notes for a contribution to a campus dialogue

I'm about to head out for a 90-minute campus dialogue event, sponsored by the associated students and some other groups. I was invited to be a faculty panelist. The title is (I swear I am not making this up) "Generation Myspace: Does it give a damn?" My instructions were to come up with presentations of my opinions on the following questions, and to make them brief, memorable, and vivid. I took a look at the questions after the academic senate meeting, which was probably a mistake, since those meetings (especially yesterday's; more on this probably later) tend to bring out my earnest side. There's far too little facetiousness in these responses, so I'll have to gum things up some other way. Students are also on the panel, which is why the questions seem targeted at student life rather than faculty life.


How do social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace) keep you connected to the world? Are they just games or is there some serious social value to them?

My early involvement in the web was decidedly for the sake of direct communication with particular people – students in my class. Then I used it for self-publishing silly stuff.

Now I’ve got a weblog that I use not as a weblog at all, but as a publicly kept personal journal, because, likely, of some combination of mental illnesses and neuroses.

In your opinion, are student well-informed about the world around them today? Why or why not?

 What issues push your buttons? How do you find out about them?

Is it a good thing to be well-informed? If well-informed means being a consumer of news, then I would be rather worried if a the majority of my students were. Thankfully, it seems that most of my students are not consumers of news in any large capacity. However, they do eat too much sugar.

I was unsurprised to find that a minority of my students had heard about the proposed CA budget and $386 million cut to the CSU budget, along with 10% student fee increase, for 08-09. I was unsurprised to find that a tiny minority of my students report hearing about the situation from other faculty.


What does the up-coming election and all the primary election activity mean to you?
 Does your vote really make a difference or mean anything?


If voting were the only or the most significant part of political participation, we would all be doomed. We might be anyway, but voting is quite literally the absolute least any of us can do. The winner of the presidential election will be the candidate with the better hair.


What life skills are the most important for you to cultivate? Why those skills? Are those skills you need to go to college to learn?

Know how to grow vegetables. Also, it is profoundly life-altering to learn how to make soup stock out of kitchen scraps, chicken or fish carcasses, beef bones, etc. I mean this in all seriousness: the life-skills that are most important to cultivate are those that allow you to act independently, autonomously, creatively, self-determinedly, and outside the realm of bureaucratic, commercial, governmental, or other hegemonic control. Growing and cooking your own food can be as much an act of political and social resistance to oppression as making public speeches or demonstrating at protests.

The reason for any of this kind of activity is, ultimately, to preserve what freedom you’ve still got, to extend that freedom as much as you can, and to create ways to promote social justice and the common good.

If you could have your degree right now and NOT learn anything, would you take it? Why or why not?

 What’s the worth of a degree from the CSU?

I’m not a fan of degrees. If we’re in the degree business, then we’re competing in a market that rewards cost efficiency by both the institution and the students: the ideal is to obtain the best-reputed degree at least cost and least outlay of resources (including labor). On the institutional side, this encourages some of the worst practices in academia: faculty contingency, increasing class sizes, eliminating or limiting direct student-faculty contact by way of exploitation of electronic “course delivery,” unbundling of faculty labor (dividing up teaching from research and service). On the student side, it encourages a kind of bargaining or negotiating mentality, a gamesmanship, where the goal is to work out the simplest possible path to the degree. It discourages those things faculty do best and (IMHO) students could most benefit from: the time-consuming, interactively intensive, often exhausting effort to learn, that is, to articulate experience, the world, the social and historical situation, and to draw reasoned conclusions about all of this, relying on one’s own and one another’s imagination, memory, intellect, intuition, and passion. You know: education.