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When I proposed the theme “Vulnerable Times” for the 2014 convention, it was my hope that the idea of vulnerability, and of vulnerable times in particular, would pull together a number of strands. I was thinking of multiple dimensions of vulnerability and hoping to consider them together with colleagues in fields both contiguous to and far removed from my own. I had no idea, however, that the response to an invitation to join this conversation would be so overwhelming. Nearly two hundred of the eight hundred convention sessions were connected to the theme, and they ranged across numerous divisions, discussion groups, allied organizations, and special sessions, across histories, geographies, and subfields.

During 2014, Profession will publish the presentations from four of these sessions: the Presidential Forum, “Trauma, Memory, Vulnerability,” “Public Humanities,” and “The Politics of Language in Vulnerable Times.”

The theme of vulnerable times addresses vulnerabilities of life, of the planet, and of our professional disciplines now and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate ensuing acts of imagination and forms of resistance that promote social change. My own interest in vulnerability derives from my long-standing feminist work on lives that are marginalized, forgotten, or omitted from dominant histories and narratives. It also emerges from a concern about the precarious place of education, particularly languages, the humanities, and the arts, as a local and global priority in the present moment. And it develops from a commitment to mobilize and promote the textual, historical, theoretical, and activist work that we do in the framework of the MLA in broader social and political platforms.

Vulnerability and its twin notion, resilience, are widely used in the fields of environment, social ecology, political economy, medicine, and developmental psychology to study the predisposition of people and systems to injury and their ability to recover from shocks and unwelcome surprises. Feminist theorists acknowledge the vulnerabilities we share as an embodied species but have also underlined the differentially imposed and socially manufactured vulnerabilities faced by marginalized groups throughout history. They have seen vulnerability—both shared and differentially inflicted—not as weakness or victimhood but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of fundamental interdependence and solidarity. Conscious of some of the pitfalls that follow from a claim to vulnerability, they have nevertheless used this claim to imagine and to demand social and political institutions that will lessen injury.

This collected discussion of vulnerable times aims to contribute literary and humanistic perspectives to our interdisciplinary engagements. It looks to the temporalities that follow from an acknowledgment of vulnerability and asks how different historical moments and different cultural contexts have attempted to avert catastrophe by envisioning alternative futures. It aims to reframe dominant narratives of power and powerlessness, perpetration and victimhood, reimagining them, as Rob Nixon suggests, from the perspectives of the vulnerable.

The contributions to the forum share several assumptions about vulnerability: the conviction that it is historically specific; that it is differentially distributed; that it goes beyond the human to other species and life-forms; and that it is not a stigma or weakness but a space of connection that, if acknowledged, can generate an ethics and politics of openness, attunement, and resistance. Thus Judith Butler, looking at the well-known photograph of the woman in a red dress from the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, asks whether vulnerability can be mobilized as a form of agency. The woman in the red dress is only one of several striking images of creative response in the face of what Ariella Azoulay calls “regime-made disaster.” These responses in no way diminish the violence that elicited them, but they do illustrate how vulnerability can become resistance. Azoulay’s paper urges us to refuse an all too common equation: if some people are made vulnerable, it is because others have accepted being made perpetrators. But, she asks, what if we were to claim a fundamental right not to become perpetrators? Or what, in David Eng’s terms, does it mean to apologize for an act for which one is not directly responsible but in which one is implicated? It means to assume responsibility for the unintended consequences of one’s actions, thus engaging in an “unanticipated solidarity” of the vulnerable—the solidarity, in this case, of the Sahtu Dene, an impoverished indigenous group in northwest Canada who mined the uranium used to manufacture the bomb, and of the bomb’s victims in Hiroshima. We see this solidarity also in Diana Taylor’s dance with the Zapatistas and in the Mayan idea of ch’ulel—the interconnectedness of all life-forms—that sustains this utterly vulnerable and yet powerfully resilient group. Claiming vulnerability as a space from which to begin rather than as a stigma to overcome, the forum papers take us to disparate and unexpected sites, all interconnected by the commitment to the tough, incisive, and activist analysis that distinguishes the humanities in vulnerable times.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

Thinking about vulnerability and thinking about it together on this occasion are both notoriously difficult things to do. Is our thinking about vulnerability together a merely contingent fact, or is there something about vulnerability that becomes understandable only when we understand it as social relation? Does vulnerability not implicate us as social creatures who are vulnerable in relation to one another and vulnerable also by virtue of the social structures and institutions, ecological networks, and biopolitical regulations on which we depend for our persistence and well-being?

It seems that to speak about this topic requires speaking about the resistance to speaking about this topic. There are those who worry that vulnerability, if it becomes a theme or a problem for thinking, will be asserted as a primary existential condition, ontological and constitutive, and that this sort of foundationalism will founder on the same rocky shores as have others, such as the ethics of care or maternal thinking. Does a turn to vulnerability seek to reintroduce into public discourse those particular modalities of thinking and valuing? Is it smuggling in discounted paradigms for reconsideration?

The resistance to vulnerability is also sometimes based on political grounds. After all, if women or minorities seek to establish themselves as vulnerable, do they unwittingly or wittingly seek to establish a protected status, subject to a paternalistic set of powers that must safeguard the vulnerable—that is, those presumed to be weak and in need of protection? Does the discourse of vulnerability discount the political agency of the subjugated? So one question that emerges from any such discussion is whether the discourse on vulnerability shores up paternalistic power, relegating the condition of vulnerability to those who suffer discrimination, exploitation, or violence. What about the power of those who are oppressed? And what about the vulnerability of paternalistic institutions themselves? After all, if they can be contested, brought down, or rebuilt on egalitarian grounds, then paternalism is vulnerable to a dismantling of its power. And when this dismantling is undertaken by subjugated peoples, do they not establish themselves as something other than, or more than, vulnerable? Indeed, do we want to say that they overcome their vulnerability at such moments, which is to assume that vulnerability is negated when it converts into agency? Or is vulnerability still there, now assuming a different form?

Finally, there are political objections to dominant groups who claim to be vulnerable. In California, when white people were losing their status as a majority, some of them claimed that they were a vulnerable population. Colonial states have lamented their vulnerability to attack by those they colonize and sought general sympathy on the basis of that claim. Some men have complained that feminism has made them into a vulnerable population and that they are now targeted for discrimination. Various European national identities now claim to be under attack by new immigrant communities. We can see that the term vulnerable has a way of shifting, and since we may not like some or even many of the shifts it makes, we may find ourselves awkwardly opposed to vulnerability. Of course, that is a rather funny thing to say, since we might conjecture that any amount of opposition to vulnerability does not exactly defeat its operation in our bodily and social lives.

When we oppose vulnerability as a political term, is it because we would like to see ourselves as agentic or think that better political consequences will follow if we are that way? If we oppose vulnerability in the name of agency, does that imply that we prefer to see ourselves as acting instead of being acted upon? And how might we then describe those regions of both aesthetics and ethics that consider that our receptivity is bound up with our responsiveness, that we are acted upon by what we also act upon at the same time? Does the opposition to vulnerability also imperil a host of related terms of responsiveness, including impressionability, susceptibility, injurability, openness, indignation, outrage, and even resistance? If nothing acts upon me against my will or without my advanced knowledge, then there is only sovereignty, the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am, a seemingly sturdy and self-centered form of the thinking I that cloaks those fault lines in the self that cannot be overcome. What form of politics is supported by this adamant disavowal?

So perhaps I have made some preliminary headway into thinking about the resistance to vulnerability. There is a dual relation to resistance that helps us understand what we mean by vulnerability. On the one hand, there is a resistance to vulnerability that takes both psychic and political dimensions; on the other hand, vulnerability changes its meaning when it becomes understood as part of the practice of political resistance.1 There are, I argue, forms of political resistance that rely fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability, and these are very different from political notions that establish agency as the opposite of vulnerability—that is, as something that requires or induces the vanquishing of vulnerability, or its full conversion into its ostensible opposite.

Quite apart from the psychological resistance to vulnerability, there are legitimate political criticisms of some of the appropriations of vulnerability, most notably, (a) paternalism and the reification of certain populations as definitionally “vulnerable”—a move that risks making lack of power into an enduring condition for those populations and (b) the cynical inversion of relations of power, such that those who are dominant claim to be unacceptably vulnerable to those who seek equality, democracy, the end of colonialism, or reparation for past injuries. In my view, it will not do to embrace vulnerability or get in touch with our feelings or bare our fault lines as if that would launch a new mode of authenticity or inaugurate a new order of moral values. I am not in favor of such a move, since it would continue to locate vulnerability as the opposite of agency and to identify agency with sovereign modes of defensiveness. It ratifies the logic that understands the two as mutually exclusive and restrictively defined within that binary frame. Rather, I am proposing that once we see how vulnerability enters into agency, then our understanding of both terms can change. This change can happen if we reflect on forms of political resistance that depend upon the mobilization of vulnerability.

Vulnerability, however, is not a subjective disposition but a relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions that impinge upon or affect us in some way. As a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from each other, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence.

I am aware that I have used resistance in at least two ways: first, as the resistance to vulnerability that characterizes thinking that models itself on mastery; second, as a social and political form that is informed by vulnerability and is therefore not one of its opposites. Vulnerability is neither fully passive nor fully active but operates in a middle region if not a middle voice (White). I think about those practices of deliberate exposure to police or military violence in which bodies, put on the line, either receive blows or seek to stop violence as living blockades or barriers. In such practices of nonviolent resistance, we can come to understand bodily vulnerability as something that is actually marshaled or mobilized for the purpose of resistance. Such a claim is controversial, since this exposure can seem allied with self-destruction, but what interests me is the kind of nonviolent resistance that mobilizes vulnerability in order to assert existence, the right to public space, and equality and to oppose police, security, and military violence. We may think that these are isolated moments when a group decides in advance to produce a blockade or to link arms in order to lay claim to public space or to resist being removed by the police. And that is surely true, as it was in Berkeley in 2011, when a group of students and faculty members were assaulted by campus police as they were practicing nonviolent protest (Asimov and Berton). But consider as well that for women and transgendered people in many places in the world who wish to walk the street at night in safety, the moment of appearing on the street involves a deliberate risk of exposure to force. Groups who gather without permits and without weapons to oppose privatization and rally for democracy, as we saw in Gezi Park in Istanbul in June 2013, are actively taking that risk. Such groups may have no legal and police protection, but they are not for that reason reduced to some sort of bare life. There is no sovereign power jettisoning the subject outside the domain of the political as such; rather, there is a renewal of popular sovereignty outside and against the terms of state sovereignty and police power, one that involves a concerted and corporeal form of exposure and resistance.

An image widely circulated on the Internet has been called “Woman in Red Dress,” and it became a rallying point for the resistance to police brutality in Gezi Park in June 2013. In this picture, Ceyda Sungur, a research assistant at Istanbul Technical University, is being pepper-sprayed by police in full riot gear. The image is a difficult one, to be sure. It is an act of brute force leveled against a woman in a red, cotton dress holding a canvas bag. She looks precisely like someone trying to enjoy a summer day in the park, but she has arrived to be part of the rally. She does not walk deliberately into harm’s way, but when the pepper spray comes at her, she stands firm, looking away to protect her eyes. The image is effective: a woman, unarmed and manifestly vulnerable, offsets the brutality of the police. I am reminded that there are at least two films called The Woman in Red. In the 1984 Gene Wilder version, the woman in red is passing over a grate on the street as the wind funnels upward to lift her skirts and mess her hair, leaving her looking sexually ravaged—a clear reference to the image of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch. The Gezi Park image, however, is not a site of obsessive focus: the pepper spray that messes up the woman’s hair and blows her dress indicts the police use of sexual attack and gender violence. It is important to remember that among those who gathered in Gezi Park to protect the public status of those grounds against state-led efforts at privatization were not only lesbian, gay, and transgender people, who had quite rarely been able to gather in a public space with the solidarity of a broader movement, but also women insisting on their right to walk the streets at night without harassment and the threat of sexual assault.

In the image, the woman remains uncannily firm as the spray is unleashed against her. She does not run, flee, or fall but remains in place. Remaining in place has marked a number of the actions in Gezi as groups refused to move or formed human barricades—the example of the standing man, for instance (“‘Standing Man’”). Although the iconic dimension of the photo seems to rely on the subordinate and sexualized status of the woman in red, I want to suggest that we are seeing a form of deliberate exposure that mobilizes vulnerability in a practice of resistance that belongs to a direct democracy movement. By “deliberate,” I do not mean that the woman is staging this scene. She is in fact suffering an unwanted assault; but in suffering it, she stands firm and thereby exposes the force unleashed against her. Note that her exposure is not only to the pepper spray but also to the camera recording the event, which operates as an iconic corporeal vector through which that local violence is relayed into a global visual field. She does not initiate what happens but, like so many others, improvises when it happens. Does the improvising diminish the violence by showing that there is nevertheless a form of agency at work here? I think not. Like many nonviolent actions, the power or capacity to take the blow without returning it in kind serves not only as an embodied critique of violence but also as an exercise of the right to stand one’s ground in concert with others, to claim or reclaim public space as public, and to mobilize vulnerability—for example, by redeploying the iconic charge of the image for global media. The agency here belongs to the camera, the crowd, and the bodies in place. It is effective precisely because the situation is unwanted and unwilled. The woman figured has not brought the assault on herself, but she does enter into a scene of ongoing assault to resist it. At one level, it indeed seems that brutality was unleased upon her as she walked in the park with her canvas bag and red dress. It is equally true that she was already part of the movement, having joined the assembly and exercised those everyday freedoms that belong to a public park: strolling, baring one’s arms to the warm sun, even wearing red, the color of the Turkish national flag. Wearing red, she seizes the iconicity of the national—and perhaps lets it resonate with Hollywood and with the political reach of the camera more generally—to oppose the state. The camera is part of the movement, providing testimony and archive, entering the image into the circuit of media distribution that establishes the local events as global and exposes the injustice.

Vulnerability, then, can emerge in resistance movements and direct democracy as a deliberate mobilization of bodily exposure. “Mobilization of bodily exposure” is an embarrassing phrase, but it challenges the notions that vulnerability is identified with victimization alone and that the deliberate use of vulnerability constitutes a form of agency that overcomes injurability.

I suggested above that we are dealing with two senses of resistance here: resistance to vulnerability that belongs to certain projects of thought and certain formations of politics organized by sovereign mastery; resistance to unjust and violent regimes that mobilizes vulnerability as part of its own exercise of power. I have now tried to suggest that the body is exposed both to police force and to photographic capture, and on some occasions (not all) photographic journalism still has the power to exploit and reverse visual icons of sexualized violence. The scene of vulnerability is not a subjective feature of the human, nor is it an existential condition. It names a set of relations between sensate beings and the field of objects, organizations, life processes, and institutions that make livable life possible. These relations invariably involve degrees and modalities of receptivity and responsiveness that, working together, do not precisely form a sequence. In political life, it often seems that some injustice happens and that then there is a response, but it may be that the response is happening as the injustice occurs. This simultaneity gives us another way to think about historical events, action, passion, and forms of resistance. Without being able to think about vulnerability, we cannot think about resistance, and by thinking about resistance, we are already under way, dismantling the resistance to vulnerability in order precisely to resist.

Note

1. For this double sense of resistance, see Rose. ↩

Works Cited

Asimov, Nanette, and Justin Berton. “UC Campus Police Move in on Student Protesters.” SFGate. Hearst Communications, 9 Nov. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Last Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Print.

“‘Standing Man’ Goes Viral, Inspires Silent Protests in Turkey.” NBC News. NBCNews.com, 18 June 2013. Web. 24 Feb. 2014. Photoblog.

White, Hayden. “Writing in the Middle Voice.” The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 255–62. Print.

The Woman in Red. Dir. Gene Wilder. Orion Pictures, 1984. Film.

Judith Butler is Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

In great part, the history of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) reflects the efforts of people both inside and outside schools to reform them. Stoking these efforts is a fear that educators either cannot or will not do it themselves. Since CCSS is here, one of the challenges now for higher education is how we will teach students who have come through CCSS with its own statewide diversities. What expectations will students have of higher education? What competencies will they bring? What love of learning?

My comments here concern yet another attempt to reform education, again driven by a fear that educators cannot or will not do it themselves. The target of CCSS is primary and secondary education. The target of this new attempt is higher education. A primary instrument of reform is the federal government, specifically the White House and the Department of Education. The MLA last year took serious notice of CCSS. I hope now to persuade us to take serious notice of these current government activities.

Such actions reflect, I believe, deep and swiftly running currents in education—both nationally and globally. Because they are well known, I oversimplify them below:

• A shift of concern from access to accountability and affordability. To be sure, access still matters to us all. Obviously, access is related to affordability. You can receive a letter of admission to college, but it is a dead letter if you cannot afford to go. However, the stress falls on accountability. The cry and choral refrain is “more bang for the buck.” Higher education is seen as being feckless about costs.
• A pronounced shift from the language of educational values, including those of humanistic learning, to the language of productivity, efficiency, and national competitiveness in the global marketplace. Productivity, efficiency, and national competitiveness can be measured. Metrics and audits guard and patrol educators.
• A shift from a trust in local knowledge, infusing and being infused by regional and national knowledge, to a belief in national expertise—embodied in federal policy makers or foundation officers and staff.

