Wanted: Prof Whisperer

A couple of remarks by Profacero here and olderwoman at scatterplot are coming together in my head with many such from over the years, to the effect that establishing authority in the classroom is a different challenge for women, race/ethnic minorities, and other stigmatized groups than for white men.

This is now an orthodoxy in the liberal academy, so like all orthodoxies I’m going to try to trouble it here. But it’s also true. It’s undeniable that since Columbus us white boys enjoy an entry privilege as authority figures, especially if we’re ruggedly handsome, brilliant, charismatic and naturally great-smelling like me. A big chunk of this is visually inherent as a function of habits of symbolic ranking and emotional identification. It’s also undeniable that for some fractions of our audiences only white men will do as authority figures, as the underbelly of this last election showed well enough.

It’s important for navigational purposes to understand where these structural reefs and shoals are, but agency at any particular moment is about where we can go, not about where we can’t. Dynamiting Scylla and Charybdis is a worthy project for special occasions but trying to do that daily will wear you out quick, which is one of the worst compounding effects of deprivileging. So in a practical, quotidian sense the question is how authority works under less-than-ideal conditions.

Here I think it’s helpful to come at the question a little bit sideways from the usual focus on qualifying privilege and disqualifying stigma. Things look pretty desperate from that standpoint. We see white guys living it up in the lap of esteemed luxury and ‘others’ struggling, and it looks like the single effective variable is whiteguyness. Looks like we’re stuck with the exhausting dynamite campaign. But wait – what do we do with all the white guys who struggle in the classroom? And what do we do with the race/ethnic/disabled/women/etc. who get in the classroom and kick some ass, without blowing up everything in sight or even breaking a sweat? Don’t we all know some of each of those? Maybe it’s possible to factor out the structural race/gender variable and get comparable positive and negative results across categorical populations! Jeepers, a playground for agency!

The problem with how these discussions go is that they tend to be informed by a lot of reciprocal ignorance and mythology. It’s well-established at this point that hetero white guys don’t know squat about what it’s like to be black/female/queer/etc. We drift around in a happy daze at the gravitic null-point of all social stratifications, unburdened and oblivious to the burdens of others. And relatively speaking, which is all I ever do, this is true. But as Goffman tells us at some length in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, it’s also relatively speaking false. The ideal, unspoiled, unstigmatized identity imagined by disgruntled white-guy voyeurs is a mythic construct not embodied by any real person (this is, for example, the founding joke of “American Dad”). Being a white guy helps a lot in some ways, but it looks better from outside than inside; and if you’ve never been one, you’ll have to take my word for that. We’re all vulnerable in big ways and small, Goffman says (Foucault agrees), and each social interaction is the opportunity for anxious and reciprocal attempts to deploy/negate strengths and conceal/discover weaknesses.

Students looking for an edge against a professor just bump on down the checklist until they find something that will work for them. Race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability make things easy, but it’s a poor strategic interactant who stops there. Nor is whiteguyness much help, after the moment of entry, when there are other white guys around to cancel that advantage out. We’re a dime a dozen, and when we think things are at stake we rip on each other something fierce. We know each others’ weaknesses. So when white guys succeed in the classroom, it’s helped us at first to be white guys but then it almost instantly hasn’t, and we’ve had to deploy some other strength. What is that?

As olderwoman perceptively noted, classroom success comes to those who “carry privilege, a presumption of competence and authority with them into the classroom.” This is the ‘other strength’ that intercepts the stigma game. She ascribes this to upper-class white men, but notice that what’s being described here is not categorical identity but what Bourdieu calls disposition: an acquired scheme of perception, thought and action. Now, categorical identity is still significant because the dispositions of competence and authority are native products of the rich white boy habitus, and are interactively recognized as such. The nature of white boy privilege is therefore a kind of symbolic capital that is enforced through symbolic violence or its threat. It is in this sense that olderwoman is entirely correct that “[p]eople whose status is unquestioned can afford to be Mr. Cool with students,” because the threat of symbolic violence is understood and gratitude for its forebearance is ritually extracted. And this dynamic is what allows symbolic capital to be converted to economic and social capital, in the form of access to careers, advancement, esteem. Thus structure is produced and reproduced in everyday relations.

