Campus Walkways and the Scene of Teaching

The appearance of the first number of Gathering Voices seems fitting as Vassar comes to the end of a proud celebration of 150 years of our history at a still troubled time for our campus community. A wise friend points out that Vassar’s history offers ample evidence that the college has survived like periods of aimlessness and neglect in the past and eventually come to thrive again. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that recent years of the erosion of vision and leadership into what seems empty sloganeering may cease and that we will renew our selves from the roots and margins. Right now it may be a desert, she says, but it will bloom again.

What comes to mind for me when she says this are the uncharacteristically worn edges of the lawns along our campus walkways as well as the littered public spaces that have come to greet visitors in the aftermath of the oft-evoked “financial crisis.” The physical decline of the campus mirrors the precipitous decline in morale and the undermining of a shared sense of mission among faculty, staff, and administration alike. It used to be that a diverse group, from the president to the buildings and grounds workers, cared about, and cared for, these worn patches because they knew that doing so signified pride in the deeply rooted and greening expanse at the core of our campus. Reversing the neglect of the margins of our human community is likewise critical to reviving the core of the broad expanse of the liberal arts at Vassar as we head toward the last half of our second century.

To do so, however, we will have to learn to put aside the empty utterances that litter our public discourse, paying attention to the core of what we have to say to one another, inwardly renewing ourselves by attending to voices that for years now have been increasingly marginalized and worn down. Rather than repeated mantras of “Go to the source” or the cascade of emails to the Vassar community about “the campus climate,” we will need once again to locate the source of our vision in an inclusive campus community based on real appreciation of our differences and their constitutive value to us. That is, we need to once again come to see media services assistant, campus security officer, administrative assistant, housekeeper, plumber, office specialist, professor, dean, vice-president, and so on each as critical, individual elements of what the late Bill Readings in The University in Ruins called “the scene of teaching.”

To come to see clearly the value of our differences, however, we will have to break through a fog of neo-liberal discourse that has evidenced itself (the passive intentional here) in easy speech. Such speech gives lip service to the liberal arts while changing the classroom to a counting room where marketing discourse transforms intellectual diversity into division, pitting arts against sciences, and administration, faculty, and staff against one another. Some years ago, Ahmet Tonak, an economist on the faculty of Simon’s Rock College, spoke of the complicity of “(neo-) liberal arts colleges…in a national trend of unfair labor practices.” The geographer and social theorist, David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as the idea that “the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions” and suggests that neoliberalism thus “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”

It was this colonizing tendency that led the late Bill Readings to argue in The University in Ruins against a characteristically devalued slogan of neoliberal higher education, that is, the so-called pursuit of excellence. Readings characterized “the new University of Excellence” as “a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, more interested in profit margins than in thought.” For Readings, foregrounding the pursuit of fuzzily defined excellence allows universities and colleges “to understand [themselves] solely in terms of the structure of corporate administration.”

“The very idea of ‘excellence’” Readings argues, “is devoid of meaning” and has become “merely a rallying cry to unite the academic troops as bureaucratic administrations attempt to keep their universities financially sound.” For Readings this kind of excellence “has no concept to call its own” and instead becomes “a purely internal unit of value that effectively brackets all questions of reference or function.”

Readings warns that “a repetition of the radical postures of the late 1960s is not adequate to resist the discourse of excellence” which he says “can incorporate campus radicalism as proof of the excellence of campus life,” thus giving lip-service to diversity of thinking while at the same time homogenizing and repackaging it. Yet for Readings “this is not to say… that no resistance to the discourse of excellence is possible…, [r]ather we must think differently about the shape such resistance can take.” He sees the locale of resistance emerging in “the scene of teaching” where “what is at stake is… the value in teaching. To whom and to what are teachers, students and institutions accountable? And in what terms?”

