I have only one really quick thought on this. Over the next few days, weeks, months, and even years, there will be much dissecting of what happened, what went wrong with the organizing efforts, failures of strategies, faults of tactics, even personal and individual scorn heaped upon things people didn’t like.

But ignore all that. For those of us, like myself, who support all forms of collective social action and organization, there is but one overriding problem that doomed the unionization effort. If you look at all the anti-union rhetoric, it focused on one major tenant or article of faith: the free market is all you need to keep things on an even keel.

This was the major warrant under all arguments. Why would a university watch out for graduate students without a union? Well, because if they don’t, the “market” will punish the University. Why will wages be kept reasonable? Because if they aren’t, the “market” will punish the University.

This is the problem with the contemporary forms of collective social action in 2012: “democracy” is understood by many people as simply being able to interface with a “free market.” As long as a market is in place, collective social action (of which unionization is a form) is antithetical to how many people understand “democracy.”

Until this situation changes, until our understandings of what constitutes the best means for the intelligent direction of activity to realize our fullest potentials shift, I fear most efforts at organization will face a similar fate. Our greatest enemies are ourselves.

I won’t link to Kopp’s piece due to issues I have with HuffPo. However, in reading Kopp’s slickery defense of her own work, you may start to notice the extreme superficiality of her arguments. We have optimism, vision, gusto, and positive thinking! But beyond concepts, there’s shockingly little of substance to be found in Kopp’s rebuttal.

For some reason, this makes me wonder if the work of Bowles and Gintis, and in particular their 1976 magnum opus Schooling in Capitalist America, is about to make a come back. It has just recently come back into print, after being somewhat difficult to find for many years.

Anyway, regarding the whole debate on education, I always come back to this idea that Bowles and Gintis introduce in the very early pages of Schooling:

“To capture the economic import of education, we must relate its social structure to the forms of consciousness, interpersonal behavior, and personality it fosters and reinforces in students.  This method gives rise to our third comment on the reform process.  The free school movement and related efforts to make education more conducive to full human development have assumed that the present school system is the product of irrationality, mindlessness, and social backwardness on the part of the teachers, administrators, school boards, and parents.  On the contrary, we believe the available evidence indicates that the pattern of social relationships fostered in schools is hardly irrational or accidental.  Rather, the structure of the educational experience is admirably suited to nurturing attitudes and behavior consonant with participation in the labor force.  Particularly dramatic is the statistically verifiable congruence between the personality trains conducive to proper work performance on the job and those which are rewarded with high grades in the classroom”

And the money shot:  “As long as one does not question the structure of the economy itself, the current structure of schools seems eminently rational” (9).

So it goes with Kopp’s defense of TFA. As long as you endeavor to not look, no problems will be found.

This process has been undeniably aided as well as profoundly shaped by a number of books I encountered and read during the year. Here, then, is a retrospective of the 10 books that left the biggest marks over the last 12 months.

1. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Robert Westbrook (2005)No one studies Pragmatism and John Dewey seriously without knowing the work of intellectual historian Westbrook.  His magnum opus, John Dewey and American Democracy, is required reading for anyone who has even a half interest in Pragmatism. I first worked through that behemoth the summer after I wrapped up my doctoral coursework and credit it with providing me with the base from which I survived my prelims. But Democratic Hope is something else altogether. While it draws heavily on many themes in Dewey’s biography, it does much more than that by picking up on the “rest of the story” concerning Pragmatism, Democracy, and what relevance it has to political theory today. In this, Westbrook moves beyond the historian’s role and directly enters the fray as a theorist, thinker, and philosopher. What this book did for me, though, was to illuminate a second, almost hidden thread concerning Pragmatism–a thread that has been unfortunately cast into the shadows by Richard Rorty. But it is precisely this thread that I had been needing, especially in light of the horrors that the economic downturn wrought on society. As will be evident, many of the other books on this list were books I came to from Westbrook’s work.
2. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. David Harvey (2010)For a fleeting moment, I felt a little sheepish about putting a “reading guide” on this list. This book, though, needs to be mentioned for one very simple reason: the economic recession caught nearly everyone in academia off guard both with how bad it got and how long it has persisted. It occurred to me (and still occurs to me) that many of the current fashionable trends in theory simply weren’t providing any ways to understand what was/is going on. I needed more Marx. While Harvey’s work has long been on my periphery (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, The New Imperialism, The Postmodern Condition, etc), what really made this book valuable to me was the way through which Harvey positioned himself as an educator of Marx through his prose. I had read big swaths of Capital Vol. I as an undergraduate, but this encounter was rough and incomplete. Things I had been struggling to connect for some time were all of the sudden much easier to wrap my mind around after going back through Capital with Harvey offering his thoughts along the way. Importantly, rediscovering Marx’s discussion of how labor is extracted from workers has been critical for me trying to understand all the data I collected from my fieldwork. Since “Marxists” (and I mean the real kind who take Marx’s actual writings seriously) aren’t as easy to come by in academia as many people think, I honestly don’t think I could have gotten these insights out of Marx without Harvey’s book.
3. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Nancy Welch (2008)Welch’s book makes this list for one single example she explores in her book. During her husband’s fight with cancer, they had to write a letter of some sort so that insurance money might cover an alternative form of treatment. The request detailed in the letter kept getting denied. Obviously, this was not due to any deficiencies in the actual composition of the letter, but rather had more to do with how the world is currently structured. This insight should be earth shattering to those who work in comp/rhet. I don’t know that Welch fully and successfully completes her project (and this has been the subject of a piece that I’ve been trying to get into print lately), but it points out what we’re up against. In my own work, this has been something I’ve been noticing with some regularity, and has lead to my own shift in thinking about language and its role in society. As the General College at the University of Minnesota was being shut down, there were many in the university community who smugly looked at GC from their own garroted ivory towers and had the gall to suggest that if only supporters of GC could argue for its existence more effectively or eloquently, it would be spared. Wrong. The first decision made when the administration decided to get ride of GC was to simply not listen to any dissent at all. No language could have broken through this barrier. This is a tough pill to swallow, especially for those who tout the social power of words and writing.
4. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. Cheryl Misak (2000)I can thank Robert Westbrook for pointing me to this book. Too much of my introduction to Pragmatism had been influenced by Rorty and James, particularly in regards to “truth” and “belief.” Misak’s book corrected this for me, by pointing me back to C. S. Peirce and the origins of that “other” Pragmatism that I, for some reason, had missed out on during my initiation to Pragmatism. It is from Peirce, not James, that Misak builds up a Pragmatist conception of “truth.”  It is precisely this concept of “truth” that had been lost with Rorty, and what has hamstrung Pragmatism for so long in regards to responding to events such as the economic recession (and more broadly, the rise of an anti-democratic form of governance: neo-liberalism).  Misak resurrects “truth” as something a little less than “Truth” but still as something we can use to ground action upon as well as moral, ethical, and political deliberation.
5. Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. Robert Talisse (2005)By now, a pattern should be emerging. I was reading Talisse’s book at the same time I was reading Misak’s book, and the two obviously compliment each other very well, as they are both working within the same trajectory initiated by C.S. Peirce. Talisse’s book, though, has forced me to think much harder about liberalism itself–not “liberalism” in the partisan sense, but liberalism in the philosophical sense initiated by Locke. In this, Talisse navigates one of the toughest conundrums facing anyone that deals with anything regarding individuals in group settings, be it political theorists or teachers in a classroom: what happens when plural beliefs come into conflict with each other. This has been an important addition to my own work, especially in trying to understand how liberalism’s anxiety over such adjudication has often times scuttled many liberatory/emancipatory approaches to writing instruction. It also has added to my conviction that Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action remains under-read and under-written about (although Talisse, not counting himself as a Deweyan, might disagree here). Someday, when I have the time (ha!), this is a project I would love to attend to.
6. The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. (2008)Things people seem to forget: Mills wrote his dissertation on Pragmatism. That is a fascinating read unto itself, particularly in light of how others have written the story of Pragmatism. But outside of Sociology, where his Sociological Imagination is still very much in currency (apparently?), Mills’ name seems all but absent. I don’t fully understand this. Regardless, working on a tip to check out his unpublished dissertation (posthumously published as Sociology and Pragmatism: The higher learning in America) I began to check out Mills’ writing as a public intellectual. To me, and where this volume of his shorter works is most important, Mills is the sort of “missing link” between Dewey and the progressive movement and left politics today. Characteristically, Mills pulls no punches in these works. What has been so valuable to me, though, is seeing how Mills attempts to make sense of his time, the cold war, and what a tenable “left” might be in the wake of the Stalinist Soviet Union as well as the decline of labor. Much of what Mills saw around him still defines the moment we are living in, particularly in his warnings about what happens when public deliberation over political goods ceases to be a social fact.
7. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Richard Bernstein (1983).
   There were two Bernstein books that really became important to me this past year, (the other being Praxis and Action) but this one has been the more fruitful one to my own work. It is in this book that Bernstein works through the enduring agon between objectivism and relativism. This book has been so important simply because these issues just never cease to die. Crack open virtually any current issue of any academic journal in my field, and you will still see debates falling neatly along the lines that Bernstein lays out. It is uncanny, and suggests Pragmatism still has a lot to offer the field of composition studies (are you listening editors and peer-reviewers that have met my work with apathy??). This “quest for certainty” has implications that go right down to the pavement, and the inability to move beyond it has really lead to the dearth of “ground shaking” scholarship that defined composition in the 1980s and 90s.
8. Writing at the End of the World. Richard Miller (2005).There are things that are hard to swallow, and then there are things that are hard to swallow. In my own field, there is one seemingly omnipresent belief we grasp on to as a means to (what…) justify our own existence. This belief is that writing matters. But we don’t just mean that it matters personally, we usually mean that learning to write is somehow one of the last remaining rays of hope in an increasingly desolate world. Miller minces no words here when he writes:
   “The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self-reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing.  Hellen Keller learning to see the world through a language traced into the palm of her hand; Malcom X in prison memorizing the dictionary word by word; Paul Freire moving among the illiterate masses in Brazil: we tell ouserlves and our students over and over again about the power of reading and writing while the gap between rich and poor grows greater, the twin towers come crashing down, and somewhere some other group of angry young men is at work silently stockpiling provisions for the next apocalypse. [...] if you’re in the business of teaching others how to read and write with care, there’s no escaping the sense that your labor is increasingly irrelevant” (5).
   This sentiment has been echoed before, notably by J. Elspeth Stuckey in 1990 and later Robert Yagelski in 2000. No one, though, has taken on this master myth of literacy instruction with as much force as Miller. As upsetting as this book has been to some (no really, it comes up often even 6 years later from people who now see it as their mission to prove him wrong), for me it points to a much more difficult reality that I think the field has to face. If I am allowed one big, pithy conclusion in my dissertation, it is this: to have good writing, we need a world in which good writing can matter.  This is not something we can assume exists–as we so often do–; this is something we have to work to create.
9. The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Corey Robin (2011).
   Read this book. Corey Robin has seemingly come out of nowhere and is now everywhere. I had heard of (and yes, ashamedly sort of half-skimmed his earlier book Fear: The History of a Political Idea) him before, but it was when Mike Konczal tweeted something about him hosting a group reading of Hayek on his blog that I checked out his new book. I’m glad I did. What Robin offers is a sorely needed re-grounding of the debate over left-right, looking to history to actually try to distinguish the two in a way that goes beyond partisan “Democrat” and “Republican.” In this, Robin works in the best tradition of others on the left, who have sought to get to the heart of the matter of what we are really talking about when we talk about “left” and “right.” Robin, in my mind, is picking up where writers like C. Wright Mills have left off. Robin’s work has been important to me simply because I had been struggling to identify what I see as an inextricably linked project or mission in writing instruction to something “leftist.” Robin has given me a better base from which I can think this through, as well as something to turn to whenever those silly arguments pop up whether someone can be a good writing instructor and be a republican or a right-wing ideologue. These arguments are silly because 1, you can’t, and 2, they completely mis-identify the question as being “democrat” versus “republican,” instead of “left” versus “right” in a much broader expanse. Are there “good writers” on the “right?” Obviously. But the mission of writing instruction in America has never solely been about “good writing,” but rather has always been about increasing the amount of voices that can participate in something called “democracy.” Next time someone tries to start this argument, I’ll just hand them a copy of this book and wait for them to read it.
10. Compulsory Mis-Education, and the Community of Scholars. Paul Goodman (1966).I was introduced to Andrew Hartman through his excellent piece (in the equally excellent Jacobin Magazine) on Teach For America. But it was a blog piece by him that tipped me off to this 1966 classic by Paul Goodman. I get why this book is so interesting to Hartman. This book reads as though it could have very easily been written in the past 5 years. The fact that these problems were pretty much the same 45 years ago is a testament to how pitiful our conceptions of national education really are. For me, what this really points to is that our normal conceptions of pedagogy, curriculum, and reform are simply useless. In my own work in the shift from high school to college writing instruction, one common complaint that always pops up is how unprepared high school students are to handle the “rigors” of college writing. The “solution” comes in a few well worn paths: explain better what “college” is all about to high school teachers, criticize methods of high school instruction, or argue for tougher standards for high school instruction. None of these approaches work. Why? They assume that curricular changes can be “pure” and unmediated. They cannot, for the very same reasons that Goodman devastatingly describes how “progressive education” was so watered down and implemented piecemeal that what it actually looked like was nothing at all like “progressive education.” Same as it ever was. Even IF high school teachers knew exactly what college writing was about, this does not mean that they would be able to just “do that.” Pressures for standardized grading, pressures from administrators with different ideas about instruction, from parents, from schools, from labor situations and environments (seriously, you try reading 125 student essays deeply and sincerely while offering well thought out feedback over the course of one week while also trying to deal with everything else teachers deal with…it won’t happen) dramatically alter and co-construct such curricula on a localized level in such a way that what we desire is never what we actually get.

