I’ve been noticing something about composition studies lately. It’s an attitude about conventional prose that sometimes looks like resentment to me. I’m sure I’m misunderstanding it in its particular manifestations, especially when I detect it in professional writing instructors, but I certainly sometimes see it in students, and even established scholars, and here I can have a long enough conversation with them to be pretty sure that they have misunderstood the problem in a way that pitches them less than constructively against it. They have a bad attitude, we might say.

In a nutshell, they think of prose as a requirement rather than a resource. They feel constrained by the demand to compose themselves in individual orderly paragraphs that each supports, elaborates or defends one thing they have good reasons to believe is true. They think that the fact that it doesn’t allow them to express their whole being, all at once, with perfect authenticity, is some sort of criticism of this one particular obligation that they have. They forget that the conventions of scholarly prose were developed to facilitate communication between scholars, not to inhibit it. They fail to appreciate the usefulness of familiar patterns in the presentation of our results to each other, especially when those results were arrived at by the use of recognized methods with the aim of improving established theories. Prose is, first and foremost a promise of something, not a demand. What is required of us is simply that we make our knowledge available to each other as a resource.

They only usually feel this way for a moment. I can normally talk them down from the precipice before they throw their research to the winds of New Literary Forms and begin to write dialogues, or poems, or even comic books. I try to tell them that writing prose, however hard it may be to do well, is easier to do at least competently than these higher arts. Much more importantly, it is easier to understand. It it is kinder to your readers, your peers, to tell them what you think in coherent paragraphs arranged to add up to a larger thesis. The reader can examine your ideas one at a time and make of them what they will. They can compare your reasons for thinking something with their own reasons for thinking the same or the opposite. They can pick your ideas up and put them down and use them as they wish to help them along in their own projects. They are not being asked to have a profound transformational experience when they read your prose, they are merely being given some things to think about and, with time, new knowledge to add to their own.

When we foreground academic “requirements” we make the work of writing less enjoyable than it needs to be. But, ironically, the best way to put them into the background is to incorporate them explicitly into our process. Some people feel constrained by an 8000 word limit on their articles. But in what sense is it a limit? Isn’t it just because they want to say too much on this particular occasion, to have too “total” an impact on the mind of the reader, to dominate it too completely, that they want more words to work with? To see what I mean, think of another requirement that can be usefully converted into a resource: the deadline. If I give you a week or a month or a year to write something, what does that tell us if we haven’t decided what you are going to write yet? And why not just reverse our thinking here and choose something to write about that we can reasonably complete within the given amount of time, the given amount of words.

What we need is a subject to write about that fits comfortably into the time and space we have been allotted or (as is more often the case) the time and space we have allotted ourselves to work. This takes an exercise of judgment and that judgment can be developed over time and through practice. This why I encourage writers to learn to master a single moment. At the end of one day choose one thing you know well enough to write a single paragraph about at the start of the next. Then spend 18 or 27 minutes writing it followed by a two or three minute break. Get on with your day. (That could be another paragraph, if you had decided that the day before as well. You could write up to nine paragraphs this way in three hours.) With time, you get better at choosing just the right thing to write about — a paragraph’s worth of your knowledge. The writing moment becomes more and more enjoyable as a result.

We begin to think of the dimensions of the paragraph, not as requirements or restrictions, but as resources. We have at least six sentences and at most 200 words at our disposal. We have exactly 27 minutes to bring it together. We are freed from distractions and interruptions as we write. We have one job and the time we need to do it well. We should feel free here, wealthy even, not confined to the cell of a debtor’s prison.

I try to help people shape their prose faculty, their facility with prose. About a week ago Greg Ashman tweeted an NPR interview about the “science of reading,” which occasioned mixed feelings in me. It’s always nice to hear science confirm one’s teaching philosophy and, though I don’t teach reading to grade schoolers, but writing to university students and scholars, I find “phonics” to be both a compelling theory and a useful practice. When students want to know whether or not they are “doing it right”, i.e., whether or not they are writing well, I tell them to read their paragraphs out loud. Even better, I tell them to get a classmate to read it out loud to them. The way a paragraph sounds, the ease with which it comes off the page, tells you a great deal about how well it is written.

But I’ve also long been skeptical about the scientific study of ordinary cognitive abilities like reading and writing.  Claudio Sanchez introduces his interview with Mark Seidenberg with this observation:

Mark Seidenberg is not the first researcher to reach the stunning conclusion that only a third of the nation’s schoolchildren read at grade level. The reasons are numerous, but one that Seidenberg cites over and over again is this: The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child’s brain.