Each of these currents is on display in a primary document released by the Obama administration, dated 24 January 2012 (Education Blueprint), the first section of which is titled “Educating Our Way to an Economy Built to Last.” Gerald Graff has pointed out to me the ambiguity of the pronoun “our”: does it refer to the federal policy makers or to all of us, we citizens? The first sentence of the document is, “In his State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last—an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values. The President has taken bold action to get the economy growing again.”

Obviously, every one of us wants the economy to grow and people to have good jobs. The question is the meaning of education, the role of schools and schooling, and the responsibilities of the federal government. In the documents I have seen, the federal government sets policy, in consultation with business and other “stakeholders” or, more chummily, “partners” and then uses federal programs and money to enforce compliance with policy. The documents I have seen note the importance of the community colleges and set a goal of having five million more graduates by 2020. I have enormous respect for community colleges, which educate over forty percent of undergraduate students in United States higher education (“Table 226”), but here they seem primarily turned into job-training sites—as if they did not teach history or literature or languages or prepare students to transfer to four-year institutions. One document states, “Working in partnership with states and communities, community colleges are well suited to promote the dual goal of academic and on-the-job preparedness for the next generation of American workers.” High-growth and in-demand areas include “health care, logistics, transportation, and advanced manufacturing” (Education Blueprint).

The documents say little about research or comprehensive universities but focus on four-year institutions or the undergraduate colleges within universities. As for these institutions, the government is prepared to help them through increased Pell Grants and through campus-based financial aid reform. However, only certain institutions will get help, specifically those that “keep net tuition down [and] do their fair share to keep tuition affordable, provide good value, and serve needy students well.” Such service must result in higher completion rates (“Fact Sheet”). A crucial question is the period of years a student will be given to get a baccalaureate degree: Six? Eight? Ten? For completion rates must take into account the diversity of student experiences, finances, and life circumstances. Moreover, completion rates vary according to an institution’s curriculum, teaching faculty, facilities, support services, and leadership.

Starting in 2013, the federal government released the first version of its “college scorecard” to help students choose the school that is best for them. The scorecard is offered as a benign gift to students and their families as they make decisions about higher education. So far, the scorecard lists what it typically costs to attend a particular college, what percentage of students graduate, whether students are able to repay their loans after they graduate, and the typical amount borrowed for a student’s undergraduate study. By 2015, the scorecard is to show the kinds of jobs students have when they graduate and the average earnings of students who have borrowed federal student loans.

Arguably, the information about costs is useful, but the average earnings can be misleading. Will colleges that educate students who take comparatively low-paying jobs—for example, as teachers or preachers or staffers in public-service organizations—make their alma maters look like slackers in the local and global economy? After 2015, the Department of Education promises to begin to use a new ratings system based on the types of measures recorded by the scorecard, to be tested and made final in 2018. Of course, who might be in charge of the federal government in 2018, after a 2016 presidential election, is an open question. In my home town, New York, restaurants get grades for cleanliness—a bold A, B, or C—which they must post on their front windows. The same drive for clear grades is surely animating the Department of Education’s ratings system. I can discern no way of rating what a student might actually learn or carry in his or her mind or soul throughout life. Moreover, in another act of pressure for compliance, the federal government will push the states to fund their public colleges on the basis of measurable criteria of “performance.”

Just as CCSS is academic in nature, so are some of the “innovations” that the federal government is encouraging. They include three-year college degrees, which have their value; the practice of basing academic credits on proof of mastery or competence rather than credit hours spent in a class, colloquially known as “seat time”; the related practice of giving credit for past experiences, which is hardly novel; and a heavy reliance on technology. Technology is the key to the kingdom of cost reduction. The government praises flipped or hybrid classrooms and, of course, MOOCs (massive open online courses). Ironically, recent studies show that the completion rate for MOOCs is very low, which would, of course, look awful on a MOOC-based scorecard. The White House is also recommending that accrediting agencies take the amount of online learning into account when they decide whether to accredit institutions or renew their credentials.

New materials from the Obama administration may reinforce or ameliorate my concerns. I hope they will do the latter; I fear and predict they will do the former.

Works Cited

Education Blueprint: An Economy Built to Last. The White House. USA.gov, 24 Jan. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2014. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cantwait/final_-_education_blueprint_-_an_economy_built_to_last.pdf>.

“Fact Sheet: President Obama’s Blueprint for Keeping College Affordable and within Reach for All Americans.” The White House. USA.gov, 27 Jan. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2014. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/27/fact-sheet-president-obama-s-blueprint-keeping-college-affordable-and-wi>.

“Table 226. Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Institutions, by Level of Enrollment, Control and Level of Institution, Attendance Status, and Age of Student: 2011.” Digest of Education Statistics, 2012. National Center for Education Statistics. Natl. Center for Educ. Statistics, 2013. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.<http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_226.asp>.

Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor and professor of English at New York University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention.

Posted January 2014

“Public education is not broken,” says Diane Ravitch in her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. “The diagnosis” of the corporate reformers “is wrong,” Ravitch writes, and their solutions are also wrong. “Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not ‘broken,’” and “the solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised” (4).

Ravitch’s argument—that the real problem is not public education but its would-be reformers—has become a familiar one for opponents of current attempts to reform the American educational system. Like most such opponents, Ravitch concedes that the system is far from perfect, but she argues that the causes lie in social conditions outside education, in “concentrated poverty and racial segregation,” as she puts it, and in the false story of a broken system that reformers disseminate in order to justify privatizing education and enriching themselves. So goes this argument.

I don’t buy it.

Ravitch is right, I think, that the solutions proposed by today’s reformers—more charters; more standardized tests and fetishized test data, all of it used punitively; more privatization—are not working to improve schools and students. But nothing in her critique of the reform movement required Ravitch to minimize the failures of public education, which I think we educators should own up to.

I also agree with Ravitch that poverty and segregation account for some of the failures of schools and students, but hardly all. Few of the college students I teach are poor, and many are white, middle-class, and relatively privileged, yet their command of basic skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking falls far short of their potential. This problem has been documented by a number of studies, including Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, the National Survey of Student Engagement, and the High School Survey of Student Engagement.

To be sure, about ten or fifteen percent of our college students (by my unscientific estimate) do beautifully. The American educational system has always been good at educating the small minority of students who are already relatively well educated when they start. But it has done little to help the great majority of students who are essentially confused about how to do academic work, about how to analyze a text and summarize its argument, or about how to make an argument of one’s own.

This is why I like the new Common Core State Standards, which focus on precisely these “college readiness” skills that my students not only struggle with but also don’t seem to have been told are important. Ravitch largely dismisses the Common Core standards as a by-product of the false sense of crisis stirred up by corporate reformers, and consequently she doesn’t address the intellectual merits of the standards, which are far superior to the standards applied under the No Child Left Behind law. As Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman point out in a recent book, the Common Core standards “emphasize much higher-level comprehension skills than previous standards” and thus represent “an urgently needed wake-up call” to American education (9, 8). E. D. Hirsch has said the same thing.

Here are a few of the skills the Common Core standards say students should be learning by the eighth grade: “Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient”; “Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence . . . acknowledge and distinguish [one’s own] claims from alternate or opposing claims.”

What is easy to overlook is that standards like these aren’t just another set of hurdles for students to jump over. They actually serve a useful teaching function by defining and clarifying mysteries about college-level work that colleges themselves leave students to figure out on their own. I wish it hadn’t taken a document from the K–12 sector to disclose secrets of college readiness that we in higher education should have spelled out long ago. I sometimes think the only places where “college readiness” isn’t being discussed these days are colleges.

In a backhanded way, Ravitch does acknowledge the intellectual merits of the Common Core standards when she predicts that their “enhanced rigor” may “cause test scores to plummet by as much as 30 percent, even in successful districts.” If this drop occurs, she says, the reformers will take it as further proof of “our nation’s ‘broken’ education system” and another excuse to “create a burgeoning market for new products and technologies” (16). True, but what follows from this argument: that we shouldn’t set reasonable proficiency standards because too many students won’t meet them?

At times Ravitch seems to suggest a much better argument: if we are going to raise standards, then we need to do a much better job of helping all students measure up to them, especially the economically deprived, which would mean using the Common Core standards productively rather than punitively. I could not agree more, but in order to help students meet these higher standards, schools and colleges will have to improve a lot more than Ravitch thinks necessary.

Let’s face it, it is the failures of public education that have opened the doors that advocates of privatization have rushed through, and I think it’s reasonable to give them a chance to show what they can do. But it’s here, I think, that Ravitch makes her strongest argument against privatization: that its corporate-backed charter schools are doing no better than traditional public schools. This lack of success seems more likely to stop privatization than unconvincing claims that public education isn’t all that bad.

When defenders of public education deny or minimize its failures, we—I count myself one—only vindicate the charge of neoliberals and conservatives that we are so complacent that we will never clean up our own educational house. The fact that the current fix isn’t working doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole lot to fix.

Works Cited

Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.

Bok, Derek. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.

Calkins, Lucy, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman. Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2012. Heinemann. Web. 17 Jan. 2014. < http://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/e04355/pathwaystoccch1re.pdf>.

Common Core State Standards Initiative. Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012. Web. 15 Jan. 2014. <http://www.corestandards.org/>.

Hirsch, E. D. “Why I’m for the Common Core: Teacher Bashing and Common Core Bashing Are Both Uncalled For.” Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-d-hirsch-jr/why-im-for-the-common-cor_b_3809618.html#>.

Ravitch, Diane. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Gerald Graff is professor of English and education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted January 2014

As an organization of teachers and scholars devoted to the study of language and literature, the MLA should be deeply involved in the debate about the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core standards were developed in 2009 and released in 2010. In a matter of months, they had been endorsed by forty-five states and the District of Columbia. At present, publishers are aligning their materials with the Common Core, technology companies are creating software and curriculum aligned with the Common Core, and two federally funded consortia have created online tests of the Common Core.

What are the Common Core standards? Who produced them? Why are they controversial? How did their adoption happen so quickly?

As scholars of the humanities, you are well aware that every historical event is subject to interpretation. There are different ways to answer the questions I just posed. Originally, this session was designed to be a discussion between me and David Coleman, who is generally acknowledged as the architect of the Common Core standards. Some months ago, we both agreed on the date and format. But Coleman, now president of the College Board, discovered that he had a conflicting meeting and could not be here. So, unfortunately, you will hear only my narrative, not his, which would be quite different. I have no doubt that you will have no difficulty getting access to his version of the narrative, which is the same as United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s.

Coleman would tell you that the standards were created by the states, that they were widely and quickly embraced because so many educators wanted common standards for teaching language, literature, and mathematics. But he would not be able to explain why so many educators and parents are now opposed to the standards and are reacting angrily to the testing that accompanies them.

I will try to do that.

I will begin by setting the context for the development of the standards. They arrive at a time when American public education and its teachers are under attack. Never have public schools been as subject to upheaval, assault, and chaos as they are today. Unlike modern corporations, which extol creative disruption, schools need stability, not constant turnover and change. Yet for the past dozen years, ill-advised federal and state policies have rained down on students, teachers, principals, and schools.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top have combined to impose a punitive regime of standardized testing on the schools. NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law in 2002. The law required schools to test every child in grades 3–8 every year; the law stipulates that by 2014 every child must be “proficient” or schools will face escalating sanctions. The ultimate sanction for failure to raise test scores is firing the staff and closing the school.

Because the stakes were so high, NCLB encouraged teachers to teach to the test. In many schools, the curriculum was narrowed; the only subjects that mattered were reading and mathematics. What was not tested—the arts, history, civics, literature, geography, science, physical education—didn’t count. Some states, like New York, gamed the system by dropping the passing mark each year, giving the impression that its students were making phenomenal progress when they were not. Some districts, like Atlanta, El Paso, and the District of Columbia, were caught up in cheating scandals. In response to this relentless pressure, test scores rose, but not as much as they had before the adoption of NCLB.

Then along came the Obama administration. In response to the economic crisis of 2008, Congress gave the United States Department of Education $5 billion to promote “reform.” Secretary Duncan launched a competition for states called Race to the Top, the administration’s signature education program. If states wanted any part of that money, they had to agree to certain conditions. They had to agree to evaluate teachers to a significant degree by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores; they had to agree to increase the number of privately managed charter schools; they had to agree to adopt “college- and career-ready standards,” which were understood to be the not-yet-finished Common Core standards; they had to agree to “turn around” low-performing schools by using such tactics as firing the principal and part or all of the school staff; and they had to agree to collect unprecedented amounts of personally identifiable information about every student and store it in a data warehouse. It became an article of faith in Washington and in state capitols, with the help of propagandistic films like Waiting for Superman, that if students had low scores, it must be the fault of bad teachers. Poverty, we heard again and again from people like Bill Gates, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, was just an excuse for bad teachers, who should be fired without delay or due process.

These two federal programs, which both rely heavily on standardized testing, have produced a massive demoralization of educators; an unprecedented exodus of experienced educators, who were replaced in many districts by young, inexperienced, low-wage teachers; the closure of many public schools, especially in poor and minority districts; the opening of thousands of privately managed charter schools; an increase in low-quality for-profit charter schools and low-quality online charter schools; a widespread attack on teachers’ due process rights and collective bargaining rights; the near collapse of public education in urban districts like Detroit and Philadelphia, where public schools are being replaced by privately managed charter schools; and a burgeoning educational-industrial complex of testing corporations, charter chains, and technology companies that view public education as an emerging market. Hedge funds, entrepreneurs, and real estate investment corporations invest enthusiastically in this emerging market, encouraged by federal tax credits, lavish fees, and the prospect of huge profits from taxpayer dollars. Celebrities, tennis stars, basketball stars, and football stars are opening their own name-brand schools with public dollars, even though they know nothing about education.

No other nation in the world has inflicted so many changes or imposed so many mandates on its teachers and public schools as has the United States in the past dozen years. No other nation tests every student every year. Our students are the most overtested in the world. No other nation—at least no other high-performing nation—judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed and that it is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable. They also agree that the highest ratings will go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools. Nonetheless, the United States Department of Education wants every state and every district to adopt this approach. Because of these federal programs, our schools have become obsessed with standardized testing and have turned over to the testing corporations the responsibility for rating, ranking, and labeling our students, our teachers, and our schools. Corporations such as Pearson have become the ultimate arbiters of the fate of students, teachers, and schools.

This is the policy context in which the Common Core standards were developed. In 2009, when the standards were written, major corporations, major foundations, and the key policy makers at the Department of Education agreed that public education was a disaster and that the only salvation for it was a combination of school choice—including privately managed charters and vouchers—national standards, and a weakening or elimination of such protections as collective bargaining, tenure, and seniority. At the same time, the political and philanthropic leaders maintained a passionate faith in the value of standardized tests and the data that they produced as measures of quality and as ultimate, definitive judgments on people and on schools. The agenda of both Republicans and Democrats converged around the traditional Republican agenda of standards, choice, and accountability. In my view, this convergence has nothing to do with improving education or creating equality of opportunity but everything to do with cutting costs, standardizing education, shifting the delivery of education from high-cost teachers to low-cost technology, reducing the number of teachers, and eliminating unions and pensions.

The Common Core standards were written under the aegis of several DC-based organizations: the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve. The development process was led behind closed doors by a small organization called Student Achievement Partners, headed by David Coleman. The writing group of twenty-seven contained few educators but a significant number of representatives from the testing industry. From the outset, the Common Core standards were marked by the absence of public participation, transparency, and educator participation. In a democracy, transparency is crucial, because transparency and openness build trust. Those crucial ingredients were lacking.

The United States Department of Education is legally prohibited from exercising any influence or control over curriculum or instruction in the schools, so it could not contribute any funding to the expensive task of creating national standards. The Gates Foundation stepped in and assumed that responsibility. It gave millions to the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and Student Achievement Partners. Once the standards were written, Gates gave millions more to almost every think tank and education advocacy group in Washington to evaluate the standards—even to some that had no experience evaluating standards—and to promote and help implement them. Even the two major teachers’ unions accepted millions of dollars to help advance the Common Core standards. Altogether, the Gates Foundation has expended nearly $200 million dollars to pay for the development, evaluation, implementation, and promotion of the Common Core standards. And the money tap is still open, with millions more awarded in fall 2013 to promote the Common Core standards.

Some states, like Kentucky, adopted the Common Core standards sight unseen. Some, like Texas, refused to adopt them sight unseen. Some, like Massachusetts, adopted them even though their own standards were demonstrably better and had been proved over time.

The advocates of the standards saw them as a way to raise test scores by making sure that students everywhere in every grade were taught using the same standards. They believed that common standards would automatically guarantee equity. Some spoke of the Common Core as a civil rights issue. They emphasized that the Common Core standards would be far more rigorous than most state standards, and they predicted that students would improve their academic performance in response to raising the bar. Integral to the Common Core was the expectation that students would be tested on computers using online standardized exams. As Secretary Duncan’s chief of staff, Joanne Weiss, wrote, the Common Core was intended to create a national market for book publishers, technology companies, testing corporations, and other vendors.

