Universities and Their Discontents

For those interested in several recent monographs which have stirred up a lot of discussion about universities in the United States, this article in the New York Review of Books summarizes the key terms of these debates succinctly.

Peter Brooks concludes:

To me, the university is a precious and fragile institution, one that lives with crisis—since education, like psychoanalysis, is an “impossible profession”—but at its best thrives on it. It has endured through many transformations of ideology and purpose, but at its best remained faithful to a vision of disinterested pursuit and transmission of knowledge. Research and teaching have always cohabited: anyone who teaches a subject well wants to know more about it, and when she knows more, to impart that knowledge. Universities when true to themselves have always been places that harbor recondite subjects of little immediate utility—places where you can study hieroglyphics and Coptic as well as string theory and the habits of lemmings—places half in and half out of the world. No country needs that more than the US, where the pragmatic has always dominated.

I think that there is validity in this statement. However, I would contend that a commitment to rationalism is not strictly “disinterested.” In my opinion, a large problem with how many librarians view information literacy is that they see it as linear process in which empirical reality yields a series of distinct “facts.” If information literacy educators are unable to teach students how to analyze the discursive framework in which facts are presented then they will not be very successful. We live in a heavily mediated culture dominated by sound bites produced by outlets owned by publicly traded corporations and a wide variety social actors that are far from disinterested. Social subjects are not the atomistic rational “information seekers” that information literacy theory tends to present. Everyone makes sense of the world through a series complex social, economic, and ideological filters and relationships.

In my opinion the goal of an educator should be to teach students how understand the difference between empirical reality and an interpretative framework. Not because human beings are supremely rational, but because an interpretative framework that values empirical reality makes for a better society. I believe that we should be partisans of rational interpretative methods—or at least present the varied historical perspectives on the different ways in which societies have attempted to address these questions. To advocate such a perspective is to argue for something that may have little immediate utility in some cases, but it lies at the core of why I try to spend the time to sit down with a student at the reference desk and talk them through their research when all that they want is a quick transaction that will result in the required article for their research paper. Such is the yeomen’s work of an educator.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Universities and Their Discontents

  1. Pingback: Footenotes » Blog Archive » Round-Up! First Week of March (…and then some)

Comments are closed.