the subject of pain

This is a proposal I wrote this morning for a book chapter. It’s for an anthology about phenomenology. 

While pain has been medicalized, pathologized, and subjected to normalization, the lived experience of pain has been pushed to the margins, misunderstood, and misrecognized. Pain remains mysterious even while its neurophysiological mechanisms are more precisely and intensively investigated. In part, this is because the predominant biomedical discourse all but eliminates the experiencing subject of pain.

Yet in counter-discourses, including those drawing from phenomenology, pain still presents mysteries. Pain seems to be most subjective, that is, most one’s own, least shareable, and almost inexpressible. It is perhaps the most indubitably and ineluctably certain embodied experience for oneself, but most doubtable and refutable to others, as Elaine Scarry proposed.[1]

In the accounts of many raised to be culturally North American or European, experiences of acute or chronic pain are described as an invasive assault. Strategies for living with chronic pain are struggles at this limit. Susan Wendell presents a strategy of distancing self from the body in pain, “objectifying” both, yet acknowledging this to be a “strategy of embodiment.”[2] Reinterpreting this strategy phenomenologically, what Wendell proposes reveals the paradox of the subject of pain. Pain appears as what is most one’s own, most intimate, but most alien. Pain threatens the sense of embodiment, and disrupts the appearance of body as organ of the Ego. Pain expresses a limit of embodiment as “I can”—the encounter with what the “I can” cannot master.

The subject of pain calls for reexamining this fundamental understanding of embodiment in the phenomenological tradition. For Edmund Husserl and for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, embodiment exhibits a typical and “normal” situation, the situation of “I can.” Against this normal situation, pain is represented as “abnormal” or as pathological (as is disability, among other conditions). Wendell’s strategy, and the struggles of many with chronic pain, could be not only a “renormalization” as reorientation to a “new normal,” but an encounter with embodiment as “I can’t.”

The classic texts of phenomenology offer only scattered hints of an approach to the embodied “I can’t” of acute or chronic pain and other limit-experiences. Further, by pathologizing pain (disability, etc.)—that is, by valorizing ability, mastery, and fluidity of the body-subject—the classic texts of phenomenology fail to account for limit-experiences as an ordinary, normal dimension of embodiment.

Without rejecting Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and without rejecting the notion of the “I can,” I will offer a phenomenological account of embodiment as both “I can” and “I can’t,” avoiding the pathologizing tendency of both medical and earlier phenomenological discourse. From an initially paradoxical representation of the subject of pain, I will develop an alternative account of the experience of embodiment/embodied experience. I will conclude with a proposal for a new investigation of the normal and the abnormal as structures of embodiment and hermeneutic concepts in phenomenology.

           

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[1] Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

[2] Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body. New York: Routledge, 1996.

non-tenure-track faculty labor

I see two ways of interpreting the situation of non-tenure-track faculty, drawing from Marx in Capital. If we think of higher education as an industry, and a university as a capitalist enterprise on the factory model (obviously, omitting layers of exchange between the “non-profit” sector of higher ed and overall social capital and accumulation), then tenure-track faculty are regular faculty workers and non-tenure-track faculty can be understood either as cottage industry “piece work” laborers, or as an industrial reserve army. These are not mutually exclusive, I believe.

Cottage industry, as Marx used the term, refers to production taking place outside of the factory. Marx distinguished ordinary cottage industry in which the commodity products of factories are transformed into more finished commodities by individuals with specialized abilities or at the convenience of the industrial capitalist, from cottage industry taking place as after-hours piecework by ordinary wage-laborers. Either form of cottage industry applies to non-tenure-track labor.

As routine, non-tenure-track faculty are often relied upon as labor for specific functions outside normal production of the university. At Cow State Santa Claus, many work as “special consultants” on special projects, to score qualification exams of various kinds, etc. Tenure-track faculty also avail themselves of these “opportunities,” including working in summer sessions through the for-profit extended education unit. Because faculty wages are held below what affords many faculty a reasonable income for their various debts, the university creates the need for additional wages for subsistence. This is similar to mandatory overtime, or extension of work-time.

But many non-tenure-track faculty do cottage labor of a different sort, producing themselves as means of production, by preparing courses that they may or may not teach, doing research and other work without compensation or paid expenses to maintain field currency, contributing to their field’s base of knowledge, etc. Unlike tenure-track faculty who are at least nominally paid for this work, and who can typically predict what classes they need to prepare to teach and thus what areas they need to be current in, non-tenure-track faculty simply have to be ready, or else their labor will lose its saleable value. This is specialized work performed entirely outside the factory setting, and only paid on the basis of its sale as ready labor-power.

