Fétiches (SANG D ENCRE) (French Edition)

The principle of equality of opportunity should be applied at the university level and the best way to implement that principle would be to seek for free education. The slowest road on that path would be to freeze tuition fees. By not adapting the fees to a higher cost of living, this policy would amount to a progressive reduction slowly leading us toward free education.

Some may be tempted to believe that the middle ground should be instead an indexation to inflation. Such a position presupposes that the current fees are just. But as already shown, since they have a negative impact on accessibility, the current fees are not just. They do not exemplify justice as fairness because they go against equality of opportunity. The fight we are engaged in is by no means a Quebec issue only. This concept is not one that entails that universities should be entirely subordinated to the private sector.

The idea is rather that universities tend to adopt the model of private corporations for themselves. This situation is now observed all over the world. Universities are more and more looking like companies. Professors become mere employees whose productivity is calculated by the number of diplomas that they generate, the number of publications that they produce and the number of grants that they get. All faculties must generate profits or at least have balanced budgets, and equalisation payments between faculties must disappear. Universities have to compete against each other in order to attract students who have become clients.

Big budgets must be devoted to publicity hoping to steel the clients from other universities 1. In the first ten weeks of the conflict, the Government representatives refused to sit down and negotiate. They kept this paternalistic attitude toward the students even if, among other things, a demonstration of more than one hundred thousand persons had taken place in the streets of Montreal. Then, in the first round of negotiations that finally took place, the government refused to discuss the main issue, which was the increase in tuition fees.

The government was also opposed to the idea of a moratorium and rejected mediation. This is yet another instance of paternalism. During the negotiations, students, for their part, made two huge compromises. First, they accepted the increase but agreed to create a Committee that would investigate the financial situation of universities.

The Committee would have at least six months to come up with suggestions and recommendations concerning cuts that could be made. And if more money were to be saved, it could even serve to reduce tuition fees themselves. The principals of universities were totally against this solution and privately informed the government that they could not accept this solution to the conflict. The second compromise of students associations took place in the month of June, during the last meetings with government representatives.

On this occasion, government representatives first repeated the compromises that they were ready to make. Finally, they proposed a policy that would enable students to reimburse their loans in proportion with their own working revenues. Students rejected these proposals essentially because the grants would help at best only 60 students. For the remaining others, they would have to live with loans that would increase their own debt. The idea of reimbursing loans in proportion of revenue is surely a nice idea, but we already have a similar system with income tax.

The only difference is that the proposal of the government is associated with higher tuition fees.

This unjust measure refrains poor people from attending university and goes against the principle of equality of opportunity. The government representatives explained that any other solution would have to be of this kind. It would have to involve no further costs on the part of the government. So students came back with the following proposal. They would eliminate completely the tax credit for the first two years, and this would enable the government to freeze tuition fees for two years without losing a single penny.

That is, their revenue would have been as if the increase of tuition fees was implemented. This was a huge compromise, but the government rejected the offer and surprisingly decided to leave the negotiation table. A Social Crisis The battle does not concern only the issue of tuition fees. However, the debt was under control and slowly being reduced in its relation to the GDP until the financial crisis occurred and forced responsible governments to intervene against the recession by making investments in order to stimulate the economy, thus creating deficits that would contribute to raise the debt.

It is in this context that it also wants to raise tuition fees. The philosophy is that the user of a service pays for that service. But at the same time, the government literally squanders its natural resources to private companies or requests very low charges for their exploitation. The government gets charges only on the profit made by mining companies and not on the exploitation itself, and it does not require transformation to take place in Quebec. This also contributed to a revolt on the part of the left wing segments of the population. This is the neo-liberal approach: It supports them with low tariffs on electricity and low charges on the exploitation of natural resources.

Governments accept deregulation of financial markets and institutions, as well as tax havens. All these measures are responsible for the financial crisis and they are responsible for a large part for a high public debt. After nine years in Government, the Quebec Liberals lost their credibility. There were numerous scandals involving Ministers and MPs in the Liberal government. For this reason, Scandals have repeatedly been revealed in the medias involving the city of Montreal, the city of Laval and many other municipalities.

