the arrival of the petulant demand

Music: James: Laid Last week Shaun passed along an article from the New York Times regarding in problem email access has created for the professoriate (the article is here for those without a membership). The author avers that "while once professors may have expected silence, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying." I've noticed a similar allegorical trend in higher education reportage, much of which laments the corporatization of the academy (e.g., the strained analogy between the resignation of Harvard's president and automobile companies). Although it is undeniably the case that the university is corporatizing, which can lead to the "me me gimme mime" attitude, I remain suspicious. The NYT article diagnoses the problem thusly: consumerism is the fuel, and technological ease, the mechanism. Something is missing.

I've been reading with much interest Dr. M's ruminations on student emails, many versions of which I've seen in my own in-box (granny died, car trouble, etc.). Owing to my personality, fashion sense, or perhaps outright unprofessional or pedagological stupidity, I sometimes get what I like to refer to as the "rabidly righteous" student email. This email is transgressive in a major way (usually after the course is over), the contents of which used to be reserved--as few as three years ago--for the anonymous teaching evaluation. I thought I might share the most recent e-howler I received regarding last semester as a sort of "mine's bigger" gesture: who can top this?

Beginning on the eve of Christmas Eve, I started getting panicky emails from a student about his grade on a journaling assignment. For an "A," students were to write 27-30 pages of discussion about concepts discussed in class. Because this was a large lecture class, the students were told their journals would be assessed only in terms of relevance and the numbers of pages. This panicky student started emailing with insinuations of my incompetence and what not, and I replied that (a) I trust my and my GTA's grading and would not change his grade; (b) there was nothing I could do about it as I was out of town, and to wait until school begins again; and (c) it's probably better to file a formal complaint with the college. I told him to file a formal complaint because this would protect both me and him (I've been harassed before, so I know it's always better to get it public). Despite repeated pestering over the holiday, I ignored the increasingly demanding emails from this guy. When I got back into Austin after the new year, I found his paper and noticed I docked him for plagiarism. He used an architecture paper he wrote for another class in an assignment for a pop music class, perhaps thinking I wouldn't notice. I phoned him at home to "be nice" and talk to him, since he broke TWO appointments to meet and discuss the situation. On the phone he got incresingly axious and then angry, yelling and ranting into the phone such that I ended up simply having to hang up. Anyway, regardless, just prior to my emailing him to tell him that he received a "C" on the assignment for plagiarizing, he sent this email:

Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:46:26 -0600 From: ---------- @mail.utexas.edu To: Joshua Gunn Subject: Fun with scathing emails

Josh, First let me say that i really regret writing you such a good course review, i fully intend to retract it through the appropriate channels. It is unfortunate that you seem to view this issue as some kind of competition between us where your position trumps mine, as opposed to an entirely understandable problem to be solved. Education is the most fullfilling thing in life and grades are really inconsequential but as a professor you have a duty to your students to treat them fairly and with integrity. In this, Dr. Gunn, I believe you have failed. Since you seem unwilling to carry on a rational phone conversation without dancing around the issues like a politician on Crossfire or hanging up i thought i'd write you this friendly email. I'm absolutely astounded at your willingness to let this be drawn out through official and unecessary channels leading to weeks of headaches and more bad press for your "tenure run" when you know as well as i do that they will rule in my favor. Before our correspondence about my final grade had begun i had commented to several people about you being one of the better professors i've had at UT. Clearly, my impression of you was uninformed. While you're a very interesting lecturer and clearly very informed on the subject matter it appears to me that your inexperience with your authority has comprimised your integrity and your ability to effectively profess. Your obvious depression mingles into your lectures by way of a condecending and generally prickish tone (perhaps, Dr. Gunn, it gets lost in emails but it doesn't in person) and you've allowed your anti-establishment image and behaviour which you've worked so hard to cultivate (and which, in part, makes you a good lecturer) compromise your ability to communicate equitably. Your obviously a very intelligent person, unfortunately you, like so many intelligent people, have made the mistake of assuming that any legitimate afront to your authority is also one to your intelligence. So let me, a very intelligent person myself, give you some advice. Operating rationally and with concession gains one much more credibility in intellectual circles (that is what intelligent people like us are looking for, isn't it, eh?) than the alternative. So before you write me off as some snot-nosed, grade-grubing, student who doesn't really "know" you, you should realize that being privy to another's true view of you is a rare and invaluable tool in regards to advancing your career and (not to mention) enriching your life. So if you feel you need to write back an equally scathing review of me, i'll welcome it as i'm always interested in improving how I project myself and for that matter i'm interested in delightfully scathing emails in general. So that "none of the tone is lost" Dr. Gunn, this email is intended to be read as condecending and arrogant (and oh so therapeutic! thanks, joshie!) in hopes that it's message will resonate and that future students of yours will be treated with a little more due justice. Later, ----.

