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What is valorized in the Vice-President's anti-intellectual agenda is, as I have argued, knowledge as commodity; knowledge as fixed identity. The tropes throughout her texts foreground this view of knowledge. Knowledge, according to the Vice-President, is a "transaction” (May 7, 1) that, like any business deal, should be settled in a friendly “atmosphere” free from conflicts. “Atmosphere”—a term deployed throughout both her texts—is the single most important feature of education for her since to her what matters is not “knowledge” that is contested in pedagogy but “educational experience” (May 16, 1). Education for the Vice President, in other words, is not a rigorous production of knowledge (that would involve conflicts) but the provision of “emotional” support in a friendly “atmosphere." This is, of course, a repetition of the very familiar and populist “pedagogy of congeniality” — a displacing of the classroom of knowledge by a session of “nurturing” experience. However, as in all versions of the “pedagogy of congeniality," the “care," “nurturing," and “trust” which are formally advocated are violently negated in the actual practices of the Vice-President. Her “pedagogy of congeniality” is a rhetorical cover for the extreme force that she has exercised in controlling the administrative apparatus of the English Department by overthrowing the democratically elected chair and taking over the Department through a surrogate administrator she has appointed from another department. In other words, the pedagogy of congeniality is only a “nurturing” of “emotions” and provision of a friendly “atmosphere” for those who support the dominant structure of power in the University.
Chair-Elect Lana Cable, in her letter of 17 May 1996 to the
Vice-President (and her 21 May Memo to the Department on
“Department Receivership"), offers a sustained but subtle
discourse analyzing the Vice-President's pedagogical and
administrative violence toward the English Department. Before citing
her analysis, however, it is necessary to again remind ourselves of
the order of events: Lana Cable, Chair-Elect of English, was displaced
by the Vice-President, after what Cable describes as her efforts to
“counter an attack mounted in secret by a group of people who
refused to accept the vote of an overwhelming majority. This was an
attack on the integrity of the very department in which I had a clear,
democratically achieved, mandate to lead toward unity” (2). In
her text, Chair-Elect Cable makes reference to the Vice President's
choice of the term “wounds” to characterize the conflicts
that the Vice-President considered responsible for the current
“crisis." To the Vice-President's terminology, Cable responds:
Have you considered the depth or effects of the new wound that you
are creating by your decision now to sidestep this already wounded
department's own compelling democratic mandate? Have you
considered how long it might take to heal a wound to this
department's faith in due process? Have you looked into whether
departments previously placed in receivership had ever first
assumed responsibility for their internal conflicts by decisively
forwarding a candidate who was prepared to make changes needed to
reestablish unity? To prohibit such a vote from achieving its
potential is to create a very deep wound. Have you thought about
the wound that administrative disregard for due process cuts in
the minds of other faculty, and in the precedent-conscious
expectations of other departments in this university, departments
that may be struggling with minority factions of their own? Have
you reflected on the wound that this denial of due process might
make in the faith of our students, who regard democratic
governance procedures as integral to the free search for knowledge
and truth? Have you considered how any of these wounds to due
process might reflect on the democratic mission of a university
that is supported by public funds? Have you calculated the cost of
this wound to departmental morale, to institutional loyalty, to
the individual sense of commitment by idealistic and generous
people?
The wounds in this unfolding scenario are indeed many and deep
(2).
The Vice-President's pedagogy is not only unself-reflexive it is also behind the times. From such a position — which is quite unaware of the complexities, for example, of the poststructuralist challenge to dominant theories of knowledge and their implications for pedagogy and is uninformed even about the Ph.D. in English at the university of which she is the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs—she regards the “medium” of knowledge to be simply a “means” for the transmission of content. Such a mechanistic view of education, as many contemporary theorists have argued, is founded upon the notion of education as the transmission of “skills” and is a passivist pedagogy.
My goal, as I have stated before, is a “symptomatic reading” of the Vice-President's texts. I think only such a reading can foreground the “problematics” of her texts. This “problematics” (the field of informing concepts) not only grounds and justifies her violation of the basic principle of democratic self-governance in a scholarly community but, equally important, provides the basis of her “plans” for the future of the English Department.
