Regarding Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (2011), which functions as both diagnostic and prescriptive of the current state of academic publishing, the touting of the public blog and the practice of blogging features quite prominently throughout. Positioned as appropriately resuscitative to the grim fate that awaits (or is already here!) scholarly publishing, in addition to questions of authorship and digital technologies, the emphasis on blogging, as opposed to other modes of public writing and expression, gave me considerable pause.

With specific respect to authorship, Fitzpatrick celebrates the blog, both its design and function, because of its promotion of collaboration. She argues that scholarship, “even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, has always been collaborative,” (12) and what blog platforms and the practice of blogging allows is for peer review in process and the public evolution of ideas. This quality seemingly responds to those scholars who feel “over-isolated, longing for new modes of collaboration and discussion,” marking a revival of the “coffee-house model of textual circulation,” (108). And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this advocacy of blogging, particularly for established scholars, comfortably situated within tenured positions or those who have already negotiated the “publish or perish” demands of academe, Fitzpatrick largely assumes the (superior) value of blogging for students and younger scholars.

Pedagogically, blogging is often extended as an opportunity for students to make their work public and interact with each other’s writing in a forum that is presumed “native” to their generations. Similarly, blogging is promoted as a digital alternative to traditional scholarly writing, allegedly emphasizing process over product, and is often embraced by institutions who provide platforms for such work to be published. Because of its digital nature and the “technologies of searching, filtering, and archiving that have developed across the web,” confirming a “surprising durability” (6), blogging has been effectively elevated to and enfolded in the academic milieu.

Where I struggle with this promotion of blogging as both antidotal to the demise of academic publishing opportunities and platforms as well as a significant methodological and pedagogical tool, is the perceived lack of consideration regarding the “substitut[ion] of one set of sign systems, meaning-making strategies, and communicative technologies for another while working to denigrate what has come before (Shipka, Transmodality in/and Processes of Making: Changing Dispositions and Practice). The mere inverting of existing hierarchies is hardly an intervention in those systems of power and knowledge that bolster the academy.

So sorry again for not being present tonight! I hope the following passages and questions/provocations can stand in a bit for my contribution to the conversation on Ferguson’s book.

Reading Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things through the lens of last week’s conversation surrounding the systematic enfolding of radicalism into systems and structures that temper or reform those ideologies, I was struck by his pointed criticisms of those revolutionary movements and activities that advocated for both representation and authority in heavily gatekept institutions.

I wanted to draw immediate attention to a few passages that not only speak to this assessment of American institutionality, but to connect them to prior class and blog discussions in which we have questioned whether radical change can be affected within academe, let alone any other Western system of power.

“In the context of the United States and the relative collapse of a national culture that portrayed itself as homogeneous, we can also see the ways in which the American nation-state used local differences to mediate the up­heavals brought about by the student movements. For instance, in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formations in the United States, the authors define the racial state in the moments after the various antiracist movements in terms of the state’s institutionalization of certain parts of those movements, arguing that the “racial state, in its turn, has been historically constructed by racial movements; it consists of agencies and programs which are the institutionalized responses to racial movements of the past.”21 The racial state for Omi and Winant is not simply the entity on which political demands are made. It is also that political formation that receives its identity and contours from having archived the social movements,” (27).

“Yet, with the widening of state and civil society’s capacities for identification came the expansion of regulatory regimes. As those various movements helped to enter minoritized and colonized cultures into social articulation, minority culture and difference also became items for the development of a new phase of global capital, a phase that would engage elite minorities as its facilitators. In this context, minoritized subjects and practices would enter on the condition that they be regulated, making state and academy within the years after civil rights contradictory sites that claimed demo­cratic representation at the same time that they disciplined minoritized sub­jects as local, parochial, and undeveloped constituencies or as the fragile embodiments of canonical and state ideals. The entrance of minoritized subjects into the academy, the rise of ethnic and women’s studies departments, and the emergence of multiculturalism were part of a context geared toward the development of regimes of identification, incorporation, and regulation, developments that ensured that all things organized in the name of minority difference—people, programs, departments, and centers—would be subject to an ever-present danger,” (190).

Are institutionalized agencies and programs merely perpetuating the subjugation of minoritized subjects through a process of classification and identification? Can radical action exist in or as these responses or is anything attached to the heteropatriarchal and white supremacist system that undergirds dominant ideologies?