At first pass, this seems like a reasonable point. But suppose I said that only one third of the nation’s school children eat a healthy diet. And suppose I explained this by way of a “disconnect” between what kids are fed and what the latest research shows us about how foods and beverages actually affect the brains of children. The research may be perfectly sound (or it may not) but did we really need brain research to understand what children should eat? This becomes still more clear when we hear what the science actually shows.

Success in reading depends on linking print to speech. There’s a massive amount of behavioral research, neuroimaging research, on brain organization and brain development, which conclusively shows that skilled reading is associated with children’s spoken language, grammar and the vocabulary they already know. It’s about teaching kids the correspondence between the letters on a page and the sounds of words.

This sounds very “old school” to me and (as with all things old-school) immediately sensible. What should puzzle us is that grade-school teaching was ever disconnected from this insight. And this is where things get tricky for me. I want to celebrate Seidenberg for speaking the truth to teachers, but I fear that the problem itself arises because the teaching profession is, increasingly, guided by research. If teachers had been able to maintain autonomy over their own teaching methods, they would never have abandoned the close connection between learning to read and reading out loud. And then I wouldn’t have to teach students to read out loud when learning how to write clear, scholarly prose. It would just be natural.

I don’t know much about the scientific literature on reading at the grade school level, so I don’t know exactly when exactly what went wrong. But  I do suspect that the distance between the spoken and the written word grew substantially under the so-called “post-modern” conditions that were inspired by Derrida’s “deconstruction” of “logocentrism”. At one level, after all, it was precisely an attempt to free the written word from its servitude to speech. I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that complaints about the “turgidity” of contemporary academic prose are often traced back to Derrida’s influence. And it can certainly be demonstrated that composition studies has been profoundly affected by this influence. Indeed, I’m increasingly confident that literacy studies has been deconstructed as well, so it would not surprise me to find that grade-school literacy practices have been deliberately freed from the shackles of logocentrism. It would not surprise me if this can be shown to have had a detrimental effect on the reading level of school children.

My mixed feelings about Seidenberg’s suggestion, then, stem, not from any disagreement I have with him, but from the authority that science increasingly has over teachers. I don’t think teachers should adopt phonics on the advice of science, but on the counsel of common sense. (Indeed, it was also common sense that should have pushed back against the “ideological turn” in literacy studies and the “process turn” in composition studies.) It has never really made sense to separate writing from speech entirely–to let writing live a life of its own, independently of the sound that our words make. It only made sense after we taught ourselves to trust “research” more than the evidence of our own senses. Or rather, at that point we had begun to happily believe things we didn’t understand, to adopt practices that didn’t really makes sense to us, because one or another “study” had “shown” that some new pedagogy was needed to get us “beyond” traditional teaching methods. I don’t think it made things easier.

I doubt if a man deserves freedom until he can get along without being being cow-herded.

“The art,” says my venerable colleague once Vorticist W. Lewis, “of being ruled”! The art of not being exploited…

(Ezra Pound)

I recently came upon a pointed critique of “neoliberalism” in university administration on Twitter: “Academics aren’t ’employees’ and we don’t work with/for our ‘managers’.” That’s not literally true, of course. Academics do usually collect a paycheck and enjoy a not insignificant package of benefits. They also normally answer to a research director, department head, dean or some sort of president. They are governed by a board, which is responsible to “stakeholders” of some kind, often simply the citizens whose taxes fund the operation. To be an academic is, in that sense, to have an ordinary corporate job.

But the tweet I’m thinking of was trying to suggest a less ordinary picture of the work of an academic. “As an academic, I work with/for students, the international research community, local community and industry partners, [and] the future of humankind.” It was in this sense, it argued, that academics aren’t “employees” as we know it. Presumably, then, we would not say the same about a sales representative working for a major pharmaceutical firm. Presumably, indeed, a sales representative working for a major pharmaceutical firm would not tell neoliberalism to “fuck off” for the same reasons.

But is that presumption true? Suppose we tweak the list of stakeholders a little: “As a pharma rep, I work with/for patients, the international medical community, local community and industry partners, and the future of humankind.” Isn’t there a perfectly good sense in which that is true? Isn’t it entirely legitimate for the employees of Big Pharma to think of themselves in these terms? Is it that much more naive for them to think this way than it is for the (not-)employees of Big Academia?

