THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS OF THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS OF THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

Lau re1 Richardson* The Ohio State University

I

I have not read a better narrative of the intertwined histories of human studies, disciplinary boundaries, the “culture of science,” and subjugated knowledges than Steven Seidman’s. De- ploying Foucauldian strategies, Seidman names the sciencehonscience binary as a boundary marker for social power, and “deconstructs” foundational discourse in the human studies. Enlightenment narratives about the progress of science and the West have “unleashed a relent- less will to suppress the traditions of multiple communities and concealed this cultural coloni- zation.” It is this (obsessive) “compulsion to erase epistemological and social differences” that Seidman calls “the political unconscious of the human sciences.”

When sociologists, then, claim their work as “science” they are enacting the hierarchical sciencelnonscience binary, authorizing their work and institutional practices as valid and true, while devaluing and marginalizing nonscience discursive practices. The “scientization of social knowledge” is thus inextricably linked to the “suppression of nonscientific knowledges.” Seidman’s goal is to help sever the link “between knowledge and a repressive politics of identity.” To that end, he proposes the blumng of the disciplines and a shift to epistemological pluralism. He touts “hybrid knowledges” such as cultural, feminist, queer, postcolonial and comparative studies and looks toward a “postdisciplinary culture of knowledge.”

His envisioned postdisciplinary culture is based on “pragmatics.” Sociology’s value (at least in the short run) would depend upon “what its discursive practices allow us to say and do.” Here, Seidman has in mind a moral kind of pragmatism, similar to that envisioned by James Dewey and William James, a kind of “postpragmatism,” also similar to that of Nancy Fraser. I, too, would like to see some kind of “postmodernist pragmatism,” but I don’t think we can get there from here. I don’t think pragmatism is a pragmatic solution to the “culture wars.”

Pragmatism is pragmatism. A “good” consequence for one group or institution may foretell disaster for another. Who judges the utility? Purposes and intentions are subject to different interpretations. Whose will prevails? Two questions, then: Useful for whom? Says who? Knowledge cannot be imagined apart from power interests. How then, can “pragmatisms”

*Direct all correspondence to Laurel Richardson. Department of Sociology, 190 N. Oval-300 Bricker, The Ohio State University Colum- bus OH 43210.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 4, pages 735-742. Copyright 0 1996 by The Midwest Sociological Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720. ISSN 0038-0253.

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possibly be so imagined? Even the liberatory pragmatisms, such as Dewey’s, finally, take ameliorative stances: They do not account for power (Leach 1996).

Elsewhere (1991) I have discussed Seidman’s pragmatism. Here, I will discuss the “culture wars” and their consequences for people in the trenches-graduate students, critical race, gender, and queer theorists. I believe the actual grounds of university life must be addressed, and that there is some urgency that we do so now. My intention is to problematize the university as the privileged, authoritative site for human studies.

This is not a move Seidman takes in his essay. Rather, in his last footnote, he voices what I call “the political unconscious of the university professor.” Seidman, apparently speaking to those already in power, reassures them that “the blumng of the disciplines, the shift to pragmatic rationales for knowledge, and a culture of epistemological pluralisms would not mean the delegitimation of the university.” Hmmm. Why not?

Let me name just a few of the problems with universities: access for impoverished, minorities, and physically challenged the dismantling of affirmative action: skyrocketing costs; satu- ration of the university by market considerations; new forms of corporate control; subcontracted labor; creation of the higher academic professional; attacks on tenure; hierarchical entrenchment; the reinstitutionalization of the part-time professor; legislative incur- sions. . . . Indeed, the university, under the leadership of its administrators, has been busy de- legitimating itself. Increasingly, the university is a commercial site to be bought, sold, and controlled through “Total Quality Management.” For now, the future of the American university is not Seidman’s utopian “culture of pragmatic pluralisms.” It is instead the culture of business values, ledgers, strategies, and practices. Business pragmatism.

Universities are increasingly “managed” by administrators who reward each other through huge salaries and perks. It is not uncommon for a faculty member’s income to double upon appointment to even a minor position, such as associate dean. Money, authority, status, and control are seductive. To keep or advance their positions, administrators follow the will of the administrator above them. The further up the administrative chain, the greater the responsive- ness to corporate America for decisions regarding the worth of programs, the allocation of resources, and the advisability of access programs.

