Comments on: Susan Blum, “I Love Learning, I Hate School”

By: Davydd Greenwood

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 14:36:41 +0000

Eli, I am glad the comment made sense to you as much of your work models perfectly the kind of understanding of the stakeholders that is required. While I agree with what you say, operationally, the kinds of participatory processes I advocate never involve every single member of the organization. So for the kinds of participatory processes we agree are needed, we have to begin with stakeholder identification. What are the categories? Within each category, which are key differences to capture (job, education, class, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Then there is a lengthy process by a planning group of working this out and then identifying stakeholders from each of these categories who could participate effectively (Some relevant actors simply are too shy or too turned off or too busy to become involved). Then the process of reconstruction can begin. So this all depends on really understanding who are the stakeholders, what the relevant differences are within stakeholder groups, etc. So it seems to me that detailed knowledge of the sort we are needing to develop for many of these groups are still missing. Our images of the work of others often are misleading but we can find that out and correct ourselves to be able to incorporate them effectively.

Just to draw on personal experience, many of the skilled accountants at Cornell think the accounting system is totally dysfunctional (it is) and they have lots of ideas about how to fix it that no one in the administration wants to hear. And within that group, those who do this for student loans, travel advances, NSF and DoD grants, etc all have different experiences and expertise that would be necessary in redesigning the system.

Davydd

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By: Eli Thorkelson

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 06:28:11 +0000

Hi Davydd,

Absolutely, I agree with you that right now, as you put it, “Since the social fabric of the university is broken, surely we cannot recreate it if we don’t know the relevant actors and their hopes.”

My main thought about this, though, is that what we would need to do this is not just ethnographic research about different actors, but actual participatory processes that get different actors working together to co-create the institution.

In other words, I think that the whole hierarchical-corporate structure of most institutions makes it impossible for there to be much of a “social fabric,” because the lower-status actors are structurally segregated from each other, and the higher-status actors are generally out of touch with the realities of the lower status actors.

I suspect we are more or less on the same page about this, as I’m in the middle of your book now and this seems to be what you are saying there…

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By: Davydd Greenwood

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 17:43:22 +0000

An intriguing review of what is clearly an interesting book. I am looking forward to reading it after this. I only want to put a pitch in here again for the recognition that we have such a limited ethnographic, personal, and moral understanding of all the relevant stakeholders in universities. Even if we had 1 book each like this on senior administrators (who I interviewed and found deeply troubled professionally and existentially in many cases), faculty junior and senior, lecturers, graduate students in various fields, undergraduate students in various fields, trustees, controllers, institutional planners, janitors, etc., we would be in a better place. Most of our debates and analysis happen on the level of dimensionless actors. Since the social fabric of the university is broken, surely we cannot recreate it if we don’t know the relevant actors and their hopes.

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