Presented to the Cultural Studies Association (US) Conference at George Mason University, Arlington, VA, April 2006

Phyllis Ryder,"Introduction to (Re)Writing the Corporate University"
Christy Zink, "Koganalia"
Carol Hayes, "First-Year Students in the Library: Information Literacy and Disneyland"
Phyllis Ryder, "The Role of the University in Cultivating Civic Identity"
Eric Drown, "Writing Back: Science Fiction Pulps Progressives' Pedagogical Promise"

Introduction to (Re)Writing the Corporate University

Phyllis Ryder, University Writing Program, The George Washington University
pryder@gwu.edu

We all teach in a brand new Writing Program at the George Washington University. I teach writing because I am committed to preparing students for their roles as public citizens—people who engage in public deliberations with each other, who see themselves as agents of change, who see democracy as an active, on-going public process. And yet, I recognize that this “public citizen” whom I imagine is a contested concept, all the more so because University space seem to orient students and faculty more towards corporate and consumer identities than citizenship identities. In our roundtable today, we want to investigate this site of struggle by noting a few specific events—both historical and contemporary—through which concepts of “public” are being constrained.

I’m going to start by first identifying the values of the corporate university though close reading of GW’s Strategic Plan. Then I’ll consider how the university responded to a specific event: the April 2000 IMF/World Bank protests that took place right on our campus. In my review of that event, I’ll talk about how our students are positioned as opposed to, rather than potentially similar to, global activists.

Then we’ll move on to our other presenters: Christy Zink will analyze a particular location on our university—a central plaza ostensibly designed as public space. Carol Hayes will examine how concepts of public and private play out in terms of information literacy. And finally, Eric Drown will offer us a hopeful response by analyzing the methods through people talked back to constraints placed on their identities. We hope to then engage in a conversation will all of you about how we might continue to resist the corporate identities that the University offers to us and our students.

The Corporate University and Democratic Citizenship

I suspect that many of you are already all too familiar with how University space is guided by market values, but I’d like to specifically identify some aspects of the neoliberal university here to help shape our conversation. My area of study, generally, concerns how writing teachers prepare students for their roles in direct, deliberative democracies: how can faculty push students to see themselves as active agents for social justice, how can we prepare them for the messy, deliberative work of public conversation. Can academic institutions prepare students to join or create a “public”—with all the various contradictions, power struggles, and challenges that this entails. I don’t think that Universities do a good job at this. Despite some small pockets here and there, the main message of a University education, I fear, is that student-citizens should evaluate ideas and assess their own interactions with others according to their profitability and efficiency—according to neoliberal values.

This handout provides a brief and admittedly simplistic sketch of the distinctions between neoliberal and democratic attitudes about citizens, students, and education. I want to use it along side GW’s Strategic Plan to touch on some of the ways that GW measures the quality of its education according to market values. The tension about public and corporate values is GW is evident in this handy 28 page pamphlet, “Sustaining Momentum, Maximizing Strength” which is referred to on our campus as the “Strategic Plan.” Published in 2003, The Strategic Plan lays out 6 major goals for GW; for each goal, it lists strategies for achieving them, and metrics for assessing them. Happily, the plan’s first paragraph indicates that GW values the goal of “preparing individuals for life in a democracy” and the University Vision emphasizes the university role in “creating new understanding of, and solutions to, human and societal problems. However, each of these goals is constrained by the way the Plan measures success: the metrics point to neoliberal criteria.

Measurement is a fundamental part of the corporate university: the benefits and successes of academic proposals, courses, departments and faculty productivity must be measurable within set time frames. The most common metrics for success in this document can be understood in terms of customer satisfaction ((as measured in the application rates, and retention rates, graduating senior survey), an image of diversity (diversity demographics, faculty-student ratios, full-time to part-time faculty ratios), and image of student engagement (enrollment in a small subset of undergraduate courses that have been specifically branded as “academically engaging”). Not surprisingly, another measurement highlights income-generating research. In the metrics related to Goal 3 (“increas[ing] the scope and excellence of the GW research enterprise,”) we find the same trends that Henry Giroux identified in his critique of the neoliberal university. Metrics include “volume of research grants and contracts from private sector; percent of faculty with external funding; productivity of research centers as measured by average sponsored funding; number of income generating licenses and patents held by faculty; number of grant proposals submitted and accepted.

