Some final thoughts from Kerr tonight — it’s been a long night, and I should’ve been in bed long ago, but I’ve been struggling with various technology issues for my two sections tomorrow. Which is somehow appropriate, since the stuff from Kerr is about technology.

Kerr argues that “The best of the liberal arts colleges are likely to be the least affected by the new electronic technology since they are mostly engaged in the all-around development of the children of the already affluent (the top one-fifth of the economic scale), providing sports, lifetime friends, social skills, programs for cultural interests, and all-around intellectual advancement, not just job skills. These institutions get their main support from gifts by affluent alumni who have the ability and willingness to pay high tuitions for their children, not from public funds” (224). But those of us who have visited computer labs in wealthy private institutions and compared them to the computer labs at the less wealthy public institutions where we teach know quite well that “the best of the liberal arts colleges” also have more, better computers per student, and because their students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, those students often possess a higher level of familarity and proficiency with computers, and also often know how to do different sorts of work with computers. The divisions Jean Anyon points to in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” apply very much to the use of computers in elementary and secondary education: students in poorer schools are often given drills-and-skills instruction while students in wealthier schools get to do the fancy stuff.
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Kerr warns that universities “will become even more of an appendage of the labor market. American higher education began as an effort at moral uplift. It continues as an effort to get a good or better job. A life of affluence is replacing a philosophy of life as the main purpose of higher education” (221). I think Kerr’s perception is dead-on accurate here; the trend is undeniable, and while we give lip service to some tweedy ivy-clad ideal of the university, the reality is that the disciplines in the university getting the most money and the most attention are the not those disciplines grouped around philosophy in the original liberal-education constellation, or even the original professions of theology, medicine and law, but precisely the disciplines that promise students that “life of affluence”.
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I love Amanda’s semi-anonymizing habit of referring to her town as “Collegeville”. The town where I teach certainly has that rep, but the town where I teach is 20 miles away from the town where I live. And halfway in between, there’s a small city that houses another college and a huge array of boutiques and restaurants on its two main drags. I love the bookstores, but I could do without all the trustafarians and fauxhemians and Saab-driving yoga moms who make sure you know just how much they recycle and can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to vote republican. I’m pretty dang liberal, but that kind of myopic elitism just bugs the heck out of me. Which is why — despite coveting Amanda’s name for her town — I’ll choose to instead steal from the good Dr. Thompson and refer to the happy municipality where I had sushi tonight as Fat City. And tonight, with the weather gorgeous, the flow of students on the sidewalks swelled to capacity: if there’s patchouli in the air, it must be September in Fat City. We had a really excellent dinner, and I later came back here to finish off Clark Kerr.
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Mike the writing teacher might respond to Mike the blogger’s post yesterday in the following fashion:

“Dear Mike:

Your first paragraph really got my attention, with the way your small alliterations called attention to the connection between the cause (your classes having gone well) and the effect (your good mood), and the ‘oh’ of clear delight. The problem is, the rest of the entry doesn’t deliver on the promise of that paragraph. You immediately switch gears by going into a detailing of bad days, including a throwaway military reference, and then for no apparent reason throw some abuse at campus IT workers before returning briefly to your ostensible topic: your good teaching day. However, you bring it up again only to confuse us by just as quickly dropping the subject in favor of the focus of the post’s second half: questions of ethical student representation. In raising these questions, you in no way acknowledge the obvious and strong connections to your earlier post, ‘What’s in a Flame?’, which was prompted by remarkably similar questions about how and where instructors talk about students.

Maintaining a solid focus — either the ‘good day’ narrative or the ethics of representation questions — should help you revise this into something that readers may be able to productively engage with. It’ll take some work, though.”

And Mike the writing teacher would be right. It was just such a good day that I couldn’t not tell you about it. My questions are still there, though. From that CCC statement I linked and from what I’ve said here, what’s your sense of how much I can responsibly write about my classroom? Obviously, I wouldn’t ever use student names, not even just first names — but does even talking about a student without using names (e.g., “I have one student who’s ten months out of Moscow and has immense difficulties with English, but man! she’s well-read and has some fantastic ideas; one of her first drafts referenced Chagall and Bulgakov in this extended metaphor that worked with some seriously apocalyptic imagery to make a political statement about being a Jew in Russia”) violate my ethical obligations as a teacher and researcher? I think so. So how much can I say, if anything? And is this really just the question Liz was asking but in a different skin?

Many have commented on Bush’s frequent rhetorical deployment of the word “freedom”. One wonders how we might pin down a specific meaning for Bush’s usage: clearly, it’s a catch-all, a universally positive term meant to discourage rather than encourage critical thought, but we can try. What kind of freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what one likes, we might suppose from Bush’s foreign policy agenda: freedom as supreme self-determination. But such self-determination does typically imply a freedom from certain things as well; things in the administration’s case usually constructed as concrete and specific agent-driven oppression: the bad guys holding you down. The market is free, or wants to be free, and so cannot be bad. We are told that lessening restrictions on the economy — making it more free — will make it more efficient, and therefore better. We hear, as well, that trade must be free in order to be fair. But, unlike the recent unfortunate case of Fox’s fair and balanced phrase, there’s a word many historically associate with freedom that we rarely hear these days. Whatever happened to the phrase “Free and equal”? Have we forgotten our historic privileging of the conjoined terms?
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In 1963, Clark Kerr wrote,

“The basic reality, for the university, is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth. We are just now perceiving that the university’s product, knowledge, may be the most powerful single element in our culture, affecting the rise and fall of professions and even of social classes, of regions and even of nations.

