Unfortunately I’ve had to suspend this project. Now that I’m not working in (or on) the academy any more, I don’t have the resources to keep up with new research on higher education. For those of you still working in this area, I wish you all the best and wish I could have stayed involved longer.
The website will remain up for a while longer, until the domain name expires.
— Eli T.
]]>I’ll just post the course description and reading list, and then add a few further comments.
This module is aimed at understanding the public role of anthropology in moments of political conflict and educational crisis. It will reach this goal through critical reflection on the notions of politics and publics, and through ethnographic study of the history of student protests since the 1960s, culminating in a reflexive study of the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa.
Part I: Anthropology, publics and politics
Sept. 11 – Decolonizing anthropology in South Africa
Sept. 13 – Power and the Postcolony
Sept. 14 – Decolonizing Knowledge
Sept. 18 – Publics & Counterpublics
Sept. 20 – Policy and Critique
Sept. 21 – Test 1
We will have a written test in class covering questions about Part I of the module.
Part II: Historical anthropology of student protest
Sept. 25 – Public Holiday
There will be no class or reading today.
Sept. 27 – Biko
Sept. 28 – France
Oct. 2 – United States
Oct. 4 – The 80s and “neoliberalism”
Oct. 5 – SASO to SANSCO
Part III: #FeesMustFall
Oct. 9 – #FeesMustFall
Oct. 11 – Gender
Oct. 12 – Colonial History
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Black Pain Matters: Down with Rhodes.” Pax Academica 1-2 (2015): 47-70.
Oct. 16 – Stellenbosch
We will discuss a range of ethnographic materials dealing with the history of student organizing at Stellenbosch University.
Oct. 18 – Course Review
There is no assigned reading for today. We will review the module content.
Oct. 19 – Test 2
We will have a written test in class covering questions about Parts II and III of the module.
As always, the first time you teach at a new university — not to mention in this case, in a new continent — there is a lot to learn about fitting into the local context. If I were teaching this again, I would tinker quite a bit with the readings, especially in the first and last sections, and replace some of the denser texts with shorter, punchier ones. But I was happy with the general course structure, which moved from theories of publics and politics to protest histories and then to current events. The South African #FeesMustFall movement was still quite recent when I taught this class in September 2017.
I also found that this class was complicated to teach at Stellenbosch because my students themselves were deeply divided along political lines. It wasn’t the mission of the class to endorse any particular protest movement, of course, but it did insist that we take student protests seriously, and be willing to learn about them. For some of my South African students, that stance was controversial. A few people walked out the day we talked about Steve Biko.
Instead of assigning traditional papers, I asked students to do two teaching exercises. The idea was that you had to try teaching someone about something we’d learned in class, and then you’d turn in a short written reflection on how it went. I actually found that this was very effective: my students largely had no experience with teaching, but asking them to teach seemed to help shake them out of some of the traps and conventions of regular academic writing.
I’ll attach the full syllabus as well, and some of the lecture notes are also available on GitHub.
]]>We’re borrowing the list from the end of Alvarez’s manifesto last year in The Baffler, Contingent No More. The manifesto is well worth reading for its general reminder that organizing against precarity should also be about organizing against the academic star system and against the dominant structures of academic knowledge.
For teaching purposes, this list could provide many useful starting places, especially since many of these texts are shorter form essays that could work well on syllabi.
Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography):
Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”
The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate
Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“
Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”
Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”
Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”
Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)
American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)
Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists
The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects
Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”
Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“
Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”
The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”
Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”
Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“
Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”
Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“
Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”
Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“
Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”
Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”
Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual
Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”
Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”
Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity
Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”
Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”
Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”
Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”
Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”
Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”
Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”
Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“
Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”
Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas”
]]>I recently participated in a roundtable debate on higher education at the AAA meeting in Washington (DC) on the subject of ‘The Academy and the Future of Freedom to Dissent’, which raised some interesting thoughts for me on what constitutes the greatest threat to academic freedom in universities.
