Part THREE — § 3

Given Reading's conservatism, it is not surprising that his “reading” of “excellence” is largely semantic and thus isolated from the specific historical situation in which the term has acquired its currency. “Excellence” belongs to a new generation of concepts that signal the post-ality of the current situation. Like Fukuyama's notion of “history," Butler's notion of “performativity," Stuart Hall's “ethnicity," and Baudrillard's “consumption," “excellence” in the university has become the code word for the university's entrance into a new phase: a phase which is post-contestational (beyond ideology). The “excellent” university stands for “pragmatism” and “techne” beyond the “old” fundamentals of (non-profit) “truth and justice." “Excellence," as I have pointed out in my “For a Red Pedagogy," is the discursive device by which inquiries into “root” social and material problems, for example, “class” are displaced by talk about procedures — how to manage large lecture courses. “Excellence," in short, marginalizes “critique-al knowledges” in favor of “skills” and thus turns the university, in Zaidi's words, “into little more than a corporate annex."

Academic quango's usually by-pass the established processes of academic self-governance, based on faculty involvement in open discussion, dissent and decision-making, and instead "report” directly to one of the “senior" administrators of the university. They undermine freedom of inquiry in setting priorities and erode collective and democratic academic-decision making processes by apriori setting agendas on “useful” things that are by definition “worthy” of doing. To insure that these “useful” (profitable) things are indeed recognized as “useful” and worthy of doing, they establish a “core” faculty: a minority of privileged faculty who “go along” with the main policies; teach choice courses and reap rewards for guarding the “useful” things that are deemed the appropriate subject of teaching and other work in the quango. In addition, they “invite” a secondary group of faculty (if the director/core faculty finds them congenial and in agreement about the “useful” things that should be taught and done) to teach a course or two in the quango. This non-core faculty is essentially a “contingent” labor force. In other words, like profit-making business enterprises, the academic unit relies for its highest “profit” on a temporary labor force that serves not to produce disinterested research results but on the projects/courses that the director/core faculty have already decided to be “useful” ("important," “the wave of the future") and thus worthy of being pursued/taught. The “important," as I have already suggested, is that which “brings in money."

CETL (the “Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning") at SUNY-Albany is an example of an academic quango: its director is responsible to the University's central administration, it is composed mostly of a “contingent labor force” — faculty from other academic units and graduate teaching assistants. It justifies its practices by what has become the all-important criteria in a (public) university more and more interested in “privatization” — “bringing in the money." It is thus “bringing in the money” (not intellectual practices) that gives the “director” a great deal of “power” and autonomy.

The fundamental way in which a quango such as CETL undermines “basic research” in the humanities is that it displaces disinterested research by useful “problem solving." The quango turns the university from a “critique-al” site in society for exploring truth and working to build a just democratic society on that truth into a pragmatic trouble shooting agency. The pursuit of disinterested truth is too much of a “big word”--it is out of sync with business protocols of profit; it is an abstract “ivory tower” sort of “vision thing” for the business community and its allies in the university. “Truth," for business and its allies has a pragmatic test: what “works," and what works is always what works within the already existing socioeconomic structures based on profit and power for the profit-makers. Pragmatism is the philosophical justification of pro-business conservatism; it keeps society divided into the polar binaries of “haves” and “have nots” and justifies that division of wealth as the outcome of useful/unuseful practices.

It is in such a context that the Vice-President's notion of a department as a unit for the “delivery” of a program acquires its full sense. The un-said in her trope is that knowledge is a commodity (not a critique-al contesting process of inquiry) and, as such, a ready-made “thing." Education, in this pragmatic and anti-intellectual paradigm is a “delivery” of already made knowledge to be adapted to “useful” practices, such as "problem solving."

To see a demonstration of this violent reduction of critique-al work and basic research to “problem solving” and “useful” skills, it might be helpful to “read” a recent issue (Vol.2, no. 1, Spring 1996) of Focus on Teaching which is the CETL “Newsletter." CETL also operates according to the idea of knowledge as commodity. It announces that its “Project Renaissance” is “designed to deliver the University at Albany's general education program” (2) and stresses that at the core of its teaching is an emphasis on “Human Identity and Technology” (2). “Technology," the items in the Newsletter make quite clear, is not a subject of philosophical or historical inquiry in this project — as it should be in a research university's “general” education programs (such as CETL's “Project Renaissance"). Instead “technology” is a code word for learning “useful” skills. At the core of this theory of pedagogy—based on usefulness — is a sustained and systematic attempt to posit knowledge as merely a set of formal procedures cut off from social structures and the economic and political practices of the larger culture. There is no hint here that “technology” will be interrogated in light of, for example, Heidegger's critique or Derrida's probing questions (Archive Fever) or that it will be questioned in relation to materialist theories of capitalism and the falling rate of profit. Technology is technology: following current cliches, it is treated as a self-evident “given” to which citizens simply have to adjust.