CAHIERS DE L'IDIOTIE no 6 D/R L'UNIVERSITÉ by fred sable - Issuu

All these events occurred in the context of an international financial crisis and in the context of the movement Occupy. So all the ingredients were in place and all the planets in alignment for a major crisis: With such turnouts, one would have expected a responsible government to act promptly in order to resolve the conflict. But instead of trying to end the conflict through negotiations, the government decided to pass a piece of legislation that would suspend classes in colleges and universities, and force a return during the second half of August in order to end the Winter term that had been interrupted by the strike.

This piece of legislation, Bill 78, severely limits freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of association 1.

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It denies the existence of a right to strike for students, a right that had always been de facto respected in the past. It denies the freedom of conscience of professors, teachers and lecturers, and imposes upon them to force the return of students in classrooms. An Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend http: As soon as the law was adopted on May 17 th, it was systematically denounced by almost everyone.

Five hundred lawyers offered their services to students associations and, ultimately, 18 of them representing persons belonging to 70 associations, unions, and federations decided to file a suit denouncing the law as unconstitutional. The law was contested in the Quebec superior court of justice. There has never been in Quebec such a confrontation involving dozens of associations, labour unions, students unions and professors unions.

Hundreds of lawyers walked in their robe in the streets of Montreal to protest against the law. The Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse also denounced the law on July 19, in a document of more than 50 pages 3. The denunciation also came from the population. In hundreds of places all over Quebec, hundreds of thousands came out of their houses to bang pans with wooden spoons. They came out like this everyday during several weeks. The news medias would report each day a new demonstration at night. It was no longer just students and their professors, teachers, and lecturers.

It was the population as a whole expressing its frustration against the government 4. The provincial elections took place on September 4, The second one abrogated Bill. In the struggle that took place between the students and the Liberal Government, the students have won. They needed this victory in order to find the energy, the courage, and the determination to continue their battle for justice.

What are we to conclude after all is said and done? My thoughts are directed towards college and university administrators. The only allies of the Government were the college and university principals of Quebec. They bear a huge responsibility not only for influencing the government to drastically increase tuition fees, but also for appearing with the Prime Minister in the media in support of Bill 78, never retracting from this position afterwards. In August, in their willingness to abide by the prescriptions of Bill 78, some even asked the police to intervene in their attempt to force students and professors to return in class and end the Winter term.

I hope that students, university professors, and college teachers will never forget that the responsibility for this huge political mess is most of all that of college and university principals. Fortunately, the red square will not become a symbol of a Falling Autumn leaf, but rather a symbol of resistance buried deep into our hearts. Ceci pointait vers un malaise plus profond. Bref, une politique de la domination de certainEs sur le plus grand nombre. Diane Lamoureux Septembre En deux endroits sur les murs, on peut apercevoir des affiches avertissant: Mais la journaliste insistait. Deux, trois policiers nous surveillaient mollement et ils ne sont pas intervenus lorsque nous avons pris la rue au lieu de rester sur le trottoir.

Le pouvoir des mots: This article offers four general observations about the kinds of argument and persuasion that are involved in current debates about the nature of universities. First, there is the need to challenge the short-circuiting of discussions about value which results from making economic growth the immediate and sufficient justification for academic activity. Second, it is important to be cautious about appearing to suggest that universities bring about, or are compatible with, every desirable social good; their functions are principally intellectual, not moral.

Third, it is vital to insist on the need for judgement rather than measurement when discussing intellectual quality and achievement. And fourth, it is important for those who wish to make the case for universities to engage the interests and sympathies of a wide range of non-academic publics: We should not assume that our fellow-citizens will be deaf to such arguments.

On the contrary, we have a duty to future generations to try to ensure that the intellectual and cultural value of universities is widely understood and supported. It would be presumptuous of me to comment in detail on the situation in Quebec, although I can report that elsewhere in the world there is a great deal of interest in and support for the resistance to this market orthodoxy which is taking place there. But perhaps the most useful contribution I can make is simply to offer four very general observations about questions of justification and persuasion that are involved in all such debates about universities.

It is for colleagues in Quebec and in Canada more generally to decide whether and how these observations may bear on the particularities of the local situation. First, one of the fundamental intellectual mistakes behind current policies is the short-circuiting of the process of justification.