What the advocates ignored is that test scores are heavily influenced by socioeconomic status. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. The upper half of the curve has an abundance of those who grew up in favorable circumstances, with educated parents, books in the home, regular medical care, and well-resourced schools. Those who dominate the bottom half of the bell curve are the kids who lack those advantages, whose parents lack basic economic security, whose schools are overcrowded and underresourced. To expect tougher standards and a renewed emphasis on standardized testing to reduce poverty and inequality is to expect what never was and never will be.

Who supported the standards? Secretary Duncan has been their loudest cheerleader. Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and Michelle Rhee, former DC chancellor, urged their rapid adoption. Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice chaired a commission for the Council on Foreign Relations that concluded that the Common Core standards were needed to protect national security. Major corporations purchased full-page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers to promote the Common Core. ExxonMobil is especially vociferous in advocating the Common Core, taking out advertisements claiming that the standards are needed to prepare our workforce for global competition. The United States Chamber of Commerce endorsed the standards, arguing they were necessary to prepare workers for the global marketplace. The Business Roundtable stated that its number one priority is the full adoption and implementation of the Common Core standards. All this excitement was generated despite the fact that no one knows whether the Common Core will fulfill any of these promises. It will take twelve years before we know its effects.

The Common Core standards have both allies and opponents on the right. Tea-party groups at the grassroots level oppose the standards, claiming that they will lead to a federal takeover of education. The standards also have allies and opponents on the left.

I was aware of the Common Core from the outset. In 2009, I urged its leaders to plan on field-testing the standards to find out how they worked in real classrooms with real teachers and real students. Only then would we know whether they improve college readiness and equity. In 2010, I was invited to meet with senior administration officials at the White House, and I advised them to field-test the standards to make sure that they didn’t widen the achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. After all, raising the bar might make more students fail, and failure would be greatest among those who cannot clear the existing bar.

In spring 2013, when it became clear that there would be no field testing, I decided I could not support the standards. I objected to the lack of any democratic participation in their development, I objected to the absence of any process for revising them, and I was fearful that they were setting unreachable targets for most students. I also was concerned that they would deepen the sense of crisis about American education that has been used to attack the very principle of public education. In my latest book, Reign of Error, I demonstrated, using data on the United States Department of Education Web site, that the current sense of crisis about our nation’s public schools was exaggerated; that test scores were the highest they had ever been in our history for whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians; that graduation rates for all groups were the highest in our history; and that the dropout rate was the lowest ever in our history.

My fears were confirmed by the Common Core tests. Wherever they have been implemented, they have caused a dramatic collapse of test scores. In state after state, the passing rates dropped by about 30%. This was not happenstance. This was failure by design. Let me explain.

The Obama administration awarded $350 million to two groups to create tests for the Common Core standards. The testing consortia jointly decided to use a very high passing mark, which is known as a “cut score.” The Common Core testing consortia decided that the passing mark on their tests would be aligned with the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is a level typically reached by about 35%–40% of students. Massachusetts is the only state in which as many as 50% ever reached the NAEP proficient level. The testing consortia set the bar so high that most students were sure to fail, and they did.

In New York State, which gave the Common Core tests in spring 2013, only 30% of students passed the tests. Only 3% of English language learners passed. Only 5% of students with disabilities passed. Fewer than 20% of African American and Hispanic students passed. By the time the results were reported in August, the students did not have the same teachers; the teachers saw the scores but did not get any item analysis. They could not use the test results for diagnostic purposes to help students. The results’ only value was to rank students.

When New York State education officials held public hearings, parents showed up en masse to complain about the Common Core testing. Secretary Duncan dismissed them as “white suburban moms” who were disappointed to learn that their child was not as brilliant as they thought and their public school was not as good as they thought (qtd. in Strauss). But he was wrong: the parents were outraged not because they thought their children were brilliant but because they did not believe that their children were failures. What, exactly, is the point of crushing the hearts and minds of young children by setting a standard so high that 70% are certain to fail?

The financial cost of implementing the Common Core has barely been mentioned in the national debates. All Common Core testing will be done online. This is a bonanza for the tech industry and other vendors. Every school district must buy new computers, new teaching materials, and new bandwidth for the testing. At a time when school budgets have been cut in most states and many thousands of teachers have been laid off, school districts across the nation will spend billions to pay for Common Core testing. Los Angeles alone committed to spend $1 billion on iPads for the tests; the money is being taken from a bond issue approved by voters for construction and repair of school facilities. Meanwhile, the district has cut teachers of the arts, class size has increased, and necessary repairs are deferred because the money will be spent on iPads. The iPads will be obsolete in a year or two, and the Pearson content loaded onto the iPads has only a three-year license. The cost of implementing the Common Core and the new tests is likely to run into the billions at a time of deep budget cuts.

Other controversies involve the standards themselves. Early childhood educators are nearly unanimous in saying that no one who wrote the standards had any expertise in the education of very young children. More than five hundred early childhood educators signed a joint statement complaining that the standards were developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades. The standards, they said, emphasize academic skills and leave inadequate time for imaginative play. They also objected to the likelihood that young children would be subjected to standardized testing. And yet proponents of the Common Core insist that children as young as five or six or seven should be on track to be college and career ready, even though children this age are not likely to think about college and most think of careers as cowboys, astronauts, or firefighters.

There has also been heated argument about the standards’ insistence that reading must be divided equally in the elementary grades between fiction and informational text and divided 70-30 in favor of informational text in high school. Where did the writers of the standards get these percentages? They relied on the federal NAEP, which uses these percentages as instructions to test developers. NAEP never intended that these numbers be converted into instructional mandates for teachers. This idea that informational text should take up half the students’ reading time in the early grades and 70% in high school led to outlandish claims that teachers would no longer be allowed to teach whole novels. Somewhat hysterical articles asserted that the classics would be banned and that students would be required to read government documents. The standards contain no such demands.

Defenders of the Common Core standards said that the percentages were misunderstood. They said they referred to the entire curriculum—including math, science, and history—not just to English. But since teachers in math, science, and history are not known for assigning fiction, why was this even mentioned in the standards? Which administrator will be responsible for policing whether precisely 70% of the reading in senior year is devoted to informational text? Who will keep track?

The fact is that the Common Core standards should never have set forth any percentages at all. If they really did not mean to impose numerical mandates on English teachers, they set off a firestorm of criticism for no good reason. Other nations have national standards, and I don’t know of any that tell teachers how much time to devote to fiction and how much time to devote to informational text. Frankly, I think that teachers are quite capable of making that decision for themselves. If they choose to teach a course devoted only to fiction or devoted only to nonfiction, that should be their choice, not a mandate imposed by a committee in 2009.

Another problem presented by the Common Core standards is that there is no one in charge of fixing them. If teachers find legitimate problems and seek remedies, there is no one to turn to. If the demands for students in kindergarten and first grade are developmentally inappropriate, no one can make changes. The original writing committee no longer exists. No organization or agency has the authority to revise the standards. The Common Core standards might as well be written in stone. This makes no sense. They were not handed down on Mount Sinai; they are not an infallible papal encyclical. Why is there no process for improving and revising them?

Furthermore, what happens to the children who fail? Will they be held back a grade? Will they be held back again and again? If most children fail, as they did in New York, what will happen to them? How will they catch up? The advocates of the standards insist that low-scoring students will become high-scoring students if the tests are rigorous, but what if they are wrong? What if the failure rate remains staggeringly high, as it is now? What if it improves marginally as students become accustomed to the material, and the failure rate drops from 70% to 50%? What will we do with the 50% who can’t jump over the bar? Teachers across the country will be fired if the scores of their pupils do not go up. This is nuts. We have a national policy that is a theory based on an assumption grounded in hope. And it might be wrong, with disastrous consequences for real children and real teachers.

In some states, teachers say that the lessons are scripted and deprive them of their professional autonomy, the autonomy they need to tailor their lessons to the needs of the students in front of them. Behind the Common Core standards lies a blind faith in standardization of tests and curriculum and, perhaps, of children as well. Yet we know that even in states with strong standards, like Massachusetts and California, there are wide variations in test scores. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution predicted that the Common Core standards were likely to make little, if any, difference. No matter how high and uniform the standards, variations will persist: there are variations in academic achievement within states, there are variations within districts, there are variations within every school.

It is good to have standards. I believe in standards, but they must not be rigid, inflexible, and prescriptive. Teachers must have the flexibility to tailor standards to meet the students in their classrooms, the students who can’t read English, the students who are two grade levels behind, the students who are homeless, the students who just don’t get it and just don’t care, the students who frequently miss class. Standards alone cannot produce a miraculous transformation.

I do not mean to dismiss the Common Core standards altogether. They could be far better, if there were a process whereby experienced teachers were able to fix them. They could be made developmentally appropriate for the early grades, so that children have time for play and games, as well as for learning to read and do math and explore nature. But the demands for a 50-50 or 70-30 division of literature and informational text should be eliminated. They serve no useful purpose, and they have no justification.

In every state, teachers should work together to figure out how the standards can be improved. Professional associations like the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics should participate in a process by which the standards are regularly reviewed, revised, and updated by classroom teachers and scholars to respond to genuine problems in the field.

The Common Core standards should be decoupled from standardized testing, especially online standardized testing. Most objections to the standards are caused by the testing. The tests are too long, and many students give up; the passing marks on the tests were set so high as to create failure. Yet the test scores will be used to rate students, teachers, and schools.

The standardized testing should become optional. It should include authentic writing assignments that are judged by human beings, not by computers. It too needs oversight by professional communities of scholars and teachers.

There is something about the Common Core standards and testing, about their demand for uniformity and standardization, that reeks of early-twentieth-century factory-line thinking. There is something about them that feels obsolete. Today, most sectors of our economy have standards that are open-sourced and flexible, that rely on the wisdom of practitioners, and that are constantly updated and improved.

In the present climate, the Common Core standards and testing will become the driving force behind the creation of a test-based meritocracy. With David Coleman in charge of the College Board, the SAT will be aligned with the Common Core, as will the ACT. Both testing organizations were well represented in the writing of the standards; twelve of the twenty-seven members of the original writing committee were representatives of the two organizations. The Common Core tests are a linchpin of the federal effort to commit K–12 education to the new world of Big Data. The tests are the necessary ingredient to standardize teaching, curriculum, instruction, and schooling. Only those who pass these rigorous tests will get a high school diploma. Only those with high scores on these rigorous tests will be able to go to college.

No one has come up with a plan for the 50% or more who never get a high school diploma. These days, a man or woman without a high school diploma has meager chances to make his or her way in this society. He or she will end up in society’s dead-end jobs.

Some might say this is just. I say it is not just. I say that we have allowed the testing corporations to assume too much power in allotting power, prestige, and opportunity. Those who are wealthy can afford to pay fabulous sums for tutors so their children can get high scores on standardized tests and college entrance exams. Those who are affluent live in districts with ample resources for their schools. Those who are poor lack those advantages. Our nation suffers an opportunity gap, and the opportunity gap creates a test score gap.

You may know Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was published in 1958 and has gone through many printings. In 1994, Young added a new introduction in which he warned that a meritocracy could be sad and fragile. He wrote:

If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage. Power corrupts, and therefore one of the secrets of a good society is that power should always be open to criticism. A good society should provide sinew for revolt as well as for power.

But authority cannot be humbled unless ordinary people, however much they have been rejected by the educational system, have the confidence to assert themselves against the mighty. If they think themselves inferior, if they think they deserve on merit to have less worldly goods and less worldly power than a select minority, they can be damaged in their own self-esteem, and generally demoralised.

Even if it could be demonstrated that ordinary people had less native ability than those selected for high position, that would not mean that they deserved to get less. Being a member of the “lucky sperm club” confers no moral right or advantage. What one is born with, or without, is not of one’s own doing. (xvi)

We must then curb the misuse of the Common Core standards: those who like them should use them, but they should be revised continually to adjust to reality. Stop the testing. Stop the rating and ranking. Do not use the tests to give privilege to those who pass them or to deny the diploma necessary for a decent life. Remove the high stakes that policy makers intend to attach to the standards. Use them to enrich instruction but not to standardize it.

I fear that the Common Core plan of standards and testing will establish a test-based meritocracy that will harm our democracy by parceling out opportunity, by ranking and rating every student in relation to his or her test scores.

We cannot have a decent democracy unless we begin with the supposition that every human life is of equal value. Our society already has far too much inequality of wealth and income. We should do nothing to stigmatize those who already get the least of society’s advantages. We should bend our efforts to change our society so that each and every one of us has the opportunity to learn, the resources needed to learn, and the chance to have a good and decent life, regardless of one’s test scores.

Works Cited

Common Core State Standards Initiative. Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012. Web. 15 Jan. 2014. <http://www.corestandards.org>.

Loveless, Tom. “Does the Common Core Matter?” Education Week. Editorial Projects in Educ., 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

“Race to the Top.” The White House. USA.gov, n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2014. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/k-12/race-to-the-top>.

Ravitch, Diane. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Strauss, Valerie. “Arne Duncan: ‘White Suburban Moms’ Upset That Common Core Shows Their Kids Aren’t Brilliant.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 16 Nov. 2013. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.

Weiss, Joanne. “The Innovation Mismatch: ‘Smart Capital’ and Education Innovation.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Pub., 31 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.

Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy. 1958. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994. Print.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted January 2014

It gives me great pleasure to present the 2013 issue of Profession in this electronic format. While some members will miss having a print copy of the journal, others will be glad to access the essays on their mobile devices for reading on the go. The decision to forgo paper reflects not only a concern for the environment but also a new vision for the journal. Now published on MLA Commons with updated content throughout the year, Profession will provide an arena for more topical, interactive, and innovative conversations about teaching, research, and higher education. I encourage you to explore the site, which is freely available and where MLA members can log in and comment.

As we close the era of publishing Profession in print, I wish to acknowledge the contributions of the managing editor for over twenty-five years, Carol Zuses. With a PhD in French and a depth of experience in MLA governance, Carol has served the profession at large with her intelligent work on this journal. If you’ve enjoyed Profession over the years, you should know that Carol, behind the scenes, has helped make each issue (nearly) perfect. As we move to a new editorial model (more on that in 2014), I extend my gratitude to all who have contributed to Profession’s success. I look forward to seeing how you will interact with Profession on MLA Commons.

Posted January 2014

What do we want?

Evidence-based change.

When do we want it?

After peer review.

—Placard at the Rally to Restore Sanity, 2010

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the pressures reshaping universities: the emergence of the corporate university, the increase in upper-level administrative appointments, the sharp shift toward sessional labor and the concomitant loss of tenure lines, the relentless raising of tuition fees as class sizes creep up as well (or expand exponentially in MOOCs), and myriad other responses to various economic and ideological forces that do not always function consistently but can broadly be grouped under what Dominick LaCapra terms the “market model” (32–33).1 This market culture is presumed to oppose academic culture, particularly the ideals that emerged from the Enlightenment and were entrenched, for instance, in universities’ Latin mottos about the pursuit of truth in education and in research: lux et veritas, veritas vos liberabit, and various near variants (lux, veritas, virtus; veritas et libertas; veritas et virtus), some used by multiple universities in different countries. Bill Readings’s University in Ruins, to take a well-known discussion, places the philosophical ideals that have historically informed the representation of the university against these sorts of market-related forces, especially the reconfiguration of the nation-state under globalization. But this focus on economics has deflected attention from the problem of governance. The difficulty for North American universities lies not only with the gap between market culture and shared academic ideals (veritas et libertas) but also with the incompatibility of both with the premodern foundations of university governance structures.

I refer not to the monastic origins of the modern university, though they muddy the governance waters as well, but to many North American university charters’ reliance on predemocratic notions of citizenship—that is, a citizenship that is rooted in property and names a kind of power and privilege, as it did for Aristotle. Under these charters, faculty members, students, and staff members are citizens neither in the Aristotelian sense nor in the contemporary sense, and herein, I suggest, lies one of the causes of the governance-related crises we are now witnessing.2 In this essay, I begin with the distribution of decision-making power in the university in order to lay out some key terms for my discussion and to distinguish what is colloquially termed academic citizenship from the more traditional sort. I then turn to various academic institutions’ definitions of who owns university property, generally a corporate body termed a board or something similar,3 to explore the relation between property-based privilege and the limited franchise of the university senate. Overall, I conclude, professionalism as an employment-centered model reinforces the charters’ ancien régime, in which power, privilege, and property are inextricably intertwined and exclude faculty members (as well as students and staff members). But there are other, more participatory models of citizenship that are amenable to the university (both as idea and as institution) and are arguably underdeployed, models that could call attention to the power that academics have, as expert and committed members of the university, to understand, analyze, discuss, and evaluate university operations and so, through critical oversight, contribute to the rigorous ethical and academic development of all those operations—and to the belated modernization of our university charters.

Power

Aristotle wrote, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, “[O]‌ne who is entitled to share in deliberative or judicial office is thereby a citizen” (87). Citizens were decision makers for the larger community, including those who could not, by his definition, be citizens—that is, most of the populace (women, slaves, migrants). Citizenship, in other words, named privilege and power. For the last few decades, North American academics have used the term citizenship informally to refer to faculty involvement in the institution as such. At first glance, this work includes decision making of the sort Aristotle might admit as proper to citizenship: a tenure-and-promotion committee, for instance, and a student appeals committee fit his notion rather nicely, and fit as well traditional ideas about faculty participation in academic oversight. But little faculty work in academic oversight rises to the “deliberative or judicial” level, and this model of academic citizenship does little to recognize the importance of financial decisions to university operations.

