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Abstract

The American university is in transition, witnessing major changes to its institutional structures and processes. While the 1960s and 1970s were decades of progressive democratization in American higher education, today’s university is more aligned with the economic theory of neoliberalism. Existing at the intersection of two dominant but contradictory cultural discourses, each with its distinct version of public pedagogy, education, and identity, today’s American university can no longer clearly articulate its ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic essence, vision, and mission. Its identity is dissociative, inhospitable to delineation and prescription, and it as such suffers a Dissociative Identity Disorder. This article starts by articulating the two constructs of Public Pedagogy and Dissociative Identity Disorder. It then moves to an exposition in higher education of the ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic contradictions between the progressive liberal democratic tradition and the economic theory of neoliberalism. The article concludes by stressing that a democratic public pedagogy in higher education should take seriously the causes and underlying symptoms of cultural dissociation, one of which is a cultural quest for foundational certainty.

Keywords

Higher education pragmatism neoliberalism public pedagogy Dissociative Identity Disorder

Introduction

The modern American university is in transition, witnessing major changes that are “structural in nature and global in scope” (Schugurensky, 2013: 308), changes that are “at least as dramatic as those in the 19th century when the research university evolved” (Altbach et al., 2009: 1).¹ While the 1960s and 1970s were the decades of progressive democratization in American higher education, today’s American university is more and more of a faithful disciple of neoliberalism.

The 1960s and 1970s was a period of democratizations in American higher education. Supported through federal subsidies, more students from ethnic and racial minorities, women, older students, part-time students, and students from lower middle and lower economic class started to have more access to higher education and consequently more realistic opportunity to climb the ladder of economic and social mobility (Gumport et al., 1997). This same period saw a rise in wider American culture of a progressive democratic discourse of inclusion and equality embodied in the civil rights movement. The university soon followed steps, becoming more receptive to critical and post-critical democratic philosophies of curriculum, pedagogy, and research. A progressive democratic discourse in higher education solidified during that period and many of its elements continue to survive today. All that said, the 1980s witnessed the rise of totally different language in higher education. With the advent of Reaganian economics, the American university started to adopt an institutional philosophy aligned with the economic theory of neoliberalism (on neoliberalism see Harvey, 2005), and today the boundaries between higher education and the free market are becoming more and more blurry (Kleinman et al., 2011: 275).

Today’s American university is then at the intersection of two contradictory cultural discourses, each with its unique version of public cultural pedagogy, education, and identity. Being a simultaneous space shared by a progressive discourse of liberal democracy and the economic discourse of neoliberalism, the modern American university can no longer clearly articulate its ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic essence, vision, and mission. Its identity is dissociative, inhospitable to delineation and prescription, and it as such suffers a Dissociative Identity Disorder. This article starts by articulating the two constructs of Public Pedagogy and Dissociative Identity Disorder. It then moves to an exposition in higher education of the ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic contradictions between the progressive liberal democratic tradition (exemplified here by work of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead on pragmatism) and the economic theory of neoliberalism. The article concludes by making some suggestions for a more experiential and less dissociative public pedagogy in higher education.

Public Pedagogy

In its most general sense, pedagogy is a cultural phenomenon that serves a public educational function. It is public pedagogy. Culture is pedagogical and a material of pedagogy (Biesta, 2012; Giroux, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c; Gramsci, 1971; Sandlin and O’Malley, 2011; Sandlin et al., 2010). Giroux defines public pedagogy as “the educational force of the wider culture and its ongoing processes” (2004c: 498). This pedagogy is then first cultural, acting through a variety of institutional and non-institutional cultural spheres and processes. This pedagogy is also educational, involved in the business of knowledge and knowing. Third, public pedagogy is political, making its own stance about proper ideology and the appropriate channeling of power. Public pedagogy is also instrumental, involved in the manufacturing of culture, and its “technologies” target the production, distribution, regulation, reconfiguration, and reproduction of individual and collective identities, agencies, practices, belief systems, worldviews, and power (Sandlin and O’Malley, 2011). Being cultural and political, public pedagogy is a contested space, recreated with every encounter with the concrete in human experience. Finally, public pedagogy could be either regulatory and hegemonic or emancipatory and democratic (Giroux, 2004c: 497–498). It flutters between “cultural production and … cultural criticism” (Giroux, 2004b: 63). While oppressive public pedagogy is that of hegemony and despair, democratic public pedagogy is that of “critique and possibility” (Giroux, 2004c: 500).