That is also the condition of the industrial reserve army. To maintain low wages, it is necessary that there always be a large stock of ready labor-power that is unemployed or underemployed. The value of labor as a commodity is lowered by this reserve stock. The costs for developing and maintaining that labor-power are unpaid, or paid via charity or social welfare systems. Capitalists call upon this reserve at the moment it is needed, and dispose of it as soon as possible. As a reserve, workers in this class are themselves immobile, but to the capitalist, transferrable and exchangeable at whatever distance and to whatever locale. The workers experience their relation to the means of production as interrupted and fleeting; for the capitalist, this labor-power is always available.

University Education as consumer object

Much consternated hand-wringing is devoted to the seeming disconnect between college education and career paths. The mantra that college prepares people for careers is repeated despite the easily available information that roughly half of college graduates enter careers in their degree major field. This has raised questions about the legitimacy of college education as career preparation, about the legitimacy of certain disciplinary fields (i.e., those without “career paths,” overwhelmingly in arts, humanities, and disciplines of critique like ethnic or gender studies). If students go to college in order to start careers, goes the “thought,” then higher education has failed if graduates don’t enter those careers.

Oddly (revoltingly), the empty rhetoric of administrators offers keener insight. Our wise administrators can’t be bothered with linking degrees to career paths. They speak only of “student success,” which, if it means anything at all, means only that a student graduates. What such a student actually does during college is irrelevant. The only important measures of degree programs are how many students graduate, at what cost, and at what speed. The only additional measures of universities are rankings by national media in one or more of the following categories: time-to-degree, starting salaries of graduates, major sports teams.

Subjectively, graduates may have acquired significant academic and intellectual abilities, begun to master complex knowledge bases, or gone through profound personal and social transformation. Objectively, systemically, this does not matter. Individually, graduates may have developed saleable skills that allow them to command decent salaries. Systemically, whether or not this happens, higher education has succeeded.

In the understanding of many critical commentators, a significant problem faces the university because of the disconnection between individual students’ experiences, goals, and outcomes, and the priorities and rhetoric of university administrators. They have failed to comprehend higher education as a commodity and consumer object.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord explains that consumer culture arises after the capitalist industry shifts from solving the problem of sufficient production to meet demand, to the production of demand. Spectacle is a quasi-ideological apparatus for the production of demand. The marketing of brands and lifestyles are its basic mechanisms.

           

I don’t know when exactly it happened, but some time between the end of the 1960s and the turn of the millennium, this shift overtook higher education. Prior to this shift, higher education produced technology and labor-power for capitalism. Since the shift, it has mainly produced consumers of higher education. There are multiple tracks of this consumption, more or less sumptuous depending on the tier of higher education.

           

Higher education is marketed and sold as brand and lifestyle in all tiers. Online for-profits, regional public comprehensive universities, local community colleges, R1 research institutions—all have niche markets and demographic targets. The consumer object they sell is sometimes called Education, sometimes Success, but whatever it is, it is desirable.

University of Phoenix is, by many measures of Education/Success, a failure. The university has poor graduate rates, iffy job placement rates, and a poor academic reputation. Nevertheless, again, our administrators wisely note that University of Phoenix and its ilk are the real competitors of regional comprehensives and community colleges.

To comprehend why this is so, we have to remain impervious to the false charms of academic standards, and instead take up the austere rigor of Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer objects and the hyperreal. First of all, we must recognize that consumer objects are consumed not in their use as “real” things, but as hyperreal, spectacular objects. It is not the noxious fumes emanating from the can that one consumes, but Axe Body Spray—i.e., the hyperreal heterosexual copulation between young men and young women. It is not learning, struggling, striving, failing, thinking that one consumes, but Education. (Of course, this is not to deny that copulation, etc., do happen, but to deny that copulation is consumption. Copulation comes to an end; consumption is an endless circuit of desire-consumption-desire/consumption-desire-consumption. I omit here further elaboration of the circuits of consumption à la Volume II of Capital.)

In advertising, which provides the most significant portion of brand benefit of any consumer object, the barest link is maintained between Education/Success and other desirable goods like careers or income (for legal reasons, no doubt). Like advertising for perfumed body spray, beer, cars, or disposable cleaning wipes, there is mention of no specific effort by the consumer, no actual use, no real qualities of the product, and no demonstrable claims about the effects of the product. University of Phoenix used to advertise with the slogan “I’m a Phoenix,” which tells us that the graduate has been branded by the University. Like body spray’s effect on relations between heteronormed young men and women, branding by Phoenix is presented as having such an effect on relations between Success-normed graduates and employers.

That is to say, Education/Success begins and ends in an exchange relation among consumer objects, which now includes in its orbit the branded graduates themselves, and their employers. Students rely on that relation to acquire the means of further consumption. Employers consume the branded graduates in much the same way that one consumes beer. Universities parlay the relation into the circulation of capital in the forms of donations and additional students.

