Help! My Writing and Reasoning Skills are Being Oppressed!
Okay, I know I crib a lot from Critical Mass, but dangit! It's worth it. From today's entry, Erin O'Connor posts a response from a local organizer of the Tunnel of Oppression meme that has unfortunately taken hold on campuses as the ultimate diversity experience. We will leave aside the oftentimes absurd nature of the practice itself--go see one sometime if you have an hour to kill and have run short of bamboo to ram under your fingernails for fun--and let its defender speak:
it's people like you that don't allow us to move foward and add to the oppression in society. Being educated means being open to new ideas you may not agree with. As a scholar myself I ask you to look beyond the actors and role play and look at the real hidden meaning of this program and what it truely does. Because numbers don't like and when 750 students ATTEND a program.....you guys have no leg to stand on
It's a self-fisker, really, but that's not my point. What a lot of folks don't realize is that university housing programs, in a desperate bid to avoid privatization, have instituted "residence hall programming" designed to slap a veneer of scholarship over dormitory living. The culprits are almost uniformly Higher Ed majors, and the bulk of their "programming" consists of diversity training, because frankly, Higher Ed as a discipline has nothing concrete to offer dormitory residents. These programs are under the purview of Resident Advisors, Directors and Residence Life Coordinators, and attendance tends to be gained either through bribery or compulsion. So the idea that the mere presence of 750 bodies lends credence to something is patently ridiculous, particularly when the stated purpose of that something is to "move forward and add to the oppression in society." Okay, so I couldn't pass that one up. Fish, barrel, bang.
Also, I would lay money on the fact that the writer of this letter is probably a higher education major (AHA! Google proves me correct--the referenced document is standard in res hall programming, and NACURH is a national body for Housing professionals, much like the MLA for English majors. Added bonus--NACURH will be hosted by my university this year. Huzzah!) Like Liberal Studies, this discipline came about as a way to ensure job security for professors more than anything else. It's a weird hybrid of pop psychology, education theory, and a touch of statistics, and tends to produce "scholarship" of the poorly written, evangelistic variety.
Higher Ed as a discipline also proves the point that more is not always better, particularly where dogma is concerned. Replacing critical thought and literacy with activism should be disdained by the educated, but hey! If it's easy and gets you tenure, then I guess it's all good.
Posted by Big Arm Woman at March 11, 2003 06:19 AM