Certainly, when former McKinney, Texas Cpl. Eric Casebolt pulled his gun on kids for swimming in strange waters, together with a host of other really bad career choices, it was a subject of serious interest and concern. As it turns out, Nicole Nguyen, an assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, thought so too, and wrote about it for Education Week.
Nguyen’s concern began with a bit of a rocky start:
Aghast but unsurprised, I wondered what role universities, and colleges of education more specifically, play in dismantling these state-sanctioned systems of violence that expose non-dominant youths to narrowed life chances, brutality, and premature death.
Non-dominant youths? Narrowed life chances? Ah, premature death. Got it. Now we’re cooking. So she’s an assistant prof. They have to gussy up their writing if they’re going to impress the tenure committee. Heh, non-dominant youths. Like lefties? Good one, Nicole.
But from there, it went downhill fast.
These brutalizing acts are a violent product and constitutive element of institutional racism. Police brutality functions as one node in a larger system—racism, classism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism—that dehumanizes and criminalizes non-dominant youths. Rather than punish a few bad apples, we must tear down the entire tree.
Whoa. I get this compulsion to indulge in the most awkward jargonism possible, like “constitutive element,” to make it look intellectual when you’re shooting blanks, but how the hell do you take the blind leap from police brutality to “heteropatriarchy and ableism”? I mean, ableism? As in being able to write something that isn’t mindnumbingly stupid?
As public transit riders shuffled on and off the train, I began to understand that we cannot solve complex social problems like institutional racism within the prototypical ivory tower as armchair critics.
Not for nothing, but some people do their best thinking on the toilet. Are you suggesting that public transportation is a better place to solve complex social problems for you “prototypical ivory tower armchair critics” than toilets? Is riding the train mandatory? Is our societal failing that not enough people ride trains?
To think, then, about the implications of ongoing police violence for colleges of education, we must first ask: What is the role of the university? Where do our responsibilities, as university scholars, lie? To whom are we accountable?
I can help here. Your responsibilities lie with teaching whatever it is you’ve been hired to teach, paid to teach. Physics? Then teach physics. You are accountable to the students who have trusted you to teach them physics.
For me, the university is a public good with a public mission. That is, the intellectual society we fund and nurture extends beyond university borders and reaches into communities to solve social problems. Producing knowledge, teaching, and researching, subsequently, we must all work toward the common good of our multiple publics, enact democratic practices, and advance social justice.
When you build the Nicole Nguyen College of Shit That Matters To Nicole, and get people to come to it, then you get to make the call. What education is not is an opportunity for some punk assistant professor to use the opportunity she’s been given to teach a subject to a bunch of kids who are paying to learn a subject from her to instead indoctrinate them into her personal ideology of life.
Your mission is to teach whatever you’ve been hired to teach. Nobody, absolutely nobody, gives a flying fuck about your politics. Nobody registered for the course, Physics with an Emphasis on Nicole’s Notion of Social Justice.
Arresting cycles of systemic violence requires we build these inclusive two-way partnerships with humility. To acknowledge the expertise of those typically denied full civic participation, we must confront our own racist, gendered, classed, and ableist assumptions that shape what we think non-dominant youths know, what behaviors and bodies we seek to control, and our definition of the purposes of education.
First, I don’t think “humility” means what you think it does. You show only arrogance and pathological affinity for jargon. Who are you to think that your political ideology should be rammed down students’ throats? You want to confront your own “racist, gendered, classed, and ableist assumptions,” knock yourself out. Ride the train all day long if it makes you feel special. But that doesn’t entitle you to redefine the purposes of education to match your feelz.
This is the public mission of colleges of education: to serve as political allies of the young people in our communities to dismantle systems of violence. This mission charges us with building reciprocal community-university partnerships to redress the patterns of injustice we confront daily. Our work begins and ends with this social compact.
I’m all for “dismantling the systems of violence,” though I would never, even in my wildest altered state of consciousness, use those ridiculous words to describe it. But then, that’s my job as a lawyer, and more specifically, a criminal defense lawyer.
If you want a side gig redressing patterns of injustice, do it on your own time. Your job as a pedagogue isn’t to be a demagogue. Your work “begins and ends” with teaching students whatever you’re being paid to teach them, and it surely isn’t your distorted vision of the social compact.
Oh wait. I just realized it. Damn, you’re good, Nicole. This was just a test of whether you could throw in every meaningless word, every jargon phrase, and cobble together such nonsensical gibberish that anyone who agreed would be revealed as an insipid Social Justice fool. I didn’t realize it until I saw the comment:
This reads less like an article than a mad-libs game from pizza night at Social Justice School. What a mess.
Well played, Nicole. Well played.
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50 years ago I was an avid reader of MAD Magazine at the supermarket newsstand while my parents were shopping. I recall the fill-in-the-blank pieces (does the magazine still have them?) in which readers could choose from important sounding options to create a non-sensical and socially amusing paragraph. Whenever I read quotes from high falutin’ social scientists trying to wedge their screwy ideas into wrongly shaped boxes I’m reminded of the Frankenstein paragraphs of MAD Magazine.
Related: more social science brain rattling: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/looking-white-in-the-face/?_r=0 Found this article by followed the links from the headline “Reason Itself Is a White Male Construct”. Tell that to the Chinese philosophers of a few millennia ago.