If we let it. Here’s where I agree with Marx that our conscious human history has not started yet. The dynamic of dispositions and habitus I have described above does not take us very far past the pack behaviors of dogs. In this connection it’s fascinating to watch the Dog Whisperer. Like the Nanny with children and parents, Cesar Millan’s whole insight is that when subordinates are getting unruly it’s not a follower problem, it’s a leader problem. The show gets old quick because it’s always the same schtick – come into a house, find owners fretting about ‘problem’ dog, discover the dog’s just confused about who’s in charge, train owners how to be in charge. Bingo bongo. And the real problem quickly emerges: white, black, man, woman, straight, gay, lotsa lotsa people have no idea how to be in charge of themselves, let alone others, even just dogs!, and anxious yapping ensues.

Cesar teaches the acquirable big dog skills of authority and competence to folks who for one reason or another perceive, think and act like little dogs. That is, he backfills the dispositions that make white guys winners in the big everyone stigma game, and alpha white guys winners in the little white guy stigma game. There’s nothing magical or mysterious about it, either. “Cesar counsels people to calmly, assertively, and consistently give their dogs rules, boundaries, and limitations to establish themselves as solid pack leaders and to help correct and control unwanted behavior.” That’s what the Nanny says about dealing with kids too. That’s what Obama did in this last campaign.

Calm assertion; clear, consistent boundaries. Not grand gestures, not puffery, not loud yapping. Those say ‘not trusting my own authority and competence, overcompensating’. Not negotiation, pleading or resentful disengagement. Those say ‘power vacuum here, please fill it’. Cesar thinks everyone can learn this. I hope so, because I don’t think we get over these pack-power games and get to human together until we do. And until we do, all of those categorical accounts of why things aren’t going right for us, even when they’re true, are little more than theodicies.

Kool-Aid cocktails

I’m still chewing on the conversation at the earlier lumpenbourgeoisie post. Profacero remains firm that whatever merits academic employment may have cannot justify the poor pay. She keeps the high expectations and high self-subsidized costs of our work in view, with specific examples like research and conference expenses, adjunct stints at less than a living wage, crushing personal debt. This is all real stuff. We have no dispute about what actually happens. All of it has happened to me and many people I know, although I am somewhat insulated more recently from some professional costs by the relatively low formal scholarship requirements at my nice teaching-oriented regional slac — which means gaps in the cv that, along with my status as a tenured associate professor, pretty much take me out of play on the market and bind me to this job.

Profacero would also like to be able to afford a small boat. I wouldn’t have minded being able to afford my divorce, which despite everyone’s good intentions cost nearly twice my annual salary. Other colleagues have aging parents to provide for. Ponies are always nice. These things are relative, but the point is that we’re not paid enough to afford many things we might reasonably need or want. And at many places the belt is tightening, as Dr. Crazy discusses in an incisive post following up on others by herself, Historiann, and Tenured Radical, with whom I completely agree. Of course there’s also much to be learned and pondered about conditions and compensation for academic work from Lumpenprofessoriat, e.g. here, and What in the hell…, e.g. here, and Marc Bousquet at Brainstorm, e.g. here.

I’m all for doing what’s possible to enhance conditions and compensation for work, for everyone. I’ve argued that there may be costs along with the obvious benefits to academics specifically for resorting to unions to do that, just as there are costs and benefits to pulling a gun in a bar fight or putting Pavarotti on the jukebox at a party. The situation inevitably gets structured in a certain way you may or may not like when you make those moves; it would be good to consider alternatives. I’m a real fan of the aikido ethic, but to my knowledge we’ve not even begun to think of how something like that might apply. I’ve also argued that dire though the plight of tenured/tenurable faculty might be, for whingeability it doesn’t sort real high on the priorities compared to other folk with genuinely crappy lives, ranging from permanent adjuncts to some of our support staff to starving Haitian babies.

OK, so what’s this post about? It’s about ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’.

