Slaton and Gordon articles for March 27

I'm impressed by Kihun and Nate's remarks. No specific response to them as yet.

From Slaton on the "Anxious Engineer":

The administrator quote about needing to fail large numbers of students in an open admissions environment shows the orientation of administrators to measurable results that can be presented to higher-ups, trustees, and accreditation agencies. If Deans are managers, then they themselves are being managed and held accountable. Pretty tough on those who are caught below them in the hierarchy.

The poor reception of affirmative action among professionals is parallel to their attitude toward unions. I had an engineering professor who counted as a liberal activist in local politics tell me that he could not belong to the Faculty Association because it would compromise him as a professional engineer.

About the issue of universities' resistance to providing remedial education to cohorts of minority students who require it, there needs to be research on how well the function of institutional research, especially the measurement of educational outcomes for students as opposed to degree production, is being handled in American higher education. No doubt the EPS folks are looking at this, but their work doesn't seem to be getting to people in other academic disciplines who need it.

Nice to see that Slaton has at least one cheer for the progressive impulses of the federal bureaucracy.

From Gordon:

Note his use of the Bourdieu term habitus at the very beginning of his article.

Images from Seinfeld and The office come to mind as background for Gordon's article.

Gordon's Foucault-derived notion of managerialism strikes me as control elevated to a value. Why control by management is off-limits in the workplace discussion makes no sense.

Practical experience showed me that coupling issues of respect for individuals with questioning management practices (Gordon, p. 21: "difference will only work as a guiding principle if it's linked to an antiracism that is explicitly antimanagerial") is effective as a strategy for getting some workplace accountability; management will do almost anything to preserve the fiction that their actions toward individuals are fair and divorced from any private agenda.

Gordon does not touch on the concept of "ownership" and how that muddles the discussion of management prerogative. The supposedly objective, rational organizational structure of American corporations and structures that imitate them is rooted in the origins of enterprises in patriarchal families.