MERLE HAGGARD – NO HARD TIME BLUES
You Go, GEO!
Universities tend to have a pretty benign if elitist image. That’s particularly true for the 2/3’s or so of the U.S. who don’t have college degrees. Too often people with degrees are grossly sentimental; perfect fodder for football programs and alumni fund drives. If you work at a university, especially if you are a teacher or graduate student, your attitude can shift dramatically.
The current GEO strike is a case in point. The Graduate Employee Organization’s (GEO) decision to strike might seem frivolous or even reckless to anyone unfamiliar with the way they have historically been treated by the University of Illinois. But sometimes paranoia is justified. The UI stalled the graduate student union in court for more than a decade.
Now, apparently, they’ve refused to guarantee a tuition waiver. That would worry me too, given the current budget impasse in Illinois. As usual, though, the University wants what they inevitably call flexibility. In other words, they want to be able to make teachers pay for their jobs (through tuition) if (in their view) circumstances warrant. It’s not an idle threat.
I paid for my job at UT Austin in exactly this way while I was a graduate student. When it comes to what it considers its own interests, especially finances, universities have proven themselves to be very untrustworthy partners. GEO needs to stick to its guns, or the rest of us are going to feel the repercussions. I hope students and professors will respect the pickets.
The Long March Through The Institutions
Two recent posts– one on the Progressive Historian blog and one on Iterating Towards Openness— reminded me of Gramsci. (It’s interesting to do a search on the phrase, “The Long March Through the Institutions.” It seems to have become a key phrase in right wing Christianity’s paranoid fantasies.) What’s so striking is the lack of a discussion of democracy in either the historian’s blog or the open source advocate’s post.
In all fairness both posts are brief summaries of conferences, not fully developed critiques, so I don’t want to stretch my point too far. But it’s interesting that discussions of technology (as the writer on the Progressive Historian suggests) are so rarely focused on progressive goals. More typical, in his phrase, are “wide-eyed cheerleading for things that are not there.” Facebook, for example, is supposed to encourage civic engagement, for example, yet in practice it rarely seems to widen social networks.
We look for technological fixes to promoting democratization but democracy is dependent on institutions. It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 (or 3.0) might assist in that process but technology is no substitute for it. The technology is what David Wiley (on “Iterating Towards Openness”) calls “easy innovations.” What more difficult is Grasmci’s idea of trying to create a broader progressive change from within existing institutions.
I think the real problem is that the academic left– perhaps progressives more generally– doesn’t have a coherent, over-arching agenda. We have ideals, but we don’t like to think about the sorts of institutions we want. We equate specific goals– and especially institutional reform– with limitation. Our question is or should be simple: how do we create a university run by the people who work there? How can these new technologies help us democratize schools?
Guy Clark: “Hollywood”