The Great Shift

Below is the content that I have imported from another blog to which I regularly contribute. If you have the time or the inclination, please do visit it, and make absolutely as many comments as you wish. It is very important and interesting work that is being done, there, and one of my greatest hopes is that more people are apprised of it.

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The first plenary session of ISP 29 provided some background information about education theory, and about university responses to the shifts in economics and social stressors. I did not know much about higher education as a field of study before arriving in Salzburg, but given my five-year career as a citizen of the California State University system, I considered myself to be qualified to speak about it experientially, and to analyze the lag between producing a problem and identifying it, between identifying it and lumbering to fix it; and moreover, the synapse between the theory and the application is sometimes so incredibly wide, that it rivals the gorge between recognition and rectification. During my term at San Jose State University, I had the fortunate opportunity to participate on a very few faculty-strong panels, to work closely with individual faculty members on academic pursuits, and to provoke some conversation regarding the often unseen bits of university politics: the committees. But I never got to flick on the light and peer around the pedagogical room. I wonder--and wonder is the only verb whose meaning I might pick, because we undergrads are not allowed to know how most decisions on campus are made--how often professors and deans stay static on their theories of higher education simply because choosing to change would be too much work. Certainly, there is a bounty of examples evident to students which make us say to each other, Why does no one address this? How can it be that they cannot see this imbalance or the other, this deficiency, that flaw? And if they can hear, why don't they listen?

Tish Emerson, who lectured on the nature of university politics, mentioned quite poignantly that "moving from the edges to the center doesn't just change you, it changes the center." In context, Emerson seemed to be charging the university faculty in attendance with actively engaging the groups who currently rest on the "fringes" of the institution. As the conversation around developing this archetype of "student as global citizen" begins to build momentum and to take a discernible shape, this mandate is an important one to keep in mind. After all, it seems to me that if there is a fringe, we must infer that there is some group that is less welcome and perhaps included less often than others. And if we exclude some types some of the time, how, then, can we consider ourselves to be global citizens? This prescription seems to be self-evident to me, and it met with general affirmation from each of the audience members; it was certainly worth making public, so that the idea remains in the forefront and acts as a lens through which to scrutinize the projects that each university will produce.

But surely, when the term "fringe" comes about, we cannot settle for thinking that this is a reference to one economic class or religious sect or cultural background; it is not a term that necessarily recalls an academic discipline or sexual orientation, a language or belief or a custom or any other political stripe. I fall into the traditionally empowered set of virtually every classification, so I am certainly not in a position to complain about personal disenfranchisement. But in my experience, when the university is the setting, sometimes the "fringe" group is the students themselves.

The awkward part for students, I feel, is that much of the important activity takes place behind a sort of administrative curtain, which shrouds from student input all of those decisions which will result in drastic changes to student life. It was my tiny experience that I had a voice, that its use was encouraged, and that its quality was nurtured. But many of my peers, who eventually became frustrated by the confusing maze that can be university bureaucratic procedure, simply grew tired of using that voice to affect any sort of change on our own behalf. I very often felt that I could raise a concern, but that it was as if I was talking into a pillow: the hum of my concern was inaudible, and it went unheeded. I realize that as struggling undergraduates, we may not be able to provide sharp and critical commentary on the university's current or proposed pedagogy, but we are certainly able to tell how the decisions that the faculty make are affecting our days on campus, the quality of our degrees, and our general satisfaction with the institution. It is manifest that we, the students, have neither the training nor the experience to be able to make high-level decisions, but should we not have input? If the administrators are to take Emerson's advice, perhaps the first step would be something of an inventory of all major panels to whom it is charged to make influential policy decisions, and to then examine how much input students are able to offer to the panels; or alternatively, take account of how many of the staple committees in academic affairs or student affairs are chaired by faculty who are champions of student affection, instead of an administrator with whom no student can identify? I just loved my experience at San Jose State. The degree of diversity that I experienced there, culturally and ideologically, was fantastic. My most fervent wish for that institution--and any like it--is that future students will be able to reflect on their tenures, and feel that they were mixed into the center, a part of what the university was.