I’ve been trying to figure out why a blog entry by Erin O’Connor (whom I’m glad to see is actively blogging again at her own site, as well as continuing her participating at Actablog) has been gnawing at me. (Her ACTA entry she points to is a better starting place for discussion, as it is more detailed and specific.)
She compares the response of the Penn State administration to a planned demonstration on immigration issues by the College Republicans to Ajay Nair, who is teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania, urging his students to attend immigration rallies, saying that he’s been “getting his classes mobilized”.
. . .
The symmetry that’s implied between the two episodes strikes me as a very common kind of linkage in many complaints about academia. Why it irritates me modestly when the point made is somewhat valid and made reasonably, and irritates me a lot when it’s made manifestly unfairly, as it is by Horowitzian types, is that what is lacking is an affirmative or clearly enunciated theory of advocacy and politics in relation to pedagogy that would specify what is and is not legitimate. Instead, what we get is a kind of running episodic commentary that implies a consistent ethos or vision of best practice but that vision is largely absent or inferred. You can find a somewhat consistent theory through organizations like FAIR and ACTA, but even then, there is some distance between the large-scale defense of “academic freedom” and what that actually means in terms of how people should teach, speak and act within academic environments.
Without a lot of specific clarity about what “best practice” involves, these criticisms can be potentially unreasonable, unfair or at their worse, actively destructive to the real reform and improvement of higher education.
Let’s start with the case of “mobilizing the classroom”. At least some of the people who complain about politicization of the classroom also complain about the irrelevant, over-intellectualized, over-theorized, unreal, self-absorbed, ethereal nature of much scholarship and teaching in the humanities and social sciences, about the distance between the world and the academy.
What is the course in contention in this particular case? . . . .
. . .
In the absence of a strongly articulated theory about the nature of the classroom, criticisms of this kind of statement cannot simply stand as self-evident indictments. Worse, if made carelessly, they could easily lead to an even further loss of academic relevance, a perverse demand that academic discourse be even more disconnected from the world. The problem is not with a professor who has opinions about what should be done, or that directs people to attend rallies, or even with a course has a slant or angle to it. My course “History of the Future” raises questions about whether contemporary futurism is determined or shaped by the past it inherits. It puts into sharply critical perspective the authoritarian strain in much futurist thought. It makes fun of experts who casually predicted that we’d all personal jetpacks by 1995. Are those acts of advocacy or bias for which I should be reprimanded? Is Erin O’Connor over the line if she frames a course intended to “trouble” the concept of the Victorian novel?
Obviously not: that’s exactly what pedagogy should do, and if you look at the course blog for her course on that topic, you can feel confident about the productive results.
So what’s the theory of pedagogy that we ought to be articulating, the ethical statement? . . . .
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