a coming contextomy

Music: The New Pornographers: Together (2010)

The new annoyance to trouble Texan academics this summer is Texas House Bill 2504 from last year's legislative session. It passed last summer with little fanfare (I certainly don't remember it---probably was eclipsed by the "Concealed Weapons on Campus" controversy that hit around the same time). The bill might simply be dubbed the "University Drive-Thru Window Bill," as it is premised on the logic of customer service: starting this fall, all courses offered in the Texas education system statewide must have up-to-date, published syllabae available on a publically accessible website (and no more than two clicks away from the front page). Further, all teachers must have current CVs (academic resumes) listing their educational backgrounds publically available, as well as past course evaluations.

Now, on the face of it this doesn't seem so unreasonable if only for the simple fact that many educators already do this. My department has been publishing our syllabae for a couple of years, we are already required to post a CV, and student evaluations are already publically available. In fact, if you spend any time poking around a college or university website, you'll find this stuff---which means, of course, this is more about publicity.

Publicity plots aside, the problem with the bill is twofold: (a) its logistics; and (b) its politics.

Logistically, these new publicity requirements expect a standardized formatting. I've yet to get the memo about what and how to new rearrange my vita, syllabae, and so forth---and I have hope there is no ordering, just required points somewhere in each document. There is grousing, however, that we're in for some kind of overhaul---and as those of you who teach very well know, syllabae and vitae are not quickly made documents. Some of us teach the same two classes over and over. Some of us, however, teach ten classes . . . and you can see where this is going (I teach nine classes in rotation here at UT---by choice, so I don't get bored or the stuff don't get stale). Then there are the poor folks who are going to have to code all this stuff---how he heck you make all the university's course syllabae available within two links from the front page is beyond me. In short, the bill is asking for more work.

The truly offensive part of the bill, however, is the politics behind it: it's really surveillance weapon deployed by Free Market Republichristian clique that has taken over the university system in the state. I don't mean republicans or conservatives, I mean the kind of Free Market Republichistian Wankerism that conducts politics through publicity---talking point celbritics pratitioners. According to a sharp piece in the Chronicle a couple of days ago:

The legislation, HB 2504, was signed into law in June 2009. It received enthusiastic backing from groups including the Young Conservatives of Texas and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank whose president, Brooke L. Rollins, is Governor Perry's former policy director.

Elizabeth Young, a policy analyst with the foundation, said the bill would enable students to make more informed decisions about which professors' courses to sign up for. "By forcing universities to list a professor's postsecondary education and teaching experience, students will have a more accurate representation of a professor's classroom abilities than they would have otherwise," she wrote in testimony to lawmakers debating the bill.

Other claims in support of the bill include the predictable, which all boils town to customer service: students need to know what they are "buying" when they sign up to take a certain professor or course.

Folks familiar with Howorwitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and Dana's tangles with these people already know what this bill is really about: it's not so much "consumer protection" as it is politics. These folks want to be able to vet the political "bias" of a teacher. These folks want to be able to police the content of coursework.

I can't think of anyone off hand who has anything to hide in their evals or their course materials. What troubles me is the coming contextomy, a concept developed by my colleague Matt McGlone. Also known as "quoting out of context," contextomy is a increasingly popular argumentative fallacy used in the mass mediated environment. For example, some years ago 60 Minutes did a story lampooning cultural studies courses. The tone of the reporting was something like, "can you believe your child can take a class in queering Elvis?"

All but one of my undergraduate courses actually relies on a bait-and-switch logic, and I worry this new publicity will make them particularly susceptible to contextomy. For example, my new course, "Celebrity Culture," relies on all the assumptions students make about what "celebrity" refers to, which is gossip, televisual drama, and scandal. The course already has quite a waiting list for this fall. Now, we DO address these racy topics, but what students quickly learn by the third day of class is that this course is not what they thought it was going to be. Basically, it's a class on public sphere theory and political communication. It explores the history of the infrastructure of publics and contemporary logics of publicity (for example, one of my favorite lectures is describing how P.T. Barnum's economic decision to use the train system changed presidential political campaigns within a decade). The course, in other words, is rigorous, educational, and colorful.

So, I predict we have more "outing" types of stories about academics teaching worthless courses in the near future. I don't think anyone is going to actively comb through thousands of syllabae in search of something to get in a huff about. I think it's more likely that someone will be gone after, and then their public teaching materials will be sifted through.

[sigh]. Annoying. And expect this to happen to your state school system too.