Comments on: Dialogue and Demand

By: jerry hamrick

jerry hamrick — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 06:39:15 +0000

I think that the problems you describe, which you have brought up several times in the years I have been following your blog, are natural to organizations which work in the social sciences. The feeling I get from what you often write is one of dullness, a lack of purpose, a lack of energy. I think the social sciences/humanities disciplines lack purpose, and definitely lack energy. Boring, boring, boring is what I remember most about my time spent in such disciplines.

First and foremost America’s educational institutions should share a common set of goals and each kind of institution should be focused on doing its part toward reaching those goals. Since I can’t put my hands on such goals that have been developed by academia, I will propose some. All academic institutions should focus on giving each American citizen free and equal access to the rights, resources, opportunities, and protections that she needs to have a fair and honest chance to go as far in life as her talents and efforts can take her, thereby giving her a fair and honest chance to build long lives worth living for her and her loved ones, including a secure, comfortable retirement.

So, what is the history department at Swarthmore doing to fulfill its role in achieving those goals? I am certain that with respect to American History it believes it is doing the right thing, and I am equally certain that is failing miserably. The same is true with the Economics Department, and with the Political Sciences Department. Engineering may be making some progress but not nearly enough. Don’t feel bad, most institutions of higher learning in America are doing a bad job in meeting these goals. How can any self-respecting head of a university permit the sloppy, error-filled versions of American History and Economics to continue to be taught? Many professors of economics are beginning to wake up, but they need to move much faster. American History professors and Political Science professors that I am able to follow are teaching fairy tales in their classrooms. It is a great shame.

By: Andrew Gow

Andrew Gow — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:03:13 +0000

Thank you for this careful, painful exposition of how shared governance both enables and resists the managerialism now dominant in higher ed. and public admin. Unfortunately, I think opening up the real dialogues your piece seems to yearn for would probably mean destroying shared academic governance, frankly. It does privilge tenured faculty, and tenured faculty are a demographically distinct group. So do the privileges of one select group to resist top-down power and change driven by non-academic rationales have to be sacrificed on the altar of openness, or of real dialogue? Doing so would inevitably empower managers and the neoliberal agenda of managerialism. Until someone comes up with a better alternative to shared academic governance, we are stuck with an exceedingly imperfect last bulwark against the fate of academia in the UK, for example.

By: Frederic Bush

Frederic Bush — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 01:25:50 +0000

With regard to the first part of your discussion, the immediate and negative response activists tend to have upon hearing a suggestion for dialogue, I think that when you approach the administration as a student with a complaint, you are expecting a response anywhere on a continuum from “the administration ignores me” to “”the administration immediately does what I say.” As an individual student begins a complaint process, they don’t really have much leverage and so the offer of a dialogue is better than being ignored and is likely to be accepted. But once a student group, having been stonewalled, begins organized protests and raises the stakes, dialogue is no longer what they are looking for— they expect actual change, or at least a vote or a public statement by an administrator denying their demands. Time is not really on the protestors’ side — if the protestors stand down while discussions are ongoing they may lose their ability to mobilize activists, vacations may intrude, etc. Unless there is a firm commitment to act on the discussion, it is a delaying tactic that favors the group in power.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 17:16:05 +0000

Yes. I think shared governance is still very important, but as someone suggested on Twitter in response to this piece, maybe understand that as negotiation or bargaining rather than “dialogue”, a word that means something very different emotionally and substantively. Information asymmetry is a familiar part of any negotiation–and can in fact be one of the things that parties to a negotiation are bargaining over.

By: Andrew Gow

Andrew Gow — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 15:48:29 +0000

Thank you for this careful, painful exposition of how shared governance both enables and resists the managerialism now dominant in higher ed. and public admin. Unfortunately, I think openimg up the real dialogues your piece seems to yearn for would probably mean destroying shared academic governance, frankly. It does privilge tenure faculty, and tenured faculty are a demographically distinct group. So do the privileges of one select group to resist top-down power and change driven by non-academic rationales have to be sacrificed on the altar of openness, or of real dialogue? Doing so would inevitably empower managers and the neoliberal agenda of managerialism. Until someone comes up with a better alternative to shared academic governance, we are stuck with an exceedingly imperfect last bulwark against the fate of academia in the UK, for example.

By: S

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 14:44:48 +0000

It’s not just Swarthmore.