Rethink.

Before I begin, let me make something clear: reading Bill Ayers' blog has made me feel really sorry for the guy, not because he's done anything right, but because he just sounds nuts. Part of me feels as if he's being used, weirdly enough, by people like Senator Obama and the educational/political establishment in Chicago.

Another thing that should be noted is that when I rant about "the fundamental corruption of the academy," I'm ambivalent. I don't think many of the people I know have been educated properly and I feel like most educational institutions - higher education  especially - are harmful, preserving some of the worst inequalities in modern life. The mere existence of this article goes a long way towards demonstrating the latter. However, there's much to be grateful for in the modern university: I'm obviously not opposed to teaching, researching, publishing, learning. I've learned much and there are many professors, students, administrators and institutions I respect.

But I'm asking for an attitude change, where a smug elitist-liberal worldview recognizes itself as the problem. Very rich and powerful professors have no problem asking corporations to give away all their earnings in taxes while they hire adjuncts as virtual slave labor. Administrators have no problem with students racking up thousands upon thousands in debt for substandard classes and shoddy classrooms and dorms, while the football team gets tutors, lounges, arcades. Students increasingly see trying to buy a diploma as ethical. All of this is brought together by a narrative where the world outside the academy is purportedly propped up by the academy. The university is not alien to commercialism or populism, but purposely generative of it, as if everyone else were powerless, unjust or thoughtless without a degree, or needing desperately the ideas that the Cultural Studies dept. has or the entertainment the university's sports brand provides.

1. How is the academy commercial? Doesn't it spend lots of time attacking business?

You are encouraged to read this article fully, but this passage will do for now:

Colleges are quick to argue that a college education is more about enlightenment than employment. That may be the biggest deception of all. Often there is a Grand Canyon of difference between the reality and what higher-education institutions, especially research ones, tout in their viewbooks and on their Web sites. Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. At many colleges, only a small percentage of the typical student's classroom hours will have been spent with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor, according to student-questionnaire data I used for my book How to Get an Ivy League Education at a State University. When students at 115 institutions were asked what percentage of their class time had been spent in classes of fewer than 30 students, the average response was 28 percent.

The question of "research" is where commercialism and populism meet. Science for the sake of discovery exists by coincidence, of course, but if science had no practical benefits we'd abandon it. Our modern relation to science makes dependence on technology primary: all other things are judged on their utility through an analogous method. Since modern science has been so successful, there must be a science of business that allows us to have specific techniques making leadership better or managing a supply-chain better. There must be social sciences, which give us certain knowledge - no longer do we assume candy taken from a baby makes it cry, but we investigate the causes so we can make babies cry a number of ways.

Now the losers in this conception where "research" is primary are genuinely educated people. Those people tend to read because taking just one other person's opinion seriously is a long, complicated process. It needs to be given time and carefully considered from a number of angles. Again, it just so happens that the virtues which accompany serious scientific research make some scientists the flower of humanity: this world is a much poorer place without people like Freeman Dyson.

But it is also true that for many of us, science is a means to having our cake, eating it too, and staying comfortable in our own little world where we're always right. Even with all the pious rhetoric for preventing global warming, if there is a problem, then the solution to that problem is primarily technological. "Living green" only shows you "care," and I'll let you determine just how much concern is involved.

What makes the academy even more steeped in commercialism, though, is the fact that its anti-commerical rhetoric is dependent on mass media (i.e. think of the number of feminist/cultural studies books on things like "Survivor") when not actively trying to be mass media. Chomsky sells. I can think of no worse argument for anarchism or anarcho-socialism or whatever than that: the hypocrisy is in the means, given that all the book says is that capitalist means are entirely corrupt and imperial and whatever.

If you want to break from commerical/populist conception of the academy, you can make money, but your primary goal is to "profess," to live up to the title before you earn it. It helps if what you have to say is logically sound, given that your job is to address complicated issues and help people think through them. A professor professes mainly to inspire independent thought, not to encourage fundamentalisms for the sake of material gain, whether that gain is money or social change. There will obviously be conflicts of interest, but I think this criteria is fair.

2. So what does Professor Ayers have to do with this?

We've established that the modern academy is very materialist and self-interested, and the example of Chomsky has shown some radicals to be hypocrites.

I don't think Ayers is a hypocrite. He seems sincere, which is why I think the man is insane. I want to look at his article "Narrative Push/Pull," and I can understand your reluctance to click on that link. I literally felt sick when I found he had a blog.

But "Narrative Push/Pull" is where Bill Ayers sounds a lot like me:

Educational research, a post-World War II invention chasing federal dollars, has grown to monstrous proportions, and yet I’m hard-pressed to say what good has come of any of it. Grants are funded, projects launched, dissertations written, careers made, but for all that, not much has been accomplished for children. Academic writing is mostly dry and boring, so deadly you risk suffocating just reading the stuff. When it cloaks itself in self-referencing dogma—so smug and so sure, so proud of its ironclad conclusions—I want to throw open the window either to jump or to breathe the free air.

