This morning I awoke to my uncle’s forwarding of Mark Bauerlein’s Opinion piece in yesterday’s NYTimes. The article surprised me, not so much because of its complaints–complaints about apathetic university students and corporate administrators (complaints echoing Thomas Lounsbury’s complaints about “Compulsory Composition” in 1911)–but because of its tired waxing poetic about “how things used to be.”
1) There exist many problems with Bauerlein’s depiction of the student/professor relationship mere decades ago, not the least of which is the pernicious valuing of an exclusionary system. I was particularly struck by the depiction of the potential University experience of old as “…the free inquisitive space of the Ivory Tower.” Most definitely there was nothing “free” about the potential inquisitive space for most people (particularly the poor, women, and minorities). The journey to the Tower proved inaccessible for most people and arguably still does.
In fact, I wonder about the relationship, if there is one, between the rise of the poor classes, women, and minorities as prolific presence at colleges and universities and the corporate dehumanizing of the systems purporting to offer education. Bauerlein’s use of “The Ivory Tower” as a positive metaphor surprises me.
2) Also I think of Sid Dobrin’s Postcomposition, and it’s contemporary call for the abolition of First Year Composition. His call for Composition scholars to cease focusing on students and the teaching of students and to begin focusing on writing, as phenomenon and function within systems (that might have very little to do with humans, writing as a post-human phenomenon), seems to me a call tinged with a similar waxing poetic about what the relationship between a student and professor should be, only via a cleaving of the relationship. According to Dobrin’s book, “The point of a professor” is to develop theories based on deep study, conversation, and contemplation about a subject (a subject that isn’t a student, apparently). The problem, as Dobrin sees it, at least for FYC is a focus on teaching as a subject. Its’ a problem because Composition doesn’t get much Respect from professors of other disciplines and academia; it isn’t considered an intellectual field; it’s a “service” field, one that doesn’t require specialized knowledge.
Bauerlein’s article suggests a similar attitude about undergraduate education in general, across disciplines. Though I’m not sure how he can presume to speak for professors who teach upper division or non-Humanities courses. Apparently–given the fact NYT published his piece, and given the five hundred or so substantial comments largely corroborating Bauerlein’s nostalgia and perceptions–there is reason to suggest the “human systems” that substantiate the core values of education are losing at the level of higher education to “corporate systems.”
I’m not sure how Dobrin’s call for a) a greater respect among academic peers for Composition, and b) less focus on teaching humans in our pursuit to understand writing as phenomenon and function avoids aligning itself with the corporate ideologists “ruining” higher education.
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