Following up on the question of
“Liberal Arts at University College
Roosevelt_RIP”
~by David Aiken~
The 1st
of May, May Day, was created an official federal holiday in the United States
in the early 1890s, after just about 10 years of being knocked around in the various
state fora in debate. The idea, as ideas sometimes do, gained impetus and took
hold, eventually becoming a recognized public holiday all over the world, from
Algeria to Zimbabwe, from Argentina to Venezuela, from Bahrain to Vietnam, from
the countries of the Eastern Block to Oceania. The idea that won the day almost
130 years ago was simple enough –that Workers were a disregarded lot.
It
is the world’s workers who actually create the wealth for the wealthy; it is
the world’s workers who have created the world that has grown up around us, and
that we all use every day everywhere at every level. From garbage cans to
toilets, from physical buildings to the edifices of classroom ideas. And—the simple
audaciousness of the idea astounds and amazes— it seemed appropriate and good to
the Powers-That-Be nearly 130 years ago that there should be a very deliberate
public reminder to celebrate the workers of the world. Per our Wiki
source:
1 May was
chosen to be International Workers' Day to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. In that year beginning on 1 May, there was a general
strike for the eight-hour workday. On 4 May, the police acted to disperse a
public assembly in support of the strike when an unidentified person threw a
bomb. The police responded by firing on the workers. The event lead to the
death of eight and injury of sixty police officers as well as an unknown number
of civilian killed or wounded. Hundreds of labour leaders and sympathizers were
later rounded-up and four were executed by hanging, after a trial that was seen
as a miscarriage of justice. The following day on 5 May in Milwaukee Wisconsin,
the state militia fired on a crowd of strikers killing seven, including a
schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his yard.
Ideas, such as the
one that inspired May Day, seem to take root more readily in soils where public
debate thrives, with all of the roiling messiness and awkwardness that attends when
the public gets involved in just about everything. At University College
Roosevelt, right now, today, the idea on the table, indeed the chopping block, is
an educational vision, a dream really, of a broad and traditional faculty of
Liberal Arts & Sciences. That dream, because it is old, older at least—which
is certainly implied by the idea of ‘traditional’, is today being forced to
yield the field to a different academic agenda, one that is fueled by financial
arguments.
And
yet this change does not have to represent a depressing step backward in
educational philosophy, really, if the debate surrounding the adoption of this ‘different
vision’ actually reflects the interests and engagements of the greater UCR
community.
Unfortunately,
though, the ideas behind this change did not get to have their day in the court
of public opinion & debate in the UCR community.
§ Self-governance
at University College Roosevelt.
It
is difficult to know where, exactly, to begin in the critical assessment of an educational
institution that continues to publicly defend imposing confidentiality on the supposedly
open processes of democratic co-governance. Especially on questions so central
to its educational core and vision.
It
is a natural and stimulating good, in Open Society, that we should get caught
up in the earnestness of representing our own thinking and our own convictions
about the essential philosophical questions that concern the academic
institution where we work or study; whether the debate is about the traditional
role of Foreign Languages in Liberal Arts & Sciences, with the very real
possibility that the co-governing community might decide in open deliberation
to redesign for their own purposes, and even to part from that tradition, or
whether the question in the public forum is to deliberate and determine whether
a particular institution might even wish to abandon its commitment to the
LA&S tradition. These are weighty matters indeed; and discussions are
heated.
So, how are we to respond, how to
act, when an educational institution, whose public reputation has been erected
on the foundations of democratic processes, elects to liquidate an established core
element of the Liberal Arts & Sciences tradition, and where the political
will of the institution seems to be to abandon their educational mission and
orientation?
The
question, frankly, is academic. Because while the humanities philosopher may be
opposed to such radical changes in educational mission, and the social science
philosopher in favor, at the end of the day both points of view are in matter
of fact arguable in models of higher education.
The
question is academic, because in democracy we understand the idea of trying to
seek out the will of the unified many, even when that will might not agree with
our own personal point of view—for is this not a foundational tension in the idea
of self- and co-governance? And, at the end of yet another day, we can school
ourselves to learn to live with opinions and directions that may differ from
our own, as long as we remain persuaded
that such decisions were arrived at fairly, that the openness, the integrity of
the deliberating processes of the many has remained inviolate.
UCR recently made
public a document that argues that faculty, staff and student representatives were
compelled to treat as confidential the deliberations that had taken place in
closed quarters on these weighty questions of UCR’s mission and educational
philosophy. “Council members are obliged
to treat information confidentially whenever they can reasonably assume this is
necessary. Information about persons always needs to be treated confidentially,
unless indicated otherwise.”