It’s remarkable how little apparent this is in my everyday work. I am confronted daily by the university brand and by the high-concept expression of it by administrators. But in classes, in talking with students or reading their papers or email messages, I labor under the apprehension of them as real people with real challenges to real learning. Because this real life goes on constantly, it’s easy to fall into believing that the brand is unreal. Some people even take it for an insult when they first hear that University Education is hyperreal, or in Bill Readings’ phrase, “in ruins.” The hyperreal is a dimension of everyday life that defies subjective understanding or mastery; it is the reality-effect of ongoing relations of symbolic exchange according to circuits of capital consumer production, in no one’s control. As such it is determinative of the conditions of real production, and appears in the guise of the real, or at least bears the same names. No wonder it is so difficult to tell whether what’s at stake in our struggle is Education or education, Student Success or students’ success, the University or the university.

writing and "teaching" writing

I have believed for several years now that I should not be teaching writing in my classes, because it's not my job. I teach philosophy, not writing, except to the extent that students need guidance in explaining philosophical ideas in writing.

I'm uncertain I still believe that it's not my job to teach writing. For one thing, I've accepted at last that the implicit form-content dualism of that belief is untenable. Writing is not a container, and ideas are not pre-existing stuff to fill it.

On Thursday, I went on a bike ride after finishing grading 108 student papers, and thought about how to begin teaching something about writing to my students. I began by telling them that reading student papers causes me great pain, because I empathize with the pain I can see in their writing.

I then asked about their pain and anxiety about writing, and when I asked them what they do in response, the first answer in each class was, of course, procrastinate. They listed a number of other responses: they stress-eat, lose sleep, plagiarize, rush through, or give up. I asked how well those strategies work out.

It's hard for me to understand this, because I write all the time. I love constructing sentences and paragraphs. I delight in playing around with words. It's easy. It's easier for me to write than not to write. I struggle to refrain from writing. (That's not entirely true. Some days I can't write easily or well. I just don't have any words. When that happens, I don't push it. The next day, it's back.)

It's also perplexing because I believe most people I come across who have to write as part of what they're doing dislike or even dread writing. How--or more to the point, why--anyone who hates writing becomes a successful academic is beyond my comprehension.

If I state everything I know about good writing, the dilemma of teaching writing is clear. What I know about writing is that good writers learn by copying good writing. Duh. You fall in love with a writer, read everything you can find by that writer, and attempt to write in that writer's style. Then you fall in love with another, and repeat. After 7 or 13 repetitions, your own writing has become a bad pastiche of these styles, and with any luck, someone tells you this or you notice it, and start taking out all the obvious thefts you can identify. You continue this, and add new stolen pieces and removing them, until you die. 

I have my students for a 15-week semester. I can tell them what good writing takes, but they typically lack even the basis of reading and mimicking good writing for years. This extends to fundamentals. Even correcting punctuation and usage on five-page papers is meaningless, if my students lack the habit and the models of conventional style.  

contingent faculty activism, part 1

The usual approach to contingent faculty^* activism is to drive for inclusion, recognition, and security within our institutions. Contingent faculty are underpaid, usually ineligible for benefits, have little or no job security, are relegated to marginal positions as “adjuncts” (as non-faculty), and systematically barred from participating in shared governance over their own work. These have appeared to be the natural targets for activism. In unfortunately many cases, the targets also include faculty leadership and faculty unions, who often mirror their institutions in marginalizing and discarding contingent faculty.

This seems like a contradiction, to some of us. The tenure-track faculty surely ought to be our natural allies. We do the same work, in the same institutions, with the same students. We share commitments to our fields of knowledge and to the social good of higher education.

Obviously, tenure-track faculty are benefited by the current institutional system. For many in the tenure-track, the current arrangement appears to be merit-based, rewarding the deserving and leaving the undeserving to their fate. I am not interested in that here, so I will simply assert that it is untrue, and that the faculty who believe this are wrong about their own merit, their merit relative to the contingent faculty, and the notion that the current system is merit-based.

It is more interesting to consider the tenure-track faculty who acknowledge that the current system is unfair to contingent faculty, is arbitrary to some degree in its distribution of rewards, and yet do not support contingent faculty activism or the usual institutional reforms contingent faculty advocate. I sometimes imagine that they view us as the monstrous creatures of evil genius, or as ghosts haunting them as a reminder of how fickle even their fates are. Few tenure-track faculty quietists would recognize themselves in my gothic fancies, I’m sure. They would explain their inaction with a wan smile and the admission that they are too busy with their own work and their own institutional struggles.

In fact, whether or not I’ve diagnosed their unconscious motivations, they typically are too busy. Most of the contingent faculty are too busy, as well—though more often with driving to another campus to teach two more classes, or to another job, to make ends meet.