The premise for the roundtable, taking its cue from the growing tide of populism and nationalism in Europe, the US and elsewhere, was that these ‘Twenty-first century populisms’ are pushing academic freedom to the brink. As the provocation for the debate noted, a combination of ‘resurgent nationalism’, the neoliberalisation of higher education, the normalisation of austerity narratives, growing university dependence on student fees, and targeted cuts to those disciplines that promote ‘liberal’ thinking (i.e. humanities and social sciences) — is fundamentally undermining academic freedom. To echo Mary Evans (2004), it is ‘killing thinking’.
The panel began with two main questions:
The responses were fascinating and highlighted some key differences between national higher education systems. As US ethnographers such as Don Brenneis noted, the heterogeneous US system grants universities more room for manoeuvre, leaving the national government less power to impose its will on the whole sector. Nevertheless, powerful financial and political interests can exercise an unhealthy degree of power and censorship. For example, the pro-Israel lobby seeks to govern what academics can and cannot say with regards to Israel, treatment of the Palestinians, and US funding of new settlements on stolen Palestinian lands. Others emphasised academic precarity and the silencing effects of anxieties about failure or censorship. As Tracey Heatherington put it, the question ‘how do I write about this without getting fired’ is now one that many critical and reflexive scholars have to ask.
Meanwhile, for European ethnographers such as Jon Mitchell and Dorle Drackle, populism combined with neoliberalism now constitutes a clear and present danger to academic freedom, as evidenced particularly in Hungary and Poland, in the 2017 German elections, and in Britain following the Brexit referendum. In each of these contexts, ‘cruel patriotism’, xenophobia and homophobia have been given free reign. , What is new, however, is the extent to which these anti-system movement have welded the ideology of integralism to a neoliberal discourse of austerity in order to legitimise their policies for violently downsizing the public sphere. Janine Wedel also noted that universities are increasingly ‘laundering reputations’ of corrupt elites, enabling former generals, politicians and financiers to mask their political interests by affiliating themselves – and their ideas – with academic institutions where they have been given honorary status.
My own view, having observed university reforms being carried out over several decades first under the Thatcher and Blair governments in Britain and more recently in New Zealand, is that the greatest threat to academic freedom is not nationalism or populism, although these are worrying in themselves. Rather, it is the increasing influence of audit culture and marketisation in universities. These have brought a whole nexus of new values and instrumentalities to the way universities are conceptualized and managed that runs contrary to the principles of disinterested knowledge production and higher learning that once defined the C20th public university.
The new narrative of the university in the global knowledge economy is all about the virtues of competition, commercialization, innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, generating revenue from patents, licenses and ‘translational research’ that turns ideas into invoices. These have become the new keywords of the university in the age of academic capitalism. What we are seeing is perhaps less a tragedy of the ‘knowledge commons’ than its increasing penetration and capture by predatory financial interests, aided by a compliant neoliberal-inspired political elite. This process is often justified in terms of the need to ‘unbundle’ universities (Barber et al 2013) in order to open them up to competition from more external private providers. In the UK, this policy has now passed into law with the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, which makes it a statutory duty for the newly-created ‘Office for Students’ to ‘encourage competition’ (read ‘asset stripping’) and ‘promote value for money’ (read ‘management by accountants’).
Neoliberalisation was always a deeply flawed and destructive assemblage of coercive managerial practices harnessed to economic dogma. Yet rather than being rejected as a dangerous idea that has gone past its sell-by date, it has become further entrenched and normalized. To survive in this brave new world, universities must increasingly hawk themselves through competitive branding, fundraising from alumni and commercializating their research. University funding has been redefined as ‘strategic investment’ and only the STEM subjects warrant public subsidy. Academics are being incentivized (and cajoled) to become entrepreneurial subjects who market themselves and their ideas. Decisions over academic recruitment are now routinely being made not by faculties of departments but by senior administrators in the university’s Research Office, commercialization units or leadership teams.
