DOSSIER ONE. Pedagogy and Profit: No to "Newt Thought"

We have (predictably) received (once again) a Memorandum, dated November 5, 1994, in which we are told that "Tuesday/Thursday scheduling for undergraduate courses continues to be a 'problem."' This Memorandum repeats the basic points of the Memorandum of October I, 1993, and both texts construct the TTh schedule as a "problem" because some of the "upper division" ETS courses (in the English Department) are suffering from "low enrollment." In the Memorandum of November 5, 1994, however, a new element—surveillance, policing, and punishment of faculty—is introduced: we are ominously warned that the low enrollment issue has now reached such proportions that it has "been noted by the Dean's office and may have budgetary consequences." As we will argue in the second Dossier of this memorandum, the Dean's office has no right to use the alibi of "budget" to interfere in the academic freedom of the faculty. Academic freedom means, among other things, freedom to teach with the highest rigor, without interference. (And, as we will argue below in the second Dossier that for some pedagogues extended class time is a necessary part of in-depth, rigorous teaching—as distinguished from the superficial "survey.") Academic freedom is an absolute right: it does NOT mean "freedom to teach rigorously" if and only if such freedom does not cost much or if and only if you get a massive number of students to attend your classes. It means freedom to produce and disseminate boundary knowledges without any constraints whatsoever. Academic freedom, in other words, does NOT mean freedom to do only what is "profitable" or to do only what is "acceptable" to the Dean's office!

We believe it is urgent to respond to the "warning" issued in the Memorandum of November 5, 1994 and to address the "problem" of "low enrollment" in upper-division courses by opening up for a university-wide debate the theoretical questions implicit in this memorandum regarding the relation between "money" and "knowledge," "profit" and "pedagogy" at Syracuse University. Our founding premise is that the primary role of a university is to produce boundary knowledges and educate critique-al world citizens—people who have the ability to participate in the affairs of a democratic society with the knowledges necessary to deal with highly complex and increasingly abstract issues and help to bring about social change. In the absence of such education in complex and abstract thinking, the fate of democracy will be decided—as we have seen in the recent election, by what we will call "Newt Thought"—the simplistic and authoritarian thinking that embraces the capitalist credo of profit and free enterprise (without regard to collectivity) as its guiding principle. If the role of the university in the emerging international society is to educate critique-al world citizens (and in all its official publicity brochures, videos, etc., Syracuse University does present itself as an avant-garde, "student-centered research university" dedicated to such a goal), then the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse—which, like all Colleges of Arts and Sciences, even by accepted "wisdom," is the "bean" of any university—should not be run as a "small business" constantly measuring all its knowledge and pedagogical practices by the bottom line. In the prior College administration, the Dean's "bottom line policies" approached problems of immense intellectual complexity in the simplistic terms of "budgetary" consequences; and as a result—it should by now be clear to all interested faculty members—the College has fallen far behind similar institutions in terms of the effectiveness of its construction and contribution to advanced knowledges and has increasingly become a "consuming" rather than a "producing" place. The decrease of incoming fresh men is not unrelated to the status of knowledges produced at a university: enrollment is not entirely a matter of the "presentation" or "packaging" of the university and public relations. As a consequence of the previous dean's policies, the College is not only not thinking of itself as a site of producing contestatory, boundary knowledges, but is day by day retreating from its intellectual role as a place for disinterest ed inquiry and the teaching of advanced knowledges to the young women and men who come to this university. It is symptomatic of this steady retreat of the College from rigorous intellectual work that these women and men, during their very first few months here encounter an incomprehensible contradiction (a contradiction that, we know from our own contact with students, is responsible for the brightest and most idealistic among them to transfer from Syracuse University). This is the contradiction between, on the one hand, the formal lip service that the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and the Deans of various Colleges (in various ceremonies at the beginning of the year and in letters, phone calls, videos, to/for prospective students) pay to the high value Syracuse University places on intellectual work and disinterested inquiry into "ideas," on the necessity of critical citizen ship for the continuation of a viable democracy, in short, on the pursuit of truth at all costs, and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day talks and practices of their Deans, the Vice-Chancellor and the Chancellor which begin, repeat, and end with nothing more than the "budgetary consequences" of such disinterested, all-embracing pursuit of truth! The time has come for the College of Arts and Sciences of Syracuse University to face its confusing discourses and cease to disillusion the young women and men who come here. The College has two choices: either to stop pretending that Syracuse is an institution of higher learning in which the primary concern is the production and dissemination of boundary knowledges for critique-al world citizenship OR to stand by its promise to the young men and women who choose Syracuse and stop harassing faculty members who are intellectually productive, pedagogically rigorous, and take seriously the task of educating critique-al citizens by threatening them with the "budgetary consequences" of their practices. Students come here thinking that they will in fact encounter intellectual-work-in-process, that is, work without the kinds of borders, limits, and artificial obstacles like the ones that are constantly thrown up for committed pedagogues and intellectually productive faculty members and exemplified in the yearly memoranda circulated in the Department of English.

