The rhetoric of rigor: Administrative incursions into pedagogy Introduction Since the mid 1980's the American university has been increasingly subjected to criticism. The mystification surrounding the university and its practices has fractured; its traditional authority and intellectual prestige has steadily weakened; its central role in sustaining technological and social progress has been questioned; and its ability to provide economic opportunity to its graduates now seems uncertain. Moreover, the American university has been depicted as an ineffective poorly managed institution lacking both a vision and a pragmatic agenda(Bosner, 1992). In 1987 a Carneige Foundation report positioned accountability and assessment of productivity as a major concern for academia. In it Boyer reported that state governors at their annual meeting in 1986 ??wanted to hold institutions accountable for the performance of their students??(p. 252). He further noted that there were increasing calls to develop ?some recognized authoritative standards of excellence? to hold faculty and students accountable(p. 255). Expressed as the need for increased accountability of students, the need for higher levels of faculty productivity particularly in regards to the stated goals of the institution, and the demand for administrators to transform their universities and colleges into quality institutions by establishing goals and by clearly stating the means for attaining them, a rhetoric of rigor and accountability now pervades the American university(Mingle, 1989). While the rhetoric of rigor has existed as long as the university, like any rhetoric it waxes and wanes and takes form in relation to the specific socio-historical context. This rhetoric is now generally but not exclusively expressed as a conservative discourse in which the call for rigor, accountability, and excellence promotes an agenda which attempts to the rescue the university from a perceived drift to the Left. It is the thesis of this paper that while the rhetoric of rigor functions to attack the academic enterprise in an attempt to reclaim it, the rhetoric also functions as a legitimation rhetoric within the university to justify administrative intrusions into the pedagogical enterprise in the form of increased organization, control, and surveillance. By demanding rigor, developing measures of accountability, and proclaiming excellence, the university not only responds to threats from an increasingly hostile political, economic, and social environment itself but also is able to exert control over its personnel and practices. I. The emergence of the call for rigor: four contextual frames. a.) as a response to the decline of American economic and political dominance in the post Vietnam period. The report entitled A Nation at Risk produced by the National Commission on Excellence in Education begins, Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world....If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves....The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capabilities of trained capabilities throughout the globe(1983, pp. 5-6). If the project of education is to produce economically productive members of society, according to this report the American educational system has failed miserably. It stated what the university already knew, that an increasing proportion of its incoming students were not prepared to do what was considered to be college level work. More recent statistics such as the drop in average SAT scores from 975 in 1960 to 902 in 1993 provided more evidence that the crisis which the report constructed was deeply embedded in the American educational enterprise(Bennett, 1994). While this report directed the blame for "the tide of rising mediocrity" at American elementary and secondary education, it became central to the debate for constructing educational practice and served to support a call for a return to educational basics across all educational levels. It criticized the smorgasbord curriculum, student choice of subjects, poor teaching and teacher training, unchallenging texts and other educational material, etc. Most importantly, this report linked education with technological and economic dominance. In a period in which the United States was slipping from its position of economic and political power, the educational enterprise was blamed. The call for rigor and accountability originates in the political realm of Reagan conservatism to be used as a discourse to rescue the educational enterprise from the liberal drift rooted in 60?s radicalism, a drift which was linked to the slippage of American economic dominance. 