An Open Letter Against the End of Critique-al Knowledges and Socially Relevant Pedagogy in the LINK Program at SUNY-Binghamton
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Summer/Fall 1997 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 2 (pp. 52-53). | ||
| • September 29, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
This letter is written in solidarity with the LINK Program's expressed commitments to enable students to construct connections between academic disciplines and between the university and larger social and political structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and ableism. One of the most historically urgent aspects of the LINK Program is its emphasis on and commitment to self-critique and self-reflexivity. During times of crisis, a project cannot retreat from a sustained examination of its practices and an investigation into the institutional, theoretical and historical limitations of its principles. In the interest of such critique and the commitment to historical struggles for equality, I am writing to publicly contest the undemocratic practices of Director, Susie Williams and instructor Kai Lundberg-Williams in their efforts to suppress critical pedagogy in the LINK program at SUNY-Binghamton—a pedagogy necessary for enabling students to become critical citizens — and to transform this program into a commodified service to manage students in their training to become bearers of skills profitable for corporations, but undemocratic for people.
Over the last two weeks I have been repeatedly harassed by Williams and more recently by Lundberg-Williams who have both discarded the democratic exchange of ideas fundamental to a university education in an authoritarian attempt to suppress a pedagogy of critique and intimidate and harass me on the basis of my ideas and my commitment to teaching “difficult” knowledges. As a co-instructor for a LINK class with Kai Lundberg-Williams, I agreed to participate in a class session in which we could explain to our students the relevance of the LINK program and how our two courses can be understood as a linked discussion over issues of a global society. However, rather than enabling students to understand the relevance of the LINK program for its commitment to enabling students to develop the conceptual and critical capacities necessary for understanding a global society, and that by taking our two courses at once they would have the opportunity to test out their ideas about global society in discussion and debate with two very different theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for approaching this task, Lundberg-Williams took this as an opportunity to anti-intellectually dismiss my course as “too difficult," my pedagogy as “mini-mall"-like, and rally students around the cultural “common sense” — the dominant ways of thinking which are produced to maintain existing oppressive structures. Instead of offering a sustained critique of the concepts I am introducing to my students in terms of their capacity to explain complex global structures in order to further the development of students' intellectual inquiries by opening up the theoretical differences between our pedagogies to public contestation, Lundberg-Williams attempted to convince my students that they do not have to engage with my position and that they do not have to do the work for my course! Students, in other words, NEED NOT READ and engage with ideas that are aimed at explaining the power structures in which they live — structures which are themselves difficult and complex and therefore require complex concepts with which to explain them.
In a similar and even more authoritarian move, EOP Director Susie Williams accused my class of being one of "the last nails in the coffin of the LINK Program" because some students had expressed frustration with and anxiety over the reading with which I had asked them to engage. I was told that since so many students had been “complaining” about the difficulty of the linked classes in general, resulting in low enrollments and canceled courses, that I had a responsibility to accommodate my teaching to the demands for less intellectual requirements. Instead of historicizing this crisis as “linked” to a much larger crisis in education and institutional access to conceptual knowledges, Williams chose to locate the problem in an individual's pedagogy. This “personalization” of an institutional crisis is further effected in her suggestion that my commitments to teaching “difficult” material had to do, simply, with a personal obsession with theory and an inflated ego: “I know that you are really wedded to theory, but you have to realize that this program is not just about KIM." This statement was followed by the harassing comment to the effect that if Williams had ever encountered my class as a graduate student, much less as an undergraduate, “I would have dropped your course in a second." This harassment of an instructor under a director's authority has the effect of silencing and intimidating alternative discourses and pedagogical practices. And this institutional suppression of alternative views is most clearly expressed in Williams statement that she was “unwilling” to discuss or debate this issue any further with me, deferring her responsibility to democratic inquiry and contestation to another director. It is outrageous that in a PUBLIC university — which everywhere else is understood as a place where intellectual contestation and debate can take place in an open and free manner — that an administrator of what is supposed to be a progressive program that works to defend such exchanges, would so violently suppress knowledge and teaching practices because they are different from her own by attempting to intimidate and harass a graduate student under her authority.
