Teaching Prosperity in the Underground, Composing, 29/07/2018

So it’s been almost a week since the last post. I didn’t mean to do this on purpose – it’s just been a busy week. Thankfully, it’s mostly been busy with some promising business opportunities starting to come together.

And sometimes, just some incredibly long days. So long that I’d run out of energy before getting down to write. At least to write this, as I’ve mostly been working on other things that I actually get paid for. The blog is meta – a writing project about my writing projects – meta takes a back seat to actual.

I'm one person, not a mechanical writing machine. I'm powered by
food, coffee, and serotonin.

I’ve started work on a small media project that will involve interviews, and I’m starting to line those up for later in August. More updates to come.

But there are some other interesting developments in my teaching job as well. As you might remember, I published my review of Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity last week. I read it months ago, and only got around to writing it all now.

But that means I’ve had a few months to stew over its arguments and ideas. I think the book does come up short in some areas. But its critical chapters on the political economy of the 21st century global economy are wonderfully insightful.

There's a lot going on in those early chapters of The Quest for Prosperity that I couldn’t fit in all their detail into the main review. I only had so much space and so much time to write the thing. But in working over the ideas, I've begun incorporating them into my teaching work.

To give you an update, I’m the head of a program in Business Administration at a small private college. We’re using a standard set of textbooks, but I’m working on lecture content that itself goes beyond just those lines.

For example, I’m not about to present uncritically a map from Freedom House ranking the economic freedom of different countries around the world. I’m not going full communism in there. I’m just asking students questions about what economic freedom means to them, whether they ultimately agree with Freedom House’s terms, and how to articulate their differences.

The marketplace should be a friendly place.

Actually criticizing some aspects of business school orthodoxy as part of the program is turning into a pretty effective value proposition for the place. Unfortunately for the rest of North American civilization, this is how we stand out from the crowd.

One idea of Sassower’s that I’ve incorporated into my program’s business lectures is how he distinguishes between markets and capitalism. Markets are a matter of what Adam Smith called “truck and barter,” small exchanges among community members that add up to mutual benefit.

Capitalism as an ethical attitude is a spirit of competition, where you can all too easily see another person’s benefit as a potential loss for you. Worse yet, you expect others to see your benefits the same way you see theirs. So you become paranoid, aggressive, and suspicious.

Solidarity is broken. Friendship is impossible.

Manuel DeLanda covered the differences of markets and capitalism in a book published more than 20 years ago. But he had an ontological focus on the macroeconomics of the massive capital flows that industrialization and colonialism powered.

Sassower’s emphasis on political economy foregrounds moral principles and ethical attitudes, so we can see the transformation of a society’s values along with their economic system. Good is no longer giving benefits to your community, but leading your community as a function of your wealth. You don’t want to be part of a community – you want to own it.

Graphs of Our Ignorance, Jamming, 05/12/2017

I had a really nice moment with my students yesterday – I don’t often talk about my teaching here, for confidentiality reasons. But this was different.

We’re in a unit about how to write research reports of different lengths and formats for professional reasons and purposes. I’m teaching a class full of engineers, so I’m concentrating my supplementary comments on writing techniques and how to synthesize a big pile of ideas into a coherent, accessible picture.

If you're carrying out some work of research for your company, it’s going to have a purpose. You’re going to have to recommend actions, goals, and define some strategies for your company going forward.

I think of the subject matter as a practical epistemology class – how to gather and organize knowledge in the best way for action.

The most important part of any research is understanding what you actually have to learn before you know it. Let me explain that in a way that I tried for my class, in a way that gave me a little nostalgia.

You see, there are known knowns. . . . Yeah, I’m going there. Because it sounded ridiculous but was actually remarkably insightful and useful, like the most profoundly pregnant Bushism.

Known Knowns. You already know the answers. This is your starting point for any investigation – what you have actually learned, discovered, made sense of, and put to use already.

Known Unknowns. Your immediate targets for research and investigation. You’ve learned enough about your subject matter that you’ve formulated specific research questions. Your first major task in this project is to answer these questions.