2.) as a response to economic deficits. In the age of diminishing funds the rhetoric of rigor and accountability reflects the pressure to ensure increased levels of productivity of both faculty and students. Federal and state budget deficits have meant the reduction of available funds for public sector spending. Private liberal arts colleges are faced with a decreasing number of upscale college bound 18 year olds(full payers). With fiscal crisis Boards of Trustees and other outside forces have become more involved in scrutinizing the fiscal policies of institutions. They want indicators of quality and productivity, i.e. the New York State legislature is considering a bill requiring that full time faculty spend a minimum number of hours in the classroom each week. Pennyslvania legislators have state university faculty keeping track of When an institution is on the defensive, it must continually legitimize itself. As internal funds decline, departments and programs and individuals must center themselves in the university's agenda whether it be teaching or research. Those that fail are subject to elimination. Witness Bennington (Edmundson, 1994). Departments, programs, and individuals must generate data which not only centers them in the core of the institution, but also promotes them as necessary, efficient and productive. Evaluation practices and the data generated both exert control over educational practices and provide information to administrators to justify expenditure. The perceived threat of reduction of resources or even elimination internally motivates both instituting practices and also publicizing practices that demonstrate centrality, rigor, and productivity. c.) as an extension of the reactionary rhetoric of political conservatism of the past fifteen years which locates the decline of America in the weakening of moral values. The conservative critique which developed within higher education is less about technological dominance than it is about re-establishing a traditional curriculum. It is critical of technism and attempts to re-legitimize the need for the generalist, the liberal arts scholar or the Renaissance Man. Here, the rhetoric of rigor and accountability reflect a desire for social order and stability organized around a bourgeois moral code. It is a reaction to cultural fragmentation celebrated by postmodernism. Expressed by Lasch, Bloom, Bennett, Hirsh and others, the rhetoric of rigor calls for narrowing and purifying the curriculum by recentering the Western tradition in the form of reading of the Great Books. For example, Lasch (1979) states: Those who teach college students today see at first hand the effect of these practices, not merely in the students' reduced ability to read and write but in the diminished store of their knowledge about which formerly penetrated deep into everyday awareness, have become incomprehensible, and the same thing is now happening to the literature and mythology of antiquity--indeed, to the entire literary tradition of the West, which has always drawn so heavily on biblical and classical sources. In the space of two or three generations, enormous stretches of the "Judaeo-Christian," so often invoked by educators but so seldom taught in any form, have passed into oblivion. The effective loss of cultural traditions on such a scale makes talk of a new Dark Age far from frivolous. Yet this loss coincides with an information glut, with the recovery of the past by specialists, and with an unprecedented explosion of knowledge -- none of which, however, impinges on everyday experience or shapes popular culture (p. 150-1). Lasch critiques both radicalism and vocationalism for denying and attacking tradition. What's important to learn? For Lasch, it is Western tradition itself. It is important because our intellectual present is based upon it. The purpose of liberal arts is to inject the student into the great ideas of history. For Lasch, the rise of the multiversity, the attack on authority by Sixties? radicals, and the rise of democratic pedagogies devalued the teacher, the master of knowledge who served as a vessel for Western tradition. Without cultural authority to establish limits the consequence is narcissism. Bloom (1987) likewise argues for the Great Books as the central component for a liberal arts education. Of course, the only serious solution [for reform in higher education] is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classical texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them--not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read....But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling, getting something from the university they cannot get elsewhere. The very fact of this special experience, which leads nowhere beyond itself, provides them with a new alternative and a respect for study itself (p. 344). Bloom locates the keepers of this pure curriculum in the top 20 to 30 prestige universities where the leaders of the country will be trained in thinking. Plato's Republic would be the centerpiece of this educational model. Bloom?s critique, however, goes well beyond academia and extends to the culture itself. It is a desperate call to save what has been commodified, mediated, fragmented and bastardized. The university is positioned as the lead institution in restoring a legitimate culture. Bennett(1992) extends this critique by attacking the liberal academic elite for being out of touch with traditional American values and for failing to guard and protect American culture and institutions. Bennett calls for a secondary school curriculum which emphasizes English, history, geography, math and science; for accountability of educators; and for parental free choice in an educational market place. Bennett likewise locates the demise of the university in the social and cultural movements of the late 60's in which academic requirements were reduced. Since the late 1960s, there has been a collective loss of nerve and faith on the part of many faculty and academic administrators. The academy has hurt itself, even disgraced itself, in many ways. Course requirements were thrown out; intellectual authority was relinquished; standards were swept aside; scholarship increasingly became an extension