Let me focus locally on my own state, Ohio, and my own university, The Ohio State Uni- versity. Here administrative pragmatists respond to the pragmatism of the board of regents who respond to the short run pragmatism of the marketplace. Few jobs today for history Ph.D.s? Discontinue doctoral programs in that field, rules the board. No jobs for English Ph.D.s either? Limit those programs too. Too many lawyers? Dismantle the part-time law schools. No matter that they have provided entry for black and working poor populations into the legal profession. And then, there are the regional campuses. Who cares that they serve as university access points for rural, poor, or remedial students. Convert these sites into pragmatic two-year technical colleges.

How best to run the university? Ask Ford Motor company, as The Ohio State University has done, joining in a-for the moment limited-partnership with it. In the “years of our Ford” the university has downsized faculty, compressed “units,” increased teaching productiv- ity through larger classes, higher teaching loads and factory work hours, sponsored disserta- tions on “marketing” the university, and eliminated benefits like the ombudsman and emergency medical services. The president recommends some “cutbacks”--like Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literature-because they are “geopolitical pork.” Most recently, trustees voted that campus buildings could be named by the highest bidder-er, con-

The Political Unconscious of the University Professor 73 7

tributor. Buckeyes will soon play ball in (I kid you not) “Value City Arena.” (“Value City” is a furniture and appliance chain store owned by a local family.) Given the largesse of alumnus Leslie Wexner, perhaps we will soon be renamed “The Limited Ohio State University.”

But my local examples are not all that local, after all. The president of Ohio State Univer- sity, Mr. Gordon Gee, has recently been appointed chairman of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities. The task of the commission of twenty-two university presidents is to make recommendations for implementation on their campuses. One recommendation “expected to come out in the study,” although the study has not yet begun, is to “combine [state] resources with private business” to make higher education more responsive to the needs of corporations (Columbus Dispatch, Jan. 29, 1996).

These university practices-and others yet to come in your university and mine-are justi- fied through pragmatic theory. An insight into this theory, and its implications for sociology departments, is found in Joan Huber’s essay, “Institutional Perspectives on Sociology” in The American Journal of Sociology (AJS) (1995). Huber was Dean of Social and Behavioral Sci- ences at The Ohio State University, and Acting-Provost under President Gee. Invited and then published in the second highest ranking sociology journal, AJS, her “Centennial Essay” reveals the kind of pragmatism that dogs the university, and that must be leashed in if Seid- man’s utopia is to be.

Huber writes from the biases of “a sociologist turned administrator,” arguing that because financial problems faced by higher education will not be alleviated soon, “prudent departments’’ must make themselves competitively sound (p. 195). Citing James Coleman, Huber sees academia as an “organizational anachronism,” with “the basic flaw” of failing “to exact control of faculty time in exchange for salary” (Coleman 1973, p. 383 quoted in Huber 1995, p. 199). “Faculty also control their classroom activities,” adds Huber (p. 199).

Provosts don’t like departments that are fractious, whose “disgruntled faculty and students. . . pester” adminstrators, and whose national reputations are shaky, she warns us. Provosts, further, want deans to reward “good” departments. Sociology departments, lamen- tably, have some specific problems that “increase the probability of attracting negative atten- tion from administrators, other departments, and the public.” These include a “tendency to recruit reformists,” public trivialization of research, sociologists’ pessimism about the “field’s intellectual vitality,” a “weak core,” and “some affinity for antirationalist ideas” (p. 200).

“Antirationalism,” aka “postmoderism,” Huber alerts us, is a problem for “disciplines which harbor it” because Administrators have little sympathy for views that “undermine the traditions of Western science” (p. 204). Sociologists susceptible to “postmodernism” are likely those who “identify” with the humanities, such as “members of groups long excluded from science [who] have come to feel that the dominance of research methods linked to West- em rationalism is a major factor in their exclusion” (p. 207). These include “feminists” and, if I read the subtext correctly, racial and ethnic minorities.

Moreover, these same groups-and some others as well-have created problems for the organizational governance of the discipline, Huber informs us. Some of their nonmeritorious representatives have even won high office in the ASA, says ASA past-president Huber. In- creasingly, ASA councils have “reflected the interests of constituencies . . . of nonacademic sociologists, political radicals, women, minorities, and sociologists as teachers.” “Militant” mobilization efforts in the 1970s won resources from the ASA, which they have retained. Others have followed, she laments, creating new sections and reducing resources for the ASA

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“core.” The ASA should not be using up its resources on these “constituencies,” says Huber. Rather, she wants the ASA to create uniform graduate education (licensure?) in sociology.

