The Twenty-First Century University
Session Chair: Kristin Kommers Czarnecki,
Univ. of Cincinnati

Session I

Mary Kay Mulvaney
Elmhurst College

Consumer Model for the University: Are We Shortchanging Our 'Customers'?

This paper will explore the increasingly prevalent consumer metaphor for higher education examining its potential threat to the "university" as we have known it for centuries. As more and more colleges and universities "pitch themselves" to potential enrollees, ever-driven by the "bottom line" of retention numbers, continually focusing on "satisfying clients," what is the price to scholarly rigor and intellectual debate.

If the dominant image for the university is borrowed from the world of "consumerism," the student becomes a "customer" whose needs must be "satisfied" at all costs. The consumer, in the American capitalist tradition, sets the bar for satisfaction -
they are "always right." "Suppliers" must scramble to face the competition and keep the customer "happy," no matter the price. A customer, rightly so, in our tradition, is paying for a service and expects "value added," with nothing short of perfection, with "no hassles," no questions asked, no challenges to "his/her" views.

But what happens to higher education when this model is imposed upon the university? I will argue that the university may no longer be able to fulfill the "best" of its "self," if it becomes a slave to this mentality. The world of higher education can no longer be a place of mental agitation, of challenge, of unsettling ambiguity - as surely those are not characteristics sought in a service exchange by the majority of consumers.

Ironically, the consumer metaphor pressures at the very time that we, in the academy, are emphasizing critical thinking, problematized realities, challenges of diversity and globalization - indeed, our ever-changing world is not a "comfortable" one. However, our "consumer" mentality of no-hassle satisfaction seemingly promotes a unilateral view, not a dialogic one. It is focused on the simple solution, the "quick fix," the non-controversial. What does that type of non-problematized worldview do to the often "messy" world of intellectual pursuits? Perhaps, in the guise of serving, we are developing the antithesis of the notion of the university as a haven of exploration, paradoxically restricting, rather than fostering, intellectual growth.

 

Gustavo Fares
Lawrence Univ.

Hispanic Identities in the United States

It has been said many times that the globalized society of the new world order tends to transcend the narrow definitions of the nation-state, as this one has been defined from the Renaissance until fairly recently. The change globalization has presented us with has consequences in several different places at the same time, of them being the definitions and limits of, until-recently, well defined categories. One of those categories that is rapidly changing is that of "hispanic / latino." Society at large as been struggling to incorporate those definitions into the mainstream if, for nothing else, for the pressure the demographic growth of this segment of the population has brought to the market place, to the political arena, and to the educational system. In the USA, perhaps the center of globalization, the identity and definition of the "hispanic" population has begun to shift at the same time that the groups belonging to this sector of society have been struggling between becoming mainstream and/or retaining the traits that have defined them as such in the first place. My proposed presentation will discuss the "hispanic / latino" definitions of identity through the life of the cities, the political intervention of these groups, and the cultural artifacts they have been creating in movies, visual arts, and literature. Moreover, I will examine the ways in which the University has responded to these changes and cultural manifestations through their programs and courses, as well as the structures of their administrations.

 

Henry Wasser
CUNY Graduate Center

The Cost of the Benefits of Higher Education Reform

[abstract forthcoming]

 

Session II

 

Robin J. Sowards
Cornell Univ.

Kant's Conflict of the Faculties in the Age of Cultural Studies

The many articulations of Cultural Studies share an opposition to calcified disciplinary formations. Cultural Studies is thus a key problem for any account of the modern university (e.g., Readings' The University in Ruins), and, by extension, for the future of the humanities in general and literary study in particular. I argue that, despite various ways in which Cultural Studies' self-understanding is informed by the specific conditions of the corporate university, it is in crucial respects not a radically new development; specifically, it has underlying affinities with Kant's account of Philosophy in The Conflict of the Faculties. In the first half of my paper I trace some of these similarities, pointing to ways in which they shed new light on currently disputed territory. In the second half of my paper, I turn to the consequences for the literary study, elaborating what is at stake through a reconsideration of the debate between Adorno and Benjamin over the status of "mass culture." My central claim is that Cultural Studies has the laudable consequence of demanding that the notion of "literature" be critically re-examined, but it also jeopardizes Adorno's category of the "autonomy" of the aesthetic and its truth content, thus undermining art's politically transformative power.

 

Ericka Hoagland
Purdue Univ.

Postcolonial Studies and the University

In Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies Timothy Brennan notes that ". . . academic audiences took postcolonial studies to be an adjunct of the same intellectual concerns that had rudely entered their domains only a handful of years earlier in the form of genealogical displacements, psychoanalytic treatments of the subject, analyses of discursive power, and programmatic demands for decentering" (185). Taking Brennan's argument as an initial locus of debate and investigation, this paper will address the following concerns/questions: How has the university responded to postcolonial studies' challenge of humanism, which has been identified as its "traditional" mission? How has postcolonial studies responded to and been affected by the growing corporatization of the university? In other words, has postcolonial studies taken on the rhetoric of business in order to legitimate itself to and within the university? In what ways has the university respond! ed to the growth and increasing influence of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline? Finally, this paper will consider whether or not postcolonial studies has "decentered" anything, or rather, contrary to its own "mission statement," become a part of the center (i.e., complicit with the university and its needs) itself.