One of the telling features of her texts, which outline her “plan," is their authoritarianism: their assumption of omniscience and their refusal to put in public the source of knowledge according to which they “define” the “problem” and the reasons behind their conclusions. Her texts never say what is the basis of the views they advocate, nor offer any “arguments” to support the opinions they articulate, the conclusions they reach and the decisions they make — which affect many many citizens and the institution as a whole. The un-said in these texts is: it is the case because I say so. Repeatedly, this is the logic of a number of statements made in the Vice-President's texts:
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| -- What are the sources of such an “awareness"? Is this “awareness” the outcome of an “intuition” or does it have “empirical” validity? What are the “facts” here?. | ||
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| -- On the basis of what “facts” and by means of what "arguments," and how is this “conviction” tested against the empirical situation and the contesting “convictions"? | ||
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| -- Who are these people? Are they members of the faculty in English? Why do only these people have "access” to the Vice-President? The majority of the faculty, who have no access to the Vice-President, who are unable to “tell” her, are then judged by what these few (who do have access to her) say about the Department? How truthful are the reports of these persons with access? How do we know? Why such secrecy? Why is the proposal for a Writing Studies Department prepared and submitted in secrecy? Why does the Vice-President refuse to reveal her sources? This is a public university and private, authoritarian control of information is against what it stands for. Why such secrecy? Secrecy only protects the interests of the privileged (special interest) groups and not the public. | ||
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| -- which specific cases? What is the basis for such evaluation? | ||
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| -- Why and in which specific cases? Are these real cases or invented to prove a (non)point? | ||
This is one place, among many, in which the politics of pedagogy-as-story becomes clear. Since the Vice President (like the authors of Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy) evidently believes that all versions of truth are simply “stories," it does not seem to matter whether there is any “truth” (or even a simple empirical verifiability) to these “stories." If “stories” are all equal, then the only criterion for “preferring” one to another is a “pragmatic” one. The criterion, then, is not “objectivity," but whether they relate us to what Rorty calls a “community” — which is his word for what in actuality is a social “network” of persons who share the same ("economic” and “power") interests. The resistance to the test of “objectivity” has in fact become one of the sites of contestation in the Department of English at SUNY-Albany. The insistence on objective criteria as the basis of practices (such as funding of graduate students) has been one of the issues raised by those who are seeking changes in the existing practices.
The Vice President's “stories” and her refusal to put the bases of her knowledge into the public space in a public university is part of a larger pattern of mystification, secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvers by persons in power at SUNY-Albany. To repeat what Professors Luz Del Alba Acevedo and Emilio Pantojas have testified in a public hearing to the New York State Senate: there is an “influential clique of faculty and administrators in this campus that run academic units as their private estates and manage institutional accounts as extensions of their checkbooks” (Testimony of Professors Luz Del Alba Acevedo and Emilio Pantojas-Garcia to the New York State Senate Democratic Task Force on the Future of Higher Education in New York State Public Hearing, February 20, 1996, 3)
An example of this pattern of secret, behind-the-scenes maneuvers is
provided by the previous Full-Term Chair, Professor Warren Ginsberg,
and the Chair-Elect, Professor Lana Cable, in their Memo of May 1,
1996 to the Vice-President:
as sitting Chair, Professor Johnson received a proposal that would
lead to the disintegration of the English Department. Instead of
referring it immediately to the Department for discussion, she
kept it secret. She has thereby directly violated her obligations
and duties as Chair to represent the interests of the
Department. This action alone makes it impossible for her to
remain as Chair (1).
Furthermore, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences is, himself,
involved in disturbing conflicts of interest in the matter of the
English Ph.D. and the secret proposal to remove it from the Department
of English. As the previous Full-Term Chair and the Chair Elect point
out:
That Dean Knoblauch received this 'Memorandum of Intent [to
Establish a Department of Writing Studies'] and did not
immediately recuse himself is unethical and deplorable. The Dean
is not a disinterested party; his wife is a signatory of the
'Memorandum'; moreover, were he to cease being Dean, he would not
return to his current tenure home, which is the English
Department, but would clearly become a member of the Department
the “Memorandum” proposes to create. It is an
intolerable conflict of interest for the Dean to pass judgment on
a proposal that would create a new department for himself at the
expense of the old (2).