I’ve been arguing that whatever influence we may or may not have over the material realities of our employment, we completely control our attitudes toward them. We get to choose how we think (and, to a lesser degree, feel) about these facts we all agree on. We become what we pay attention to, as Mead and the interactionists say. Or Nietzsche: “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” So while we ponder available remediation or transformation strategies, we also get to direct our attention, think and be ourselves in the now. And I’ve remarked that in the context of this particular now, given the available alternatives, I’m pretty pleased to be drawing a comparatively decent salary to be doing work I notice is personally and relationally affirming. Profacero thinks that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, this is a delusional form of pathetic sacrifice, and “they’ve got” me where they want me.

Perhaps. I agree that sacrifice is pathetic, but what I do doesn’t seem like sacrifice to me. “We are all conformists of some conformity or another,” Gramsci said. It’s not whether you’ve drunk Kool-Aid, it’s which Kool-Aid you drank. You can drink the angry, alienated Kool-Aid or the woeful, victimized Kool-Aid or the contented, peaceful Kool-Aid. These are all interpretive stances. None of them are more or less ‘true to life’, and none are inconsistent with working to make things better, but the latter will take some of the sting out of your day. What we do has value; or at least, it’s what we do. This is Existentialism 101, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Our fate belongs to us. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill our hearts. We can be happy.

Grading – the curve

Interesting old thread popped back up at Lumpenprofessoriat on grading on the curve. The original post offers an elegant way of calculating a curve. Recently, a mom commented with questions about whether her kid was being graded fairly by a high school physics teacher.

Mass higher ed has done its marketing well. The idea that education really matters for life chances has percolated down to many families at this point. Grades sort the levels of accomplishment, so of course grades are what matter. Higher grades must be good. Intervention may be needed to make sure Junior is getting the best grade possible.

But what do grades mean? It’s obvious, I hope, that top grades are meaningless if everyone gets them — unless there’s some very, very dense evidence that excellence has been achieved across the board. Princeton and Harvard (“where the best students in the country get the worst education in the country”) may be able to give everyone A’s on this basis, but most schools can’t. Sorting has to happen. A curve, in particular, starts with the assumption that everyone is not and cannot be excellent. (This is why I think they’re immoral.) You can tweak a curve to get higher or lower distributions, but the point of it is to sort student performances into bad, fair, good, better and best.

As I said over at Lumpenprofessoriat, any competent teacher can sort student performances into bad, fair, good, better and best. If you can’t trust a teacher to do that, ‘fairness’ is the least of your worries. The grading system, whatever it is, is just a pass-through for the evaluative expertise of the teacher. After a whole semester of work and interaction I should – and do – know where a particular student ranks in relation to standards and other students. This is every teacher’s professional responsibility, whether we do it directly or invent a fiddly system to do it for us.

I feel for any parent who cares about their baby’s success. Sometimes mismatches, miscommunications or injustices do occur, and some (self!) advocacy is appropriate. But mostly what’s happening is pretty ordinary, in a this-is-the-rest-of-your-life kind of way. So if a student can’t distinguish her- or himself in a high school or college class, and needs parental intervention to engineer some kind of emotional figleaf, I’m not impressed with their long term life chances. Get smarter, work harder. Eventually the hands of consequence must caress us all — unless when someone hires your kid, you’ll be coming to work with them too.

UPDATE: Ironic karma moment – just opened my school email and found a grade appeal from a student accompanied by separate emails from both parents. If I got it wrong I’ll change it. If I got it right, we’ll see how much my teacherly expertise is worth to various audiences.

More thoughts on the lumpenbourgeoisie

*I’m staying away from faculty unions for a second in this one. Yay, unions. For further discussion in that area see Dean Dad’s post linking several more from across a spectrum of circumstance and opinion. Here I’m sketching some more general ways to think about the liberal academy and disagreements/conflicts therein.

*One way a perfectly good discussion can run aground is if the participants are cognitively or morally or aesthetically mismatched between the view that things are/should be either one thing or the other, and the view that things may/should be complex assemblages of disparate elements. There is a lot of leverage in simplification, a clear enemy and a clear agenda, as we know from the histories of racism and sexism; but as those examples show, if it’s programmatic rather than true to life the thoughts, feelings and actions that result are distorted and distorting.

