~by David Aiken~
 |
| Diogenes, by Zanchi |
Setting the record
straighter: An UPDATE on “Liberal Arts
at University College Roosevelt_RIP” (useful for moments of dis- and
mis-information).
·
No!
The suspension of the policy of co-governance at UCR was not done to protect the confidentiality of a few teachers or staff;
but rather to impose a new non-liberal
orientation to studies at the institution.
·
No!
The Reorientation at UCR was not made
to improve or enhance an LAS program; but rather to dismantle one.
·
No!
The notion of ‘liberal’ in Liberal
Arts and Science does not mean being
able to choose whatever courses you want to take, or to create your own program.
Even a cursory web-search definition of LAS always yields approximately this: “… liberal arts means that the courses you take will be in general [=
liberal] areas of study such as philosophy, mathematics, literature, art
history, or languages, rather than in applied or specialized [= non-liberal] fields.”
What I did on my Summer Vacation
Let us play a little
memory game—one that all American school-teachers used to do with their
students at the start of Fall classes, when All & Sundry are fresh and
rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a summer of
adventures and travel, rest and play. Our teachers used to ask us kids to write
a short essay about what we did on our summer vacation. That was then, for
children.
For teachers, on
the other hand, summer is a time for getting away from the endless bureaucratic
administrivia that goes along Part & Parcel with the profession of
teaching. Summer vacation is a time for the teacher to re-source himself
emotionally; to be able to plunge quietly back into her subject and to breathe
the exhilarating intellectual air of ‘thinking’—about her research; about how
to rediscover, and then to pick up again the thread of her thinking and writing
from the summer before; about the quiet that accompanies the thinking life in
general, time for sustained reflection unperturbed by the floodwaters of
meetings and colleagues, students and papers and grades, and forms needing to
be filled out, signed, and sent out along their various and diverse ways into
the blackhole of the institutional administrative labyrinth.
This year, summer
vacation will be a time of special nostalgia for those of us who teach at our
imaginary LAS university. We will remember the massive institutional changes
that were introduced to our community mere weeks before the end of a long semester,
administrative decisions announced just in time to join forces with, and to be
dissipated by, the barrage of papers and exams and deadlines and extensions, and
end-of-semester meetings, that swamp us all during this period.
Administrative
announcements of institutional change and dissolution made precisely at
semester’s end in order to dilute, it might almost seem deliberately, the very possibility
of response by those upon whom those changes were thrust… changes to lives and
livelihoods, programs and academic orientations. Changes that were conceived
in the hush-hush shadows that linger ominously behind closed doors and
gag-orders, and birthed by circumventing institutional principles and policies
of co-governance; changes that were never openly and democratically proposed,
and therefore went unchallenged by the community of the concerned; changes that
were never brought up for public debate or approval, or rejection.
So, this summer,
as we go about our away-time occupations, we teachers will have new opportunities,
right from the get-go, to enter into the nostalgia of ‘what I did on my summer
vacation’. We will be able to quietly reminisce about the ‘done-deal’ of
massive institutional changes to an LAS program, which was dropped in our laps just
as we were shutting off the lights, locking our doors, and preparing to get into
our cars, all packed up in anticipation of driving off into the sun for summer fun
and adventure, and, yes, even for the prospect of the teacher’s summertime of
non-administrative other-ness and away-ness.
Some
of our teachers will have nostalgia for their jobs—having been openly informed by
administration, mere weeks before the end of the semester, that their contracts
were being reduced or terminated. Those concerned, especially in the area of
foreign languages, will of course also have heard publicly from administrators that
as academic subjects go, their classes are of little or no interest to (non-liberal)
academic or university programs in general. So, these teachers will have the
long summer to process and deal with their newly discovered intellectual and
university unworthiness, and to gird themselves up to begin their search for
new lives and meanings.
Otherwise,
all the other humanities types will have several months of vacation isolation
to think their way to some new protective emotional strategy, having discovered
the hard way that their public worth to the institution is not intellectual,
but rather only as an economic resource which is poised to be cannibalized and consumed,
depending upon time and place, in order that the rest of the institution,
represented by disciplines more scientific, or at least more immediately useful
in the short-term, might survive.
For myself, at
least part of my summer vacation will be spent reminiscing nostalgically about
what was once a worthy and worthwhile career. And in my nostalgia I can well
imagine that I might consider, even if only just for the odd moment, that I am somehow
become an extremely amateur ‘crisis actor’ who gets
the sudden and unexpected opportunity to turn player in his own little personal
drama—a drama of life’s endgame where an unsuspecting senior gets put out to
pasture, thereby losing his sense of productivity, usefulness, etc., etc., etc.
The role of a lifetime.
