Pleasure Now or Never

Campus Report ^ | January 7, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Pleasure Now or Never

by: Bethany Stotts, January 07, 2008

Chicago, Ill- At a 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) “Pleasure Now!” panel discussing the dreary emotional malaise permeating many classrooms, professors called for an integration of environmental, spiritual, and pop culture references into the classroom.

The panel’s “Pleasure Now!” “manifesto for change” exhorts professors to “reassess the disciplinary habits that our generation has been so vital to articulating.”.....

The authors of the manifesto also attribute their pedagogical angst to uniquely capitalist roots. “The corporatization of the university, escalating expectations for productivity, external monitoring of outcomes, scarcity of resources, and the structural undermining of the tenure system make us miserable,” they write. In other words, the accountability required by the marketplace is dehumanizing and tedious—core Marxist doctrines....

Art History Professor Christopher Reed offered his own unique conception of pleasure in the workplace by highlighting the social virtues of homosexual references in the television sitcom Will & Grace and a YouTube video titled “Shoes.” “And we argued that a lot of fun that we had in watching [Will & Grace] came from us watching this kind of queer references which were unmarked as such” the Lake Forest College professor said.....

Showing a YouTube video of “Shoes,” which had 10.9 million views and approximately 85,000 favorites as of January 7, 2008, Reed asserted that the cross-dressing protagonist Kelly’s “drag act is completely unconvincing” but that “Kelly is completely compelling.” Recounting a recent shopping trip at the mall, Professor Reed said that “there was a big shoe store next door, and I was walking through it to get back to the car, and I found myself doing “these shoes rule. These shoes s---!” just like Kelly.

[JamesP81]

bttt

[WritableSpace]

So what Epicurianism?

If pleasure is all that is important in life, then thats a life worthy of swine not human beings.

[ClearCase_guy]

Art History Professor Christopher Reed offered his own unique conception of pleasure in the workplace by highlighting the social virtues of homosexual references

I can imagine what other methods of "pleasure in the workplace" he believes in. Tell your children to be on their guard.

[wintertime]

The corporatization of the university, escalating expectations for productivity, external monitoring of outcomes, scarcity of resources, and the structural undermining of the tenure system make us miserable,”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Gee!...The real world su*ks! Doesn’t it?

[wintertime]

Your link is not working for me. Too bad. I would have enjoyed reading the article.

[Billthedrill]

I see the MLA hasn't changed much. Could it be that there is a malaise in the classroom because - gasp! - clitoral hermeneutics is insufferably boring? That students are tiring of going into debt ten thousand a term to contemplate the profundity of bad puns? Could be...

But there are concepts in academia that will not die any more than that rubber-masked guy in a George Romero movie. One of the most painful of these is that the kids want the professors to act like them. They don't. They want the professors to act educated. That's harder.

[wintertime]

In other words, the accountability required by the marketplace is dehumanizing and tedious—core Marxist doctrines....

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I have repeatedly written that Marxism is our nation’s most imminent and serious threat....And,,,schools are the Marxist’s **most** important weapon.

We can survive a nuclear suit case bomb but freedom will not survive if the Marxists succeed in indoctrinating the next generation of voters!

[untenured]

If the panel is accurately summarized, the participants seem very concerned about how much fun professors can have in the classroom and not a whit about whether students are learning, getting at higher truths and purposes in life, and generally being prepared for life as an educated adult.

I just reread The Closing of the American Mind after 20 years, and I was reminded how much a true university education is not just about skill provision but about clueing students in to the need to be constantly reflective about life and its purpose. I would bet that none of this goes on in the classroom of the people who attended this session.

I have been a college teacher for 13 years. I only know realize that when I started I was terrible, and that negative student reaction was more my fault than theirs. It took me years to learn how to teach effectively. The key principles, at least for me, are to demand excellence, to tell students ahead of time that you will demand excellence, to remind them that failure and struggle are part of life and not the end of life, to tell them that it is my job to help them to master difficult material, that it is their job to ask for that help if they need it, and to rely more on Socratic questions and less on declarative sentences, so that students may themselves learn to wander toward the truth. If you do these things most students, even those who struggle to get a C, respect you. (Those who fail because (unbeknownst to them ere now) they are totally unprepared are a different matter.)

[bs9021]

The link should be working now:)

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Oh, Lord....

The “Shoes” thing is known and quoted by young teens of my aquaintance (a.k.a. my daughter’s friends) but is rightly treated as silliness on a par with “Charlie the Unicorn” and “Harry Potter Puppet Pals”. The numbskull in the article seems to place intellectual weight there. Is this really how far our universities have fallen?