Madison University Newspaper |
Mandy, Masebala and I had the opportunity to interview Henry Giroux, who is now a distinguished professor at MIIETL at Mc Masters, and he had very interesting things to say on this and other matters. (I will post some video clips of the interview once I have worked out how.) He added that there has been a huge increase in 'sessional' lecturers, ie. part-time lecturers, in order to cut costs and that these tend to earn below the minimum wage. This information is illustrated during our trip to the Madison, Wisconsin university state system of about 160 000 students, where the Governor of Wisconsin has ordered the education of posts by 400 staff members. He has also ordered a stay on student fees for four years. This is evident from the front page of the university newspaper. How ironic, that as strategies to increase the numbers of youth that have postgraduate education proliferate, the same governments decrease the working conditions of academics, support the idea of higher education as a commodity, and increase the cost of higher education. We need to watch these trends in higher education in South Africa. We might argue that we already suffer from many of these problems, but our administrators and policy makers do tend to look to other university systems, including in the global North, for bright ideas.
Henry Giroux |
Giroux shared with us his ideas about the task of higher educators, that we should be defending higher education and its role in advancing democracy in society. It should also ensure that students become both more critically literate, as well as more proficient in whatever domain they are studying. By way of example a graduate doctor must be made aware of his or her role in society, but at the same time, he would not like to be operated on by a doctor that has not been well trained. Also relevant for those of us who work in academic and professional development, is his appointment at Mc Masters centre for teaching and learning, MIIETL. He made the point that this field tends to be characterized by an empiricist approach to knowledge, and that his post at MIIETL is bucking this trend. I would like to think that the SOTL @ UJ project is another example of this.
Here is an interesting extract from the interviews on Henry's views on theory:
[Students]
begin with the assumption you have to know theory, then maybe a problem might
come along, you just impose the theory on the problem. That doesn’t work, I’m sorry. Even Stuart Hall, before he died, recently,
he said he was so disappointed with cultural studies because – you see cultural
studies was never meant to produce critical theory. It was meant to use theory as a resource to
address important social issues. I mean
policing the crisis which is really one of the hallmarks raised out of cultural
studies came out of a problem. The
problem of mugging, you know, police brutality in England. And I think I see too many instances of where
– don’t get me wrong. I think that
learning the geneologies of theory is important and I can’t imagine any
university not teaching it. Teaching the
geneologies. But I think we do it from
the wrong perspective. I think that what
we do is we tend to enshrine the theories in such a way that they now become
too abstract. They become rigid. They become isolated. You know they seem to exist in a world that
is removed from any sense of worldliness.
Any sense of what it means that – I teach my kids C Wright Mills. I talk
about Gramsci. I talk about a variety of theories that they’ve never heard
of. I don’t go for fashion except if
there’s something there that are really crucial that I think matters to
them. And my colleagues hate that, you
know. They want me to be – I talk about
things that are important. But I of course
I talk about Foucault. I talk about Marcuse.
W.E. I talk about DuBois. I mean, I talk
about DuBois before I talk of RanciĆ©res, that’s for sure, you know. And I think that the notion that the university professor is a celebrity following
in the footsteps of a kind of fashion theory is surely the hallmark of a dead
professionalism. That’s how I read it. I
read it as a dead kind of professionalism.
It’s political in the worst sense in that it undoes what the
relationship between knowledge and power should really be. It turns into
something static and obscure. I edit two
book series, three journals and, you know, the stuff that I get that is so
impenetrable that you would have to take LSD – and go on a trip of some
magnitude to be able to even penetrate it.
And I always right back and I say, why do you write like this? What’s the point. I don’t get it. Explain it to me. They never respond. They can’t do it. And so I don’t understand why we need to
subject our students to this.