At John’s recommendation, I’m (finally) starting to read Howard Tinberg’s Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College. I look up to John, and his recommendation is certainly enough for me, but I was talking with a compositionist colleague in the computer lab today, and my colleague — with some puzzlement — asked me, “But why are you interested in community colleges?”

It gave me pause. My initial reaction would have been to say, “Well, with my interest in socioeconomic class, why would I not be?” But what does that mean, really? How might an interest in class incline a university-based graduate student towards an interest in community colleges?

John and Cindy and others have talked about this before, of course, but the institutional blindness that university-based compositionists maintain towards teaching practices in two-year colleges continues to amaze me. Here at UMass Amherst, almost all students (seem to) have the same goal: a four-year degree. Such homogeneity of purpose is at least somewhat useful to me in defining the relatively homogenous economic ends that four-year students see their degrees as serving, but also dangerous, in that it helps students and faculty see both their purposes and the purposes of higher education in general as serving a rather homogenous and unified capitalist market economy. (OK: that conclusion is a big leap, and I’ll leave it open for further interrogation.)

On the other hand, students at two-year institutions constitute a far more diverse population, who envision far more diverse purposes for their educations. Some are there for accreditation, some to earn transfer credits, some for continuing education and career purposes, some simply for financial reasons, and so on. These purposes seem to me to much more adequately fit with the paradigm of the diverse and not-necessarily-capitalist economy posited by J. K. Gibson-Graham. In the very first paragraph of his Introduction, Tinberg confirms both my hopes and my fears vis-a-vis perceptions of the purposes of two-year colleges, naming the two missions of such institutions as being “to provide vocational training and to prepare students for transfer to colleges and universities” (vii). That’s pretty grim: we’re either creating a worker class or pushing students into the fancier schools. Yes, Tinberg addresses schools’ diversity of purposes, but he also sets up (or, perhaps more properly, perpetuates) a scary binary.

But at least he’s explicit about it. University-based compositionists, by and large, seem to me to happily and entirely ignore the “vocational training” aspect, or else take it for granted, as something not worth mentioning. So: is that perhaps due to the relative homogeneity of our classes, as compared to those of community colleges? My dissertation-blinkered perspective makes me want to holler that all of this is so, so economic in nature, and I’d be really grateful for either a confirmation or a reality check.

It’s been a long day, and a long week. Had two good sections of first-year comp today, and we got a lot of productive work done; I also had a morning meeting and and evening meeting and a couple hours’ work at the library, and didn’t leave campus until nearly half past eight. Despite the fact that I’m working on my annual fall cold, I’m feeling OK. Add-drop is over, my two sections are stable, and the students are learning the ropes: things feel like they’re working well, although I did get a comment today that things move so fast as to be pretty confusing. That’s something I’ll need to work on — while, as I’ve said before, I value the back-and-forth and varied activities, I understand how the cycling from whiteboard to screen to discussion to typing and back again during a single class can be incredibly disorienting.

Did some re-visiting tonight of economics texts I’d seen before, and found some useful stuff. Duncan Ironmonger’s excellent essay “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product” (Feminist Economics 2[3], 1996, 37-64) performs a wonderfully insightful (and firmly grounded) analysis of how many non-market economic activities are simply ignored by mainstream economic statisticians. According to Ironmonger, “In everyday language we have come to use the word ‘work’ to refer only to paid work. Thus, when people are challenged to consider everyday household chores they tend to think of these activities as ‘nonwork’ time, done in free time without the constraints of a work contract. People often say household chores are not work because they enjoy minding children, cooking or gardening; this enjoyment is a process benefit from the activity which cannot be transferred to another person. One coutner to this argument is to say that not all household tasks provide enjoyment and ask, ‘How many people enjoy cleaning the toilet?’ The point can also be made that, for many people, much of the time spent working in paid work is enjoyable. The level of enjoyment of the person working is not the criterion to distinguish between work and leisure. Meal preparation, whether in the household or in the restaurant, is valuable work because of the meals provided, not because of the pleasure the cook obtains through the act of cooking. The meals are the outcome benefits that are transferred to those that eat them” (40, emphasis in original). So too with housework, and Ironmonger makes substantial employment of time-use studies of household industries versus market industries and concrete valuations of household labor to draw the rather startling conclusion that Australia’s Gross Household Product is at least equal in size to Australia’s Gross Market Product. In other words, the household economy — the sum total of all household labor and production — is at least as large as the market economy. Yeah: yow.
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A good friend of mine who teaches high school wrote this keep-the-computers-out-of-the-classrooms polemic. As you might guess, I don’t quite agree with everything he says, although I love the fact that a high school English teacher leads off with Stooges lyrics. His joke about Velcro got me thinking, though, about the ways we frame our discussions of computers.

