Readers might remember my series of posts on QUT Vice-Chancellor Peter Coaldrake’s move to abolish the “old humanities” at QUT. It’s pleasing to be able to report that reason has prevailed and a lot has been salvaged from the wreckage:
THE Queensland University of Technology will keep some arts double degrees and may even end up with a reworked bachelor of arts degree.
The outcome of the Council meeting is a significant turnaround from earlier proposals, which some at QUT have characterised as a rejection of Coaldrake’s push. For far too long, academics and students have rolled over when university managements have unilaterally announced school closures. It’s heartening to see that a strong student and staff campaign, supported by the NTEU, can make a difference.
Thats it is good news, and no doubt the result of a good campaign.
The fact is, it aint Melbourne up there. There arent that many unis - UQ hoed back on Arts in 96, Griffith ticks along, there’s ACU (but thats hardly for everyone), so without QUT there’d be a very restrained choice for a large population in Brisbane/ Gold Coast.
Id go so far as to say - if these courses are losing money, its probably due to inept management, not lack of demand.
And Im not some unreconstructed idealist here - I actually think managerialism brought some real benefits to the sector in the first wave of 90s reforms.
But now its a force thats eating itself - look at Melbourne. The only Arts faculty in the country which rates top ten in the world, and now its for the slash.
Net predicted result: Australia will have no top ten Arts faculty next year.
Lefty E,
No doubt you read the “Age” article about La Trobe uni this morning. No doubt about it, this is a society that really has its priorities right!
The only uni I could find that doesn’t have an Arts faculty was this one.
What about this one? It’s already been through the wringer and come out the other side.
You mean this one? The “ailing” is more significant here than the “radical plan”. Anyone who thought La Trobe could continue on its merry way down the toilet is kidding themselves. QUT wasn’t in anything like that amount of trouble and the solution it chose didn’t relate to the realities it faced. Has this guy got all the answers? What are La Trobe’s strengths anyway? Isn’t focusing on bricks and mortar scattered across southern Australia detracting from a focus on learning & teaching? We’ll have to see.
Well done, Mark. No need to campaign for reinstatement of the old ‘Institute’ to replace the inappropriate ‘University’ on the letterhead just yet, then.
One requirement for removing the “cabbage patch” stigma that is currently attached to the humanities and social sciences is to significantly increase the quality of intake through higher Year 12 entry scores etc… It is was downright embarrassing and frustating doing group assignments in my B Soc Science with students who in too many cases were knuckle dragging neanderthals who couldn’t spell, couldn’t use a computer and couldn’t think.
You wouldn’t have enjoyed the conversation between two law students on the bus going out to Uni today, mel. They were discussing their legal writing course and trying to work out what a pronoun and a verb were. It would be quite wrong to suggest that this has anything to do with people doing an Arts degree. I couldn’t pick between Business and Arts students (I’ve also taught tons of the latter) on preparation for Uni, and generally the former have higher entry scores. I suspect it’s got a lot more to do with the state of school education than the cutoffs for uni courses.
Meanwhile … This from the Oz on free degrees and bonding to accounting firms, while asking for more accounting courses. Yep, that’ll help increase the innovation of new products our trade balance needs (not). Ralston-Saul noted that this is a tertiary discipline that doesn’t actually produce anything.
Note to melaleuca: on the same basis, stay away from Engineering students. Med students also, particularly if you plan on going to a medical graduate with a serious health issue. Some economists can be doubtful, just don’t bother with them.
It’s a shame Stan Zemanek is dead - you could have rung his program and told him what idiots uni students generally are.
I was writing quickly at work (after having taught some bright uni students!) and I think we should avoid stigmatising people for the faults of the education they may have had inflicted on them. I might add, though, I suspect that the age of teh perfect grammar is something of a myth. But, really, this is a bit off topic.
My point isn’t so much about spelling and grammar. I’m far from perfect in both areas myself. My point is that some humanities and social science students are just plain dumb. I wasn’t the only one to notice this, especially during group assignments, in my course.
I think even Mark would admit that the average IQ of humanities and social science students is several orders of magnitude below that of law, commerce, engineering and science students. I nonetheless acknowledge that some very gifted people do study humanities and social science. It’s just that we could do without the “Tim and Debbie” types.
Can I have a rant? Do you mind if I don’t spell-check it?
It should be known to all prospective students of the University of Melbourne’s Arts department that the Renewal Strategy about to be implemented has one purpose: minimise the resources students get, while maximising the income from same students. Today the VC sent staff a letter telling them that fees have overtaken HECS, 286 million to 270. While the University staff works hard to maintain teaching standards, poor management at the University level – especially in the implementation of the Melbourne Model – means that no parent can let their student attend in good conscience. It really is just that simple.