of political activism; and many colleges and universities lost a clear sense of their educational mission and their conception of what a graduate of their institutions ought to know or be (1992, p.156). While Bennett criticizes the failure to create a legitimate core curriculum, he is more interested in expressing moral outrage towards the liberal notion of the university as an open forum. For example, he advocates the loss of federal funds to universities which do not pledge to rid their campuses of drugs, and is critical of federal support of artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe whose subject matter celebrates space outside of a bourgeois moral order. Here, the rhetoric of rigor is a moral discourse which expresses the need to recenter Western bourgeois tradition in the educational system and to transform students into not only productive but also moral citizens. d.) as a response to the explosion of commodity culture in which all cultural texts are transformed into entertainment. Not only conservative but also leftists critics see commodity culture as pervasive and detrimental to the educational enterprise. Neil Postman(1985) in Entertaining Ourselves to Death argues that media culture operates on the super-ideology of reducing all experiences to an entertainment format which promotes superficiality, infantilism, and regression. Both conservative and leftist discourses construct students as products of a commodity culture. Quoting such diverse sources as Allan Bloom, Richard Schicknel, and Mark Crispin Miller Collins(1995) notes that contemporary critics attack new cultural forms such as cinema for failing to provide intellectual depth, moral coherency, and authentic renditions of history. He notes these social critics construct youth as the consequence of their experiences with these cultural forms. While conservative critics see the Western tradition as an alternative to this cultural malaise, leftists stress the reading of multicultural texts and deconstructionist methodologies as liberationist strategies. Aronowitz and Giroux(1985) argue for the development of critical pedagogies which use popular culture as the objects of analysis. A programmatic alternative to the splitting of writing into technical functions might begin by recognizing that if the task is to penetrate the apparently opaque "mind set" of students, then the spectacle in which they are caught must be deconstructed. Most students go through their classes as if in a dream. They are bemused by daily interaction as if it were the unreality. Many of them live for the spectacle of the television show, the rock concert, the record party, and other mass cultural activities. The spectacle appears as the real world in which they wake up and participate in the process of living, and their non-media life is the fiction. If writing is to become part of the critical process, deconstruction of mass audience culture is the first priority. (p.52). Aronowitz and Giroux recognize that to a generation reared in this commodified culture, classroom learning is experienced as dull and boring--the Generation X syndrome. These authors attack the conservative elitist position which refuses to engage popular cultural forms in serious analysis. They argue for the necessity to deconstruct and debunk commodity culture as a strategy for both engaging students and developing critical thinking(See Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991).. The construction of students as immersed in commodified culture serves to justify a call for accountability. ?Upholding standards? is the catch phrases for a strategy designed to attack motivational apathy, the need to be continuously entertained, and the inability to accede to literacy as the primary strategy for constructing one's identity and worldview. The rhetoric of rigor like all legitimization discourses is a defensive discourse which speaks to the failure of socializing institutions to transform the next generation into the vision of the previous one. II. Instituting rigor: constructing students and faculty a.) Towards integrated programs Whether the crisis is constructed as economic, moral, or cultural, it demands a rational response. Astin(1985) notes that in the 70?s and 80?s American universities have drifted towards an industrial production model which posits that a desired end can be articulated and therefore an efficient program can be put in place to achieve it. For example, Bok(1986) states that A logical first step would be to define a set of shared objectives toward which to orient teaching and learning throughout the four undergraduate years....Agree-ment on objectives, though indispensable, is not enough; the goals must be connected in some deliberate way to the teaching of individual courses. To achieve this, several steps seem especially important. Colleges must communicate the goals to students and explain their importance. Members of departments or instructional programs need to come together and discuss ways of adapting their teaching assignments to make sure that the shared purposes are not forgotten amid the private aims and interests of individual professors. Faculty members should cooperate to devise ways of crafting examinations to reinforce their common aims, since the exams have such a strong influence on the ways students study in their courses. Finally, faculty members should give students prompt and ample feedback on their