Throughout the document student satisfaction ratings—as reported in graduating senior surveys—are the prime indicator of the University’s success: But what kind of things will satisfy our student customers? Good grades? Career placement? If students don’t arrive at the University with a desire to engage in civic life, how does the University cultivate that desire? Goal # 4 offers a potential answer. Goal 4 is “continue to develop a strong sense of community,” both on campus and with the DC metropolitan area. Goal #4 suggests that we can create a sense of community at GW by promoting dialog throughout the campus; it highlights the need for a campus people can hear and be heard, where participants feel a “sense of inclusiveness” as they “interact with fellow students and faculty and explore the complex social, political, scientific, and ethical issues that challenge citizens in a democratic society” (19). GW’s strategy here is to bring in a more diverse student and faculty body. The metrics, listed on the back of your handout, would quantify the diversity among faculty and students, and record student satisfaction ratings about their experiences with different people. (Presumably, the faculty demonstrates satisfaction by staying here.)

But what will turn this diverse pool into a public, a community? Michael Warner points out that the central means for turning a group of people into a public is through deliberation. A public is created from a sense of crisis that foregrounds the interdependence of the participants, who must then deliberate to gain a fuller sense of how the issue affects everyone and what solutions are acceptable. But, the GW public here is being called into being without that motivating force and without reinforcing a structure that would facilitate it. It does suggest that the campus needs more space for public interaction and calls to "strengthen the sense of campus community by increasing public spaces that facilitate the exchange of ideas and by providing a campus that is well-defined, well-designed, safe, and well-maintained" (20). However, the Plan doesn’t specify what kind of a space this would be and the metrics don’t list public space in the criteria for success.
When we look at the metrics, the concept of diversity is seen as additive, not transformative. They focus is on adding new people to the pool and then asking everyone how they felt about that. With these metrics, we see that the purpose of a multicultural community is not about ensuring the cross-pollination of ideas for university governance; or about advocating more thoroughly situated knowledge-making. Rather, the question of community and diversity is a marketing goal: do our student-customers report feeling good about this aspect of their experience? What else can we do to make them feel good about it? The metrics don’t acknowledge that sometimes the most transformative and meaningful interactions across difference are ones that might not feel good at the time for the participants involved.

I could say a lot more about how this document defines GW’s relationship to the DC community in neoliberal ways. I could say a lot more about about how our new writing program—as a program made up of non-tenure track full time and part time faculty—seems to promote that vision of University education. I could say a lot more about how the criteria for evaluating writing—as clear and persuasive—might not prepare students for the messy complexities of community interactions. But I’ll pause here so that my colleagues can analyze some concrete examples of the interactions among corporate and public identities.

Henry Giroux argues that citizens—and here I’m thinking of both students and faculty—“lose their public voice as market liberties replace civic freedoms” and “as corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, . . . noncommodified public spheres [diminish]” (427-28). This is certainly happening at our University. The University celebrates diversity and community, on one hand, and measures productivity and consumer satisfaction on the other. What is lost in the pinch are opportunities to teach students the values and practices of deliberative democracy.

References

Giroux, H. (2002). "Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere." Harvard Educational Review 72(4): 425-462.

Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. New York, Zone Books.