In fact, the language of pseudo-science that has come to dominate the discourse about schools has led to a hollowing out of our consciousness of what actually occurs in classrooms, the intellectual and ethical core of what really goes on. In the “scientific” narrative, teachers and students are reduced to an S-R relationship, standardized tests—simpleminded, deceptive, and fatally flawed—rule supreme, and everyone is asked to genuflect in front of the phrase, “the research says.” All of this becomes a bludgeon to beat educators and children and families into submission.

Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this, for it posits storytelling and story listening as important ways to understand and improve classroom life. It suits the noisy, idiosyncratic, complex, multilayered, dynamic reality of schools and classrooms. It can fit itself to that reality rather than hammering the natural messiness into a convenient if choked and clotted frame.

Where we disagree almost seems a practical matter: he talks about "narrative inquiry" as a way of fixing the classrooms. I try never to talk about the specific goods the liberal arts may give without emphasizing how useless they are at first. It is not clear justice or treating others well is useful; it is not clear the highest good is used for anything. To me, to talk of "schools and classrooms" is to miss how artificial those environments are: they're completely sequestered from reality, they need to be.

Ayers' conception of narrative in this essay drives a conception of education but also frames where he is in the academy. Closer to the opening, he discusses a courtroom where people funneling arms to the IRA were acquitted:

In a trial I observed years ago a large group of Irish Americans and recent Irish immigrants, all known supporters of the Irish Republican Army, had been charged in federal court in Brooklyn with accumulating weapons to send to the IRA in support of their fight with the British. The prosecution contended that the political beliefs of the defendants along with their avowed support for the IRA motivated them to conspire and to break a number of federal statutes.

The defense told a different story: the defendants, they maintained, were part of a long and proud tradition of anti-colonial struggle against imperialist powers like Great Britain, a tradition that embraced the founding of the United States itself. Further, there was no criminal intent, since the defendants were convinced that they were acting in concert with US policy and as adjuncts to a known federal agency.

It happened that the defendants in the case were acquitted. The defense apparently had an insight the prosecution missed entirely—they worked systematically to put an audience in the jury box that would be receptive to their particular narrative. The facts were only in minor dispute; the larger argument was over whose narrative was believable.

The defense succeeded in selecting a jury that was overwhelmingly recent immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, from Central and South America. The trial took place at the height of the Malvinas crisis, an ugly war that almost went nuclear between Great Britain and Argentina. The crisis didn’t register with most Americans, but it was the top story in Latin American newspapers where the undisputed bad guy was Great Britain. For these jurors at this time a narrative of independence from the evil empire was easy to hear, completely acceptable to believe.

What is critical here is how powerful narrative is: it doesn't matter that there are laws and they were broken. What matters is the story and our intuitive conception of what is just and unjust. Ayers doesn't use the word "justice" much, but he does talk about a self that precedes any writing:

Narrative begins with something to say—content precedes form. You must have something to say, something you want to say, something of burning importance that only you can say.... Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant. The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page. Human beings are incorrigibly self-deceiving and self-justifying, and in order to create a reliable narrator readers need to see a writer interrogating her own ignorance, investigating what she doesn’t know, searching for and writing into contradictions—rather than running away from them with easy conclusions—as they appear.

"Honesty" is Ayers' true goal; from "honesty" springs something like justice. The multiplicity of narratives is an inherently radical fact - it means that the world is anarchic, all of us have different stories which have claims to truth. He cites current US policy towards Israel as a denial of this fact: the "dominant narrative" for him assumes that the US is godly and Israel is godly and no one cares about the Palestinians and their story. A "dominant narrative" is a problem.

If I were to tell you that the power of this essay lies in the usual Leftist tropes - Israel is bad, white people have privilege, terrorists are really liberators - I'd be lying. This is actually a very cleverly put together essay: Ayers begins with free-form brainstorming, moves to a general statement on the writing process, then talks about narrative in terms of crime (IRA, Central Park rape), Israel/Palestine and narrative in terms of political order, narrative in "school reform" and race, Orwell on authorship, and then concludes with the statement on narrative for all in education that has been quoted from above.

Orwell says authors write because they're egotists, artists, historians or wanting political change, and that for him (Orwell), the fourth emerged so significantly after his flirtation with the other three that he only saw his past work as relevant inasmuch as it was political. Ayers has given us before the section on Orwell a part where he rambles about writing, then has a statement about the art of writing, then talks about history he's witnessed and a larger political narrative.

The power of this essay comes from the fact that this is Ayers invoking his radical persona of before to discuss the larger change he wants now. That's why I think he's nuts - if my girlfriend blew herself up making some bombs I wanted, I'd be crying my eyes out, not getting introspective about it. Some pasts have to be denied, there's too much pain involved, and making the personal political is a double-edged sword. Ayers doesn't seem to have a need for this, and that's stunning to me. He's willing to be psychoanalyzed for this larger purpose.

