faced with this
plight, the teacher's 'resistance' consists in part, he suggests, of
being 'transformed.' maybe i'm missing something, but none of the best
teachers i ever had -- in studying quite classical disciplines -- were
transformed in the course of a semester; they did, however, know ex-
actly what they were teaching. iirc, their personal odyssey didn't
play a big part in the syllabus, which mainly focused on transforming
students from people who didn't know something into people who did.
trebor claims that 'Media Study Departments bring together the most
relevant sources of knowledge.' this may be so, but that assumption is
hardly the clearest basis for constructing a curriculum, let alone a
syllabus. those tasks are much more banal, involving as they do the
orderly presentation (and, over the years, repetition) of whatever
'knowledge' is being supposed to be imparted. a field founded on the
presumption that it's the bee's knees is likely to have a hard time
explaining in plain terms (which students do tend to appreciate) what
exactly is being taught. 'relevance'? 'sources of knowledge'? 'cult-
ural theory, and literature to technical skill, from the vocational to
the conceptual'? could it be that media studies, however 'relevant,'
doesn't constitute a coherent field, discipline, or object capable of
sustaining a disciplinary structure that supports sustained inquiries
into Intellectualism and Art? could it be that the students are res-
ponding sensibly to a lack of clarity? that their 'careerism' is less
'anti-intellectual' than a pragmatic and affirmative request for the
department to please explain how they're supposed to make a living
with all these high-minded values? the (old-school) answer could well
be, 'well, if you're smart enough to ask that question we trust that
you'll be smart enough do what you're going to have to do anyway,
namely, figure it out for yourselves.' that'd be honest; but then the
line of inquiry would shift very quickly from top-down Art and Intel-
lectualism to bottom-up What the F---?. which would be an excellent