The rightfully maligned ‘Dreamlarge’ adverts literally tell the story of neglect; problems are re-cast as opportunities not through hard work or innovative thinking, but by merely glossing over the big issues. Marketing trumps hard work. To add insult to injury, the millions spent on the adverts are compounded by the suspect expenditure of a retainer. In short, the people who made some of the daftest adverts in recent memory are paid 45,000 a month just to be on call to advise about future adverts. Meanwhile, some of the best teachers in the country are told to buy their own office supplies or simply just cut loose. 45,000 a month could transform the University into the world’s best educational institution – and that would be the best marketing of all.
Of course the curriculum needs to be streamlined, and of course a renewal strategy would be welcome – but what is going on at Melbourne is nothing short of a snafu festival. Where did the money go? Why is it so hard to fail students who steal their work from the internet, or literally impossible in the case of full-fee paying students? (I was told ‘not to make trouble’ by University administration when it came to kicking out a full-fee paying student) Why are students allowed to believe they are clients who deserve their degrees, no matter what? Melbourne will soon be no different that the suspect degree farms on the second floor of a dozen city buildings – and at least the staff at those places are treated with respect, trained and encouraged.
The comeuppance for the University’s mis-managing of its transitions will be nigh-Biblical in scope. The ill-conceived push to a user-pays model is to the great detriment of everybody in the country, and by the time students come to realise their part in it, they will have wasted real time and money. And then? Full-fee paying students will leave. In droves. They already talk about taking action.
The Melbourne Model is what happens when you let second-rate marketing consultants decide the education direction of a critical institution. So far, the Model looks like this: pay an external consultant to tell you what you already know, let them charge you as much as it would take to fix the problem, ignore the recommendations anyway, implement something else, pretend it was fully consulted with staff, ignore complaints, and finally fire a third of the people who looked at it on the way through. If you can hire anybody who has overseen the ruination of another University, you may be up for promotion.
Look for a ’surprise’ closure of one of the Parkville campuses’ key libraries, only to make way for a vague and useless ‘hub’ that once again meets the approval of marketing gurus but leaves teachers and students in the dark. Maybe the business school will use it? Good luck to them! Meanwhile Baillieu Library Prospective students should be warned they are entering into a University for which their education comes dead last. In the coming weeks, you can expect another sickeningly expensive and self-congratulatory round of defensive public relations from the University. In the new system, all problems are public relation problems, students are annoying carbunkles to the income system, and teachers are referred to as ‘talent’ by the den of cynical hackery known as the media unit.
I wish there was room for a fight to make things change for the better, but there just isn’t the fight in Melbourne staff. Arts to management there means fee-paying journalism degrees. Deviation from the model is dealt with swiftly by the guards.
No, I wouldn’t, mel, in respect of law and commerce students at least where I have about ten years’ teaching experience. Around 60% of humanities/social science students anyway are doing double degrees with law or biz (at least in Qld Unis) and thus have to have the higher entry score, and there are some law and biz students you can’t top for narrowness of outlook and refusal to learn.
Am glad Mel’s blame the victim approach is in virtual parenthesis to the more plausible comments from Ex Melbourne Lecturer.
Some of the comments in the thread make me wonder whether some people ever stop to consider what the purpose of arts/humanities is in a real world. A real world rather than one of zombies as seems favoured by many control-freak neolib employers and politicians, that is.
It suits some to have highly skilled “manufactured” morons doing specific tasks without understanding certain implications involved in certain types of work, or the real $value of certain types of skilled work for those doing such work. This despite the fact that folk are often in trouble when they are thrown on the scrap heap after very specific types of work become obsolete. But Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts are concerned with the human “product” itself- not just in one role amongst many as a culturally-created numb robot, existing as a disposable unit for some un-self- reflexive Platonic corporate or bureacratic fascist, but as someone for themselves family and community, not merely as a artifact within the realm of an exclusive “owner”.
“The unconsidered life is hardly worth contemplating”.
So said Socrates who lived and loved life so passionately that he was prepared to DIE for that maxim.
If life means nothing more than the vicarious animal thrill of pleasure in the pain inflicted on others through dreaming up ways of sacking them, or the fear-driven reactionary spite that drives barbarians to lobotomisation of those they can’t understand a la “Cuckoos Nest”, my thanks at any rate to my betters, who fought NOT to get rid of the various conceptual and intellectual apparatus that allow for a more nuanced approach to LIFE.
One that includes an idea of the person, perhaps?
If only the employers and politicians would WELCOME that, maybe they’d be less inclined to clutch their suitcases of dollars and “live ” comfortably in harmony with life rather than involved in a constant and uninformed battle against it.
But they live their lives filled with fear that the proles will finally after all discover a workable concept of the “person” which includes the discovery of just those rights ensuring a meaningful life.
Else, why a headlong rush to destroy education “into life” in its full sense, rather than promote an opportunity?