The
argument is interesting, because we are driven to conclude that there was either
managerial incompetence in the way the meetings of our representatives were run,
which is a disconcerting thought for the community to have about UCR leadership,
or we must accept as an assumption of management that concerned UCR citizenry
is incompetent to think through, together and openly, issues related to our
mission and educational philosophy without necessarily getting into the private
affairs of individual colleagues. Which is to conclude that the democratic
ideal is a fool’s errand.
What
would the Roosevelts have thought about that?
But
then, why would UCR administrators discuss in the first place specific human
resource issues in such an inappropriate venue as debates about general mission
and educational orientation? Why would any administrator think that such a
discussion reflects any sort of appropriate focus, or professionalism, or that
it is ethically, or legally justifiable?
In
the best of circumstances, it is challenging for all democratic venues to navigate
the delicate tension between the personal ambition of leadership and the
discovery of the will of the community. So, the response of UCR management to
this situation has simply been not to deal with the challenge at all; instead, the
management team chose to impose non-disclosure agreements on UCR faculty, staff
and student representatives. All exchange of information between
representatives and represented was shut down by administrative fiat.
When
the UCR administration elected to pursue paths of secrecy and closed-door
“discussions,” they created a de facto structure of tyranny—a tyranny of the
few “representatives,” who were called upon to replace the open debate and
participation of the many. The imposition of non-disclosure agreements on
faculty, staff and student, flies absolutely and unequivocally in the face of
any democratic governmental will or structure, and certainly contradicts the
institution’s self-declared policy of institutional co-governance.
So,
it is really not possible for
individual committees and councils to discuss the value, for example, of having
a philosophy track at UCR, without necessarily involving the specifics of the philosophy
instructor? If so, then the idea itself of the public roundtable, where issues that
concern the good of the people can be openly debated, is a wretched,
dysfunctional lie.
What
would the Roosevelts have thought about this Closed Process circumvention and
co-option of co-governance at UCR or about the dismissal of LA&S? Certainly,
the Roosevelts and their 4-Freedoms would have found the first to be problematic.
As for the dismissal of LA&S, that would probably not have been very high
on their list of desirable solutions, either. If one can extrapolate from the
fact that Franklin was educated at Harvard College, the Liberal Arts &
Sciences bastion of the America of that period, and that Eleanor was educated
by “a noted feminist educator who sought to cultivate independent thinking in
the young women in her charge,” and … learned to speak French fluently and
gained self-confidence.”
If
UCR management has its way, the young Eleanors of today will not speak French,
or if they do, they will not learn it at UCR.
At this point in
our finally public discussion at UCR,
it seems certainly obvious, to me at least, that co-governance has been cheaply
sacrificed; and this has led to a certain number of very specific and real
consequences. So, let us judge the tree by its fruit.
Perhaps
principal among the consequences, is the sacrifice of the sacred principles of Open
Society, the principles of self- and co-governance, on the altar of some
personal ambition by the interested few.
Among
the consequences we are currently experiencing at UCR, is the economic
demolition of the lives of those teaching faculty who have been terminated or who
are in the process of being forcibly downsized.
And
among the consequences, is the demolition of one example of a Liberal Arts
& Sciences vision of education in the Netherlands, which has argued that in
LA&S there is a greater good than just the material courses our students
follow in the pursuit of some future employment, but which goes to the very heart
of creating the good human in all of us who value democracy, and out of which
will, eventually, hopefully, flow virtue and beauty as we create the future of
our world.
Autocratic systems
of government can be trusted because the vision of the ruler is worked out,
predictably, in the rules and activities of the systems the ruler creates; and there is
none of the messiness of Open governance. But in those places where the Open
Society remains a value, it is not possible to have confidence in a type of
management that pretexts a publicly democratic system of government, and which
shows itself in point of fact to not be Open at all, but rather hidden behind
closed doors. The employed can have No Confidence in this environment. So, let
us judge the tree by its fruit.
The promise of the
Open Society is the dream that a Brotherhood of Man is in fact possible; but it
will only become a true possibility when each one of us learns to stand, back
to back, and to dare together to speak truth to power.
For united
we stand. Divided we fall
And if our backs should ever be against the wall
We'll be together, Together, you and I.
And if our backs should ever be against the wall
We'll be together, Together, you and I.
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