Critical Dispositions

Evidence and Expertise in Education

Greg Dimitriadis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136882708
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Set against the current proliferation of global "difference" and economic realignment, Critical Dispositions explores the notions of "evidence" and "expertise" in times of material scarcity. Both have come to the forefront of national and international debate in education as "evidence" and "evidence-based" research and pedagogical practices continue as major trends in educational policy. Author Greg Dimitriadis maintains this debate is best understood as part of a broader rise in professional and managerial discourses in various aspects of educational research and practice. Each aims to control and contain some aspect of research and practice in ways that are increasingly specific and targeted.

As demonstrated through examples from critical intellectuals and artists outside the field of education, this current proliferation of specific, autonomous fields of inquiry and practice marks a much deeper ambivalence about our contemporary moment and how we understand it. Following Bourdieu and other theorists, Dimitriadis argues that educational researchers and practitioners today must be increasingly self-reflexive about the positions they take up in various fields of inquiry, what they allow us to see and to understand, what they blind us to. This kind of self-reflexivity, however, is becoming increasingly difficult today as material demands and dislocations are forcing educators to occupy particular fields in more specific ways. Unpacking this tension and offering alternative "thinking tools" is at the core of this volume.

Section 1

Dispositions Towards Evidence

1

Humanism and the Production of Expertise

A spate of recent popular commentaries and books have argued that all-pervasive neoliberal logics have colonized post-secondary education. Titles such as Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (2009), University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (2005), and The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (2008) tell much of the story. Universities and colleges are increasingly leveraging their intellectual capital to engage in private ventures, particularly in the sciences; they are increasingly entering into corporate partnerships of various kinds, including around student support and services; they are increasingly using contingent labor to fill teaching slots (particularly introductory classes); they are increasingly spending big money on “star” faculty; and they are decimating humanities and general education curricula in favor of more “practical” ones. The line between “non profit” and “for profit” higher education is blurring in ways that distress many.

On one level, this is a discussion familiar to critical educators. There is a long history of writing on the so-called “corporatization of education,” writing that has powerfully demonstrated the growing marriage between school systems and industry. Among other things, this work has demonstrated how schools are now less concerned with developing citizens who can thoughtfully deliberate the “common good” in the public sphere than with producing workers ready to take their attendant positions in the economic order. According to Michael Apple and others, this often means the production of de-contextualized, technical kinds of expertise and knowledge. From Bowles and Gintis (1976) to Henry Giroux (2005) and beyond, then, this work has powerfully demonstrated how corporate logics have wholly overtaken the functions of schooling at many levels. As this research and writing has shown, schools often work in service of reproducing capitalism and its logics, occluding democracy and democratic possibilities more broadly. Again, there is a long tradition of theoretical and empirical research in this regard.

On another level, however, we are perhaps seeing something new. As Shelia Slaughter and Gary Rhodes (2004) argue in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, academia has not been simply “duped” here, nor is it only “acted upon” by outside forces (as phrases such as “the corporate corruption of higher education” imply). Colleges and universities are actively producing corporate dispositions in new and unpredictable ways as they enter new “circuits of knowledge” which connect them both to other universities and various profit-driven entities. According to Slaughter and Rhodes, “The theory of academic capitalism focuses on networks—new circuits of knowledge, interstitial organizational emergence, networks that intermediate between public and private sector, extended managerial capacity—that link institutions as well as faculty, administrators, academic professionals and students to the new economy” (p. 15).

As neoliberal economic logics continue to unfold, universities are positioning themselves both to survive and prosper on this new terrain. Universities are aggressively competing against one another to attract “high-ability students able to assume high debt loads” (Slaughter & Rhodes, 2004, p. 1) while redefining their role as new economy “players.” Universities are actively marketing sponsored products (e.g., negotiating exclusive licensing rights for Pepsi, McDonalds, or Apple computers, etc.) to their captive students while aggressively capitalizing on the intellectual work of their faculties (e.g., securing patents and copyrights from ongoing faculty research, etc.). Slaughter and Rhodes open up an important discussion about the ways in which universities are not only responding to external corporate pressures but are actively producing institutional dispositions which allow them to compete with a host of other profit-generating businesses. Moreover, they argue, these academic institutions benefit both from public state-sponsorship through their non-profit status as well as their own private profit making endeavors—a largely unmarked though problematic nexus.

While Slaughter and Rhodes (2004) tend to focus on the institutional implications of “academic capitalism,” their perspective on “power” opens up a more nuanced discussion here. That is, power is not only “out there,” acting upon us. We are all implicated here. While these moves have clearly served to privilege particular areas of research and inquiry—those with grant-getting and profit-making potential—such a discussion does not let any of us “off the hook” as we fashion our own careers and trajectories. Indeed, one pernicious effect of “academic capitalism” is that academics have increasingly come to function as seemingly autonomous individuals—individuals cut off from broader communities and constituencies. While there have been pushes for “collaboration” in some research circles, it is often narrowly defined, a way to create specialized knowledge in service of funding “niches.” A kind of hyper-professionalization has come to mark much of our work today across any number of fields—even critical ones. Our responsibilities are now increasingly diverted from broader public good towards narrow specialties and sub-specialties—along with their attendant journals, presses, conferences, honors, etc. Survival for the neoliberal subject is now an individual responsibility, not a social one. As Bronwyn Davies writes, “since the individual is responsible for taking care of him or herself and not dependent upon society, such selves, in being cut loose from the social, no longer have the same responsibility to the social” (2005, p. 9).

The proliferation of “niche expertise,” then, is very much linked to the rise of the contemporary neoliberal university. This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, neoliberal realignment and restructuring is often associated with scarcity and loss. In counter-distinction, what we see here seems productive—the growth of field and sub-fields, specialties and sub-specialties, all linked to the kinds of active positionings encouraged and enabled by the contemporary university or “multiversity.” Moreover, the concomitant proliferation of expertise has been largely “apolitical.” That is, this expertise has been linked to a broad and disparate range of political projects. For example, those working on “progressive” or “critical” projects are often reproducing neoliberal subjectivities as they manage their careers—even as they contest the growth of these very logics.

These changes have helped constitute the very “structure of desire” among many academics and intellectuals today. Shared governance, as Cary Nelson (2010) points out, is a good example. Shared governance has long been a cornerstone of university life—the notion that universities are largely autopoietic organizations, with faculty members regularly cycling in and out of administrative roles and/or having active voices in local university decision making. Such modes of governance often demand extensive time commitments—serving on mundane committees, standing for and with colleagues for larger principles, doing local work, etc. With the rise of the neoliberal university, however, many understand—or more accurately must understand—their careers in atomistic and individual ways. Like the contemporary corporate worker, academics today “self-manage” their individual “portfolios,” always with an eye towards mobility. This often means taking up professional identities in particular fields of inquiry.

Extending last chapters’ discussion, this chapter looks at various modes of intellectual life that have marked the last several generations of academia. In so doing I hope to move past discussions of particular disciplines or theoretical constructs and instead focus on underlying intellectual dispositions. Such a discussion will help de-link this notion of “expertise” from the kinds of intellectual work necessary to take on the broad swath of concerns facing education today. This chapter will briefly trace the evolution of “humanist” ideals about intellectual work, through three different models of the intellectual. I stress that this is but one story that can be told here. There are surely other versions of how this “arch” unfolded in the 20th century. I focus on this one, as it will provide some key resources for the chapter that follows. I conclude with an argument favoring a kind of humanism that calls the notion of “professional competence” into sharp relief, as it looks to broader communities and constituencies.

The Rise of the Expert

I begin here with the veritable sea change that occurred with the rise of Foucaultian approaches to intellectual life during the late 1960s. For the early part of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre and other so-called “existentialists” focused on large questions and goals—including those long-associated with humanism. These include questions about the “human condition,” individual choice, and freedom. For Sartre, life was a “project” that demanded individual, political commitments. Marxism was the overarching political narrative of the time—the terrain upon which Sartre, Camus, and others struggled. Sartre was undoubtedly the most widely read and influential intellectual of his time.