3. The radical destroyed by success

The problem with Ayers' narrative is that it is nearly entirely false because there's no nuance. When I make a claim that Senator Obama is corrupt, I can do it based on the people he's willing to work with, without needing specific evidence always (of course, one needs evidence to start the inquiry, of which we have plenty), and a larger examination of his purposes, which seem to be to indulge his ambition.

That ability to analyze purpose and see one as having some control over one's environs ("public" and "private," more or less) comes from the fact that "narrative" simply isn't all there is. Taking humanity seriously means seeing that we author our lives, and that creates an immediate disjunct: there are the people who want to be self-reflective and can do it, and everyone else, including the people who think they want self-knowledge but can't possibly get it.

This is what Bill Ayers is missing because of the radical egalitarianism of his critique, and it is why the academy can use his ideas to sell books and educational policy and not make a bit of difference, and why he can't see the truth. The truth is that the US government, for all its problems, is far more liberating than modern education. The government does try to tell you how to think, but is based on these cultural artifacts called a "Declaration," "Constitution," "Bill of Rights," etc. that inform you that your liberty matters.

Whereas the academy tells you that it is working towards solving all injustices in human life - including the fact we die - and all you need to do is give it lots of money and your full attention and of course you'll come out better! There's no respect within the institution for anyone as truly free: the thing is a machine, a diploma-mill or giant lab or gold mine, depending on who you are.

So the lack of nuance means that Bill Ayers is missing his own story, how a radical was co-opted into the most tyrannical association we have today because he failed to understand a crucial conception of liberty which is "lower" in dignity but more accessible. It also means that his story is filled with all sorts of crap that just isn't true: he claims, for example, that we are told "America is good" over and over. Professor Ayers, I went to Catholic grade school and high school and then to Rutgers. All I was told the whole time was that my country sucks, in no uncertain terms. All we wanted to do is kill British people, then Indians, then slaveholders, then former slaves, then people all over the world, then Vietnamese people. There you go - that's the American history I was taught, by people who are not coincidentally very sympathetic to you.

To get the "narrative" where America was something good despite its flaws, I had to get lucky. I had to stumble upon conservative magazines and read them thoroughly; I had to find books in the bookstore that seemed just like every other, and examine them closely. The point is: You, Bill Ayers, have helped establish the "dominant narrative," congrats. Problem: since it was an inherently biased and not-entirely-true narrative, it has become a means of commodification and alienation. In other words: what you sell doesn't transform lives; it marginalizes each of us and makes us slave to a capitalism where even knowledge is a construct for sale.

To see this, consider how hard it is to bring the voices you want to hear to the forefront. You say:

The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification. Annie Dillard argues that while personal essay is an art, it’s not a martial art, and that the personal pronoun can be the subject of the verb—I see this, I did that—but not the object of the verb—I discuss me, I quote me, I describe me. The goal of the writing is to set up a relationship, a dialog based on both identification and difference, harmony and disharmony. The assumption is that there is a unity in human experience, that within each of us is the human condition. But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency.

I am going to ignore the fact that your essay does air grievances and self-justifies, and move instead to your very low criteria for the "relationship" based upon a "unity in human experience." You're just assuming we can see each other as human, even as you yourself have done deeds that are no less than "inhuman." Being human isn't easy, but one thing is clear: what defines us as human is how we relate to larger purposes, as well as how we make the most of our own limits. You need both for a person to be a person: the public self is essential because language itself is inherently a social phenomenon. But the private self - the one that can show the dearest love towards others - transcends narrative.

Notice that the public self would demand an evaluation/consideration of purpose that cannot be entirely relative: if you smuggle arms to the IRA, you're not just a lawbreaker, you're a scumbag. The national sense of what is honorable coincides with what is morally true to a degree. The only refutation is to say that the British have done something worse necessitating violence. But that refutation itself depends on a sense of what is honorable/dishonorable, just one coming from another starting point. You want no starting points, and that's just insane, because what will invariably happen is that people's selfishness will dictate their "morals."

The private self also makes more demands than you're willing to concede: a lot of people would be happy with sex and drugs alone. You seem to think a great number of us can be educated; I think that too. But I think before people are writing they've got to know a ton, and not just "The People's History of the United States." You're asking for a lot from these students, and while I know it is worthwhile, they need a healthy respect for the past and their own country, and that involves a lot of books and "narrative" you don't like.

To get people to see each other as human - to get them to be independent truly - takes a lot more than getting them writing. They have to write well, and they need to start somewhere. What conservatism nowadays emphasizes is giving them that chance: what you want is for everything to go perfectly for them.

Being a critic and a radical is easy - the issue is what you want to do with your success. You won Bill. You're a Distinguished Professor of Education - I might be lucky to get an adjunct job at a community college. People read your stuff and you're influential, no one looks at this blog even just for the primary sources. This is your world, the one you tried to blow up. I don't really have a say in it: my "narrative," if you will, is the one unheard.

• How The Academy Destroyed Itself
• English professor demonstrates why sitting around and being paid to muse can create really crappy articles
• Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow: Monticello, Sept. 6, 1824
• Creating Statesmen, Part Final: The Rebirth of the Humanities
• At the University of Dallas, 3/28/10

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