Reorganising universities into schools (‘schooling’) is another corrosive disciplinary technology that undermines academic freedom. The main purpose of schooling is to increase centralized control by breaking up departments might question decisions from above. Torin (2005) calls this process ‘fragmented centralization’ as it concentrates decision-making at the top of the organisation while making accountability for centrally made decisions more ‘distributed’ (Amsler and Shore 2017). It is also about replacing disciplinary knowledge with more ‘flexible’ forms of integrated teaching and learning so that managers can more easily re-deploy academic labour where they decide ‘student demand’ or ‘strategic opportunities’ may lie – all typically justified by the neoliberal mantra that the ‘student consumer is king’ (except that the student consumer rarely gets to speak for herself). The strategy is to promote the flexibilisation and casualization of the workforce.
So to answer the questions raised earlier, anthropology is deeply affected by these changing budgets, bureaucracies and political shifts. Academic precarity and constant managerial demands for increased productivity and accountability are extremely effective instruments for keeping academics isolated and in their place. Research assessment exercises, teaching evaluations and annual performance reviews – all of them individualizing and totalizing ‘technologies of the self’ — also play an increasingly dominant role in shaping academic behavior and subjectivity. Most anthropologists and academics, even those who feel deeply committed to the ideals of academic freedom and collective struggle, simply don’t have time to perform their social role as critic and conscience of society. We have all become far too busy and distracted answering emails and filling out the latest online form demanded of us by our university administocracies to be able to be actively engaged in the decision-making processes that shape our own institutions.
All this has worrying implications for democracy. Public universities matter because they (like other public institutions) are essential to democratic society, as Levin and Greenwood (2016) cogently illustrate. Along with a free press, academia is a key site for critical thinking and reflection and the humanities and social sciences are practically the only spaces in society where received wisdom and policy can be meaningfully challenged. As Helga Via, President of the European Research Council states:
The social sciences and humanities produce knowledge and insights about our societies and our past, our complex relations to each other and to our environment. They are crucial to building, understanding and improving those institutions that are the backbone of democracy.
Looking across the globe today I would say that democracy is looking increasingly weak and fragile in many parts of the world. Much needs to be done and could be done to protect both our universities and the future of freedom of dissent. One starting point is to turn our disciplinary skills as anthropologists and ethnographers towards our own institutions. That could provide a knowledge base for reclaiming some of the space that we have ceded to managerialism. We could also adopt some of the principles of the ‘slow academia’ movement (Berg and Seeber 2016) and put a halt to the fetishized obsession with speed that now dominates academia.
But a fuller account of ‘what is to be done’ deserves its own blog post. Let me end, therefore, with a call to others to propose ideas for how me might address the twin blight of neoliberal dogma and managerial corporatism that threatens to drown both our public universities and our political systems.
Thank you for the review of our book. This is what we need for our own professional development. Our challenge is to be open and responsive for comments or judgement of the book but still stick to our major arguments/ideas underpinning the book’s major point. I am glad that you seem to appreciate the “simple “language we are using. Simple language is not the same as simple ideas. We have learned a lot from this German, Australian and Norwegian based researcher Philip Herbst.
It is unclear for me what you mean by using the concept “manifesto.” Too political and too little substance is what I fear. What we argue for in the book is a professional and substantive position which of course is a political-economic perspective.
Sound like a workshop mechanic. We have the ambition too, but only in combination with theoretical reflection. It is an integration of theory and practice what we are aiming at. The essential Action Research (A) argument — “learn from practice and feedback reflection to participants” — is the major message. This is the “long” argument in the book.
You expand on critical distance as an important issue. In AR it is important to identify own biases related to the field of research where one are working in. I like to identify this issue as controlling for biases. Keeping a critical distance has its counter-position in involvement in concrete research.
Neo Taylorism is basically a way to identify the now-dominant organizational models. Social democracy is first of all a joint labor: managers and public/political representatives join in the same activity. There are lots of books/reports in Norwegian on this issue. The perspectives differ quite a lot from your modeling of social democracy. Maybe your interest and experience from industry result in substituting social democracy with a capitalist model of organization.