Consider three examples:

1. Someone poses the question, “Does technology help learning?” For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “Well, yes. Of course.”
2. Someone poses the question, “Do computers help learning?” For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “Well, yes. Of course.”
3. Someone poses the question, “Does Velcro help learning?” (Velcro is, after all, a technology.) For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “. . . Whahuh?”

If you think long enough about it, I’m sure that you can come up with some possible ways in which Velcro can be put to productive pedagogical uses. And that’s kind of the point: we’re so smitten with the computer as fetishized object that we’re blind to the particulars of pedagogical context and practice. (Charles Moran and Pat Hunter critique this inattention in their excellent essay, “Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change,” in Todd Taylor and Irene Ward’s Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet.)

Thanks for the insight, Jay.

I’ve been receiving comment spam lately from degreeusa.com (under the cover of other URLs), who claim an affiliation with the University of Phoenix (note the alternate non-.edu URL). Usually, I don’t worry too much about comment spam: just put them into MT-Blacklist (my personal blocklist now has over 2,000 entries, with many naughty words) and go along my merry way. But this comment spam I found particularly irritating, because it associated itself with for-profit education. Now, I’ve taught for the for-profit UMass Division of Continuing Education (note the non-.edu URL), and I have to say, I don’t much like them, both for the way they treat their teachers, and for the downright nasty practices they’ve historically engaged in against academic labor. But maybe this example will highlight the particular problems I see with online for-profit education:
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Check out the penultimate fifteen words of this comment thread at Crooked Timber responding to a recent ha-ha-ha-the-MLA-is-silly essay at The Believer, describing “millions of hours of English grammar and composition classes” as “the interlingua of global capitalism itself”.

First off, I don’t know of any colleges and universities that offer straight “grammar” courses, and this signals to me that the commenter has a rather distorted (albeit all too common) view of what first-year composition courses teach. But of course that “interlingua of global capitalism” thing totally grabbed my attention. I might suggest that many rhet/comp scholars would immediately protest, “No, no! That’s not at all what we’re trying to do!” But I wonder how many English Lit scholars — the types perhaps more likely to attend annual MLA conferences — might nod their assent, and think, “Well, yes; nice of those rhet/comp folks to handle the grubby little economic side of things, since we’re all about capital-c Culture.” (Yes, I know that’s unfair of me. I’ve been to MLA, and enjoyed it.) And then I wonder what global scholars outside of English departments and rhet/comp programs might make of the “interlingua” thing.

Thoughts?

I recently mentioned the two articles in College English that evidence an explicitly economic focus in their titles; one from 1947, and one from 1977. I had the opportunity to read them both on my flights out here to the left coast, as well as the Henry Giroux article recently linked by the Happy Tutor, and a couple chapters from Zuboff and Maxmin. What I found was an interesting progression of economic rhetoric that helped me to solidify some of the conclusions I’ve started to develop about the nature of economic discourse in English studies, in academia, and in mainstream American culture.

It’s like this, see:
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I did several JSTOR searches today, looking for how often people in English and in composition and rhetoric talk about economics. In JSTOR (which should be available via your nearest academic library, if not your community library), I searched for the word “economic” in the title and abstract fields for the journals College English and CCC. Results: two hits, both for College English. One an article from 1947, the other an article from 1977. Apparently, we only talk specifically about economics once every thirty years or so. Next, I searched for the word “economic” in the full text field for the journal CCC. CCC articles tend to run between 4000 and 7000 words. Volume 1 of CCC was published in 1950; since then, there has been a total of 3070 articles (or, very roughly, 16,885,000 words) published in the journal’s pages. In that time, compositionists have used the words “economic” or “economics” 207 times. (For much cooler wordcount fun, go check out wordcount.org. 4808 1427!) This gives me some additional information about the contours of economic and class discourses in English and composition; my next step will probably be to do the same sort of thing with The Bedford Bibliography.

In other news, Zeugma’s new favorite game is upstairs-downstairs. She loves being out on my second-floor little deck behind the kitchen, being able to watch the birds that come to the birdfeeder up close, and she wants to go outside every chance she gets. So I’ll go out there with a book and the laptop and do some work and make sure she doesn’t go down the stairs. Only lately she’s gotten quick and bold. She’ll dart around me and down the steps, then dash across the lower deck (the flower shop and restaurant use it) and up the other stairs to the bigger second-floor deck on the other side, behind my bedroom. I chased her a couple times, with her looking back every few steps to make sure I was following, and she was delighted to find that the other door led back into the bedroom. (It was a better option for me than carrying her, fussing and wiggling and clawing, back down and back up the deck stairs.) So now it’s a game: pick a time when Dad’s not watching, dash down the steps, let him chase you up the other steps and let you back into the bedroom, and then run around to the kitchen again.

