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TEACH-CUNY | LOBBY-YOUR-LEGISLATOR
By
Tony O’Brien, Queens College Contract Liaison for the PSC
In
general, your best source of information about the March 28 event is the
website: www.psc-cuny.org. Some may question--and it is a legitimate question in
the profession--whether our authority in the classroom should be used, as the
PSC advocates, to promote energetic student support for rebuilding CUNY, and for
our contract demands in particular.
The
"Teach CUNY" day of action is of course voluntary, and each of us must
ponder this question for herself or himself, but misgivings about "teaching
CUNY" in your own class or office should not prevent anyone from sending
students to the public forums on each campus. Note too that "Teach CUNY"
has been endorsed by the University Faculty Senate. The PSC legal staff also
says that teaching about the relation of CUNY working conditions to the students
is protected by academic freedom as long as we connect it to the material of the
course, and there are suggestions about that on the website.
One
source of faculty misgiving concerns the nature of a university labor contract:
is it merely a set of self-interested demands for faculty and staff welfare,
quite divorced from student interests? Or is it--and in this case the PSC
urgently insists that it is--a document devoted to rebuilding CUNY and therefore
also devoted to our students as much as ourselves? (We urge you all to read the
Contract Proposals bulletin you have recently received from the PSC in your mail
at home, and judge for yourselves.) In asking students to support our contract
fight ("teaching the contract," in a sense), and in teaching about
CUNY and the contract struggle, we are assuming that the classroom is the common
workplace of students and teachers and therefore a legitimate place to discuss
together common concerns like the fate of your college and CUNY and the common
struggle to improve our conditions in the workplace. Many students are workers
themselves and some have experience of union struggles, so this is not a
peculiar idea to introduce to them in the classroom.
Another
source of misgiving concerns the extension of a teacher’s authority to
advocacy of any sort. Here the nature of our authority in the classroom has to
be examined carefully. We are teachers, not preachers or thought police, and
students--though obliged to be in class--are not a passive congregation of
believers nor a flock of dupes; they are, rather, thinking adults with
(typically) a good deal of life experience and resistance to persuasion. They
are skeptical and critical listeners, able to judge a position and an argument,
and vigorous discussants, ready to argue the point. They will hear what we say,
weigh it carefully, and think about their response all along the scale from
enthusiastic support to outright rejection.
This
is what "Teach CUNY" means in an individual classroom--to present
facts, history, institutional structure, arguments, and ideas about organizing
for what we need, for students to discuss and respond to. That is something
quite different from imposing a particular view of the CUNY situation purely by
force of our authority as teachers. What IS that authority, anyway?
Academic
freedom in its classic nineteenth-century German formulation as the freedom to
learn and the freedom to teach (Lernfreiheit, Lehrfreiheit) implies that a
university teacher’s authority is earned by its valuable relation to existing
knowledge, earned in performance, and judged by peers and students both.
"Teach CUNY" is fully in that classical spirit of academic freedom.
From that point of view, to pursue the self-reflexive question of how my course,
my classroom, and its intellectual concerns are related to the institution in
which it is located is to inquire into the very conditions of possibility of
academic freedom, especially in the new circumstances of the restructured
university.
Finally,
more recent thinking in the humanities and social sciences about the knowledge
industry and the institutions where knowledge is produced encourages
acknowledgment of the always already socially and politically inflected
dimension of university teaching. It is an older, problematic liberal idealism
that would segregate the university classroom from the political and ethical
tensions of contemporary life. To many of us, the freedom of the classroom is
always contested and claimed by competing ideas, passions, and interests; and it
is ethically better to acknowledge that and be open about the ideas, passions,
and interests one deeply cherishes as a teaching intellectual than to postulate
an implausible neutrality free of commitments. That openness certainly implies
openness to contrary arguments in the classroom and even an obligation to lay
such arguments before students; and an outline of the common justifications
given by politicians, journalists, and trustees for the attacks on CUNY would
certainly be in order in the "Teach CUNY" program--the whole
misleading discourse of standards, tests, excellence, reputation, efficiency,
relevance, and productivity we know so well. Authority in such a model of the
production of knowledge is even more interactive and student-referential than in
the classical academic freedom model.
Much
more might be said. We are all learning as we go along as academic unionists,
for whom "the union" is US, not an entity at 25 W. 43rd Street. To
make the union an active rank-and-file organization, to build the pressure for a
decent contract, means to rethink a good deal in our academic lives, including
our relation to students. The PSC means to do that very carefully and with wide
consultation, in our structures of leadership and in our press. We may discover
some unexpected sources of renewal as academics in the academic labor movement.
Let us know your views, and join us March 28.