The same argument can be used when it relates to social democratic vs capitalist ideology driven leaders. The literature in the field is a crazy mixture of research based text and, stories of leadership heroes. It is complex and laborious job to make sense of leadership. Participative leadership is our model.
The overreaching model for social organization is a model where participative democracy would be the engine that transform society through education for a democratic praxis. The long time perspective is that democracy in higher education would expand to all strata in society.
Maybe our ambition is unrealistic and far too big and complex. It might be too big and complex for engagement in one institution. Creating a democratic higher education would have to be a collective responsibility.
]]>Cathy N. Davidson has been writing about her experiments in education for years (for example here and here and here). She brings to her new book deep understanding of the context, history, successes, and shortcomings of the dominant forms of higher education—college—and highlights several dozen approaches that are more successful. These are more appropriate, she argues, than the conventional forms, which have not changed in more than a hundred years, because they respect students’ abilities, teach them to employ the affordances of not only technology but also other people, and anticipate that the content of whatever they do in college will have only limited relevance in the future—so they need to focus on learning to learn. Conventional colleges have outlived their initial purposes, which were to train managers in a newly industrializing and urbanizing society, when books were scarce and simply ingesting information was challenging enough. They selected only top students and churned them through a disciplinary mill, certified by authorities.
That’s not what we need now.
Information is hardly rare. We need, rather, to teach students—all people—to find it, evaluate it, use it, as they ask real questions and prepare for an ever-changing career and cultural landscape. Davidson rejects the idea of a simple vocational focus for higher education, because no matter how quickly students will find a first job if they have narrow skills training, it is almost certain that this will not be their only job. So the purpose of higher education has to be to prepare them for flexibility.
The New Education derives its title through citation, exactly, of a two-part essay published in 1869 in The Atlantic Monthly, by Charles Eliot, the transformative president of Harvard. (Titles are not subject to copyright, FYI.) After earnestly scouring Europe’s educational systems, Eliot brought to Harvard and then to the rest of us the familiar forms of college, with their disciplines, majors, requirements, entrance exams, grades, and “scientific management” methods borrowed from Frederick Winslow Taylor and his time-and-motion studies in factory production. Though Davidson admires Eliot, who was innovative in his moment, she also makes sure her readers understand that his vision worked for his time, and that it is now the moment for a new rethinking of the purposes and processes of higher education.
All the illustrations she provides are inspiring and hopeful, going far beyond what are now ubiquitous “STEM” or “STEAM” or “digital humanities” or “interdisciplinary” innovations (and rejecting MOOCs entirely). The vision is radical, and has many dimensions. Some of the cases she presents, in some luxurious detail, include the following:
Davidson’s vision is not elitist. In the chapter on “Why College Costs so Much,” Davidson encourages greater public investment in higher education, claiming that the most successful “national business” of the United States in the last hundred and fifty years has been higher education (p. 187). Citing careful work by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Davidson shows how the states (using Wisconsin as her case study) have reduced drastically their share of support, resulting in life-destroying student debt (impossible to evade even through declaring bankruptcy) and a barrier to attendance and completion for many nonwealthy students and their families.
One way of measuring this is to compare state appropriations per thousand dollars of state personal income. In 1981, Wisconsin appropriated $10.18, falling in 1990 to $9.24, in 2000 to $7.52, in 2010 to $6.32, and in 2016 to just $5.00—so it has fallen by half (pp. 170-171). Another way to look at this is to note that even private colleges’ tuition used to be affordable. Yale’s 1970 tuition of $2500 could be earned by working 4.8 hours of minimum-wage ($1.45) work a day; in 2014 the $45,800 tuition would require 17 hours a day at minimum wage ($7.25)—an obviously absurd proposition. (Davidson ignores here the point that most students don’t actually pay the “sticker price” but rather the “net price”—and the finances of financial aid are another miasma, like airplane tickets…)
In addition to challenging the enormous expense of higher education, Davidson fascinatingly argues against both technophobia (fear of new technology) and technophilia (belief that technology is the cure-all). She compares slide rules and calculators (I’ve done this too) and looks at MOOCs Massive Open Online Courses (The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” a fashion that came and went fast), which essentially reify the old elite lecturer model. Linguistic anthropologists will savor this nuanced approach to investigating the ideologies as well as the actual practices surrounding various media.
