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Parrhesiastes and the Poet This rubric appears in each issue of The American Dissident. Rarely, however—in fact, just about never—,does the editor receive submissions, parrhesiastic in nature, where the poet/writer dares RISK biting one or several of the multiple hands, both actual and potential, (e.g., boss, colleagues, editor/publishers, and cultural councils) feeding him. Submissions for this rubric should "speak" rude truth to power, preferably local, and/or to those connected to it. The poet/writer thus consciously RISKS by choosing TRUTH OVER COMFORT! Clearly, if more poet/writers did this, America would have a stronger democracy and the poet/writer would truly be a figure worthy of admiration.
The editor's own diverse experiments in academe sadly support the hypothesis that relatively few professors understand the importance of testing the waters of democracy in their own institutions and very few are concerned about the increasing absence of it in academe. Democracy in America is slipping through our fingers thanks in part to the nation's indifferent professors. For the American Association of University Professors, the editor would like to add the following stanza to the famous poem written by Martin Niemöller on the Nazis: "Then they came for the dissident professor/ and I did not speak out/ because I was not a dissident professor."
The editor has taught at several HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in the south and sadly, if not oddly, observed no notable thirst, let alone interest, for democracy, certainly no more than at the predominantly white institutions where he's also taught. Apathy towards democracy, including hostility towards critique of taboo areas and lack of desire for vigorous debate, is the rule. The large majority of professors accord prime importance, not to democracy, but to "professionalism," that is, to bureaucratic behavior, appearance, and collegiality, a euphemism for not criticizing ones colleagues, no matter how corrupt or inept. They also admire corporate money.
The editor spoke with a white, tenured professor from another public university about his
recent "experiment" criticizing the institution employing him with regards the prayers and religiosity manifested during faculty
meetings. He mentioned he'd sketched a satirical cartoon in solidarity
with the Danish cartoonists who'd dared criticize Islamists and sent it to the
student newspaper, knowing damn well it would provoke anger amongst many of his
black colleagues. The tenured professor's reaction was one of seeming incomprehension.
I haunt the Halls of Academe with Prevért's bird on my head, and I teach undergraduate students at "Georgia's Technology University." I play the committee game, the scholar game, the academic politician game, the meeting-goer game, and so forth. One time, I tried to leave a faculty meeting and give them the bird. But he flew back to me from every hand, so I assumed that he was mine to deal with. Apparently I am the bird-brained one, the only one "not comfortable" (the P.C. phrase for "totally pissed off") with all the resources we are wasting on technology-based teaching and learning. In my leisure time, I teach four courses per semester, usually with four different preparations. Most of my teaching is old-fashioned—lecture, discussion, and student conferences. Here, as at most universities across the United States, we privilege technology over humanity in teaching. Why? Because technology is easier to quantify, to evaluate, and to fabricate a happy ending from what is in fact a tragedy. Along with our hyped-up reports about technology-based teaching and learning, we also privilege arrogant ignorance over genuine inquiry, easily tuned statistics over the raw truth that our students are graduating with less wisdom than ever before. They also have less human knowledge, less curiosity about the world, and less humane desire in helping others than ever before. I am merely a sojoumer among the true academics, and I have not learned—and probably will not learn—the knack for self-promotion and careerism. Thus, I haunt the halls, bird on my head and my decade and a-half as an associate professor draped across my neck like an albatross. I pester the wedding guests with my tale of back when we were once a University, a place where young men and women learned about human virtue and values. They learned not from an online course, chat room, Smart Board, multi-media, multi-software program, but from a human being who valued their minds for what they might become. If our nation were filled with educated, thinking human beings, would such citizens have allowed President Bush's arrogant abuse of this country's military? I doubt it. The outrage should come from the humanities, from the universities en masse. It did not. Where is the revolutionary fire that blazed in the 1960s and 1970s? Where is the protest against immoral and stupid administrative and political decisions within and without the walls of Academe? It is the faculty's duty to express the righteous rage that university presidents and business "leaders" need and—verily—in their souls are begging for. I still dream of helping our young people become humane citizens. Many are not stupid; they have to be taught to be stupid. We do it. And so I make light of the serious, and serious of the light. To paraphrase the independent journalist I. F. Stone, I preach that "Bureaucrats lie. Administrators lie. Professional academics lie." I raise the issues of faculty freedom of speech, "professional" academics, the tenure system, abuse of adjunct faculty, the evaluation process, merit pay raises, student rights, and almost everything status quo at our local Mind Factory. Until recently, most administrators and other faculty members shrugged me off as another harmless drudge and were able to control me by paying me less than others of my "rank" and by generally ignoring me. But lately I have started making the real academics nervous, for I like to think. Just think. And as John Dewey wrote, "Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Whatever emerges will be an improvement over the Shame University which now sucks dry the minds and spirits of college students. Today's university is a Corporate Training Facility. Consider the corporate research moneys doled out to large research universities and to specialized "technology" colleges like my own, "industrial advisory boards" to assess and recommend changes