The "problem" of Tuesday/Thursday upper-division courses (if under-enrollment can ever be called a problem in a research university) is, first of all, not a universal "problem." There are upper division ETS courses which are not under enrolled. In those courses where enrollment is a "problem," the "problem" is in fact an "intellectual" problem and has nothing to do with such managerial issues as the "day," "hour," or "frequency" of teaching. This "problem" should therefore be approached (like all complex intellectual problems) with complexity and in rigorous intellectual and conceptual terms and not through managerial gimmicks. These gimmicks (changing the days and times of classes) are dangerously similar to the naive "solutions" that have now become the hallmark of the right wing of the Republican Party. Not having the conceptual resources and the political and historical understanding of complex issues of advanced industrial societies, the Republican Party has opted for populist "solutions," The "budget deficit" of the federal government (to take one complex issue that Republicans have "solved" with gimmicks) is ultimately a crisis of capitalist economy in the era of the globalization of production and a result of changing rates of profit. However, the Newt Gingrich "solution" to this crisis (in the "Contract with America") is an ideological mystification: rather than evaluating the causes of economic and social "problems," Gingrich proposes the "formal" solution of "constitutional amendments"—acts which, like the unthoughtful approach to "low enrollment" by changing the hour of teaching, deal only with symptoms and not causes of "problems." If the Congress has proved to be unable to deal with issues of immense complexity (to take another example of "Newt thought"), this is in part because of the growing sophistication of the social division of labor (i. e,, class antagonisms) in a multicultural "democracy." The "Newt Thought" solution is just another ideological and managerial gimmick: instituting "term limits."

The time has come for the College of Arts and Sciences (and the English Department) to realize that "Newt Thought" cannot solve the "problem" of low enrollment in ETS courses. The main reasons why those ETS courses which have rigorous reading lists, demanding assignments, in-depth paper writing requirements, and non-compromising pedagogy "suffer" from the "problem" of low enrollment is that not enough students are prepared intellectually in lower division courses such as ETS 141 and ETS 241 to take these rigorous upper-division courses. Such lower-division English courses as those in the "Introduction" series (to fiction, poetry...) just add to the problem: they are simply part of the intellectual retreat we talked about earlier because they have completely given up abstract thought and embraced the project of celebration of the a "pleasures" of the aesthetic. The new English course, "Living Writers," is only the most recent mark of the Department's rapid retreat from intellectual contestation to impressionistic adoration: it is a course in which "writers" are turned into "celebrities." How is a student who has just finished such a "pleasurable" course going to be at all prepared then to sit in a class in which Marx, Derrida and Foucault offer relentless interrogations of the bourgeois ("pleasure-seeking," "celebrity-celebrating") subject? Unprepared for any serious thought, why shouldn't students just drop rigorous courses? They do and they will continue to do so, so long as their preparation for serious work is lacking.

