The Response to Camille’s Challenges?
I’m out of the ‘news’ loop, but I can only hope that she has contributed to an improvement of freedom and freespeech on campuses. Now, I’m not sure much has really changed, but I think that the Leftists/Feminists/Racialists were given pause a few years ago and I suspect that CP had something to do with it. —That she provoked a renewed respect for the idea of adulthood, freedom, risk and responsibility.
In particular, I wonder about the reaction to her main practical challenges:
*to blend women’s studies in with sex studies and open it up to scholarship
*how do fem’s and the rest of humanities respond to the charge that recent work is fifthrate?
*to stop paying for attendance at conferences
*to defend against her charge that conference-itis has ruined scholarship
*to require all profs to give general lectures to undergrads and esp freshmen
*to halt the saltmines of grad school
*to re-emphasize general integration and de-emphasize specialties, relegating them to personal projects
*to return to the canon and ADD to it, rather than continue in the chaos vein
*to defend their stand on and response to deconstruction and the French (Many programs might not even know that academic respect for their new litigious highperformance style is thanks to the French. They might think it’s due to Deming or to The TQM Revolution. It’s French. When ‘do as thou wilt’ is the rule then power comes to the fore…mainly in the guise of lawyers and Budget Pride.)
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At my local campus, almost all integrative programs have been killed. Where they survive they’ve farmed out a few general required courses to specialists to teach as they please. The profs resent it, don’t know how to lecture generally or in an integrated way, and the students are lost, bored. Strictly going thru the motions of a general ed anymore. They ONLY do it coz it’s part of the Land Grant, part of the (hated word!) constitution of the institution. Otherwise the whole frigging place would be a Voc Tech center for braindead high tech job training. A general liberal arts education now seems to be laughed at, despite its easy proof as a key to success (or a job at Burger King, har har!) We neglect to use our bully pulpits to show how a society really works. The abdication is strictly because of the need for SALES. There is no other motive that I’ve seen. My budget, my Wales.