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First-Year Students in the Library: Information Literacy and Disneyland

Carol Hayes, University Writing Program, The George Washington University
hayesc@gwu.edu

Henry Giroux, in his article, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” states: “As democratic values give way to commercial values [under the political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism], intellectual ambitions are often reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self” (428). At the university level, this “entrepreneurial self” is the student-as-worker-in-training. Giroux notes: “In the age of money and profit, academic disciplines gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market, and students now rush to take courses and receive professional credentials that provide them with the cachet they need to sell themselves to the highest bidder” (432). What Giroux dreams of instead is a revitalization of the university as a “site where students gain a public voice and come to grips with their own power as individual and social agents” (432).

At the heart of Giroux’s discussion of this increasingly corporatized university is a cultural clash: on the one hand, many students of the corporate university are embedded in – and believe in – a market-driven discourse where what’s valued is efficiency: efficient research, efficient writing techniques, efficient study habits. On the other hand, many professors are embedded in – and believe in – a discourse of democratic, public citizenship, where vibrant, multivocal debates are anything but efficient.

For this roundtable, I’d like to discuss that cultural clash in terms of a “research day” that I developed with my librarian partner, Paola Ceccarini in the fall of 2005, for a first-year writing course focused on the theme of “California Dreamin’.” For Paola and me, the exercise was designed to introduce students to information literacy. Information literacy, as we imagine it, is a way of thinking about knowledge production: the ability to analyze where information comes from (and thus where it’s likely to be found), how it’s constructed and by whom, and whose voices are privileged by historic and current systems of knowledge (versus voices that are marginalized or silenced).

Many of our students, on the other hand, view the library sessions as a “library orientation”: a moment when they learn about the tools available to them as student consumers at GW. What they want is an introduction to these tools that will allow them to access successfully what they see as already existing pools of information. Their goal as researchers is to learn efficiency: what they expect and desire from the “library orientations” are foolproof research strategies that will work over and over again, in any context. They know that the library has electronic databases and they believe that if they can be introduced to enough of those databases, they’ll always be able to “find” the information that they need.

This vision of knowledge, of course, is a passive one:

In other words, they see information as simply available, something that is “out there” that they need to learn to find, not as something that is created, produced, contained, or restrained in any way.

So how do my librarian partner and I attempt to reconcile this clash in cultures, this clash in expectations and desires for the library sessions?

To a certain degree, we meet the students’ expectations and speak their market-driven language – at least long enough to get their attention. What impresses my students the most about the library? The price tag for the annual subscription to Lexis-Nexis (approximately $100,000). The price tag for how much it would cost them to access certain materials if they didn’t have the library’s resources – like a search of the LA Times archival database ($40 per 15 minutes). Paola and I, at various points in the past year, have deliberately dangled these details before the students to impress upon them how much they’ll come to like and depend upon these databases we’re introducing them to; we speak their language to create within them the desire to learn more about those databases.

That approach is problematic, of course, because it perpetuates the students’ belief that what they need – and are getting – from these “library orientation” sessions are these tools for efficiency.

To complicate and challenge those expectations, we decided to set up a “research day” that – while it took place in the library, in the computer room where students were accustomed to going when they learn about the library’s online “tools” – wouldn’t involve learning about any new databases or catalogs. Instead, we pitched it as a day to be devoted to learning to “think like researchers.”

The class had been reading a series of newspaper articles describing Disneyland during its inaugural years: 1955 through the 1960s. I had been drawing on the historic dislocation of the articles to raise questions about the “factual” discourse of the newspaper articles, such as the way the articles represented women and families (as well as other groups).

After reminding the students of the major historic changes we’d been noticing between the 1950s and today, Paola and I posed a question about one other major cultural shift that had occurred during this period: the change in race relations between whites and blacks. Specifically, we wanted to know whether Disneyland had been segregated when it opened its doors in 1955. We told the students that they had the entire class period to pursue the question, using any resources available to them in the library.

This “research day” demanded a completely different pattern of thinking. First, the students couldn’t simply type in keywords like “black,” “Disneyland,” and “segregation” (although almost everyone tried this approach initially) because the language had shifted from the 1950s to today: African Americans would not have been referred to as “black” in the 1950s. As students began to realize that “black” wasn’t working as a search term, they began a discussion about language: when and why it changes, and what those changes signal at the level of meaning.