“As the history of black studies and the social movements implies, the interdisciplines were both the midwives and the children of affirmative and regulatory modes of power. If the modern university is, as Derrida char­acterized it, “responsible to a nonuniversity agency,” then the student move­ments and the interdisciplines helped to broaden the scope and meaning of “nonuniversity agency,” (111).

Additionally, is characterizing the “interdisciplines” as a “nonuniversity agency” also an act of classifying, identifying, organizing for the purpose of control?

Hi everyone! Apologies for the tardiness of my post. I have been in the process of moving and have also had to dash out of town because of an unforeseen family issue.

I will not be able to attend class this evening, but my formal post is still forthcoming. In (temporary) lieu of it, I will post a few questions/comments that I wanted to address in class. I hope they make up, in part, for my absence!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

Published in 1974 by the Newt Davidson Collective –named for the imaginary author of a satirical memo directed to Governor Nelson Rockefeller the previous fall– Crisis At CUNY offers a thorough accounting of the institution’s most immediate deficiencies, shortcomings, and outright failures. It diligently chronicles the history of American higher education with particular attention to the development of public universities as well as the very relevant (and recent) social and cultural activism on City University of New York’s own campuses. And, while quite obviously inspired by Marxism with respect to its distinctly anti-capitalist position and its repeated emphasis on racial and class inequity both on campus and within the city at large (not to mention the dedication to one “K.M”), it hardly aspires to be a manifesto. Instead, it largely operates as a well-researched and impassioned thesis, written in an acceptable academic vernacular.

Despite the absence of any definitive statements on future policy, which is perhaps intended given its criticism of the politicization of the university, it does culminate in a certain prescription, namely the elevation and integration of faculty and student unions and grassroots activism into those critical conversations concerning the evolution of the university. Moreover, it calls for analysis before action, affirming that financial necessity alone cannot (and should not) shape the future of the CUNY system, a conclusion that has been echoed time and again by educators and students alike.

That said, there are some very distinct formal and stylistic characteristics of Crisis at CUNY that warrant further reflection and investigation. While a response to the administration and not Academe itself, this text largely romanticizes the university’s history, citing eras in which institutions of higher learning were not ruled by administrators and their budget cuts or business and/or political relationships. Like Newfield and Veysey before him, it neglects to interrogate the challenges associated with an institution built on Western epistemologies and ways of knowing, namely Enlightenment ideologies, which wholly informed those economic policies and systems to which the Newt Davidson Collective was so resistant.

I posted some chapters from this in the Dropbox!

As articulated in Fabricant and Brier’s Austerity Blues, the post-World War II climate initiated many new considerations as to the democratic function of higher education and its formative potential in citizen building. The Zook Commission (1946) detailed initiatives and protocols to engage college-level learning in the representative fight for democracy, including calls for racial justice in both admissions processes and institutional culture. Despite the lingering stench of fascism amidst the western world, reports from the commission remain quite compelling, particularly with respect to the inclusion of certain undergirding principles of socialism as well as pre-Brown vs. Board of Education positions on the wholistic dangers and disadvantages of racially segregated education.

Though not explicitly mentioned by Fabricant and Brier, George Zook and his presidential commission he lead follow previous efforts to articulate citizenship-building within higher education, namely those articulated by the National Society for the Study of Education and their Thirty-Eighth Yearbook (1939). The document in question endeavors to cultivate a general education, largely centered around the humanities, with the explicit stipulation that all studies under this newly proposed umbrella field be deliberated integrated, so as to inform well-rounded students and active citizens. Why I bring this up and perhaps find the timing quite interesting is because just half a decade prior to the Zook-led commission emerges the beginnings of first-year writing programs as part of a common core of courses necessary to mold engaged Americans who will readily participate in all facets of the democratic system.

Moreover, the resonate use of the word integration, in all its social, cultural, and curricular implications, is considerably more interesting within the context of how segregating schooling remained for subsequent decades and how despite the progressivism of the Zook   Commission, actual representation within higher education from students, faculty, and course content are still so systematically controlled. And though this is no revelation, I remain struck by the repeat omissions of formal, institutional efforts to address racial and gender inequality with respect to the deeply white, European epistemologies that define the very foundations of higher learning.

*Apologies for the absence of any definite argument here, as I still have so many more thoughts and musings that I hope to discuss with you all in class!

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academes-Outcast-Prophet/233966