Inside the Teaching Machine

The full integration of public higher education in the United States into the global capitalist economy should come as no surprise to anyone. Catherine Chaput makes the case in Inside the Teaching Machine that despite the Morrill Act and its aim of turning out “critical citizens,” the U.S. system of public higher education has always worked to produce subjects whose labor would promote the aims of national and, later, international capital. She goes further to claim that U.S. public higher education in its most recent iteration has served as a model for, and has in fact made possible, the creation of a post-professional class of knowledge workers who naturalize the system of global capital so much that we, along with the university chancellors, deans, and alumni who do the cheerleading, seem eager to embrace it. Chaput presents a historical materialist and rhetorical analysis explaining how cultural, political, and economic spheres function together to produce what she calls the boundaries of valuation by which the process or normalization takes place.The book has two principal aims. The first is to show how during the transition from industrial capitalism to monopoly capitalism and then global capitalism, the political, cultural, and especially economic actors in society have produced the corporate university. The second aim is to outline a historical-materialist-rhetorical methodology by which further analysis—and, better still, a pedagogy—might be advanced. Chaput succeeds at her first goal but falls a bit short with the second. The argument begins, in the book's introduction and first three chapters, with a reexamination of the rise of a “professional” class through the system of public higher education in the United States, especially after the middle of the nineteenth century. Although many leaders in higher education cite the Morrill Act as the legislation that opened the doors of colleges and universities to the “sons and daughters of the working class” and thus was conducive to participatory democracy, the passage of the act in 1862 mainly spawned a class of managerial personnel. The legislation was an engine of the late-nineteenth century industrial economy in the United States as it professionalized the mechanical and agrarian arts and sciences, “provide[d] low-cost research and development sites that would help advance the United States in its struggle for international political legitimacy” (p. 52), and “helped shape disparate groups of individuals, previously isolated from one another because of a primarily home- and farm-based economy, into a new class of managers who could identify with one another culturally, politically, and economically” (p. 43). During the Progressive Era, the focus was less on the development of individuals with managerial skills and more on the culture of cooperation, which led ultimately to the “organization man” (p. 82). Later on, the professional expert gave way to the post-professional, whose knowledge—endlessly duplicated by myriad public colleges and universities—is now replaceable and exportable. The “expanded marketplace [is now passed] off as openness” (p. 111), and multiculturalism simply means that, among other things, all culture can be commodified and consumed. It also means that, to make maximum use of the commodification of everything, universities have become models of efficiency to be emulated by corporations, freeing up the time of their research faculty by relegating teaching to the “replaceable and exportable” contingent workforce, promoting distance education (thereby cutting down on the need to commute to the office or library), and creating self-service portals through the use of technology (do-it-yourself advising, registration, and course management via the marvels of PeopleSoft). Not a pretty picture, but a pretty accurate one.In the book's second part, Chaput analyzes the mission statements put out by university officials at research-intensive public colleges. She teases out the cultural, political, and economic strands of these statements to highlight the rhetoric of global citizenship. She concludes by laying out a pedagogical model that cuts against the grain of “professional education” and develops a historical-materialist-rhetorical hermeneutic. In so doing, she wants students to recognize that the reality made “natural” through the rhetoric and performance of professionalism and globalization may seem “solid, permanent, impenetrable [and] final,” but in fact it “can be torn apart, like the dotted lines on a sheet of paper” (p. 234). Taking her cue from Edward Said, among others, she goes on to propose a pedagogy that creates “working class professionals” who can “interrogat[e], interven[e], and attemp[t] to change the structures of society that link citizenship to a weak version of democracy in order to justify the exploitative historical materialist terrain of capitalism” (p. 238).This last step is unconvincing. Even if a historical-materialist hermeneutic can lay bare the economic (material) assumptions that spawn the rhetoric of globalization and citizenship and thereby rationalize the exploitation of a post-professional workforce, such an analysis will not necessarily generate the kind of critical awareness that in turn leads to a change in the underlying material circumstances. To be fair to Chaput, she acknowledges as much, noting that, at best, “such a pedagogy ... disrupts the easy ebb and flow of [a] university education” that “produces complacency through its training of future employees” (p. 269). Having seen such pedagogies before and even put some of them into practice (including in the first-year writing curriculum, as Chaput did with her model course), I know well that many students—even the most critically engaged—do not “intervene in the institutions that produce and reproduce class struggle” (p. 269). Rather, they become cynical and participate in global capital's rhetorical project even though they know that doing so is unhelpful at best and complicit at worst. The problem is that the transition from analysis to invention (from using a rhetorical hermeneutic to take the measure of the language of global capital in the modern public research university to inventing new rhetorical techniques to change or disrupt that language) is very difficult, as even Louis Althusser and those working with his model came to acknowledge.Chaput's Inside the Teaching Machine is a smart and timely analysis of the involvement of the contemporary public research university in the globalization of capital and the history of how such involvement came to be thought of as natural. Whether such an analysis will lead, in the end, to the transformation of the (post-)professional class and of the U.S. university remains to be seen

Globalization · Media studies · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Higher Education Governance and Development · Law · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies