As for the name of the "Department of Ideological Deprogramming," I named it to get the readers attention vis-a-vis the need for radical change in the way people think. How about if we call it the "Department of Deschooling", and put Ivan Illich in charge?As for the Department of Ethnographic Studies, the important point to remember is that ethnographic study should be the primary vehicle of social-scientific knowledge-gathering, that quantitative methodology exists as a (sometimes necessary) supplement to such research but that without such research, the social sciences risk vacuousness. So, you see, I am not arguing for a "separate" department of Ethnographic Studies, but rather the abolition of "separate" departments of sociology, anthropology, communication studies, economics, politics etc., many of which duplicate each others' work anyway, and the incorporation of the faculty of these departments into a department of Ethnographic Studies, as well as the adjudication of pedantic arguments for why these departments must necessarily remain separate.
The modern university, as David F. Labaree (HOW TO SUCCEED IN SCHOOL WITHOUT REALLY LEARNING) has become a mere mechanism for reinforcing the class culture of capitalist society having only a tangential relationship to actual learning. As Labaree points out:
Market pressures have elevated private interests over the public interest in education, with the result that schooling has come to serve the competitive needs of the most ambitious and culturally advantaged educational consumers (for a leg up on the opposition) more than the substantive needs of society as a whole (for capable citizenship and competent workmanship). Consumer demand for credentials -- and the economic leverage they bring -- has compelled the educational system to assume a highly stratified form. The system has beocme better at creating invidious distinctions among students than at providing them with the political and social capacities required for a healthy society. In such a system, educational placement -- in the right school, the right college, the right program -- is more important than educational performance, and learning to work the system well is more important than learning to do the curriculum well. This is a system, in short, that puts a premium on the acquisition of educational credentials over the mastery of educational content.
(p. 250)What needs to be emphasized in this regard is that thinking in such a society goes on in a desultory fashion outside the system rather than in any effective capacity inside the system. Please read an essay from Ben Agger's THE DECLINE OF DISCOURSE titled "Academic Writing as Real Estate," in which Agger describes how writing for the academic market system shares with mass-market prose "an insensitivity to the dialogue requirements of public speech and prose, notably the way good discourse not only anticipates but provokes a response as a way of constructing a democratic polity." (p. 123). You might find Agger's essay interesting as an exercise in textual analysis -- give it to your students and ask them to see if they can find any of Agger's points substantiated in a journal article picked at random from the Quarterly Journal of Speech or some other such publication.
The publications, it might be added, are a reflection of the departmental specializations within the university. The solution is to tear the specialist framework down and re-employ the thinkers toward the task of thinking to strengthen democracy and thus to end the university's complicity with the creation of class society. Against the trend Agger specifies, I wish to demonstrate that the ethnographic perspective, the perspective of the culture bound participant-observer in culture, is the central perspective of social science, and that furthermore it's the most democratic perspective, because it's the perspective that even the most pedantically specialized scholar shares with the woman or man on the street. I also wish to democratize awareness of ethnography to the least academic possible audience -- actually I want to teach ethnographic methods to ten-year-olds, any suggestions you might have for revising my teacher's unit are welcome. At any rate, the departmental differentiation specified in the elementary-school term "social studies" is enough for the universities, too, and in this regard the "Department of Ethnographic Studies" merely tells us where we stand.
As for "population biology," physical anthropology, etc., perhaps a department of the physical sciences can be reserved for "human biology"?
Lastly, I wish to respond to the objection placed
: Concerning the
: : Department of Critical Social Theory
I said that: : ...On the other hand, critical theory, argued Horkheimer, is concerned that theory point the way to a better society.
Floyd responded: Again, I've seen a tendency for even the most well conceived, beneficient plans turn to rigidified dogmatism or, more often, simple irrelevance, in less than a generation. The theory that pointed the way to social improvement in the 1960s can't possibly remain the best possible set of goals for tomorrow. I realize that you aren't suggesting this at all, but radicals can turn into reactionaries very quickly, simply by remaining the same as the world changes around them. I fear that any institutionalization of ideological goals will tend to suffer the same fate, and I would tend to suspect that a formalized Dept. of Crit. Theo. would be no exception.
My comment: I'm not sure I outlined what a department of Critical Theory would do in sufficient detail. Pushing momentarily aside the issue of the significance of Floyd's experiences, one can nevertheless say (especially considering Labaree's above quote) that the university can no more escape the "institutionalization of ideological goals" than direct sunlight can escape being bright. The point of a Department of Critical Theory would be to create an academic public sphere for debate about the appropriate ideological purposes of the university, the workplace, etc., given the governing influence of theory in directing observations about the world.
The discussion of what sort of theory actually points the way to a better society, besides being more healthy than the sort of theory that today forwards the careers of its academic copyright-owners, is to move the discussion of right action, of "what is to be done," up a metalevel. What sort of social frameworks permit decision-making, and which ones offer the best chances of social improvement? John Dryzek's RATIONAL ECOLOGY offers an example of the sort of writing that would flourish in a Department of Critical Theory -- also view my essay here.
Theory as such is not merely an "ordering framework," a way of explaining and predicting empirically-observed social scientific events, but rather a way of governing how observations are observed, conceptualized, and interpreted by human observers. This is so because the social scientist's relation to the "object population" is one of intersubjectivity, rather than impartial objectivity -- the social scientist participates in the community of the object population. Once we get past our conceptual resistances to the notion of intersubjectivity as the basis for social theory, we then need to explain how intersubjectivity works. The Department of Critical Theory will, to be sure, have its hands full trying to get its students up to speed on the philosophical readings necessary to an understanding of critical theory. A basic curriculum would have to deal with Adam Smith, Maynard Keynes, Marx, Weber, Mead, Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Skinner, Kohlberg, and I'm sure much much more. So, frankly, I believe such a department would make us masters of an institutionalized ideology, rather than making us slaves to one.
None.