The scandal of a Group taking into its own hands the reshaping of the
institution in secrecy and in violation of various established
practices could not be neglected even by the conservative Consultants
hired by the university. In their recommendations to the President,
the Consultants write both that
The administration should insist that departmental business be
conducted according to approved and public procedures” and
that “So long as the Dean of Arts and Sciences is a member
of the Department of English, he should continue to recuse himself
from any decision-making process concerning the organizational
framework of that department or its successors (Report
to the President, 9).
Whenever the Vice-President runs out of arguments, she refers to letters she has received from graduate students and faculty. How reliable are letters whose writers are unwilling to take a public stance and make their texts available to all so that they can be read publicly? Why does the Vice-President not make public all the texts to which she refers? If she is not willing to do so, then she should stop using them as evidence — evidence means publicly available documents and statements whose claims can be verified. The evidence for the “crisis," which the Vice-President regards to be “reality," does not exist in public for public scrutiny — we are instead required to take her word for it — to take her word for it when she, herself, does not “trust” the faculty enough to make these texts available.
Public policy should be set by public debate and argument in the agora and not in secrecy through behind-closed doors talks. In fact, one of the main strategies of power used by the Group has long been a resistance to public openness, to the verification of claims and to the testing of what is said against what historically exists (the “objectivity” of practices) in discussing issues and establishing and implementing public institutional policies (for instance, the distribution of funds to graduate students or travel grants to faculty; the assignment of courses; the determination of committee memberships, and the evaluation of promotion and tenure cases).
The oligarchical Group has for years resisted keeping open and representative public records of discussions of public issues and the setting of policies. It has, in short, attempted not to leave a paper trail and to evade public accountability. Through various maneuvers, it has managed either not to produce “minutes" of various Departmental committees that it dominates or, when it has been required to do so, has delayed publishing them, obstructed their dissemination or in other ways evaded making deliberations public and accessible. For instance, last year in the Graduate Advisory Committee—a central committee long dominated by members of the Group and determining much of the practices in the Department—a departmental staff member took notes at each meeting (which were highly contested sessions). However, these “minutes” were suppressed by the Director of Graduate Studies who not only refused to make them public but even denied access to the notes to other committee members with whom he disagreed.
To take another example, the “minutes” of “Departmental Meetings” themselves are limited to primarily innocuous narratives and “official” statements that provide only the briefest mention of any oppositional views or debates or omits these altogether. These “minutes” manufacture a “consensus” that does not exist in the Department, and it is this fabricated “consensus” that the Group represents to the University Administration as the views of the Department. It is a peculiarity of this “procedure," for example, that the “minutes” of the Departmental meetings are never submitted for the approval of the faculty in the following meeting. As a result, I have, in a number of public texts, called for changing the practice of taking “minutes” to make them open and representative. Specifically I have argued for recording contesting views so that the history of debates, alternatives to existing practices and arguments for change are not suppressed but become part of the public institutional archives.
One of the “advantages” of this lack of complete—or at the very least representative — public record-keeping has been the way it has supported “deniability” for the oligarchical Group. In other words, the inadequacy of public records has allowed the ruling Group to “deny” manipulating existing procedures and to evade public accountability for its actions—actions that have been institutionalized through the various committees and administrative positions that it has dominated year after year. Anytime questions are raised about the Group's practices, the Group re-cycles the “argument” that such questions are based on mis-interpretations of what has been said/done. Since there is no objective record of what has been said, all interpretations—except the one supporting the Group's views — are said to be misinterpretations. This, of course, allows not only for “deniability” by those in power but also endless opportunities for “rewriting” history since there is almost no record of what has been said; only sparse accounts of what course of action has been actually recommended, and a near silence about the objections raised.