Public pedagogy functions through many cultural spheres including citizenship education within and beyond schools, popular culture, informal institutions and public spaces, dominant cultural discourses, and intellectualism and social activism (Sandlin and O’Malley, 2011). Of special interest here is public pedagogy of dominant cultural discourses. Following Giroux in his Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014), this article looks at two contradictory but coexisting dominant discourses of public pedagogy that have been and continue to be influential in American higher education. The first is that of a progressive version of liberal democracy (exemplified here by the work of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead on pragmatism). The second is neoliberalism as an economic theory acting on and through today’s higher education. Following Nixon in his Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education: Arendt, Berger, Said, Nussbaum and Their Legacies (2012), these two dominant cultural discourses of higher education are negotiated against their wider cultural philosophical underpinnings (ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic). Such an exposé will be suggestive of the modern American university’s identity crisis, its suffering of a Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

Today’s university is a confused amorphous institution. Schugurensky describes a heteronomous university which “mission, agenda, and outcomes are defined more by external controls and impositions than by its internal growing bodies” (Schugurensky, 2013: 306). Hermanowicz describes an anomic university suffering from “a collective breakdown of order instigated by a divide between the realities of everyday situations and the needs and wants for a future” (Hermanowicz, 2011b: 217). As early as 1996, a pessimistic Readings described a university in ruins which does not anymore recognize its cultural raison d’être (Readings, 1996: 5). Another yet suitable depiction of the modern American university, a university that is trapped between two contradictory dominant cultural discourses with contradictory public pedagogies and identities, would be that of psychological dissociation, of a Dissociative Identity Disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2000; International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, 2011).

In clinical psychology, a Dissociative Identity Disorder is a condition that results from “disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception” (American Psychiatric Association, 2000: 519). This inability to self-integrate leads to the fragmentation of personality into two or more rudimentary personality splinters. Dissociative Identity Disorder is as such characterized more by “identity fragmentation rather than a proliferation of separate personalities” (American Psychiatric Association, 2000: 519). These irreconcilable splinters of personality (alters) differ by a variety of traits including mood, demeanor, or even handwritings. Dissociative Identity Disorder is believed to be caused by prolonged childhood trauma (emotional, physical, or sexual abuse), and personality dissociation could be understood as a coping mechanism attempting to escape the reality of traumatic memories.

Ethics

Influenced by the tradition of the European Enlightenment, the ethics of pragmatism is rooted in a progressive and reformist humanism that asserts that the variety of cultural actors can come together, through reason and an innate sense of goodness, to solve their own problems and make the world a better place to inhabit. Pragmatism centers “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature … [and a] belief in the Common Man” (Dewey, 1939: 226). And to Dewey,

the permanent and fruitful outcome of a college education should be the training of one's human nature. This training alone is really practical and preparatory for life, for it alone is ethical … [and] only as all the studies of a college course find a unity in the human, in the social, do they become more than scraps and fragments. (Dewey, 1890: 54).

The ethics of pragmatism is ecological, taking seriously the need to develop and sustain the variety of cultural resources, whether an ecosystem or cultural carriers of democratic communication and action. “The hope for the liberal mind and the liberal college is not in the spread of liberal beliefs, but the hope for the spread of liberal ideas is in the development of the liberal mind” (Dewey, 1924b: 210).

Pragmatist ethics is communal. It is an invitation to perfect the art of living together and to promote a discourse of dialog, pluralism, cooperation, harmony, and unity. George Herbert Mead captures this communal emphasis when explaining that the pragmatist

principle … suggested as basic to human social organization is that of communication involving participation in the other. This requires the appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other. (Mead, 1934: 253).

