Identity Politics and Faculty-Graduate Student Relationships

A short while back (a couple months ago if memory serves correctly – which it may or may not), there was a nice section of essays written by anthropology graduate students on the topic of graduate student – faculty relationships published in Anthropology News.

There was one sentence in one of the essays that particularly struck me. (I won’t say which essay, in part because as is typically the case, once I had finished reading the issue, I left it in my department for someone else to pick up and read, and as a result I don’t have it in front of me, and in part because it seems nasty to me to single out a graduate student as if for attack – not really my intent anyway – on the basis of one sentence out of an otherwise nice essay – and in any case, my reactions are more to the sentiment expressed there, which I’ve encountered among other students, too, while the rest of the essay seemed more original or unique in its content.) The sentence basically argued that faculty can’t really understand or fully relate to graduate students because they’re not in the structural position of being graduate students.

Even though I discarded the copy of the issue, I’ve kept mentally coming back to that statement since. I have three sorts of reactions to the sentiment expressed in it.

1. My initial and immediate reaction (and one I still hold, though it’s no longer my sole reaction) was to think something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous. Of course, faculty can relate to graduate students.” One thing virtually all faculty have in common is that we’ve been graduate students. Many, if not most, faculty can relate to the experiences of current graduate students because we had similar experiences when we were graduate students. And if (a big “if”) understanding or relateability derive from experience of a structural position, faculty are in an ideal position to understand graduate students, even if the reverse is not true, at least not most of the time (I add this last qualification, because part of the experience of graduate school is often the gaining of things like “teaching experience” by partially occupying the position of “faculty member” – the division between graduate student and faculty is more of a graded continuum than a clear and absolute line).

2. My second reaction is that this is a strange position for an anthropologist to take. If direct experience in occupying a particular social position or structural position is a prerequisite for understanding or relating, then the discipline is in serious trouble (and there are many who think it is for many reasons, with a long line going back at least several decades at this point of worrying [or anticipating] that the discipline of anthropology is immanently going to fly apart, implode, disintegrate, deteriorate, or otherwise have big troubles).

If we take the sentiment that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students and extend it logically at all, we might wonder how graduate students might relate to one another – they don’t occupy the same exact positions and have the same exact experiences, or indeed how we might really understand anyone at all – a longstanding and still significant philosophical question. If we take philosophy and psychoanalysis at all seriously (and I do – at least much of the time), we might, even must, conclude that we don’t really understand or relate to our selves.

All of this is true, though in a sense operationally and pragmatically false – no one who functions in the world operates as if it is true. Put another way, this is to confuse total understanding with understanding at all, total relateability with ability to relate at all. In pragmatic terms at least, most of us relate to ourselves at least tolerably well; we relate to and understand those around us not absolutely but well enough to function almost as if we did; ethnographers understand something, even much, about their research subjects’ lives without, and without need of, total understanding.

3. I think what the student might have meant was that faculty members might not be able to relate to students in the here and now because being a grad student here and now is different from faculty member’s past and usually spatially/institutionally different experiences.

I often can relate quite well to my students, but it might be provisionally wise to proceed as if my first reaction is not true, and to attempt to relate to graduate students in the same way that anthropologists attempt to relate to research subjects – to stop, look and listen carefully.

Structural positioning doesn’t determine consciousness, experience, or actions deterministically, but it does matter, and my students don’t have the same experiences as I did as a student. Like a lot of scholars, I had experience in more than one graduate institution, in my case earning degrees from one quite large state university (the University of Georgia) and one medium-to-large private institution with lots of money (Cornell University). In some ways, my grad student experiences parallel those of the students I now work with – there are certain commonalities to the grad student experience the characterize most institutions of higher education – but teaching at a mid-size regional state university (the University of West Florida) with much less student funding available than at the graduate institutions I attended (just to identify one, albeit an important, variable – student funding), the students I work with in some ways have very different experiences and concerns than I did as a student.

That is, just as I do think the student writer was incorrect in arguing that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students (understanding or relating doesn’t depend on experience of the same exact structural positioning, and in fact in any case faculty have had structural experience as graduate students), having occupied a social structural position or having had experience of a particular identity category (in this case “faculty” or “student,” but the point could apply to identity categories and politics generally) doesn’t translate into automatic or necessarily easy understanding of others occupying the category.

An Important Essay on Race and Academia

On his blog, Reginald Shepherd recently posted a thoughtful, nuanced, and important essay on the topic of race and academia. It can be accessed at:

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-race-and-academia.html

Longfellow, George Will, Poetry, and the Individual Artist or Thinker

George Will is a conservative I respect. Of the widely published op-ed columnists in American newspapers and newsmagazines, Will is one of the few of any political persuasion, and virtually the only conservative, I consistently respect and find insightful, even while I disagree with much he has to say.

I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.

About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:

“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”

I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)

First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.

Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).

Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.