You can’t always answer those questions univocally. But you at least have a research question in mind – you can understand how different variations in conditions can affect this aspect of your work going forward. You may not know how to handle it in advance, but you know enough about a problem to prepare.

Unknown Unknowns. You don’t even know how to ask the question. The notion isn’t anywhere in your thinking at all. You can’t prepare for it – You don’t even have any idea it could happen or exist.

What this amounts to is that the world tends to be more complex than we know. The invasion of Iraq itself, from the American perspective at least, is a really good example, unfortunately. The entire US military was, practically speaking, built for state-on-state combat. Total war, just like back in the Second World War.

Their ability to deal with a guerrilla movement was so pathetic for that exact reason. When you don’t even consider guerrilla movements a possible thing you could deal with, you won’t be able to fight them.

It’s a dramatic example for a business class, but the concept still works for more typical corporate priorities. For example, it’s difficult to prepare for your business model being disrupted by a wholly new technological development, or the law being changed to undercut your business practice or allow for more competitors.

You can’t ask people to prepare for future events which have literally no signs in the present. How can you plan for what you don’t understand?

Zizek hit the last category, in his depressingly Freudian style. Unknown Knowns. His example was the return of the repressed – the best example being Abu Ghraib.

We now know that it was much worse, the head of Blackwater being a radical Christian extremist. It’s a much better example of the Unknown Known – our blindnesses to how our own nature corrupts us. In the example of the war, it’s the American exceptionalist presumption that their military power brings good, that it liberates.

But that triumphalist vision of America ignores the horrors of slavery and religious extremism that were just as much parts of America’s origins as their heritage of liberal democracy.

Of course, I didn’t really discuss it that way in class. Instead, I talked about corporate issues – blindness to your own flaws, weaknesses that you don’t discuss or confront in the name of, maybe, maintaining company morale. Or just plain hubris.

Practical epistemology. A study of human stupidity.

Back on the Saddle, Pedagogy, 09/05/2017

Or am I in the saddle? Is that how this metaphor works? I don’t really know because I don’t ride horses. I was on a horse once when I visited a farm near where my uncles live. I was maybe eight years old and it kind of frightened me.

I’m actually writing this while delivering a presentation introducing the basics of English grammar. Or at least that’s how I started writing this. I wrote last week about how much I looked forward to returning to teaching. It’s been fun, and a very different experience from where I worked before.

One interesting thing about my job at Cestar is how much of its student body comes from Asia – literally everyone in my first class yesterday was of Indian descent, Punjabi for the most part. I’ve never had people react to me with such deference before.

I mean, I quickly took care of that. I don’t do authoritarian teaching styles. And since the subject matter of the business communication class is pretty dry moment to moment, I couldn’t just haughtily intone the content.

A pretty good depiction of how I roll in a classroom.

I don’t do haughty anyway. I had what I think is a solid technique for defusing the hierarchical tendency, though. I was actually a little shocked when I came into the classroom for the first time, a few minutes before start time – because all the students who had already shown up stood up as a salute to me. There was only one possible response.

“Shit, guys, sit the fuck back down. I’m just dropping off my stuff before going to the bathroom. Then I’m coming back.”

I don’t do authority. I mean, I am an authority – in the sense of expertise, skill at teaching, knowledge of English grammar, knowledge of philosophy, pedagogy, how to communicate complex and dry ideas. But I’m no authority in the hierarchical sense.

My training at Cestar discussed how, along many vectors, I’d be introducing a lot of my students to the subtleties of Canadian culture as well as the course content itself. An important part of that is the democratic principle – authority is earned, deserved through hard work and achievement. And deference is not the same as supplication.

The first class is always about introducing my teaching style, and my style is an approach that often overcomes the usual dynamic that can bring a teacher’s student evaluations down. I don’t lay down the law. I mock academic dishonesty itself.

My key points. This is not a difficult course,* it's actually more effort to cheat or plagiarize. So why would you waste your time and money on faking your way through the course when you’ll do just as well, if not better, by just showing up and paying a small amount of attention?

* I’m not lying. Yesterday (and every day for the next three weeks) was a business communications course, which focusses mostly on English grammar, editing, and short form composition skills. Emails, memos, letters, article-length writing.