Instead of redeploying the bankrupt managerial tactics of the past, the new College administration should adopt a new and intellectually complex approach to this "problem". The Dean's office should begin, immediately, to provide intellectual support for teaching lower-division ETS courses and in doing so begin to "solve" the "problem" of low-enrollment in upper-division courses. The instructors of lower-division courses should be trained (by theorists in the Department, by summer seminars in which advanced theorists from other institutions teach courses for faculty here, through grants to attend summer schools at other universities) to prepare students in contemporary "theory." Students who either "drop" or do not "enroll" in rigorous upper division courses do so not simply because the "time" of these courses is "inconvenient" but because they simply cannot follow the discourses of these classes.

If these difficult "upper division" courses cannot "take something for granted" (such as the students' familiarity with the rigorously taught contents of ETS 141 and 241) and must instead start all over again, these cease to be "upper-division" courses at all and become instead remedial lower-division classes (which again means that the College curriculum becomes a consuming rather than a producing site of knowledge practices). The College/Department cannot have it both ways: either we are serious about teaching boundary knowledges at this university and educating critique-al world citizens or we should stop pretending that Syracuse is anything other than an institution set up to teach useful and practical skills such as spelling and grammar to students, with courses such as "Living Writers" thrown in to give them an encounter with "celebrities" while they are in College—so that they can talk about these celebrities at the dinner table with their parents and assure those who have paid the bills that the money spent on them was indeed well-spent. Now they have seen Joyce Carol Oates in person (and perhaps even shaken her hand)!

In courses like "Living Writers," the Creative Writing Program is simply expanding the space of aesthetics—that escape door of "experience" for accumulating the daily contradictions of capitalism. The role of fictions and poems in the post-al moment has become one of "creating" singular, sensuous, local spaces for the singular individuality of travelling (transnational) capital. In the name of "imagination," "vision," "intuition," these texts have placed ruthless entrepreneurial individualism beyond the reach of critique and any questioning in public discourses. In the ludic academy, next to the football team, the "creative writing" program is the most cherished part of the university. Because creative writers deploy a commonsensical language and rely on the simple "truths" of capitalist ideology, the central administration whose members are unable to even "read" the texts of its radical pedagogues and theorists, now deploy creative writers to wipe out from the academic scene any conceptual discourse that might awaken students to the incoherence of their lives. The (post)structuralist academic cliques have helped this process by openly using poems and fictions as models of intelligibility for theoretico-political practices: thus the defense of "rhetoric" in Paul de Man and his disciples. There is an unholy alliance now between the athletic department, the "creative" writing program, (post)structuralist academics and university administrators to squash any radical discourse from the scene of the university. Most of the "creative writing" programs today have become the bastions of U.S. post-al comprador ideologies. Even suppposedly "left-ish" editors of "creative writing" sections of contemporary journals are now participating in a quite reactionary recycling of the ideology of individualism and have become some of the greatest sales men of "experience." For example, Fred Pfeil ("creative writing" editor of the Minnesota Review) opens one of his recent texts by offering his credentials for writing about"women" in the following way: "I am a white male, a native of the United States, and, as member of the professional-managerial class, a relatively privileged one at that, however, much of my life has been marked by a youth spent largely with women and within working-class culture" ("No Basta Teorizar: In-Difference to Solidarity in Contemporary Fiction, Theory, and Practice"; in Scattered Hegemonies, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, U of Minnesota Press, 1994, 197). Pfeil is, in other words, saying: I write, because I have the "experience." I write NOT because I have the theoretical knowledge of the historical social totality of capitalism that enables me to "understand" ("understanding," in this context, is almost a form of "rape") the world-historical situation of women, but because I FEEL their circumstances.... In this New Age non sense being circulated by such editors and by "creative writing" programs, the world-historical situation of workers is being twisted and mystified in front of our eyes under the alibi of producing fictions and poems.