University decision making proceeds on two basic fronts: bureaucratic operations, largely focused on the university’s educational mission, and financial operations. The first includes various processes in which faculty members apply, revise, and communicate academic standards and results: entering grades, assessing tenure applications, making policy revisions, approving student admissions, answering e‑mail messages on course requirements, and so on. Senates are typically the highest authority on this work, overseeing curricula (including program development), policies, and other kinds of academic regulation. Research gets attention as well but tends not to be as heavily bureaucratized as teaching; most research regulation focuses on finances, ethics, and safety (where applicable) or is left to external procedures such as peer review. Financial operations refer to decisions about resources, from who gets a course release to which department gets a new tenure line to which faculty gets a new building or new undergraduate program and what tuition fees will be next year and how much of the library budget will go to books and how much to databases. Bureaucratic operations flow through such faculty bodies as senates, academic units, and committees; financial operations flow from boards down through the upper-level administrative structure to directors, heads, and chairs. (Both operations rely heavily on staff support, of course.) Nearly every full-time faculty member participates in bureaucratic operations as a decision maker, and some students do as well, precisely because of the emphasis on education; very few faculty members participate in decision making on financial operations. In this arena, faculty members are defined as employees and, moreover, as employees who are hired for research and teaching but not primarily to participate in university oversight.

Faculty members are, from a financial perspective, professionals. The term professional can adjectivally refer to professors, but the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this usage is “now rare.” More familiar in the twenty-first century is the general definition: “Engaged in a profession, esp. one requiring special skill or training,” “a specified occupation or activity for money or as a means of earning a living” (“Professional”). It is as professionals that most faculty members interact with financial operations, that is, as employees negotiating workload, salary, and benefits. Moreover, faculty and graduate student professionalism is sharply distinguished from bureaucratic operations, as any survey of the professionalism courses that have emerged in recent decades will attest. Such courses tend to cover genres of academic research writing (conference papers, essays, grants), job applications and CVs, pedagogy, and introductions to theory and other research methods. This is the work of academic research and teaching—of a “special skill or training” making possible a “specified occupation or activity for money” (“Professional”). But professionalism classes rarely (if ever) cover such items as the responsibilities of a committee chair, including how to run a meeting efficiently, or the drafting of policy documents, let alone the management of paperwork and e‑mail in-boxes. Bureaucratic operations are not professional (see Burgan): graduate students do not train for such work, and universities do not hire for it. Hiring committees might take into account whether someone seems well suited for service in general but do not issue job ads for someone to chair a curriculum committee or oversee a department’s graduate program. In accordance with long-standing practice, faculty members are expected to figure out bureaucratic operations on the job and to move through many kinds of bureaucratic roles during their careers—such work is not “a specified occupation or activity for money.” Even upper-level administrators are typically not trained as such, often hired for a body of experience rather than on the basis of relevant degrees or other formal qualifications.

This gap between bureaucratic operations, in which faculty members safeguard academic standards and processes, and professionalism, in which they are subordinated to an employment structure, is ideological as well as traditional. Chris Lorenz notes, “There is an inherent conflict between bureaucracy and professionalism,” and he quotes Keith Roberts and Karen Donahue, who suggest that “bureaucracy expects its members to promote and represent the interests of the organization: the professional expects the interests of the client to be supreme” (611). Academics often call those who do a lot of this kind of bureaucratic work, pejoratively dismissed as “housekeeping” (Wall xi), good departmental citizens; such citizens are perceived to labor on departmental committees at the expense of professional goals such as career advancement through teaching and research. This misuse of the term citizen in academic circles has masked the broad lack of faculty participation in institutional decision making, especially in financial operations; it associates the word with self-sacrifice for the good of the community rather than with the civic exercise of privilege—of real citizenship, in Aristotelian terms. The divide between faculty-controlled bureaucratic operations that safeguard educational standards and executive-driven financial operations that safeguard the bottom line keeps getting wider and wider, but it is founded in university charters.

Property

So who are the citizens, the clients that academic professionals serve? Western definitions of citizenship were long tied up in property, and not intellectual property either. Property was originally land and only much later expanded to include money and movable goods. For instance, Daniel Defoe argued in 1702 that only those who have a “Right to the Land,” landowners, have a “Right of Government” (19), contending that whoever owns land should get a voice in what happens to that land (and to the aggregate of the land, the nation) but not anyone else. For over two centuries after Defoe, landownership or rent above a set level was the key requirement of full citizenship through suffrage for adult men in Britain. In the United States, property was removed as a qualification for the vote nearly a century and a half after Defoe. As professionals, academics are employees, not property owners—not citizens. But neither, arguably, are members of that managerial class, upper administration.

The university’s property owners are defined in charters that often predate universal suffrage by a wide margin. I have surveyed a few dozen charters for universities of various sizes, focuses, regions, and nations, but in this essay I quote only a couple from the 1860s, the decade that saw the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States (1863) and the Confederation in Canada (1867). An 1863 Canadian charter declares, “The Board of Governors of Dalhousie College is continued as a body politic and corporate . . . and shall continue to . . . have the title, control and disposition of property and funds belonging to the College and University” (“Statutory Provisions”). An 1867–68 charter of a state university on the other side of the continent proclaims,

Regents to have power. All lands, moneys, bonds, securities or other property which shall be donated, conveyed or transferred to the said Board of Regents by gift, devise, or otherwise, including such property as may hereafter be donated and conveyed by the President and Board of Trustees of the College of California, in trust, or otherwise, for the use of said University, or of any college thereof, or of any professorship, chair or scholarship therein, or for the library, observatory, or any other purpose appropriate thereto, shall be taken, received, held, managed, invested, reinvested, sold, transferred, and in all respects managed, and the proceeds thereof used, bestowed, invested and reinvested, by the said Board of Regents.

(“Chapter CCXLIV”)

If you think that this wording means that a board controls the money while faculty members control academic matters, think again. That 1863 charter was modified in 1988 by the addition of the requirement that “the internal regulation of Dalhousie College and University is committed to the University Senate, but any such internal regulation is subject to the approval of the Board” (“Statutory Provisions”). Look through university charters across Canada and the United States, and you will find few that go as far as that 1988 addition, but you will find that the founding principle of these nineteenth-century charters is standard: the board (or a comparable body) effectively owns the university. It appoints the upper administration, who are the public face of the sort of privilege that defines older ideas of citizenship, that is, an elite who owns property and makes decisions for the larger, unpropertied community. It is the members of the board who “have power” (“Chapter CCXLIV”). The board is, moreover, a “body politic” (“Statutory Provisions”); the Hobbesian resonance of the phrase reinforces the board’s connection to predemocratic forms of governance (or, more accurately perhaps, of dominance). The 1863 charter specifically limits the polity to the boards: they are a body politic, not the university community.

But university charters are rather idiosyncratic documents, arising out of old laws and often regionally and historically specific government concerns. In the 1960s, some major academic organizations in the United States developed their own vision of university governance: the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities was “jointly formulated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Council on Education (ACE), and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB)” (Statement). All three groups supported the statement in late 1966, and it is, at the time of my writing, posted on the AAUP Web site as a policy statement, along with a few changes made over the years. Here is the key passage on faculty governance: “The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” This is familiar territory; many university members take this division of responsibility for granted. Nonexecutive staff members—all those assistants, secretaries, managers, and technicians who keep the wheels turning—are not specified in the document. The president gets a few short paragraphs. It is when the statement turns to the board of governors that it gets interesting.

Boards are largely focused on making or approving decisions with financial implications—such as appointments—and guarding, zealously, the bottom line, consistent with their central identification as the university’s property owners. But here is the 1966 vision. The middle part is familiar enough:

The board plays a central role in relating the likely needs of the future to predictable resources; it has the responsibility for husbanding the endowment; it is responsible for obtaining needed capital and operating funds; and in the broadest sense of the term it should pay attention to personnel policy. In order to fulfill these duties, the board should be aided by, and may insist upon, the development of long-range planning by the administration and faculty.

This prose calls to mind recent complaints that the corporate university is shortsighted.4 More to my point, it is consistent with those nineteenth-century charters—and earlier political thought in which civic power is grounded in property—in tying control over “resources” to the top-level governance of the institution. But here is the part that seems especially surprising in the current climate, and I have yet to find anything like it in my survey of North American university charters:5

The governing board has a special obligation to ensure that the history of the college or university shall serve as a prelude and inspiration to the future. The board helps relate the institution to its chief community. . . . When ignorance or ill will threatens the institution or any part of it, the governing board must be available for support. In grave crises it will be expected to serve as a champion. Although the action to be taken by it will usually be on behalf of the president, the faculty, or the student body, the board should make clear that the protection it offers to an individual or a group is, in fact, a fundamental defense of the vested interests of society in the educational institution.

(Statement)

Imagine our governing boards as “champion[s]‌,” “help[ing] relate the institution to its chief community,” and supporting the “inspiration[al]” possibility of university activity. While this vision might be attractive in a climate where education is increasingly seen as mere job training for the purpose of personal financial gain and thus outside the public interest, in political terms it makes the board responsible for the defense of the realm and external relations, like an early modern monarch. It also makes the board responsible for the “defense” of the Enlightenment premise “of the vested interests of society in the educational institution.” In defining the board, then, the document imagines a pre-Enlightenment institution in a precariously Enlightenment society: a “champion” who enters the lists to defend the value of education beyond the university’s walls. In this pre-Enlightenment enclave, the upper administration, answerable to the board as professionals are to a client—and not to the faculty, students, or staff—are more akin to courtiers than citizens.

Privilege

In scholarship on the emergence of the modern nation-state in eighteenth-century Europe, one point comes up repeatedly: the shifting of power from the monarch to a voting public arose from an Enlightenment turn to reason, transparency, education, and moral philosophy (or secular ethics). Jürgen Habermas, for instance, points to the “critical process that private people engaged in rational-critical debate brought to bear on absolutist rule . . . : public opinion aimed at rationalizing politics in the name of morality” (102), and Anthony D. Smith has tied this process structurally to the emergence of a civic bureaucracy (76), that is, educated bureaucrats who exerted a check on aristocratic and monarchical power. Instead of the will of the monarch, sanctioned by divine right and expressed through statutes managed by courtiers, who varied widely in competence and in moral behavior (the rare Metternichs and Richelieus and the forgotten many), a citizen bureaucracy emerged hand in hand with regular ethical principles and a public sphere defined by “rational-critical debate,” to use Habermas’s phrase.

Universities typically have senates to govern academic matters, with varying balances between administration and faculty and student representatives, but generally speaking a significant majority of members in a university senate have advanced and specialized education. Nearly all but the undergraduate student representatives have degrees, typically doctorates. The senate offers, on a compact scale, a more or less functional civic bureaucracy. The senate is still elitist, like an eighteenth-century civic bureaucracy, insofar as there are significant excluded and underrepresented constituencies, such as graduate students, contingent teaching labor, lab assistants, and staff members, who are nevertheless deeply involved in research, teaching, and “student life” (Statement). Senate meetings do, however, tend to be open to the university community, except when confidential business is conducted, and to allow questions from the floor, extending the decision-making bureaucracy into the general public sphere of the academic branches of the university, where the value of rational-critical debate is a foundational principle. But senate activity is not professional: it is not specialized training for pay; in its ideal form, it is the exercise of broad academic oversight, both ethical and intellectually rigorous.

The board is a different animal. Many board members in North American institutions do not have advanced degrees or engage in activity clearly connected to teaching and research. Boards also tend not to hold public meetings. They are at a remove from the public sphere of the academic community and its emphasis on rational-critical debate, and their roles are based on predemocratic forms of citizenship in which privilege, property, and power are inextricable. As a consequence, there is a structural inconsistency in university governance: senates are partly representational and stress rational-critical debate, whereas boards (appointed and even self-renewing bodies) derive their power and their purpose from resources, that is, from property. One focuses on bureaucratic operations, largely devoted to the maintenance of educational standards and processes; the other controls financial operations. Neither the board nor the senate, it should be stressed, typically displays much commitment to the principle of universal suffrage and other key features of political modernity.

This lack of commitment leads me to a central question raised by the 1966 statement, especially in the light of recent controversies over governance. In the twenty-first century, who is responsible for defending the “vested interests of society in the educational institution,” a duty that was given to boards in 1966? For with boards now largely composed of people from the business world and explicitly tasked in university charters with focusing on financial operations, their responsibility to defend the social value of education has faded from view. The 1966 document was forged in heady days when North America was awash in public dollars for roads, bridges, hospitals, and new universities; there was also a burgeoning public debate about traditional institutions, most clearly in the civil rights movement. It does not imagine the possibility of a penny-pinching board of governors or a Western nation-state supposedly without sufficient funds to maintain its public institutions effectively. Put another way, the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities does not anticipate a governance crisis that is focused on resources rather than on rights and responsibilities.6 A resource-based crisis puts further stress on the ideological rift between the charter-defined role of the property-owning board and the Enlightenment-shaped project of academic activity, locking many campuses structurally into a rather antiquated struggle for power while those “vested interests of society in the educational institution” go largely undefended.

Bureaucratic operations are, by their nature, internal. Financial operations are, by their nature, external, and hence the board is historically the interface between the university and the wider community, defined and empowered by public documents (legislation) to act for the university in and for the public realm: “The board helps relate the institution to its chief community” (Statement). This is precisely why it makes sense for the statement to give faculty members the responsibility to safeguard the quality of education and the board the responsibility to “defen[d]‌” “the vested interests of society in the educational institution.” For the framers of the statement, the board is not just supposed to “share in deliberative or judicial office” (Aristotle 87), passing final judgment on financial operations in the institution; it must also speak for the institution in the larger public sphere. But charters have not much followed the statement on this point.

Professionalization, as a collective move toward presenting the doctorate as a specialized qualification worthy of remuneration, has arguably defended tenure lines but has also drawn tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members into a scramble for resources from the client (the board), who still embodies the premodern trinity of power, privilege, and property. Professionalization is a fourth p that does not share in but reinforces the standing of the other three, on almost Hegelian terms. This is where the opposition between professionalism and what I have been terming bureaucratic operations has been most insidious—impeding, or at least complicating, the emergence of a kind of civic bureaucracy that might begin to set new ethical limits on upper-level decision making and to put university governance back on a more modernizing track.

Progress

Universities need an idea of academic citizenship that will not only revalue faculty participation in bureaucratic operations as necessary to support academic standards but also energize the collective ethical and rigorous scrutiny of the operations of the university as a whole and within society—displacing in major ways the board as it is conceived in both charters and the statement. This idea would be in some respects merely an Enlightenment citizenship, at least as a first step in which university communities might concertedly consider the “vested interests of society in the educational institution” in the twenty-first century. In this vein, Benjamin Baez examines “race-related service” to argue for “the recognition of a critical agency which uses service to redefine institutional structures,” suggesting that “in this regard service is important and valuable when it furthers social justice” (364). He thus points to the potential for university service, broadly understood in relation to “critical agency” (recalling Habermas’s term, “rational-critical debate”), to address larger ethical goals. Scrutiny, debate, and critique—these are the kinds of oversight that began the work of modernizing the nation-state in the eighteenth century, and so they might begin to modernize today’s university governance structures.

For example, pressuring a dean to defend a threatened undergraduate program follows the medieval and hierarchical model in which a community pins its hopes on an authority (a champion or a divinely ordained ruler) who will act on its behalf. A more modern response would be to have faculty members analyze the situation and open up the decision-making process to considered, informed debate. Complaining in the hallways about administrative waste (bloated salaries, glossy brochures no one reads) has little institutional effect; investigating expenditure decisions and putting the results into a public forum might lead to more accountable procedures, even to a rich and largely untapped form of interdisciplinarity. Faculty members from diverse disciplines—say, economics, sociology, literature, and political science—collectively have the expertise to generate a researched, methodologically cogent, and rhetorically powerful response to decisions about financial operations. Such interdisciplinarity does not aim to advance knowledge in the usual academic sense, but it could further the collaborative and collective exercise of scrutiny. This interdisciplinary scrutiny could raise the level of discussion and resulting analysis to better inform financial decision making on a daily basis and not just on the large questions (such as the elimination of departments) that periodically galvanize campuses and social media. The corporate university is in part a symptom, rather than the cause, of a structural failure to modernize our institutions politically, organizationally, and operationally, and the abjection of faculty citizenship as mere housekeeping has obscured the potential for effective participation in the institution and its future.

Academics can work to bridge bureaucratic and financial operations in defiance of the separation of powers entrenched in so many university charters. As has been widely discussed in recent years, upper-level financial decisions, made largely without faculty participation, are reshaping not only educational programs and research activity but also the North American university as such.7 But this development grows not only out of current economic and ideological trends but also out of the premodern origins of our universities. By charter, most boards are primarily concerned with finances and not directly involved in education or research, and recent cultural shifts—including deregulation, declining public funding, and packing boards with likely donors rather than community leaders—have pushed that financial mission even more to the fore. We are witnessing an increase in fund-raising, corporate partnerships, and upper-level administrative positions. Unprecedented discussions are taking place about how the university can serve not the “vested interests of society in the educational institution” but the vested interests of business and the financial mission itself—not “veritas et libertas” but “expand and patent”—as if the university’s mission in research and teaching is supposed to further the board’s financial goals instead of the other way around.