Now let me see if I can recapitulate this. The primary goals of mainstream contingent faculty activists are to gain very much or all of what tenure-track faculty currently have in compensation, job security, and self-determination and professional status. What protects those privileges of tenure-track faculty right now? If I’m not mistaken, it is the current institutional system of power and distribution—the very same system of power and distribution to which mainstream contingent faculty activists want access. If this system is what guarantees unfairness, why should the goal be inclusion in it?

So it goes in reformism. (Cf. the same-sex marriage “rights” “victory” that has provided same-sex couples access to the discriminatory institution of state-sanctioned marriage. If marriage were not used as a way to discriminate regarding access to healthcare, survivor’s benefits, and access to other social goods—that is, if marriage were not an administrative means for allocating social goods to certain categories of approved-of lives—this would be a completely empty “victory.” As it stands, it’s certainly Pyrrhic.)

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^* "Contingent faculty" is a misnomer, one of many, for the faculty who work off the tenure track. It delights me that there is no proper name for us. "Contingent" is technically untrue in my case, under our Collective Bargaining Agreement, and is also vague. "Adjunct" is inappropriate and derogatory: non-tenure-track faculty are around 75% of college faculty in the US, and more than 50% are part-time employees at one or more institutions, so there is nothing "adjunct" (ancillary, additive, inessential) about our work. "Precarious" (a term more often used in Mexico and Québec) is nice. I like the little bit of homophony of "tenuous track," which I claim to have coined in around 2008 or so. My three-year appointments all contain the word "terminal," so we could be called the "terminal faculty."

In any case, although it is not a proper name for us, it is in common usage as an alternative to the obnoxious term "adjunct," so I'll adopt it here.

then it's war!

The "War on Terror" doesn't seem to have gone so well, after all. Whodathunkit?

No doubt, it's the wrong target. No, I don't mean that the US has bombed the wrong brown people, although in large part that's true. And I don't meant that bombing brown people isn't solving the problem, although that's true too. I also don't mean that there's no moral justification for the policy, although that's abundantly clear.

I mean "Terror." Maybe we can't really commit war against "Terror." Plus, I don't know, but isn't war itself kind of terrifying? It's certainly terrible.

Terror is paralyzing. So - follow me here - it's not the people in terror who are turning into terrorists. It's more like people who have something wrong with their lives, and they can think of no other way to solve it but to lash out violently against the supposed perpetrators, in an atavistic and doomed attempt to kill their way out of their problems.

To target the right affect, what we need, I've realized at last, is this: a War on Malaise.

university education and opportunities to do stuff on campus

This is the text of something I posted for my students to read. It's related to class discussions in my Philosophy and Education class (aka Phil and Ed, nice guys, really), and starting Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and other stuff goin' on.

Last Thursday was the Academic Freedom Forum that I organized. One of the primary goals of the event was to contribute to the intellectual life of the university at large, and to invite all members of the university to take part. By my count, 8 of my 108 students attended. I expect there are basically three reasons more of my students didn’t attend: because they weren’t interested, because they had a schedule conflict, or because they didn’t feel comfortable going.

Those who were uninterested may not have understood what the event was about, or why it would be relevant to their lives. They might also have not cared about the issue. I expect that some didn’t care because they don’t consider education to be about doing anything except attending classes and fulfilling requirements for graduation. What is the purpose of university education? How does that purpose relate to fulfilling graduation requirements? Is that purpose related to doing anything outside of fulfilling graduation requirements?

Those who had schedule conflicts may have had a class at the time of the event, but many had work or family obligations. It’s obviously impossible to schedule anything such that no one has any conflicting events. But scheduling is made more difficult by the many obligations most of our students confront daily. Many of those obligations should take precedence over engaging in the intellectual life of the university. What is the relative value of engaging in that intellectual life of the university compared to these other obligations?

Those who were uncomfortable about attending may feel alienated from the life of the university. That could be because of language or culture gaps: even the notion of “intellectual life” may make someone feel unwanted or uninvited. Others may have a health or mental health related reason. I know I often skip events on campus, even events I am interested in, because of anxiety. I know it’s not avoiding anxious situations is not a very positive response to anxiety, but after a long work day, with my energy reserves low, it’s sometimes too much of a burden to summon the fortitude to tough it out. Whose university is it? Whose intellectual life is it?

This is a complex issue. I usually think about it in simple terms, based on my own experience as an undergraduate student. My life as an undergraduate student was not similar to most here at Stan State. I come from a relatively privileged background, and my parents paid my tuition to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (tuition would have been a bit higher there, in constant dollars, than tuition here at Stan State now). I had a job, 20 hours a week, in the library, to pay for books and other expenses. I lived on campus. In addition to classes and work, I spent hours and hours every week, on campus, talking to my professors in their offices, reading in the library, and just prowling around the academic buildings, seeing what was going on. I went to some kind of university academic-related event about every other week—a public lecture by a visiting scholar, a film screening, a play, an art display, a poetry reading, you name it, I would go, especially if there was free food. None of this was for class, or for graduation requirements, or for credit, but just because I saw there were opportunities to do these things, and I wanted to do them. It mattered to me because I had an actively curious intellect, and because I wanted to be an active member of the university. Not only that, but I felt like the university was mine to explore and even exploit in those ways. My feeling was that faculty in their offices were fair game for me to go talk to, about anything at all; that the library was an open invitation to read anything at all about anything at all; and that the art studios, theaters, and architecture department were there for my own entertainment and stimulation. Nobody told me I wasn’t allowed in.