Sorry for a long post. Wanted to get it right as much as possible and am not the genius some others contributing here are. To those people I say sorry, I did my best including for myself because I sense misguidedly or otherwise, that this is an important topic.
The average IQ of law students would be higher than arts simply due to the massive difference in entry score. I think the average arts student would be smarter than science students. My uni’s geography department, which is part of the science faculty, says arts students are generally better at the science component of geography than the science students are at the humanities/social scientific component. Many science students are terrible at comprehending anything historical or cultural. They just can’t get their head around cultural change.
Entry scores are simply the product of supply and demand. You increase the entry score, and the arts faculty couldn’t get enough students to sustain itself.
I can’t believe this QUT thing! Abolishing Arts!
Ex Melbourne Lecturer and Paul Walter:
Hooray!
Ex Melbourne Lecturer:
Are you saying they’re closing the Baillieu?
Erk.
I get glossy mags from Melbourne University every month with begging letters for me to give them money. That’s the hyena-like laughter you hear every so often from my humble home.
Yeah that’ll happen!?
OMG of course they are not going to close the Baillieu.
Ex-Melbourne Lecturer, your pain is felt and shared, but look, it’s easier to get a semi-decent outcome by working with marketing types and those who want us to teach more students in less time, etc, than by digging in the heels and ignoring them altogether. That approach only gets you steamrolled. Buying one’s own office supplies really isn’t that bad, anyway.
Andrew, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about w/r/t to La Trobe. Yes, the regional campuses are a problem, but when The Age says LTU is ‘ailing’, keep in mind that they are simultaneously congratulating themselves, in their fatuous way, for ‘bringing down’ the previous VC with their hard-headed investigative journalism type behaviour.
LTU hasn’t leapt on the latest futuristic edjumacational bandwagons some other institutions are so keen on (eg Creative Industries) but this is hardly a sign of decrepitude.
QUT has “Creative Industries” and a completely unfathomable distance education system (from observation of my partner’s frustrations after recently completing a distance education degree interstate).
I could get marked assignments back within a couple of weeks from two states away (a week of that was in an Aussie Post mailbag) - QUT takes 8 weeks AND WE LIVE IN BRISBANE!
When my daughters both did their BA’s at Melbourne, the Baillieu Library rarely met their needs for texts and sources for essays. Melbourne is self-congratulatory. So was Monash under VC Robinson, so are many Australian Unis.
Too much gloss and hype; too little substance.
The “Melbourne Model”, so far, is looking like “Melbourne University Private” - a spectacular failure, and deservedly so.
Meanwhile, other universities in Victoria are hoping for the current Year 12 group to desert Melbourne Uni and flee in their droves to enrol at Monash Clayton or RMIT or Deakin etc. Why should students living in Melbourne or RAR Victoria take a chance on getting entry into a Melb Uni postgrad course after an undergrad course? Straight into a professional degree elsewhere - why not?
As to Melb Uni Arts: in 1997 they had a unit called “Let’s Go Shopping!” and several others with trendy postmodern titles and synopses in the Handbook. Ye gods!! (It wasn’t just the marketeers who brought them down…..)
Ambigulous
Mark,
You are right about students in some courses, like commerce, often being unwilling to think. Many of them seem to prefer rote learning “the facts”.
That observation doesn’t invalidate my original point though.
What’s so bad about the Melbourne Model? I’m not being provocative - I don’t know much about it.
My first impression was that it would help generalist degrees like humanities by preventing people going straight to professional programs. It suggests that a general education is a good basis for life and career. That’s what I thought anyway. Don’t know anymore!
It sometimes seems that some people in humanities are actively trying to sound ‘out there’ to be provocative or something. I don’t know why. I believe in the importance of sexual and cultural inquiry, but it’s as though some people are trying to get mocked in the way they word things.
A version of this debate has been around for some time. The paper by Ian Hunter, Denise Meredyth et. al. that was titled ‘Accounting for the Humanities’ historicised it in an interesting way, at a time (the early 90s) when the decline in arts and humnaities enrolments was being attributed to the Labor party and the Dawkins reforms (check out pretty well any issue of the Arena journal from 1988-1991 on this.
There are often two things conflated in these debates. The first is the complex industrial politics of staff positions and interests relevant to student demand. Just as there are those who feel that their institution has ‘devalued’ their area and this has led to declining student demand, there are also those - often in the same institutions - who feel that they have to deal with the rising student numbers to cover for and cross-subsidise their colleages.
Second, there is the general point about the value of an Arts/Humanities education, and whether the BA in question has actually worked towards these goals. This is not just a matter of the quality of the student intake; it also comes to the question of how the degree has been designed, and whether the staff involved bought in to such a goal.
That said, it is great to see a renewed commitment by QUT to Humanities and Social Sciences education. As people in Brisbane would know, some of the problems arose as much from geography ie. you could only access courses in Politics, History, Ethics, Sociology etc. from the outer suburban campus, as from the nature of what was delivered.