Obviously, I hardly need emphasize that the actual politics involve many other and perhaps more consequential forces, but this mistake is fundamental and is one which hamstrings defenders of universities unless they identify it clearly at the outset. The blend of individualism and instrumentalism characteristic of contemporary market-democracies makes contribution to economic prosperity and to consumer-satisfaction the only goal which politicians can assume will meet with universal endorsement.

Hence the constant tendency to jump The truth, of course, is that the growth and deepening of understanding contributes to human flourishing in various ways — is, indeed, partly constitutive of that flourishing — but the connections between the two are usually indirect and very long-term. We have reached the position where to describe the primary purpose of universities in terms of the deepening of human understanding about the social and natural world is dismissed as high-minded waffle, whereas to say that such activities indirectly contribute so many billion pounds to the economy is considered a powerful democratic argument.

We shall not succeed in making an effective case for universities until we succeed in contesting the assumptions behind that proposition. Second, there is a tendency for defenders of universities to want to present them as contributing to every approved social good, including the promotion of equality, social mobility, and general niceness.

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In addition, there is a tendency — this may be a rather delicate point to make when contributing to this particular journal — to present universities as naturally congruent with approved left-wing values. This seems to me a mistake both as a matter of fact and as a matter of tactics. And where these values clash, the priority for universities has to be the extension of understanding, not the furthering of desirable collateral values, however uncomfortable a position this may be.

So, in articulating the argument for education as a public good, we must be careful not to over-state the case. Champions of higher education tend to make universities not just compatible with almost all currently approved moral and political values, but the necessary, and even at times the sufficient, means of their realisation. The fact that someone can make a dazzling breakthrough in the understanding of nature while at the same time behaving abominably in other aspects of life and holding deplorable political views is not an argument against the value of scientific enquiry.

The disciplined free play of the mind over a given topic that is at the heart of scholarly and scientific enquiry is principally a cognitive achievement, not a moral one, at least not directly. Third, public debate about universities is bedevilled by the pressure to substitute measurements of quantity for judgements of quality. We should not accept that judgement is a matter of personal or arbitrary We all in fact conduct our lives on the basis of that assumption, but we sometimes seem to lose confidence in it when faced by the proposition that in public debate only that which can be measured can be considered objective.

Where their supposed findings are convenient, these are readily cited for publicity and propaganda purposes, yet the truth is that they are practically worthless. On many matters the data are not available in strictly comparable form, and the reliance on subjective and inadequate opinion surveys provides little information that is both reliable and useful.

We should challenge, in particular, the glib assumption that universities are locked in combat with each other in some form of world-wide competition, itself a transposition of larger assertions about the centrality of national economic competitiveness. The language here betrays a kind of mercantilism of the intellect, a fear that the stock of national treasure will be diminished rather than augmented by the success of enterprises elsewhere. It is remarkable how quickly and easily this language has become naturalised in the past two or three decades, even though it is damaging to the intrinsically cooperative nature of all science and scholarship.

National amour propre, ever a vain and giddy quality, comes to be invested in having universities that might give the big American powerhouses a good game. Many of the ways in which a particular university might contribute to maintaining the standards of scholarly and scientific enquiry more generally, or the ways in which a system of higher education as a whole might meet the needs of its host society, are simply disregarded — in part, of course, because there is, anyway, no means of translating the answers to such questions into the pseudo-objectivity of tabular form.

And then my fourth and last observation: It seems to me very important to emphasize that this is not a sectional cause, not the special pleading of an interest group made up of academics and current students. We have to do better at making the case to the public as a whole, the case for what is distinctive and valuable about what goes on in universities. I suspect that among the public at large there is, potentially, a much greater reservoir of interest in, and latent appreciation of, the work of universities than the current narrow and defensive official discourse ever succeeds in tapping into.

In talking to audiences outside universities some of whom may these days be graduates, of course I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas and the quest for greater understanding, whether in history and literature, or physics and biology, or any number of other fields. Some members of these audiences may not have had the chance to study these things themselves, but they very much want their children to have the opportunity to do so; others may have enjoyed only limited and perhaps not Such audiences do not want to be told that we judge the success of a university education by how much more graduates can earn than non-graduates, any more than they want to hear how much scholarship and science may indirectly contribute to GDP.