So with that, here’s to an equally interesting 2012.

Indeed, in 2011, nothing says “civility” quite like a face full of pepper spray.

I don’t mean to be glib. There were those–myself amongst them–who were ambivalent about the “Occupy” movement at first. We’ve all seen these “protests” arrive over the years with great gusto, only to falter due to faulty leadership (either too much or too little), or flimsy understandings of “how things really work.” Like spurned lovers, many of us have been tentative and wary.

But sitting in bed last night, watching the reaction play out on twitter, watching the videos, watching the whole drama unfold in real time (much like what happened in Oakland a few weeks earlier), it struck me that this is indeed something new, and something that will not be going away for some while. The movement may not have a leader, but it definitely has leaders. Far more importantly, however, is the nerve these “Occupy” protests seem to be touching on, and the completely unrestrained and–frankly–ugly response they have been getting. The protest and the protesters may not be what keeps this going, but rather the reaction they seem to get everywhere they go. It is in these over the top, completely uncalled for, and grossly disproportionate responses by police and the class interests they are being brought in to represent that I think we need to all recognize that this is not a test. For those of us like myself who always wondered what it might have been like to be alive during times like the hot summer of 1968, I think we’re about to find out.

For me, and I think for many of us, the question is now: where do we fit into this?  At the least, I don’t think I would be able to hear of reports about a situation going down on my own campus without being called to immediately drop what I am doing and to go physically join them in solidarity. Sometimes it simply comes down to bodies on the ground (literally and figuratively) that matter.

But I am also an educator, a scholar, a researcher. I teach writing, I study the history of this endeavor, and I conduct research into the effects of literacy. Where does this fit in? What could writing and the teaching of writing say about all this?

Perhaps ashamedly, this one is a little tougher. For one, the discipline of “composition studies,” like many other disciplines, has proved to be remarkably adept at washing its hands of the dirt, grime, and blood that often accompanies the problems of life outside the bucolic campuses we like to imagine in our minds. While there have been a vociferous few who have always championed the act of getting into the fray, and doing so directly, on the whole the practice of writing instruction has remained as tepid as always. Part of the problem is the way in which we have always been quick to claim that problems such as these are the problems of some other discipline, some other area of expertise. As we cowardly say, we teach “writing,” and the economic and political problems of our times are for someone else to figure out. This is something I, like others, have been trying to dismantle. We are teachers of writing, yes, but we are also members of the academic community that is deeply and inextricably linked to what is going on at places like UC Davis.

But there is something deeper that is amiss, something that I want to try to pull out of all this that goes right down to the very root of what many of us do in academia. While academia certainly did not cause the current predicament we are in, we have put ourselves in a position in which any sort of response (properly, a leftist response in the very broad, non-partisan sense of the term) is doomed before it even begins.  Let me try to explain.

For some time, the standard take on language and language usage has focused on something normally referred to as “discourse” or “discourses.” The term discourse refers to some web, structure, or totality of language features that shape and define meaning. It is an outward->in view of language in which users of language do not get to define the words they use, but rather receive meaning through words that have been previously defined by others over time. This supplanted a view or understanding of language in which meaning was derived by the individual mind and then language was used to externalize it.

Often, the idea of “discourse” is used to describe generalized conventions of a group or a community (e.g., discourse communities, etc). It is also used to describe a “way of talking about” things, as we have a “discourse of rights,” a “discourse of morals,” a “discourse of health.” Above all, though, discourse generally describes the way in which language “circulates.” There is no better explanation of this “circulation” than the Cohen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski:

Throughout the film, various utterances are heard, absorbed, and repeated by various characters in various situations. My favorite is the expression “this aggression will not stand,” first said by President George H.W. Bush and heard by the Dude as he is buying half and half in the very beginning of the film. This expression is then not only repeated by the Dude, but also by other characters (notably, Walter).