Pragmatist ethics is also phenomenological and hermeneutical. It takes seriously local context and time/space historicity and denies any objectivism that “assumes the mind is capable of attaining real truth” outside the idiosyncratic history of that mind itself (Dewey, 1902a: 165). Finally, the ethics of pragmatism is critical and at its heart lies an invitation to get rid of all provincialisms and partisanships (Dewey, 1890). Describing what a good college course should be about, Dewey captures the spirit of this critical tendency:

let a man learn on this journey to lay aside the suit, the habit, of mental clothes woven and cut for him in his native village, and to don the foreign costumes. If he be called to wear again his old suit, he will wear it the more easily and naturally for knowing something of the fashion of other men's garments. (Dewey, 1890: 52).

The ethics of the neoliberal university, on the other hand, is egocentric and individualistic. The neoliberal higher education actor is discrete rather than united, a self-interested competitive individual whose main goal is material profit. Students are positioned against one another, competing for the higher step on the labor market ladder, and faculty worth is measured against scholarship’s receptivity to free market commodification and commercialization. Neoliberalism as such is anti-humanist, a threat to the very “divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart” (Harvey, 2005: 3). Such ethics is rooted in an economic anti-cultural worldview that “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (Harvey, 2005: 4; also Readings, 1996). For example, some of the metrics used today to assess a university’s organizational performance include labor market readiness, employment rate, post-enrolment earnings, and the degree’s return on investment (Ewell, 2010: 130–133). Instead of the university being a response to and a manifestation of the will of a peculiar concrete community, it today responds to economic impositions by the free market, the federal government, state authorities, accrediting agencies, and powerful interest groups. Neoliberal ethics lacks interest in collective cultural sustainability as neoliberalism suffers a “social amnesia that erases critical thought, historical analysis, and any understanding of broader systemic relations” (Giroux, 2014: 2), and as such should be understood the declining role of the university as a pioneering democratic institution with democratic vision and mission and commitment to the public, public good, and public service (Delbanco, 2012; Lagemann and Lewis, 2012).

Politics

To Dewey, “education and politics are one and the same thing” (Dewey, 1922a: 334) and the practice of criticism is “the theory of education in its most general phases” (Dewey, 1916: 33). Pragmatist politics centers a participative version of communal democracy that values diversity and creative agency, a “mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey, 1916: 87). Such politics is public, catering for “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1927: 15–16), and such an organic understanding of the public is at odds with “reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements” (Dewey, 1897: 93).

Pragmatist politics is also critical, taking seriously the constructs of power, politics, ideology, and conflict. It is suspect of all authoritarianisms, dogmatisms, oppressions, cultural reductionisms, hegemonies, and classisms since the aim of a democratic education is to “take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation [rather than] to perpetuate them” (Dewey, 1916: 119) and to dismantle the “caste organization of society” (Mead, 1934: 318). Pragmatist politics resists the variety of cultural discriminations, whether by economic class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, language, geographical location, religious affiliation, political preference, or otherwise, and it fights for social justice, equality, economic access, and cultural welfare. This is especially important in times when “it is easy to take boisterousness of thought and expression for earnestness of conviction; the thoughtless assimilation of opinion from an authority already, probably, second-handed, for strength and originality of mind” (Dewey, 1890: 53).

The critical function of the liberal college is to sustain “in existence an intelligence both emancipated and generous, both critical and sympathetic” and to provide the student experiences that will free her from “class, sectarian and partisan prejudice and passion … [and from] fanaticism” (Dewey, 1924c: 201). Such a college should also protect the ability of the scholar to direct the search for truth “without the interference of political, bureaucratic, or religious authority” (Dewey, 1911: 460). While some universities “exist for the sake of upholding a set of tenets agreeable to a certain class” and “the propaganda of certain doctrines,” free speech and academic freedom are the only guarantee against “propagandism” (Dewey, 1911: 463). A final mark of pragmatist politics is that of cultural praxis, and the purpose of a democratic education is not the production of rigid archival knowledge but democratic action on cultural reality, leading to that reality’s reconstruction, transformation, and reorganization.