papers and exams in order to help them understand what constitutes superior performance and where their strengths and weaknesses lie (p. 63). What is essential is that goals are clearly stated, specific policies are formulated and techniques are continually evaluated. This scientific engineering approach attempts to extend control over the entire production process through the application of science or the pseudo-science of human relations(a mixture of psychology, counseling, administrative technique, and education). Increasingly the corporate organizational model has seeped into academia. Statistics indicate a disproportionate increase in the number of administrators. "The proportion of staff who were administrative and other non-teaching professional staff rose from 15% in 1976 to 21.9% in 1989"(US Department of Education, 1992, p. 164). Universities hire corporate managers trained in administrative technique who applied the criteria of efficiency to academic programs(Astin, 1985). The expansion of the administrative apparatus and the organizational imperative by its very nature necessitates increasing surveillance and evaluation. Total Quality Management, Total Quality Leadership, Continuous Quality Improvement are now the corporate catch phrases which have entered the university. In his article "Total Quality Education" Bonser (1992) integrates the language of the corporation into the rhetoric of administering the university: An organization requires a long-term commitment to quality and productivity at each stage of its production process. It needs to understand that the "customer" is the most important part of the organization's "production" chain and needs to be constantly in mind. Each person in the production process also needs to understand that they are both ?clients? and ?producers,? and that all inputs into the process must meet appropriate standards if the unit is to achieve high-quality production(p. 507). The goal is to construct an efficient highly productive organization. Some of the principles of Continuous Quality Improvement include continuous improvement, striving for quality, teamwork, communication, evaluation, and full development of human resources. Increasingly references to Deming's 14 characteristic of Total Quality Management are made( Massey, Wilger and Colbeck, 1994). The rhetoric of rigor and accountability mixes with the rhetoric of teamwork, community and collegiality. These rhetorics have one thing in common--increased surveillance/evaluation. The key for control is knowledge about the practice. Programs are established with specific objectives followed by increased assessment and evaluation procedures. Moreover, the curriculum cannot stand on its own as a motivator; it must be supported by auxiliary enterprises. Support Programs become increasingly pervasive. A growing educational carceral archipelago extends the academic project into counseling and residential practices. Often enforced study halls and other support services are conditions to admission and continued support. The goal is the total program. Since students are constructed as not only poorly equipped in basic learning skills but also as products of a commodified sexist racist culture, programs must be established to ensure movement to politically correct attitudes. The rational model necessitates total control. At St. Lawrence University we have a First Year Residential Program. Since it is a program, consistent standards which cut across various colleges (courses) within the program are instituted. An average grade is prescribed. Syllabi are evaluated by committee to ensure that the policies of the program are met. Students are partitioned into colleges; surveillance of student behavior intensifies. The expectation is that academic and residential life merges and that residential problems be discussed in the classroom.. The university again acts in parentis locus. It must take control over student lives. Increased residential requirements, elimination of fraternities and sororities, expansion of orientation programs, or generally more incursions into student life are the trend. Also, anti-drug programs such as Get High on Life enter campus culture. Often, these programs are brought in by administrators and run by concerned student groups. These behavioral modification programs are often couched in the rhetoric of concern. Although unintended, the panoptic tendency intensifies in which new requirements, more specific programming, and greater integration of academic, counseling and residential decisions, practices and philosophies takes place(See Foucault 1979). The call for accountability and the programming that this rhetoric generates becomes increasingly totalitarian as the university attempts to take more control over the elements. As Foucault so aptly theorizes, institutions aim at increasing both the utility(aptitude) and the docility of their elements, in this case faculty and students. b.) If it moves, evaluate it. Evaluation of student, faculty and administrative performance as well as program assessment has reached a fever pitch within the university. Faculty are engaged in more frequent, more detailed levels of evaluation. Student life is examined holistically; the residential, behavioral, and academic are integrated whenever possible. Support services are increasingly bureaucratized and evaluated. Once the evaluative imperative is put into place it becomes self-augmenting. It is not necessarily administrators who evaluate. Often the surveyed take control of the evaluation process itself--generating criteria, constructing and administering the measuring instrument, analyzing the results. Taking control over the process, however, has little to do with autonomy or power. Foucault(1979) notes that panopticism aims at increased efficiency and is most effective when the disciplinary gaze diffuses into a system of multiple relays. