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.
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