Becasue of this fundamental reality, the university is being called upon to produce knowledge as never before — for civic and regional purposes, for national purposes, and even for no purpose at all beyond the realization that most knowledge eventually comes to serve mankind. And it is also being called upon to transmit knowledge to an unprecedented portion of the population.

This reality is rehsaping the very nature and quality of the university. Old concepts of faculty-student relations, of research, of faculty-administration roles are being changed at a rate without parallel. And this at a time when it seems that an entire generation is pounding at the gates and demanding admission. To the academician, conservative by nature, the sound made by the new generation often resembles the howl of a mob. To the politician, it is a signal to be obeyed. To the administrator, it is a warning that we are in new times and that the decisions we make now will be uncommonly productive — both of good and ill.

Thus the university has come to have a new centrality for all of us, as much as for those who never see the ivied halls as for those who pass through them or reside there.” (xii, The Uses of the University)

Perhaps I’ve already been looking at class for too long, and I’m seeing it everywhere I look. In that short passage from Kerr’s preface to The Uses of the University, class is not only named explicitly, but also embedded in the connection between education and profession, in economic growth, in the understanding of knowledge as a product, in the acknowledgements of broadening inclusivity and gated exclusion, and in the Arnoldian reference to the mob.
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I meet with Charlie and Donna this week, so I’ve spent the past several hours re-reading old blog posts and trying to come up with some sort of condensed version or way to encapsulate for my self the idea I’ve been working with. One thing Charlie suggested was to take all these different versions of class and attempt to apply them to a classroom study that talks about class, so maybe that’ll be one of my goals for tomorrow. Tonight, some brief insights.

First, I feel like the most exciting and useful stuff I’ve been doing has been the stuff that tries to connect directly to classroom practices. No big surprise there; composition as a field has historically been a place for people who find the day-to-day realities of practice more engaging than the abstract flights of theory. So, some classroom-type thinking.
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I mentioned yesterday how Curtiss’s post provoked my thinking on class and the “liberal education,” but I didn’t manage to articulate everything that I found engaging. Hence this follow-up.

Curtiss quotes a long passage from Leo Strauss’s Liberalism Ancient and Modern, with which I’m not familiar, so I’m relying on the account Curtiss gives. I should point out, though, that the term “liberalism” indicates to me that we’re in problematic territory even before we start, since the term — like “class” — is a moving target, and I suspect there might be a bit of play in Strauss’ use of the term to refer either to those in Roman times who were not fettered by slaves’ chains, the ideal cultural values ascribed to such people (and this is the sense from which we get the term “liberal education”), the generosity with money (or pure overindulgence, as in Trimalchio’s case) ascribed to such people, or in contemporary culture, the degree of freedom of the market, or — in perhaps its most common use — political opposition to the right wing.

Anyway — now that I’ve spewed my Recommended Daily Allowance of pedantry — maybe I can actually get to what Curtiss was talking about. He quotes Leo Strauss at length: “The education of the potential gentlemen is the playful anticipation of the life of gentlemen. It consists above all in the formation of character and taste. . . [the gentleman] must possess the skill of administering well and nobly the affairs of his household and the affairs of his city by deed and by speech. He acquires that skill by his familiar intercourse with older or more experienced gentlemen, perferably with elder statesmen, by receiving instruction from paid teachers in the art of speaking, by reading histories and books of travel, by meditating on the works of the poets, and, of course, by taking part in political life. All this requires leisure on the part of the youths as well as on the part of their elders; it is the preserve of a certain kind of wealthy people.” While the suggestion that the patriarch should run the polis like he runs his household could be charitably characterized as feudal, the rest of the stuff on education is practically straight Cicero, right out of De Oratore. In terms of class, there are a few things worth observing.
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I was all satisfied with myself for the ways I’d started to get my thinking around the American qualities of the class system I was thinking about in my post yesterday, and I was ready to continue — if you’ll indulge me in a bit of praeteritio — sputtering along in the slow lane today with my foundational readings in Resnick and Wolff. Was being past tense.
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The photos of the Genoa anti-globalization protests several months ago made me realize something pretty basic: while the protests dealt with many worker-related concerns, I understood them in terms of nationalist and post-nationalist ideologies. I’d bet that’s an understanding common to a lot of Americans. Darla the Wal-Mart greeter and Ann the librarian and Monte the lawyer don’t watch the news and think about that working-class guy the police shot. They watch the news and think about that Italian guy the police shot. Even when students in American universities learn about the Paris Commune, I’d wager they think of it as an incident in French history, not as an incident in labor history. Despite its title, “L’Internationale” — isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t for Americans: that link back there notes the curious under-/non-reporting of the Tiannanmen Square singing of the anthem in the American press. Contrast this to the American Media’s wholesale embracing of the free-market ideologies of the New Economy. There’s an obvious reason, of course: American ideologies line up much more closely with the ideologies of neoclassical economics than they do with the ideologies of Marxian economics.

Let me shift gears for a minute. Composition, my discipline — university first-year writing instruction — got its real start at Harvard in the latter part of the 19th century, under Charles William Elliot, and got a big push toward its current form at Dartmouth in 1966. To the best of my understanding, it’s a uniquely American phenomenon.
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