Post-Oppositional Consciousness - Part I the Quantification of Everything

I am a Martial Artist, so I believe that sparring is important - it has its place. It teaches us that some of what we are learning may be applicable in a real life situation and it may even be deadly if applied correctly. Usually though, sparring is used for making "points" on an opponent. This also may have its benefits in terms of indicating either our own or our opponents vulnerabilities and weaknesses. It is important to learn the efficacy of our own forms, but at the end of the day, no serious martial artist wants to destroy sister/fellow practitioners.

In academic Life, it would seem to me that sparring makes even less sense. In the life of the mind, though, we are frequently encouraged to think "critically" = question everything and think our way through various proofs and situational appeals. Their are any number of Problems associated with this Oppositional Consciousness. We have been using it far too long, and far too destructively to get much further use out of it. I will >argue< here that it is time to move toward a post-oppositional consciousness in order to constructively change and build new structures for education.

As I have progressed through the Ranks of Scholars, I have increasingly witnessed the destructiveness of various forms of applied oppositional consciousness. The first move is the Quantification of EVERYTHING. While scholarship itself in many of the social sciences, and even in the hard sciences, has softened somewhat in accepting qualitative evidence or data - academia itself has attempted to become increasingly quantifiable. As I start to enumerate my observations, I realize that this quantification has slithered in to just about everything that we do, say or teach.

The most obvious example is standardized testing at ALL levels from K-12 up through anything that bears the possibility of being evaluated with a quantifiable test score: percentages and rubrics being the obvious translation tools. But, increasingly these quantifiable moments are being integrated into other forms of Scholarship such as publishing, retention and hiring. The number of journal articles one has published upon exiting a master's, or even an undergraduate program, has become part of the evaluation of candidacy for graduate and post-graduate acceptance. Databases whose whole purpose is to capture ALL of the information supposedly encompassed in a Curiculum Vitae make it possible to further quantify such information.  Increasingly, just as Colleges and Universities attain different rankings for various fields and nationally - justifying their "competitiveness", so do Departments within fields of study, as well as the judgment of the caliber of their researchers and instructors AND their students in those departments and centers of higher learning.

But WHAT have we PROVEN with all of this quantification? Our ability to evaluate WHAT ? What do we WANT to know at the end of the day? As various scholars - especially Anthony Giddens and Dorothy E. Smith have demonstrated in their Sociology, we are a society fixated on forms and/or templates that proscribe activity and behavior. Increasingly, through quantification, our Scholarship has become formulaic and almost entirely quantifiable. But, I ask is this Scholarship or the Measure of All Things?

The most obvious form of quantification and the correlation that is most eagerly grasped within Academia is the pay scale. Living in a capitalist / market / consumer system - one must have some measure to pay academics - Yes ? Pay differentials between private and public universities and colleges belie the efficacy of these forms of quantifiable differences. There are very few standards set here - other than to continually reinforce and inform us that women and minorities will always make less in every system, no matter how intellectually or academically advanced. Furthermore, almost all of the current systems in the United States reinforce the ideas that Sports/Entertainment figures, Administrators and, especially, CEO's are the top salary performers across the Academic spectrum. As my Business Professor regularly taught us "What you reward - you will get a lot of, . . ."

So, quantification is usually applied in the evaluation or assessment stage of various forms of Academia. It is supposed to be used as the proof / evidence of learning or that you have accomplished some form of output that is beneficial. As we increasingly standardize these outputs in things like Grades - we are given the numeric Grade Point Average (gpa) that is so central and key to the Students existence. And - YES - your gpa will be used to evaluate you for almost everything from suitability for jobs and employment, as well as scholarships and further education. About the only area that may still be free from the gpa hurdles could be the long term care facilities that many boomer faculty will be exploring in the near future.

The "Dead Granny problem" or >STUFF< happens

Death and the Academic

Every semester, I and my students face all of the serious problems of dealing with >TIME< and "stuff" happening. Now, I intentionally teach HYBRID classes. This means that I am NOT available every week for short blocks of time where students can pick and choose, which parts of my schedule are amenable to them (or NOT). But, we are also ALL caught up in a Society that values "busy-ness" or business (in both senses of the word) above all else.  I ask my students to work in small groups in order to address the organizational problems of large classes and my being the central hub. I KNOW from my years of teaching organizational communication that one of the most difficult issues in small academic groups is finding a TIME to meet.

Now, idealistic me thinks that since they have a set class time EVERY week - where we do NOT meet every week - why couldn't they schedule their group meetings at the same time as class would happen, IF we were actually meeting on a weekly basis. That is my very idealist version of WHAT could happen on the group level, but now back to the class problem. I choose the times the class meets during the semester, and obviously, try to make it work around MY schedule.

My academic life has been 'blessed' for lack of a better term with some short and a few long protracted illnesses of several very important people followed by death. Each of these events completely disturbed my work/life balance and several involved extensive travel. All of them came while I was responsible for classes - either as a Student or an Educator. I have either dropped out of classes or semesters as a student, or found ways to arrange my teaching around illness when I was the responsible educator. This is not always easy, and indeed much more difficult to plan than births, weddings and other life events.

As an educator, I almost always REFUSE documentation for life events and illness. I want my Adult students to have an adult sense of truth, honesty, trust and morality. If they have written up an Obituary for a dead granny a thousand times, so be it. If they are pulling the cover up over their  heads to have a day off - more power to them and congratulations on their wisdom in self-care. In any case, the consequences like their lives are up to them. They will have enough difficulties figuring out and sorting their priorities as they go through a life faced with hectic schedules and scheduling and ever increasing amounts of busy-ness.

I may post more on this subject as I ponder what I have learned from each of the significant illnesses / deaths in my life and as I encounter ever increasing material on the impact of death in/on ALL of our lives, . . .