David
Actually, there is a simpler explanation and that is those students accepted into Law have higher IQ’s than Arts and Social Science students. Which is just as well: the vast majority of Social Science and Arts courses taught at Australian universities are far less intellectually demanding than Law.
The general exception would be economics. Of course there are oases of erudition, but they are rare. Though even Law degrees have been watered-down as they continue to be offered further and further down the university quality chain.
Most Australian undergraduate Arts/Social Science (non-economics) degrees produce people will very low-grade analytical skills. Just about all employers will interview a fresh graduate regardless of what degree they have.
Arts/Social Science grads are then given an opportunity to show evidence of their analytical abilities. To the extent you think employers are ‘missing out’ the cause lies with the grads and the poor quality of their educations.
I see no evidence for what you are saying. Giving that (in NSW) scores for Law are up to 99.6 while Arts are only up to about 85, with all sorts of secondary ways to get in, I’m surprised the difference isn’t greater than it is. When a degree is only admitting people over 99.6 they are obviously smart to start with. I would like to see an empirical study of graduate results AFTER controlling for starting score.
Many employers actually do specify a particular degree, but I agree that most who don’t are very open minded to assess each candidate on his or her merits.
John rarely provides evidence for his assertions. And as noted above, a very large number of arts students (the majority at QUT) are doing double degrees where the score for entrance is effectively the higher one - for instance a BA/LLB student would need to get a very high score.
Well, not that I’m in any position to question JGs holy pronouncements, but spinning off my own narrow evidence base of 10 years teaching in an Arts faculty, and a Law degree of my own, id say:
a. up to 50% of my Arts students do double degrees nowadays
b. Law degrees ain’t what they used to be. The amount of material students have to cover is greater than in Arts, yes, but not conceptually more difficult. Possibly less so (with the exception of say, Law of Evidence, which will generally separate goats from sheep). Plus they get spoon fed these days - an equity measure on the back of the international student dollar.
And frankly, its kinda hard to spoon fed essay/ argument based subjects in Arts to the same degree as problem based law questions.
I do think spoon-feeding has become pretty bad in all uni stuff, including arts. I think it’s largely a function of this that rightists get their evidence for a sustained lefty political conspiracy. Complex ideas tend to get reduced in Arts 101 subjects to “ok in this text we will find 1. Women are oppressed, 2. Indigenous Australians are oppressed, and 3. Indigenous-Women Australia are especially oppressed. Actually this serves as a good all-purpose rule for analysing any text.”
But I think over-simplification is a problem everywhere now… I do think that some kind of critical-historical inquiry is essential for a healthy society.
David, that example doesn’t bear any relationship to any subject I’ve ever taught in an Arts Faculty over the last decade.
I’m exaggerating but I do think things tend to go to far that way, depending on the subject, lecturer and tutor. I’ve also experienced the very best and most rigorous kind of thought in arts faculties.
It’s also true that all disciplines have crappy stuff. Interesting JG rates economics – I think that tends to be one of the less scientific of the social sciences (read McCloskey’s trashing of it…).
Mark,
For example, I’ve once had a lecturer who said that whole notion of GDP was mythical, just a fabrication by the capitalists… I am not simplifying some complex conceptual critique, because I carefully clarified what he meant. He literally said GDP change won’t have any consequence for our lives. This is stuff he was teaching students… and to which they were carefully taking notes…
There are also some feminists who maintain that the moment you use a numerical measure you are engaging in patriarchal oppression (I have journal published quotes).
I do think that various oppressions are often taught in a manner where they seem to move from empirical generalisations to some kind of quasi-transcendental law. I think this is an especial problem in subjects like literature, because a good imagination combined with argumentative skill can twist almost anything into the pre-determined idea. For example, when you find that men and women are represented identically in particular case, all you need to do is say “ahh but they signify something different because we have to *first* contextualise it by reference to differential positioning inside a network of power�. And of course the network of power will mean the woman’s representation is subordinate to that of the man’s. It’s wonderfully circular, but that kind of reasoning goes on all the time.
As David implies, many humanities courses seem to insist that all we need to know of any political, social, economic or historical topic is who is oppressing who, and how. The answer is allways rather predictable too. The “analytic skills” involved in this are negligible and there is a high potential for self righteousness as well, (which perhaps has even worse consequences). Aggressively advocating a particular “theory” may have it’s place, but being ignorant or contemptous of any alternatives is more akin to religous training than traditional humanities scholarship.
It does seem to create at least a substantial minority of graduates who are reflexively hostile to anything to do with science, technology, commerce and allmost any government. They combine this with ludicrous assumptions of their own intellectual and moral superiority over all the “capitalists” and “proles”. Paul Walter’s post (above) is a beautiful example of the genre.