When people deride “neoliberalism” in the universities they usually mean the increasingly managerial culture that shapes how their work is organized. I agree with Joseph Heath that the term functions mainly to shift the blame onto an abstract entity that can’t defend itself–one that no one is, in fact, prepared to speak in defense of. But where Heath suggests that it might be better to engage in real arguments with libertarians than to “critique” the influence of neoliberalism, I would suggest talking directly about management. I think we too often, and too easily, blame “neoliberalism” for the consequences of what is, at the end of the day, simply bad management. “Managerialism” (which we might define as the ideology that promotes management for its own sake) is certainly at the root of countless bad management decisions; but the solution is not to tell the ideologues to fuck off. To be sure, that’s a pretty good start, but the real revolution will come when the managers smarten up.

What I want to call “academic exceptionalism” is the view academic work is unlike all other kinds of work. I cultivate a version of this attitude myself when I say that universities should be good places, indeed, exceptionally good places, for smart and curious people to thrive. (Let pleasant and ambitious people thrive elsewhere, I say.) But I think it is misapplied when we say that academics are neither “employed” nor “managed”, when we suggest that being managed is somehow beneath the dignity of academics in a way that does not (or should not) humiliate a corporate employee.

The problem in universities, I would say, is mainly that a new managerial culture has been imposed too quickly and is being implemented by people who have limited management skills (they are mainly academics) or limited academic experience (managers “brought in” from the corporate sector). That is, I disagree with the “neoliberalism” diagnosis, though I lament many of the same ills that plague us today. As universities grew, they needed management that looked more like that of a corporation. It was badly implemented and the results are often less than ideal. But rejecting “managerial culture” as such isn’t the solution.

There is managerial excess and it should be challenged. But it’s everywhere and equally bad. And serving our stakeholders directly without the mediation of a manager is more stressful than many academics like to admit. None of their “bosses”–our students, colleagues, collaborators, editors–know what the others are demanding, and what the “future of humankind” demands of us is downright horrifying to consider! A good department head or program director, who reduces our complexities to manageable contingencies, is worthy of respect, and an incompetent one should be returned to the ordinary academic labor they’re more suited for.  When “neoliberalism” is used to cover all the effects of “managerial culture” on the university, it actually ends up providing ideological cover for  bad management. Creeping managerialism becomes an excuse for crappy management.

Wyndham Lewis published The Art of Being Ruled almost a century ago. Two and a half millennia before that, Lao Tzu suggested that “ruling a large state is like cooking a small fish.” (Think on it a bit. I’ll unpack it, or unpick it, in a later post.) Academics should not eschew management; they should learn how to do it well. They should not reject “neoliberalism” but earn the academic freedoms they enjoy. At the end of the day, though they may be under new management, they are employees after all. At the end of the day, like their managers, they go home.

These are two things you have to acknowledge. If someone asks you where you got your information from, you have to tell them. You may have learned something just from reading a book or you may have gleaned it from careful analysis of data. You may have happened on a long-forgotten document in an archive. Whatever is the case, you have a story to tell about how you know something. If you are a scholar, other people have a perfectly legitimate interest in that story. If you refuse to share it, you have stopped behaving like a scholar. Even telling someone that you don’t know where you got it (if you in fact don’t remember) is a (true) story about the basis of your claim. Being a scholar means having to be honest about that.

The same goes for your mistakes. If someone points out that you’ve gotten something wrong, you have an obligation as a scholar to do something about that. You have to acknowledge the mistake and you have to try to correct it. This also means that you have to check whether it affects the general conclusions you’ve reached. Don’t assume (or pretend) that it doesn’t matter. “When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter,” Andrew Gelman reminds us, “it makes you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all.” You seriously undermine your credibility by not taking people who think you’re wrong seriously. If they do spot a mistake, you really lose us if you act like it’s of no importance to you. Why did you assert a fact that it’s of no importance to you to be right about?

Remember Wayne Booth’s story about “the two standard tutorial questions at Oxford”: “What does he mean?” and “How does he know?” Make sure you know the answers to those questions. Think of them as answers to the questions, “How could I be wrong?” and “Where can I find more information?” That is, if you know a thing you also know how things could be different, and you know how to find out whether they have changed and how similar things are now arranged. You are not just saying things that other people can take or leave, believe or reject. You are proposing to discuss these things with people whose opinions you respect. Scholarship is an ongoing conversation among people who are mutually committed to acknowledging both their sources and their errors.

