I was glad to see Kevin writing on the strike at York U. I don’t usually take much of an interest in the annual strike there, but after reading Fulford’s remarks I had a few thoughts… Even gladder I was that Kevin and I are in broad agreement: ”education is essential… those on strike at York should have never had the opportunity to do so…”
My own take on it diverges from Kevin’s slightly — or it turns on a slightly different axis. I think this is mainly about organizational dysfunction (something I complain about at almost every opportunity). Instead of opting for one side or the other and reducing it down to a ‘right to strike’ vs. an ‘obligation to educate,’ I’m inclined to think that York University is probably just too damn big, with too many administrative layers and office-holders, not enough room for good sense to make adjustments and soften the edge of policy, which leaves too many nooks and crannies for professional frustrations to germinate and grow and replicate into widespread outbreaks like their dealing with now.
As I was thinking about it I found this article on First Principles (via 3qd), “Last Things: On the First and Last Professor,” which addresses the more corporate attitude in higher education in general:
The lives of students have no place for the “impractical” enterprise of simply knowing. Everything is now practical, “down-to-earth,” job-oriented. No one, it is said, cares for things “for their own sakes,” to use Aristotle’s expression. As a letter to the editor said, the teachers are looking to the AFL-CIO for help.
My main concern is that we seem to be increasingly committed to the notion that education is the same as being taught. Learning is losing its vitality and vibrance. People go to school to get good jobs — and even when people take courses or read books outside the classroom, there tends to be an assumption that it must be directly useful:
No longer do we have “leisure” only “occupation” or “business” [more], to use the English of Aristotle’s term, “askolia.” And the works of leisure were, in Pieper’s famous essay, the only things that could protect our freedom, keep us from being absorbed into the absolutist state, where our souls have no transcendence but only a function as a part in the whole. We are all employees now, more and more even of the state, not master-craftsmen or those who know things higher than utility. Our virtue depends on what we do or make, not on the habits of what we are, habits that we form in our own souls by our choices and self-discipline.
I’m at the other extreme. I love learning for its own sake — I need to learn for its own sake — and there’s nothing that would change that. Which isn’t to say I’ve never been deeply annoyed when people condescendingly ask, “But what do you plan to do with that when you’re done???”
The First Principles article develops its theme after Stanley Fish’s recent blog post, “The Last Professor,” in reference to a book by the same name by Frank Donoghue, subtitled, “The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” The fate of the humanities (as they have been known in the past) is to cease to essentially exist, having been displaced by the more practical, utilitarian interests. According to Fish’s account of Donoghue’s book:
[That] vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.
As higher education becomes more rigidly organized and industrial, the liberal arts (and certainly the ‘contemplative arts’) will have to find new accommodations. But that doesn’t have to be something to lament; it may be something to celebrate.
As much as I’m sentimentally disinclined to agree, our world really needs large-scale, efficient educational institutions that teach applied knowledge and skills. The big universities like York might be going through a phase of adjustment — learning to develop strategies for coping with large workforces, composed as they are now of people who expected a little more professional autonomy but are coming to find that job security in the 21st century means being beholden to the dumb laws of the almighty organization…
But there’s no law that says education has to happen within institutional parameters, nor does it have to result in some kind of certificate, nor even must it be taught.
Ironically, by pushing the contemplative arts out of Big Education, they may actually go through a kind of renaissance, finding revitilization as individuals who truly live for it to have to struggle for their opportunities and working resources. It introduces a greater degree of chance, which in turn generates variety, which in turn feeds the process of enrichment and genuine creativity.
Pingback: Best Of: Education | brianfrank.ca