They are, rather, susceptible to the romance of ideas and the power of beauty; they want to learn about far-off times and far-away worlds; they expect to hear language used more inventively, more exactly, more evocatively than it normally is in the workaday world; they want to know that, somewhere, human understanding is being pressed to its limits, unconstrained by immediate practical outcomes.

These audiences are not all of one mind, needless to say, and not all sections of society are equally well represented among these audiences. At various points in their lives they may have other priorities, and there will always be competing demands on their interests and sympathies. But it is noticeable, and surely regrettable, how little the public discourse about universities in contemporary Britain and, I believe, elsewhere makes any kind of appeal to this widespread appreciation on the part of ordinary intelligent citizens that there should be places where these kinds of enquiries are being pursued at their highest level.

Part of the problem may be that while universities are spectacularly good at producing new forms of understanding, they are not always very good at explaining what they are doing when they do this. Of course, we should also acknowledge that, in practice, contemporary universities do not perform some of their distinctive tasks all that well, especially in such matters as contact hours in undergraduate teaching. Not to acknowledge this would be, yet again, to underestimate the intelligence of the public who are well aware that all is not well with many of our over-crowded, over-regulated institutions of higher education.

By way of concluding, let me suggest that recent discussion of universities has been impoverished not just by an almost exclusive concentration on how they are to be funded a concentration which itself colludes with the dominance of economic categories , but also by an excessive focus on universities as places of undergraduate education.

A different starting-point may be to consider what it is that we value and admire about good work in scholarship and science, and then to reflect on the conditions which seem conducive to its achievement. Universities are not quite the only places where such work is done, even now, but they unquestionably represent much the biggest concentration of such enquiry. The undergraduate teaching role is, of course, central to most universities, but it is far from being the whole story. Major universities are complex organisms, fostering an extraordinary variety of intellectual, scientific and cultural activity, and the significance and value of much that goes on within them cannot be restricted to a single national framework or to the present generation.

They have become an important medium — perhaps the single most important institutional medium — for conserving, understanding, extending, and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific, and artistic heritage of mankind. I do not pretend that building up wider public support for universities is an easy task nor that it would, by itself, be sufficient to prevent or reverse the damaging effects of current policies. But I do think we should not be so defensive about making the case for universities in the appropriate intellectual, scientific, and cultural terms, and I do think that we should not be so pessimistic or condescending in assuming in advance that large numbers of our fellow-citizens would be wholly unresponsive to a case made in such terms.

This paper reflects on a fundamental question: Combined with ongoing scepticism about the value of research, the university is engulfed by a sense of anxiety that has resulted in many institutions withdrawing from controversial debates. In this paper I argue that despite such pressures, the role of the university has never been more important.

This should be the foundation on which university programs should be built. It is what separates us from other service providers and makes universities such valuable institutions. Further, given the massive changes within our societies, how do universities actually justify themselves? Though such questions are rarely spoken inside universities, they are now never far from the minds of students, staff and administers giving rise to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Such feelings simply reflect an environment of confusion as the modern university sector attempts to understand its role in the contemporary world.

This anxiety plays out in many ways. In the post global financial crisis environment, students for example, remain anxious about their job prospects GCA Many students wonder whether their focus should be on a path to enlightenment or improving their professional proficiencies that make them more attractive to prospective employers — two aspects of an education that are not always in sync Bridgestock Academics face a different group of pressures with continually changing workloads, increasing pressures to publish, win external grants and adopt new technologies for classroom teaching Bexley, James and Arkoudis The administrators, who are often much maligned in academia, must balance the needs and desires of their students and staff in a neoliberal political environment that demands each institution, no matter its history, justifies its existence in economic terms.

Additionally, they must respond to ongoing accusations of being everything from ivory towers, the home of leftist thinking and ignorant of the demands of the corporate sector Devine Within this environment, there appears to be an underlying crisis in the way universities identity themselves and their role in society. As a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, an institution with six campuses that aims to serve the community of one of the most diverse communities in the world, I am also involved in a number of research projects with colleagues across Australia and internationally, I have observed this crisis closely.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the role of universities in the contemporary world. I argue that for universities to survive and flourish, there must be a renewed and increasing focus on two broad issues: In this way, universities should return to their role as community leaders, embedded as a civic institution within the community.