Philosophers have long thought of knowledge as a special case of belief. The idea is that in order to know something you have to believe that something is the case. It also has to actually be the case, which is just to say that the belief has to be true. Finally, you have to understand why it is true; you have to have a justification for believing what you believe. While many issues can still be raised, this definition of knowledge as “justified, true belief” offers a nice heuristic for deciding whether you, as an individual, know something. In this post, however, I want talk about what we can call “epistemic institutions”, i.e., social arrangements that support knowing and believing.

I’m thinking especially of the institutions* of journalism and education. These institutions shape what we think, they direct our “epistemic” states. But it recently occurred to me that we do well to distinguish between institutions that help us to know the truth of things and institutions that aim merely to get us to believe that particular things are true. The difference, it seems to me, is that which exists between journalism and propaganda, education and indoctrination.

Now, it should be obvious that no organization* would identify itself as a propaganda machine or indoctrination center if its aim was to actually get us to believe something. It would say it was engaged in journalism or education. So it is on us to make the necessary distinction, i.e., to exercise critical judgment. What then are the criteria for deciding whether or not an organization is engaged in journalism or propaganda, education or indoctrination? When we open a newspaper or enter a classroom, how do we know whether we are being supported in our search for knowledge, or being manipulated into believing something? From the other side, when we sit down to write an article or stand up to begin a lecture, how do we know what we’re doing? Are we journalists or propagandists? Are we educators or indoctrinators?

More instrumentally, suppose we wanted to become good at any of these things. (I may find it distasteful, but is it really my place to say that propaganda and indoctrination are always bad things?) I think it would be good not to kid ourselves that we are doing one thing when we’re really doing another.

Obviously, from the point of view of immediate action, a belief is as good as knowledge. If I falsely believe that a threat is imminent or that a reward awaits I will be guided to the same action that I would take if I were right. The difference lies in what the consequences of that action will be, how successful it will be. (This is why pragmatists sometimes tell us that “the truth is what works”; a true belief is simply one that guides action towards its desired outcome.) Since knowledge is a species of belief, an educator’s immediate effect on me may be indistinguishable from an indoctrinor’s. Both will get me to believe something. How can I tell the difference between the processes that got me into this state of belief? Or can I, perhaps, tell the difference between the states of belief themselves?

I think the most important clue is the role that criticism played in the formation of your belief. Another is whether the soi-disant journalist or educator cares very much what you end up believing. Was the belief you formed at any point challenged? Were you afforded a means to make up your own mind?

It’s relatively easy to decide whether your situation is a “critical” occasion. Try asking some questions. “How do you know?” is a classic question. If your instructor immediately takes this as though it’s a polemical one, you might be dealing with an ideologue (which we can take as a covering term for propagandists and indoctrinators). Also, you should be skeptical (i.e., less disposed to believe them) if they answer this question by invoking their authority rather than telling you what their evidence is and how they got it. My favorite example of this is a professor I once heard answer a sincere question from a student about his method by explaining where he got his millions in funding from. Education and indoctrination have very different “foundations”. If drawing attention to them immediately causes a crisis, you’re not going to be able to do much in the way of critical thinking.

The other question is whether your instructor leaves you a dignified place of disagreement. Do they imply that you are either stupid or evil if you don’t believe what they are trying to tell you? Or are they content to lay out a set of arguments and let you draw one of several conclusions, including (as per the previous paragraph) the possibility that some of those arguments are unfounded? Someone who truly knows something will be patient with your attempts to learn it; they know themselves how difficult it is to understand. Someone who has merely been instructed that something is “true” will be distressed (and perhaps disgusted) when you do not process the instruction to “Believe!” as easily as they did. An ideologue is someone who thinks you should believe things even if you don’t understand them. A teacher is someone whose primary aim is to get you to understand something. Only that way can you also know when you finally come to believe.

_________

*A quick terminological note. We sometimes use the word “institution” to denote what is really an organisation. As I use this distinction (I’m sure imperfectly at times), journalism is the institution of bringing news of current events to the population and CNN, for example, is a news organization. When we say that the New York Times is an “institution” we mean that in an honorific sense. Really it’s just another organization; it’s just that it is so powerful that it has a formative influence on what we think journalism is. A particular university is an organization; higher education is an institution.