I’ve been receiving comment spam lately from degreeusa.com (under the cover of other URLs), who claim an affiliation with the University of Phoenix (note the alternate non-.edu URL). Usually, I don’t worry too much about comment spam: just put them into MT-Blacklist (my personal blocklist now has over 2,000 entries, with many naughty words) and go along my merry way. But this comment spam I found particularly irritating, because it associated itself with for-profit education. Now, I’ve taught for the for-profit UMass Division of Continuing Education (note the non-.edu URL), and I have to say, I don’t much like them, both for the way they treat their teachers, and for the downright nasty practices they’ve historically engaged in against academic labor. But maybe this example will highlight the particular problems I see with online for-profit education:
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Check out the penultimate fifteen words of this comment thread at Crooked Timber responding to a recent ha-ha-ha-the-MLA-is-silly essay at The Believer, describing “millions of hours of English grammar and composition classes” as “the interlingua of global capitalism itself”.

First off, I don’t know of any colleges and universities that offer straight “grammar” courses, and this signals to me that the commenter has a rather distorted (albeit all too common) view of what first-year composition courses teach. But of course that “interlingua of global capitalism” thing totally grabbed my attention. I might suggest that many rhet/comp scholars would immediately protest, “No, no! That’s not at all what we’re trying to do!” But I wonder how many English Lit scholars — the types perhaps more likely to attend annual MLA conferences — might nod their assent, and think, “Well, yes; nice of those rhet/comp folks to handle the grubby little economic side of things, since we’re all about capital-c Culture.” (Yes, I know that’s unfair of me. I’ve been to MLA, and enjoyed it.) And then I wonder what global scholars outside of English departments and rhet/comp programs might make of the “interlingua” thing.

Thoughts?

I recently mentioned the two articles in College English that evidence an explicitly economic focus in their titles; one from 1947, and one from 1977. I had the opportunity to read them both on my flights out here to the left coast, as well as the Henry Giroux article recently linked by the Happy Tutor, and a couple chapters from Zuboff and Maxmin. What I found was an interesting progression of economic rhetoric that helped me to solidify some of the conclusions I’ve started to develop about the nature of economic discourse in English studies, in academia, and in mainstream American culture.

It’s like this, see:
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I did several JSTOR searches today, looking for how often people in English and in composition and rhetoric talk about economics. In JSTOR (which should be available via your nearest academic library, if not your community library), I searched for the word “economic” in the title and abstract fields for the journals College English and CCC. Results: two hits, both for College English. One an article from 1947, the other an article from 1977. Apparently, we only talk specifically about economics once every thirty years or so. Next, I searched for the word “economic” in the full text field for the journal CCC. CCC articles tend to run between 4000 and 7000 words. Volume 1 of CCC was published in 1950; since then, there has been a total of 3070 articles (or, very roughly, 16,885,000 words) published in the journal’s pages. In that time, compositionists have used the words “economic” or “economics” 207 times. (For much cooler wordcount fun, go check out wordcount.org. 4808 1427!) This gives me some additional information about the contours of economic and class discourses in English and composition; my next step will probably be to do the same sort of thing with The Bedford Bibliography.

In other news, Zeugma’s new favorite game is upstairs-downstairs. She loves being out on my second-floor little deck behind the kitchen, being able to watch the birds that come to the birdfeeder up close, and she wants to go outside every chance she gets. So I’ll go out there with a book and the laptop and do some work and make sure she doesn’t go down the stairs. Only lately she’s gotten quick and bold. She’ll dart around me and down the steps, then dash across the lower deck (the flower shop and restaurant use it) and up the other stairs to the bigger second-floor deck on the other side, behind my bedroom. I chased her a couple times, with her looking back every few steps to make sure I was following, and she was delighted to find that the other door led back into the bedroom. (It was a better option for me than carrying her, fussing and wiggling and clawing, back down and back up the deck stairs.) So now it’s a game: pick a time when Dad’s not watching, dash down the steps, let him chase you up the other steps and let you back into the bedroom, and then run around to the kitchen again.

OK, I can indulge that, at least for a little while. The problem came the other night, when I was refinishing some furniture and had the sliding door in the kitchen cracked for ventilation.
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It’s taken me a while to work through my thoughts on Curtiss’s recent comment to me, which is pretty much par for the course, since Curtiss’s thoughts always tend to offer a big, complex mouthful of analysis to chew on. (I know you work in IT, Curtiss, but damn academia could use a technology critic as insightful as you. You’d give Professor Feenberg a run for his money.) But Clancy was good enough to e-mail me a link to Jenny’s excellent recent thoughts on critical pedagogy, which I’d been lame enough to overlook, and some stuff started to click between what Jenny and Curtiss had to say. Let’s see if I can start to make some connections.

Jenny notes that the for-sale paper mills offer “a plethora of ready-made essays” in the “critical pedagogy” mode: “an analysis of gendered constructions in film, the hidden ideology of class within certain ads, the circulations of men’s magazines”, and so on, and such essays “are just as common as any other kind of ‘usual English essay assignments that can be bought at these sites.” These essays, Jenny suggests, “have now entered a kind of general equivalency”, in that their “analyses [comprise] a ‘universal’ vocabulary and methodology of critique”. In other words, they’re a genre, with easily recognizable and replicated generic conventions — which, Jenny points out, removes “such ‘cultural analyses’ from the actual content of cultural operation”.
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While the Zuboff and Maxmin book is fascinating and insightful, in reading it I sometimes find myself forgetting why I find economic concerns so essential to how I think about writing instruction and its intersection with technology. In a recent edition of James J. Murphy’s A Short History of Writing Instruction, I found some reminders. The book’s final chapter is by Catherine Hobbs and James Berlin, and deals with twentieth-century writing instruction. In the chapter’s second paragraph, Hobbs and Berlin write that “education in a democratic society is a site of contestation over the kind of economic, social, and political formations we want schools to endorse” (248): certainly a familiar argument, but one worth remembering. What I find more interesting (although it’s something I had begun to understand from the brilliant work of Raymond Williams) is their assertion that “The modern high school and the modern comprehensive university took their shapes as part of an economic shift from a laissez-faire market economy of unbridled individual competition to a managed economy of corporate and government alliances and planning” (249).
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Mark C. Taylor begins his analysis of Kant’s Der Streit der Fakult