Before WW2 most Americans didn't go to college. Now most expect to. We have forgotten how to be a middle class country. The middle class of America is basically disrespected by the media that is the mouth, if not the conscience of the nation. Too many yuppies. I also think, too many academics that cater to those yuppies, and I think those academics know it.
If you want to know how I really feel about academics, I can sum it up in one story - a story Cobb readers may be familiar with. It is the story of how I went to an academic conference at Harvard filled with mostly black superstar professors including Kilson, Bell, West and Guinier and informed them about this thing called the Internet. I had on a baseball cap, backwards of course, with my email address on it. This was 1992. I was considered to be a creature from Mars. A few years later, this same crowd had invented something called the Digital Divide and proposed that things like Moore's Law didn't apply to black people. They could not imagine the world we live in today.
You should note how obvious it is that nobody talks about the Digital Divide. Nor do people give much credibility to language like the following, or maybe they do...
Styles of discourse are not natural. They differ from culture to culture, and are a product of socialization. Socialization takes place through institutions--the family, schools, religious traditions, etc. Men and women are socialized to different styles of discourse in this culture (again, I refer you to the voluminous and oft-duplicated research on this question). When women adopt male discursive strategies, they're punished for it (again, see the research on conversational patterns and the disruption caused by women embracing "male" speech patterns, and see both my posts [and other women's posts] to this list). The mechanisms of punishment are engaged automatically, without deliberate or conscious effort on the part of the men in the conversation because that is simply the "normal" reaction to female speech that challenges the status quo. That's the very definition of institutionalized oppression--when enforcement mechanisms become diffuse, naturalized, and automatic, so that no individual needs to take responsibility for keeping another in her place. It just "happens."
But that was essentially an argument in support of the idea that the internet is a white male discursive space incapable of supporting the ideas of women - that it's maleness was baked into its very fabric. I no longer pay attention to that sort of talk. Quite frankly I don't think the author does either. Because, after all it is an academically researched reason for women to discount what discussions take place in this medium, which both preposterous and academically sound. Then again I'm of the sort that often discounts academic discourse for practical reasons. It's the same two edged sword.
It occurs to me today that academics, especially those whose aim is to support social justice, understand very well that they cater to the chatting classes who exist on the fringes of relevance. But a constant stream of undergraduates must confirm in them some value. Underlying the journeyman's job of undergraduate edjumacation must be higher aspirations, one of which I assume to be cultural evolution. And so there is a numbers game afoot. The more high quality academically vetted knowledge that can be pumped into the minds of an increasingly thick stream of students, the greater the share of the population will live in enlightenment.
But at the same time it must surely be equally obvious that higher education is indeed a bourgeois exercise. Most people won't get one. And so for the aims of social justice to be met, all such students must serve as proxies for the truthiness contained in the pedagogies of college professors. And in there lies the difficulty. How can academics reach the masses when they won't do their jobs for free? Why is it that relatively few academics can bear to publish their best work on the Internet? How might one go about actually breaching the barrier? Isn't college a very very expensive certification / indulgence? Is it really possible to learn what one needs to know without paying so many thousands of dollars? It is a question put plainly by MIT by the example of their Open Course Ware program.
Now I actually expect college professors to be elitists and I expect those applicants to universities to be the elite. So my questions are mostly rhetorical. I think that the art of writing in and of itself as made broadly possible by the internet is actually superior to traditional publication and that despite what is said about whitemaleness, the blogosphere is an extraordinary gift to civilization. Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that everything that comes out of the 'sphere because of its origin is somehow superior, but for the sake of content and reputation, the certification process of college is being met by that of internet writing. In other words, in every way except for the most formal vetting processes of institutions, the knowledge provided at low or no cost is as socially relevant and valuable as that gotten from formal higher ed. And as such it is challenging the ways and means by which people communicate and learn.
I believe that academics and journalists in particular, as arbiters of the social value of knowledge, are most threatened by this. As such they seek to ingratiate themselves with broad classes of people who are by and large currently excluded from higher ed. In other words, they are overcompensating by amping up their moral authority and trying to impress too many people.
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