On This Campus: At the Heart of the Pedagogy of Congeniality Lies Institutional Terrorism

An Open Letter to Students in the Humanities at Syracuse University

Donald Morton

Revision History
• Fall/Winter 1995-6	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 1 (pp. 12-14).
• August 30, 2003	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original.

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(Department of English)

A week or so ago, a small group of students stopped by my office to discuss my course, ENG 641 Critical Theory/Critical Pedagogy, scheduled for Spring 1996. The first question they asked me (and we never quite managed to go beyond the first question and its associated questions) was why are people spreading horror stories about me. “Here we are," one of them said, “very interested in your course and eager to take it, but we are 'warned' against taking it and told frightening narratives about you." He then offered a detailed narrative of these narratives.

I am, of course, aware that there are always “narratives"—especially about oppositional intellectuals and pedagogues and all those who do not go along simply to get along. But I had thought that they were part of “critique”; that is, I have always thought that they are just a regular part of the ongoing general contestation of ideas that is always present in intellectual life. Those who are opposed to my mode of teaching have every right to discuss it and to critique it, as in fact I myself critique practices which I find non-productive and retrograde. This is what intellectual life is about, that is, what universities are for: the production of knowledges, not by synthetic “consent," but out of an ongoing, energetic critique.

But what I heard from these students was not critique. Far from it: it was an ensemble of stories deployed by anti-intellectuals to suppress critique and erase critique-al pedagogy from the scene of contestation in this department (English), this college (Arts and Sciences) and this university (Syracuse). According to these stories (circulated by those whose classes are marked by the absence of any rigorous thought), I punish students for their lack of conformity with my ideas. That is to say, in these narratives, the mere fact that I do put forth “ideas” is seen in the intellectual blankness of the dominant courses, as an act of coercion! In these narratives even to present students with ideas is now coercion! The current reign of “experience," “pleasure," and “anecdote” as the basis of teaching has now become a reign of terror in which any pedagogy that takes “ideas” seriously is said to be a “violent” form of pedagogy.

But this is by no means the end of the “story." The fact that I offer a historical materialist theory of race and racism, of sexuality and gender, of desire and need is fabulated [sic.] in these narratives as my “disregard” for those issues. All I know, according to these narratives, is “class," all I do is “class," all I accept is “class"! Well, there is a class theory of gender, there is a class theory of race,... and there is a class theory of desire and sexuality—and a very strong one, as I demonstrated in my essay, “Birth of the Cyberqueer," PMLA, 110 (1995): 369-81. The narratives that demonize me are silent on why it is that a ludic theory of sexuality (stressing desire and pleasure) is to be regarded as “thinking sex” while a historical materialist theory of sexuality (stressing need) is “unthinking sex." Is it because what I say is really “unthinking sex” or because it is so offensive to the managerial class and so questioning of their economic interests? What is "thinking sex” anyway? Offering anecdotes about one's own desires, pleasures, and sexual experiences? Discussing narratives of pleasure that are recorded in bourgeois texts of the nineteenth century? And what is “thinking race"? Re-telling the race tales that circulate in the (newly formed) second canon? Narratives about me and my practices are invented not as sustained critiques of my practices, but as violent suppressions of all and any theory that asks bourgeois academics to face their own complicity with the regime of wage labor and capital, those very academics who “talk” politics in their classes and “apply” postmodernism to political activism, who mystify the political economy of labor by glib talk about trade unionism and social democracy, who never get enough of “talking” about the need to revise the “canon” (now in 1995?), who still think (white) Women's Studies represents a radical site on the “border” of freedom for oppressed women around the world, who still seem to think (in 1995) that deconstructing theology is the limit-text of knowledge.

Like all stories of ideology aimed at twisting reality without subjecting their own claims to truth to a sustained critique by objective historical practices, the “truth” of these stories is obtained by suppressing the “other” truth"—the truth of my actual practices. These stories are fabricated and circulated to reinforce the institutional power of those who for a long time have held onto power by networking and who see oppositional thinking and practices as a threat—the threat of demystification, the threat that oppositional knowledges will teach their students to have a “second” thought, to ask a “second” question. The force of these stories comes not from their truth, but from the sheer institutional power of those who invent them. Their inventions are in fact quite necessary for them: “re-invention” is their desperate strategy of “self-fashioning” at a historical moment like the present when the politics of their subjectivities is being put into question. This is another way of saying that these stories are believable when (and only when) bourgeois queer theorists and bourgeois feminists take their own free-floating notions of “experience," “gender," the “application” of what is simply an “attitude," a “taste” for “tropes” and assume—without rigorous arguments—that all this somehow constitutes a “theory." They are believable when (and only when), for example, liberal anti-racists and ludic postcolonialists approach “race” as a matter of prejudice or simple cultural politics. In other words, bourgeois academics who fetishize gender, race,... without ever being willing to contest these issues in public, in print—have been able to form a fortress of “self-evident” truth in the light of which my practices are found to be “outrageous." Since because of the violence of their institutional power they have been “successful” in representing critique as “uncongeniality” and “uncollegiality," they have managed to obscure the fact that from “another” perspective their practices are not simply outrageous but oppressive and complicit with capitalism. They have managed to obscure the facts because they have a monopoly over discourses in this and other humanities departments partly because of their numerical “superiority." But their power is not simply in numbers: they hold—these supposed “critics” of institutions—the power of institutional positions they have assiduously sought—department chairships, directorships of programs, key advising positions for both undergraduate and graduate students, special teaching professorships, ... In the light of their agenda, what I do is unacceptable, since it doesn't enhance their institutional power but is critique-al of it. Having suppressed critique, they are able—through the narratives about my practices—to teach certain lessons to young students.

