Re: <nettime> de/fund/ed digest martha rosler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> John Hopkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:41:35 -0500 From: martha rosler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: <nettime> de/fund/ed digest Coco and I are in complete accord. Even in my backwater U, there are occasional stirrings of the profit motive in our department, but the art school dean has apparently turned his sights on creating a stand-alone documentary "film" unit to serve the interests of the NJ pharmaceutical industry, which presumably will serve as its chief funders, so the pressure is off our fiscally useless selves. >I have colleagues who have been hired and >who passed professional reviews BECAUSE they brought funds into the department through private donors. yes, we've got that as well. And on the strength of that, they have also sucked institutional funding away from other disciplines within the department. And, Coco, I will pause to express shock that this sort of crap happens at YOUR institution, one of the nation's premier (private) ivies. Andwe can observe that not only digital media departments--which after all can be said to serve a demand, just as graphics divisions do, on the part of both students and parents for marketable skills--but also the rash of digital media exhibitions, prizes and hoopla in major museums are traceable to the late, lamented tech boom, as you know. (And as we have agreed, graduate art departments ideally now are simply routes to immediate market presence and thus have become academies in which the search for "knowledge" is denigrated and even the scientized language of experimental modernism is forsworn in favor of business logic or more appropriately, silence.) (MAs in many disciplines have long functioned as cash cows, the terminal degree for those not quite PhD-worthy. Maybe this has received some recent ramping up.) The selling of the university has been detailed in many books, especially in relation to the politicization of research, but many also track its relation to industrial demands. Radical historians and sociologists produced many critiques of this trend starting in the 60s. David Noble has been a longtime chronicler and critic of the commercialization of universities, and the relationship to technological imperatives. His_ America by Design_ took on the shaping role of the demands of capital on engineering and science faculties, and thus on entire universities. Some relatively recent books are _How Harvard Rules_ and _Universities and Empire, and _ Sigmund Diamond's _Compromised Campus_. Speaking of Columbia, the 68 strikers' pamphlet was called _Who Rules Columbia?_ Many commentators have pointed out that medical faculties are beyond being compromised by pharma funding. Even Chinese universities are now seeking corporate support. But I don't want to shift the ground of argument here. How could someone simply teaching German get ANY kind of donation? That has still not been answered. Aileen, the "point" of a university education increasingly is economic. Long gone is the idea of liberal education, promulgated at mid-century by the University of Chicago and, famously, Clark Kerr and his doctrine of the multiversity (the technocratic nature of which led to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in maybe 1964, which in great part led to the birth of the entire student movement in the US and perhaps Europe, at least as a proximate cause). Student "unrest," and the general "ungovernability" of the Western democracies (Samuel P. Huntington) led to the determination by the start of the 1970s to convert the telos of higher education from "cultivation" of the self and the production of the "well-rounded individual" (read: informed citizen) to job training tout court. Thus, the answer to "why bother" is, because you want to retain your foothold in the ownership society. You might as well ask, why bother to go to school at all--and maybe in the near future, we won't. martha >If university teachers are under pressure to devote more attention to >fundraising than to teaching, as I have heard from several people now, and <...> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:11:01 +0100 From: John Hopkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: <nettime> de/fund/ed digest [rosler, hopkins] Hallo Martha -- >wait, this is not really an answer. >i really would like to know HOW someone teaching in the humanities is >expected to find money to support their research. maybe it IS impossible, but ... > It makes no sense because there is nothing to motivate funders. ... that's the point... >the above is in reference to donations to a general fund, not monies >gone after by individual faculty members such as happens in the >sciences. > >Unlike you, i seem to think it makes NO sense because it cannot >work--who would fund language teaching (German, not chinese)? In the >60s the DOD funded language RESEARCH because of its interest in AI >and related technical developments, but even they did not fund >language teaching. The army teaches in its own schools, such as the >monterey linguistic institute or whatever it is called these days. > So please enlighten me if I am wrong. >I teach, by the way,as a full-time nonadjunct. Making sense shouldn't be something to look for in egocentric power-mongering neo-cons caught up in the maelstrom of new globalism and old militarism... It seems to me that it is exactly the policy an increasingly conservative market-focused social milieu is happy to implement -- choking off all possible pathways or interstitial spaces for alternate (unpleasant) voices. Of course there is a serious long-term social downside (like the downside on basic R&D in science of the US Homeland Security implementation -- scaring off huge percentages of foreign graduate students in the last couple years). But it seems that Otherness is not something that the majority wants to deal with unless the Other is a seller, and the Self is a user. (this downside can be read as a positive thing for the world in that the hegemony of US technology/military will start to slip much faster...) And yes, of course it won't 'work', but in the short term, which seems to be the present time scale of bureaucrats, administrators, and politicians, it at least functions to fullfil the policies of appeasement (primarily, reducing taxpayer support of 'liberal' higher education). And, as well, again, it puts some annoying critical voices out of the picture. Actually people working in engineering and hard science are also very familiar with the cyclic 'popularity' of many disciplines. Aerospace, petroleum, mining, materials, and many other quite defined 'careers' were subject to the whims of global markets and national (defense) policies. These 'business cycles' are merely expressions of the Military-Industrial machines' changing need for human resources and the physical dislocation of the companies/governments who happen to be involved in production. Art (and art education) was never 'popular' in the US, it may never be, in the 'classic' sense. It is simply not necessary in the apocalyptic Military-Industrial complex's vision of the world. Get over the surprise (I''m surprised that you are surprised!), establishing an alternate to all this requires undivided attention and focus away from the policy noize. keep engaging the Other in direct dialogue... cheers JH - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net