These are complex challenges that need multifaceted solutions, but one way forward is to revise our governing documents. University charters are not easy to change. It is easy to ignore them by elbowing into discussions of university financial operations and related decision making, and perhaps that elbowing is a necessary first step so that members of the university community at large can comprehensively rethink university governance. There needs to be a grassroots-up discussion, not least because of the diversity of institutional needs and responsibilities in the present century. But it is time to pick up political models that are more participatory and structurally open to debate and scrutiny than was imaginable in the 1860s or 1960s and write our charters into the twenty-first century.

Notes

I am grateful to Jason Haslam for his very helpful comments. I would also like to thank the audience at a Committee for Professional Concerns panel at the 2012 meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, who responded generatively to a shorter version of this paper, and the panel’s organizer, Clint Burnham, for inviting me to participate. Finally, I would like to thank all my more virtual colleagues for many shares of articles, comments, and tweets on current events at North American campuses. Social media are already emerging as a resource through which academics can bring scrutiny and debate to bear on governance-related campus issues.

1. In gesturing to the inconsistency of this culture’s effects, I refer to “bur[ying] the notion of substantial effectiveness under that of formal efficiency” (Lorenz 606) and to the shifting of university resources from the work of the institution (teaching, research, and the administration they require) to the marketing-driven work of revising the university’s image: Web site redesigns; the revamping of library space into banks of computer stations (often called learning commons)—ironically, just as smartphones, tablets, and notebooks started becoming common student tools; and, most recently, rebranding, so that the University of Western Ontario is now, after nearly a century with that name, Western University, and the University of California has exchanged its nineteenth-century logo for an animated GIF evocative of a spinning clothes drier (see Readings 10–11 for early instances of the same trend). ↩

2. I refer here to various recent controversies, including the University of Virginia Board of Visitors’ asking the university president to resign (2012), the votes of nonconfidence in the president of New York University (2013), and events at two universities that led to censure by the American Association of University Professors (2013). ↩

3. I use the term board throughout as the one common to most of my sources (including Statement), but it is not universally used in North American institutions. ↩

4. Oxford University faculty members rejected the corporate model on the grounds that such “governance produces only partial and short-term governance solutions” (Trakman 69). ↩

5. Some come close in requiring the board to act in the larger interest of the university, but only in very broad terms: for instance, British Columbia’s University Act requires that “[t]‌he members of the board of a university must act in the best interests of the university” (“University Act”), and Brandeis University’s board of trustees is subject to the requirement that “[t]‌he clear income of the estate, real or personal, of which said corporation shall be seized and possessed, shall be applied to the endowment of said University in such manner as most effectually to promote the general educational purposes of said corporation” (Charter). ↩

6. See Lorenz’s argument that “[n]‌eoliberalism . . . shifts its focus from rights to risks” (602). ↩

7. The AAUP report on National Louis University offers a dramatic instance of this reshaping (Academic Freedom). ↩

Works Cited

Academic Freedom and Tenure: National Louis University (Illinois). American Association of University Professors. AAUP, Apr. 2013. Web. 12 July 2013. <http://www.aaup.org/file/National_Louis.pdf>.

Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Ed. R. F. Stalley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Baez, Benjamin. “Race-Related Service and Faculty of Color: Conceptualizing Critical Agency in Academe.” Higher Education 39 (2000): 363–91. Print.

Burgan, Mary. “Academic Citizenship: A Fading Vision.” Liberal Education 84 (1998): n. pag. EBSCO. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/1493860/academic-citizenship-fading-vision>.

“Chapter CCXLIV.” The Organic Act—Chapter 244 of the Statutes of 1867–1868. California Digital Library. Regents of the U of California, n.d. Web. 1 June 2012. <http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6w100756;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=div00001>.

Charter. Board of Trustees. Brandeis University. Brandeis U, n.d. Web. 1 Oct. 2012. <http://www.brandeis.edu/trustees/charter.html>.

Defoe, Daniel. The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted. London, 1702. Print.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Print.

LaCapra, Dominick. “The University in Ruins?” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 32–55. Print.

Lorenz, Chris. “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management.” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 599–629. Print.

“Professional.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. Oxford UP, June 2007. Web. 21 Aug. 2013.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.

Smith, Anthony D. “Neo-classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions.” Nationalist Movements. Ed. Smith. London: Macmillan, 1976. 74–87. Print.

Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. American Association of University Professors. AAUP, n.d. Web. 2 May 2012. <http://www.aaup.org/file/statement-on-government.pdf>.

“Statutory Provisions: Summary and Unofficial Consolidation of the Statutes Relating to Dalhousie University.” Dalhousie University. Dalhousie U, n.d. Web. 10 June 2012. <http://www.dal.ca/dept/university_secretariat/board_of_governors/statutory_provisions.html>.

Trakman, Leon. “Modelling University Governance.” Higher Education Quarterly 62 (2008): 63–83. Web. 24 May 2012.

“University Act.” BC Laws. Queen’s Printer, n.d. Web. 22 May 2012. <http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/00_96468_01>.

Wall, Cheryl A. “Foreword: Faculty as Change Agents—Reflections on my Academic Life.” Doing Diversity in Higher Education: Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies. Ed. Winnifred E. Brown-Glaude. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2009. ix–xiv. Print.

Julia M. Wright is professor of English and associate dean (research) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University.

Posted December 2013

The Spanish department at Mount Holyoke College has in the last six years profoundly transformed itself. It merged with the college’s Latina/o and Latin American studies programs to form a new academic unit, possibly unique in the United States, while it thoroughly reconfigured its major. This comprehensive revision of our mission and academic as well as social location emerges partly in response to the evolving role of Spanish speakers and United States Latinas/os in general.1 Although specific to a private liberal arts college in the Northeast, our departmental and curricular refashioning suggests broader lessons that might advance the ongoing conversation regarding the mission and location of United States Spanish programs.2 Spanish departments operate in a country where over 35 million people spoke Spanish at home in 2009 and where Latinas/os are projected to represent thirty percent of the population by 2050 (2010 Census). Building on these statistics, in this essay I focus on the equally compelling intellectual and ideological arguments underlying the necessary restructuring of United States Spanish departments.

While a one-size-fits-all model does not work across institutions, the rationale behind our transformation is based on key factors of the early-twenty-first-century United States social and academic context. Nonetheless, this discussion must take into account that the production and allocation of knowledge remain fundamentally ideological processes and therefore, for better or worse, deeply personal as well. As I summarize the collective work that led to our transformation, I attempt to differentiate my own beliefs and opinions from institutionally backed perspectives. I first discuss our new department’s location and structure as we embrace United States Latinidad as a critical component of our mission; then provide a detailed description of our new major, including areas of particular potential for growth such as community-based learning and multi- and interdisciplinary courses; then briefly explain our new department title and nomenclature for the major.

Mount Holyoke College, a private women’s liberal arts college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, today has a student population of approximately 2,300, with a relatively high percentage of international (23%) and domestic minority (25%) students, of whom 8.6% are Latinas (Common Data Set). Although two of the cities with the highest concentration of Latinas/os in Massachusetts, Holyoke and Springfield, are a short drive away, our faculty did not include a single Latina/o studies specialist when I joined the college as chair of Spanish in the fall of 2006. Spanish was thriving in terms of student enrollment (over three hundred students each semester), but it was dwindling in the number of majors (we graduated only seven majors at the end of my first year). A demanding interdisciplinary program in Latin American studies had only two tenured faculty members and a handful of declared majors; the overall number of students in introductory courses was stable.

After conversations with all faculty members involved as well as with the then dean of faculty Donal O’Shea, who proved supportive from the outset, I proposed the merger of our existing Spanish and Latin American studies programs. Our new department would also host a Latina/o studies track with at least two new tenure lines. An overdue external review of Spanish and Latin American studies was conducted jointly. We chose four reviewers who had a broad and interconnected vision of these fields and understood the role of Latina/o studies in academia in general and in our new department in particular.3 After two years of internal and external consultations, as well as numerous meetings and draft proposals, in the spring of 2008 we officially requested the creation of the new department of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American studies; a new Latina/o studies tenure line; and a new Spanish major.

According to the Modern Language Association’s 2009 report Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Spanish accounted for 51.4% of the total foreign language enrollment, with French a distant second at 12.9%.4 While high enrollments at the lower levels of language instruction put enormous pressure on staffing needs (Klee 22; González-Stephan 55), students are less likely to major in a foreign language today than they were in the 1960s (Report 1). The disproportion of student enrollments to declared majors results in institutional reluctance to fund additional tenure lines. At many smaller schools, the combination of these two factors structurally relegates Spanish to “a position of servitude” (González-Stephan 55) and labels Spanish pejoratively as a service department. As such, Spanish serves a campus-wide purpose, allowing students to fulfill a language requirement, but is perceived as lacking in intellectual substance. The stereotyping of Spanish departments as academically inferior mirrors mainstream perceptions of United States Spanish speakers as socially and culturally deficient individuals.

The location of Spanish can no longer be based solely on its status as a foreign language. Whether we consider Spanish a “foreign national language” (Alonso) or, as Raymond L. Williams has unequivocally stated, “not a foreign language in U.S. universities” (280), Spanish departments occupy a unique intellectual and political space in United States academia and society. Historically, Hispanism grew out of the domain of Romance languages and literatures with a focus on the Spanish language, Spain and Latin America (usually in this order), and the Eurocentric literary canon (González-Stephan 55; Resina 161). To a large extent, Spanish departments have historically proved unwilling or unable to regard interdisciplinarity, contemporary issues, and most strikingly Latinas/os as essential components of their mission (Sandoval and Aparicio 677).

The realization that Spanish is both a foreign and a domestic language radically alters the mission and location of United States Spanish departments. All aspects of our intellectual, personnel, and curricular structures must recognize this belated awakening to the new role of Spanish (Lipski 1251). In a country that reluctantly accepts its bilingual condition (Campa 24–25), if not openly fears it, Spanish must take an active role in the promotion of the kind of translingual and transcultural competency that most Latina/os in the United States employ and have been employing for generations in their daily lives (Sandoval and Aparicio 679).

It is in the domestic and transnational contexts both that Spanish departments are best suited to implement the recommendations issued by the MLA in its 2007 report “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World.” The MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages recognized that preparing our students to attain the linguistic and cultural levels of an educated native speaker is a lofty but rarely achieved goal and one that may not even be essential. Instead, we ought to foster their ability “to operate between languages” while helping them “grasp themselves as Americans” (237) (and as global citizens, I would add). For foreign language departments, this new focus represents a radical departure from their traditional mission, which was centered on linguistic purity and literary history. As the MLA report reminds us, only 6.1% of foreign language majors go on to pursue graduate studies in their field (239). Their professional and intellectual potential, as well as the future of our nation, will thus be best served if we prepare them both to operate in a translingual context and to understand themselves and others against the transcultural and transnational backdrop of twenty-first-century societies.5

At Mount Holyoke College, the new mission of our department lays out a joint long-term vision for Spanish and for Latina/o and Latin American studies. We collectively commit to “the multidisciplinary study of the past, current state, and emerging realities of societies and cultures of Latin America, Spain, the Caribbean, and the Latina/o heritage populations within the United States and their relations with each other and with the wider world” (Mount Holyoke Bulletin 457).6 We retain a predominantly humanities-centered perspective, although the social sciences are also represented. While all our appointments are in practice fully housed in our department, we actively and successfully seek cross-disciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration, which translates into curricular, administrative, and intellectual campus-wide projects. Our new configuration allows us to continue to offer majors and minors in Spanish (mostly Spanish-language cultural production) and Latin American studies (a traditional area studies program) and to add a minor in Latina/o studies by the fall of 2014. We hope to offer a new Latina/o studies major when we secure sufficient faculty staffing.

Our new departmental configuration and joint mission have radically affected our curriculum, staffing, and location in the college and our local Latina/o communities. Here I discuss the changes that affect our Spanish major, because the other two distinct fields of inquiry in the department (Latin American and Latina/o studies) remain fully autonomous. The department is not an expanded Spanish program but an innovative configuration that pursues its common vision while recognizing the individuality of its constituents.

Because our collective razón de ser owes more to intellectual principles than cost-saving measures, our existing Spanish major could implement our new mission only if fundamentally updated. With significantly different objectives and underlying tenets, we reflected on the curricular and intellectual consequences of our transformation, which extended our mandate well beyond Spanish and Latin American literary history. In alignment with the overall departmental mission, our new major description now reads:

[O]ur courses adopt a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including literary studies, film and media studies, social history, and politics. . . . In addition to providing opportunities for learning on campus, the department also strongly recommends that students study off campus in a Spanish-speaking context in order to enhance their language skills and to forge their own connections to place through language. . . . The major and minor in Spanish (Hispanophone Studies) include a variety of courses intended to facilitate proficiency in the language and contextualize and analyze issues relevant to Spanish speakers abroad and in the U.S., such as terrorism, migration, and imperialism.

(Mount Holyoke Bulletin 457)

We thus study the cultural production (mostly in the Spanish language, although in others as well, such as English, Portuguese, and Catalan) of Latin America and Spain but also of the Latina/o population of the United States. The implications of including the United States in our mission are far-reaching, but I focus here on the most consequential two: our redefined relation to Latinas/os in the country and the inclusion of multi- and interdisciplinary approaches in our curriculum.

In recent years, institutions of higher learning have made significant efforts to recruit domestic minority students, including Latinas/os, and Mount Holyoke has proved particularly adept at this task. However, recruiting is only the first step; it is curricular reform and meaningful faculty, staff, and student retention efforts that truly test the depth and breadth of institutional commitment to diversity. At the departmental level, this reform means that our efforts to engage Latina students cannot be limited to offering the occasional if essential “Spanish for heritage speakers” or “Latina/o literature” class (Sandoval and Aparicio). Introductory courses to the major and minor must meaningfully incorporate elements of United States Latina/o cultural production, and upper-level seminars must be offered in the department or cross-listed (whether in Spanish or English) on issues relevant to Latinas/os. Our department also reaches out to Latina student organizations on campus to consult with them on curricular and personnel changes. These organizations designate faculty members (typically from our department) to serve as their mentors, and Latina student representatives are regularly invited to participate in department meetings, job searches, and other events.

In curricular terms, the syllabus of our introductory course to the major (Spanish 212) dedicates approximately forty percent each to United States–based and to Latin American cultural production and the remaining twenty percent to Spain. Ideally, we should have a Latina/o cultural production specialist in the Spanish section of the department, but instead we opted to hire a faculty member outside Spanish who could dedicate all her efforts to building a campus-wide Latina/o studies program. In my experience, it is more effective in the long term to start or expand a freestanding Latina/o studies major than to hire a lone Latina/o studies scholar into a Spanish department.

Mount Holyoke offers Spanish for Heritage Speakers, a class taught by a specialist in that area, although our enrollments tend to be low. The Latina students who register for it are neither bilingual students with solid written proficiency (those usually enroll in 212) nor English-dominant Latinas with little or no knowledge of Spanish (those usually take regular language classes). Through an online placement test and a written evaluation administered in all elementary and intermediate classes, we identify and encourage heritage speakers with robust oral skills but weak written skills to take this class.

Many bilingual heritage speakers tend to regard their translingual abilities (a great achievement in a country that so fiercely discourages bilingualism) as a deficiency. Their Spanish, some believe, lacks correctness, may negatively affect their English, and generally serves as a detrimental social, cultural, and ethnoracial marker. As Frances Aparicio explains, United States social and educational structures enforce differential bilingualism, which rewards monolingual English speakers for studying a foreign language while discouraging heritage speakers from preserving theirs (5–6). For this reason, it is crucial to validate any Spanish our heritage students might employ and to build on it by expanding their vocabulary and stylistic registers.7 For Spanish departments, heritage speakers embody a courageous model of linguistic and cultural perseverance in the face of societal resistance to translingual and transcultural Latinas/os.

The importance of Latinas/os to the United States economy and service industries has now become all but impossible to deny. The need to offer products and services in Spanish in areas such as health care, law, media, marketing, and entertainment charges our departments with a special responsibility. Many of our students, regardless of ancestry, ethnoracial identity, major, and socioeconomic background, want to learn Spanish for specific and practical purposes. But a purely utilitarian use of the Spanish language stripped of its cultural and historical contexts will result in an impoverished understanding of Spanish speakers and their cultures.8 Preparing our students to tend to the needs and demands of our Spanish-speaking communities does not diminish the relevance of our department; rather, it increases it. Rigorous course sequences in translation and interpretation, for example, have been implemented at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte (Doyle). At Mount Holyoke, we pioneered a statewide program for bilingual student workers at the Holyoke District Court under the office of the Massachusetts Supreme Court chief justice Lynda M. Connolly. Spanish for specific purposes offers us the opportunity to attract students who may otherwise never take advanced classes in our departments. As initiatives such as the Partnership for Twenty-First-Century Skills and the Spanish and Entrepeneurship: Languages, Cultures, and Communities seminar at the University of Illinois, Urbana, suggest (Oxford; Abbot and Lear), Spanish departments can and should build coalitions with community partners, institutions, and companies to increase their ability to educate United States–based translingual and transcultural citizens. At Mount Holyoke, unfortunately, budget constraints keep us from hiring faculty members or training current faculty members to teach Spanish for specific purposes (Sánchez-López 88).