With this shift in their thinking, students began to find one or two short articles discussing issues of race and Disneyland in the 60s – but still no answer to their question. Paola and I then asked the class to come together to discuss a different research strategy: we asked who would have commented on segregation in Disneyland in 1955. Who, in other words, would have produced this knowledge? The class soon began to see the point. They started to ask who controlled the dominant newspapers of the period (whites); they asked whether there were databases that specialized in collecting minority voices (there are, but they don’t go back far enough); why don’t those sources go back as far as 1955? (the lack of resources and institutional support available to minorities in the 1950s and 60s). Students also started to ask at what point those white-dominated newspapers that do date back to the 1950s would have started discussing segregation (if, in fact, Disneyland had been segregated when it opened in 1955). They then started a new search, one focused on finding discussions of Civil Rights protests at Disneyland, or a discussion of desegregation in the 60s at Disneyland.

At the end of the session, the class still hadn’t found a definitive answer, so I asked them to make a reasonable guess, based on the information they had found. They suggested that Disneyland wasn’t officially segregated, at the level of its guests, in 1955, but that the park had probably had a policy of unofficially discouraging blacks from frequenting the park (they based the latter claim on discussions of how hippies and other people who didn’t meet the ideal Disney “clean-cut” look were kept from entering the park).

I then revealed that I didn’t have an answer to the question – but that their speculations matched my own.

For me, what was important about that “research day” was the way that it privileged the process of research: the twists and turns and dead ends that teach as much as the finding of what you’re looking for.

I wish I could say this research day revolutionized my classroom: it didn’t. My students are nearing the end of this semester, and most of them are still lamenting the “inefficiency” of their own research and writing process. The day is a start, however, at trying to demonstrate that, for me, the heart of scholarship is based on the notion “to err,” which I mean both in the archaic sense, “to wander,” and in the sense of making inefficient “mistakes” that lead in directions that may or may not be “productive” in terms of the end product – but that are a part of learning and intellectual work.

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The Role of the University in Cultivating Civic Identity

Phyllis Ryder, University Writing Program, The George Washington University
pryder@gwu.edu

How do we define university space—is it public space, safe space, corporate space? What kinds of educational opportunities should be promoted in University space? As an urban campus that is located right next to some powerful national and international organizations, GW has confronted these questions in very tangible ways. I’d like to examine how GW space and GW participants were defined in anticipation of a large protest in Foggy Bottom in Sept 2001.

Some quick background: In April 2000, the IMF/WB annual Spring meetings brought between 30-50,000 protesters to the Foggy Bottom area. During that event, the University remained generally open, but students were forbidden to invite any guests into their dorms; the weekend was festive and students were able to witness an international event from their dorm windows; some even participated. As the international anti-globalization protests gained momentum over the next year, protesters and police clashed in large events in Quebec City and Genoa. DC police anticipated a much larger crowd for the Sept 2001 annual meetings and they laid plans for controlling the event. Now, the big protest never happened, because after Sept 11 of that year, and the organizers agreed to shift focus from anti-capitalism to a call for peace. Many, many fewer people showed up. So what I’m analyzing today is not what actually happened, but rather the rhetoric of the planning for a Foggy Bottom event that never materialized.

The IMF/WB buildings are geographically interlaced with the GW campus. One of the main buildings is across the street from our largest freshman dorm. Thus, when police shut off the streets around the headquarters in April 2000, they prohibited vehicle traffic to the campus during that weekend. For the Sept 2001 meetings, they proposed a much more comprehensive system of 9-foot barricades, which would have snaked through all or part the GW campus, shutting off dorms from academic buildings and the like. Thus, they asked GW to close the campus for the five days of the protest and to send students away. GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg he sent out letters to students that they should plan to evacuate campus during the protests.