I love the affection and respect Davidson demonstrates for the students currently being allowed to work on more complex issues than simply mastering an old, tired syllabus. The most exciting sections of the book are when she shows the successful implementation of new approaches.
Davidson herself exemplifies the constant reinvention we anticipate for our students.
She began as a professor of English, studying in part the cultural, historical, political, and technological contexts of the American novel. One of her first creative detours was 36 Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, written following four stints living in Japan; if you are looking for a gift, this book would satisfy many readers. She did a book with a photographer about the closing of a century-old furniture factory in North Carolina. She taught at several universities and other educational institutions, where she grew interested in the mismatch between what students seemed to need and want, and the established expected curriculum (“Freshman Composition”), with its term papers and five-paragraph essays.
At Duke, she began to achieve public prominence and became Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In her role as a campus leader, she cofounded HĀSTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), the “interdisciplinary community” claiming 14,000 members, aiming to “change the way we teach and learn.” There she developed a sophisticated understanding of the potential and limitations of new media-building on her nuanced understanding of how such earlier new media (printing press and affordable books) had influenced literature and politics. She moved to the Graduate Center at CUNY in 2014, where she is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative, to influence a greater number of students, with greater diversity. Many of the cases she details stem from the institutional partnerships among HĀSTAC, Duke, CUNY, ASU, and Georgetown
The New Education is a clear, compelling account of a truly dire situation.
Anthropologists might wonder about some dimensions, but these do not diminish the power of the presentation. Davidson states, as if there is no possible dissent, that “We all know that college has never mattered more” (p. 187) as she challenges it outrageous contemporary costs. This may not be the case; arguments about the economic benefits of attending and finishing college show that probably not everyone knows, or accepts, this.
Davidson’s baseline is that our world is “postindustrial and post-Internet,” that “the boundaries between work and home are far less distinct, work itself is more precarious, wages are largely stagnant, automation is expanding and becoming more sophisticated, democratic institutions are failing, professions are disappearing, and the next shock to the economy is on the horizon, even if we can’t see it yet” (pp 3-4). In this context, she sees college as having to do better. One might agree with her generalized, timeless present assessment of “the situation,” and still challenge its overly generalized conclusions: Some people do work in industry; some people (wind turbine service technicians, for example—the fastest growing category of jobs) may separate their work and home lives.
Davidson is driven in part by a vision of equity, and social class is a constant theme.
I was pleased to see John Mogulescu, dean of the School of Professional Studies at CUNY (pp. 63-71), point out that having an associate’s degree in and of itself won’t guarantee a middle-class life; that is society’s responsibility. Wages paid for all work should be living wages, so that jobs are justly compensated.
“We can do our part—we can give them a good education, we can ensure that they graduate. But if the jobs they are going into are paying several dollars an hour, then that’s not the fault of higher education. That’s the fault of a greedy society” (p. 70).
Anthropologists of education might want a little more in-depth study of the actual workings of all these experiments, however. Davidson tends to consult with the leaders and to make a quick visit, talking with a few students. In the LaGuardia Community College case, for example, she shows that all colleges could learn from the student-centered approach. I concur. (In fact I’ve decided that if I donate money to educational institutions, they will be to community colleges, which educate about half our students.) She quotes President Mellow, who spoke admiringly of “students who walk from Flushing to take one class and then walk back to get to their part-time, minimum-wage job… That’s ten miles each way. They are determined to get an education no matter what. You tell me we aren’t training our future leaders!” (p. 61). But what of the ones who stop walking, even if they do get a subway card?