in college curricula, and professional guest-lecturers or former businessman-as-professors. You don't have to be Cardinal Newman to see that "knowledge for its own sake" and a "liberal education" are not marketable. Such concepts are as useless to Corporate America as a sick slave. It hardly needs to be argued at this late date that the great American experiment of universal education, as Neil Postman calls it, has failed by almost any definition. In fact, the experiment was never universal, nor was it education. It was and has been training for the rich and the want-to-be-rich. Most universities are so focused on conformity of thought that they have no time to teach students human values, and certainly no time to explore vital human questions such as who they are and why they are on the planet. "We use up teachers," Lionel Basney writes, "by demanding the impossible from them, and we do this because we demand something impossible from education as a whole—that it redeem society from our quite deliberate plans for it. Since World War II, American culture has been redesigned for the comfort of the corporation." Can anyone interested in Truth dispute Basney? Many of the best students simply drop out. Others commit suicide. Or they stay drunk or stoned for their college years, which is good practice for their corporate careers. Having not experienced the humanizing aspects of education (what Newman called "liberal"), these students are telling us something we refuse to hear—by physically or emotionally dropping out of college or life. They have not failed; we have. They want to know who they are. We will not let them find out. They want to know why they should learn corporate mental garbage that means nothing to them. They want to know why they should unquestioningly endorse the authority of a political/industrial system. They see professors—their moral role models—silently or vocally support a Government whose lethal economic policies, unjust social actions, and technological madness have killed millions of human beings, annihilated thousands of species of plants and animals, fouled the air and the waterways, and contaminated the very languages we speak. Are these students wrong? We need to support their skepticism. That's a major part of any educator's work. But instead, the professional academics support the very institutions they should rage against. Why are we not standing up for and defending the students' rights to a real education? The best teachers we've had have always stood for the right to learn about compassion, fine feelings, respect for just laws, self-worth, the right and the absolute responsibility to challenge "the Establishment" with its entrenched evils of nepotism, cronyism, racism, nationalism, sexism, and hopelessly outdated logocentric world view. Even those students who graduate often are not educated. Jonathan Kozzoll points out that many U.S.-born college students can neither read nor write. National, state, and local elections suggest they have not learned think, either. Clearly, then, a university degree does not mean an educated human being, at least in Newman's terms. Most college freshmen got through high school by being obedient and by usually showing up without firearms or drugs. To slightly alter a phrase from Thoreau, I can find a Newfoundland dog that can accomplish as much, and I mean no derogation of students who really want to learn about the world or to those dogged teachers who keep plugging away, but to the system. But why are the students dropping out physically or intellectually? There is no single cause, but over-reliance on a "technological fix" is the number-one delusion we labor under. The only thing that educational technology is increasing, however, is the distance between students and teachers and between students and their own capacity to learn for themselves. That's the only "Distance Learning" we need to worry about. In many ways, educational technology erects barriers to real learning. Postman keenly observes that most students are motivated by the same "models" the adults around them use—that is, money and political power are the only real raison d'être. Brainwashed by a culture addicted to material success, college students merely trade their high school learning-to-make-an-A for college learning-to-make-BIG money. Yes, these students are motivated and they are encouraged to learn technology "tools" and skills that can bring them money and power—and yet, these are the very skills and "training" that Plato, Aristotle, and, yes, Cardinal Newman felt were not worth studying. Perhaps it is because such technological skills are so superficially attractive and easy-to-learn for a generation grown up playing video games that they have taken power away from true learning.
Sermonette for a Sermonette
The possession of power unavoidably corrupts the free exercise of reason. The citizen must learn to speak truth, rude truth to the multiple faces and colors of power. Where grand discourse of "soaring to the heights," pathetic mesmerizing of malleable mentalities
to further erode lack of critical-thinking capacities, enabling facile fit-in, fit-in, o collegial fit-in!
Big Sistah on billboards watchin’, sermonizin’, all knowin’, all praisin’, all dictatin’. Messiah mama, savior of simpler souls lacking— cultists of personality for the vacuity within— heaven, heaven forbid independent thought! Enthrall, o, enthrall we black-robed sheep, fear in eyes!
Auspiciously, the daemon within the poet must sing to the multiple faces and colors of power, not the great poems of amours, but those of the ivory tower, not the great poems of Hallmark courtesy, but those of monstrous academic perversity.
O Sister President, propaganda’d on front pages and covers, savior of educationist fluff and bluff of intellectual dishonesty, crush the dissident spirit where oddly it may bourgeon even there upon pew in chapel before the stage where you normally omniscient, ubiquitous, and ever applauded. How have we, PhDs, become such fools to swallow the swill?
Big Sistah is watching, who needs
Big Brother? collegiality, everything; while dissension, adjudged profanity! O we must speak truth, odious truth, once and for all for once to the multiple faces and colors of power or democracy be laid upon the coroner’s gurney divvied up by the smooth talkin’ paladins of autocracy.
God save us all… God save us all from the preachers of God!
Doomsday Poems
Written Round Midnight
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