Greg Nowell, pithy political commentator, wrote:
>While I have no sympathy with the right, I really don't
>understand why any group should have to file a FOIA
>request to get course syllabi and/or a CV. I consider
>this kind of stuff public domain. In fact I and many
>of my colleagues have it posted on the internet:
The New Paltz Conferences also taught about sex toys, the joys of solo sex, the pornography and S&M wars among feminists. Ms Vagina was tame by comparison
Not really an answer to your specifics question:
While I agree that we ought to be forthcoming about what we teach and our credentials, it seems to me that a lot more is going on here and this may explain the resistance. I assume that you know that some schools are trying to make sure that this info is 'theirs' So, all your syllabi, all your lectures, etc belong to them and its their intellectual property. In other words, can Prof Nowell and hire a few desperate adjuncts for peanuts somewhere down the line once they've gotten what they can out of you. Some videotaped lectures on NY political life, course notes, lecture outlines. Pass it on to the adjuncts who'll field electronic queries, standing in for the now unemployed Prof Nowell, who's probably home harvesting his bio mass and cooking up some tasty dish with olive oil to ease his pain. (Btw, could you lend some advice on what are the best olive oils? That would be swell. Usually, I only have olive oil on hand for non-cooking purposes and quality hasn't mattered too much. But I understand that one should use different kinds for different cooking purposes)
Chuck Grimes might know more about this because I recall that he raised this issue on another list some time ago. Somthing happening in Cali if I remember correctly. This move to ensure that our work as employees is somehow the uni's intellectual property really bugs me. It's happening in several places as I understand it. It is often connected to the increase in interest over the use of the web for teaching.
>So now, here's my question: Is the attempt by a right
>wing group to get this information "fascist intrusion",
>or shouldn't we, as public employees, provide it as a
>matter of course???
It would seem the thing to do, since they work for NYS. But, I have some misgivings....
>What is the big deal about handing
>out your qualifications and course materials?
Well, obviously, because folks on the right will likely make hay with it. Imagine this info becoming publically available. Not only can they--whoever 'they' are--play fast and loose with what they find in the syllabi of those nasty, unqualified, silly feminist professors concerned w/ the politics of vaginas, penises, phallogocentric discourse, and whatnot, they can also have fun subjecting *all* syllabi to scathing critiques of their political content, however they choose to define it.
The Culture Wars redux, only this time with a lot more systematically collected data. Download it all into a software program like Nudist and someone can count how many times Marx is mentioned in syllabi, lectures, class notes posted on the web.
Maybe it was just that I was teaching at private liberal arts colleges and universities, but I heard plenty of first year students who responded to the use of a book by Holly Sklar or Jonathan Kozol and the like with (to paraphrase): "My parents warned me that college professors were radicals opposed to democracy and capitalism" A laugh-riot: at least I thought it was because compared w/ my state college undergrad education and my experience working at priv. liberal arts colleges, the marxists who much more visible at the state colleges. I mean, hell, these weren't even students of a conservative right fundie or Rush persuasion, they were the children of ordinary upper-middle class folks who truly believed that they were relatively progressive in their views.
But this is nothing new, this fear of a radical professoriate. What is new, it seems to me, is the uni's total quality management discourse: Pleasing the customer who is, of course, conceived of as a consumer with all kinds of rights and no obligations; a customer whose rights are circumscribed and delimited to a certain kind of limited control over the uni; a customer who registers their ostensibly 'private' preferences in the form of course evaluations, surveys of student satisfaction, etc. All of which result in rather superficial 'fixes' while the uni goes on about its business--making a profit or at least coming in on budget.
At least, that's the way it feels to me and a number of other folks. Hop onto Syracuse University's web-site and check out their moblization of this crud. It'll make you want to vomit. And worse, it was precisely this "please the customer" rap that was wielded against the faculty who were honoring the picket line when SU employees went on strike at the beginning of the fall semseter. The memos coming out of the Dean's office were just filled w/ reminders that our job was to work for and meet the needs of our customers/students. Which, of course, is another laugh-riot since most of those students were happy to have a few more days of partying as their prof's cancelled classes. If they had it their way (at Burger King) they'd be demanding A's in exchange for just breathing in class half the semester. One of my diss advisors used to talk of having bumper stickers printed up that say: "Professors aren't vending machines"
Don't get me wrong. I believe that students would want more than this if they had the opportunity or could possibly conceive of things differently. But, right now, most of them tend to think that school is a waste of time substantively (and I'm specifically talking about the upper middle class private uni set).
Oh, we can get into a discussion about whether our courses ought to be balanced, presenting all sides in some ostensibly netural fashion I suppose. But that ultimately isn't the problem, on my view. The problem is that as this info is increasingly available to the public because of the use of web pages. We're increasingly accountable to a wider audience than we once had been. Now this would be perfectly fine; I'm all for a kind of public scholarship and public teaching that recognizes that the professoriate has some obligations to contribute to society. I'm all for reforming the tripartite structure of the professorial career which values research over teaching and engagement in the university community. But not by modeling it after 'new management' technologies like Total Quality Management which turn all of us into fucking internal and external customers.
SnintgrrRl, done ranting (maybe)