The most ominous lesson of this pedagogy of terror—that wraps itself up as the pedagogy of “congeniality” and “nurturing," “caring" and “friendliness," and providing a “safe” classroom space in which anecdotes of experience can be told and told again without any critique (since critique=danger)—is that if they take classes/work on intellectual projects with me, they will later find it “difficult” if not impossible to work with the professors who do not “approve” of my pedagogical practices and the kinds of knowledges disseminated in my classes. In warning students away from my classes, these prosecutors of radical knowledges who represent themselves as “congenial” and “supportive mentors” to students actually set limits on those same students's intellectual practices and (to use their own favorite word) “choices." “Choice," it seems, should be enhanced only when the students choose the brand of pedagogy preferred by these “mentors” of congeniality who “mentor” students not into the rigors of knowledge but into the codes that teach them merely “how to get along in the institution," “how to get along by going along,"...

Against all the proclaimed liberal intellectual ideals of the bourgeois academy, the warning narratives demonstrate with rigid clarity that the University (the site of “liberal” pedagogy) is, after all, not really supposed to be a place of engagement with “different” ("diverse") ideas and modes of intelligibility so that these encounters with difference become the basis for making informed choices. Instead the “advice” of these anti-intellectual faculty “advisors” suggests that the University should be the space where students (and faculty alike) work hard to avoid encountering all ideas except those with which they already “agree." Thus, those who constantly mouth slogans about the urgency of promoting “diversity” and a “liberal” and “multi-cultural” education at the very same time systematically discourage students from encountering different ideas. At the heart of liberal pedagogy, as these practices clearly indicate, lies institutional terrorism and intimidation masked as “caring."

Since the practice of critique is suppressed, “real teaching” is—according to these teachers—"congenial” (not critique-al) and “supportive," in the sense that it confirms students in the set of assumptions with which they come to class feeling most “comfortable," while my teaching is “disrespectful” of these “assumptions” and is therefore “upsetting” to students. Of course teaching through critique (my practice) aims at interrogating all assumptions, including the assumptions of critique-al pedagogy, at taking nothing as “self-evident” in the interest of a teaching that produces citizens capable of informed choices. The practice of challenging all assumptions is meant to produce neither a smug self-assurance nor a skepticism about all truth, but at eliciting sustained explanations and arguments in defense of the “truth” that students have carefully thought through. The narratives I heard from this small group of students are just a further extension of the ongoing harassment of oppositional intellectuals by reactionary faculty members who use the power of institutions to support their unargued “truths," who refuse to engage in public debate about pedagogical and curricular issues, and who use the private space of rumor, innuendo and gossip to steer students away from professors with whom they “disagree” (meaning basically whom they do not “like").

The contradictions between what the liberal university and its pedagogy of congeniality formally professes and what in actuality it does is clear in all the daily practices at Syracuse University. But, to be precise, let me offer a specific example. While I was writing this text about a small group of students who came to my office to talk to me about the way I am treated by my colleagures [sic.] and by university administrators and to tell me the horror stories spread about me, Professor Laurence Thomas, a very popular teacher in the Philosophy Department, filed a complaint against the University arguing that the University has shown its racism by discriminating against him as an African-American. Professor Thomas explains (Syracuse Herald-Journal, 11/16/1995, A-13) that he was the top candidate from the College of Arts and Sciences for the Meredith Teaching Professorship. At one level, Professor Laurence is arguing what I am arguing here: that while the University through its liberal policies professes “diversity," in actuality it systematically opposes “diversity” (in his case, “racial diversity"). Of course, my practices and those of Professor Thomas are radically at variance and he would be the last person who would want to ally himself with me on any political or intellectual practice. But this is not about local differences: this is about the intellectual and professional integrity of the workplace—something that, as far as I understand it—is as much concerned in Professor Thomas's case as in mine. There are, as I implied, radical differences of practice between Professor Thomas and myself: I believe the function of pedagogy is social change as a collective practice, while—it is my understanding—Professor Thomas regards teaching/learning to be a form of individual self-improvement and individual self-enlightenment. Having stated one of our broad pedagogical differences, however, I would like to declare my solidarity with Professor Thomas against institutional racism and to protest the University's violent disregard in failing to recognize his achievements as a teacher with a Meredith Professorship.