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Academic dishonesty is a terrible crime in a teaching institution, and comes with severe punishments. You get a zero on the assignment where you cheated. Caught a second time and you fail the whole course. Caught a third time and we kick you out for three years.

I’m not kidding.

But cheating is, more importantly, ridiculous. A disservice to yourself. A person is better than that. Especially at the prices we charge for tuition these days.

Lights at the End at Last, A History Boy, 04/05/2017

I think, feel, and sincerely hope that the direction of this blog will change over the next little while. Permanently.

I mean this in an optimistic sense. And I’m very happy that I can say this optimistically. You might have noticed that I added a new link under my professional links, Cestar College. This is a career college in northern Toronto where I’ll be teaching Business Communications and Leadership Ethics for the next however-long-I-decide-to-stay-there.

And I may stay there for quite a long time. After all, I trained for years to be a teacher and researcher. I’m still a damn good researcher, and writing this blog over the last nearly four years has improved my writing tremendously. Both for argumentative, casual, and fiction.

I started this blog not just to build a small online profile for myself as an independent writer, but also to keep myself going as a person. The call centre job I’d had since late 2012 spent the winter and spring working me for sometimes 50 hour weeks. I quit around the same time my disastrous round of university sector job hunting exploded. I was acutely depressed and barely left my bed for three days.

My own experience with severe anxiety over the last four years has
made me realize how inappropriate it is to medicalize anxiety as if it
were a disorder entirely in thought and individual neurochemistry. Yes,
it can be treated with medications and therapies. But its causes most
often are social and environmental. Anxiety is a body and personality
reaching its breaking point in being able to handle chronic insecurity.
It's the mental expression of a social and economic disorder. Go read
Anti-Oedipus and see the basics of the dynamic.

I spent the following year working for an online editing farm, where my piecework wages amounted to less than minimum wage. I trained in communications because I thought that was the best business certificate I could get where my talents as a qualitative analyst the writer would be put to the best use.

But I was so out of place as a personality with the culture of the Toronto PR agency that I could never find steady entry level work. I was a bookish nerd in a world of aging frat bros, Lean In archetypes, and a kind of amoral approach to client acquisition and services that I never felt comfortable.

My first paying job after graduating – writing work for the Business Owners’ Council, a spinoff of Inc. Magazine – only ever gave me work on such short notice, I was practically on unpaid call 16 hours per day. And they never even paid me. Nor did they ever send me a non-disclosure agreement, so I can describe their human resources practices without restraint.

I’ve never been able to make a living wage from my business training in corporate communications – only picking up occasional contracts that got me a few hundred each month at best.

For four years, I’ve lived under constant stress from financial insecurity and anxiety over whether I’d ever be able to find a decent job. It hammered my personal and professional confidence so much that I thought my only path to a secure future was working my IKEA job at $13/hour.

I loved the people I worked with, but the job itself was so stressful and draining that I broke down after a year. It didn’t help that I had a therapist who I trusted to help me, but who seemed more intent on condescendingly ordering me not to feel stressed or agitated instead of helping me deal with these states of mind.

The GF and I have been watching Thirteen Reasons Why, since it seems
to be one of those generational touchstones in progress. It's a powerful
narrative, and I deeply admire how camera and lighting blends time
periods and memories into a single flow of imagery. Also how
intricately and precisely the show reveals its labyrinth of relationships.
It's the best mystery show I think I've ever seen.
But I think it's giving me nightmares. And as a 34 year old professional
teacher and writer, I'm decidedly not its demographic. My anxiety
and depression issues make the storyline hit me very profoundly. I can
believe that people whose current experience is closer to the social
media embedded hell of modern high school go through far
worse sympathetic depression.

I actually think my brain has been affected somewhat by the years of continual worrying. I’m now one of the many people who has to take mild anti-depressants to stay focussed. I’m probably not even the only one at my new job who does.

Cestar is the first time since 2013 that I’m actually being paid a good middle-class salary. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid a decent living salary at all. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid at all for the type of work I spent my 20s training for. The type of work that I’m good at.