Thus it was especially telling when the “Governance Cluster” (a special task force which was set up to follow the Consultants' advise for reviewing and changing the existing "by-laws” and structure of governance of the Department), debated “taping” its proceedings in order to have an “objective record” to refer to in matters of dispute. Those working for reform argued that taping would provide a reliable means of knowing what is “said," and an objective basis for determining the relation among what has been “said," how it is being “interpreted” and what has been “done." However, members of the Group immediately objected on the “grounds” that there is no such thing as “objective” truth: all that is available to us are personal takes on what is said — (mis)interpretations. Since all these (mis)interpretations are “stories”, they are all equally (in)valid. In other words, no “taping” because such a practice will be a “positivistic” fallacy (as Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy has argued), but no “interpretation” either because interpretation is, in fact, always a mis-interpretation, and, like the idea of “objectivity," it is a “story." All interpretations are equally misinterpretations. This relativism is then used to justify the refusal of pubic [sic.] accountability: accounting, in an objective manner, for how what is said relates to what is “done” and how these serve or do not serve the public interest. The “everything is a story” theory of truth, advocated, for example, in Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, turns out to be one of the strategies for holding on to power and never having to account for one's practices.
The notion that “objective” truth is part of the historicity of social practices and democratic contestations over setting public priorities and protecting the public from private interests, as well as the notion that “interpretations” are part of these contestations are all marginalized as (Marxist) positivism. Beyond the ludic and simplistic idea of “everything is a story," there is, of course, a historical and objective truth to practices. Thus the response to an “interpretation” of objective truth, I would argue, is not the suppression of interpretations as misinterpretations, but rather the need for counter-interpretations. The social sphere is the space of interpretations and counter-interpretations: the conflict over interpretations is an integral part of democracy.
These strategies of exclusion, closure, the suppression of debate and an opportunistic relativism continue to pervade the practices of the Group and its efforts to maintain power. For example, the Graduate Cluster (another “open” task force set up following the Consultant's Report to re-examine the graduate program) continues to be dominated by the Group and its allies, who have used these strategies to suppress the ideas and discourses of others—particularly of theorists. The problem here has become especially severe as I describe in my letter of 27 March 1997 to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs:
In order to exclude faculty whose views are counter to the hegemonic practices of the “partitionists," the (open) graduate “cluster” has been dissolved into the existing (closed) “Graduate Advisory Committee," and its main tasks (e.g. re-examining the curriculum) are subjected to the “regulations” and restrictions of that Committee. In other words, what is required to be an “open” cluster and function like other clusters as a place of open discussions and the democratic exchange of ideas on curricular and other issues is turned into a “closed” committee. Moreover the partitionists have tried at length, through various bureaucratic maneuvers, to bar from consideration and suppress proposals and memoranda on important issues submitted to the Committee by non-members and to which they object.
On Tuesday, 18 March, I attempted to participate in the graduate cluster/committee and discuss curricular issues, including a new proposal for “pedagogy” courses (co-authored by Professor Elam and myself). In order to keep me from active participation in such discussions, however, during the meeting, the Director of Graduate Studies and some members of the GAC decided, with the support of Professor Roberts, that all graduate curricular matters should be discussed in the Graduate Advisory Committee and should be voted on exclusively by members of that Committee. Not only was I barred from voting, I was pointedly not given texts concerning proposals for courses that circulated among members of the committee — for the reason that I was not a committee member. Every single time I attempted to speak and offer a critique of the proceedings and practices of the committee, I was interrupted and shouted down. I was repeatedly told that I was "(mis)characterizing," "(mis)interpreting," "(mis) reading." In short, any raising of questions about the practices of the committee was seen as “deviant” ("mischaracterization/interpretation/reading") and as a “disruptive” and “offensive” discourse that was preventing the committee from doing “more important” work.
It is ironic that the injunction against “interpretation” is issued by teachers of literature, who, in their professional and pedagogical practices, are expected to encourage and, in fact, teach the production of multiple interpretations as the sign of intellectual independence, imagination and the rigorous critical engagement with texts. The production of multiple interpretations is constitutive of the humanities: the purpose of encouraging multiplicity is to guarantee that no single dogmatic version is put forth as the “truth” while all other views are rejected as heretic misinterpretations. It is, therefore, telling that the moment an interpretation is counter to the interests of some on the Graduate Advisory Committee it is labeled and dismissed as misinterpretation, mischaracterization, misreading. For a committee to silence a faculty member with whom they disagree under the alibi that her views are misinterpretations is in effect to posit their own views as the unquestionable truth and any difference from this as “Non-Truth” as Misinterpretation. This is censorship in the University. When I asked one member of the committee to substantiate his charge that I had distorted and misrepresented his views, he refused. He had nothing to say....No committee has the right to refuse to accept a proposal for curricular change and return it to its authors demanding that they remove “the first two paragraphs” (which they interpret to be offensive) of the proposal before the committee decides to discuss it. No committee can put down restrictive conditions for the open discussion of ideas—especially innovative ideas that go against the grain of established practices. This is censorship, and it has no place in the university (2, 4).