This all radically changed with the work of Michel Foucault. Humanism and its calls for universal human projects became technologies of oppression. Individuals were no longer assumed free to author their lives. Rather, the very notion of individuality itself was understood as an historical production—one available differently to different groups. Marxism was no longer the overarching narrative of human progress for the Left. The very notion of progress was called into question, as local struggles came to supplant dreams of larger ones. The age of Sartre—and all that came with it—was over.

I am particularly interested in what this meant for intellectual life in the 20th century. As Michel Foucault noted, the transitional figure in 20th-century intellectual life was J. Robert Oppenheimer—professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley and inventor of the atomic bomb. More specifically, Oppenheimer marked a transition between the “universal” and the “specific” intellectual. The former was concerned with “rhapsodizing the eternal,” with “matters of truth and justice,” and writing as a “sacrilizing mark” (Foucault, 1984, pp. 71, 67, 68). The latter had a “more direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge.” While the former was a grand “jurist,” the latter was a more narrowly defined “expert” (p. 69). That is not to say, of course, that the “specific intellectual” had less power. Rather, he or she was a “strategist of life and death” (p. 71), not necessarily linked to the state. As evidenced by Oppenheimer, the specific intellectual could quite literally change the course of world events through specific kinds of technical knowledge.

Foucault’s notion of the “specific intellectual” offers a particular angle of vision on changes in late 20th-century academic life. Foucault understood the rise of “expertise” as linked to the rise of particular “regimes of truth.” He writes, “It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology,’ but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power.’” For Foucault, “the professionalization of intellectuals” can be understood largely in these terms—“the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects are attached to the true” (1984, p. 74). For Foucault, the modern university is an ensemble of “experts” authorized to mobilize specific truth-effects. The role of the critic, for Foucault, is to detach truth effects from social, economic, and cultural forms of hegemony (p. 74). This is a highly specific intellectual practice, one he variously called “archeology” and “genealogy.”

I am particularly interested in how completely Foucault’s notion of the intellectual—one I will take up in more detail below—came to so totally supplant previous ones. In particular, Foucault was writing at a moment (as was Bourdieu) dominated by Sartre’s notion of the “total intellectual.” Sartre’s vision of intellectual work foreground existential choice, human freedom, and the imaginary. It was a disposition that allowed him to think through and across a variety of social, personal, and intellectual issues with a broad range of discursive forms and tools. Sartre was less defined by his own relationship to the French university system than was Foucault. Sartre held no permanent post, while Foucault held a prestigious chair at the College de France. Sartre even turned down the Nobel Prize for literature when it was offered to him in 1964. Drawing on and extending the intellectual currents of the time, Sartre focused on the emergent nature of consciousness—how “experience” always precedes “essence.” Writing during World War II, Sartre called for a “committed literature.” As Gary Gutting writes, the defining experience for Sartre and other French intellectuals of the time was the German occupation of France. “This experience led Sartre to see political decisions in the absolute terms of loyalty and betrayal, corresponding to the stark choice either to support the resistance or to collaborate” (2005, p. 22). Individual experience, choice, and agency—all cornerstones of humanism—were all paramount for Sartre here.

These concerns were largely eclipsed after Foucault’s work began to gain prominence. As I will show, Foucault’s notion of the “specific intellectual” was extended by others in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Perhaps most notably, Palestinian American critic Edward Said came to define a kind of “public” or “worldly” intellectual activity. In particular, Said drew on Foucault’s concerns with systems of thought and the production of discourse but situated them in a more personal, humanistic criticism that spoke to larger social and political concerns. Like Sartre, Said worked across a range of genres. His earliest work was traditional literary criticism. Yet, over time, Said came to address the question of Palestine and the Middle East in more public, political texts. Among many other things, he also wrote a series of books on the nature of intellectual activity, as well as a memoir. But Said is undoubtedly most well-known for Orientalism (1978/2003). A text that all-but ushered in the field of post-colonial studies, Orientalism is an exploration of the ways Western scholars have produced a mutually reinforcing distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident” to understand the Middle East. Throughout this all, Said maintained very high visibility, both in his own academic discipline (he was president of Modern Language Association for a time) and in a broader public arena (where he constantly spoke about the Middle East). Said’s own interest in the production of knowledge—a concern he took from Foucault—was always wed to a kind of personal, situated intellectual engagement closely related to Sartre’s “total intellectual.”

