Category Archives: The University

What Do YOU Think?

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I didn’t want to tell those students in that class linked with ethics that their job was to memorize and repeat the professor’s lectures.  The pain though was probably more mine than theirs—the ideaunclesam that writing should be reduced to that, to the “regurgitation,” of the lectures, to nothing more or less than a form of test irritates me no end.

Still, one student said, you mean they don’t want to know what we think.

What was I to say, “Of course not, you addled child.  What planet have you been living on?”  But I didn’t say that:

“Well, some do I am sure.  But you have to be able to speak their language and if you can’t do that yours thoughts make little or no sense to the Professor.”

“But,” the addled child persists, “it says right here in the question (for the midterm) that in the last part they want to know what we think about (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc).”

“Alright then what do you think?”

This always tends to stump the addled child because he or she has not stopped to think that he or she may not have any thoughts on the subject…

“Well, I think,” says the addled child who then goes on to repeat in a more or less mangled form something the professor said in class as an objection to (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc)

I say, “Well, then, so you agree with the professor when he said “X” because you are saying the same thing (X) he said.  That’s clear.  But what do you think?  Can you think of anything else?  If not, I would strongly recommend that you memorize and repeat as your thoughts what the professor says.

Listen.  It’s not that I don’t think something is horrendously wrong with utilitarianism.  I mean what the hell is a “hedon” and how the hell do you measure it.  As far as I know nobody has developed a “hedonic” measurement devise.  But honestly, I have no objections, coherent ones, to utilitarianism that others have not had or that have not been brought up in class. I mean, what have you got.  I didn’t make this system up.  I don’t like it either.  But the deck is stacked against beginning students especially when it comes to saying what you think.  Maybe it’s better to know that memorization and repetition is required.  Knowing that might save you time beating up the wrong bush.  Wait, I mean, barking up the wrong tree.  I am just trying to be straight and not beat around the bush.” 

And just as I am getting warmed up, somebody says, “What IS a hedon?”

Self as Fascia

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According to JP Sartre, there is no such thing as an isolated individual.  Robinson Crusoe was not isolated; he brought the values, customs and mores of his particular society with him to his lonely island.

fasciaThe “individual” is best pictured as a nexus or node for a highly complex and frequently contradictory relationships with people, institutions, ideals, values, mores and particular objects (such as a car or watch). 

The self is best pictured as the fascia or connective tissues that hold the diverse, highly complex and contradictory relationships in a relatively stable configuration.

The relationship of the self or fascia to the relationships that it holds in place is dialectical.  The fascia of the hand holds the bones of the hand in place and makes possible the function of the hand as a hand.  The fascia of the foot, while making it possible for the foot to function as a foot, will not help the hand function as a hand.

The fascia of the self, however, is not fixed.  Rather its shape and design varies with the function and functioning of the diverse and contradictory relationships of the “individual” to its “objects” (ideals, values, morals, ambitions, skills, and particular material objects).

If the fascia of the self becomes rigid and/or calcified, any changes in the complex and contradictory relationships that it seeks to stabilize and hold in place will be experienced as painful.

 If the fascia of the self becomes rigid or calcified it will not be able to develop in relation either to its internal impulses or relative to changes in the social sphere.

That the fascia of the self is capable of change or more properly of development makes the self susceptible to fragmentation or breaking up as previously concealed, for example, contractions between relations come to the fore. The fact that the fascia will fragment and break up on occasion does not mean however that, as some have concluded, that there is no self.

The capacity of the fascia (self) to withstand contradiction and the pains of development is dependent upon the biochemical makeup of the fascia.  This make up and these elements remain and are continuous throughout the lifespan of the fascia.  While then the fascia may break up or become rigid or change relative to development, the essential elements of the fascia do not break up or change.  That iron may be liquid or rigid or appear in a variety of shapes does not mean that it is not iron.

Change does not mean development.  A hand, for example, may be hit by hammer; this blow may permanently cripple the hand.  The fascia of the self may calcify in a form of scar tissue.  But just a blind person may correct to a degree for his or her blindness by the development of the other senses, so the fascia of the hand may correct or adjust to permit the hand a different form or kind of functionality.