Ouch! That did hurt to read, although I also know not to "take it to heart" (oh, these Objectivist, Ayn Rand types!) Regardless, there's something in this email that speaks to something other than "student consumerism." The aggression of the manner and tone reflects not only the narcissism individual psychology (surely this guy is having a rough year), but a cultural narcissism of righteousness that has more to do with religious violence than capitalism (although I realize the two are inextricable at some level). Sure, there is a way to read this student's email as a good example of narcissistic identification gone wrong: the student identifies with the teacher ("intelligent people like us") and my failure to recognize him as someone "like me," an "equal"—apparently by dismissing his demand for a grade change—has led to verbal violence. Yet the New York Times article is tracking a trend: students are increasingly transgressive and challenging the presumed "deference" of institutional authority. For this student, I'm not so much an expert as I am an equal who has failed to recognize his status as co-parent. So is it consumerism? Is it merely the "I paid for my grade" syndrome?

Hardly. These students would rarely speak to the boss at work this way. They may speak to a parent this way. I think we need to be thinking more about the cultural function of the professoriate in their capacities as familial authorities. Clearly, teaching used to model itself on the transference of unconscious feelings of the student for a parental figure, such that so-called "good teachers" are typically those who seem to impart a sense of caring for students, such that the students want to "do good for teacher." Not all teachers do or did this, I'm just saying that it seems to be a foundation of the pedagogy I learned (e.g., my advisors are mom and dad, I'm an intellectual child of their union, and so on). Students lashing out at professors in this way could be read as classic "demand," a narcissistic and infantile plea for an impossible satisfaction (e.g., "make me whole!"). Yet in the so-called culture wars taking place in newspapers and Sunday political talk shows, the professoriate, or more to the point, the professoriate of the humanities, are increasingly seen and treated as "bad" parents who are unable to see the real threat of terrorism around every corner. Capitalism may be fueling the fire, but what we are witnessing is a consequence of a general and widespread turn against the classic functions of the university and so-called "liberal values," a shift betokened by the election of the current President and current political climate that supports legal transgressions paralleled only in the 1930s and 1940s. In any dictatorship or fascistic state, there is really no "need" for the university (other than the function Gramsci specified): what I think we are witnessing is the spreading cultural attitude that the professoriate dispensable—not a new story, I realize, but one that recurs—and a collective, largely unconscious release of agressivity. In other words, this trend recounts what Marcuse termed the "silent, 'professional agreement'" that aggression that tends to violent death (as opposed to rigorous sublimation in other domains of life) in repressive society.

In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as a constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning—surrender and submission. It stifles "utopian" efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat.

The surrender is not necessarily, as if often thunk, to absolute authority, although the uncanny persistence of George W. Bush as the sovereign is good evidence. The surrender is to aggression leading to violence and death, the surrender is to a culture of death and an economy of violence that is no longer repressed, but unleashed. The surrender is to the ecstasy of a culture of fascism—of both enjoying control and meting sadism oneself. It would make sense that the professoriate, after the racial Other, is the next to go.