For CETL, the issues in “linkage” are, in short, all “formal” issues — matters of skillful manipulation of the various “assets” and “sources” available. Even when the question of “perspective” is introduced into the matter of mapping, it is simply in relation to individualistic traits: how different perspectives foreground the signature of the specific mappers.

What is studiously avoided in this view of hyperlink is, of course, the question of class and the power relations that follow from them. The CETL project not only does not show any interest in these issues, it is completely unaware of the rigorous debates on the question of “linkage” and the matter of “power" in the New Humanities and critical theory. To be more precise: the question of “linkage” as Jean Franĉois Lyotard—among others — has indicated is above all a question of “conflict” and contestation — a question of the organization of the social in a democracy. Any “linkage” (how one phrase is related to another) is thus, the "'victory' of one...over the others”. What is not “linked” (what is by-passed in a “linkage” thus “remains neglected, forgotten, or repressed” (The Differend 136). As far as the “Renaissance Project” is concerned, however, the critique of “hyperlink” is simply non-existent: all that matters is to learn how to manipulate the link and pay no attention to what is, in fact, repressed in the linked/unlinked. It is the “skill” that matters; critique-al thinking about the consequences of that “skill” for the social is simply too abstract an intellectual exercise! But, as Lyotard explains, to limit the matter of linkage to formal issues ("analogy, subordination...") is to suppress the fact that there are acceptable and unacceptable linkages: to suppress, in other words, that “There are hegemonies of genre, which are like figures of politics. They fight over modes of linking. Capital gives political hegemony to the economic genre” (141). The function of the university — as the space of critique-al thinking — is to investigate the political economy of the genre (that is, the tissue of texts created by linkages) and not simply teach the “useful” skill of linking without questioning the social consequences of the links. CETL does not indicate any interest in these complicated issues: all it cares about is the “technical” and the “useful." Lyotard pressures the linkages (and genre) further: “What politics is about and what distinguishes various kinds of politics is the genre of discourse” (142). To know the power relations of linkages, for Lyotard, is the sole goal of critique-al thinking ("philosophy” he calls it). What are the links, for example, of poverty and race; women and rape; queer and exclusion? What is the link of the labor of the periphery and the wealth of the metropole? It is, however, to the “useful” that CETL is devoted (what is the link of “useful” and “power"?). The longest text in this issue of the Newsletter is thus given to “Some Proposals for Making Large Classes (More) Interactive” (7-8). The useful “advice” concerns such “novel” and “innovative” practices (to which CETL says it is devoted) as "1. Assign seats/establish a seating chart. 2. Establish and enforce a clear attendance policy, 3. take attendance on a rolling basis..." (7).

The historical role of a quango like CETL is to re-locate the university from a place of critique-al knowledge into a site of useful skills. It does this by jettisoning the structures of “basic research” and at the same time introducing projects and rhetorics that sound and seem “new." This “new-ness” is what makes the ideological effects produced by the quango appealing. The “new" works in the academy as a code word for the “marketable," and what is “marketable” receives the support of the dominant power in the university. One of the “new” things in the academy (and the humanities) now is, of course, the introduction of the computer and other cyberpractices. These practices are, by and large, deployed as new “techniques” (without any philosophical and theoretical questioning of their status in relation to epistemological or political questions) to re-produce the existing structures of power/knowledge by new means. Or as Umberto Eco, whom I have already quoted, states: this is simply a new way of resurrecting logocentrism and empiricism. These uses of the computer, which in many cases act to cover the old contents in the wrapping of a new form, have the double appeal that a) they do not disturb the political economy of knowledge and b) they look “new."