Here I think of one of my favorite people at Vassar, a security officer, let’s call him Vic, a former police officer with many years of seniority at Vassar, who early on in the midst of administrative talk about “adjustment[s] to the cost structure” – that is, layoffs and “encouraged retirements”– but well before the campus plant and its plants began their decline, stopped me one spring evening to say that he didn’t recognize the campus anymore. “I used to think that what I do kept things flowing and made it a little easier for the kids to learn. I was a part of it. Now I feel like I just work here.”

Whether he would have recognized it as such, Vic characterized his efforts in terms of what Readings, following Bakhtin, called “a specific chronotope … radically alien to the notion of accountable time upon which the excellence of capitalist-bureaucratic management and bookkeeping depend.” In Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin speaks of the chronotope “(literally, ‘time space’)” as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.” While Bakhtin applies the term to literature, taking care to specify that he “would not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture,” Readings is right, I think, to appropriate it to discuss higher education institutions. For at their best they, too, are works of art rather than locales for commerce. Just as for Bakhtin in “the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole,” so, too, is a campus community at its best. There, again quoting Bakhtin, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”

For most of his years here, Vic thought of himself as part of “the scene of teaching,” an embodied representation of Vassar education, and thus a stakeholder in “the value in teaching.” Readings describes the resistant chronotope much as Vic used to see himself, in terms of keeping things flowing; which for Readings means “keep[ing] the question of value open in regard to pedagogy… neither accepting the accounting logic of bureaucrats nor simply ignoring it in the name of a transcendental value to education.”
In order to keep questions of value open and resist corporatization, Readings proposes a “community of dissensus” as a much more difficult and complex guard against not only the aforementioned “accounting logic of bureaucrats,” but also against hollow and uninhabited claims for “the transcendental value to education.” One might think of the community of dissensus as a way to water and rake both margins and center, keeping lofty words like “excellence,” as well as hallowed phrases such as “multidisciplinary learning and living communities,” or “going to the source” from being compressed into dry pellets that fall by the wayside as litter and do not bloom.

Ironically what desiccates and compresses us are the empty insistences upon shared mission and values that are proffered in place of a genuine recognition that mission and values alike reside in our differences and how freely and widely we are able bring them to our common enterprise. Readings argues instead for a “community of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common,” and that

would not be dedicated either to the project of a full understanding (autonomy) or to a communicational consensus as to the nature of its unity. Rather, it would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex. To put this another way, such a community would have to be understood on the model of dependency rather than emancipation. We are, bluntly speaking, addicted to others, and no amount of twelve-stepping will allow us to overcome that dependency, to make it the object of a fully autonomous subjective consciousness.

It seems clear that many of us are ready to reinhabit a space of complex differences and thriving margins, indeed long to do so, whether or not there is leadership that seems committed to maintaining such a space. I know Vic is. Because I teach evening sections in a computer classroom, it happens that sometimes one or another security guard will try the door to make sure it is secure while we are meeting there. Vic usually goes one step more, entering respectfully and wishing us all good evening in a softly reassuring voice. Usually he’ll ask the students if they are having a good discussion and if I am doing a good job. They laugh and answer, yes, the way I recall myself responding aloud to a principal’s questions long ago when I was in a Catholic grammar school and Sister Mary Suchandso would surprise us and our teacher with an unannounced visit. I suspect this kind of momentary intrusion might annoy one or another colleague, but I always find it a comfort. I like feeling accountable to Vic for “the value in teaching” and so I am glad that he asks. I hope and trust that my students would be comfortable speaking up if I am not doing as well as I should. That Vic feels comfortable asking makes it clear how we all depend upon each other, which truly is the meaning of not just real security but real community. I just wish I didn’t still feel I had to use a pseudonym for him here, or, for that matter, that I felt comfortable naming the friend who feels sure the desert will bloom again. More than this I wish I had thanked the crews that used to dig up and seed the bare spots along the walks in the weeks before commencement when spring had returned to this magical scene of teaching.