My way of approaching college life was unusual then, and would be even more unusual now. For one thing, my economic situation was very different from what a larger and larger majority of students face today. A lot has changed about the financing of so-called public higher education: fees are higher, and textbook costs are astronomically higher. A lot has changed about the economic conditions of everyday life, and about public funding for a great many human needs.

I imagine it is also the case that the culturally prevailing ideas about the value of higher education have changed. If it was unusual in my undergrad days for students to think of college as an intentional, transformative set of experiences, I think now it sounds almost goofy to suggest this. The cultural idea we have of higher education now emphasizes job preparation to such an extent, that it’s hard for many people to imagine it can do anything else.

The cultural role of higher education has changed also because the demographics of college student populations have changed. Back when I attended, UNCC had more than the usual number of “non-traditional” students—which means students who are not 18-22 years old, and who did not begin college immediately after high school and expect to complete college in four years. At Stan State today, most of our students are non-traditional students. On top of that, a huge majority are first-generation college students, many are immigrants, many more are the children of immigrants, and many do not primarily speak English (the de facto language of teaching on our campus).

When I take all that into consideration, I realize that my own experience of undergraduate education was incredibly privileged, but also that I took every last advantage of it that I could. That immeasurably enriched my education and my life. Because I know how full, rich, and happy the experience of participation in the intellectual life of the university was for me, I want that for everyone. This also indicates what I think university education is, what it is for, and what value it has.

But who is it for? Remember, I was privileged. I didn’t doubt where my next meal was coming from (not until grad school). I had the resources to take advantage of the university. I didn’t receive the message, not once, never ever ever, that university education was not for me.

What do you value about university education? What are you getting from it? What could you get from it? How?

If you did not attend the Academic Freedom Forum because you couldn’t afford to (i.e., your schedule made it impossible), because you weren’t interested, or because you were uncomfortable about coming, this is not your problem. It is a problem concerning the institution as a whole and all of our relations to it. It is a problem regarding our economic, cultural, and social statuses, and, yes, of classism, racism, sexism, prejudice against different ethnicities, against different linguistic groups. The university is not somehow outside of the society, and the social conflicts and problems in our society are reflected in everything that goes on in the university.

My question is what we can do to make university education as valuable to you as it can be, and as it should be?

Ella Fitzgerald Sings Every Song Ever

I am listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book. I adore Ella Fitzgerald. I think there should have been an Ella Fitzgerald recording project called Ella Fitzgerald Sings Every Song Ever.

I am unabashedly biased in her favor, and can think of only one or two instances in all the recorded music I have of hers that I think could even have been improved, let alone where I think she made a mistake—and those are on imported discs of unknown and dubious provenance.

The impression I get so often listening to Ella Fitzgerald is that she sang on the basis of a kind of Necessity. Her voice had astonishing range and power in almost all registers, great emotional scope and depth, and did not lack delicacy, although she is not well known for it. One of the glorious things about the recordings we call the Song Books is the way they display her ability to take quite varied material and treat it as both the material that it was and also make it her own. She could take even Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers numbers that seem a little corny or square, and make them fresh while remaining paradoxically quaint or out-of-time.

All of it seems to be precisely what had to happen, a kind of singular perfection of each song—an odd thing to say about jazz-ish interpretations of popular songs, I realize. In those rare cases in which I prefer someone else’s version of a song, I still perceive something necessary and complete in what Ella did with it. It’s perplexing to me in a deeply satisfying way, and that’s why I can’t help returning to her. Her singing was a kind of Hegelian absolute of popular song, I think.

I think playing Ella Fitzgerald, and explaining what she’s doing, would be a good way to explain Hegel’s philosophical method.

turning point

I’m in a book club on campus discussing a book about the situation of first-generation college students. Among the things we talked about were the different attitudes first generation students tend to have about college education and the work they have to do in classes. Among the issues was that we as faculty have expectations about the appropriate valuing of and attitude toward coursework, and our first-generation (and poor, working-class) students come with a different set. For instance, when I assign an article to read for class, and say that I expect my students to read and prepare to discuss the article in class, I mean that they should read carefully and work to understand the text. I say this specifically to them, too. But they approach the text in a way of their own, maybe at the end of a 6 am-to-midnight day of work, school, and family responsibilities. At that point, they don’t have much time or attention to devote to a complicated philosophy text, and at best, they skim through it.