What of the failures? Are all educators in these schools on board? Who resists? Colleagues frequently lament to me students who resist efforts at radical pedagogical transformation: A math teacher at a community college brought in all kinds of creative connections to the world, but his students wanted “real math”—worksheets and algorithms—rather than concepts. I have heard that not all faculty at Arizona State embrace the reorganized “schools” and that the actual results are not always as radical as the conception. This would be an ideal topic to investigate ethnographically.
But that is for another scholar to undertake. Davidson has significant strengths and access, and she need not write a two-thousand-page multidisciplinary study. (She rejects trans-, multi-, cross-disciplinary because she rejects disciplines entirely.) She has written an important book.
This book is easy to read, with profiles of inspiring individual transformers; it is a model of how to convey detailed and complex material accessibly and without jargon. The overall approach is informed by deep understanding of class (not so much gender, race, sexuality), focused on the United States in historical context. The author has both theoretical and practical understanding, and is critical in the best sense, providing alternatives and positive suggestions, not just tearing down a deeply flawed system. She strongly promotes a system of higher education, but not in its current form.
The concluding short appendices are for current college students and current college faculty who are not in a position to undertake radical transformation; they are reminiscent of James Lang’s Small Teaching (and of my own contributions in this vein). These are the kinds of advice that tend to be provided by teaching-and-learning centers on most campuses: practical, working within constraints.
As an anthropologist I may be missing a little broader, and international, context, but as a writer (and frequent reviewer of manuscripts) I am sympathetic to the notion that other people should not be trashed for failing to write the book I wish they had written. And this book has an excellent point of view; it builds on careful study; it is well presented.
Read it.
And change the world! If you are an academic or a student or an administrator, begin with college.
— Susan D. Blum, Department of Anthropology, The University of Notre Dame.
It is probably impossible to write about postsocialism without coming to terms with nostalgia and the legacy of the past. It is a particularly sticky past, which lingers in memories, texts, and institutions. Research on post-Soviet education has been preoccupied with this weight, and rightly so: Soviet history and its recollections inevitably color the everyday practices of learning and teaching in Russian schools and universities; triumphant recapitulations of the achievements of the Soviet educational system are often written into the very documents announcing neoliberal reforms designed to sweep away the institutional legacies of that system. However, the tendency in much of this literature has been to treat the past as, well, past: a dead weight bearing down on a lively present. Olena Aydarova’s recent and refreshing article, however — “Glories of the Soviet Past or Dim Visions of the Future: Russian Teacher Education as the Site of Historical Becoming” — certainly tarries with the past, but in an ultimately more productive vein than many of its contemporaries.
Empirically, the article is an interesting contribution to the study of postsocialist educational reform in its focus on teacher education. The teachers’ college is a crucial site for both the reproduction of existing pedagogical practices and the implementation of reform, perhaps especially in postsocialism (Webster, Silova, Moyer and McAllister 2011). There has been little work on teacher education in Russia, which is unfortunate; as Aydarova argues, teaching was a uniquely politically important, high-status profession in Soviet Russia, and carries much cultural weight today. Further, she rightly points out that studying teacher education is crucial for understanding contemporary education reforms, as trainee teachers are precisely those who will determine whether and how global neoliberal educational models become locally concrete. More culturally it is also a site of dense and recursive commentary on educational values and norms, and Aydarova does a good job of fleshing out this discourse. In a nicely holographic methodological recapitulation of her theoretical interest in the intersections of past and present, she carefully surveys multiple generations of teachers and teachers of teachers to show the contested, yet inescapable, presence of the past — even for those who did not live it directly.
In so doing, she draws attention to the coexistence of both values and concrete practices, drawn from both the neoliberal and socialist frames of temporal reference. The article carefully details the actual pragmatics of grading at the school, where the older Soviet system coexists in uneven and personally idiosyncratic ways with newer models drawn from Western repertoires. It also, however, gives a thorough account of commentary on these systems, and on the very fact of their coexistence. In so doing, it charts an underlying ideological dispute between and among teachers and students about the clash between an “authentic,” Russian form of evaluation, and a mechanical, universal, neoliberal approach. Aydarova takes a similarly nuanced and bifurcated approach to her other two primary areas of empirical engagement, showing both the pragmatic and ideological coexistence of past and present in the selection of students and the performance of classroom excellence.