Before proceeding, I would like to make a short comment on the methodological approach employed. Both my research and engagement activities are driven by an aspiration for justice. It is from this understanding of the role of the contemporary engaged Responding to the Challenges of the Contemporar y University. In designing and implementing research projects, I have utilised a participative research methodology, becoming directly involved as both a participant and observer.

Such an approach is informed by feminist insights such as those of Mies as well as by post-colonial authors including Said and Nandy This approach rejects the concept that there is one objective form of inquiry or knowledge Stanfield There are a number of important benefits from this approach: Education as a commons To begin this conversation about education as a commons and its democratisation, I want to start with a discussion of the hierarchies of knowledge. Hierarchies have always framed the functioning of universities existing across all disciplinary boundaries.

While I accept the importance of many such hierarchies, I am uncomfortable with others. For example, there is little doubt that I have much to learn from senior members of staff and leaders in the field of research I pursue. There are also mentors within and across the institutions in which I work who may be considered both senior and junior to me.

There are also hierarchies that exist between students and staff. For example, when I walk into a lecture theatre to discuss theories of racism, gender or class, there is a general acceptance that the theoretical knowledge I bring can be considered superior compared to my students. There are, however, hierarchies that are concerning and we should confront. At the University of Western Sydney, for example, approximately 60 percent of our students are the first In this way, they may have far greater insights into the issue of class politics than those who research it. In this way, as Paulo Freire informed us then, knowledge hierarchies are something we should both confront and feel uncomfortable with when educating.

Many researchers, like myself, also confront uncomfortable hierarchies. These emerge as disciplinary gatekeepers enforce hierarchical knowledge: It is these enforced hierarchies that I find problematic. As such, it is negotiated hierarchies that I am comfortable with.

An important way to confront enforced hierarchies is through the democratization of knowledge and education: One way to achieve this is by employing the concept that education should be seen as a commons: Such resources can be understood as the oceans, beaches and the atmosphere and have both tangible and intangible aspects. David Bollier explains that today, there are other conceptions of the commons: The commons can also include Responding to the Challenges of the Contemporar y University. At the base of each commons existing and thriving, is a respect for the value of the original resource and a reciprocity — ensuring people not only take from the resource, but reciprocate.

Elsewhere I have argued that commons can include human relationships such as the need for safety, trust, shared intellect, as well as simply cooperation Arvanitakis This is mediated by a sense of belonging that allows members of communities to interact with each other. This is a form of biopolitics that promotes the potential for greater cooperation: Safety can produce relationships that are nonhierarchical and inclusive, allowing communities to work together to overcome scarcity, crisis and fear Hardt and Negri From this perspective, I argue that education is a form of commons: In so doing, we create a new form of biopolitical production.

To promote this, I make my research and own intellectual work available for all. In return, I only expect a reciprocity that those who use it do the same — even if this is in the form of feedback. This must be the way that universities reframe the debate around their role in society: The response that we must have is, as far as possible, to promote the democratisation of knowledge and therefore do our best to distribute the education material produced in different formats that are accessible to all: By making the information accessible — both in This way, universities can exist both inside and outside institutions, be simultaneously local and global and be available to all.

This enclosure promotes a scarcity in knowledge that has important implications for education and intellect. This too, however, must be a negotiated process: The second dimension of universities confronting the contemporary neoliberal environment is to embed themselves within their community with a broad range of engagement activities.

For example, what exactly does this concept of mutual benefit mean? Most often, however, the university falls back into the idea that it is the source of knowledge and it has a one-way relationship with the community. That is, engagement should be used as a guide to make strategic interventions not only through our teaching and research, but to the broader citizenry to promote a sense of agency and active citizenship. And it is here that there exists an overlap between education as a commons and engagement: It is here that knowledge hierarchies must be broken down: Engagement and the commons The focus of my most recent research and engagement activities is an Australian Research Council funded project looking at the changing and heterogeneous nature of citizenship within Australia.