The politics of the neoliberal university, on the other hand, is that of oppression and distortion.

First, the neoliberal university is oppressive, a property of the wider culture of neoliberalism and its project of “the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power” (Harvey, 2005: 119; on the rising material gap between different economic strata in the United States over the past few decades, see Institute for Policy Studies, n.d.; Oxfam, 2015; US Department of Commerce, n.d.). Such a politics of oppression in higher education should be understood as “a much larger assault on all aspects of the welfare state, social provisions, public goods, and democracy itself” (Giroux, 2014: 124; on decreasing state funding in higher education, see Mitchell and Leachman, 2015). Marginalization, segregation, and classism are the then hallmark of the neoliberal university (Giroux, 2014), and the lack of affordability, access, and mobility is not limited to the economic sphere but takes other forms as well (by race, ethnicity, language, geographical location …). Students are major victims of such neoliberal oppression, and this is especially true for that already vulnerable student population that has been on the rise for some time now, as the student of today is more likely to be a minority, come from low economic status, work full time, and study part time. S/he is also more likely to be financially independent, a family provider, single parent, older, and a first-generation college student (for example, see Aziz, 2014; Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success, 2015).

The neoliberal university student’s economic mobility cannot escape her residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure (Chetty et al., 2014; also see Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2014). Those students who do not have the financial means to attend higher-tier universities end up flooding low-tuition, open-access, two- and four-year institutions (Carnevale and Strohl, 2013). Other even less fortune ones (usually low socioeconomic status, minority, single parents, and poor academic achievement) end up in covetous private for-profit diploma mills (Hentschke, 2011: 18). Today’s student pays more expensive tuition (Mitchell and Leachman, 2015), and has less access to bell grants, affirmative action resources (Desilver, 2014), or need-based financial aids (Woo and Choy, 2011). She is in higher debt (Institute of College Access and Success, 2014), and more susceptible to predatory lending practices (Rooney, 2015) and debt default (Education Trust, 2015). Even when trying to escape cycles of economic reproduction through a sense of “self-initiative” and “responsibility,” the task seems less than easy. While in 1980 an undergraduate needed to work 21 hours a week for 52 weeks to earn enough to cover the average cost of attendance at a four-year public college, the number was 52 hours in 2012 (Blumenstyk, 2014: 60). Another group that is experiencing oppression is the faculty body. Contingent part-time faculty and no-tenure full-time ones are replacing traditional tenure-track academics (Curtis, 2014). Between 2005 and 2012, and at the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university (Lewin, 2014). Adjunct instructors in specific seem to suffer most, holding “academic McJobs” that “destroy lives [and] breaks the human spirit” (Nelson, 2009: 193 and 180 respectively). Some 25% of part-time college faculty members rely on public assistance for survival. The highest number is 52% and it is for fast-food workers (Jacobs, 2015).

The rise of oppression in the neoliberal university is accompanied by a mounting authoritarianism as a variety of institutional and para-institutional actors now exercise strong influence over curriculum, pedagogy, research programs, technologies produced, and skills developed. On the administrative side, while the percentage of professional employees per 100 faculty members was 52.4% in 1976, it has risen to 97.3% in 2009 (Vedder, 2012). States’ regulatory frameworks, federal government policy, accrediting agencies’ requirements, and business and industry labor preferences are all contributing to the erosion of the institutional integrity that the American university has for some time enjoyed. Today, research funding, agenda, and findings are increasingly dictated by market ideology (Bok, 2003), academic–corporate partnerships (Deluca and Siegel, 2009), and powerful philanthropic interest groups (Marts and Lundy, 2015; Thelin and Trollinger, 2014). Finally, a variety of new market players, include for-profit colleges and universities, alternative service providers, and a variety of non-traditional online programs, are changing the ecology of higher education and forcing the modern university to adapt accordingly (on for-profit universities, see Fain and Lederman, 2015; Hentschke, 2011; on online education, see Stokes, 2011; US Department of Education, 2014). Such an authoritarianism has a negative effect on academic freedom (Schrecker, 2010), faculty control and shared governance (Gerber, 2014), professional institutional autonomy (Schugurensky, 2013), the institution of tenure (Baldwin and Chronister, 2001), and collective unionization and bargaining (Flaherty, 2015). No wonder more and more stories are emerging of faculty and entire institutions comprising their professional autonomy and ethical integrity at the expense of pleasing some external stakeholders (for example, see Cummings, 2014; Elgin, 2015; Wildavsky and O’Conner, 2013).