On a drive home from Stockton to Turlock, Lauren and I talked more about it. She said, brilliantly, that my students reading these articles is like me reading Husserl in German. German is a foreign language to me, and I’m not fluent in it. Reading Husserl in German is slow and painstaking. I have to look up many words, stop and restart sentences, sometimes practically translate the whole thing rather than actually read it. Not only is the philosophical language foreign to my students, sometimes the text is also in a language foreign to them.

Now, I understood this implicitly, but the explicit statement is helpful for knowing what they’re going through. Plus, I knew immediately, telling them about this would be help my students understand not only that I empathize, but more importantly, what their relationship is to these texts, and what kind of work it may take to read them.

So I have had this conversation with three of my classes. I emphasized the need to go through this slow process, indeed its indispensability, and my eagerness to go through it with them. I said I believe they take a couple different strategies to reading that are unhelpful: giving up, and skating over passages they didn’t understand. In both cases, my assigning the articles achieves nothing.

I offered a different strategy, like the one I take with Husserl. I go as slow as I need to. I look up the words as I go, rebuild each sentence, then a whole paragraph, and often re-read passages four or five times before moving on to the next part. Today a student said that she does the same thing with our articles, and although she finds it frustrating sometimes, in the end she understands them, and it seemed obvious this provided meaningful satisfaction to her.

I challenged my classes to read this way, as much as they can, and that this was how to prepare for class. I also said that if they came to a passage in an article that they didn’t know how to get through, it was worth our time to stop there and work on that passage.

Every semester, each of my classes has a turning point—a single class session that changes everything about the class. It demands attention of even profoundly disaffected students who typically prefer to sit through classes simmering in contempt. For the students who are willing and already buying in, it turns everything upside down. It’s a class session outside of ordinary classtime. If I were into that kind of thing, I’d want to invoke Mircea Eliade and say that this class happened in sacred time, but it might do to relate it to Thomas Kuhn and say it’s a form of revolutionary science, a paradigm shift. The class session always turns reflection on what is going on in the class itself. The discussion is directly and provocatively about how they do or don’t do their work; how they relate to philosophy, to other classes, to each other, and to me; and about their responses, desires, and fears about the class, about learning, and in some way, really, about life. The class shivers from the unexpected candor and the openness to whatever happens next. It’s exhilarating and feels weirdly risky and naughty, and I can’t predict the outcome.

a couple notes about teaching difficult texts, part 2

Yesterday I wrote about teaching using small group discussions, as part of trying to get at some reflection on reading aloud in class and how that’s going this semester. I feel like there’s more preliminary to say.

I have my classes read difficult material. I write it into my syllabus. I tell my students so in class. “You will read things you don’t immediately understand,” I say. “Expect to have difficulty. When you do, make notes about it. Ask about it in class, because I promise you, everyone in the room will also have difficulty. You might feel shy about it, or like you’re the only one. Trust me: you’re not the only one.”

I explain that their responsibilities are to read assignments prior to class discussion, to look up unfamiliar words and ideas, not only in an ordinary dictionary, but in specialized reference works related to the field, and to take notes and ask questions about the articles. I start every discussion of an article by asking for overall questions, or clarifications of particular words or passages.

I have three justifications for my choices of reading assignments. The first is pedagogical, the second is disciplinary, and the third is political.

The pedagogical justification is that the course is supposed to develop critical thinking skill. The ability to analyze and critique complex material and ideas can only be developed by reading complex material presenting complex ideas. I sometimes set up an article in advance by explaining something about the author’s way of thinking (e.g., “Peter Singer is a prominent ethicist, most known for writing about vegetarianism and animal rights”), or by providing guiding questions on the reading (e.g., “Why does the Clarke conclude that Baby L’s parents did not have the right to demand treatment?”). Sometimes I don’t provide any set up, but just remind my classes that they should come to class with their questions. Sometimes I have them bring a written question.

The disciplinary justification is that philosophy courses should involve reading philosophers’ own writing, as much as possible. It would be much easier to read a synopsis of Onora O’Neill’s article on paternalism and patient autonomy in medicine, but there’s no substitute for reading O’Neill’s own writing. Philosophy is in large part a tradition of texts. The article by O’Neill is a splendid example of the style of British-trained academic philosophers: abstract, concise, and universalizing. Taking a philosophy class ought to expose a student to stuff like that.

The political justification is that articles written in academic and professional journals are in a coded language that excludes most readers, and this exclusion should be resisted by learning as much as possible to break the code. Professions are proprietary about their knowledge bases, and this serves to legitimize their claim to expertise, and their power and authority. In teaching ethics, I’m always aware that almost all the messages my students have ever received about ethics have been pronouncements by authority figures. It would be a cruel irony if an ethics class taught them to replace one set of authority figures (churches, family, cultural hegemony) with another (ethicists).