It should be noted that the Couch workshops had a number of iterations, and as the intellectual property used to develop them was registered under a Creative Commons licence, there have been versions developed by others. Though the Couch workshop was originally designed as part of a training program for an Oxfam Australia initiative, it has developed to promote this sense of agency especially amongst young people who have become disengaged from political processes. Beyond the project, however, what we have identified is a lack of agency that has now come to define many of the communities we work with.

Surrounded by a network of relationships that are lateral, vertical and oblique, in all directions, there is frequently a sense of disempowerment that encourages disengagement — removing the sense of agency of many citizens. And it is here that the university community should reframe their engagement activities: This should not be limited to the humanities and social sciences and not just to students of individual universities, but accessed by the broader public. The role of universities within this current environment then, should be about promoting a sense of agency and active citizenship.

This goal does not contradict the other aims of the university, such as making students employable, but rather enhances them. In the research we have undertaken so far as part of our broader research project, we have identified the following principles that should guide such programs: Civic education should promote action-based learning to encourage a sense of agency and provide insights into Individual students should set the agenda for engagement rather than assuming that there is a single priority that needs to be set.

Any program should be both flexible and reflexive — allowing participants to alter the direction based on changing priorities and needs. Conclusion If I return to the opening of this paper and the anxiety I describe, it should be noted that such feelings are not limited to the university sector but are reflective of broader society.

A fundamental aspect of this is a feeling that we lack control over our lives. Though there are few things that we can control, one response is to frame the way the role of universities exist in society. Above anything else, I have argued in this paper that we should be about promoting a sense of agency and leadership with both our students and well beyond. This should be the foundation on which all programs are built — for anything less than that will always open up the question why universities exist at all.

An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. Responding to the Challenges of the Contemporar y University. International Journal of Community Research and Engagement 5: Addressing the challenge of reconceptualising academic work and regenerating the academic workforce. Literature review, report, Whitlam Institute, Sydney. GCA , Grad Stats: Employment and Salary outcomes of recent higher education graduates, G. Negri , Multitude: What is it like to be a philosophy professor in one of the most reactionary states in the Union?

Sadly, there is nothing unusual about Texas students in this regard. They are merely an expression of wider trends that are evident throughout the United States. If being a professor in the United States of America in is comparable to being a character in a mildly amusing absurdist play, being a philosophy professor is comparable to waking up in some sort of Lovecraftian hellscape.

If you are a non-American reader, you might think I am waxing hyperbolic; rest assured that I am not. You probably live in a country that still qualifies as civilized and, as such, cannot begin to comprehend what a bizarrely tragicomical state of affairs has taken root here. Yes, we have always been a dim-witted nation, but for a long time now it has seemed as though eight-tenths of the population has been stricken by an incurable stupidity virus. Yes, Texans are religious people— nearly one-half of them attend a religious service at least once a week, compared to thirty-seven percent of Americans—but that religiosity bears strange fruit.

Texas leads the nation in executions and illiteracy and ranks among the highest for its incarceration rate, number of teen pregnancies, number of people living below the poverty line, and number of people working below minimum wage 2. They are overwhelmingly Southern Baptist and megachurch evangelical and kneejerk Republican.

Many of them have never ventured outside the state and honestly believe that Texas is the best place on earth. Some have never read more than a dozen books in their entire lives. When I was a newly-radicalized twenty year-old protesting against the WTO, they were tiny children learning the alphabet in kindergarten. They have never known a world without the Internet or cell phones. They have no idea what the U. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others3. The best among them are uber-pious zealots who, to their credit, are at least able to think about something besides Facebook; the worst are vacanteyed drones obsessed with celebrity gossip, shopping, tweeting, and texting.

Their religiosity, like so much else in their lives, is pure saccharine. On the contrary, they frequently do things that I find unbelievably rude, tactless, inconsiderate, and selfish. It would be wrong to call such people narcissists since they lack any realistic conception of an alternative. They have been told their entire lives that they alone are special, that they deserve to have whatever they want, and that the rest of the world exists only to benefit them.

Having grown up in a hyper-consumer society, it is little wonder my students think of themselves first and foremost as entitled consumers. They are not producers, not creators, not thinkers. They do not take themselves to have any active responsibilities beyond paying tuition and showing up to class once in awhile. The purpose of a college education, after all, is credentialing, and no one needs philosophical training to become credentialed. What she needs is credit hours and a What else is she paying for, if not that?