It is important to again emphasize that public policy should be set by public debate and argument in the agora. Therefore, the assumptions of the Vice-President's texts should be unpacked and made the subject of public debate in and outside the University and should be evaluated in the context of the mission and character of the University at Albany. The University at Albany is one of the four university centers of the State University of New York (SUNY). It is a research university, and the philosophical underpinning of the policies that are set for it should be self-reflexive and complex enough as well as sufficiently aware of the most advanced developments in knowledges to meet the needs of a research university. What, then, are some of the other theoretical and policy assumptions ("first principles") in the Vice-President's texts?
I say “other” because the idea of university as a combination of “organizational units” which “deliver” a “program” to “students” does not operate in ideological isolation from other assumptions. It produces them and is in turn naturalized by them. One of these other assumptions in this managerial theory of education is the notion of “network-ing." Among the (supposed) “reasons” the Vice-President gives for “suspending admissions” to the English Ph.D. program is because “Some of you” (who?) “have also indicated that in the present situation, you cannot responsibly activate your networks to recruit new graduate students” (May 7, 1, 2). The notion that attracting students to a Ph.D. program should take place on the basis of activating “networks” and not on the strength of the scholarship, publications, and innovative pedagogical practices of the faculty and their professional involvement in international associations and conferences in their fields is truly astounding and is an extension of the managerial notion of education as a commodity.
"Networks” and “networking," however, are not simply local strategies but are also tropes of a world-view, a mode of global capitalist practice. It is through “networking” (and not “working") that privileges are accumulated and secured by various already highly privileged groups in society at the expense of those who are excluded from “networks”—“networking” in other words is an apparatus of subversion of the democratic principles of fair play and a level playing field for all. The class politics of “networking," in short, substitutes oligarchic “selectivity” for democratic “collectivity." It is by “networking” that privileges are protected. This is why “networks” become more and more entrenched and, as time goes by, more and more reactionary and anti-progressive. This is why they use their vast resources to block any changes in the system that might endanger their (seemingly) “natural” privileges.
One of the un-saids in the practices of the Group has been the assumption that to not be on the “network” is to be either a hopelessly irrelevant (i.e. an institutionally powerless/useless) person or (equally “hopelessly") an idealistic intellectual who is cut off from the “real” (i.e. the wheeling and dealing behind closed doors). In other words, to resist cynicism (since cynicism is the condition of being in the “network") and actually take ideas and principles seriously (as a scholar, teacher and “citizen") is a mark of one's institutional naivete. “Idealism," like “rigor," is a “dirty word” in the Group's usage — by “idealism," however, they mean a commonsensical anti-pragmatism. In the cynical world of the “network," it is naive to be cut off from the practical (which has come to mean acting in an un-principled way to get what one desires). It has become a sign of “savviness," in the network, for a scholar and teacher to be cut off from ideas. Ideas are seen as the obsession of the naive. For the “savvy," ideas are not only impractical, they are obstacles to power!
Networkers are protected from cynicism by the ideology of “trust” — which can be used not only to manipulate those not on the network but also by some on the network to get ahead of other networkers. The intra-network competition for power among the members of the Group is so intense that even the Consultant's Report to the President takes note of it. “Indeed," they write, “creating a new Department of Writing Studies...offers no guarantee that tension will ease." The reason, they argue, is that "The very diversity of viewpoints among its faculty suggests that this group might itself eventually subdivide..." (13). “Diversity of viewpoints," it is important to note, is a euphemism here for the various internal conflicts in the Group over power. “Trust” is the ideology of cooperation within competition deployed by the ruling network to protect it from outsiders as well as from those insiders who might not be satisfied with the existing pecking order. Thus all (insiders and outsiders) are enjoined to “trust” the status quo.