What Williams and Lundberg-Williams are dismissing in an anti-intellectual and reactionary manner is the need for knowledges that can explain the emerging structures of a global society. Both Williams and Lundberg-Williams have suggested that my pedagogy is “too difficult” for female students and students of color and is therefore “complicit” in racism and sexism. In doing so they confirm and affirm the racist and sexist power structures that instill the belief that women and people of color are not conceptual thinkers—that they are "irrational” and incapable of understanding complex ideas and therefore should not demand exposure to them. And now they are intimidating me because I refuse to support a power structure which has internalized in women and people of color the notion that they are incapable of learning and understanding complex ideas and, instead, have committed myself to making the classroom a space where these very power structures can be explained and critiqued.
Rather than understanding the "difficulty” in these ideas as an historical problem — that is, that these ideas are difficult both because students of color, women and poor students have historically been denied access to conceptual knowledges and because the global structures which they are attempting to address are themselves complex—Williams and Lundberg-Williams have dehistoricized this “difficulty” and represented it as a “personal” defect on my part. As a result they discourage students from taking seriously the production of concepts that can explain global structures as a necessary task for social change. But Williams and Lundberg-Williams take this personalization even further by suggesting that I, a graduate student instructor with no institutional power, am putting the entire LINK program on the line by giving students access to new ideas. In doing so, Williams and Lundberg-Williams are taking what is an historical crisis in public knowledge and education practices and making it a “personal problem." In alignment with a much broader trend toward the corporatization of public education that aims to cut back on programs and pedagogical practices which are concerned with producing critical citizens, and instead advance programs which produce people who are bearers of “skills” that are profitable to corporations, Williams and Lundberg-Williams are taking the pressure off of the institution's retrograde practices and placing it on an individual instructor who is attempting to oppose these practices. Rather than defending the university and the LINK program as a democratic space for the free exchange of ideas (including those that challenge the “everyday commonsense” manufactured in society to support existing power structures), Williams and Lundberg-Williams are attempting to violently and brutally silence precisely those pedagogies that can enable students to question, challenge, critique, and intervene in existing social arrangements. This simply transforms the LINK program into “lip service” — a marketing strategy — by the corporate university to make more profit with no real commitment to public education and producing knowledges that will enable students to make social change. In other words, Williams and Lundberg-Williams are doing the work of the very power structures from which they formally distance themselves: they are trying to get rid of the LINK program de facto if not de jure by compromising its capacity to raise the intellectual preparedness of students to confront the changing structures of a global society.
But Williams and Lundberg-Williams are very clear on this point: teaching students “difficult” material that is not easily and readily grasped within the first few weeks of the semester, material that challenges students' ideas — including teaching those discourses aimed most rigorously at critiquing the status quo — is “authoritarian." If this is the case then instructors should never plan a course. They should enter at the beginning of the semester, ask students what they feel like doing and then proceed accordingly. But this merely transforms educators into a commodified service and ends education. It erases what is at the core of education: intellectual change enabled by access to ideas which may be “new" and “different” and therefore challenging and unfamiliar—but which can enable students to understand, critique and intervene in existing social arrangements. Instead, it posits education as a confirmation of what students already know. Teachers simply become “managers” of the common sense which the status quo instills in the public. The necessity for education and the public university is “defunct” as students need merely to “teach themselves” while paying thousands of dollars to the institution to “let” them do so. This is a convenient strategy for the corporate university to make a profit off of students without investing in their intellectual development as critical citizens. In short, it is aimed at producing “good” subjects of oppressive social structures who will not demand literacy in the concepts necessary to explain emerging global structure but will instead DEMAND IGNORANCE of these structures and the concepts that explain them—“good” subjects, in other words, who will then be easier to manage and manipulate.
On the contrary, a pedagogy of critique affirms the necessity for a public education in the full sense: not one aimed at producing the majority for the profit of the few but one aimed at producing critical citizens who understand, can explain, and will intervene in the complex structures that give rise to inequality, oppression and exploitation. Serious public educators today cannot afford to transform progressive programs into marketing strategies for corporate executives, we must reaffirm our commitment to producing the knowledges necessary for social change.
The retreat to silencing and reactionary practices in the face of the crisis of the LINK Program is to participate in the very practices in response to which EOP and Affirmative Action Programs had to be fought for and developed in the first place. The historical stakes of this program need to be made available to public and democratic inquiry. In short, to resort to “pragmatics” — the administrative practice aimed at administering the status quo — at this historical moment is to do so at the expense of interrogating and intervening in the status quo.
I am urging individuals involved in the LINK Program, and those committed to public and critical education, to make these issues matters of public and democratic discussion and contestation.
18 February 1997