In this connection, it is, interesting that, having failed to partition the English Department at SUNY-Albany in the spring of 1997, a group of “writing faculty” started to again move to partition the Department (and appropriate the privileges and resources that they had failed to do so when the project for a “Writing Studies” Department was canceled); this time along new lines by carving out of the Department what is basically a “Virtual” unit. The “writing faculty” realizing that soon its light teaching loads and other privileges will end, has claimed that unless the Department allows them to teach “writing” by deploying “computers," the Department will miss an opportunity and fall behind the times. However, they have also been claiming that in order to teach by computers they should be given special privileges—including teaching in “flexible” ways and exemption from “undergraduate” teaching. They were asked by Helen Elam, in a Department meeting, to explain how what they proposed to do was, in fact, intellectually and conceptually new and whether what they had suggested was not reproducing "correspondence courses” in a new guise. She has received no response except the usual evasions. The very persons who have been blocking the introduction of new knowledges in the Department and in the age of transnationalism argue for establishing an old-fashioned “American Studies” program, suggest that unless “we” adopt virtual teaching (and allow some to use this as an excuse for course reductions and exemptions from undergraduate teaching), we will fall behind the times! The very persons who have been blocking the redrawing of the map of “pedagogy” courses and keep teaching the “oldest of the old," turn to the computer for rescue!

The destruction of “critique," it seems, is done in order to bring in “new"-er things to the curriculum when in fact the “new” is simply a strategy for renewing very old profit motives and practices. Projects such as CETL do this in two stages. In the first stage, as I have implied, they propose to introduce novel subjects and methods based on new “technologies” to the university curriculum”: for example, “Human Identity and Technology” or “Hypertextuality and Fiction” (in the case of creative writing). This is one way that capitalism gets rid of what has become historically inefficient in raising the rate of profit. The introduction of the “hyperlink” notion, for example, is an efficient mode of dealing with multiplicities (of all kinds) that mark the economics and culture of post-industrial societies. However, these “new” themes and the curricular patterns are as committed to the “old” ideologies as the “old” curriculum. Both the “old” and the “new” curricula, in other words, are situated in the world of commerce and their primary objective is the naturalization of that world and the marginalization of critique. The “new” (CETL-type) quango, simply renews the old in a “new” rhetoric and a “new” organization so that the same ideological effect is re-produced more effectively.

This double-move is perhaps most clear in CETL's proposal for a first-year English/writing project which was called, the “University Wide Writing Program." The project (as I have argued in my paper “CETL Proposal for University-Wide Writing Program") to some extent goes beyond the old empiricist project of “writing” and introduces the idea of “discourse” into the teaching of first-year English, just as it introduces the question of “linking” into the Renaissance Project. However, it also treats “discourse” in the same way it treats “linkage”: it more or less reduces it to a formalist project. The concept of “discourse” takes the traditional project of teaching writing a step forward, but a formalist treatment also limits it so that it does not become transgressive of established practices. As I have argued in my critique, “discourse” implies that the “writing” project will attend to the question of “language in its entanglements and complications in social institutions of knowledge” (2), and although such entanglements involve questions of “class” and other socioeconomic determinants, the CETL first-year English writing project at no time addresses them. In fact it systematically avoids them. The purpose of the project becomes not a study of “discourse” (in its postmodern sense) but a remedy for the “tremendous difficulties many of our students have in reading and writing academic prose and in speaking articulately in class discussions” (Proposal: University-Wide Writing Program, 1). “Discourse” (which promises a shift in conceptualizing “writing” as traditionally taught) is quickly reduced to teaching “skills." It becomes a set of formalized “problems” to be “solved." Under the novel concept of “discourse," CETL reverts back to what all “writing” projects have done: to substitute critique-al work for “skill” acquisition. In other words, by introducing “hyperlink” and “discourse," CETL abandons some of the old practices (and this is why, for example, its project was opposed by some empiricists, in the English Department, who believe that such a move is wrong-headed and, as a consequence of exposure to it, students' writing “will get worse"). I should point out that after behind-closed-doors “negotiations," some of those who opposed CETL on these grounds are now its supporters and have joined the CETL faculty and are working to establish the “Writing Studies Department." What was proposed as the “Writing Studies Department," was, of course, itself a from of quango, since it would have been composed out of such quangos as CETL. CETL abandons the old “writing” methods not for a more progressive and critique-al goal but rather to update the old goals in a new rhetoric. “Writing” is still a “skill," but “skill” itself has now changed because of changes in technologies. “Skill” is now a more complex set of practices that includes (as befits the age of cyberspace) abstract thinking. (This is why most writing faculty at SUNY-Albany who teach “writing” as a “skill” are outraged by this critique: they think that since the “skill” they are teaching is different from the old “skill” that they are no longer teaching skills!) But abstract thinking itself has largely been reduced to a form of functional skill in the age of computational literacy — as required by the fact that the labor force must be capable of manipulating computer programs.

Producing these new skills which are useful for big business has become the goal of education: a goal that as Zaidi writes: "diverts resources from the humanities and theoretical sciences in order to fund applied research that profits corporate sponsors" and has turned the university from a place of critique-al knowledge “into little more than a corporate annex” (51).