I am struck by a number of things about this decision. I’ve passed around another handout, this one from an interview in the on-line equivalent of GW’s glossy PR magazine By George! I notice a couple of things here:

a) the paternal relationship the President sets up with the campus community: “I’m clearly concerned with the safety and welfare of my students and my faculty.” In an interview aired on NPR in early September, Trachtenberg talks about how he would hate to have to call any parents to explain that their child was hurt during the protests. He positions the students primarily as children, rather than as citizens of voting age; he characterizes the protests as violent, even though he says in his letter that he “believes that the majority of guests, including protesters, will peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.” Note that he believes the faculty also need his protection.

b) the second thing that Trachtenberg mentions in the By George interview is his concern for property; in the NPR interview, that is the first point he makes. He says he’s concerned that protesters will get into GW labs, destroy scientific equipment, and damage GW property. This assertion seems to miss the fact that the destruction of property in the Seattle protests were deliberately targeted towards symbols of global capitalism—Starbucks, the Gap, etc. Would GW be considered a symbol of multinational corporate power? I suspect that GW makes itself more of a potential target by demonizing the protests and helping the police.

c) Trachtenberg suggests that he has no choice but to follow the advice of the police, whom he characterizes as a neutral party. A GW professor in the NPR interview suggests, instead, that the police are complicit in creating a fear of violence and in perpetuating that violence, and that Trachtenberg is fueling that response. As one student put it in an interview in the student paper, The Hatchet, “they are confusing protest with riot.” The police plays up the element of chaos, danger, violence in order to justify a large police force, and violent and at times preemptive response (in 2000, hundreds of protesters were arrested and detained in what the chief later admitted was a preemptive move.) But the affiliation between GW and the police goes even farther: GW had planned to lease the athletic building to the police to use as headquarters. The food court usually creating food for students would be open to serve the police. (So, even in the image of violence that he uses to send students and faculty away, he will require the food workers to come in to campus.)

d) Trachtenberg suggests that he has no choice but to comply with the police. But university campuses—even our own—have not always considered themselves aligned with the police. Consider the Vietnam protests. In his radio interview, Trachtenberg brings up Vietnam to offer a solution to students who want to stay in town. He tells them to grab a sleeping back and go stay with friends on other DC campuses, and says this kind of bunking up what happened during the anti-Vietnam protests. What he leaves out is that during Vietnam GW itself opened its facilities to Vietnam protesters; according to GW’s own celebratory timeline, “the University provided “sanctuary” for anti war protesters. I’m also interested in how he characterizes the Vietnam protests as much more coherent than the complex, disorganized multiplicity that is the anti-globalization movement. He would prefer things to be more unified, more coherent, less messy; he has little tolerance for the radically inclusive protests.

e) Finally, consider in all this the characterizations of anti globalization protests: he confesses that he doesn’t really understand them, he hints that these issues that he does not understand are not appropriate ones to be protested, and he disparages the complexity of their message. He suggests that the best that can be done at this point is to “make lemonade of these lemons” by “asking our faculty and students to talk about what it is that’s happening and why.” However, he doesn’t seem to value this approach enough to set it up prior to making his own decisions for the campus. He als prevents conversations from proceed with any first-hand experience of the event, since the faculty and students would have to leave campus. In mid-September, faculty in the Elliot School of International Affairs with expertise in globalization held a panel discussion drawing. However, the event did not include any members of the anti-globalization community or any students. At that event, student protesters challenged the panelists for not addressing the arguments and criticisms of the democratic globalization movement.

I think that our location next to and within the site of international social activism offers opportunities for the University to emphasize the interconnections between university and citizen activism. However, the administrative responses suggest that the University does not or cannot take advantage of such opportunities. I wonder what we, as faculty, as citizens, might do in response.

