Gender and Cultural Capital
There’s only so much you can do in a brief letter to the editor, of course, but I think Dr. Gardner has done a great job (“Diversity in Academia: All I Can Say is Amen“) of suggesting some of the complicated institutional and creative work that needs to be done if the old ‘white male’ order in the U.S. university system is to be finally and fully overturned. As she suggests, this will take a rethinking of the meaning of cultural capital in the educational economy.
This re-vision, in turn, I think, suggests some interesting links among gender (or, rather patriarchal power), genre, and cultural capital. “The dominant picture of philosophy,” Gardner notes, “is an objective search to answer universal timeless questions … expressed in a treatise or scholarly article.” Since access to the cultural capital underwriting these texts was mostly limited to men, few women philosophers’ exist, at least in a strictly formal sense. In effect, genre is the gatekeeper.
Women asked important questions, of course, and they wrote about the answers. “However, the work of some women philosophers,” Gardner says, “can often be of a more personal nature, sometimes written in a literary form, and focused on specific questions that pertain to women or to women at a particular historical and cultural era.” Since few women had access to the traditionally masculine form of cultural capital, in other words, they created an alternative.
Interestingly, you could say the opposite as well. Since women had other interests, they side-stepped the traditional masculine forms, creating a form of capital that had value outside the traditional academic economy. Women working in the academy, then, had to either embrace a traditionally masculine discipline, and so work with few historical precedents (in terms of their own gender and at least in some cases interests), or change the criteria that defined the cultural capital of philosophy.
Do the Right Thing
Interestingly, Insider Higher Ed pitches this story as a survival story (“Survival — Through Open Access“) but I think that’s hardly the most interesting point. What’s interesting is that the Utah State University Press’ recent self-transformation brings us one step closer to a systematic embrace of open access as the governing principal in the U.S. academy.
I don’t like the “survival” label for the same reason that I don’t like the idea that “green energy” is going to “save” the U.S.– and world– economy. In some technical sense both of those things might be true but these are also things that move the economy in novel, more democratic directions. We don’t need the old ways to survive, we need to build something new.
The idea of open access in education is not to allow traditional academic culture to survive unchanged once the current fiscal problems have passed. The goal is to take the opportunity– created by technological change as much as the financial dilemmas– to make academia (and the energy sector) into something very different. Let the banks survive; we need a better higher education system.
The Utah strategy will be one of the important tests of the old status system under a new ‘open’ era. Will free journals become the “lower tier” of academic publishing, less valued as cultural capital by the upper tier of journals funded through paid subscription? Will we have two tiers of publishing, one for the wealthy research institutions, and another for the rest of us? Time will tell.
An addendum: I was just pointed (via the TechRhet list) to an “Inside Higher Ed” piece, “A Call for Copyright Rebellion,” which summarizes a recent talk by Lawrence Lessing, “the Harvard University law professor and renowned open-access advocate.” Lessing seems remarkably distant from political economics, given his subject, but I like the way the piece ends:
“We should see a resistance to imposing the Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,” he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed by what we see out there in the scientific and and education communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first and foremost to intellectual discovery.
To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”
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The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.