I am sure this does not apply to all humanities departments and graduates, especially double degrees - but it does seem to be very common.
It’s possible that these sorts of attitudes might be part of some literary studies/cultural studies courses, taught badly, but they certainly aren’t found in social science from my extensive experience teaching in four universities over a decade. But I’m sceptical because so much of the “postmodernists dumb down everything into a tale of oppression” narrative can usually be demonstrated to be a beat up when people are asked to provide evidence rather than generalisations.
Plus, “self-righteousness”? The classes I’ve taken which have involved examination of inequality have had a strong emphasis on reflexive and critical examination of one’s own privilege, as part of the learning process.
If you come out of them feeling self-righteous or entitled, you’re not paying attention.
Blaming Arts and Humanities lecturers for the poor quality of Arts and Humanities education in the past ten years is true fucking cart before the horse material. Well done to all involved for a magnificent intellectual tumble roll. How about some accountancy for course structure at the University level? No?
Oh well, better luck next decade…
Or twenty years of government funding decisions. When I was an Arts student, we used to have tutorials with a maximum of twelve students and the tute work would be a thousand word essay for discussion. In some of the unis I’ve taught in, you get no tutes at all, or five a semester with thirty students in them.
David, I just don’t see it at the ground level. I have a little experience teaching gender studies now, and while the students may sometimes be interested in lapsing into those simplifications (because it’s easier to engage with something formulaic, or it’s easier to engage in activism without having to ask difficult questions) I haven’t encountered any situation where we’re actually offering simple explanations. If anything the refrain is: look, this is more complex than it appears, it has unexamined political and social effects, it relies on unexamined assumptions that need to be evaluated. And this is as true of how we approach the texts we are teaching as it is of the things that those texts are themselves discussing It is always about adding something to the process of thought and not just halting everything at the monotonous recognition of oppression.
It depends a lot on the teacher. I do think there might be a bit of an unconscious conspiracy of silence - the ‘good’ academics don’t really look over their shoulder about how the ‘bad’ academics are teaching. That way, the good ones can present a sort of acceptable public face, and with all sincerity say, ‘hey that kind of stuff doesn’t go on in arts faculties, it’s all a conservative myth!’.
Mark and ex-Melbourne, I’m all for finding causal and non-moralistic explanations. But I don’t think the Australian funding situation can be blamed. I think the issue is a longer-term one, and one that spans Anglo-American countries.
I would suggest it is primarily caused by the declining availability of academic jobs compared to graduates. This was not caused primarily by funding changes, but rather by demographic changes since the baby boom (the baby boom filled up all the jobs, now the ratio of young people to old people has not kept up, meaning the university doesn’t need all that many new teachers). Funding would make a difference, but nowhere near as big a one as that.
The low job market means that the pressure towards conformity is far greater than it used to be. When a field has such strong control on all new entrants, the result is stagnation. What Bourdieu calls the “bureaucrats of normal science� hold sway. The field becomes self-sustaining, turning into a feedback loop; in the case of academe, a feedback loop of exponentially ‘out there’ sounding radicalism.
lauredhel “reflexive� and “critical� are buzz-words. But usually they seem to function as means to an end of undermining white males’ taken for granted assumptions about the world. Not so much for undermining other subject positions’ taken for granted assumptions. The usual explanation for this would be that white males are the ones more in need of reflexivity, because it is their perspective that is more or less universally dominant. When minority positions are reflexively examined, the causal bases are invariably ‘nice’ sounding ones, like being positioned to act as a ‘voice’ due membership of a collective experience of oppression. The white male reflexivity will invariably involve recognition of a power over other subject positions. It’s soul-cleansing, penitence stuff. This would all be fine, except it presupposes certain hazy empirical generalisations of differential power in certain contexts as though they were some kind of a priori basis for reality – as though ‘white males’ fit into some kind of neat category that are always already privileged due to some spooky grid of power.
The sociological aura around gender, race and class goes well beyond treating them merely as useful variables for predicting social interaction. The whole point is that they are meant to serve a political purpose. And ANYONE knows you can read dozens of theorists stating this explicitly. Some of a Gramscian persuasion believe that the very point of academia is encouraging political transformation. Well, if that is so, why not just give the conservatives bad grades? But things are set up so it doesn’t need to be as overt as this. Rather, the conservatives will be described as insufficiently critical, reflexive or deep; they will be described as banal, etc. This is because the very definition of critical depth in certain teachers’ minds seems to be attached to a specific kind of class/gender/race/sexuality critique.
But I do agree that most of this comes from professional self-interest within institutional/bureaucratic arrangements rather than a substantive revolutionary political commitment. I think most of us accept that the university is now structured in a way that encourages lecturers to system-reinforce, to actively *market* their particular approach, rather than to countenance a nice Socratic dialogue. When the approach involves a prescriptive political theory, how exactly can the uninitiated distinguish the teaching from activism?