I mean, administration stuff is going to be a pain in the ass. But that’s true universally. The point is, I’m a teacher at last. And I’ll be a teacher with a pre-tax salary of around $35,000. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.

Four years. I had to go through four years of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and worthlessness before getting started. Yeah, a lot of people have it way worse. I see them begging on street corners and in subway stations pretty much every day. But it’s far from fun.

Yeah, those were the years when I met the GF. She’s the love of my life, and I shouldn’t regret anything about that time with her. Without her help, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have made it through at all. But I do have one regret.

I regret that it’s taken me so long to be in a position where my situation won’t stress us both out. I regret all the pain I caused with every career setback, every anxiety attack, every opportunity that turned into a kick to the balls. I regret that I’ve never been able to show her what I can do, only how I can manage.

For the last four years, I’ve been a failure. Not anymore. But all I’ve been able to show her is failure until pretty much the last month. That still hurts me.

Now I have a good-paying teaching job and I’m making my first film. I'm getting married in a couple of years to a woman I love more than I thought I could love anyone. That’s fantastic.

But the scars and pain of the last four years feel like they’re never going to leave me.

The blog, however, will probably take a new direction. I'll be talking about teaching techniques here sometimes, and continuing to work through ideas in my research and writing for different projects. Also, writing about more experiences in my artistic work.

My blog started as a means to keep myself alive and motivated through a depression that I didn't see a way out of. Now, it seems I'm in shape for it to become a chronicle of growing success and happiness.

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

Grinding Us Into an Essence II: WTF Is Biopolitics Anyway? A History Boy, 15/04/2016

Continued from last post . . . I have a history of being able to explain pretty well terms that people tend to find impenetrable. Biopolitics has been one of those terms. I have a pretty good history of making sense of that idea for people who openly admit that it mystifies the fuck out of them. 

Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopolitics as
it's understood today. But its problem is that it's used in
disciplinary contexts, where if you don't already know
what it means, you shouldn't expect it to be explained.

And unless you’ve already spent a lot of time reading the relevant philosophy, you probably are pretty mystified. This isn’t because the idea is complicated. It isn’t at all.

Biopolitics is simply about understanding that every aspect of material human life is a legitimate area of politics. And concept has a mirror image – politics is about managing the needs, desires, powers, and productivity of material human bodies. The manager can be an authority, a community, or an individual.

So having some particular form or list of rights in your constitution becomes, as far as you need to understand your political situation, a list of your powers that your government officially steps back from standing against. Claims to property or private spheres are only a limited subset of all these powers. 

The concept of biopolitics is a response to understanding that the liberal tradition of political thought – with its focus on rights and claims to privacy and property from government interference – isn’t adequate to all the politically relevant relations of power.

The problem with the language of biopolitics, at least as I’ve heard it spoken about over my old academic career and continued conversations in that world, is that nobody bothers to explain it. The term becomes dogma. 

Questions about what it means are answered with non-explanations. For example, politics as the domain of bare life, which is one thing I’ve heard in conversations that left most everyone more confused. 

Foucault wrote plenty of technical, heavily detailed books,
but he was always at heart about reaching the wider
population. He pitched his books to a general audience
interested in the history of Western institutions. And he
wrote journalism and popular criticism all his life
alongside his more stereotypically intellectual work.

This is a gatekeeping function of academic culture – it shuts people out of the conversation that haven’t wanted to devote themselves to it. It’s a way of making sure that a conversation is dominated only by experts. That’s fine when your goal is to discuss technical refinements and theoretical experiments or explorations. 

But not every conversation about philosophy, theory, and conceptual engineering should be like that. Instead, you have to explain it. 

A concept like biopolitics can have real power in the world, because it can radically change the way you see the world. And so it can change how you act in it. To me, this is the most important power of philosophy, and its essence. Think about the process like this. 

Say you’ve grown up all your life exposed to ordinary liberal sort-of-wishy-washy ideas about the proper subjects of political discussions and activism. The stable management of government. Legal adjudication. Administering property and privacy claims according to particular sets of rights. Arguing over which of those privacy and property rights are most important. 