Importantly for this book, I would like to highlight the different ways each of these figures positioned themselves as intellectuals and “experts.” I focus here on the “arch” of intellectual work—from the total to the specific to the public intellectual—that has so defined the last several generations of scholars. In each case, we see particular ideas about what constitutes “expertise” and its relationship to empirical material. Thinking through these examples will allow us a distinct and sharper angle of vision on the kinds of dispositions circulating today in education. This treatment of these three dispositions extends the impulse discussed in the last chapter—to open up the circuit of knowledge that has circumscribed discussions in education.

The Total Intellectual

Perhaps the most succinct (if controversial) statement of Jean Paul Sartre’s thinking as well as existentialism more broadly is his famous 1945 lecture at Club Maintenant, published as “Existentialism and Humanism.” Emerging from the horrors of World War II, the French public was hungry for perspective on large issues—good and evil, truth and lies, commitment and collaboration. As he argued, “Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual; and that is for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teachings upon the truth, and not a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real foundations” (Sartre, 2001, p. 38). For Sartre, the individual needed to face the world in all its ambiguity and complexity—to look for truth without recourse to “fine theories.” “What we are considering,” he wrote, “is an ethic of action and self-commitment” (p. 38).

For Sartre, such “fine theories” would invariably reduce humans to “objects” not of their own making. He continues, noting that existentialism alone is “compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object.” (p. 39). If nothing else, Sartre’s understanding of humanism resisted “pre-determined” reactions of all stripe. For Sartre, the human condition is constituted by and through action and interaction. Moreover, this condition can only be understood inter-subjectively. That is, to be fully human, one needs to recognize the humanity of others. The “cognito” is thoroughly social for Sartre. “I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself ” (2001, p. 39). He sums up, “What is at the very heart and centre of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity—a commitment always understandable to no matter whom in no matter what epoch—and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment” (p. 40).

The talk was a philosophic intervention with much broader social implications. Sartre articulated a world-view that foreground individual choice, responsibility and “answerability” and the goal of total human freedom. The specific “cultural pattern” that would follow could not be determined a priori. But it would surely be ground in a broad notion of “humanism” as an individual and collective project. For Sartre, the important philosophic questions of the time need necessarily be located in the individual situation. There were no human “essences” that could be explored outside of the emergent, lived lives of people. The mind itself—including its imaginative capacities—could only be understood as realized inter-subjectively. Both a philosophic intervention and a passionate call for humanistic ideals in “dark times,” it remains a powerful statement.

In years to come, Sartre would more fully come to terms with the “limit conditions” individuals face—the question of “structure,” to put it bluntly, as opposed to “agency.” As he said several times, the political horizon of the Left at the time was largely defined by Marxism. For the remainder of his life, Sartre would struggle to reconcile his humanistic and Marxist ideals. Most particularly, in Search for a Method (1963) Sartre discusses the complex intersection between the existential freedoms of the individual and the often encumbering demands of the social and historical. For Sartre, any social or historical framework which locks actors into pre-scripted and determining roles is inauthentic. In his discussion of historical materialism, he critiques a deterministic theory of history—“It is a priori. It does not derive its concepts from experience—or at least not from the new experiences which it seeks to interpret. It has already formed its concepts; it is already certain of their truth; it will assign to them the role of constitutive schemata” (1963, p. 37). Recourse to deterministic theories of any type are anathema to Sartre, as they look to distance us from our moral and ethical responsibilities and choices.

If nothing else, Sartre’s body of work highlights the ways in which our particular theoretical and practical frameworks cannot fully exhaust an emergent reality that always exceeds our grasp. “Existence,” for Sartre, “precedes essence.” As Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin writes in the novel Nausea (1964) (a novel I will take up in more detail in the next chapter), “Existence, everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence which is limited only by existence” (p. 133). The impulse to “be there” as a full participant in the social and its contingencies is paramount. For Sartre, this means both facing our specific material and social circumstances while ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Dispositions towards Evidence
• Section 2: Aesthetics, Accountability, and Collaboration
• Section 3: Policy, Value, and Evidence
• Moving Ahead: Final Thoughts
• References
• Index