I think many ‘good’ academics are vaguely aware of these problems. But they prefer to shut up about them, partly because they are personally attached to ‘bad’ academics and don’t want to diss their hard work, and partly because they view them as lesser evils compared to giving ammunition to the right wing anti-intellectuals. I actually think this policy is mistaken. The right wing populists have a field day selectively quoting bad academics anyway. The best political strategy is to promote a culture of intellectual rigour and quality by means of a deterrent effect of stigmatising bad research. I think it’s time to accept that the conservative attacks, although exaggerated, are not complete myths. By culturally castigating bad studies, and thereby deterring them, we can deprive conservatives of their ammunition by taking away stuff for them to mock.
Maybe this has all sounded too harsh. I love the idea of a critical scholarly community. But there are some problems, and *complete* denials by ‘public faces’ of arts faculties really bug me. Everyone should admit their own problems.
David, I’ve not been particularly reticent in the past about criticising what I see as bad or unsound research. There’s a fair bit of it about, to be sure, but there are some reasons why that’s the case as well which don’t go to ideology or politics. I’m also wondering whether there ever was a golden age of humanistic critical enquiry - if we’re talking literary studies, I very much doubt there was more openness in the heyday of “the new Criticism” and the rule of the Leavisites than there is now. I know there was bad teaching when I was an undergrad in the late 80s and early 90s and I know my parents had bad university teachers in the early 60s.
David, I was talking explicitly of my own experiences in social sciences and humanities classes, and I’m not a white male.
I’m not convinced that literary studies as it is today should have any place in universities. However a couple of units in literature would be valuable for prospective English teachers.
The bizarre theorising, much of it pseudo-Freudian, produced by the characters in literary departments serves no social function and is little more than academic boondoggling.
It is a great shame that the minds of so many talented young people are poisoned by this noxious nonsense.
True that - no golden age. But I would be interested to do a survey of the politics of the changing generations, and see which had more diverse members. In the mid-60s you found conservatives, liberals, radicals… While I do think now things are more one-dimensionally, politically, at least. Now I don’t think this was due to a big bad leftist conspiracy as the first step to world domination. There were other causal factors. But I do think some academics should be more self-conscious about this, and actively try to guard against appearing to impose a particularly belief system. Obviously leftist monotony is going to piss conservatives off, and obviously that’s going to open up academia to attacks from reactionaries.
Cultural studies also has bucket loads of nonsense. Look at this subject at Melbourne University called “Rock to Rave: Cultural Formations”: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/HB/subjects/106-057.html
Lord give me strength.
Lauredhel, so I assume you’re not working class or queer?
The reason that almost everyone finds something to feel un-entitled about is because the vast majority of people have at least one ‘oppressor’ side of the binary in their subject position. But assumptions about hierarchy on each particular variable are very rigid – eg. You will very rarely find an academic saying ‘ok in this particular social context, it would actually better to be a woman than a man’. Those kind of contexts are ignored.
Again, your assertion doesn’t reflect my experiences. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a humanities or social sciences academic make bald remarks like “in this particular social context, it would actually be better to be a man than a woman”, let alone the reverse; the analyses I’ve encountered in the course of my studies have been far, far more nuanced and supported than that.
You’re the one making the assertion that other people’s personal experiences and knowledge are invalid and that you can reliably generalise about everything that goes on in humanities classes: perhaps you could put up or shut up. Where’s your evidence?
Sorry, Lauredhel, but I really struggle to find where I said that other people’s personal experiences are invalid. As far as I can see, we are all making generalisations from personal experience. Earlier, I did provide some examples. Would you like names, dates and times as well?
If “be better” is too banal a term, substitute “have more power”.
I agree, and I am myself very conscious of it.
But let’s give students a bit of credit. When I was studying political science in the late 80s, we had lecturers who were strong Labor and National partisans, and history lecturers who were Liberals. It’s not too hard to adjust for bias.
I also think you’d find that until the 60s academics were predominantly conservative. Even now, the degree to which they’re not is overstated and the influence of politics on particular subject areas is also vastly overstated in my view. How many courses in 19th century Russian literature or French symbolist poetry are going to have some sort of overt political agenda? (Of course university managerialism has disappeared many such fields of learning.)
I only remember two teachers from first year uni (Qld).
An Orwell/Kroptokin/Bakunin loving Politics lecturer, tutor and Lothario who, reputedly, a decade or so later found God, and an LSD-gobbling Modern English Literature tutor who declared the set texts were perfectly fine but he was only going to discuss Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan. He cleared the chairs out of the tut room and we sat cross-legged in a circle, facing an inner circle of incense sticks, or, when he was feeling more lively, flanuered by the lake sequentially relating shaggy dog stories about our parents and families, until the goody two shoes anal types petitioned and he was sacked, sadly, at the end of the year.