In
my summer reverie, the tragic action of my little drama would begin where the administration
announces publicly, repeatedly, in several venues to different bodies, that This
Teacher will be retired in due course. ‘It is the law’; ‘it is mandatory’, they
will say, ‘so of course we must obey’. They, of course, will color themselves
as simple servants of the law, and the narrative as comedy—‘here retirement is
a reward, not a punishment, like it is in your country’. But the unsuspecting
and unwary victim nonetheless experiences the public announcement as tragedy.
Because the tragic victim thought, foolishly as it turns out, that This Teacher
was already in negotiations with our administrators to remain teaching for ‘a
while longer yet’. And then the institutional curtain drops upon my reverie,
and our philosophical duffus cum crisis
actor is met with lusty guffaws and rancorous applause by administrators
and onlookers alike.
And
yet it will still certainly continue to seem to my obviously aging memory (but
fortunately my wife’s memory is sterling on the subject…), that This Teacher
was recruited and hired out of a country with no mandatory retirement, with the
promise of post-retirement teaching at our LAS university, should This Teacher wish for it. But, silly day-dreaming me!
And
all this talk about retirement when the Dutch state has been continually
retarding that moment legislatively, and, in fact, “no longer sets a fixed age for retirement.” In fact, the Netherlands has been
accelerating the implementation of their non-age of retirement, explaining that
“acceleration is necessary due to continued budget deficits and a strong increase
in the social security cost.” Obviously, then, there is active legislative encouragement
for workers in the Dutch system to work beyond
retirement, so that it can continue to pay for itself and its various good, but
very expensive programs of social maintenance!
Our
imaginary LAS university must not have gotten that memo.
One consolation in
my summer nostalgia, I suppose, will be to know that after being openly shown
the road out of the institution by fiat of retirement, our imaginary LAS
university has only publicly (but never
privately and/or confidentially) offered
This Teacher the possibility of applying for his old job back—'as one in the
field of all the other possible candidates’. But with the town crier’s additional
caveat: “Hear ye, hear ye, all
ye who pass by: ‘Dependent on the
candidate pool, This Teacher may
perhaps be permitted back to teach, but only as part-time faculty’.”
I wonder whatever
happened to the principle of confidentiality at our imaginary LAS university? Elsewhere,
I have known confidentiality about matters of Human Resources to be Law; but at
this troubling imaginary place it is obviously just a Pleasant Possibility, a
passing afterthought really.
Maybe
I just dreamed it in the haze of the tsunami that is the end-of-my-semester… but
it seems like just yesterday I heard our administrators pay lip service to
confidentiality and gag-orders in order to justify skirting open institutional
debate concerning their new project of reorientation. Did I really recently
just imagine or mis-hear administrators
making very impassioned public defense of confidentiality and gag-orders? It
may be entirely possible, given the institutional opinion of my advanced age
and obvious dotage—for which reasons they are clearly right to want to put me
out to pasture next year. But it certainly seemed
to my senior brain that the Management Team of our imaginary LAS university was
making the case that these restrictive and gagging ‘means’ were necessary for
them to impose all their new changes in program orientation and institutional
structure…
My summer-time
reverie presents a funny kind of Looking-glass inversion, does it not? A
contemporary version of Alice’s journey into a Looking-glass Wonderland… minus the
Wonder. And minus Alice, of course.
The imaginary Management
Team of our imaginary LAS university applies and even compounds confidentiality
where and when subjects and topics, such as institutional reorientation and re-structure,
are supposed to be open to public democratic debate. At least according to
institutional policy.
Then
they just pleasantly and quite conversationally forget about confidentiality when
it comes to addressing, very personally, very publicly, and very often, the
topic of This Teacher’s retirement.
The little memory
game learned from my childhood teachers was intended both to remind us of the
value of ‘being entirely away’ in the summer, and of the importance of returning
‘ready to take on the world’ at summer’s end. When we all, teacher, staff and
student, return to the reality that will mark the start of Fall classes at our
imaginary LAS university, when the adult versions of All & Sundry are fresh
and rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a
summer of adventures and travel, rest and play, reverie and reflection. Perhaps
we will then be ready to take on the challenges of injustice and dis- and mis-information,
right here on our very own door-step.
And,
in hoping against hope, would it not also be comedically wonderful,
invigorating in fact, to discover at our Fall return that over the summer some surprising
changes had been made to our current cast of players and characters. So that,
renewed and unexpectedly supported, we could move forward in defense of Liberal
Arts and Sciences; so that we could all learn as a life lesson that honesty and
democratic openness can, actually and truly, trump the shadowy world of the
closed society… right here on our very own door-step.
Further reading:
Further reading on
retirement in Holland:
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