Second, the neoliberal university is distortive, having little interest in versions of democracy that center understanding, interpretation, debate, inquiry, cultural critique, and political activism. John Sperling, founder of the private for-profit University of Phoenix, is illuminating here: “this is a corporation …. Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop [students’] value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit” (as cited in Donoghue, 2008: 97). More specifically, the neoliberal university has little interest in interpretive and critical disciplines, majors, technologies, and research programs. The emphasis is instead on degrees in vocational, technical, and professional fields favored by industry and corporates. While departments in the humanities and arts are the most hit by federal and state budget cuts, other more vocational ones continue to thrive (Schneider and Townsend, 2013). And even more conservative classical versions of liberal education and liberal arts are now “at the brink” (Ferrall, 2011: 156).

Being distortive, the neoliberal university cannot but refer to grand narratives and hegemonic dogmatisms.

Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’) can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. (Harvey, 2005: 39).

One neoliberal narrative is that of consumerism and entertainment. With its lazy rivers, bubble benches, tanning pools, climbing walls, big games, and gourmet food (Jacobs, 2014; KingKade, 2015; Newlon, 2014), the neoliberal university is more and more a site of shopping and entertainment than a center of liberal leaning (on the relationship between capitalism and entertainment, see Adorno, 2001). “As big money, big sports, and the culture of illiteracy, violence, and corruption they inspire make clear, schooling is no longer about educating students. Rather, it is about exploiting them when not infantilizing them in the name of entertainment” (Giroux, 2014: 124). Another narrative is that of the community, one built from the bricks of Logos, brands, Cheerleading, and fictional stories of unique selfhood. Of course, frail bricks are crumbled at the first occasion of marginal bad weather, let alone mighty storms of the postmodern. No less influential are narratives of economic mobility, democratic participation, and myths of divisiveness grounded in racial, ethnic, gender, political, national, linguistic, religious, geographical, and economic segregations.

Ontology

The ontology of pragmatism is naturalistic, best defined as “that which excludes everything distinctly spiritual or transcendental” (Dewey, 1902a: 142). Naturalism denies traditional dualisms like those of the self against nature and knowledge versus action. This pragmatist ontology is materialist, rejecting any separation between language, the cultural actor, and nature as “further advance will require complete abandonment of the customary isolation of the word from the man speaking, and likewise of the word from the thing spoken of or named” (Dewey and Bentley, 1949: 50). Pragmatist ontology is relational, transactional, and cultural since “human nature is something social through and through, and always presupposes the truly social individual” (Mead, 1934: 229), a nature capable of seeing “together, extensionally and, durationally, much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates” (Dewey and Bentley, 1949: 69). Pragmatist ontology is also experiential, constantly framed in peculiar time/space context. Dewey reminds us that experience is “the only method” (1925: 11) and Mead explains that

… psychology deals with the experience of the individual in its relation to the conditions under which the experience goes on. It is social psychology where the conditions are social ones. It is behavioristic where the approach to experience is made through conduct (Mead, 1934: 40–41).

Finally, pragmatist ontology is constructionist and relativist since nature is “a plastic material of human desires and purposes” (Dewey, 1929: 82) and “symbolization constitutes objects” (Mead, 1934: 78).