This is as good of an example as you can probably get in regards to the idea that we do not speak discourses, but “they speak us” (as is fashionable to claim). In other words, we find ourselves thrown into a world in which language, sayings, utterances, and so forth already exist and already have meaning. In this sense, “discourse” both enables and limits meaning. It enables meaning simply because without “shared” understandings and so forth, no one would know what we were talking about when we uttered something or other. For example, imagine going to a location where Starbucks was completely unheard of, and trying to order a “venti frappucino.” The looks you’d get would be ones of confusion. Similarly, meaning is also limited because this means, as mentioned before, we receive language and all the meanings, histories, and so forth that come with it. This is why, despite some people believing otherwise, certain words cannot be “claimed” or “cleansed” of historical meaning.

It is here that the question of determinism is one that is hotly debated. Some would argue that we are incredibly constrained by discourse while others might argue that due to multiple discourses always being present, that we have something like “agency.” However, this debate, as it typically commences, completely misses the more important question: what are we to make of the existence and nature of “discourse” in the first place?

The way “discourse” is generally treated is as an ontological feature of language itself. This is bizarre, as most contemporary socio-cultural theorists of language would also argue that “meta-narratives,” especially of the metaphysical types, are dead-end quests. Truths, as the story goes, are historically, socially, and even sometimes geographically situated. There can be no “eternal” notion of truth in which something is “true” for all time. Any attempt to understand something that does not show how it is “true” of a particular time and place, is simply asking to be proven wrong by a social or historical comparative analysis. And yet, many do just that when describing “how language works.”  We might ask, perhaps in a somewhat fatuous manner, whether or not “discourses” will exist in 100 years.

This is not to say that language does not work in the way described above. To illustrate what I mean, here is Bill Black at a recent “teach in” at the Occupy LA demonstration.  Bill Black was a financial industry regulator during the 1980s and the Savings and Loan scandal. His lecture consists mostly of that. However, at the 2:46 mark, Black says something worth paying attention to: “Not this journalist [referring to a previous speaker], but what we get as faux-journalism today repeats this [the idea of a "productive class" that creates job so long as it is unregulated] endlessly as if it is a fact, that they create jobs, that they destroy jobs.”

Here, yet again, is a perfect illustration of circulating “discourse” at work, particularly in the way that such circulation of “truths” function to shape the way people talk about things such as “the productive class.”  If you want a slightly more comical–and perhaps tragic–illustration of this, check out this clip from Conan O’Brien’s late night show:

For those who study “discourse,” these examples demonstrate with chilling effectiveness why the study of “discourse” is important: it allows us to see the ways in which language is ultimately at the root of practically everything. It is through things like media in which everything we know, and this includes knowledge of our own “self,” is created and controlled. It is this descriptive and analytic perspective of language that has come to dominate the academy. I say descriptive and analytic because this view positions the hyper-localized study of language itself as the proper method to understanding everything. Or, in other words, the goal is the study of discourse itself.

That’s all well and good. I have no problems with this. As the two examples above show, the way academics have found to describe language is fairly accurate. But as I mentioned above, the more interesting question is what, exactly, we are studying when we study “discourse.” If it is just language and the way “language works,” then that’s the end of the story. However, if we take the socio-cultural theorist’s position seriously–perhaps more seriously than they themselves take it–then we have to realize that the descriptions we create of “how language works” are themselves simply descriptions of a historical time and place. In short, discourse is nothing more than the linguistic feature of a particular social arrangement, in all its historical splendor.

Going back to the Conan piece, the repeating of scripted language for the news story occurs because major media companies (the AP, for example) create stories and multiple outlets simply repeat the words given to them. That is not a feature of language, but a feature of language within a very particular social structure. Is this an illustration of discourse, or the effects of the consolidation of news media in the United States? The interesting thing about how language “circulates” in such a manner, and in particular the way in which individuals use, re-use, and often times simply repeat “talking points” they have heard is why they might do this in the first place. After all, instead of simply “repeating” bits and pieces of language, there could be an intermediary step in which such utterances are critically examined. The old saying around Washington is that if you repeat a lie long enough, it eventually becomes true. But why? Is this a feature of language, or a feature of how humans interact with language?

So what we see is not language, but something about the world we are living in. The hyper-focus on language itself has simply obscured this understanding. While it may be true that “nothing exists outside of discourse,” the way “discourse works” doesn’t exist outside of history, either.