Again, I tell my classes about this. None of these agendas are secret. I also refer back to them frequently.

Summing up the situation, I give my students difficult things to read, and explain why I do so, and what I want them to do with these things, and why I want them to do it. We spend most of our class sessions digging into the reading material and the ideas presented. We then expand on that into the broader implications of those ideas. An approach I use very frequently is small group discussion in which each group has an assigned question (usually) and is responsible for responding, based on the text. While they give those responses in class, I take dictation, and sometimes adding my own notes, or prompting them to add more. Their responses then become the basis of a second round of discussion involving the whole class, before I correct, clarify, and try to deepen the response. I then ask the class to take a step back to consider how the whole discussion, and the texts under discussion, bear on an issue or topic. In that way, we move from interpreting details of some particular passage of an article, to the whole article, to connecting it back to the overarching theme of a unit of the course. 

This semester I've restructured my classes completely, so that we begin with a plainly described "situation" in which ethics and ethical questions matter. In Bioethics, it's the Ashley Treatment. In Professional Ethics, it's long-term effects of head injuries in professional sports. Each article gives another bit of nuance or another way to think about the situation, sometimes but not always directly related to the situation itself. When we return to the overall situation, I try to help my students synthesize ideas and rethink their initial reactions. 

a couple notes about teaching difficult texts, 1

We read some tough stuff in my general education Professional Ethics and Bioethics courses, ranging from overstuffed academese to extremely dense philosophical reasoning. I tell my classes at the start of the term that the reading will not be like a textbook, is not written for a general audience, or even a college-student audience, and that they will have to work to understand. Most of my students have difficulty with it. Each student fails to understand at least one significant article or key concept in an article.

My impression is that my students' default strategy when they have difficulty reading is to pass over the difficult passage, or even skip an article altogether. Some prefer to read the article abstracts (when present). They wait for me to tell them what the article was about. If this has been a successful strategy in their schooling, it may be because they have been rewarded for attending to the teacher's explanations, and not for working out what a complex text means. It may be a more canny strategy, expressing a desire to expend least effort to obtain a completed degree requirement.

I attempt to block that strategy, because key goals of my courses are to help students develop their abilities to analyze complex texts and to follow and critique complex reasoning. In short, I am trying to provoke them to do the opposite of what appears to me to be their basic go-to approach.

One of my counter-strategies is challenging them directly, by playing devil's advocate to a position taken by an author and asking for its defense, or by suggesting that the author is trying to trick them into believing something they shouldn't. I want to suggest to my students that they need to protect themselves against charlatanry, or act in self-respect and not accept something told to them by an authority. This is low-stakes, and I guess works to encourage about 1/4 of students to take up the task.

Another counter-strategy is requiring that each student discuss the texts and ideas of articles in detail, in papers they write. Obviously this is high-stakes, and as a motivation to read and analyze, fails overall. I don't remove this requirement from papers, though, because it's justified intellectually. I know that requirements motivate students, at least to comply with the letter of them, but I also know my students have wildly disparate ideas about what it means to "discuss" the articles, let alone "in detail." Still, this does motivate the most grade-anxious.

A middle-stakes counter-strategy is small-group discussions about textual passages. I break the class into groups of 3-5 (depending on class size and numbers of questions or passages), and give each group a question regarding an assigned reading. I instruct them specifically to go back to the article text, find the relevant passage, explain how it answers the question, and then prepare an answer to present to the whole class. They take notes on this discussion, as a group.

There's a lot going on in this activity. I can't control all of it, even if I wanted to. The students interpret their task, keep themselves on the task, interpret their question, interpret the text, compose an answer to what they interpret the question to mean, and, I hope, question themselves and one another about their interpretations, about the text, about their question, and about their task. It could have a self-recursive aspect, in other words.

The questions range from broad, highly conceptual or applicative questions (e.g., "How does the author's idea of 'best interest' help explain what's at stake in the Ashley Treatment?" or "What is 'horizon of ability?'") to very textual (e.g., "What does the author mean by 'the best interests of an incompetent person are simply speculative?'"). I think both poles of this range are important. Most group discussions include some of each.

Students respond in various ways. Some groups present detailed written answers that the groups spokesperson reads from their notes. Some groups misunderstand absolutely everything about the task. Some groups are clearly unprepared. That all shows up when they present. I believe all the students can easily hear the differences.

Although I often reflect on my own responses, I have never set down for myself any sort of guidelines or rules. Here's what I think I do.

As groups present, I take dictation, typing on my laptop connected to a data projector. I type verbatim, or a close paraphrase, under the typed question they are answering, in a Word document. I type whatever they say, for good or ill, whether they have really followed the prompt or not. I do not scold individual groups for failing to be prepared or for missing the point of the task or question or text.