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power (p. 202). Panopticism strives towards efficiency and is most efficient when inmates guard themselves. Ironically, not to participate, it is to leave oneself vulnerable. Since substance of courses is in the territorial jurisdiction of faculty expertise, evaluation increasingly focuses on the use of proper pedagogical technique designed to motivate and/or control. Bok notes, "the time faculties and administrators spend working together on education is devoted almost entirely to considering what their students should study rather than how they can learn more effectively or whether they are learning as much as they should"(1986, p. 58). The consequence is a more detailed account of the use of time and the application of technique. Evaluation increasingly sinks down to the surveillance of syllabi and the choice of pedagogical strategies. The internal dynamics of courses are increasingly scrutinized. Pedagogy itself replaces substance as the indicator of excellence in teaching--perceived difficulty of the course, average course grade, number of reading and writing assignments, perceived ability of the faculty member to uphold standards, etc. The quality of teaching is transformed into quantitative measurements. Rigorous teachers uphold standards. Conclusion: some concerns The rhetoric of rigor is a politically dangerous rhetoric because it has no alternative. Rigor is not debatable; only how it is measured. How can one be against rigor or excellence? What are the alternatives? slovenliness, mediocrity, failing to uphold the standards of one's discipline. There is no alternative to rigor. Once a program, course or person is deemed to be not rigorous, it can be easily eliminated. While the source of the rhetoric of rigor is a conservative rhetoric, it seeps into the pedagogical strategies and presentation of all perspectives. Some subjects have ?natural? rigor which can be called upon to enhance their position within the disciplinary hierarchy. For example, it is assumed that the natural sciences are more rigorous than other disciplines. Jacoby (1994) notes that humanities and social 'sciences' often adopt a dense or complex vocabulary and style in order to be taken seriously. The rhetoric of rigor not only serves many constituencies but also transforms them. Faculty/student relationships expressed through pedagogy have less to do with self-generated innovative practices and more to do with a response to macroscopic political and economic forces. While we teachers may experience agency in the control over our syllabi and classrooms, structural forces determine the drift of those practices. The experience of agency may simply be an imposed illusion, a false centering of self(Althusser, 1969; Elster, 1982). The drift of the university towards the right and the imposition of practices of control supported by a non-debatable rhetoric in a threatening economic climate tends to move even the most radical teachers towards the center. Consequently, the call for rigor limits pedagogy and reduces it to technique(Proctor, Weaver and Cottrell, 1992). Soft pedagogies or those which construct students as autonomous reflective self-motivated persons such as those in the traditions of Rogers or Freire have no place within this model. The notion of serendipity, that knowledge suddenly springs up, is replaced by a behavioral model of total programming. If standardized examination are instituted, pedagogy will be increasingly rationalized. The consequence is textbook teaching. What is absent from this discussion? We don't hear a call for greater creativity, for the inherent pleasure of the texts, or the innate satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. These subjective attributes, unless they can be rationalized and measured, wane in academic discourse While I don't want to tackle the reasons behind the crisis of motivation associated with youth, I would argue that increased rationalization may simply aggravate the crisis. When education is reduced to a series of pedagogical practices (Foucault's discipline), motivation is externalized into the micropolitics of organizational structures. Affect as a source of bonding between student and faculty is eliminated and replaced by the practices designed to ensure compliance. Charismatic authority is replaced by rational authority. Weber?s proposition that rationalization has an elective affinity to disenchantment describes both the organization process and psychological mood which now pervades campuses(Weber, 1946; Roth and Schuluchter, 1979). Faced with increasingly rationalized or bureaucratic forms of social organization, students increasingly develop strategies of resistance which devalue knowledge and ideas. Their first and foremost concern is surviving in the most efficient manner. Talk is less about ideas and more about the logistics of navigating the educational bureaucracy. 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