Last but not least, redefining our relation to Latinas/os in the United States means that Spanish-language instruction can and must leave the classroom in order to engage our local Latina/o communities. Community-based learning (CBL) owes nothing to charity.9 Our students are simply not equipped, nor should it be their responsibility, to better the lives of local community residents. The notion that college students engaging in a weekly field trip can know a community better than its own residents or do more for that community than its residents is absurd. Rather, community partners, residents, and faculty members should aim to prepare our students to combat a mainstream way of thinking that often still regards communities of color and migrants with indifference, contempt, or condescension. Through a sustained framework of collaboration, our communities and members of higher learning institutions can learn from each other and work toward coordinated goals. I consider the community-based purpose of my own CBL classes fulfilled if we further multidirectional and long-term conversations among local Latina/o residents, community partners, and students about inequality, privilege, difference, and structures of power. The completion of goal-based projects (for instance, in my collaboration with the Latino Youth Media Institute of Springfield, Massachusetts, the production of digital stories, several of which have been featured on local media) offers tangible proof of this type of long-term engagement.

Although CBL courses facilitate community engagement and the use of Spanish in a variety of formal and informal settings, they remain content-based academic courses for which faculty members hold full responsibility. CBL seminars must therefore revolve around topics about which faculty members have significant expertise. We need to train (or retrain) ourselves rigorously in CBL pedagogy as well as in the topic of choice before sending our students out into communities that deserve nothing short of respect and professionalism from their local higher learning institutions.

The study of contemporary cultural production, CBL practices, and the intellectual and ideological bonds among Spanish, Latin American, and Latina/o studies all underscore the need to refurbish our disciplinary and methodological toolboxes. I do not mean to say that we should abandon the study of literature or even monodisciplinary approaches or that all faculty members should return to graduate school to learn something other than their original field of study. But the reality of our field—its connections to the ever-growing and shifting Latina/o population, its commitment to CBL—raises the question of whether any monodisciplinary approach enables us to fulfill our mission. Based on my own personal experience, the answer is no. Without obligating anyone in the department to pursue such routes, college administrations should offer incentives (such as grants, course releases, and merit-based raises) to faculty members who are willing to make the effort to broaden their disciplinary focus, learn CBL pedagogy, and focus on emerging fields such as the digital humanities.

The teaching of literature remains an integral part of our curriculum, but it is not the sole (in many of our courses, not even the most relevant) element of instruction. Our new curricular structure at Mount Holyoke does not revolve around literary history; our courses are not organized by literary periods, such as medieval or contemporary, or geographic areas, such as the Caribbean or the Southern Cone. Instead, we articulate our curriculum around themes and ensure students’ exposure to a variety of historical periods, languages, and methodologies through a few additional requirements. All majors and minors must take Spanish 212, enroll in a class with a pre-1800 focus, and take no more than two courses in English if they are bilingual or study away. We allow students who neither are bilingual nor study away to take only one class in English, wanting to maximize their exposure to Spanish. A common course for the three areas of the department has been approved but is yet to be implemented as we consolidate our Latina/o studies section.

Our 200-level courses present an overview of topics with a chronological emphasis; our 300-level seminars address narrower themes and require advanced scholarly production or the completion of sophisticated creative or digital projects. The four major themes around which all our courses revolve are

• “Identities and Intersections” (230 and 330): issues of identity (gender, sexual, ethnoracial, cultural, class, national, and religious) and their intersections with other dimensions of cultural agency and power differentials
• “Visual Cultures” (240 and 340): visual representation of a variety of topics in media such as film, television, fine arts, the Internet, or video
• “Concepts and Practices of Power” (250 and 350): political discourses and economic relations in or among Latin America, Spain, and Latina/o cultures in the United States
• “Studies in Language and Society” (260 and 360): specific form and meaning relations in the linguistic system of Spanish and the function of language in society

These broad topics serve as umbrella categories for courses that can be offered in different versions each semester (Mount Holyoke Bulletin 460). To the general description above we add in the course catalog that “specific course contents and examples examined will vary each semester” (460). Therefore, we can offer many courses, whether new or revised, without requesting curricular approval for each.

Because our configuration is unusual in the academic landscape—I personally know of no other Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American studies department in the country—we collectively debated what name would best reflect our disciplinary and geopolitical interests while still clearly identifying for both students and colleagues our respective academic subjects. Latina/o and Latin American studies are well-established fields of inquiry, but we chose Spanish as the first term of our rather long departmental title to make it clear that Spanish-language instruction remained a vital area in the new unit. We reject the identification between Spanish and the predominance of Spain as a subject of study, and we reject the reduction of our field to language teaching.

When the Spanish section of the department discussed the title of our new major, we faced an even greater problem. No title of a major has yet succeeded in reflecting the dramatic changes in our profession of the last thirty years. Spanish continues to be inadequate as a major title for the reasons outlined above. Hispanic studies, widely used across the nation, employs a politically charged term with ethnoracial connotations; it is also regarded by many, particularly those in the field of Latina/o studies, as Eurocentric. As francophone and lusophone studies spread across the country in lieu of French and Portuguese, respectively, we chose to rename our major “Hispanophone Studies,” although we left the term Spanish in parentheses for clarification (a quick survey of our students made it clear that the new title was not self-explanatory). “Hispanophone Studies” refers to the study of cultural production (mostly) in the Spanish language and is slowly emerging as a viable alternative in course and journal titles. To the best of my knowledge, we are the first department to rename our major in this fashion, and the term is still unfamiliar to both students and colleagues. Given the innovation of our new department configuration and mission, however, we agreed that some lexical boldness was appropriate to our overall proposal.10

United States Spanish departments find themselves in a position to become an academic engine of social change. Our revised mission includes two goals of vital importance: to teach students the kind of translingual and transcultural competencies that our diverse nation and interconnected world demand and to underscore the crucial role of Latinas/os in the United States and the global arena. To fulfill this mission, we need to fundamentally redefine not only our academic and social goals but also our methodologies. CBL, multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, interdepartmental collaboration, and a full acceptance of the role of Spanish as a domestic language constitute the building blocks of our new academic and sociopolitical location.

Each department must work within the parameters established by its faculty members as well as by the institution at large. The process of updating our programs will be best accomplished by adopting a healthy degree of pragmatism. A curricular and administrative renovation of the scope discussed here can succeed only if profound changes are carefully calibrated, allowing for each faculty member to feel adequately heard and represented in the process and resulting structure. As the MLA warns language departments in its 2007 report, however, “lack of change will most likely carry serious consequences” (“Foreign Languages” 241). Change in Spanish departments can be resisted but not halted, because our evolving sociopolitical and professional circumstances demand it.

Notes

I want to thank my Mount Holyoke colleagues, external review committee, and students for making possible this article and the transformations it details. More than anyone, María Elena Cepeda has taught me a great deal about our profession in general and Latina/o studies in particular.

1. As of 1 July 2011, the census estimates the Latina/o population in the United States at 52 million, or 16.7% of the country’s total population (2010 Census). An increase of 45% over the 2000 census made the Latina/o population the largest minority in our country. ↩

2. Other institutions have recently undergone similar transformations in their undergraduate programs. Columbia University’s (Irwin and Szurmuk 51–52) and Vanderbilt University’s (Jaschik 2–3) are most akin to Mount Holyoke’s. In 2004, Rice University was engaged in a similar process, but progress has seemingly been mixed (González-Stephan 53, 55–56). Before 2004, liberal arts schools such as Middlebury College (Rogers) and Saint Olaf College (Barnes-Karol), as well as the University of Florida (Nichols), still regarded Spanish as an exclusively foreign language. Outside Spanish departments, other initiatives have prospered despite initial difficulties, such as the bilingual creative writing MFA at the University of Texas, El Paso (Sáenz). Foreign languages across the curriculum initiatives have experienced ups and downs since the 1980s but still hold considerable potential (Klee 26–33). ↩

3. Chaired by Frances Aparicio, an esteemed Latina/o studies scholar with a Latin American literary studies background, our review committee included a Latin Americanist (a historian), an early modern Spanish literary scholar with broad transatlantic and contemporary interests, and an expert in Latin American contemporary literature. We also consulted with Alberto Sandoval Sánchez, a nonteaching member of our faculty and a renowned Latina/o studies scholar originally trained in early modern Spanish literature. ↩

4. For a historical perspective on the rise of Spanish in United States academia, see Pope 382–87. ↩

5. Several insightful essays cover different aspects of this new position of Spanish in United States academia and society: Alonso discusses Spanish as a “national foreign language” vis-à-vis English (222–27); Williams examines the “deterritorialized and hybrid Hispanic culture” throughout the Americas (274); González-Stephan, the “politics of Hispanism” in United States academia (50–55); Avelar, the contrast between “a multilingual and geographically flexible Latin/o American Studies” and the anglophone “Pan-American Studies” (56); Lipski (1248–50) and Campa (24–25), the new role of Spanish in the face of fiercely monolingual mainstream sentiment; Kelm, the utilitarian role of Spanish in our society (528–30); and Klee, “foreign languages across the curriculum” initiatives (23–25). In Spanish, Sandoval and Aparicio discuss the location of Latina/o studies in academia in general and in relation to Latin Americanists in Spanish departments in particular (677–79, 686–93). ↩

6. The comparable study of Brazil and Portugal draws mainly on the resources available through the Five College Consortium: Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ↩

7. A recent study on heritage speakers’ programs in the Southwest reveals a lack of curricular consistency across schools as well as a primary emphasis on writing (Beaudrie 333, 330). Studies on heritage speakers’ attitudes toward language and curricular structures (e.g., Potowski’s) will help us better serve this crucial segment of our student body and vital portion of the general Latina/o population. ↩

8. I reject the commodification of our students as simply “clients” (Kelm 528–29) and object to courses in which other departments contribute “content” while Spanish faculty members practice language skills from a purely utilitarian perspective (Domcekova). Spanish, as Jennifer Leeman asserts, must be treated as an “object of inquiry” in itself (38). ↩

9. Other names are also commonly employed for such teaching: civic engagement, service learning, and experiential learning. Because of the perceived conflation of CBL and charity, I prefer to avoid the term service altogether. Gabriel Ignacio Barreneche, nonetheless, offers compelling thoughts on the implementation of “service-learning pedagogy” in an advanced Spanish course at Rollins College (103–06). In the spirit of service, however, faculty members often implement courses that have scarce or too diffuse intellectual content or that are in fields completely outside their expertise (Caldwell; Long and Macián; Domcekova). ↩

10. Because of space constraints, I leave out a detailed discussion of our language program’s renovation, which was led by our program director, Esther Castro Cuenca. In brief, we hired local applied linguists whose area of specialization is one form or another of language teaching but who for a variety of reasons were not pursuing a tenure-track career at the time. We created a new, college-approved, indefinitely renewable position for our “language lecturers,” who participate in all department decisions within the parameters defined by the faculty handbook (they do not serve on committees or vote on personnel matters, for example). ↩

Works Cited

Abbot, Annie, and Darcy Lear. “The Connections Goal Area in Spanish Community Service-Learning: Possibilities and Limitations.” Foreign Language Annals 43.2 (2010): 232–45. Print.

Alonso, Carlos J. “Spanish: The Foreign National Language.” Profession (2007): 218–28. Print.

Aparicio, Frances. “Whose Spanish? Whose Language? Whose Power? An Ethnographic Inquiry into Differential Bilingualism.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 12 (1998): 5–23. Print.

Avelar, Idelber. “The Clandestine Ménage à Trois of Cultural Studies, Spanish, and Critical Theory.” Profession (1999): 49–58. Print.

Barnes-Karol, Gwendolyn. “Literature across the Curriculum: One View of Spanish from an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Perspective.” ADFL Bulletin 33.3 (2002): 13–19. Print.

Barreneche, Gabriel Ignacio. “Language Learners as Teachers: Integrating Service-Learning and the Advanced Language Course.” Hispania 94.1 (2011): 103–20. Print.

Beaudrie, Sarah M. “Spanish Heritage Language Programs: A Snapshot of Current Programs in the Southwestern United States.” Foreign Language Annals 44.2 (2011): 321–37. Print.

Caldwell, Wendy. “Service Learning into Foreign Language Study.” Foreign Language Annals 40.3 (2007): 463–71. Print.

Campa, Román de la. “Doing and Undoing Hispanism Today.” Debating Hispanic Studies: Reflections on Our Disciplines. Ed. Luis Martín-Estudillo, Francisco Ocampo, and Nicholas Spadaccini. Hispanic Issues 1.1 (2006): 23–29. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/pdf/de-la-campa.pdf>.

Common Data Set. Mount Holyoke. Mount Holyoke Coll., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2012. <https://www.mtholyoke.edu/iresearch/data_set>.

Domcekova, Barbara. “Science in Foreign Language Education: A Response to MLA Reports from a Liberal Arts College Spanish Program Perspective.” Hispania 93.1 (2010): 139–43. Print.

Doyle, Michael S. “A Responsive, Integrative Spanish Curriculum at UNC Charlotte.” Hispania 93.1 (2010): 80–84. Print.

Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2009. Modern Language Association. MLA, Dec. 2010. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://www.mla.org/pdf/2009_enrollment_survey.pdf>.

“Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World.” Profession (2007): 234–45. Print.

González-Stephan, Beatriz. “The Politics of Hispanism at Rice University; or, When Is a Hispanic Part of a Minority?” PMLA 119.1 (2004): 48–57. Print.

Irwin, Robert McKee, and Mónica Szurmuk. “Cultural Studies and the Field of ‘Spanish’ in the US Academy.”A contracorriente 6.3 (2009): 36–60. Print.

Jaschik, Scott. “Coherence, Literature, Languages.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 23 Dec. 2008. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/23/teagle>.

Kelm, Orlando R. “Report on the National Forum on the Future of Spanish Departments on College and University Campuses.” Hispania 83.3 (2000): 521–30. Print.

Klee, Carol A. “An Unforeseen Consequence of the Boom in Spanish: Who Is Teaching the Majors?” ADFL Bulletin 37.2-3 (2006): 21–25. Print.

Leeman, Jennifer. “The Value of Spanish: Shifting Ideologies in United States Language Teaching.” ADFL Bulletin 38.1-2 (2006–07): 32–39. Print.

Lipski, John M. “Rethinking the Place of Spanish.” PMLA 117.5 (2002): 1247–51. Print.

Long, Donna Reseigh, and Janice Lynn Macián. “Preparing Spanish Majors for Volunteer Service: Training and Simulations in an Experiential Course.” Hispania 91.1 (2008): 167–75. Print.

Mount Holyoke Bulletin and Course Catalogue, 2012–2013. Mount Holyoke Coll., n.d. Web. 3 Sept. 2013. <https://www.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/registrar/bulletin/docs/2012_13.pdf>.

Nichols, Geraldine C. “Spanish and the Multilingual Department: Ways to Use the Rising Tide.” Profession (2000): 115–23. Print.

Oxford, Raquel. “Promise (Un)Fulfilled: Reframing Languages for the Twenty-First Century.” Hispania 93.1 (2010): 66–68. Print.

Pope, Randolph D. “Teaching Spanish in the United States: A Mixed Blessing.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 37.4 (2001): 382–92. Print.

Potowski, Kim. “Experiences of Spanish Heritage Speakers in University Foreign Language Courses and Implications for Teacher Training.” ADFL Bulletin 33.3 (2002): 35–42. Print.

Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature. Modern Language Association. MLA, Feb. 2009. Web. 16 Sept. 2012. <http://www.mla.org/pdf/2008_mla_whitepaper.pdf>.

Resina, Joan Ramon. “Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory, and Symbolic Dominance.” Ideologies of Hispanism. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2005. 160–86. Print.

Rogers, Donna M. “Middlebury College: Department of Spanish.”ADFL Bulletin 35.1 (2003): 54–58. Print.

Sáenz, Benjamin A. “Where Spanish and English Are Good for Each Other.” Chronicle of Higher Education 24 Sept. 2010: B43–B44. Print.

Sánchez-López, Lourdes. “El español para fines específicos: La proliferación de programas creados para satisfacer las necesidades del siglo XXI.” Hispania 93.1 (2010): 85–89. Print.

Sandoval, Alberto, and Frances R. Aparicio. “Hibridismos culturales: La literatura y cultura de los latinos en los Estados Unidos.” Revista iberoamericana 71.212 (2005): 665–97. Print.

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Williams, Raymond L. “Inhabiting Spanish in the Twenty-First Century: Toward a Deterritorialized and Multilingual Americas.” Ed. Ken Hall and Ruth Muñoz-Hjelm. Studies in Honor of Lanin A. Gyurko. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. 273–87. Print.

Rogelio Miñana is professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College.

Posted December 2013

Introduction

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum

In January 2012 the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a report titled Accommodating Faculty Members Who Have Disabilities, and in January 2013 the presidential theme of the MLA convention was Avenues of Access, calling attention to disability and access, broadly conceived, in higher education. These conversations are timely: we are twenty-three years past the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the people who grew up with the ADA at their backs are now becoming college professors and entering the professoriat in greater numbers. This collaborative essay extends these conversations about disability to consider issues of access and accommodation to academic scholarship.