(long aside: why don’t theorists take their own positions seriously and run them out to the end of the line? Who knows. One cannot discount sheer laziness, though. Instead of taking the time to read major theorists and philosophers who deeply informed thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and so forth, many scholars these days are content to work from a synthesized “hand out” about Marx or Hegel or whatever that they got during their doctoral coursework, instead of going to the actual source itself. It is in these compressed “too long; didn’t read” versions that such nuanced understandings fade with each copy that is xeroxed. Anyway…)

On the surface, this may seem as a sort of “small ball” conversation within circles of philosophers and theorists. Much of what I am saying about discourse simply being an effect of social structures would not really cause too much controversy. But these discussions, particularly when they hit the classroom, start to take on immense importance. They take on immense importance because it is here, in this critical space, that the “too long; didn’t read” versions come to take over for the “really long, super complicated” understandings of language. For example, the study of “discourse” does not really say much about what to do with such knowledge of discourses. Going back to the Conan clip, what is a teacher to say to students who have just watched it? They could just simply describe it the way I have, to note how language is repeated, passed around, circulated, becomes discourse. And for many, this is exactly where the lesson ends. This, coincidentally, is where far too many lessons have ended.

What’s missing here, though, is the rest of the story. The part about “how language works” is itself historically situated and a product of very specific social structures. This part, though, is the most crucial part, because it indicates that it need not be this way. We can, and this has been the most crucial aspect of Marx’s work as well as Dewey’s work in the United States, create different ways that language circulates. We can, for example, teach students to never simply accept “truths” from any source without first skeptically treating it against evidence and experience within a community of like minded inquirers. We can, if we wanted to, make this a major goal of our educational enterprise.

This, though, is not what we have done. And without this extension, we are relegated to standing by helplessly while discourses do, in fact, “hypodermically  inject” individuals, who are themselves helpless against simply repeating such language to others.

This, then, is the other “lost generation.” Much ado has been made about how the current college-aged group will enter in to a “lost generation” due to the terrible economy, much like Japan and other countries have experienced their own “lost generation.” But while this generation may face a lessened potential in regards to income earning, the truly lost are the ones who cannot help but be held prisoner by the ideas of others, damned to a life in which the best they can do is simply repeat what they hear on the news, at their church, and from their fathers. These are not just the uneducated, but a massive swath of American society. For example, journalists themselves these days apparently understand their work as simply repeating what each side in a controversy has to say. What they’re not doing is understanding their work as actually examining the claims of different sides. They could, in fact, often times “go find out” if one side is simply offering empty claims. They could, in fact, engage in inquiry themselves about the stories they report on instead of just repeating what the newswire tells them to. They, like others, are “lost.”

I say this is the lost generation, and it probably goes back a few decades, simply because they are now in the unenviable position of watching all these “Occupy” protests gain steam and having virtually no capacity whatsoever to understand what is going on. I watch students just a few years older than those in the UC Davis photograph and they are so completely stricken by the “old discourses” that they have no ability to detach themselves from that they cannot fathom why students would engage in such actions.

Here, then, is a chance for many. While we all have different parts to play in this unfolding narrative, what I am suggesting here is that one part that needs to play out in the academy, and in particular, the humanities is a thorough re-thinking of all the things we have come to cherish. First on the list, in my mind at least, is to go back to our views of language and to really question whether we “got it right” or not. As I’m suggesting here, it’s time to start realizing that we may have simply been wrong and now is high time to rethink about how we describe the nature and function of language, especially in how it changes the way we teach in schools.

Earlier this afternoon, Mike Konczal posted a rather thought-provoking pair of images that attempted to visually represent different interpretations of what is wrong with the economy as well as their accordant solutions.  It’s really quite an interesting way of looking at what’s being talked about.

Except…one thing that is conspicuously absent is a circle representing those who think nothing at all is wrong with the economy and that, more importantly, it is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing.  After all, the notion that a crisis is actually just a natural function of capitalism in which, as Andrew Mellon reportedly claimed, assets are returned to their rightful owner is not at all a new thing, nor that much of a minority opinion. That means there’s also another rather important circle missing, which is those who believe that this is not an aberration at all, but rather that what is wrong is the whole structure of capitalism itself.

These are pretty serious omissions, but not that surprising. While I’m no economist and I’m barely a casual observer of the debates economists and public policy wonks interested in the economy engage in, what is fascinating is this overwhelming belief in the “scientific-ness” of the economy.  That is, it’s really just math and math-like stuff at the end of the day that drives the economy, and the real question revolves around which ways to conduct the proper mathematical dissection of it.  Except…if you pay really close attention, you’ll realize how ridiculous this is.