*What is the liberal academy good for? It’s certainly not to prepare people immediately for employment, although when we’re desperate we trot out marketing slogans about how our degrees prepare folks to be effective in any career. We do have functions in the production of a value-added educated labor force, but honestly there are way more efficient ways to do that than degrees in medieval literature or classical philosophy. Our legitimating, hegemonic functions are probably more a matter of lingering (convenient) habits than careful planning and effective resource-allocation by the class overlords at this point. Nor are we and our graduates at least generally happier or more fulfilled than the average bear.

*We’re not structurally that important. A little legitimation, a little status, a warehouse for surplus labor, a containment system for irritating radicals (this is the mistake the Russians made in the 19th century – they trained a critical intelligentsia to show how progressive they were, but gave them nowhere to roost). In a sense we’re pets. We are paid accordingly. When academic administrators try to tap into a more corporate model they are trying to tap into a higher and better-compensated level of structure. They’re following the money, of course they are. To do that they need to look right (pdf, Chaudhuri and Majumdar, “Of Diamonds and Desires: Understanding Conspicuous Consumption from a Contemporary Marketing Perspective”) to the target audience, which is why they need better salary, amenities and perqs than the workforce. This is no mere venality, but a bootstrapping investment; it’s a smart one, although it’s not at all clear that it can succeed. But if it fails, the alternative is to not be tied into corporate funding, which puts the whole institution at the mercy of the market and of the indirect scraps of corporate success the government in a capitalist society is able to skim off. And it is all ultimately tied to the U.S.’s ability to extract far more than our ‘fair’ share from the global economy.

*If we’re good for anything apart from the little services mentioned above, it’s to practice, model and teach the arts of complexity and dispassionate analysis (Weber’s “science as a vocation,” Bourdieu’s reflexive “interest in disinterest” [I apply this kind of analysis at length here - pdf]) — to produce more thorough, balanced and reliable understandings of the world. This is a way cool thing we know how to do! We can start with us. Competence in the humanities = ability to construct persuasive accounts of multiple perspectives. Joining a gang is not critical thinking. Partisanship is instantly delegitimating. Can we do better, or at least differently than that? Bracket our biases, even overcome them, as we teach our students to do? Speak truth to power, not shout our corporate interests and conveniences at power? Well, here’s a test. Is the academy a simple place with heroes on one side and villains on the other? Here’s another one. Can we see the ‘problem’ of academic proletarianization as a direct and elementary unintended consequence of the expansion and liberalization of higher education to include proletarians? Just as the inclusion of women feminizes institutions by downgrading them, and the extension of voting rights inevitably dilutes the value of each vote. Yay; oops. A sense of humor helps so much here.

*At this point we’ve got mass institutions trying to do elite work. That’s a recipe for disappointment on all sides. We’d all like a pony. You can have wealth, status and distinction or you can have openness and inclusion; you can tweak a compromise mix, which is the game we’re really playing now; but you can’t have all you want of everything at once.

*I’m just sayin’.

Teaching philosophy

I’m inclined to agree with Academic Cog, whose various statements about teaching I admire, that “teaching philosophies” as required for job applications and tenure/promotion files tend to be “vague, general, and dorky-sounding,” ranging from inane to robotic. I especially dislike the ones that respond to explicit or implicit questions about “innovative” teaching. I’ve seen and developed some pretty fancy ways to deliver lecture and discussion over the years, but until someone figures out a way to teach the humanities that isn’t a variation on lecture or discussion (knowledge pills? cortical implants?) –

– I may add some tricks to my bag but I’m holding fire on innovation cred.

Re: innovation (or not), here’s the statement from my introductory world history syllabus, under the heading “teaching/learning philosophy as I learned it from world history:”

“If I give a student one corner of a subject and he cannot find the other three, the lesson is not worth teaching.” — Confucius

“When we renounce learning we have no troubles… when there is abstinence from action, good order is universal.” — Laozi

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” — Walter Benjamin

“Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be: — a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad.” — the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” — William James

“I don’t believe in living in the past. The past is for cowards. If you live in the past, you die in the past.” — Mike Ditka

“And it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. God knows but you do not know.” — the Qu’ran

“The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous.” — Shunryu Suzuki

These are not meant to be linear. My classes are ’some assembly required’.