The contributions to this essay that follow take the AAUP report as a point of departure, acknowledging its positive contribution in recognizing disabled faculty members while critiquing the stance on disability reflected in the text and urging proactive dialogues about disability and accommodation that build on, but also move past, the report. Throughout, we pay special attention to access and accommodation to the materials of scholarship and the work of scholarly production, from emerging technologies to academic conferences to library resources. We approach these issues holistically, believing that all aspects of life in academe infuse the development of scholarly knowledge.

The Changing Profession

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Accommodating disability in the workplace is an opportunity to define the essence of a job. The AAUP report states, “A faculty member who has a disability needs to accomplish the essential functions of his or her position, either with or without an accommodation” and “[a]‌rticulating essential functions provides a useful framework for professional responsibility and reduces for all faculty members the prospect of arbitrary charges of neglected duties or incompetence” (Accommodating 3, 4). What the report fails to recognize is that both essential job functions and accommodations are dynamic.

To illustrate this quality of change, I would like to bring forward a personal example, which involves pace—what Margaret Price below calls “crip time.” Producing text is an essential activity of my position as a literary scholar, but how I produce text and what kind I produce are complicated. The normative text-producing technology in the past was a typewriter, but, because my disability involves arm and finger reduction, a typewriter is an inflexible and exclusionary text-producing machine for me. To make words on paper, I required another person to do the typing. The personal computer was liberating because text producing is more flexible and forgiving on a PC than on a typewriter. Still, with the expansion of e‑mail, the amount of required text production increased tremendously in the 1990s. The pressure to produce more text at a more rapid pace increased as dealing with the volume of e‑mail and other kinds of electronic text became part of the requirements of being an academic.

Thus text production on a computer using a keyboard remained a job requirement. A keyboard is highly normative because it was created for a particular number of fingers and for the arm-and-hand configuration of most people. I could use a keyboard but not effectively or quickly. Fortunately, voice dictation technology came along at just the right time. Intended both as an assistive and universal technology, speech-to-text programs became a reasonable option for accommodation for me once they developed in accuracy and usability.

Although I can produce text quickly now, accuracy and navigation still slow my text production down, whether I use dictation software or the keyboard. My point is that the essential functions of my job shift constantly because of the requirements and the conditions of text production. The demands change, and the technology changes. Faculty members must consider the dynamic nature of disability, function, and technology as they “lead the effort to create fair descriptions of essential functions of faculty positions” (Accommodating 4).

On Including Disability

Sushil K. Oswal

Throughout, the AAUP report (Accommodating) assumes that, as long as administrators meet their legal obligations for accommodating the physical needs of disabled faculty members, the university has accorded an equal place to these people in university life. Such legally orchestrated inclusion is just not enough. Here I discuss some of the major exclusions in the report. It addresses the question of physical accommodations in some detail but is silent about the accessibility of the overall university infrastructure. Imagine that a blind job candidate gets hired. How will the library provide reasonable access to its digital and hard-copy holdings so that the faculty member can conduct research and avail herself or himself of the university’s vast teaching resources? Since all faculty members are bound by the same tenure-and-promotion guidelines, how will a blind faculty member produce research at the same rate and pace as sighted colleagues if access to the required research infrastructure is reasonable—reasonable in the legal, ADA sense of the word—but not equal to that of sighted peers? This blind faculty member will be assessed by the same student evaluation instruments used across campus, but will she or he have equal access to smart podiums and performance media that other faculty members use in their classrooms?

Although university infrastructures—both physical and digital—pose the greatest hurdles for the blind, the report mentions the blind or visually impaired only in passing. When discussing accommodations concretely, it overlooks altogether this group’s unique needs. As the Penn State agreement with the Department of Justice and the National Federation of the Blind informs us, all these university structures fall in the purview of the disability laws that govern the current accommodations regime (Settlement). But most academic institutions remain noncompliant in providing adequate access to these structures, structures that are essential for blind faculty members’ scholarly productivity and general survival in the twenty-first-century university.

The report excludes blind readers as audiences: the PDF version of the document employs fonts and spacing unsuitable for screen readers like JAWS for Windows. To the sighted eye the text in the PDF document appears quite legible, but to JAWS it is squished in various places because of the use of proportional spacing. Therefore the screen reader reads the text as long strings of babble instead of as distinct words and sentences. Even when the document was converted using the specialized PDF tool in Kurzweil 1000 for producing scholarly commentary, the screen reader could not recognize the entire text and misrecognized its font in many instances. Such exclusions are particularly troubling when one considers the intensified expectations of scholarly production and dissemination that result from the insertion of these very technologies in academic work.

Continuing the Conversation

Amy Vidali

While legal requirements set standards for accessibility and accommodation (standards that are often not met), they also foreclose other conversations crucial to including disabled faculty members. Legal requirements are best treated as minimum standards, and we can further conversations about including disabled faculty members by adapting campus initiatives focused on including other groups of faculty members who identify as diverse (e.g., people of color), where such initiatives exist.

When approaching the inclusion of disabled faculty members in our profession, the focus is often legal, as in the AAUP report (Accommodating). However, the idea that we would approach including or accommodating faculty members of color primarily by adhering to what is legally required seems absurd. One approach to including faculty members of color that might be adapted for disabled faculty members is presented in the final report from the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and Tolerance.

This report notes that the committee sought to create inclusive environments for faculty members of color by examining the meaning of bigotry, exploring campus policies and diversity guidelines, networking with other groups, moving beyond tolerance and toward inclusion, and considering racially charged case studies in particular campus contexts. These strategies emphasize exploration and education and can be adapted to discussions of including disabled faculty members, for example, by examining the meaning of ableism, exploring scholarship on disability inclusion, networking with disability groups that exist in academe, and considering disability-focused case studies in higher education. The MLA committee report is not perfect: it primarily positions faculty members as seeking to resolve discrimination instead of being subject to it, and it claims to address disability but does not include it in the case studies. Still, although policies and strategies used to include faculty members of color do not easily map to disability, the methods used to generate discussion around inclusive environments can be usefully repurposed.

I understand why the AAUP report focuses on legal compliance: the existence of policy can enable conversations that might otherwise not happen. However, we cannot solely depend on legal standards to ensure the inclusion of disabled faculty members in the production and distribution of scholarly knowledge. Instead, we can continue conversations with and about disabled faculty members by drawing on—and complicating—what we already know about including diverse faculty members on campus.

Real-Time Barriers to Accommodation

Susan Ghiaciuc

In June 2007, I sat alone in a hospital gown listening to my doctor deliver my suspected diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. My initial flare-up was successfully treated with IV steroids, but it wasn’t until February 2008 that, at the urging of a trusted colleague, I officially disclosed my disability to my employer.

Following the ADA guidelines, which are now mirrored by the AAUP, I had to explain my illness and its expected duration to various members of the university community. I felt like an amateur actuary preparing a predictive model of my life to protect my employer against future loss. I filled out a functional limitation form, in which I described major life activities affected by my relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, specific limitations my condition placed on my ability to perform the “essential functions” of my job (Accommodating 3), and specific accommodations I was requesting. My neurologist had to provide confirmation of my diagnosis, and I needed an occupational therapist to independently validate my functional limitations. That this thorough burden of proof seemed legitimate didn’t make it feel any less stressful or intrusive.

Although after my diagnosis my schedule included lengthy trips to the neurologist and a regimen of medication, my life as an academic continued at a typically brisk pace. Yet I worried that the new disabled version of myself might be in the wrong profession. Nothing appeared different about me on the outside, but the time I spent holding down a 4-4 teaching load, serving on committees, and presenting at conferences—all while experiencing unpredictable symptoms and trying to come to terms with my illness—took a toll.

So in 2009, after the university lawyer told me that I could either ask for a tenure-clock extension and see what happened or gamble by not asking for it, I chose to apply for the extension. I was taking a considerable risk, since there was no precedent at the university for that kind of accommodation, but approximately two months later human resources and upper administration granted my request.

Even though my story has a happy ending and everyone at my university worked with me in good faith during my request for accommodation, the documentation I was required to provide once I disclosed my disability made me feel that I was being forced to put my various symptoms on display for public examination. If this same requirement is faced by all academics with disabilities, many will continue to avoid disclosure, especially those whose disabilities are not evident to an observer and difficult to describe definitively. Such avoidance is a problem, because without disclosure there can be no impetus for the employer to provide accommodation.

Crip Time and Procedures for Accommodation

Margaret Price

Any policy attempting to address disability accommodation must demonstrate some understanding of crip time, a term from disability culture and theory that indicates the complex relation that many disabled people have with normative time frames (Kafer). Although commonly understood as a need for extra time, crip time is better understood as a need for flexibility and an acknowledgment of unpredictability with regard to time.

Here’s an example of what I mean by crip time. Imagine a junior faculty member on the tenure track whose research necessitates attendance at a couple of conferences a year. Unfortunately, virtually all meeting rooms in the conference centers or hotels are lit by compact fluorescent lights, which give him migraine headaches and put him at high risk for seizures. Although his university uses primarily natural light, most of the conferences he attends take place in fluorescent-lit spaces.

His request for accommodation might seem odd and rather convoluted. The whole story will sound something like this: He can attend a conference but only for a few hours at a time each day. If a session runs all day, he may be able to attend it, but then he won’t be able to attend any other session at the conference. He can attend all day and every day if the lighting is not fluorescent. His response to fluorescent lighting is unpredictable: on some days he will have a debilitating migraine after only forty-five minutes of exposure; on other days he might be able to tolerate hours of exposure with no trouble. He can never know ahead of time how much exposure will trigger a migraine or seizure.

According to the guidelines of the AAUP report, this faculty member should raise his access needs every time he attends a conference—but it is not entirely clear with whom such needs should be raised when the work involves being away from his university. Assuming he does locate the right person, he will have to explain that his disability is unpredictable and does not go by the clock. His difficulty attending conferences regularly will certainly impair his academic career and may lead to questions about whether he can fulfill those “essential functions” of his job. Curiously, the impairment itself is straightforward: he simply cannot tolerate a certain kind of light.

Note that in this example I chose a fairly value-neutral type of impairment—a seizure disorder. Imagine the conversations that might occur (especially behind his back) if his impairment involved a more stigmatizing condition, such as mental illness. Mental illness is common in academe (as it is in the general population) and is not usually linked to violence, behavior problems, or incompetence, despite its popular image. Yet faculty members with such a diagnosis, even when their conditions could be mitigated with accommodations, often avoid speaking up.

Disability and Linguistic Agency

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum

Representations of disability in the academy further frustrate faculty members’ willingness to speak up about their disability. The AAUP report’s descriptions of disabled faculty members and its references to acts of disaccommodation and disability discrimination erase agency at key moments for these people (Accommodating). The erasures promote an orientation to disability and accommodation as a problem of personal adjustment and ignore how human behaviors in social environments can be disabling.

In the report, agency is erased in three ways. First, disabled faculty members are not presented as agentive, except when they declare that they believe they have a disability. Second, abstract disabling conditions (e.g., illnesses or accidents) are the source of personal limitations and the impetus for all accommodations. Third, acts of disaccommodation and prejudice are not attributed to human agents but presented through passive constructions that mask individual actions.

Taken together, these erasures suggest that disability and agency are irreconcilable. Because the limitations that determine disability are seen as resulting from happenstance conditions, the report does not acknowledge that human agents make choices on a daily basis as they design environments and workplaces, choices that affect how people move in them. By abstracting actions to anonymous, faceless entities or processes, these erasures of agency imply that there is little or nothing that can be done to provide accommodation other than to retrofit people who have disabling conditions.

Let me give an example of such retrofitting. At one point, the report’s authors briefly mention how departments might make choices about accommodation. They first mention that “some accommodation requests might be inherently unreasonable” and offer examples, including “refusal to participate in department meetings.” They then suggest two ways that a department might accommodate such an unreasonable request: by allowing a faculty member to participate remotely or by excusing the person from participating in meetings altogether (Accommodating 7). These suggestions focus on what an individual faculty member could do differently (i.e., participate remotely or be absent) and fail to consider what the department could do differently.

This point is germane to many activities of our profession, such as attending academic conferences, that are essential for faculty success. As we are encouraged to expand our thinking about the work spaces and professional resources that we design, implement, and move in, instead of thinking of disability as a problem out there for other people to handle or suggesting that disabled faculty members ought to retire or otherwise leave (Titchkosky), we might reexamine how academic spaces are made accessible and inclusive.

Essential Functionaries

Jay Dolmage

A key mode of exclusion in the AAUP report comes in its major rhetorical move of introducing the idea of “essential functions” and defining them as those functions that “a faculty member who has a disability needs to accomplish . . . either with or without an accommodation” (Accommodating 3; emphasis added). This wording raises the possibility that the report could be used not as a means of creating “access and success” but rather as a sophisticated legal dodge (3). In other words, the report could be read to situate disability as a legal risk to be mitigated, or it could even be used as an excuse not to extend accommodations. To combat this possibility, the MLA should move in the other direction, defining not a baseline of essential functions but instead making space for the unexpected and extraordinary insights, interactions, embodiments, and cognitive and communicative styles that disability promises.

The specific language of the list of functions also clearly delimits a particular body and mind and as such is distinctly ableist. First of all, to expect “mental agility” is to import bodily ableism into the uncharted territory of mental gymnastics—likewise for “strong” communication (3). More important, there can be no reference to subjective concepts like mastery, agility, capacity, ethics, or even ability without their opposites. Ability is erected and protected through the labeling of disability. In this way, the creation of a list of essential functions will always, by the very logic at its heart, mark out a predetermined quotient of bodies and minds as less than, extreme, irrational, broken. A statement on disability cannot invent one ideal body and mind. The MLA needs to take this into account by acknowledging the inherent ableism of academic life, and it must create means of highlighting and eliminating institutional ableism rather than perpetuating it.

Finally, what we really need to talk about when we talk about lists is who does and does not get to make them and who does and does not get to enforce their criteria. The report’s legal focus, its quick reversion to telling horror stories about faculty members who clearly have asked for too much, its sly qualification of a legal accommodation process that was already austere through the insinuation of “essential functions,” its reinvocation of already ableist institutional norms—all these things reveal that this document is neither by people with disabilities nor for them. Any statement on disability must center on the perspectives and scholarship of people with disabilities and give them the driving roles in defining the future of disability in the academy.

Beyond the Overcoming Narrative

Craig A. Meyer

While attention to disabled faculty members in higher education should be welcomed, I argue that the AAUP report’s approach is itself disabling by framing disabled faculty members primarily through an “overcoming narrative” (Linton 18). The theme of overcoming is problematic because it suggests that disabled people should overcome their disability through hard work and extreme effort, ignoring the need for accommodation and cooperative efforts in the production and distribution of knowledge in our profession.

In the report, we see the prevalence of the overcoming narrative most prominently in the profiles of three disabled professors. Consider, for example, how the profile of Stephen Hawking focuses almost exclusively on his disability, not on his academic work or his university’s efforts at accommodation. In the report’s narrative, Hawking overcame his neurological disease by continuing his work, thus framing his success despite his disability. Such moves place the onus of responsibility for making accommodations and adjustments on disabled faculty members themselves.

The report, however, does take some important steps toward recognizing and acknowledging the importance of disability to the university. For example, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Temple Grandin, like Hawking, are framed through references to their disabilities, unlike Hawking they are shown as using their disability experience to inform their work. Indeed, the profile of Grandin emphasizes how she utilizes her disability to excel in and expand her field. It is because of her disability that she is able “to analyze an animal’s perspective differently from other experts” and consequently influence her field by “design[ing] half of the livestock-handling facilities in the United States” (Accommodating 2). In her case, the theme of overcoming is partly replaced with the notion that disability is an asset.

My point is that the report focuses on what faculty members must do to be considered equal instead of on what they are able to do. The result is that disabled faculty members are confined by and often must defend their disability instead of being free to utilize it.

Fast Roll Forward

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

I am a visual learner . . . stuck, but successful, in a very textual and print-oriented field. I get by with a little help from my friends. I understand the AAUP report as one of those friends. To be sure, this friend is very well-meaning, wanting eagerly, perhaps even desperately, to get it right and use all the proper disability etiquette. But this friend then also stumbles in those back-bending efforts.

Because I get by with a little help from my friends, I want this report to be my friend. And I want us (this report and I) to find ourselves mutually enriched by what can grow from that sustained—if sometimes also a little strained—relationship as we continue to develop our connection in the years to come. I hope to grow old in the academy (wait! I’m already doing that!) with this friend and its future incarnations. At the moment, the report is a bit stiff and solicitous, too polite and distancing, too clinical and chaste. But the report will loosen up once it gets to know me better; I’m sure of that.

As my colleagues have so smartly pointed out, the report, as it is currently written, overindividualizes (yet again) the person with a disability as the problem, the burden, the issue. Stigma, disclosure, risk, the academic environment—all these are missing from the document. The report makes use (and rather inspirational use) of Temple Grandin, Stephen Hawking, and Kay Redfield Jamison as successful examples of “faculty members who have disabilities” (Accommodating 2) and who have been accommodated, but it does so because, quite simply, it doesn’t have many other examples to draw from. And the authors of the report don’t really have a good sense of their audience. They can’t yet parse out all the much-needed information about how people can disclose and not risk their jobs or tenure possibilities, to whom to turn with access or accommodation requests, how and what to identify as “essential functions” of a faculty position. They can’t do so because we (all of us) have to make the molds, create the models, and inspire the policy to a new level. Let me repeat that: all of us.