Development Basic Propositions

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Perhaps to clarify my thinking about education as self-development, I should state—although I find lists tedious—several propositions concerning the developmental process.

babycrawlingProposition 1. All developmental steps must be phase appropriate.  When it is a phase appropriate for a child to crawl she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to walk she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to talk, she will.

Proposition 2. Developmental phases build upon and incorporate skills and goal setting established in previous phases.  A later phase does not wipe out or obliterate an earlier phase; rather had the earlier phase not occurred the later phase would not occur either or if it does so occur, it occurs as a compensatory structure. 

Proposition 3. One phase is not “superior” to another.  An adult is not superior to an infant.  An adolescent is not superior to an adult.  If as Wordsworth said, the child is father to the man, which is “superior.”

Proposition 4. The movement into and out of a phase is necessarily attended by momentary disequilibrium or de-stabilization.  One needs only to remember puberty to understand the kinds of destabilization attendant upon development.  One used to speak of “growing pains.

 Proposition 5. The frustrations attendant upon destabiliation must be optimal.  If the frustrations prove either traumatic or chronic, the challenges of the developmental move may not be met.  That particular impulse towards development will remain undeveloped in an unconscious and archaic form.

Proposition 6.  If frustrations prove traumatic or chronic, the individual may be forced off the developmental path.  His or her psychological energies go into erecting defenses against possible self-fragmentation and de-stabilization.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott has said, there may exist in our society a gap greater than that between the social classes and that is the gap between those capable of continuing development and those who are not.

Proposition 7.  The possiblities of development are most likely to be realized if they occur with an overall “empathic milieu.”  This fancy phrase is intended to suggest that development is most likely to occur if the trials and tribulations of the person undergoing destabilization are recognized, affirmed as necessary, and understood.

Proposition 8.  Currently, institutions of higher education, while they serve to destabilize the individual, do not recognize the potentials for development implicit in higher education and do not afford students an “empathic milieu.”

I think I could write more propositions.  But these afford a rough outline and eight is a round number.
 

You can lead a person to college but you can’t make him think.

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Buying my theory that students might want to learn something requires buying a number of propositions that people appear disinclined to buy these days.  One of these propositions might be developmentthat people want or desire to develop.  I think it generally accepted that infants and children go through a pretty regular developmental sequence; and that one step in a sequence builds upon and around the one that came before.  But these developments one might say, along with the developments of puberty are biologically driven.  About 21—once the adolescent mind had gone through its hormonal changes—development stops.  Adulthood appears, de facto, the end of development.

But not all developments are purely biologically driven; the opportunities for such development are dictated by the social sphere.  Adolescence, as an emotional and moral state, has been significantly prolonged in the industrialized western world.  People are living much longer and that in turn changes one’s perspective (or development view) of life’s stages.

I think that higher education—along with other “real life” situations—poses the possibility of a developmental at the level of cognition or, since I dislike that world, intellect.  The mind, as LeRoi Jones put it, is a muscle.  It can be worked out and further developed.  This is the promise of higher education.  But it remains largely a promise.

 Students at Duke a while back sported a t-shirt that said, “You can lead a student to college but you can’t make him think.”  One might be inclined to infer from this that students don’t want to think.  But that’s not what the t-shirt says; what it says is true: you can’t make anybody think.  Thinking requires that the individual take a step, make a leap, however dimly and unconsciously that step or leap might be felt.

Taking that step or even dimly wanting to take it can be psychological disturbing and unsettling.  A lot goes into taking that step.  In the current system of higher education this is what remains unstudied, and unrecognized.  It takes a lot to develop the intellect, and institutions do absolutely nothing to support students in taking the step.  They can hardly even begin to do so if they fail to acknowledge that taking the step can be unsettling and disturbing.

The institutions of higher education do their part, as I have indicated, to disturb and unsettle students by beating them upside the head with the misery, injustice, and ugliness of this world.  No doubt the human race is pissing and shitting itself.  The full recognition of this fact, however, is bound to be devastating, more indeed that any individual could truly bear.  And with no support in trying to face it, with professors talking about the most horrendous things in detached and surgical tones, students repress and eventually numb themselves to the drums of despair, decay, and final destruction.

No wonder, as I have said, students become pre-mature cynics most especially about the realm of the intellect.  Why think about these things?  They are far too unsettling.  Denial is a much better route, along with concluding that most of what the university teaches is bullshit.

Les Main Sales

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Today’s students may be characterized in brief as lazy, drunken, lascivious, self-absorb, materialistic, wayward louts.  And, one might add, lemmings.  I think here most especially of middle class students.  I have taught a writing course several times for persons who wished to doghowlingbecome doctors.  And I must say the idea that 98% of these doctors-to-be should ever treat a patient fills me with terror, especially since I could well be one of their “charges” in my lay away rest home.

This characterization would appear to run counter to the one I have just suggested as their being something like dogs howling at the moon, longing for what they know not, yet longing still.  One is not inclined to think of today’s student as such pansy like wilting violets.  Certainly most students would not admit to harboring any sort of profound desire to learn anything, just for the sake, that is, of learning it.

But pointing to the moral flaws of students is a nice and convenient way of not looking at how the current educational system may contribute to the problem.  What if some of their loutish, boorish, and vulgar behavior is the way their repressed desire to learn something expresses itself.  Repressed desire, as Freud has told us, can result a great deal of odd and untoward behavior.

One might hazard, though, that, even if at one time students did want to learn something, by the time they have reached college certainly this desire has been completely flogged out of them by their prior educational experience. Admittedly, this may be the case.  But no matter how mundane and ho-hum college might be for today’s student, it is still, for however brief a period, something new. Something a little bright and shiny.

That this moment is very short isn’t entirely students’ fault.  Sometimes, I think, at the college level, the professorial desire to fill up these empty vessels as quickly and thoroughly as possible leaves many of them feeling beat up about the head and rendered pretty much deaf to any learning that might come after.  For while the secular university does not teach “values,” it certainly does seem to feel itself the designated spokesperson of the reality principle.  It’s as if, having failed to educate by other means, some are driven to rub students’ faces as deeply as possible into the ugly muck of this ugly world.

I don’t know what else to think, when a colleague whom I respected in many ways, had the students in his introduction to ecology course, itself a general education course, read, as their primary text, a book that outlined seven scenarios by which the world, by the end of this century, is sure to come to an end from some ecological disaster or another.  Or, if that is not enough, one may learn about the ongoing, persistent treatment of women throughout the world as the “second” sex.  Or perhaps one would like to hear about how the United States persistently and consistently exploits the poor people of the world so that we all have more trash to buy at Wal-Mart.

There is shit enough.  We are all up to our necks in the muck; not one of us, as Sartre said, without les main sales.  And the shit must and ought to be taught.  I do question however the way that it is taught and the dosage.

Dogs Can Read! And, thus, have the right to do so.

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During one of those ethics classes, I sat through one of the strangest “discussions” I have ever heard.  The course was taught for a couple of years by a good guy who liked to mix it up a bit with the students and was pretty quick on his feet.  I don’t remember the overall context of the dogreadingdiscussion, but at one point he said, in effect, a person cannot be said to have or be given a right if the person cannot exercise that right.  For example, it makes no sense to say a person has the right to jump over a building if he or she cannot jump over a building, or to say that a dog has a right to read when I dog is not capable of reading.

A bit later, as the class came towards it close, the instructor entertained questions and it became clear through a little give and take that some number of students did not agree with the assertion that a dog does not have the right to read even though it cannot read.  The instructor cleverly turned his questioning this way and that to get at the core of the students’ objection to the assertion.  But the core was not forthcoming.  I was caught up in the mystery and, having raised my hand said, perhaps people are thinking that, while a person does not the right to drink till he or she is 21, clearly he or she can drink and therefore ought to have the right.

My attempt at opening Aladdin’s lamp however seemed to fall on deaf ears.  I had thrown my bread on the water but nobody rose to the bait.  The instructor plodded on until finally, he uttered one of the strangest sentences I have heard uttered in an academic setting, “We all do agree, don’t we, that dogs cannot read!”