Huber thus describes the “sciencelnonscience” binary not as a boundary to be blurred, as Seidman does, but as an “unbridgeable” chasm. “What is at stake,” she says, is the idea of the “disinterested observer seeking objective truth with universal validity that is based on the notion of a reality independent of human thought and action” (p. 204). Thus, her essay pro- claims a seventeenth-century notion of science. Reinforced here, actually, is “a weird pre- Copernicanism, where the entire social universe revolves around scientists, and where all bod- ies with vaguely eccentric orbits are suspected of anti-science tendencies” (Ross 1995, p. 594). This quaint understanding of science would be merely ludicrous, and harmless, if those who espouse it did not control the university.

Focusing her “disinterested” eye on the “objective truth,” Huber tells us about the “real” “reality”-hers. There is no room in her construction for people like Seidman and me who both question foundational assumptions and believe in a world “out there.” We become “un- real’’ in her binary. Pragmatics provides the intellectual rationale for cleansing the discipline.

So what does Huber suggest sociology departments do? First, get rid of the “antirational- ists”; second, develop a “core” of required courses; third, act “civilly” (which apparently means suppression of intellectual debate); and fourth, establish sociology’s “disciplinary niche as a producer of knowledge” (p. 213). “What does the public get in turn for supporting sociology?’ she asks. The mountain delivers its church mouse: Sociologists “supply the knowledge to run welfare states” (p. 213).

Delivering knowledge to the “welfare state” is enhanced through “uniform [sociology] graduate education,” Huber infers. She argues all students should be “required to master the [statistical] methods needed to work in government or applied settings,” and all students should master her definition of “sociology’s central core: demography, social organization, and social stratification” (p. 210). As it is now in graduate programs, there are doubtful rigor, unclear standards, smorgasbord curricula, and “inappropriate graduate student participation in governance” (p. 206).

The effects of pressures for a postivistic, “uniform graduate education” are already being experienced by intellectually curious and personally vulnerable graduate students. Four examples-tales from the crypt-have passed over my desk in just the past two weeks. On a feminist e-mail list came this request from a first-year graduate student:

My department has been having a series of “feminist epistemology” debates . . . . The anger/hostility/backlash/defensiveness in some of the faculty and the increasing alienation and marginalization of feminist (and students pursuing critical race theory) students is troublesome to me (one of the disenchanted grad students). When I raised my concern, it was suggested that I organize the next seminar. While I am not altogether sure this is a responsibility I want, I am wondering if any of you have had successful . . . forums which address hostilities within the disciplinddepartment yet does not increase those hostilities or place less powerful people (untenured faculty or graduate students) at greater risk . . . . Please reply to me privately.


When I asked the student for permission to quote her e-mail for this essay, she asked for anonymity:

It drives me crazy that I have to be afraid to even speak, but it is realistic. Actually, even posting to [the listserve] made me nervous, but I can’t think of other ways of accessing resources beyond my pathetic institution.

Another graduate student, Eric Mykhalovsky, writes about what happened to him when he used an autobiographical perspective in the practice of sociology. Changing his “I” to “you,” he writes in Qualitative Sociology (1996, pp. 133-134):

During a phone call “home” you hear that your application for doctoral studies has been rejected. Your stomach drops. You are in shock, disbelief. When doing your M.A. you were talked about as a “top” student . . . . Later you receive a fax giving an “official account” of your rejection. Your disapproval, it seems, was based on reviewers’ reserva- tions with the writing samples submitted as part of your application. One evaluator, in particular, considered your article, ‘Table Talk,” to be a “self-indulgent, informal biogra- phy-lacking in accountability to its subject matter.” You feel a sense of self-betrayal. You suspected ‘Table Talk” might have had something to do with the rejection. It was an experimental piece, not like other sociological writing-YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BE’ITER!

Slowly self-indulgence as assessment slips over the text to name you. You begin to doubt your self-are your really self-indulgent? The committee’s rejection of your autobiographical text soon feels, in a very painful way, a rejection of you. All the while you buy into the admission committee’s implicit assessment of your work as not properly sociological.

In a personal letter requesting advice on whether to apply to my university, a lesbian graduate student from another university recounts:

I can’t do the research I want to and stay here. The department wants to monitor how many lesbians they let in because they’re afraid that gender will be taken over by lesbians. I’ll be allowed to do gender here if I do it as part of the “social stratification” concentra- tion, but not if I want to write about lesbian identity construction or work from a queer studies perspective.