Insofar as I have anything like a formal teaching philosophy I fall into the general category of humanists who think learning is good and it’s possible, in principle, for every student to learn; and of pragmatists who think this is better accomplished actively than passively. As for specifics, they vary. I use my classrooms as teaching/learning laboratories, so I’m always trying out new (to me) strategies. I also do a lot of reading and reacting with particular students and groups of students, which means that the instancings of a general approach may be quite different even across sections of ‘the same’ class. Finally, I have noticed that just about any way of teaching will work pretty well if the teacher is excited about it and fall flat if they’re not. So I never teach ‘the same’ class twice because I use each class as an opportunity to learn new things and I periodically cycle out of even very successful teaching strategies to keep myself fresh. I think that teaching stops being about technique and starts being about feel and fit and mindful interaction pretty quickly.

Still, as a member of several search committees I have read some pretty inspiring teaching philosophies. Occasionally at the interview they even turn out to match the practices of their authors! But it’s practices we care about in the end, isn’t it? So perhaps we should ask for statements of teaching practice. As to that, I indicated in the previous post I think it’s important to think through what we actually want our students to learn in our classes and teach directly to those objectives. For my students the most important outcome is the ability and disposition to learn independently and to read, think and write critically. I reported out an example of how that looks in practice in my earlier post, Ninja Reading, which is currently my favorite teaching statement and not at all inane or robotic.

Grading

I’ve figured out, again, that if I want to get any serious work done I have to get away from my distractions. So for the last few days I’ve been taking up tipspace for as long as I thought polite at a series of restaurants and coffee shops, buying just enough to rent the table and overtipping like mad, bringing down the atmosphere of leisure no doubt with my gradebook, big piles of papers and journals, and the occasional anguished cry.

Actually the papers have not been half bad overall. I finally figured out that I need to teach what I want them to know and do, so I’ve got my teaching and assessing aligned (I ‘teach to the test’). It’s sort of amazing to me how long I got by with a reputation as a good teacher without doing that. Anyway, the papers are much better when I’ve taught them how to read, think and write in the ways one must to write a good paper. ‘What gives’ is content coverage. It’s amazing too how little I care about that if by the end of the class they can develop a coherent, well-supported thought about something in particular relevant to the course for 5-8 pages.

Community, agency, networks, happiness

This semester as a collective project my school of Arts and Humanities worked in various ways toward a better understanding of what we called our Big Idea, “happiness.” One is Bob Ritzema’s excellent blog, Life Assays.

In my classes I plugged happiness in as the topic of the final papers, then sequenced the semester’s shorter papers as topical analyses leading to happiness as the synthesis. In my introductory World History classes the topics were community and agency. The students tended to struggle with the concept of agency, which I spent a lot of time walking them through as an umbrella term for power, control, choice, action, reaction and the like, but kept coming back at me informed by the folk definition of bureaucratic functions. Eventually I realized I was doing them no favors shielding them from the framing problematic of the structure/agency question, and this seemed to click; whether because it was the right way to teach it all along or they were ready for it from what had come before would be hard to untangle.

In general I find students have some trouble getting past definitions to concepts, and from concepts to cases. Of course it’s a cognitive mistake to linearize that way, so we also work from cases back to concepts, which does complicate the instruction. When introduced to abstraction they’ll spend a whole paper defining their terms if you let them; I call this throat-clearing. It takes a lot of patience and individual attention to get many students comfortable with a dialogue between the concrete and the abstract.

In my Contemporary World History seminar I added a third topic, networks. For the community module we primarily worked out of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, a wonderful ethnography of failures to communicate between Hmong immigrants and social service providers in Merced, CA; for agency we worked from David Reynolds’ nice global history One World Divisible; and for networks we had Donald R. Wright’s The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, which uses a world systems approach to work through how Niumi on the West African coast has been tied into the Atlantic Complex over hundreds of years.

