coldhearted scientist وداد

Four out of five sections are finished and I just want to get this manuscript out. To that end I am (a) in a writing binge that could not sustain a book or even a different kind of article, but is good for this; and (b) “just writing,” in the way I understand this (like Dame Eleanor Hull, when I “just write” I do not “free write,” I still compose, I just give the current state of my ideas primacy and leave worrying about the current state of the field for later).

A question I had: if the entrepreneurial university is a fait accompli, would one perhaps best wash one’s hands of the matter and move on, be a crack researcher, and consider one’s institutional home to be some other project like, perhaps, the UN Indigenous Peoples Forum, or Poetry?

Not quite yet, said the lady with the alligator purse. That is why I am writing my text. We are all losing, says Chris Hedges; we are not escaping; “market rule” is irrational; corporations are ruling everything and cannot be voted out; we have to rise up somehow, et cetera.

Also: the adjuncts are on the move, and the post-academics are complaining, so there is a movement to join.

Keywords: simulacrum, and Margolis also says icon — think reification
Idea: √There has been this whole drumbeat about how tenure is ONLY job security, and by eroding the power of faculty they MAKE it only job security. Now, with MOOCification and the devaluing not only of research but of expertise, they really are going to be able to have college not be college but a college-like experience, a simulacrum.
Materials: √Lombardi, √Burstein’s review of the Krause book, √Burstein’s comment on governance (simulacrum of faculty governance), Margolis
Question: how to operate in the entrepreneurial university?
Context: √Financial crisis, budget, Jindal, my university’s response … and also the possibility that with the GRAD act and this budget crisis, what they are really after is the destruction of the HBCUs
Quotation: Walter Benjamin; Maples Arce (new city, dwarfed workers, workers’ parade, a Bolshevik super-poem) … I should end the piece with a discussion of these, adding in the Benjamin quotation √to which I have alluded obliquely already, revolutionaries are the ones trying to stop the train careening to disaster)
Reference: Marshall Berman, the shock of the modern? Administrators tell us we are just resistant to change…
Comment by e-mail to my other piece: I have just read your opinion piece and wish you would send it to the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. √Perhaps the syntax of the first page would need simplifying even for the Times, but the connections you make among MOOCs, digital producers, and governmental budget reductions are crucial to understanding the current crisis in higher education.
√Benjamin Ginsberg, in “The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters”, (Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780199782444) writes a scathing attack on what he catalogues as the cancerous bloat of US university administrations beginning about 1975.
Corporatization: The universities are increasingly seeking to own intellectual property created by the faculty. I don’t know if they have gone after textbook royalties (yet) but they will want the rights to MOOCs. I think it will be quite strange for a university to be making money with the images of lectures by long dead professors. We will be turned, not into simulacra but into something worse — icons. You remember all the trouble caused by the golden calf. (Personal communication Margolis; I do not know that I can cover all aspects of corporatization here, but yes.)

I have something to say, that is related. I think it is stingy to complain about graduate students who haven’t done well or faculty who have not been happy as traitors to the field. As if they were the ones responsible for what is going on.

Axé.