The context for the "marketization" issue is the Sunday-morning
presentation given by Kenna Manos and Susan Drain. I don't remember the
title of the session, but their presention took the form of a dialogue
between a cranky, skeptical, thoughtful faculty member and an ambivalent,
well-intentioned, thoughtful administrator (I'll leave y'all to figure
out who was who) about the language used to "sell" universities and their
programs to legislators in order to get funding. The dialogue was
peppered with actual quotes from Nova Scotia documents, which took the
whole thing from abstract to terrifying, in my view. One of the central
issues Kenna and Susan addressed was: If we adopt the language of
business and the marketplace to peddle our wares, as it were, then at
what point does the language begin driving what we do? If we describe
ourselves in "their" terms, what do we risk losing? (There were other
issues, to be sure, and I trust other people will fill them in. I also
heard a scurrilous rumo(u)r that the text of this presentation will soon
be available on the Inkshed web site . . . [pause as Marcy looks
hopefully toward the east].)
At any rate --
On Fri, 17 May 1996, Brenton Faber wrote:
> As Roger seems to suggest (if I can put keystrokes in his
> computer) the issue is not so much "whether or not scholars
> participate in the market" it is "*how* will we negotitate
> the demands of the market within our scholarship." For example,
> G. Ulmer (1985?) offers a detailed discussion of the ways in
> which French philosophers (yes, Derrida et al.) created political
> strategies for re-integrating philosophy into the French
> school system -- working beyond the university and in
> co-operation with legislative and political branches of
> government.
I'd like to hear more about this, Brenton, because I don't know
the piece. Could you say more or give a full cite?
> I think Roger is correct when he notes that universities need
> to provide (and many do) services that the public will pay
> for. Now, this doesn't mean that we blindly serve the whims
> of the population any more than Microsoft sits back and waits
> for people to "appreciate" Windows '95.
Hunh. So if we follow Microsoft's example, we monopolize the
market, deliver a substandard product, tell everybody it's wonderful
(which they _have_ to believe because we've killed the competition) and sit
back and watch the profits roll in?? I'm tempted to say that we've tried
that, and it isn't working, in our cases . . .
> We simply need to
> be a little more rhetorically ambitious. . . .
I think Roger was calling for more than rhetorical ambition,
though. Roger, I thought, was advocating a different kind of
responsiveness to the marketplace when he talked about DePaul's new
programs. But creating programs that the public will pay for seems like
a two-edged sword to me. One troubling aspect of that approach is that
we're in danger of losing the concept that an education isn't something
you buy; it's something you buy the privilege of pursuing. It's not a
simple case of "you get what you pay for." And _that's_ the point at
which I think we need to leverage our rhetorical savvy.
Marcy
Marcy Bauman
Writing Program
University of Michigan-Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Rd.
Dearborn, MI 48128
email: [log in to unmask]