I do, however, correct them, in one of several ways. One approach I take is to open the floor for other comments or responses. I imagine that if other students point in the direction of a more accurate understanding, it sounds different than when I do so -- by which I mean, it may motivate and encourage differently. It also makes more students at a time responsible for doing this work. It also provides a chance for other students to try out their interpretations or to express their own difficulties.

Another is to correct them directly, which I often do when a group has gone terribly wrong. Often I highlight the text I just typed from their discussion, and delete it from the Word doc, while beginning to explain how the response missed the point. Often I go back to the text, and read it aloud, and then open the floor to ask what it means. Often I break down an individual sentence or phrase, or even a single word, to try to show how the meaning of a passage, and thus a concept, is constructed by an author. By doing this, I try to demonstrate how they could themselves do that work while reading, and I hope that my students hear a meaningful and satisfying connection between that analytical reading work and answering the question I asked for the discussion. I also give them the meta-remark that this is the kind of reading work that is sometimes required.

I have mixed results. Maybe there's too much going on in this activity. I like complexity, though, and I also believe these discussions almost always lead into the best, most productive class sessions. I have two main dissatisfactions, about which I'll write more later. First, these group discussions, while they can bring groups of students together, also divide students, into what I'll call for short intellectual haves and have-nots. Students who are following and diligent sometimes help bring around those who are not, but often the students who are successfully doing the reading work are impatient with those who are not. Second, classes, groups, and individual students, vary in their focus and effort, for a variety of reasons, and so group discussions are inconsistent. Two sections of the same course have very different experiences and rates of learning based on this, and a class or group culture starts to emerge that reinforces either productive or unproductive habits.

is the “Steven Salaita Case” about academic freedom?

Steven Salaita was offered a tenured professor position at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to teach American Indian Studies. He resigned from his position at Virginia Tech to accept the offer. Salaita’s provocative anti-Zionist comments on Twitter were then brought to the attention of administrators and members of the board of directors of the University of Illinois, leading to the withdrawal ofthe offer of employment. (Some have referred to this event as his having been “fired” by the university, but he never was employed by the university.) No one has denied that his comments on Twitter were the reason for withdrawing the offer.

In the heated discussion of the case taking place through media (especially social media), in communication to and from the university administration, and within other organizations, academic freedom has been evoked. The withdrawal of the employment offer has been characterized as a violation of Salaita’s academic freedom, and has been defended on the basis of protecting academic freedom from Salaita’s mode of expression and/or views.

To what does academic freedom apply? Those evoking it to protest or defend the university’s action seem to agree that academic freedom applies in the case of comments made on Twitter. Why would that be? Does academic freedom cover expressions made outside of academia? Or is Twitter use by an academic de facto academic expression? Is there a standard of judgment to rule expressions in or out of the academic field? Twitter posts, by definition 140 characters or less, do not conform to conventions of academic writing or other expression, though perhaps a series of posts would, if used as a (rather awkward) publication medium. Since academic expressions generally involve engagement in reasoned discussion under prescriptive rules for coherence, relevance, evidence, etc., a single post (and perhaps especially an inflammatory post) expressing an opinion is not a strong candidate for inclusion in this field.

If so, then it seems academic freedom is being applied outside the field of academic expression. How could this be? Two possibilities are that academic freedom applies to some not-yet-defined field of expression broader than the academic, or applies to a person rather than to expression. Some of the protesters’ phraseology (“Salaita’s academic freedom was violated,” e.g.) suggests the latter. To what persons, for what reasons, does academic freedom apply? In the case of Salaita, it would seem to apply to him because of his status as a professor. In other words, the academic or non-academic forum or substance of his expression is not relevant, because his expressions should be protected by academic freedom simply because he is.

To reiterate, Salaita’s academic freedom is in question just because he is a professor. Yet he was not a professor at the University of Illinois, and was not a professor at Virginia Tech, indeed not a professor anywhere, when the offer of employment was withdrawn. I am being precious here: he was not a professor in the narrow technical sense that he was not then employed in that capacity. Obviously, professor is a title as well as an employment status. This line of reasoning leads to a messy, vague conclusion. Salaita’s academic freedom is in question if professors have academic freedom just because they are professors, and if that applies to the person and not primarily to their expressions as professors (or to the forum or substance of their expressions).

So, let’s say that academic freedom applies to professors. Who are professors? Now I wonder just how precious I was being before, since being a professor depends on having or having had an employment status as a professor. A professor is a college faculty member who is eligible for tenure or has tenure; a professor could also be anyone who teaches at a college, but colleges and universities deny tenure eligibility to 75% of those who teach, which would make this a rather peculiar way to draw the distinction. In that case, what a college instructor says, in class or in an academic journal article, following the standards and practices of academic expression, would not be protected by academic freedom because the instructor is not a professor.