Anyway, the best and the brightest had pissed off by then to far more fruitful, stimulating and enjoyable endeavours.
Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.
David, what you seem to require from humanities scholars is a confession: admit to bias, admit to poor quality research; if you haven’t done it, you’ve facilitated it. I am very interested in this, because it’s exactly the sort of thing that you seem to be suggesting that humanities scholars require of students when they use those buzzwords (eg reflexive, critical).
Why do you feel that you can demand this with impunity and ‘we’ cannot? It seems inconsistent.
If you think there is no reflection on, or critique of, the humanities by humanists, then you are simply wrong. It is all there in the journals, the books, at the conferences and seminars. Where it isn’t is in the mainstream media, and that’s because humanists, particularly those in the ‘new’ humanities, are wary of invoking knee-jerk reactivity in order to do critique. That’s not how universities work, or it’s not how they used to, and it will only feed an agenda that refuses to differentiate between (for example) good and bad cultural studies research.
“Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.”
It’s obvious: if millions upon millions of people engage in a practice, enjoy it, devote countless hours to it, it couldn’t possibly be worth studying.
I agree with Mark that it’s fair enough to study rave culture. I think the key is how it is studied.
Adam, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn’t saying that students shouldn’t be told to be reflexive and critical. By using the term “buzzwords” I didn’t mean to imply they’re bad concepts (perhaps it was a poor choice of term). What I said was that they are usually one-sided in how they are taught.
Thanks for informing me that reflection on academic practice exists within the humanities (did my own Bourdieu reference escape you?). Just because it’s been debated a lot, doesn’t mean the result is satisfactory or coherent.
cultural studies has been definitely demolished and disembowelled by the superlative Camille Paglia. It is mickey-mouse stuff. Anti-intellectual, shallow rubbish.
Paglia attacks the kind of French-US pseudo-radical theory that I want to attack, but, unlike her mentor Harold Bloom, she strongly believes in the merit of studying popular culture.
yes she does, but secondarily to architecture, archaeology, religion, mythology, and classical literature.
“Cultural studies” isn’t a unified thing, anyway, and the Australian/British style of doing it is very different in its origins and theoretical tradition than the American. I imagine that Paglia, like many other US pundits, writes as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. In the States, what we think of as cultural studies is often done under the banner of “the new cultural sociology” though as with American sociology generally, with more of a Durkheimian twist.
I’ve never heard Paglia trash cultural studies - she trashes a specifc kind of wacky literary theory that originated in the US. And I’ve never heard her suggest that popular culture was a secondary study pursuit compared to ‘high culture’.
And she doesn’t ignore British cultural studies - on a discussion with Laura Mulvey:
http://www.salon.com/it/col/pagl/1998/10/07pagl.html
I haven’t read Paglia, and I was just speculating based on jinmaro’s statement.
Any significant difference between Brit and US cultural studies orientation and scholarship has long gone. In any case, they have in common key theoreticians that Paglia abhorred: Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, etc, revered by fashionable cultural studies aficionados today in Oz. Raymond Williams is who?
“Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.”
If you want to study go to a club or pub. Don’t sit in class listening to some uptight goose carrying on about Lacan.
I suppose I’d learn about musicology by going to hear a string quartet?
And I very much doubt that Lacan has anything to do with this course. Your comments reflect your own obsessions on this one, mel.
“What I said was that they are usually one-sided in how they are taught”
This implies that there are only two sides, and that what is required is balance. I think there are probably closer to n-sides, where n is more than two, sometimes many more.
“Any significant difference between Brit and US cultural studies orientation and scholarship has long gone.”
I strongly disagree with this because it implies two internally homogeneous traditions that have merged. The current divisions within the Brit and US fields are immense in themselves. Also, I would cite Meaghan Morris as the perfect example of a counter-argument to the idea of monolithic, unidirectional cultural studies tradition emanating from ‘the North’. Morris speaks back in a very Australia-situated way to US-centric assumptions.
“In any case, they have in common key theoreticians that Paglia abhorred: Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, etc, revered by fashionable cultural studies aficionados today in Oz”
The ‘etc’ is telling because those are some very different thinkers being listed. Virtually all they have in common is that they are hated by Anglophonic conservatives. Plus, show me a paper that uses all of the above consistently, and I’ll show you a genius or a crackpot. Not everybody loves those thinkers. Myself, I like a lot in Derrida and Irigaray, although I think there are serious problems with aspects of their work.
Actually, no it doesn’t. Is that the kind of “analysis” you use in your critical interrogations?
(Cliche critical analysis trick 1 - pretend that faulty metaphysical presuppositions lay behind interlocutors’ discourse. Proceed to ‘reveal’ them by twisting and over-interpreting.)
Okay, my reading of your comments may be less than generous because the mode of engagement here has become polemical, so perhaps we can start again?