“Well,” they do look at the TV set, one student dumbly replied.  Yea, intoned another, “How do we know dogs can’t read.”  I am convinced that people can get trapped in a web of words, of false distinctions and empty jargon, of such power that they are sometimes led by the “logic” of that “discourse” to say and to believe the most amazingly absurd things.  We all tend towards the solipsistic; only ongoing vigilance, effort, and the exercise of imagination keeps us from succumbing to it completely.

But this was something different.  This approached something like a willfully and defiantly maintained delusion.  I chewed on this case for some considerable time off and on over the years after.  Eventually I came to understand the event more psychologically.  The students clearly identified with dogs.  Were they saying, as if from the depths of their unconscious, we are, in this class, like dogs.  We cannot read either; we cannot make out any meaning in what we have been asked to read.  We cannot understand a word of this, but, even if we are dogs, we have a right to understand, a right to grasp it, and that right should not be taken away from us even if we lack the capacity to do it.  And who knows, you may not see it or grant it, but how do you know that I, like the dog, do not understand in my own way.

This was before the time “dawg” replaced “dude” as a casual appellation.  That it—that one’s buddy is now a “dawg”—is worthy of some thought.  But I infer from the above that students feel not infrequently like dogs in the halls of learning.  I infer also that many students want to understand; but the method by which learning is delivered has so beaten them down that they can only sit in front of the TV quite wordlessly.

Saving Keith Richards: Or: An Argument for Abortion

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Apparently, Judith Jarvis Thompson argument for abortion was de rigueur.  It popped up each time I sat through the ethics course in all its bizarre and gothic detail.  This damn long and detailed keithrichardsthought experiment to my recollection involved a person, of a certain blood type, being kidnapped by a group of music lovers.  As you may note a thought experiment need not have any relation to any known reality; I can personally think of no group of people less likely to kidnap anybody than a group of music lovers.

But let us say these music lovers have fallen under the spell of a fanatic music lover, and high on crack, kidnap this person, whose blood type they have in some mysterious fashion previously learned. The person apparently makes no attempt to resist the weenie music lovers and is taken and strapped down to a bed where the person is connected up by tubes to a famous musician who will die unless he or she receives a constant infusion of blood from this very particular person. 

Why the famous musician is not in a hospital, as usually would be the case, is not explained.  Nor is it explained how a group of music lovers would know how to hook a person up with tubes.  Apparently, one of them had at one time been pre-med.  Nor is it explained what makes the fanatics think they have the right to kidnap somebody even for the purpose of preserving the famous musician’s life.  Finally, no one apparently has bothered to ask the famous musician if he or she approves of this particular method of saving his or her life.

If one may plow through all the absurdities and improbabilities of the set up for the thought experiment one gets to the crux.  The kidnapped person wakes up.  The situation is explained to him or her, and he or she is told that if he or she stays hooked up to the musician for nine months that the musician will live, miraculously, and be able to resume a normal life unattached to anybody.  According to Thompson all rational persons would agree that the kidnapped person has a right to unattach him or herself from the musician without bringing down upon his or her self any moral onus whatsoever.

As the reader has no doubt guessed, the thought experiment is intended as an analogy to a forced pregnancy, the result of rape, and we are to conclude that just as it would be OK to detach one’s self from the musician so it would be OK for a woman to detach herself from an unwanted fetus. Additionally those who would oppose such a decision must be a group of totally insane musical fanatics, senile fans perhaps of Keith Richards. And this is not the end of the experiment either.  It goes on and on to cover other instances of unwanted pregnancy, including a bad condom that allows buds of some kind to leak into a house and become rooted in a rug. 

 My students couldn’t make heads or tales, though, of this experiment.  They seemed unable or perhaps unwilling even to memorize the basic set up for the experiment. They just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And the whole thing did seem insane: to find ourselves talking about fanatical musicians as we supposedly investigated the right of a woman to control her own body. 

 I found the whole thing and the considerable time devoted to it infuriating because I think the experiment trivializes the pain and suffering involved in a forced pregnancy and the decision to terminate it.  Further, it all seemed ass-backwards.  Whether or not a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy is not an ethical question, but a political one.  Rather than being asked to think about fanatical musicians, I think it would have been better for students to examine the political and economic reality of women still being very much the “second sex.”  But this would not be doing ethics, since as we can see actually matters of fact have nothing to do with ethics.