What is the function of a philosophy or literature, or history, or sociology… course in this kind of educational environment?

But the truth of the matter is that many employers these days get by just fine with subpar speakers and writers and actually prefer employees who are better at taking orders than thinking for themselves. The idea that reading poetry, studying philosophy, or writing term papers prepares one for life as an account executive at J.

Morgan Chase is nonsense. Even most graduate level business classes fail to do this—or so I have heard on more than one occasion. If education is just credentialing, and credentialing is just a precondition for entry into the workforce, why not give students a full one-hundred and forty credit hours of meaningful vocational training? The skills one gains from becoming educated are worth having either because they are valuable for their own sake or because they are means to truly valuable ends, such as intelligent, informed political engagement.

We do ourselves and our students a profound disservice when we try to justify everything in terms of financial and professional success.

• Sang d'encre by Stéphanie Hochet.
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The idea that college education might have some value beyond credentialing is simply incomprehensible to them. The very few who are capable of seeing beyond the next day, or the next week, see their future in purely financial terms. Many want to be rich; others just want to be comfortably bourgeois, with all that this entails materially. If it is difficult for a chemistry professor or a sociology professor to make her subject seem relevant to such students, imagine how difficult it is for me.

When it comes to religion and politics, they typically march in lockstep with their parents and pastors; their minds are absolutely made up and impervious to any challenge. My Herculean efforts notwithstanding, they consistently fail to appreciate the significance and relevance of philosophical, ethical, political, and religious questions.

None of this is a surprise when we consider who their parents and older role models are. In and , how many of the adults in their lives flocked to the Tea Party—a group which has distinguished itself precisely by rejecting reason? In the selfcontained world of the Tea Party, reason, like everything else, has a liberal bias. People do not have to hold themselves independently accountable for anything they say, think, or believe.

When I was a teenager in Nineties, we rebelled. My teachers who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties rebelled, too. So did my parents, who grew up in the Sixties. Everyone knows that teenage rebellion is often short-lived and superficial, but it is vital and necessary. What I am seeing now is a whole generation of students who, by all reasonable appearances, have never rebelled and show no signs of wanting to rebel.

Sang d'encre

It would never occur to them to be anything else. This is truly sad, as there are few things in life more pathetic than an eighteen year-old Republican who is basically a younger version of his parents. I remember a time when College Republicans were an exotic breed. I do not expect help from the politicians, the bureaucrats, or the administrators.

They will only continue to make matters worse. Nor do I expect help from powerful peers. The elite members of my profession cannot begin to appreciate any of this; the view from Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton does not extend that far. They are too busy working on their research that only other elites will read while their graduate students most of whom will end up unemployed, underemployed, or teaching in Texas are busy looking after the undergraduates who will form the next generation of crooked politicians and corrupt Wall Street C o m e , L e t U s R e a s o n To g e t h e r.

Nor can they relate to the absurdity of teaching philosophy to the most anti-philosophical generation of students in American history. There is plenty that needs to be changed, and radically so, but there is next to nothing that I can accomplish as a single, solitary individual. All I can do is roll my boulder up the hill and watch it fall down the other side.

And you must imagine me happy as I do it. Tu as une peur bleue des transformations. Oui, mais dans la bonne direction. Mais, laisse-moi terminer donc je lisais que: Tout est en fonction de la vente. On regarde les marchandises, on choisit. Tous les choix sont individuels sans aucune norme qui les guide. Ni contre les clients. Elle est en train de devenir une structure qui phagocyte toutes les forces.

Des nouvelles et des anciennes. Vous parlez sans savoir ce que vous dites! Elle nous fera du bien. Ils essayent inutilement de convaincre Manon de partir avec eux. Je ne sais pas, mais ne lui demande pas. Une rousse toi aussi, Manon? Bien pire que les mauvais profs. Mais pour moi la vraie question en est une autre: Elle allait se taire. Ethical Action Inhumanities Abstract: Through an evaluation of my own positionality I seek to approach the topic of contingent faculty in a new manner.