I’m not really sure what you are expecting to happen in relation to the problems that you identify. It seems to me like you are trying to elicit a confession, whereas I would prefer not to confess because I think that such a demand is, in one way or another, politically motivated and designed to produce, well, what exactly?
This discussion is simply bizarre!
“This is because the very definition of critical depth in certain teachers’ minds seems to be attached to a specific kind of class/gender/race/sexuality critique.”
I’ve noticed, David, that your characterisation of bad research/teaching always takes the form of a particular (and particularly one-dimensional) type of identity politics: i.e. critique as the privileging of one social “identity” (e.g. woman) over another, apparently dominant identity (e.g. man). Just wondering whether this kind of research/teaching defines bad research/teaching for you, or whether it’s a convenient example and there are other kinds of research/teaching that you would also judge as bad?
If it’s the latter, would you be so kind as to provide characterisations of the other kinds of research/teaching you deem poor?
If it’s the former, then never fear! That kind of stuff just doesn’t go on that much anymore, if it ever did. While I’m sure a melaleuca could trawl university handbooks, etc. and pick out dozens of unit titles that have words like “queer”, “feminist”, “race”, and quite possibly “black lesbian working class transgenders” in them, the great bulk of these units concentrate on exploring the history and the critique of their enabling concepts and their original political objectives. Thus, a unit called “Representation and Gender”, for instance, is far more likely to be about the problematic nature of identity categories such as “woman”, about the institutionalisation (hence powerful and potentially dangerous nature) of feminism, about the utter naïvety of critiquing representation with the aim of demonstrating its oppression of women, etc. than about “undermining white males’ taken for granted assumptions about the world”.
In other words, your characterisation of bad research/teaching is a caricature that bears little resemblance to any reality.
Of course, the caricature is instructive insofar as it indicates at least some of the ways in which contemporary works form the humanities and social sciences (oh fuck it! let’s just call it “postmodernism, since that’s what everyone’s thinking anyway) are received by “the general public”, by the media and by the other self-appointed saviours of the Great Tradition and Intellectually and Morally Sound Scholarship (but also by students, which poses some interesting questions for pedagogy). It thereby indicates that a certain understanding of what “critique” entails is widely established outside the particular disciplines in which “critique” is practised or valued. And, while that non-specialist idea (for want of a better word) of critique bears little resemblance to the diverse range of critical practices utilised in postmodern argument, that idea nevertheless makes it very easy to presume to know what’s going on in humanities and social sciences units on gender (e.g.), which wouldn’t be the first time in history that ideas and activities related to women were subject to prejudice.
So it looks as though even “bad” critique can be useful — by helping show up the operations and reproduction of a familiar, utterly inane stereotype.
“What Bourdieu calls the “bureaucrats of normal scienceâ€? hold sway. The field becomes self-sustaining, turning into a feedback loop; in the case of academe, a feedback loop of exponentially ‘out there’ sounding radicalism.”
Since you drew my attention back to this, I thought I should address it. I see this risk as having been averted with the way in which cultural studies and other ‘new’ humanities disciplines have moved, especially in Australia. There are strong critiques of ‘out there’ radicalism, and the big projects tend to have solid empirical or archival components. There have been calls for a return to more radical positions, recently by Simon During, but these are far from representative. More representative in the case of cultural studies would be the direction that is advocated for by Ien Ang - ie of embracing the move to ‘cultural research’ and of necessarily being politically ‘compromised’.
Trapped in moderation again. Next time I’ll use a different name and email….
Jebus! How times have changed!
I well remember Ang’s thinly-veiled swipes at any kind of cultural studies that engaged with concepts and didn’t wear its politics on its sleeves (aka “deconstruction”), which she dismissed as “theoretical professionalism”.
And so begins the process of elimination to work out why every one of my comments goes into moderation…
Chnage of name does nothing. A different email address perhaps?
Continuing the process of elimination to determine why all my comments go into moderation…
A change of name and a change of email address don’t fix it.
Could it be the IP address (surely not)?
Captain Oats, this has been explained to you before, but you’re not in moderation which would imply a decision on our part to filter your comments, but accidentally getting caught up in the spam filter which often returns false positives. Because one of the things its algorithm recognises as characteristic of spammers is posting large numbers of comments in quick succession, you only compound the problem by posting comments about it, because you’re convincing it it’s right. People are advised to email us if their comments don’t appear. Please do so.
Hoorah! A different IP and I’m straight into the discussion.
But what does this mean?
Oats - same thing happened to me a while back, and nothing short of a different email address would do.
I did nothing to deserve it either, as best I could tell, and there was nothing LP admin could do but keep fishing them out. Which I imagine gets boring before too long.
It means the spaminator has pinged your IP address as that of a spammer. Wasn’t my previous explanation clear?
Yes, it does.
She’s still not too happy with ‘deconstructive criticism’…