The neoliberal university on the other hand is a structural, rational, and functional entity that resists the flux and uncertainty of culture and the constructionist leanings of lived experience. First, the neoliberal university is presented as a structural organizational unit of analysis which stewardship is rooted in classical organizational theory, even when using the language of adhocracy and order at the verge of chaos (Etzkowitz, 2009: 54–55; also Ruben et al., 2009). This act of structuration aims to objectify and naturalize the essence of the university. Second, and in this “era of hyperaccountability” (Knapp, 2009: 1), the neoliberal university is rational, assumed to be susceptible to control and direction. This rationalization is possible, it is assumed, through scientification, technicalization, technolization, quantification, standardization, and standards-based monitoring, evaluation, and accountability. As such should be understood the language so dominant today in higher education of national data and data systems (like US News & World Report and the Princeton Review), accreditation, rankings (Wildavsky, 2010), strategic planning, continuous improvement, quality assurance, and spreadsheet models of efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, the neoliberal university is functional, certain about its exact role as an economic player in a free market. This economic, rather than democratic, vision and mission mirrors “a conscious effort of powerful interest groups to adapt the university (and education in general) to a new economic paradigm” (Schugurensky, 2013: 296). Slaughter and Rhoades (2004: 1), for example, describe the rise in higher education of an “academic capitalism” where different actors (faculty, students, administrators, and academic professionals) use state resources to “create new circuits of knowledge that links higher education institutions to the new economy.”

Epistemology

Pragmatist epistemology is problem based, targeting the identification and resolution of problematic situations faced by the cultural actor in her wider democratic cultural milieu (Dewey 1938: 59). This problem-solving epistemology always starts from and goes back to the concrete contextual environment of the cultural actor. The environment is “our environment” because “we see what we can reach, what we can manipulate, and then deal with it as we come in contact with it” (Mead, 1934: 248). To Dewey, the curriculum should be “psychologized” (Dewey, 1902b: 22) and “a course of study should be a course; it ought to be a flowing, moving thing, for its subject matter comes into continuous contact with the minds of the pupils” (Dewey, 1924a: 183). Problem solving as such is a naturalistic empiricist exercise in observation, hypothesizing, experimentation, action, and evaluation. It involves an inquiry that is always aware of its own fallibility in a nature of flux and uncertainty. To Dewey, “experience involves, first, an active experimenting with things” (Dewey, 1911: 448) and “ways of understanding human nature in its concrete actuality and of discovering how its various factors are modified by interaction with the variety of conditions under which they operate” (Dewey, 1922b: 321). Problem solving requires proper habits of science including those of appeal to evidence rather than emotionalism, skepticism rather than blind obedience, and a generous “hospitality of mind” (Dewey, 1924c: 201).

Pragmatist epistemology is actionable. One purpose of a college education is to “awaken the student to a sense of his own powers and their relation to the world of action” (Dewey, 1901: 312) since “only in this connection of knowledge and social action [that] education [can] generate the understanding of present social forces, movements, problems, and needs that is necessary for the continued existence of democracy” (Dewey, 1937: 184). Knowledge is instrumental and functional rather than substantive, “a method of active control of nature and of experience” (Dewey, 1920: 150), inseparable from intelligent action.

Pragmatist epistemology is suspect of spectator theories of knowledge and knowing. Terms like truth, rationality, universality, and objectivity have no meaning outside the peculiarities of the social situation. “Orders, relations, universals apply to intensive and extensive, individualized, existences; to things of spacious and temporal qualities” (Dewey, 1925: 325) and “knowledge that is ubiquitous, all-inclusive and all-monopolizing, ceases to have meaning in losing all context” (29). To Mead, universality is nonreplicable and lies in the consistency of response by specific actors across a specific intelligent social act (Mead, 1934: 146). And reason “arises when one of the organisms takes into its own response the attitude of the other organisms involved” in a particular social process (335).

Being reflective and intelligent, problem solving is reconstructive and educational. The educated is “a reconstructive center of society” (Dewey as cited in Mead, 1934: xxv), and all cultural institutions are emerging and always in the making manifestations of this problem-solving activity. Education is always “of, by, and for experience” (Dewey, 1938: 14) and its democratic purpose is that experience’s “continued reorganizing, reconstructing, [and] transforming” (Dewey, 1916: 51).

