There are days, with this project, that I feel I'm trying to force a square into a circle. And I fear that when I realize I can't do any such thing, then the whole foundation of the project will crumble, and I'll be left with nothing. Hopefully these are common feelings for this process.
So I've chosen a few comments from those that my director gave me on my revised prospectus, and I've been setting them up as kind of freewriting prompts and forcing myself to write on them:
The first comment I chose to focus on had to do with rhet/comp's adoption of critical pedagogy and cultural studies and the relative inattention paid to the university's structure. My director asked whether this lack of attention "speak to their assumption that the university's structure mirrors that of the larger society as a whole." So he wants to know why I argue for the specific context of the corporate University as so crucial--why I think it should be a starting point, not an end.
I set myself up with this prompt:
What might be gained in scrutinizing one's own critical position/contextuality? In particular that of the corporate University?
And I guess that it just is, isn't a good enough answer.
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2 comments:
I always want to invert these kinds of formulations, just to see how it looks. If I do that here, what I think is that the "corporate university" is an objectified sort of abstraction built out of the practices in which we engage. That's a vague we there, but a lot of those practices are aimed at deciding or executing decisions on who is / is not a member of that "we." The reason this is useful to me is that then, instead of thinking of the corporate university as some external object / structure / institution which exists apart from us and perhaps acts upon us in a more or less determinant fashion, I can think about how the various practices in which I and others like me engage go towards reinforcing (or are) the positive and / or negative practices which I would attribute to the "corporate university." How many of those practices go towards consolidating and reinforcing that objectified construct of "the university" (and its corporatization)? Here, the corporate university isn't a "starting point" because it's a thing which contains us; it's a focal point because it's one significant thing that all (no -- some, but which?) of our activities create.
In fact, what's really kinda cool (to me) here, is that this lets me also think about practices which occur outside the traditional bounds of the university -- how they go towards creating and reinforcing its (do I dare say "ideology" here??). I.e. the cultural discourses on education, university life, the "ivy league," the corporate enterprise of testing and student quantification, even all those horrible school-ranking publications, etc. This also (and I think really importantly) shifts agency away from the rather oblique spectre of a disembodied "corporate university" back to where it belongs -- on the individuals who take part in the practices which I've mentioned. It's much easier to think about changing those -- even on a vast, collective scale, than to try to change (subvert, critique, oppose) the "corporate university."
fwiw,
--m
Thanks. It is helpful to have these words and the idea of "practices." I guess I've always just assumed that it should be obvious that "our" activities/practices help create the corporate University, but before I just jump into naming those practices (the naming of chairs by corporations; corporate contracts in the food court; issues of academic labor; etc.), I should consider slowing down and identifying that these practices contribute to this thing I am trying to name and define. Plus, as you point out, it *is* easier to think about changing practices and activities than this abstract entity. Thank you:)
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