For example, here’s Paul Krugman in an essay linked from Konczal’s piece.  As he writes:

That’s about what I was thinking in, say, January 2009. With the severe financial crisis still relatively recent, and many people still expecting a V-shaped recovery, it didn’t seem possible to persuade the Fed to commit to a permanent rise in the monetary base or a rise in the medium-run inflation target, nor did it seem possible to convince markets that there had been a long-run change in policy. The chances for persuading Congress to agree to a large temporary fiscal stimulus seemed much better.

But as it turned out, that didn’t happen either; we got an inadequate stimulus, and the failure of that stimulus to do more was then taken as proof that Keynesian policies don’t work – in part because the Obama administration insisted and continues to insist that the size of that stimulus was just right.

So what was the right answer? I guess I’d say that if powerful political forces block any effective response to a crisis, there is no effective response to that crisis.

The phrase “the chances for persuading Congress to agree to a large temporary fiscal stimulus seemed much better” is honest but also brutally telling.  What this reminds us is that, as far as the nuts and bolts of the economy go, this is all still precariously predicated on nothing more than social arrangements. If it were purely mathematical, the outcomes of elections, the personalities of leaders, the ability for a legislative body to be persuaded shouldn’t matter.  And yet, they do matter and matter a great deal.

The fact that we can influence these things means that economics is cultural, not scientific or mathematical.  God did not write Wealth of Nations, nor The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  It is far to easy to get caught up in quasi-scientific analyses of economics and to forget that at the root of everything is human intellect, nothing else.

This, though, is beyond the scope of the discipline of economics.  They can measure various things, but try as they might they cannot account for things like, for example, the clash of personalities within the executive branch.  So in trying to figure out what is “wrong” with the economy, we have to at some point realize that we’re no longer asking a question concerning a rule governed system, but rather we are asking a question of culture.  Ultimately, what is “wrong” with the economy depends on the culture that the economy is an expression of.  Is our current problem a problem with weak demand, or is it a problem of our political system that allows inordinate amounts of control to be exerted by those who actually benefit from a crisis?  Are we seeing a need for more quantitative easing, or is this a sign that we have so dramatically narrowed our educational system that members of our society can no longer envision exactly what a systematic critique of the structures of society might look like?  Remember, at its very root, capitalism is a collective enterprise predicated upon individuals accepting its basic premises.  At the very least, for example, we all have to assent to the idea of private property.  If enough people cannot be persuaded of the virtues of private property (or cannot be forced through violence), capitalism simply ceases to function.

So the death of Troy Davis is not so far removed from this, as it was not “justice” that executed him, but human beings who have and have always had the power to stop this.  They did not. His death is saddening, but should not be surprising.  An awful lot of Americans believe in the death penalty, even when confronted with evidence that innocent people have and will continue to be wrongly put to death.  We assent to this, just as we assent to the ways the economy currently works.  This is our America in all its brutality and ugliness.  What more can be said?

Coming up in this space:
- Thoughts, notes, and reflections from this fall’s group reading of F.A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty
- What is “left?”  A series of musings on the political, social, and economic “left” in academia in the 2010s.
- More Dewey than you can shake a stick at!

What you see below is a graph that plots the University of Minnesota’s in-state tuition from 1961 to 2011 (not including 2011-2012). This figure is adjusted for inflation. Also, because I think it suggests something that has fairly strong explanatory power, I have put two other bits of data into this chart.

- The first is the Gini Coefficient for the US. This number is a statistical representation of income equality within a society. The lower the number, the more that wealth is distributed equally. (this data is from the US Census Bureau)

- The second number, obviously “geared down” to fit on this graph, are some recent operating costs of the University. One argument often thrown around is that the U has just gotten too expensive, and needs to “tighten its belt” in order to stop tuition increases. Here, though, we can see that while operating costs HAVE increased (after all, they did not have the technological / internet infrastructure to maintain in the 1970s). However, the operating cost increases do NOT match tuition increases. The argument I am not so subtly trying to make here is that operating costs alone offer a very poor explanation for rises in tuition.

While I am not suggesting that the Gini coefficient trend in the US is the cause of higher tuition rates, I am suggesting that the two are very tightly correlated to a much larger restructuring of American society. Some of the biggest jumps in the Gini-coefficient occur during the Reagan years and the ascendency of what theorists refer to as the conservative restoration and the rise of neo-liberalism. One undeniable result of this is that, in colloquial terms, the rich have become MUCH richer while the poor have become MUCH poorer. This is very clearly represented by the gini-coefficient.