All this stuff matters, but it leaves you thinking about politics in a very limited way. For one, all politics is about the relationship of people to the institutions that protect their rights and administer their claims and suits. It’s all about the role of people under their state’s regime and its laws.

Fine enough. But that actually sidelines and ignores a lot of what makes people powerful and weak. It ignores a lot of what makes people themselves. What builds their subjectivities.

Foucault and his books could be quite dense, but he was
always fundamentally about encouraging people to live
their own lives and rebel against values that held
themselves universal for their own sake, if your own
desires led you in a different direction.

Remember what I said yesterday about fundamentalisms. Each of them has an intense focus in their practical political programs of controlling what people do with their bodies. Religious observance, ethnic purity in reproduction, production and consumption. 

But none of that is focussed on the body in itself. Controlling what people do with their bodies is more about a means to an end – purifying their souls, purifying their nation, the pure vision of homo economicus. 

The kind of utopia that Antonio Negri thinks we should build using our biopolitical ideas isn’t a literally perfect society. He doesn’t know what that would look like. Neither do I and neither do you. 

We’re talking instead about a utopia of people in charge of creating their own subjectivities. Free from any value system that would use the force of authority and its institutions to impose itself in the name of some ideal that transcends all the messiness of life. 

My Future in Philosophy and Philosophy’s Future: The Pessimistic Case, Jamming, 23/05/2014

This Sunday until Wednesday, I’ll be at the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings at Brock University. This is the annual conference of Canadian philosophers based in universities, which I have attended every year since 2009, having presented a paper or commented on another’s work each time. I plan on updating each morning throughout the week with news, events, and reflections from the conference.

However, this year offers a bittersweet occasion for me at the CPA, as this past academic year has been the first one where I haven’t been a doctoral student or employee of a university. This time last year, I was honestly uncertain if I would ever gain employment in a university again. Tenure-track and even contractual faculty positions were drying up at the time when a generation of retirements would supposedly open them up. As for sessional/adjunct work being paid per-course, the terrible lack of job security in that field has resulted in the unionized units of the universities in my region* doubling down on seniority protections for their current employees. Essentially, the previous generations of PhD graduates have rigged the system to prevent the current generation of graduates from securing the work that we have spent years training to do.

* If you think it’s worth immigrating to the United States for adjunct work, then you haven’t done your research: sessional positions elsewhere in North America pay one-third of what they do in most of Canada. Canadian per-course instructors usually skirt the poverty line even when, as in the best case scenarios, they can acquire teaching gigs at multiple universities.

What makes me truly sad about this state of affairs is the mercenary atmosphere it creates. The desperate expression of self-interest has killed any community values among academics. The problems of the current faculty job market lie in massive cultural and economic shifts in the university sector. Government funding for universities has fallen as enrolment increased. Rising tuition rates have attempted to make up the difference, but they are inadequate in most cases to cover the shortfalls. And because tuition has increased so much faster than inflation or average middle-class income, students have become increasingly dependent on very large loans to finance their education. Even those lucky enough to secure a solid income shortly after graduation carry a debt burden that is often unsustainable.

To cover the shortfalls, universities have increasingly turned to corporate partners in its research. However, these corporate relationships come with their own, ultimately destructive, effects. Sometimes, corporate partners purposely interfere with research to cover up crimes, or health and environmental hazards. But more often, the influence is more subtle. Corporate partners often make demands for capital developments, equity assets that justify their investment. However, these only put universities themselves further in debt through maintenance costs on new facilities, and servicing the debts they owe on the construction costs themselves. 

This has resulted in an unfortunate cultural shift in the university sector, what I’ve taken to calling, mostly facetiously, the Ghost of Thatcher. More often, it’s called the growth of neo-liberalism. This is an ideological concern, as the university sector has transformed how its leaders and workers think of themselves. The notion that universities supply a public service that is funded by public tax dollars and investments has disappeared. Instead, students are conceived as customers, faculty as service providers, and senior administration . . . well, I’m not exactly sympathetic.

While protests like this played a key role in bringing down
the President responsible for the Buckingham disaster, they
arrive too late to repair the larger institutional damage
to the university system across North America.