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Writing Back: Science Fiction Pulps Progressives’ Pedagogical Promise

Eric Drown, University Writing Program, The George Washington University
edrown@gwu.edu

I study the reading and writing practices of the first American science fiction community in the first three decades of the 20th century. My interest in this discourse community stems from the way it came to theorize the constitutive role played by reading, writing, and learning in the production of modern industrial subjects. My thesis is that popular science and pulp science fiction enabled wage-earning readers to encounter, engage, and revise the philosophical, scientific, and educational theories of a professionalized elite that refused to write for them. As a result, the stories, editorials, ads, and letter columns of science fiction magazines represent the efforts of a group of people situated on the cultural fault line of industrial modernity to create an alternative, and potentially counter-hegemonic, public space for themselves in an emerging late capitalist economy.

Between 1908 and 1937, the readers, writers, and editors of a small group of magazines together developed a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary, and critical field of discourse inspired by the world changing and worldview-shattering elements of modern science and technology. The enabling assumptions of this discourse were that science had created an “entirely new world” and that that reached deeply and “intimately” into “our entire mode of living.” For the most enthusiastic science fiction readers this formulation was certainly true. Living in a moment of dramatic changes in industry, labor, management and education, they saw science as both radically transformative and potentially empowering. Many science fiction fans had more than a readerly interest in modern science and technology. They experimented at home with chemicals, electrical circuits, and radio sets. They pursued amateur research in astronomy and rocketry. And most importantly, they formed a communication network that helped define them as a discourse community. Readers corresponded with one another, with writers, or wrote letters for publication in magazine letter columns. They met in clubs or on the air by means of homemade radio sets, rented halls and held conventions. They produced and distributed amateur magazines and, occasionally, even wrote articles or stories that the professional magazines published. These activities transformed both home experimenting and science fiction reading from private and personal acts into forms of social practice that enabled readers (on the one hand) to acquire and practice the technical, business, organizational, and literacy skills that were entry level skills in modern America, and (on the other) to “write back” to the educational, corporate, civic, and labor institutions that were remaking the lived conditions of their existence.

Aimed by a self-made entrepreneur at readers who were largely, but not exclusively, urban members of the newly established class of permanent wage earners, and written by professional writers paid piecework rates for prose or well-educated hobby authors stealing time from their day jobs as doctors, journalists, chemists, or astronomers, this discourse is a particularly fraught class-inflected construction of the contradictions of industrial modernity. Yoking practical advice about education, employment and class ascent to pulp adventure, science fiction often challenged Progressive reformers’ promise that specialized training (in knowledge, skills, deportment, and culture) would result in finer and fairer future for all.

At its most practical, science fiction promised that a usable knowledge of science and technology would provide readers with better employment opportunities and greater access to the consumer rewards of middle class life. The central promise of self-invention and social ascent by way of science education was offered by Progressive reformers as well as science fiction writers and editors. Librarians, educators, social workers, and other cultural managers tried to solve urban social issues—like crime, immigration, unemployment, poverty, and squalid housing conditions—by means of cultural and educational uplift. A rational, practical, and specialized course of education in key skills and attitudes aimed at candidates with the right aptitudes would go a long way toward making America a better place. Whether targeted at new immigrants, working class men and boys with ambitions for middle class employment, or young women “adrift” in the city, the right kind of reading, writing, and speaking—inspiring rather than emotional, uplifting rather than salacious, rational rather than sensational—played an important role in this reeducation for modernity.

Not surprisingly, this well-meant prescription provoked a series of ambivalent responses in the science fiction community. In one way, the pulp origins of American science fiction meant that no earnest message could be taken entirely straightforwardly. The science of science fiction was practical and empowering; but it was also wild and wooly. Imagine what reformers’ advice to reinvent yourself must have sounded like in Edmond Hamilton’s April 1931 short story. In “The Man Who Evolved” (first published in Wonder Stories) an arrogant biologist concentrates the force of evolution, exposes himself to it and emerges first as a radiant physically-perfect genius, next as a shriveled brain-enlarged tyrant, then as a cool emotionless brain with no body at all, and finally as a puddle of primordial protoplasm. In such a register, where science is so multivalent, where there are limits to growth through self-invention, the Progressive promise of class-ascent through science education becomes radically unstable and dramatically contingent. Science fiction’s deconstructing narratives equipped readers to conduct multiple thought-experiments about the variable relationships among education, employment, power, identity, and opportunity.