Epistemology of the neoliberal university, on the other hand, is that of grand spectator theories of knowledge and knowing. To be profitable, knowledge and knowing in the neoliberal university have to be “useful” across and beyond the contextual in human experience. They have to be disposed to commodification, commercialization, and marketing to the mass free market and its mass public (Brock, 2013; Bundrick, 2015). This requires such knowledge and knowing to be generalizable. Students are looking for “best” programs that appeal to labor market. Faculty are investing in “best” research programs that have the potential of being “useful” to the widest free market audience possible. And entire universities are looking for “best” management systems through which to insure that the rationalization and functionalization of the university are successful. Dewey reminds us, however, that such a cultural insistence on comprehensive certainty with the hope of appeasing a hunger for completion, security, and settlement is no democratic property. “Tendency to premature judgment, jumping at conclusions, excessive love of simplicity, making over of evidence to suit desire, taking the familiar for the clear, etc., all spring from confusing the feeling of certitude with a certified situation” (Dewey, 1929: 181).

Epistemology of the neoliberal university is ideological rather than scientific. Its ultimate purpose is to align with the needs and power of the economic elite, and

modern neoliberal economics is no less dogmatic than its nineteenth-century predecessor in resting on a set of simplistic assertions about the character of the market and the behavior of market actors … the point for neoliberalism is not to make a model that is more adequate to the real world, but to make the real world more adequate to its model. (Clarke, 2005: 58).

Serving the needs of an economic elite, the universalization of knowledge and knowing in higher education comes with a cultural price. Processes of knowledge production and actual knowledge produced—whether about curricula, pedagogy, research programs, or technology and skill sets—that take interest in the problems and potentials of communal critical democracy become “too expensive” and “secondary” (Freedman, 2003; Kezar et al., 2005). The purpose of the neoliberal university is not to bring knowledge and knowing to the lived experimental experience of the cultural actor, but to bring her to what the free market judges as acceptable being, reduced to economic jargon. Its function is not to get a community together to understand and act on its potentials and problems, but to individualize all communities and turn their members to efficient cogs in the impersonal machinery of the free market. Its mission is not to initiate and maintain reconstructive and educational action, but to reduce all action to quantifiable bits of labor which efficiency could be controlled, manipulated, and “improved.”

Aesthetics

It is at the intersection of pragmatist ethics, politics, ontology, and epistemology that pragmatist aesthetics emerges. Any experiential scientific problem-solving activity that serves both concrete needs of the cultural actor and the democratic wider culture, and that results in a concrete, critical, actionable reconstruction of the cultural situation leading to its humanizing and ecological sustainability is an aesthetic work of art. Nature is always uncertain and in the making, and the cultural actor is its potential aesthetic creator. “The esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (Dewey, 1934: 53). The enemies of the aesthetic on the other hand are

… the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience” (Dewey, 1934: 47).

Rooted in an individualistic economic worldview that had little interest in experiential democratic problem solving and anti-authoritarian critical ecological praxis, the aesthetics of the neoliberal university on the other hand is that of alienation and imposition. Trapped in a structural, rational, and instrumental cultural discourse of scientification, technicalization, technolization, quantification, and standardization that sees every aspect of higher education as capable of commodification and commercialization, the cultural actor of the neoliberal university is left very little space for authentic aesthetic improvisation or emergent uncontrollable eccentricity. The neoliberal language of grand narratives is by nature anti-liberal and thus anti-aesthetic. Striking similarities exist between the aesthetics of the neoliberal university and that of Culture Industry of monopoly capitalism as described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944). To insure both material profitability and ideological cultural production, monopoly capitalism refers to cultural standardization of a variety of cultural spheres, including that of cultural aesthetics. Monopolists do not “produce or let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their conception of the consumer, or, above all, to themselves” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944: 96), controlling “the needs of consumers-producing, controlling, disciplining them” (115). “All mass culture under monopoly is identical” (95) and “power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality” (16).