This was a good group with good materials to work with, so we had a blast. One of my students is a community organizer, a real smartie attuned to the discourses of exclusion and oppression. She thought along with me all semester and had a whole bunch of clicks about how what we were talking about related to her work. Here’s one of those, from her network paper:

Taking oneself out of a network is near impossible. A person may be a socialist, but unless he moves to a remote location and begins to grow his own food, make his own clothes, defend himself, he is still living and functioning in a capitalist system that works by allowing people to mentally compartmentalize their actions. A group of activists may take up a cause, but in these times, it is near impossible for them to work outside of the non-profit industrial complex…. The institutionalizing and invisible nature of networks create an environment where people become so dependent on each other it is impossible to unsubscribe from the relationship.

Yup, we’re stuck with each other and in some pretty complex ways. I can’t wait to see how she finds happiness in this.

Readability: Hitler

The Dec/Jan 2009 issue of Bookforum has an interesting interview with Timothy Ryback about his book on Hitler’s Private Library. (In Pierre Bayard’s readability system as discussed in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, to which I will be introducing my students in the sophomore seminar in the Spring, Ryback’s is an HB+: a book I’ve heard of and have a good impression of.) Ryback was able to identify a number of Hitler’s most personally significant books from more than a thousand housed at the Library of Congress; and prompted by Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” he was able to use them to figure out some things about Hitler as a reader and a thinker.

Most notably, Ryback found that “Hitler was animated not by the excitement of the autodidact discovering a vast world of knowledge but by the intellectual insecurity of a high school dropout who needed to overpower everyone else in the room.” (I know plenty of Ph.D.s with the same insecurity, but the point is we know this type.) Hitler’s genius was for collecting very broad, very shallow knowledge. He liked encyclopedias. He was not a critical reader or thinker; he took what he read at face value and lumped everything together without distinction. In conversation he was a dazzling reciter of facts, constructing detailed but superficial comparisons by juxtaposition.

So far so good – a nice triangulation of something we already knew or at least assumed about the guy. Perhaps the surprise is that Hitler was a compulsive reader; we might have thought him even more shallowly absorbed in his own wacky thoughts and the echo-chamber of his cronies than that. But here’s where Ryback seems to get into some trouble. Ryback is an old-school liberal artist and bookworm – one imagines corduroy, tweed and elbow patches – who struggles to imagine how reading could not be positively transformative. “‘We believe literary reading is an ennobling enterprise,’ he says. ‘The underlying assumption is that we are better people for reading. What’s shocking about this is that we had a man who read to fuel exactly the opposite, everything that was destructive to intellectual processes. Out of this imbibing emerged such evil that it flies in the face of what we believe reading actually does.’”

Not so fast with that “we,” Tim. We’re not all congregants in your religion; books do not light up all rooms with their halos. If books are sacred things you might be right, but if they’re human things, not so much. And sure enough, books are read, and first written, by human beings, who are what they are before they write or read any particular book. Good humans usually write good books, and bad humans generally write bad books, although the reverse can sometimes be true. Good humans tend to prefer to read good books, and bad humans gravitate toward bad ones (Hitler was a big fan of Henry Ford’s and Madison Grant’s racist tracts); but also good humans may read bad books well, and bad humans may read good books badly. Nor is it a simple thing to sort out ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with respect to humans or books. One needs a moral system for that, and moral systems are contested.

We are riddled with confirmation bias, hard-wired for jamming new data into old schemata. Of the three basic kinds of analytical thinking, habit, belief and theory, only theory is readily subject to disconfirmation by new information. I sometimes tell students that the way to tell if your theory is a good one is to track your surprise. A good theory will prepare you for reality, a bad one will leave your head spinning every time something that doesn’t fit happens. By this standard, the theory about the ennobling powers of literary reading is a bad one; but of course, if it’s really a “belief,” as Ryback says, and not a theory, his surprise will motivate no substantive transformation of his thinking. And sure enough, his own reading will not have ennobled (or better, enlightened) him, either.