OK, I can indulge that, at least for a little while. The problem came the other night, when I was refinishing some furniture and had the sliding door in the kitchen cracked for ventilation.
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It’s taken me a while to work through my thoughts on Curtiss’s recent comment to me, which is pretty much par for the course, since Curtiss’s thoughts always tend to offer a big, complex mouthful of analysis to chew on. (I know you work in IT, Curtiss, but damn academia could use a technology critic as insightful as you. You’d give Professor Feenberg a run for his money.) But Clancy was good enough to e-mail me a link to Jenny’s excellent recent thoughts on critical pedagogy, which I’d been lame enough to overlook, and some stuff started to click between what Jenny and Curtiss had to say. Let’s see if I can start to make some connections.

Jenny notes that the for-sale paper mills offer “a plethora of ready-made essays” in the “critical pedagogy” mode: “an analysis of gendered constructions in film, the hidden ideology of class within certain ads, the circulations of men’s magazines”, and so on, and such essays “are just as common as any other kind of ‘usual English essay assignments that can be bought at these sites.” These essays, Jenny suggests, “have now entered a kind of general equivalency”, in that their “analyses [comprise] a ‘universal’ vocabulary and methodology of critique”. In other words, they’re a genre, with easily recognizable and replicated generic conventions — which, Jenny points out, removes “such ‘cultural analyses’ from the actual content of cultural operation”.
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While the Zuboff and Maxmin book is fascinating and insightful, in reading it I sometimes find myself forgetting why I find economic concerns so essential to how I think about writing instruction and its intersection with technology. In a recent edition of James J. Murphy’s A Short History of Writing Instruction, I found some reminders. The book’s final chapter is by Catherine Hobbs and James Berlin, and deals with twentieth-century writing instruction. In the chapter’s second paragraph, Hobbs and Berlin write that “education in a democratic society is a site of contestation over the kind of economic, social, and political formations we want schools to endorse” (248): certainly a familiar argument, but one worth remembering. What I find more interesting (although it’s something I had begun to understand from the brilliant work of Raymond Williams) is their assertion that “The modern high school and the modern comprehensive university took their shapes as part of an economic shift from a laissez-faire market economy of unbridled individual competition to a managed economy of corporate and government alliances and planning” (249).
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Mark C. Taylor begins his analysis of Kant’s Der Streit der Fakultäten (for which I’ve repeatedly run into citations and footnotes) with a summary: “On the one hand, the modern university embodies the mechanical logic of industrialism, and, on the other hand, the university is governed by the principle of autonomy, which, when elaborated, leads to organicism. Anticipating the logic that would eventually issue in the assembly line, the university produces education for mass consumption. In order to function efficiently, the labor process is divided into different departments with different tasks and responsibilities” (240-241). There are several things worth noting here: first, the emphasis on mass production for the purpose of mass consumption.

W. W. Rostow suggests a five-stage process of economic development that ends in high mass consumption, driven — and necessitated — by high mass production. (Consider why Henry Ford paid his workers the relatively high wage of five dollars a day.) The stages are as follows:

1. Traditional society: limited technology and a static society, with forward transitions triggered by external influences, interests, or markets.
2. Preconditions for take-off: commercial exploitation of agriculture and extractive industries; installation of physical infrastructure (roads and railways); emergence of sociopolitical elite.
3. Take-off: development of a manufacturing sector wherein investment in manufacturing exceeds 10% of national income; development of “modern” social, political, and economic institutions.
4. Drive to maturity: development of a wider industrial and commercial base; exploitation of comparative advantages in international trade.
5. High mass production and high mass consumption: the purpose of Fordism and Taylorism.

This sequence is clearly teleological. It takes the current state of much of Western civilization and declares that the economic development of such a state is the road that all nations should follow. As such, it’s a way for the U.S. to say to every other nation, in economic terms, I Am The Omega. I know nothing about the relation between Kant and Adam Smith, other than that Kant’s life succeeded Smith’s by several years, but I am well aware of the critique of the development theory outlined above that such a sequence is hardly a normal or natural state of being, but rather that underdevelopment — and poverty, and inequality — are produced in the production of development. Economic development is ultimately and inextricably intertwined with the ways in which rich nations develop poor nations and exploit their resources, and in doing so produce underdevelopment.

I think there are some clear obvious parallels here for domestic economic and educational policy, and for literacy studies, but I’ll leave them for another day. Still: to what degree do writing teachers — especially those who work with emerging technologies — facilitate and rely upon the mass production and consumption of higher education?