Contrary to how it may seem, Professor Thomas's case is not an exception but in fact the rule at Syracuse University. Syracuse University is run by a network of corporate men and women whose only concern is preserving their hold on power in all spheres of University life and operations. They thus discourage scholarship and pedagogy which is transgressive in the sense that it goes beyond the bromides that the University puts forth as its formal pedagogical goals in all its public relations literature. Professor Thomas's case is related to other University practices: for example, to the University's insistence in foregrounding the Creative Writing Program as the core of the literary humanities at Syracuse University at the expense of critical thinking. Professor Thomas is exactly right when he points out that while the University claims a commitment to “diversity," it does not in fact either welcome or reward innovative, oppositional pedagogical and curricular practices that diverge from the corporate norm. He is furthermore quite right in his observation (A-13) that while the University claims to be supporting intellectual innovation and diversity in its formal self-representations, it is actually using its financial resources in the most intellectually, academically, socially, politically, ... retrograde ways—for actually little more than training students in “basic skills” so that they will fit into the preordained job-slots in corporate America, on the one hand, and to entertain and distract those same students, their parents, alumni, friends of the University,..., on the other hand, with everything from Dome events to the narratives of pleasure and nostalgia provided by “creative writing."

What is at stake in these issues, it should be clear by now, goes beyond “me” and all things “personal”: the Department of English is presently at a historical crisis that serves as an allegory of the political climate of higher education in the 1990's. Since the 1989/90 academic year, as a recent report indicates, the Department of English has lost 15 1/2 faculty lines—a devastating number, by any measure, and out of all proportion to what any department should have been expected to contribute in the general university “downsizing." What's more, these losses have been concentrated in those intellectual workers who were able to provide theoretical and conceptual knowledges to provide education for students living in today's increasingly complex world. This has left the Department largely in the hands of a group of anti-intellectual conservatives who would like to see all remnants of theoretical and conceptual education erased completely from the scene. They therefore do everything possible by means of “close networking” (reinforcing each other's institutional power, not critiquing ideas, with which they are not concerned) to discredit teachers whose courses aim to provide oppositional knowledges and sustained inquiry into those contested struggle concepts which shape contemporary life. Getting rid of critique-al and conceptual education, that is, getting rid of those knowledges that have any chance of providing the basis for effective resistance to the oppressive and exploitative status quo, fits the right-wing agenda now dominant in the academy.

As students who have come here to engage knowledges that can make a difference, you cannot remain passive and refuse to “take the heat." You have to face the reactionaries and ask them some tough questions about the politics of “congeniality," about their reading lists, about the anecdotes which they present in classes as “knowledge," about their writing and scholarship. You cannot simply assume a fatalistic post and declare yourself “helpless” in the face of the enormity of the institutional power of these retrograde groups who represent themselves as “progressive." SILENCE ACTUALLY DOES MEAN DEATH! So Break the Silence, Take a Stand, Put an End to the Reign of Mediocrity, Terror, and Intimidation, Break the Silence! You have a responsibility—to democracy and to knowledges that foster critical citizenship in a democracy. You have to take a stand and speak in public—that is your right as a citizen and your responsibility as a knowledge worker. The next time they tell you a narrative in which critique-al intellectuals are demonized, ask those who tell you these stories to prove (argue) it. Refuse to accept anecdotes conveyed in private offices as knowledge, refuse to accept rumors whispered in private chats as convincing argument. Ask them to explain: WHY should bourgeois concepts be given priority over oppositional concepts in this University? Why should knowledge-as-crisis-management be marked as “progressive” “knowledge” without any qualification and oppositional knowledge rejected as “nasty," “mean," and “uncollegial"? Why is suburban “niceness” the norm of intellectual work and not critique-al debate? Why is the “professional” displacing the “intellectual” in the humanities? Why are graduate students being taught how to “re-invent” themselves as professionals rather than how to make their work intellectually rigorous? Why is it that provincial norms have come to set the agenda of the humanities here? How far will this intellectual isolationism be allowed to go? There is a world outside the local canon of networking at Syracuse, a world beyond that circle of friends who have monopolized power here, a world of ideas and not simply anecdotes, a world of serious scholarship and not stories. Ask them to engage that larger world conceptually and not by rumor and innuendo.

Stand up for critique-al knowledges and do not let narratives of interested power be substituted for rigorous conceptual understandings of world-historical practices! Stand up for democracy and the freedom of inquiry—the most basic premise of free citizenship! Stand up for ideas that have the power to change the world, and with it, the universities that masquerade as places of truth and knowledge but are in fact the last bastions of those who are frightened by truth! Take the heat! Remake the universities not by personal “re-invention” but by public and collective historical critique!