As I sit down to write this thing, I wonder, is this going to be another close-reading of Bartleby? Another attempt to push whatever is currently pissing me off onto the enigmatic scrivener? Am I going to use Bartleby as a way to examine the adjunctification of the university on a grand scale? It was the first story I read that made me want to try arcane and esoteric things with literary texts. It was my gateway into this whole twisted world of literary analysis and critical chicanery. And perhaps more importantly, it was my first introduction to Herman Melville, who has come to be, for me, a mentor and a friend.

Suffice it to say, that initial reading of Bartleby was fucking huge. This chapter of my life began with Bartleby and it is very likely closing with it as well. But more of that later. I want to talk around Bartleby here, rather than through him. Instead of applying meaning to Bartleby and to his words, I am going to use the story and the figure as a thread to follow throughout the discussion of my own experiences.

There is no shortage of writing chronicling the steady shift from JOB jobs in academia to the new mercenary black-ops adjunct system. I both love and hate reading about how much this situation sucks. Justified anger is delicious. It smells wonderful and tastes great, but it usually makes me want to vomit in the long run. Ah yes, the sickly sweet stench of my hot-buttered bowl of self-loathing soothes my nerves like nothing else can. Despair can be a wonderfully blissful moment. What happens when that moment passes? Where am I then? Has my situation changed?

The reality of applying for jobs and receiving nothing but rejections. Preparing to teach classes that I still feel I have no business teaching. It is at moments like these that Bartleby comes back around. Bartleby never lets on what is bothering him. He goes to great lengths to keep a piece or all of himself private from everyone involved in the story—the narrator, his co-workers, and perhaps especially the reader. It is possible to put just about anything on Bartleby if you want to. He can be whatever the reader needs him to be. The narrator applies his own meaning to Bartleby, and the reader probably wants to do that too.

But Bartleby straight up refuses to be read like this. Bartleby is a communist, Bartleby is a revolutionary, Bartleby is a union organizer, Bartleby is Jesus, Bartleby is a partridge in a pear tree. My point in bringing this whole line of thinking up is to show that it is unimportant, or at the very least a secondary concern, what I think Bartleby is doing within the story.

And for that reason, and perhaps because of lazy scholarship, I am going to simply say: As a graduate student who plays a teacher in real life, I have my own experiences to draw from. I can strive through the telling of these experiences to give weight and depth to why I am writing this, and perhaps why I am writing it THIS way. I can try to show you how I feel, to move beyond IS in a practical sense.

To apply meaning to my own experience. I am more or less comfortable doing this. I know that we all have unique experiences, reasons, and motivations for doing the things that. And I can only really attempt to explain my own. If I can even do that. Even after two years I still feel like an interloper.

I walk into the English Department office and the office manager barks at me with an accusatory tone: In some ways I am grateful for this clear response from administrators: It plays right into the justified anger gig that I was talking about at the beginning of this. I am being treated unfairly!!! But again, as I have already stated, where does this get me? These situations draw attention to the precarious and temporary nature of my position as a graduate assistant, and the immediate awareness of this, makes me afraid.

And my knee-jerk reaction to fear is anger. And then the anger fades and I keep towing the line. I resist in my head, but in my actions I keep on plugging away in the unreal, intensely hierarchical world of studying how to break down hierarchies and make literary texts speak in alignment with the need to break down hierarchies, all the while hoping that my ability to make these texts speak against. Perhaps…Or is it because I want a little slice of power? To move on up through the ranks and feel the pride, security, and ultimately POWER that appear, from this side of the desk, to accompany a tenured position in the capital A academy.

Oh boy, what a wicked one. Before he can tell his story he needs to make sure the reader knows who he is. The narrator is an important man!!! The lawyer is assuredly nice and comfortable and swell and wellfed. He reemphasizes this situation time and again throughout the story. As Bartleby does whatever it is that Bartleby does, the lawyer ponders, questions, ruminates, and wrings his hands with impotent charity. What are my intentions in trying to help this man?

I wanted to do a maneuver here where I put myself in the position of Bartleby, or better yet, I could make Bartleby speak for all adjuncts and graduate assistants. We could all be enigmatic, persecuted little Bartlebys. And that is an interesting meal to digest to be sure. I have no regrets about my experience. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

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