Put bluntly, what we are seeing here is a manifestation the decline of the public sphere. Replacing it is a private sphere model in which things like education are subjected to market forces, including the removal of public funding/support. Remember that Tim Pawlenty was a very successful Minnesota politician due to his “cut taxes” philosophy. These philosophies have consequences, though. Instead of public support and funding through taxes, endeavors such as education are increasingly reliant upon individual / private support through tuition.

Further, because wealth is increasingly concentrated in a shockingly small portion of society, the burden of paying for the costs of education will disproportionately hurt those on the lower 3/4ths of the income spectrum in American society. Previously, progressive tax rates and regulations that prevented such a concentration of wealth helped to ensure that not only resources but opportunities via education were (at least minimally) redistributed to a larger portion of society. As this arrangement erodes, college will become increasingly out of reach for everyone except for the truly well-off who can afford it.

In other words, until this direction in American society is reversed, there is only one way tuition will go in the foreseeable future: up.

I think discussions over plagiarism are often more illuminating of ourselves and the strange business we are all in. It seems to me that the ultra-fluorescent pink elephant in the classroom here is the fact that the ultimate object of assessment and evaluation resides in the final draft itself. That is, while we often talk a great game in “process,” the process is utilized to generate and shape what REALLY matters after all: the product at the end of the tunnel. What if–and I know “what if” games are dangerous–but what if the emphasis was truly placed on the movement of ideas, the experimentation in form, the evolution of “voice” between drafts and not within drafts? How does someone plagiarize this? If someone were to pay another individual to go through all THIS rigmarole, well, more power to them. SOMEONE in this instance would have learned something!
Here, though, we have a problem. To attend to writing in this way is prohibitively labor intensive. Some of us with very low teaching loads can get away with it. That’s a luxury afforded to very few in our field. Worse, even IF we are allowed the luxury of teaching one or two classes with small class sizes, there’s still an institutional culture within academia which places the emphasis of assessment and evaluation on the single, final, polished draft. So then we have a question: what is the purpose of a writing class anyway? Or, more generally, what is the purpose of writing in school? Is it where we end up that matters or is it the journey that got us there? That’s a question for a different day, but let’s not forget that this question haunts all discussions of plagiarism.
But back to plagiarism and paper mills. Is this a problem of a lack of student morals? Is this hard evidence of The Much Ballyhooed Decay in the Moral Fiber of our Youth? Probably not. While many discussions focus on the appropriate actions when a plagiarizer has been caught in the dragnet, this exposes a rather strange contradiction: the actual biological author is rarely of any concern in the way most writing assignments are treated within the academy. Really, we only begin to care about the life and circumstances of the actual biological author when the veracity of authorship is in doubt. Foucault had a lot to say about this and the general nature of the author-function. I’ll simply defer to Mr. Foucault on this one. It will suffice to say that rarely do instructors truly try to get to “know” students except when a crime is suspected to have been committed. Someone should write a piece entitled “Composition as Twin Peaks: Laura Palmer’s secret life as a plagiarizer”
That said, there are fairly strong programmatic and pedagogical responses to plagiarism. These responses, though, have three distinct problems. One is a labor issue, as I alluded to above. Pedagogical strategies that render plagiarism as irrelevant require a way of teaching that goes against the modern composition program in which heavy class loads are handled by a reserve army of contingent labor. So is plagiarism a problem that has its direct roots in the labor structure of composition? I suspect it is.
The second problem is an institutional problem endemic to literacy education. In many institutions, the freshman composition course is considered a remedial course and as such, is not eligible for college credit. Teachers know their pedagogical work is not valued by the University. Students know their work in the FYC class is not valued by the University. So, really, is anyone going to seriously be surprised when students make a choice to plagiarize an assignment? Seriously?
The third issue may be the most wily issue, and that is a cultural problem within the ranks of comp-rhet itself. Even if we had the funding and support to correct the labor issues our discipline faces, there are still many instructors who see their job as instructing students in producing shiny, polished, finished drafts. As long as this emphasis in product remains firmly entrenched within literacy education, plagiarism will be going no where. The reason this belief has been so hard to budge lies in the fact that composition works within a larger structure of the university and must remain within the logic of that larger system. At a programmatic level, the benefits of composition programs are bought and sold to administrators on this promise of producing “better writing.” What “better writing” means to administrators, though, rarely has anything to do with the development of new and novel ideas. Rather, “better writing” generally is measured through test scores and other standardized systems (including rankings against other Universities). This requires producing writing that is, and excuse this pastiche of rhetoric, writing that is pleasing to the prince. Speaking truth to power? Forget it.
So to talk about plagiarism is to talk about ourselves more than anything. After all, could a student plagiarize in the woods if there were no composition instructor around to see them do it?