And, fourth, there are documents on my desk pertaining to a required graduate seminar on how to teach sociology. In that seminar, a non-American student of color questioned the white male professor’s Eurocentrism. Following a heated dispute, the professor provided a statistical count of the racial distribution of students in undergraduate classes-80 percent are white. The professor, then, putatively said that instructors cannot afford to alienate students by teaching multiculturalism, that professors are uncomfortable teaching multiculturalism “crap,” and that white heterosexual males were being discriminated against. When the student of color brought his concern to the department chair and other departmental administrators, they proposed he “voluntarily” withdraw from the class. The departmental administrators then attended the seminar, supported the syllabus and side-stepped discussion of the race-


based issues. The professor apologized for breaking his own code of proper behavior in the classroom, but he apparently had not grasped the import of postcolonialism. He was model- ing his teaching model.

As a result, at least one graduate student has chosen to go elsewhere for the Ph.D. This student sent an e-mail to all faculty, staff, and graduate students to avert “idle speculation” regarding the reasons for departure:

It has disgusted, saddened, and enraged me that this department has chosen to ignore and avoid the serious occurrences of racism going on within it. Instead of admitting to these problems and dealing with them, the department has used its institutional power to scape- goat, marginalize and penalize individuals who dare to challenge its racist structure. Then those in power go back to their computer screens to study race as a dummy variable, not even realizing that a sociological process called racism is happening in their midst. . . . Students are advised to study social movements, not participate in them. . . . Here racism is not considered real sociology, as evidenced by students having to start “extracurricular” groups to do reading on postmodernist or Afrocentric thought. Meanwhile, at national and regional meetings, presentations abound on these topics, and ASA book awards continue to be offered to scholars who use these perspectives in their work. The department seems isolated and out of touch with all but a small portion of the discipline (quantitative, positiv- istic thought) and becomes the laughing stock when stories get out. . . .

I am leaving because, while I respect, learn, and appreciate the importance of things like demography and statistics, the same appreciation and respect is not offered here to other areas of sociology which are very influential in the field, and institutional power is used to prevent students from learning about them. As a result students leave ill-equipped for understanding any but a limited portion of sociology.

I sincerely hope that the prospect of losing more talented students, especially those who are students of color (who are not leaving because they “can’t handle it [statistics courses]”), will compel this department to reevaluate its capacity to serve its students of diverse backgrounds and interests more effectively. My career just didn’t have time to wait for all that to happen.

Feminist epistemology, autobiographical sociology, queer studies, Afrocentric perspectives, and postcoloniality are apparently so dangerous that the graduate students who have been exposed to these plagues must be quarantined, invalidated, or expelled from the sociological hive. Not only are departmental units “terminated,” but so are graduate students lest they reproduce themselves. In the words of one humanities scholar:

The rationale for this solution is that some even Higher Authority, possibly a Federal Bu- reaucrat . . . will conflate the vigorous intellectual debate and exploration beyond authorita- rian boundaries necessary to the greatest human endeavors (science, even) with “weakness”-and reduce sociology’s funding. To counter the most dire of possibilities, we must declare total war, Beneath the night and fog of “the struggle for resources,” we must cleanse speech and vision; we must discipline the Discipline (Lockridge 1995). *

Thus, we find expressed identical views of tyranny in Huber’s “Centennial Essay” and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Like the prison warden, the university administrator struggles to construct a total institution reflective of his or her authority


over-if I might be a touch ironic here-demographics, social organization, and social stratification-or, who can belong, how they will be organized, and what rewards and punishments will be meted out to whom by whom.

But there is a difference between Foucault and “The Centennial Essay” in attitudes toward tyranny, or power congealed into one position. Foucault sees it as evil, but once exposed, capable of being changed. “The Centennial Essay,” on the other hand, struggles “to eliminate all obstacles to those whose will to power has met with success, however they might have achieved it, and to cement existing Authority in place monolithically” (Lockridge 1995).

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I have not used my allotted journal space to discuss again the epistemological grounds of pragmatism. Rather, I have chosen to write about the actual grounds of academic existence, because I am greatly saddened by the fear, distrust, and dampening of creativity of graduate students. The excesses or crass pragmatism are hurting them, now-and their careers cannot wait for Seidman’s utopia.

