Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 02:20:05 -0400 (EDT) From: "M.A. King" <kingma-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca> Subject: RE: academia On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Liano Sharon wrote: > Try writing something that does not reference and IS NOT ARGUED according > to modes recognizable as coming from the tradition. If someone asks you a question, and your response is literally unrecognizable as an answer to that question ... well, I think you can't really be surprised if s/he doesn't think it's a great answer. You want to reserve the right to ask your own questions, but why should anyone else recognize them as good questions? How can they, if you don't engage with them on their terms? (I have some vague notion of "black holes" from ATP kicking around my brain on this point--something to do with lines of flight that never connect with anything, lead to isolation. I may be completely off on that one....) I wonder how you think the university should work. You seem to think it should not have standards of any kind--anything the student wants to do should be acceptable. Either that or professors should have some supernatural power for discerning genuine genius from self-indulgent gibberish. How do you think it should be decided who gets to be employed by the university as a teacher? How do you think it should be decided who is "good enough" to continue as a professional academic? I'm genuinely wondering; I don't mean this as a challenge--you obviously seem to think the university should be somehow different, but I don't know what kind of differences could satisfy you. I suspect it isn't possible that any reform, no matter how drastic, of the institution could satisfy you. You seem to want an institution without norms, which is an impossible thing. Maybe you only want a loosening of standards, a broadening of what is considered acceptable--but no matter how much standards are loosened, there will always be *someone* who doesn't "measure up", echoing your complaint.... To want to change the value of the currency is a fine thing. But surely you can't expect the bankers to help you ... and if they did, what would be the point? In an undergrad philosophy class, I had a prof who gave us hell for the lack of imagination we showed on our first set of papers, our unwillingness to stray from "the tradition". As an example of what he considered a good essay, he showed us a painting which had been submitted by a student in a previous class. Well, that's OK ... but I get the uneasy feeling that if you're *encouraged* to do something out of the ordinary, if it's made ordinary to do something out of the ordinary, then what's so ... out of the ordinary about it? I get the same feeling about "progressive" elementary schools. It's one thing to have your imagination and curiosity carefully cultivated; it's another thing--a nobler thing, if you'll forgive me--to have people try to drill those things out of you but hang onto them anyway. (That's how you see yourself, anyway, isn't it?;) Not that I'm saying that educators *should* try to drill them out of you ... but they--we--ought to be aware that *any* education is normalizing. Personally, as a TA I've been given a good deal of leeway as far as setting standards for assignments is concerned ... and personally, I'm inclined to tell my students to follow the party line, so to speak--because it's much more impressive--more courageous--when they're told to do that and don't than it would be if they didn't because they were told not to. I'm also afraid that telling them "knock yourselves out! Use finger paint!" would produce a bunch of smug little geniuses, ever so impressed with their own originality--when they were just doing what they'd been told to do. Anyway, this has been a fascinating thread so far. So off-topic that it inspired me to go and pick up *The Logic of Sense* today, which perhaps will inspire me to pick up *Alice in Wonderland*. :) ----Matthew A. King------Department of Philosophy------McMaster University---- "The border is often narrow between a permanent temptation to commit suicide and the birth of a certain form of political consciousness." -----------------------------(Michel Foucault)--------------------------------
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