"Trust," along with “network," therefore, becomes of great importance in the Vice-President's text of May 7. Having defined education as a commodity to be delivered, her text advises, “the transaction is based on trust..." (1). “Trust," in other words, is a trait deployed in the managerial views of education to provide for what is missing from the actual, material practices. It is posited as the “cause” of a good social “transaction” and not as the effect of a good society — a society of equality and justice that is free from manipulation (networking).
"Trust” has always been part of a managerial view of the world: it is a device by which the managers refuse to put in the public space the assumptions upon which they make decisions that affect the lives of many. “Trust” mystifies the (special) interests concealed in these decisions and asks the people (who have no part in decision-making) to “trust us"! In his classic study, Wandlungen der modern Gesellschaft: Zwei Abhandlugen über die Probleme der Nachriegzeit, Karl Renner shows how “trust” is used as the basis for establishing the identity of a managerial class. “Work," which is the source of value (wealth), is a collective practice. When material conditions are not equal in this collective act and some exploit the work of the others, the inequity (which could cause alienation and thus inefficiency) is covered up by “trust." The contemporary conservative writer, Francis Fukuyama's defense of “trust” is rooted in this very fact that trust is the condition for the production of wealth. However, what is not made clear in his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity, is that the wealth produced is not shared equally. In contrast to this managerial use of “trust” as an ideological apparatus for cooperation under unequal conditions — as a means of suturing over inequities—a genuine, non-exploitative "Trust" is the effect of equality and should not be used in the workplace as a substitute for equality, as a cover-up for inequity. Faculty in the Department are working under blatantly unequal conditions: some, for example, regularly teach loads of "2-2" and fewer courses a year while others teach "3-3" and "3-2" course loads; some receive salaries in the range of 90,000 or more dollars while others have to live in the same department while carrying heavier courseloads with salaries only in the 30,000 dollars; some receive merit raises (with little or no justification based on their scholarship and intellectual and pedagogical work) that are three, four or more times that of others. The people subjected to these unequal conditions do not “trust” the system that oppresses them, in part through its support of “network"ing, and no amount of propaganda about “trust” can substitute for material equality.
"Trust," in the Vice-President's world-view is the “cause” and not the “effect”: “trust” she writes “will create an environment that will make it possible for [students] to complete their studies in a timely fashion” (May 7, 1). I put aside here the issue that “timely fashion” is a code word for “processing” students as fast as possible without asking the question: what have they learned and is what they have been taught part of the boundary knowledges in the field? “Processing” (in a “timely fashion") and “delivering," in this managerial discourse, have priority over results. Trust, however, does not create anything; the material conditions of the workplace produce everything. What produces “trust” is an equal workplace in which cynicism (the precondition for networking) about ideas and intellectual work, about equality, about rigorous scholarship and demanding pedagogy, about commitment to the education of critical citizens for democracy has no place. "Trust” is produced when there are open public discussions about public priorities and not behind-closed-doors deals for using public funds for the convenience of networks and a power oligarchy. But it is part of a managerial view of education to marginalize the historical and social conditions of work and put “cultural values” in their place. As I said in the opening part of my text, it is through “cultural values” that the Vice-President “creates” a crisis in the English Department, thereby legitimating her overthrow of a democratically elected chair — who was elected to enact reforms and establish material equality in the Department — and her takeover of the Department through a surrogate chair that she “trusts." Her own actions, to be more precise, reveal the ideological nature of her idea of “trust." She removes from chair the person “trusted” (and democratically elected) by the majority of faculty in English and then asks the same people, whose choice she does not “trust," to “trust” her and her choices: “trust” the one who, herself, does not “trust” you. “Trust," the Vice-President's practices show, is the ruse of power. This is how cynicism grows in the workplace and erodes critique-al pedagogy and democracy.