Theoretically, this material is framed as part of an ongoing discussion in the educational research literature on how the legacy of socialism interacts with neoliberal reforms. Aydarova suggests, I think rightly, that much of this research has unfortunately treated this legacy as an impediment, responsible primarily for “mutations” or “failures” of neoliberal reform efforts. Her own, Bakhtinian approach differs from this mainstream in its insistence on the necessary and inescapable imbrication of the past with the present. Far from an impediment to a somehow pure and universal neoliberalism, she argues that postsocialism provides an inescapable local chronotopic backdrop for the emergence of neoliberal reform projects. The present straddles local histories and potentially global futures, and temporal difference is itself a resource for configuring plans and actions in that present. Aydarova uses this framework deftly, keeping it close to the empirical ground. It lets her show quite convincingly that commentary on Soviet academic excellence serves, for some, as a constant touchstone in discussions precisely on the failure of contemporary reforms, resituating the blame from authentically local legacies to insufficiently universal global reforms. At the same time, she can argue that for others, more invested in the neoliberal reforms, this historical legacy serves primarily as a negative shadow of neoliberal excellence, orienting more progressive action in the present. In both cases, however, the local and global, the past and present, both emerge together in producing chronotopes for practical action and commentary, acting as available resources and enabling constraints for making, disputing, and enacting concrete plans.
Unfortunately, I think that Aydarova sells herself somewhat short in trying to subordinate this rich material to an overarching focus on how “the socialist past and the current neoliberal moment present a dichotomy in participants mental scapes of a better before and a lacking now” (italics original). Although this is certainly an objective ethnographic reality, it is hardly unique to teacher education. Of course, Aydarova clearly must work with a broader literature on postsocialist education that is obsessed with this dynamic, and makes an admittedly admirable effort to trouble that literature’s often literal-minded interpretations. However, I think that there is the basis, here, for a more radical troubling of the divide as such. To my mind, Aydarova’s arguments show ample room room for the ethnographer to move beyond charting such such dichotomous mental operations to understand how pasts and presents become futures together. Although the article hints at this as an ultimate horizon of a Bakhtinian analysis of temporality, it never fully achieves either an empirical characterization of talk about the future or a theoretical explanation for how that future emerges from the melange of past and present. Certainly, we catch glimpses of the future in the article, and Aydarova is clearly passionately invested in how the present and past orient processual action. In coming work on this rich vein of material, it would be interesting to see a more fleshed out analysis.
Works Cited
Webster, C., Silova, I., Moyer, A., and McAllister, S. (2011). “Leading in the age of post-socialist education transformations: Examining sustainability of teacher education reform in Latvia.” Journal of Educational Change, 12(3): 347-370.
Ian Lowrie studies higher education, data science, and computing infrastructure in Russia and the United states. He’s currently a doctoral candidate at Rice University, and the editor for Platypus. You can reach him at [email protected] and see some of his work at www.ianlowrie.us.
]]>There’s more and more great ethnography of higher education, but so much of it is hard to find.
The point of this project is to bring this set of work together. We think that both newcomers and established researchers could use help keeping track of everything that’s happening in the field. If you’re just getting started, our developing pedagogy section might be especially helpful.
It’s an extremely diverse set of research. It comes from people in all sorts of fields, from many different continents, from many different political perspectives, from different institutional positions. It overlaps with what’s lately been called “Critical University Studies,” but also includes work in science education, policy studies, critical sociology, educational anthropology, higher ed research, anthropology of knowledge, history and sociology of science, laboratory studies, reflexive cultural studies, and no doubt others.
The project is sponsored by the Committee on Postsecondary Education at the Council on Anthropology of Education, but anyone is free to get involved. We’d love to hear from anyone working in the field or just starting out. Especially let us know when you come across new research we should write about.
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