Are there any alternatives for students? For faculty? Other ways to learn despite the minefield of the “culture wars”? Seidman himself points us toward one possibility. He re- minds us that the university has only been an important site for social knowledge for the last fifty years or so. Other sites, such as churches, labor unions, countercultures, libraries, public learned societies, printed materials, and public forums previously “served as key social sources for the making of social knowledges.” Despite their muscle, university social-science programs have still not managed to “effectively silence and discredit nonscientific rivals” or unaffiliated, independent intellectuals. Feminist, poststructuralist/postmodernist, Chicano/ Chicana, Afrocentric, postcolonial, lesbiadgay, and queer discourses have speakers, writers, social bases, and audiences inside and outside the academy.

What might we do? I propose that we engage in collective activities that delegitimate the university as the authoritative site for the production of social knowledge. I propose, for example, creating small interdisciplinary groups dedicated to interrogating the grounds of our knowledge and pledging ourselves-not to the preservation of the university-but to the preservation of the “freedom of inquiry” that originally made the university a site of knowledge making. These groups-not the university-can become the site for social knowledge construction and, I think, are about the only hope we have for a revivified university sometime in the future.

The groups I have in mind are not like the “tree model”-professors sitting under a tree and students coming to study with them-a model popular in the seventies. In the model I am proposing professors don’t have “trees”-we question “trees.” We explode the myth of the lone scholar; we are not isolated scholars with roots in a single discipline. Rather, we work rhizomatically, new growths pushing through the old ground, goodness knows where next.

I have belonged to such a group, usually meeting bi-weekly, for almost a decade. We identify ourselves as “feminists” and come from the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and practice-oriented disciplines. Acronymed PMS (postmodern studies), we read difficult texts that nudge, jostle, and shove us intellectually, supporting our mutual desire to learn from each other, to feed each other’s projects.

A new group composed of “radical theory” types has recently sprung up on my campus. I see them pushing each other into new terrain, and I hear how even those I had thought were encouraged to think in “postmodern pragmatic” ways are marginalized within their own disci-


plines. I have heard of many such interdisciplinary groups on the fringes of departments and campuses elsewhere. Conferences and workshops provide other occasions for links and sup- port. Through these kinds of interdisciplinary groups, I think, we will get through “the culture wars,” nurture graduate students, and keep alive for the while, anyway, the trust.

As to the “future future,” the ongoing social and cultural shifts are as great as the shifts from an agrarian to an industrial society, and faster, much faster. Talking of desired futures then I think is less “practical” than talking about the processes and preferred sites through which we can sever, as Seidman wishes us to, the link “between knowledge and a repressive politics of identity.”

Before any kind of pragmatism can be a solution, the authority of the university apparatus over the production of knowledge must be challenged by those who profit from it. If the political unconscious of the university professor-particularly those with as much intelligence and humanity as Seidman-remains tied to legitimating the university, the task is so much the more difficult.

How about a new foomote, Professor Seidman?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Mary Leach for her insights on pragmatism, Ernest Lockridge for his readings of this essay, and, especially, the graduate students whose experiences are the “core”-heart-of this paper.

NOTE 1. Ernest Lockridge, a humanities scholar who has contributed to sociology journals, wrote a letter to

the editors of the American Journal of Sociology regarding Joan Huber’s “Centennial Essay” (101: 194- 216). In that letter, he critiqued the article’s values, politics, and writing style. The editor, enacting “civility,” has not acknowledged receipt of the letter.

REFERENCES Coleman, James. 1973. Power and the Structure of Society. New York Norton Press. Huber, Joan. 1995. “Centennial Essay: Institutional Perspectives on Sociology.” American Journal of

Leach, Mary. 1996. “Dewey after Deleuze.” College of Education, The Ohio State University. Lockridge, Ernest. 1995. Unpublished letter to Edward Laumann, Editor, American Journal of Sociology. Mykhalovsky, Eric. 1996. “Reconsidering Table Talk Critical Thoughts on the Relationship between

Richardson, Laurel. 199 1 . “Postmodern Social Theory: Representational Practices.” Sociological Theory

Ross, Andrew. 1995. “Exchange: Pseudoscience and Anti-Science.” Nation, Nov. 25, p. 594. Seidman, Stephen.

Sociology 101:194-216.

Sociology, Autobiography, and Self-Indulgence.” Qualitative Sociology 19: 13 1-5 1 .

9173-179.

1996. ‘The Political Unconscious of the Human Studies.” The Sociological Quarterly

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THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS OF THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR