Part TWO — § 3

The Vice-President's texts of May 7 and May 16 clearly demonstrate that she is not only out of touch with the contemporary theories and practices of knowledge and pedagogy as spaces of critique, contestations and conflicts but is also largely unaware of the philosophical and pedagogical frames of the Ph.D. in English in her own university — a program on whose future she is sitting in judgment.

The new graduate program in English at SUNY-Albany is designed to counter the dominant idea of knowledge as commodity: a pre-existing body of information, methodologies and practices “exchanged” (under contracted terms) to “consumers." In more concrete terms, the philosophical articulation of the new Ph.D. in English at Albany does not revolve around pre-established and ready-made commodities called “American Literature," or "writing," or “theory," or the “women's novels” but rather engages the “making of knowledge” and “the questions that arise from the movement between theory and practice” ("Proposal for a Ph.D. in English” 12). In other words, the Ph.D. in English is not simply about teaching "writing” or “American literature” or “feminism," as if these bodies of knowledge are pre-given and self-evident.

In short, the new Ph.D. has been articulated to “produce” knowledge — to lay open the processes, logics, political conditions, economic terms, intellectual frames within which something be-comes (that is, acquires, through historical and institutional conditions as well as knowledge processes, the unstable identity of) “literature." Therefore, for the Vice-President to say with executive assurance, as she does in her text of May 7, that “An academic department...is first and foremost, an organizational unit for delivering an academic program” (1) is to show considerable lack of awareness about contemporary scholarship on this issue and an absence of information on what is the English Ph.D. This is a bureaucratic view of education that completely ignores the philosophical and theoretical problems in theories of knowledge and pedagogy. The Vice-President also demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about why what the Group calls “conflicts” — in order to suppress them—are, in fact, part of the very pedagogical and scholarly process that the Ph.D. has been set up to develop. The Ph.D. in English is not a “delivery” system; it does not “deliver” “American Literature” to consumer-students. Instead, the Ph.D. is an ensemble of contesting discourses for unpacking how knowledge is made by deploying rigorous critique.

The Vice-President's founding idea that conflict is the negation of the proper functioning of an "organizational unit” called English is rooted in a mechanistic idea of knowledge — one that approaches knowledge ahistorically and with a managerial mentality antithetical to the spirit of free (i.e. conflictual) scholarship. To repeat: conflicts and contestations are built into the Ph.D. program at SUNY-Albany (as they are in all advanced research programs)—they are the condition of possibility of graduate studies. To teach without conflicts is to abdicate the intellectual responsibility of the pedagogue as a researcher into the truth of what is represented as “knowledge” and to act, instead, as a merchant of commodities labeled, “Hawthorne's Novels," “Women's Writing," “African-American Poetry." After all, “African-American” poetry did not become an established part of “suitable” knowledges without a “conflict”—a very unsettling, explosive and terrain-shifting conflict that still “upsets” some people. In the conflicts over knowledges there are no limits. Therefore, no authority can draw a limit line and say: thus far and no more. This conflict is legitimate and that one is not. The limit line of conflict is always drawn—by Church, State, and University Administration—when the self-evidence of the interests of these bodies is put in question by the new knowledges that are emerging from conflicts. When the Church found the knowledges developing out of Galileo's research threatening to the social order that it had naturalized, it drew a limit line to stop the “conflicts” that it feared would tear apart the social fabric. It was, of course, not the social, moral or ethical fabric of society that was falling apart but rather the economic interests of the ruling group protected by the church. There are no unproductive conflicts in knowledge production.

For the Vice-President to use the emergence of “conflict” as a reason to consider a proposal for dismantling the English Department and to suspend admissions to its Ph.D. program is to impose limits on free inquiry. “Conflict” is being used here as an ideological alibi. The lines drawn in her texts are the lines necessary to protect the status quo — to block changes in humanities studies at Albany in the name of maintaining emotional tranquillity! The rising conflicts in the English Department, as the public text by Montgomery, Kelsh, Nespeco and Torrant argue, are the very condition of possibility of transformative knowledges and the pedagogies they enable and not their negation. Conflicts over knowledge never end.

However, “conflicts” do reach a point of historical transformation in which the questions that were previously the subject of “conflicts” are superseded by another set of questions owing to new historical, economic, and social conditions as well as to internal processes of knowledge production. Today there is very little “conflict” over “postmodernism” or “hypertextuality." The reason is that “postmodernism” and “hypertextuality” are superseded by other conflicts based on new concepts and analytical categories in history, such as transnationalism, globalization and the class politics of “virtuality." This does not mean that today there are no conflicts over “postmodernism” or “hypertext” and their limits, but rather these are no longer determining conflicts. This is what makes a forward-looking advanced research university different from other sites of teaching: what are the conflicts that mark it? Are “postmodernism," “hypertext," the “canon," or “women's writing” still boundary issues? No administrator can squash the conflicts by an edict ("you cannot go beyond this line because it is bad for the university") without undermining the very idea of the university itself: a site of critique, conflict and contestations over truth and justice.

The Vice-President's idea of a university department as an “organizational unit” that “delivers” commodities is a bureaucratic, positivistic and mechanistic one that looks back to nineteenth century ideas about knowledge and education. It is an old technicist view that is now represented as a new idea simply by wrapping it in recent cyber-technologies. This view of education confuses the uses of technology with scholarship and research (the basis of pedagogy for life-long critical learning). It is a thinly disguised anti-humanities theory of education that finally substitutes, as Sandi E. Cooper and Dean Savage have argued, vocational training for citizens for critique-al citizenship ("CUNY, the Vocational University," The New York Times, April 8, 1996, A-15). It valorizes “technicians” of such “applied knowledges” as “writing studies” (a useful, marketable commodity) and places on the periphery the pedagogy, for example, of the “purloined letter” (Muller, The Purloined Poe) — which is not an easily salable commodity since it is an “abstract” discourse on loss and absence, but it is also an integral part of learning how to “read” the politics of the un-said and the un-said politics of the resistance to conflicts over knowing. A mechanistic view of knowledge/pedagogy marginalizes, in short, the pedagogy of conflicts—which is an enactment of democracy itself as never-ending open discourses and conflicts over public priorities. Without conflicts there is no democracy.

The Vice-President's notion of avoiding the “conflict” is an attempt to manufacture consensus. However, it is incoherent. If indeed “conflict” (which she reduces to “intellectual differences...and their attendant emotions," May 16, 1-2) is something to be avoided and if avoiding conflict can be the basis for partitioning the English Department (or a research and teaching unit, for that matter), then she implicitly at least accepts that there is no unified voice in the Department. In the absence of such a unified voice, no one can speak for the others. All voices have to be heard. How then does she know that there is “conflict” when she refuses to have any communication with all but a select few members of the Department who un-conflictually say there is a conflict? In other words, if she thinks there is “conflict," it is because “someone” or a Group has claimed that there is “conflict” — while all other views are silenced. “Someone” or the Group — who count among themselves those “select few” with access to the Vice-President — has represented as “conflict” any resistance to its hegemonic power. “Conflict," in her text, is a code word for de-stabilizing the interests of the oligarchy in the English Department.

When it serves the purposes of the administration, conflict is marked as harmful, but when it comes to paying attention to all voices, then conflict is ignored. A few unconflicted voices, united by their privileges, are allowed to speak for the many, with whom they see themselves in conflict. However, in a conflict situation, no one group (especially a hegemonic one, such as the Group) should be allowed to represent the “real," and the “real” that is constructed should be clearly marked as “conflictual” and inclusive — that is all “sides” of the conflict should be able to articulate their positions. The Vice-President has a very non-conflictual view of what she, herself, regards to be a highly conflictual situation. This is a simplistic view that is not conducive to a sophisticated understanding of a layered situation. It has led not to sound, inclusive public policy but to orthodoxy and partisanship.

According to the research program and planned curriculum for the Ph.D. in English at SUNY-Albany — as approved by the New York State Department of Education — there is no such thing as a ready-made commodity called “writing," “teaching," “criticism” in the Ph.D. program. “Writing," for example, is not self-identical and pre-given. It is a contested knowledge practice to be made — its mode of production, in other words, and not its "essence” is what makes “writing” a subject of the Ph.D. program in English. In positing the English Department as a “framework for delivering” a program, the Vice-President's texts show their theoretical and philosophical naiveté and their institutional innocence.