Ordinarily, I would trash your comment for violating my no link policy, but since I twitted about this when it came out in the Times because I, like you, found it so absurd, I’ll leave it be.
You 2 can be an impressive jargon based educator
Examples:
We will recontextualize meaning-centered systems across content areas.
We will metacognate interactive systems throughout multiple modalities.
We will unpack impactful interfaces across the curricular areas.
Now you don’t have to think for yourself.
http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html
Is today screw my rules day and nobody told me? Sheesh.
You didn’t read your memo?
Does Prof. Nguyen actually get paid for writing that crap? If so, I picked the wrong profession. Oh, wait, an old, fat white guy writing like that would be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.
Only if you kept that heteropatriarchal appendage between your legs.
I am inspired to create a bumper sticker “Dues paying member of the Heteropatriarchy”, with hopes that driving past the likes of Prof. Nguyen will cause episodes of actual head explosions, much like those in the movie Kingsman (worth watching).
Does the heteropatriarchy have an official logo I can use? Is there a link to some clip art?
Saw Kingsman. Liked it, though I would have picked the brogue.
I would not blame Mrs. Nguyen too much. All professions have their jargon. Mrs. Nguyen is used to writing in hers and probably, has great difficulty dropping it when writing for more popular consumption. In fact, she may even think that every educated person should be familiar with this mode of jargon as it is the dominant mode of discussion in large part of social sciences and humanities. (Oh, the humanity!)
If you look at the content of the words behind the jargon, you’ll note that she is actually almost of the same opinion about police violence as you, although her great learning has reduced her unable to express her thoughts clearly.
On a different note, I beg to disagree with you. Theoretically, a teacher is accountable to their students. However, such accountability shoukd remain theoretical, as students cannot – in most cases – form an informed opinion about the quality of instruction they receive. If they could, they would already understand the topic being instructed. If the teacher is accountable to students, it leads to mindless pandering of students, as being a nice, undemanding teacher is the easiest way to get good evaluations.
Therefore, it would be very good if the actual accountability is to some other body that has a more objective understanding of the quality of instruction than the students.
You are completely wrong on both counts. This isn’t the jargon of education, but the jargon of social justice. The two are unrelated. Second, accountability isn’t limited to the simplistic cash and carry notion, but the duty to teach students what they are there to learn.
I agree with SHG. This is pseudo intellectual gibberish, not academic jargon. It’s an embarassment to scholars to read such nonsense. Your apologist comment is totally off base.
The obfuscatory nature of jargon is annoying when used to convey real meaning; fortunately this is a rare enough occurrence that the use of jargon is a very reliable indicator of mental analogues of the sorts of badly attempted physical feats that always wind up showcased on youtube.
For that reason, I’m ecstatic when I see jargon, and feel we should pass a law that mandates its use when there is no there there. That will have the beneficial side effect of helping to save the dignity of the authors, because impenetrable jargon makes it an open question of whether their detractors actually parsed the words carefully enough to truly understand the message or not, and then they can feel misunderstood rather than denounced.
Uh, yeah.
“Assistant professor of social foundations of education”? I didn’t know such a position existed, and I think the taxpayers of Illinois, which is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, shouldn’t be paying to fill it. To me, it sounds suspiciously like “assistant professor of leftist indoctrination.” So she may well be teaching exactly what she was hired to teach and what her students expect.
Somehow, I’m thinking her lesson plan is supposed to be slightly less banal.
Nicole Nguyen’s writing is easily simulated by computer automated methods. It doesn’t require much thought, just a combination of stock phrases.
The following was produced by a computer program (Google: Postmodernism Generator). It is fun to see how close this automated writing is to modern deconstructive analysis. It has produced millions of analyses.
=== ===
The Rubicon of Reality: Precultural Socialism, Socialism and Neomaterial Capitalist Theory
In the works of Gibson, a predominant concept is the concept of textual art. It could be said that Baudrillard promotes the use of neostructuralist constructive theory to deconstruct capitalism. The subject is contextualised into a predialectic paradigm of expression that includes narrativity as a reality.
=== ===
Anything that can produce a predialectic paradigm of expression is fine by me.
Be careful what you ask for.
After full consultative review, including recommendations for elimination of privileged structuralist microaggression, by a faculty committee augmented with fully empowered representatives of the appropriate traditionally oppressed classes selected by criteria of socially progressive merit, we release the following fully contextualized critical analysis to facilitate correctly understood deconstruction of the heteronormative societal dynamics governing the paradigmatical hegemonic narrative:
A gendered non-dominant youth
Became ableist, classist, uncouth.
“Heteropatriarch Rulez!
You constitutive foolz!”
He shouted, then added “Forsooth!”
To broaden his narrowed life chances,
He invited young ladies to dances.
A devout Terpsichore,
He would tear up the floor,
To dismantle state sanctioned romances.
One young lady who thought he was daft, or
Had full civic reasons for laughter,
Went to his abode,
Shook his tree, found his node.
And they happily lived ever after!
Is there no end to your talents?
Ouch! And just when I thought I had built an inclusive two-way partnership with humility.
Might be my new favorite.