Conclusions

Today’s American university is in transition, at the intersection of two contradictory dominant cultural discourses, each with its unique version of public cultural pedagogy, education, and identity. Being a simultaneous space of a progressive discourse of liberal democracy and the economic discourse of neoliberalism, the modern American university can no longer clearly articulate a distinct ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic self. Its identity is dissociative, inhospitable to delineation and prescription, and it as such suffers a Dissociative Identity Disorder. While the progressive liberal university is an expression of voice, participation, and improvising, its alter (the neoliberal university) is invested in disciplinary teaching, learning, and authorship. Between the palimpsested and the doctrinaire oscillates the cultural text in higher education, a text that is becoming under neoliberalism more and more positive and alienated from the democratic needs and potentials of the common and their complicated realities. Dewey reminds us, however, that “Ethics and psychology are to pedagogy, rightly undertaken, what the theoretical study of scientific principles is to work a laboratory” (Dewey, 1894: 485).

A pragmatist pedagogy for higher education is reformist rather than conformist, ecological rather than contaminating, cultural rather than technical, communal rather than egoistic, public rather than private, and distributive rather than monopolistic. It is also experiential rather than generic, naturalistic rather than dualistic, relative rather than ubiquitous, experimental rather than ideological, and actionable rather than spectatorial. In addition, it is political rather than essentialist, critical rather than hegemonic, and activist rather than reactionary. Finally, a pragmatist pedagogy is educative rather than instructional, reconstructive rather than conservative, creative rather than banal, and emergent rather than certain.

While a pragmatist pedagogy takes seriously the gestalt of all the “curricular” components described above, many theoretical interpretations and practical frameworks of such a pedagogy have historically been reductionist, sacrificing complexity for simplicity, wholeness for fragmentation, and continuity for rupture. Still, Louis Menand (1997) beautifully captures the spirit of a pragmatism that evades such tendencies to objectification:

Pragmatism is antiformalist: it represents a principle of endless assault on every tendency to erect contingent knowledge into a formal system. To the extent that philosophy is an effort to erect what we know about how we know into a formal system, pragmatism cannot help acting the role of termite—undermining foundations, collapsing distinctions, deflating abstractions. (Menand, 1997: xxxi).

In the same vein, Gert Biesta (2012) argues that a public pedagogy should resist the urge to big reductionist theory thinking. Biesta is suspicious of both neoliberal like pedagogies of instruction in “what to think, how to act and … what to be” and of Freirean like critical pedagogies of learning that come with “a particular conception of political agency in which (political) action follows from (political) understanding” (Biesta, 2012: 692). Biesta is instead for a contextual nonreplicable pedagogy, the function of which is the experimental interruptive enactment of a concern for the public quality of time/space human togetherness. In higher education, avoiding reductionism requires applying public pedagogy to itself, promoting its reflexive application in instead of on experience. As such, this article does not aim to use a pragmatist pedagogy to propose specific solutions or describe specific obstacles that apply across American higher education or even across colleges in same university (such foundational claims would be anti-pragmatist). A pragmatist pedagogy instead should be used as a fluid guiding paradigm, one that takes a unique phenomenological and hermeneutical identity with every encounter with the idiosyncratic in human experience, complicated by that experience’s ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic “reality.” The more experientially coherent public pedagogy is, the less inclined it becomes to formalization, packaging, and transferability.

A pragmatist public pedagogy should also take seriously the dissociative nature of the modern university. It should address that university’s fragmentary disruption in consciousness, memory, identity, and perception. It should attend to the contradictions created due to the rise of different institutional personalities, each with its own institutional language, character, and appreciation of the good. It should apply itself to the manifestations of dissociation including cultural phobia, lack of trust, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior. Finally, a pragmatist public pedagogy should devote itself to unveiling the kind of cultural abuse that is resulting in the cultural traumas leading to dissociation. Such dissociation is after all nothing but a desperate attempt to escape trauma and abuse.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

Ali H Hachem is an assistant professor of educational leadership in the Department of Secondary Education & Educational Leadership, James I. Perkins College of Education, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas, USA. Dr. Hachem’s research interests include the philosophy, sociology, and history of educational administration and critical pragmatist educational research and practice. Dr. Hachem can be contacted at Ali.hashem0@gmail.com.

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The dissociative university: Pragmatist reconstructions in democratic pedagogy

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Public Pedagogy

Dissociative Identity Disorder

Ethics

Politics

Ontology

Epistemology

Aesthetics

Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Note

References