Objectivity is Repression

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The instructors for the ethics course were all devotees of “thought experiments.”  These were rather fanciful affairs designed, as far as I could see, mostly to throw students into confusion concerning thoughtexperimenttheir “moral intuitions.”  They involved trains going down tracks and people tied to the train tracks and someone standing by a lever and having to decide whether to switch the lever so that one or three people died, even if the one was your brother and so on and so forth.  They also involved people getting stuck in caves and having to drive over people to save people stuck in caves.

The questions these thought experiments are intended to evoke involve such matters as whether or not it is ever morally right to kill an innocent person even if killing that person might mean saving many lives.  Also involved, in the experiments I heard was the attempt to make the distinction between killing and letting die.  The amount of mayhem and mutiliation evoked–all spoken about in a very light hearted manner complete with stick like illustrations drawn on the black board–for the purposes of philosophic speculation was quite amazing.  The thought experiments, as one can see, along with discussions of capital punishment, abortion and euthenasia all involved, in one way or another, the topic of death. However, death, as an issue of some subjective importance to the individual, was never addressed.

For a number of years I also taught a writing class linked with a course international relations. At that time, the mid-80’s, the course concerned itself with US and Soviet relations.  A full three lectures were devoted to nuclear war and the possibility of nuclear disarmament.  The different forms of nuclear destruction, whether from air craft, submarines, or rockets, was quite amazing.  Additionally, rockets differed considerably in “throw weigh,” some had multiple war heads and some didn’t; some were in cased or hardened silos and others weren’t.  The discussion was very complete and designed to show that disarmament was probably impossible.  

Every time I sat through these lectures I got a headache.  Also amazingly, though I had heard the lecture three or four times, each time it seemed I had completely forgotten everything I had previously known about the subject.  I didn’t at first understand why my head felt all abuzz after these lectures; but one day it hit me that basically we had been discussing mass destruction, and the possible end of civilization as we knew it.  And once again death was never directly addressed as a matter of some possible significance to the individual.

I have long wondered what academics mean by “objectivity,” because as far as I could tell, especially in the social sciences and humanities, none of them remotely approach it.  Perhaps this is what they mean—talking about death, pain, misery, mutiliation all as if they had no relation to anybody in the lecture hall, as if it all were happening somewhere out there in a kind of giant thought experiment.  Talking about sticking or not sticking a needle of poison into somebody’s arm as a way of distinguishing between killing and letting die.

Personally, I don’t call this objectivity.  I call it repression, systemmatic and unconscious repression.  Boredom is an odd thing.  Sometimes it is a mask for anxiety; perhaps that’s why the ethics class seemed at times to drag on endlessly. Anxiety is timeless.

Dry as Dust Analytic Philosophy

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I am not an academic philosopher so I could be mistaken, but I think, for every one of those six years, that, while the “Introduction to Ethics” course was taught by different people, that all taught spiderwebethics under the heading of “analytic philosophy.”  Perhaps as a consequence of this dry as dust approach, my students, almost to a person over the six years, reported, when the class was done, that they would never again be caught dead taking an ethics course or anything else in the philosophy department.

Richard Rorty has written about the plague of analytic philosophy and pretty much described it as serving best—given its hair splitting and logic chopping—as preparation to be a lawyer.  And Bernard Williams, a relatively famous ethicist, argues that moral philosophy, while generally boring. today has become particularly boring.  If this is the case, then I do think the teaching of ethics should be removed utterly from the hands of academic philosophers.  

This might at least be a step in the right direction.  How it should be taught, I don’t know.  But I know it shouldn’t be taught in such a way as to turn students away utterly from the study of philosophy.  For my part, I found the course only mildly boring, even a bit soothing in its boringness.  But I have studied philosophy and through my education have come to learn to think in ways that allowed me to appreciate at least mildly the pure amount of brain power and the considerable cleverness that had gone into the construction of endless and absurd arguments.