Together we must make, create, and model stories of successful avenues of access in the academy, and on our team should be those of us on crip time working to help those in normate tempo create syncopated rhythms, jazzy stories. This making and modeling is fraught with the narrative normalcy hazards of creating and becoming, yet again, inspirations. We don’t necessarily have to follow that beat. We are the drummers. Modeling and providing examples is but one measure away from inspiration, after all. A horror story can be a romance, if you just tell it the right way, and documentary can lean toward science fiction, to the future, both utopian and dystopian.

Response

Ellen Samuels

When the AAUP report was released, I was pleased to see appended the guidelines for departmental search committees on disability and hiring (Disability) that I helped write during my tenure on the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. I was also aware that although the report, like the guidelines, is a necessary first step toward meaningful inclusion of disabled faculty members, it is not nearly enough. As the authors of this essay insightfully and forcefully indicate, it is necessary not only to issue guidelines and reports but also to do the deeper work of promoting disability literacy throughout the academy.

I offer a brief anecdote to illustrate what I mean. On a recent visit to a university campus, I sent the usual messages in advance to explain my access needs, including a wheelchair-accessible taxi from the airport. Although I was assured that one would be provided, I was greeted instead by the regular campus shuttle, now sporting two drivers instead of one, helpfully prepared to lift me in and out of the van. Faced with this situation, I had two options: I could call my faculty host, pitch a fit, and insist that someone find me an accessible taxi, or I could smile and explain to the drivers how to lift my chair without hurting it or themselves. You may guess for yourselves which course of action I chose, and you may imagine how much more fraught and uncomfortable this choice would have been had I been a job candidate rather than an invited speaker.

The point of this anecdote is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the choices made by disabled faculty members, even in the simplest of matters, involve negotiating complex obstacles both physical and social. We must constantly weigh our access needs against the very real risk of being perceived as demanding and expensive troublemakers in a professional landscape shaped by expectations of gracious collegiality.

The second point is that the current state of disability accommodations in the academy not only places the onus on disabled faculty members, as the authors of this essay indicate, but also suffers from a profound and widespread lack of understanding of what access even looks like. That a request for a wheelchair-accessible taxi could be met by sending a van with a couple of guys, or that the report was issued in a form incompatible with screen-reader software, shows how wide the disability literacy gap can stretch.

Because of this gap, the report, a well-intentioned first step, still falls short of becoming a tool for effective change. As the authors of this essay suggest, any real change must begin with input from disabled faculty members, not as inspirational profiles but as expert witnesses on the state of disability in the academy today. I urge that this essay be read as the first installment of such expert testimony and that the authors, the MLA, and the AAUP work together to take the crucial next steps toward meaningful inclusion for disabled faculty members. Such steps must involve massive consciousness-raising about both the basics and the complexities of disability access.

Our next steps must also be informed by the principle of universal design, sorely lacking from the report, such that access is conceived not as attaching to a disabled person but to the broad physical, social, and intellectual environment of the university. Through this lens, accommodating disabilities is not merely a matter of legal obligation but also a means to expand the democratic potential of the academy at a time when forces internal and external threaten its contraction.

Works Cited

Accommodating Faculty Members Who Have Disabilities. American Association of University Professors. AAUP, Jan. 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.aaup.org/report/accommodating-faculty-members-who-have-disabilities>.

Disability and Hiring: Guidelines for Departmental Search Committees. Modern Language Association. MLA, 30 May 2013. Web. 28 July 2013. <http://www.mla.org/dis_hiring_guidelines>.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. Print.

Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print.

MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and Tolerance. “Final Report.” Profession (2005): 210–25. Print.

Settlement between Penn State University and National Federation of the Blind. AccessAbility: Accessibility and Usability at Penn State. Penn State U, n.d. Web. 28 July 2013. <http://accessibility.psu.edu/nfbpsusettlement>.

Titchkosky, Tanya. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print.

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum is assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware, Newark.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor of women’s studies at Emory University.

Sushil K. Oswal is assistant professor of technical communication at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Amy Vidali is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Susan Ghiaciuc is associate professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University.

Margaret Price is associate professor of writing at Spelman College.

Jay Dolmage is associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo.

Craig A. Meyer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Ohio University, Athens.

Brenda Jo Brueggemann is professor of English at the University of Louisville.

Ellen Samuels is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Posted December 2013

The amount of education required to prepare a human being for meaningful, effective interaction with the information infrastructure that undergirds the contemporary social order has increased exponentially in the last seventy-five years. For centuries, literacy was expected for a life of political and social consequence; nonetheless, up through the broadcast era, weak literacy skills could be compensated for by critical listening and rote memorization. Literacy rates rose throughout the twentieth century, when the demand for literate workers increased, as did the demand for advanced cognitive skills associated with degrees from institutions of higher education. The largest expansion came after the Second World War in the United States, when the GI Bill made college accessible to an entire generation in response to a return of restless, world-traveled veterans and to perceived challenges in science, technology, and culture mounted by the Soviet bloc and Communist China.

When the sons and daughters of that war generation went to college twenty to thirty years later, in the 1960s and 1970s, something unintended happened. College education was supposed to assist the government of the United States in defeating the threat of world communism. Instead, college campuses became hosts to a challenge from within. Students with advanced skills were probing familiar arguments and finding them flimsy; they were unearthing documents, secret histories, and evidence in plain sight to articulate dissenting opinions. Now a college education could be associated with antipatriotism, with elaborate distinctions and challenges often baffling in their complexity and unmistakably hostile to the class, cultural, and familial origins of the students. The mass media emblem of this divide was portrayed on weekly television, when the college-educated (including graduate school) Michael Stivic faced off against Archie Bunker, a war veteran from the working class, in the CBS television series All in the Family. Antiwar sentiments, antiauthoritarian impulses, friends to dissenters, and threats to the social order as we knew it—all this flowed from college and, worse still, from graduate education in the humanities.

Fifty years later, and we still seem perplexed about the function and value of higher education. A few facts are illustrative. What educators call the great cost shift has moved most of the cost of education from government (through state college subsidies) to individuals, through tuition revenue. Thus, as employers, legislators, and educators are arguing for increased access to higher education, we have seen historically unprecedented financial barriers to higher education rise nationwide. In 1947, higher education was considered a state investment for the public good; after 1970, a pattern of disinvestment began, paralleling the sense that higher education for its own sake was suspect—the source of national dissent.

It is not difficult to understand why the voting public, most of whom have not attended college, would favor the shift away from higher education’s being funded like the national defense to its being funded more like a private commodity. The shift has been supported by parallel arguments that define a college education as career preparation and thus a private matter—and some private colleges are supported by endowments that rival the wealth of small nation-states. Career preparation is precisely what Michael Stivic was not getting in college. Implicit but largely silent in the currently popular vocational definitions of higher education is that college is not preparation for citizenship, much less for leading dissent or progressive change.

As a result, while the United States has become wealthier in the half century since 1970, it has deinvested in higher education access. We have seen a rise in dollars for merit aid, which funds college prestige, at the expense of need-based aid, which funds access, thus increasing the barrier for working-class families, for families of color, and for first-generation college students—strong sources of dissent, historically. Heather McGhee, of Demos, an educational advocacy group, has observed that American wealth is largely in the hands of an aging, relatively whiter generation, while educational need is growing fastest among younger, darker Americans. Fifty years ago an older generation asked why it was paying the bill for light-skinned, long-haired hippies and bra-burning feminists who majored in English and seemed preternaturally critical; today, McGhee suggests, the same question is asked by an aging generation about a new, darker American demographic.

College presidents at liberal arts institutions undermine their historic mission by catering to vocational arguments at the expense of the social and cultural missions of their institutions. In addition, graduate programs in English undermine the unprecedented opportunity they possess at this particular historic juncture when they argue, in parallel fashion, that a PhD in English is preparation exclusively, primarily, or even preferably for a career in the academy. For as long as I have been in higher education, I have seen the MLA’s charts and graphs explaining the paucity of jobs for new PhDs in English departments, with the implication that there are too many English PhDs because we don’t have enough tenure lines to employ even half of them.

Allow me to sketch out my own career path in the name of full disclosure. I am a first-generation college student (Haverford Coll., 1978). My education was funded in part by need-based aid and National Defense Education Act student loans. I completed a master’s degree at Wesleyan in 1981, which was paid by the loans; my PhD in American civilization at Brown University (1985) was funded by institutional resources. Because there were no tenure-line jobs for me in 1985, I took a one-year replacement position. In 1986, because there were no tenure-line jobs for me, I accepted with gratitude a three-year Mellon postdoctoral appointment. In 1989 I secured a tenure-line appointment at a business college, where I progressed through the faculty ranks and got involved in administration. Until that appointment I did not know what a business college was. In 2000, on the strength of my administrative record, I moved to an appointment as chair of an English department at a state university, where we not only expanded the graduate program but also added an MFA to the existing MA and PhD tracks. I left that position to become a dean in 2006 and then a president in 2010, both at liberal arts colleges. Two life lessons inform my thinking as a result: I never had the kind of job for which my mentors prepared me in graduate school; I received in graduate school precisely the training I needed for each job I have had, especially my most recent appointment, which was largely managerial and entrepreneurial.

I remember discussions in the English department at the University of Mississippi regarding the nature of the MFA we would create. MFA programs tend to run along a spectrum, from extensive reading-list requirements, on the one hand, to minimal reading and almost exclusively studio work or writing, on the other. The late Barry Hannah was on the Ole Miss faculty then, and his voice carried considerable weight in our deliberations. “Oh hell,” he declared at one point, “we don’t want to add to the number of dopes out there who want to be writers. They should read ten thousand words for every one they afflict on someone else.” That argument won the day in Mississippi—I fear it does not win the day in many parallel situations when preparation is discussed.

Hannah used the term superliteracy to describe the argument in favor of the expansion of graduate degrees in English, against current trends. He was intending to be at once descriptive and caustic. I liked the term, despite its origin in irony, and am drawn to it again when I think about the need in our workforce and in society for PhDs in English. What I understand by the term is that while we need greater literacy in general, we also have a growing need for people who can do a lot more with language than simply read and write it. The superliterate not only possess advanced capacity to use language but also know its history, especially the history that is embedded in literary traditions, where language is stretched, experimented with, and revived. We have a greater need today than at any moment in the past one hundred years for more, not fewer, PhDs in English. And most of them are needed outside the academy.

The so-called knowledge economy indicates a critical challenge to educators. Consider the example of a video on YouTube that goes viral, which means that a seemingly innocuous, amateur, homemade video has caught the attention of social networkers to the extent that millions may see it, be influenced by it, have it become a significant part of what influences and motivates (or subdues and depresses) them. The potential today for the spread of unvetted content, of outright misinformation, is astounding. Moreover, the totalitarian potential is greater today than ever, as is the potential for nefarious infiltration (whether internal or external) of information sources. Although our attention is captured more dramatically by the armed shooter, threats to the peace and to civil procedures are far greater at the keyboard than in the schoolyard.

At the very moment when the need for those with superliteracy skills is at its highest in the history of humanity, there are calls to move away from it because it is not productive or because we cannot make a direct link between these skills and the workforce. My work recently has been at the undergraduate level in the liberal arts, and I think English graduate programs might learn from the advocacy, for example, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where job skills in high demand by employers are aligned with liberal arts study. One program in particular, called the Presidents’ Trust, is working to connect CEOs and college presidents to create employment pipelines for liberal arts graduates. These examples are transferable to graduate study in English.

First and foremost, PhD programs in English must cease to define the targeted career goal for the PhD as that of college professor or teacher or educator. To facilitate and maintain this redefinition, I would introduce the model of the external advisory board to the English department. English departments should consider creating consultative committees made up of alumni and friends of English from industry, government, nonprofits, and NGOs to advise graduate faculty members and department chairs on nonacademic career paths for their graduates. Community leaders and civic activists might be included as well, and leaders from traditionally underserved segments of the community, to assist English departments in looking outside the academy for points of influence and opportunity. These boards would operate in an advisory capacity, to critique, cajole, and assist in maintaining departmental relevance and to provide resources and opportunities for graduates.

Second, English departments might consider adding a segment to the standard “introduction to graduate studies” course on careers outside the academy. It does not need to be a wish list so much as a contextualization of specific skills in workforce needs, along with career examples from employed PhDs. According to a 2003 MLA study, “for the last thirty years PhDs in literature and language have had rewarding careers outside the academy. Repeated reports affirm that these PhDs experience greater job satisfaction than their colleagues who take academic positions.” The study also notes that those employed “report that their doctoral years provided critical preparation for their careers outside the academy, for doctoral study taught them how to define a large, complex research project; how to work with a supervisor; how to organize and carry out research; how to take criticism; and how to revise and bring a major work to completion” (Professionalization 4).

My third suggestion is that graduate programs in English ought to employ what the social sciences call clinical adjunct faculty members—English PhDs from various professions: publishers, yes, but also staff members from foundations, corporations, industries, and community organizations, to run workshops and other tutorials for advanced students preparing for life, after graduation, outside the academy.

These three changes, using external advisory committees, adding an introduction to career potential, and employing clinical faculty members, will realign departments of English with contemporary opportunities where the skills we teach are desperately needed. The intellectual tradition in literary criticism of demolishing perceived, intended, and claimed authority or purpose (the method of unmasking) has become more valuable as the rate and forcefulness of misinformation rises. Convincing, using evidence, revealing how language manipulates as well as informs—these habits of mind are critical in the defense against viral truths and other digital phenomena. The linking of the value of an English PhD exclusively to the job market for English professors is an abdication of graduate education’s power to shape the future that will emerge from the digital revolution, right at the moment of its dawning. The value of an English PhD will rise only with the cultivation of external opportunities.

Marjorie Perloff argues:

[A] true literature department would focus on critical reading—on the how of literary texts rather than their subject matter, with the implication that immersion in the program . . . will develop an expertise that those who major in math or business don’t have. Emphasis would be on the very nature and variety of verbal representation, on such questions as the relation of “verse” to “prose,” fiction to nonfiction, irony to parody and satire. Difficulty rather than eclecticism would be the order of the day.

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She suggests that value must be grounded in things English PhDs can do that others cannot, because we specialize in language, language use, and language history. Let’s dispel some old misconstructions. Studying literature does not make you a better person. There is no route to virtue through Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, Morrison, or any genre, period, or critical school of thought. We really need to stop saying so. There are as many unethical English majors as there are unethical business or sociology or engineering majors.

At the same time, the wish to suppress a liberal arts education and sequester its poster child, the English PhD, in the academy will continue. Authoritarian admonitions against abstract, open-ended education will continue. They are grounded in the fear that such education will disrupt the social order and therefore should be replaced by more practical, measurable training. Consistently, the question posed is, What will you do with this education?

Historically, restrictions on intellectual development are entwined with political control and rooted in power relations. The disruptive potential of a liberal education, or of a proliferation of PhDs in English, is not so much that it has no practical use as that the end result for those who engage in its rigor is not something that we can predict with certainty. Liberal education in the humanities is rooted in the manipulation and use of language without regard to the relative value of conclusions or findings. In the tradition of liberal arts education, we prepare the future makers of widgets to be as critical and manipulative as we do those dedicated to banning widgets from society. We do this by ignoring widgets, for the most part.

I suggest the same approach for graduate programs in English. In fact, I would recalibrate the reigning, defeatist ethos that defines the tenure-track job as a crowning achievement to one where remaining in the academy would be but one among many options. The ambition of the graduate program coordinator ought to be the placement of English PhDs in positions of authority and influence in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors of the economy, where they may become agents of linguistic power and creative change. Such recalibration may result in a higher demand for PhDs in English and for faculty members to teach them. Why would we want fewer experts in language at the dawn of the digital age, the age of the knowledge economy?

The genealogy of dissuasion is traceable to the historical suggestion that, for some, abstract thinking, thinking about thinking, is not appropriate, is useless. Or worse, because it implicates us (the MLA “us”), it is traceable to the idea that the only occupation for which a PhD in English prepares one is to teach—a perfectly self-fulfilling misconception as long as graduate programs remain willfully uninformed about the expertise they impart. Implicit in my argument is a reorientation of graduate faculty members to the state, so that they will recognize and articulate the relevance of experts in language and literature to the digital era. The reorientation will communicate what is at stake in the passion held by a select portion of the educated population to pursue a calling toward linguistic acumen or superliteracy. Such passions should be cultivated, not suppressed, as if or because the oncoming evolution of our civilization depends on them.

Works Cited

McGhee, Heather. Keynote address. Another Bubble? The Sustainability of the Higher Education Economic Model. Presidents Conf. on Higher Educ. New York, 16 Oct. 2012.

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Decay of a Discipline: Reflections on the English Department Today.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20.1 (2011): 153–67. Print.

Professionalization in Perspective. Modern Language Association. MLA, 30 May 2013. Web. 28 July 2013. <http://www.mla.org/professionalization>.

Joseph R. Urgo is a senior fellow with the Association of American Colleges and Universities and senior research professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

Posted December 2013