The managerial view of education is most concerned not with the “rigor” of intellectual work but with the consumer-"friendliness" of the processes involved in the “transaction." In this view, education is, in the last instance, basically an “affective” and “emotional” relationship between marketers (teachers) and consumers (students). “Differences” and “conflicts” are antithetical to user-friendliness and obstacles to the “transaction." Given such a view of pedagogy based on “exchange-value," therefore, it is axiomatic that pedagogy should at all time create a friendly “atmosphere” — that is, one in which there are no differences, conflicts or contestations. It is by valorizing the emotional and marginalizing the intellectual that the Vice-President manages to represent “conflict” as basically the other of pedagogy. In the managerist educational world of the Vice-President, a good pedagogue is always friendly and congenial. This is the idea of teaching not as a critical act but as support and therapy: a form of the affective practices of stress management. Since the level of stress in the English Department, according to her assessment (the basis of which remain mystified), is high, and a place of high stress cannot manage the stress of others efficiently, the Vice-President has decided that there is a “crisis” of values in the English Department.
To declare the English Department “in crisis” because there is conflict in the Department and it does not offer what the Vice-President regards to be a friendly “atmosphere” is to miss the entire point about doctoral research and pedagogy: a university department is not a therapy clinic nor is it a restaurant—its success is not measured by its congeniality or its “atmosphere” and ambiance but by the depth and breadth of its interrogations into the “making of knowledge” and of its understanding of the “questions that arise from the movement between theory and practice." These movements are interstices in which a new generation of scholars learns the complexities and pluralities (the conflicts) of critical citizenship and the responsibilities of public intellectuals — not only the achievements but also the anguish, agonies and travails that accompany the responsibilities.
It is in fact to this “distinctive character of the doctoral graduate program as authorized by the New York State Education Department” that the majority of candidates for a Ph.D. at Albany are attracted, as the graduate students themselves have informed the Vice-President (May 16, 1996, 1). And it is this “distinctive character” that the Group-in-secret, who wish to set up a “Department of Writing Studies," intend to destroy by reducing the Ph.D. to a monodisciplinary system of “delivery” of a program of “writing studies” so that their classrooms, once again, become (seemingly) “tranquil” spaces for their unchallenged authority. I say “seemingly” because by sheer exercise of institutional power (such as determining graduate funding and TA appointments) they may have been able to banish critique and oppositional ideas to the underground of their classes but they have not been able to eliminate them.
The sin of the new faculty — who have produced “other” knowledges in the Department — is that they engage colleagues and students in long and probing debates and ask for (public) evidence and scholarly support for engaging “differences” and the “conflicts” which derive from differences. This is going against the grain of the “accepted” knowledges and practices of the hegemonic Group—practices that prevent the Department from acquiring a highranking on the contemporary map of knowledges and pedagogy. Moreover these “other” practices — of public inquiry and debate — are marked, by the Group, as acts of obstructionism that “ruin” the Department. Obstructionism, in short, has become the code word for any attempt to bring outdated knowledge practices up-to-date and to reform undemocratic administrative practices. In other words, any resistance to unquestioned practices; any attempt to make dominant practices (such as the funding of students, the awarding of fellowships, organization of the graduate curriculum, faculty access to graduate courses, courseload...) non-arbitrary, principled and public is regarded by the Group to be an act of obstructionism. Obstructionism, in short, is a refusal to become cynical — it is the insistence on taking teaching and scholarship seriously enough to honor, in one's daily practices, the mandate of the Ph.D. as approved not by some radical, Marxist, “Chinese or Maoist” “anarchist” but by The New York State Education Department!
Since the oligarchical Group controls the "norms” of discourses and determines what is “reasonable” and “professional," it has been able to exclude all critiques of its practices as a species of un-reason. These critiques are, to quote C. Knoblauch, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, instances of “melodrama," or to quote a statement reported to have been made by one of the members of the oligarchy at the CCCC conference (1997), simply “tabloid” texts. The “reasonable” has been made, by the oligarchy, to mean that which naturalizes the status quo without questioning the privileges of the Group. The foregrounding of “friendliness” and “atmosphere” and the rejection of critique as “melodrama” are, of course, part of the efforts to erase “conflicts” and manufacture consensus. The manufacturing of consensus is itself a discursive apparatus for repressing dissent. If the normal procedures fail to manufacture consensus, then the Administration resorts to apocalyptic stories, reports and threats. Thus, in the English Department's “open forum” held on July 11, 1996, the Vice-President's “appointed” chair issued the warning that while there were fascinating intellectual differences (which is the way he, like the Vice-President and the Group, mystify material and labor differences), the Department has to come together otherwise, it would not receive the resources it needs! Go along, say yes!