The students however were perplexed and frustrated.  First, it’s this argument they said, and then it’s that argument that says the first argument is wrong, and then the second argument itself is said to be wrong.  What, they wanted to know, was the point, if all of it was wrong. Knowing that all of ethics up to that point had been a mistake might be liberating for that rare and aberrant student who could then think, hell, if it’s all wrong, maybe I will be the one to get it right.  But the average student certainly was not encouraged to think in this way with the result that they felt they were stuck memorizing and repeating stuff either completely wrong or significantly flawed.

They didn’t see as I did that for the academic philosophy whether an argument is right or wrong is not the point; it’s an argument and as such material for making another one perhaps later in one’s career for a professional journal.  I tried to explain to my students that their philosophy teachers were in love with what they taught (however aberrant that love might be); that they ate, drank, breathed, and shat that stuff; that what they were trying to do in their own bizarre way was to make students love it too.  Consider the lectures, I said, rather clumsy foreplay.

But my students were unimpressed and I guess there was no reason they should be.  After all they were freshmen with some sort of naïve idea that ethics was about the study of right and wrong and not young academics in training, young academics already completely caught up in a vast web of arguments and counter arguments about which those beginning students knew absolutely nothing.  My students didn’t even know that they were being taught ethics from the perspective of analytic philosophy; and the teaching assistants did nothing to enlighten students on this critical point, as if analytic philosophy was the only way to do philosophy.

Yes! He had a dream!

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I think I taught a writing course linked to that ethics course six years in row.  Every time the course was taught by a teaching assistant who had been elevated for that particular course to the status of something called an associate.  This status allowed a second year graduate student to teach 250 mlkundergraduate students and to act as the boss of two or three other TA’s who read the papers, midterms and finals for the course.  

I was rather amazed when I heard about this.  250 students seemed a pretty big responsibility especially for teaching assistants who had never taught such a course before.  I learned later that, if a TA was going to be elevated to the position of an instructor for an upper division course in a major special paper work had to be filled out, explaining why this substitution was necessary (the usual professor was on sabbatical usually) and indicating the TAs qualifications to teach the course.  But no such dispensation was necessary for a teaching assistant to teach a General Education course.

This seemed to me another indication of the low regard for and the little thought given to General Education courses by the departments that offered them.  And because no paper work was necessary, nobody knew how many General Education courses were serving as teacher training sessions for teaching assistants rather than educational situations for students.  I found this all the more troubling given that many of these General Education courses were money makers for the individual departments concerned and that some departments would have trouble making ends meet without their General Education courses.

I do not suggest the Teaching Assistants were necessarily bad instructors.  They tended to make up for their lack of knowledge, their lack of confidence, and public speaking skills by a good deal of enthusiasm. Still, I wish could forget the General Education course devoted to the Civil Rights movement.  For some reason, the usual dynamic instructor, a lecturer like me was not available, and the course was handed over to a young graduate student.

She showed a lot of video.  Additionally, the instructor was teaching a revisionist version of the Civil Rights movement with emphasis upon the role of women.  Alright, I guess.  But none of the students knew that was what she was doing because none of the students knew anything about the history she was revising.  The intellectual force of the course was thereby considerably blunted.

Also she had technological troubles.  One day she was attempting to show slides.  But every time she clicked the slide clicker the slide machine would go backwards.  I don’t know how long she clicked and re-clicked.  I was in the back row.  So I got up, went to the slide machine, readjusted the carriage of slides, and for a few clicks it worked.  Then with another click, the whole machine sort of leapt up off its tiny perch and flung itself to the floor in apparent death throes.  I was embarrassed to death for the poor instructor.  

This embarrassment was trumped however by what I felt when one day she said she was going to play a tape of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream" speech. The tape started splendidly, with Kings sonorous “I have a dream….” But was followed abruptly by Walter Cronkite saying, “Yes, he had a dream.”  This was not what the TA wanted.  This is not what anybody wanted.  But the teaching assistant had failed to preview the tape.  She persisted by having the tech guy in a little booth in the back try to fast forward through the Cronkite parts to get to the King parts.  This proved impossible.  The speech was rendered a horrible mish mash of King plus Cronkite.

I swear I was ready to crap with embarrassment.  But looking around, the students seemed their usual selves, yawning, sleeping, reading the paper, picking their noses and generally acting completely unperturbed as if this kind of screw up was simply par for the course.  And who knows, maybe it was.