Reading and writing in this funky discourse, and in a supportive community where thinking about reality in decidedly unconventional terms earned one the respect of peers meant that the science fiction community’s thinking about the economic and political conditions of existence was necessarily distinctive, giving it a parallax view of the world. The relativizing insights produced in these home-made educational institutions enabled them to theorize—to understand and even challenge the underlying assumptions of— both their own shifting positions in industrial modernity and the situatedness of the Progressive reformers’ promise. From this vantage point, early science fiction readers were able to draw usable conclusions about the world that spoke to their own needs in ways that reformers’ discourse never could. Among their conclusions: the insight that education, and particularly advanced education, was a key means of distributing power, wealth, and authority in America, a means that ensured that these resources were distributed unequally; that reading and writing about science in particular class-inflected ways could secure individuals (from even socially-marginalized populations) more than an average share of their society’s rewards—provided that they could first gain access to the hallowed halls of higher education, and that whatever the promise of science fiction culture, no informal or vernacular means of education was nearly as good at securing outsiders a position of privilege and power as a university education.

These insights, formulated some 75 years ago, still apply in the world of higher education, especially at places like George Washington University, and particularly in the University Writing Program. In spaces such as these, there is still real worth in making the observation that there are and perhaps should be divergent understandings of the aims and value of post-secondary education, that education in reading, writing, and research is not a neutral process designed to secure access to success for all people, but rather an interpellation that can define what is meant by work and citizenship. As we all know, writing programs are profoundly contested spaces; and the kinds of reading, writing, and research we teach matters.

When, as in the neoliberal university, students are considered raw materials to be fashioned into a deterritorialized individual knowledge-worker global citizen consumer, writing faculty rapidly become little more than assembly-line workers implementing their academic managers’ Taylorized plan and in the process a vital buttress to neoliberal social relations. What is amazing to me is how, in this context, so many of George Washington University Writing Program faculty are committed to first-year writing as an opportunity to engage students as colleagues-in-inquiry. By treating students as emerging but real scholars, we—I—hope to help students construct themselves in dialogue with others as producers of knowledge, to become sensitive to the power and authority of written language, and to engage the material and cultural conditions in which they are produce and producing as subjects, workers, and citizens. But even as we stake claims to authority for students as producers of knowledge, seek to create and maintain counter-public spaces responsive to the collective interests of communities, and vigorously contest the authority of neoliberal educational paradigms, we need to destabilize the privileged ways of knowing that dispose our students and our selves to think in value-added terms.

Trying to do this work from within an institution that promises students that they will be the ruling elite of the next generation presents us with particular challenges, not the least of which is that, considered from the vantage point of students, the clean, well-written, disciplined academic discourse we are urged to teach, and which I suspect has been a dramatically decentering tool for many of us here, tends to occlude many of its political and economic investments. The lesson from science fiction is clear. What we need are sustained efforts by students and faculty alike to produce and deploy discourses that are resistant to appropriation by the marketplace and capable of giving authority to identities, interests, and needs that are devalued and deformed in the market. As a field, cultural studies already knows the necessary qualities of such discourses. They are deeply situated, rooted in the local, aware of the conditions of signification, and answerable to the conditions of existence. They exchange the common sense of instrumental discourses for the partial, affective, informal, and vernacular. They produce a true culture of writing, one rigorous and engaging and capable of creating and sustaining the intellectuals, activists, communities, and publics that might make a world worth living in.

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