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The two texts issued by the Vice-President for Academic Affairs (on May 7 and May 16, 1996) open up a space to examine the assumptions that lie behind the dominant practices which she articulates in specific terms. These practices are marked by her breach of the democratic principle of self-governance, which is the foundation of governance in the United States and its universities. The Vice-President has arbitrarily disregarded the overwhelming vote of faculty (25-14) for a new chair and taken control of the Department of English, putting it in receivership. This is an administrative colonization of a department which is the main site of research and teaching in the humanities. I will discuss at length later why the main humanities department is the target of this violence. It is a violence, which, as Helen Elam states, has been turned the English Department into an occupied zone: “occupied precisely by the forces that are against change and against the improvements that change would bring” (June 7, 1996 letter to President Hitchcock, 2).
The Vice-President's texts and practices reveal a partisanship—supporting the oligarchy in the English Department—that is quite out of place for an administrator who is supposed to act impartially and whose function is to ensure that the highest quality of teaching and research are being done in a university supported by public funds. Her texts also ground her practices in a theory of knowledge and pedagogy that I will unpack in the following pages. It is a theory and pedagogy rooted in an out-of-date, nineteenth century positivistic understanding of knowledge and a corporate view of governance. This theory of knowledge and pedagogy substitute a mechanistic notion of education for the rigorous intellectual work of pedagogy and scholarship; rehearse an anti-intellectual populism that confuses the uses of technology with scholarly and scientific research, and advocate the training of “technicians of practical knowledge” in place of critique-al citizens. Her texts valorize the “how” (the mechanics) of education — in total lack of awareness of contemporary views of knowledge as contestations and interrogations—by marginalizing the “why” of knowledge production.
These assumptions not only have had immediate and grave negative consequences for the Department of English at SUNY-Albany but also have much larger implications for the way the scientific, scholarly and pedagogical priorities of public universities in general—and the University at Albany in particular — are determined at the highest level of administration. The Vice-President, it should be kept in mind, is the highest-ranking officer in charge of the academic and intellectual affairs of the University. To engage her “official” texts (addressed to the "Voting Faculty, Department of English") is thus to engage in public the official philosophy of teaching and scholarship at the University determining the academic policies under her supervision.
I, therefore, read the Vice-President's texts “symptomatically." My goal is to bring their structure of assumptions (their “problematic") to the surface by marking their un-saids, their self-evidence, their gaps and slippages and thus the overriding “first principles” that they take “for granted." In short, I read the Vice-President's texts in their global context because an idea, a concept, a trope does not exist by itself—it derives its significance from the problematic in which it is located. My reading is aimed at foregrounding this problematic since only after making it publicly visible, can one see how this problematic privileges a managerist, anti-intellectual and counter-critique-al theory of education which is modeled after transnational corporate priorities. It is a model that is antagonistic to the role of a (public) university in a free society — an institution whose main mission is to educate critique-al citizens and critique-al researchers for an open and democratic society.