A situation like the Robert Buckingham crisis at University of Saskatchewan is only the clearest case of the everyday injustice and unfairness that this new approach to the university as an education business creates. If the top priority of a university’s leaders is balancing its budget, then cuts will be inevitable. Comprehensive universities are not financially sustainable without public support: corporate partnerships bleed them dry with debt service and equity maintenance, and tuition can’t cover their costs without ruining a generation of students with their own personal debt. Since government will no longer support these essentially not-for-profit institutions and corporate clients insist that they be run for-profit, the public university as we know it simply cannot survive this trend.

And I think the practitioners of humanities and social science disciplines like myself have to face the possibility that we and our disciplines will not have a place in the privatized university. Our research does not make money. Researchers in the social sciences quite often uncover injustices that are committed in the process or the name of making money. Researchers in the humanities, especially philosophy, are at their most relevant when they develop the theories that allow people to understand and critique the various orders that underlie their generally chaotic lives. These activities can’t be monetized because they critique the very relations that are largely responsible for monetizing things. Even when philosophical ideas are used to make money, that activity happens outside the university.

Inside philosophy departments, the situation is even worse. As the job market tightens, the desperation to find a simple steady job at any cost often becomes a detriment to innovative research. Any projects that are risky, eccentric, or especially critical of disciplinary norms are often forgotten as the new generation takes as few chances as possible to avoid excessive boat rocking. Of course, such tendencies result in departments that only reproduce the most ordinary teaching and research, making the content of undergraduate programs merely dumbed-down copies of specialized doctoral research. This only feeds into the stereotypes of corporate managers that the humanities are a useless field that teaches nothing of practical importance. As a result, when the inevitable cuts come to make an inherently not-for-profit institution profitable, they are the first on the chopping block, as they were at University of Saskatchewan.

In such an atmosphere, it’s impossible for me to see how philosophy will survive much longer as a university-based discipline. To be continued . . . 

The Art of Balance in Teaching, Composing, 21/04/2014

Just a short post today, summarizing most of the philosophical work I’ve done this weekend without getting too specific. I’m applying for a few temporary positions around my neck of the woods, and so have been preparing new course ideas and outlines for the position. 

I’ve worked with many professors over the years in my own training to teach philosophy. They have all approached their classes, especially introductory-level work, very differently. But if I could group such approaches into any simple system, this is the best dichotomy I can think of: survey courses and close reading courses. 

When a lot of students bring their laptops or tablets to
classes, I like to have competitions to see who can look up
factoids for my lectures the fastest. "Jenkins! Original
publication date of the Leviathan. Go!"

Survey courses are often organized by topic, and each week will feature a short philosophical reading that illustrates a simple concept. This can often work well for teaching applied philosophy, because it roots the conceptual work in a variety of real-world situations. Each short piece of work can cover a different aspect of some philosophical problem in worldly action, like a series of papers on different environmental justice problems. Several different articles can offer several different ways to approach a problem like, for instance, tracing the complicated networks of responsibility and moral obligation in a disaster like an accident that causes heavy pollution. Even more complex would be the webs of such obligations and responsibilities in conflicts arising from droughts and floods. If you examine a complex issue from enough angles, you will come to understand it.

But for the most part, the survey course isn’t quite my style of teaching. I find that you can’t really take an idea into philosophical depth if you have only a short reading and a brief lecture to introduce it before moving on. As much as we rely on short definitions of philosophical concepts (e.g. utilitarianism, virtue ethics, epistemological fallibilism), increase ability in philosophical thought eventually understands just how inadequate those short definitions are. I’m just not a fan of conducting a whole course that’s nothing but introductions. 

If I’m teaching an introductory course on some broad topic, I’m going to find the classic works that developed that topic. I’ll stick to a central three or four that are especially pivotal, and represent the major directions that developed since then. That way, students are introduced to the classics of philosophical canon as early as possible. And because we spend a few weeks at least on each central text and topic, we can all explore it in far more detail than if I filled a semester with a survey of as much stuff as I could. That way, they aren’t just learning the classics; they’re learning why these books are classics. 

I certainly hope I can get an opportunity to actually do this. After all, it’s what I spent an entire four year degree, in part, training to do.