Abstract
This chapter analyses a text that makes an urgent case for the primacy of the object within university pedagogy, and for commercial education: ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’ by Diane Purkiss (The lecherous professor revisited: Plato, pedagogy and the scene of harassment, Sage, London; 1994). Purkiss considers contemporary university teaching a ‘harasser’s charter’, the tentative solution to which is a more visible, public form of pedagogy. Taking her cue from the Athenian agora, Purkiss imagines an open, digitized space, where students move freely, having no intense relationships with lecturers. This vision can be understood to have been subsequently realized within new-managerialist provision. If Purkiss recognizes commercialised education as dangerous, it is a danger that has no bearing on the object. The commitment is to ‘transparent’ communication and community, for Bill Readings the defining features of ‘The University of Excellence’.
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Notes
- 1.
Another problem with the defence of Faculty expertise, as suggested by arguments put forward by Bill Readings, is its dependence on notions of clear demarcations of identity, including self, subject and nation state that have been understood to have lost their purchase within contemporary life. See Readings (1996), pp. 44–53. It is here, I would argue, that Readings differs from Thomas Docherty. See Docherty, Thomas. 2015. Universities at war. London: Sage Swifts.
- 2.
I had the privilege of being taught by Diane Purkiss at UEA in the early 90s. Purkiss was an inspirational teacher, and her writing continues to have a profound influence upon my thinking. She was also instrumental in my being accepted onto a postgraduate degree. Without Purkiss’s influence, I would not be in my present academic post and would not be writing this.
- 3.
For the former, see Deem, Rosemary, Hillyard, Sam and Reed, Michael. 2007. Knowledge, higher education, and the new managerialism: The changing management of UK universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Newman, Janet. 2001. Modernising governance: New Labour, policy and society. London: Sage. For the latter see Dennis, Dion. 1995. Brave new reductionism: TQM as ethnocentrism. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 3/9. http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/652. Accessed 10 November 2016; Avis, James. 1996. ‘The enemy within: Quality and managerialism in education’. In Knowledge and nationhood: Education, politics and work, eds. James Avis, Martin Bloomer, Geoff Esland, Denis Gleeson, and Phil Hodkinson, 105–120. London: Cassell/Continuum; Levidow, Les. 2006. Marketizing higher education. In Neo-liberalism and educational reform, eds. E. Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson, 237–256. New Jersey: Hampton; Docherty (2015).
- 4.
This is quoted by Stefan Collini in his exacting critique of the appeal to Newman in contemporary accounts of Higher Education. See Collini, Stefan. 2012. What are universities for? London: Penguin, p. 45.
- 5.
Michael Barber, quoted in Mead, Sara. 2006. Education reform lessons from England: An interview With Michael Barber. http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id. Accessed 1 July 2016. See also Barber, Michael. 1996. The Learning Game. London: Indigo.
- 6.
Deem et al. (2007), p. 10; Deem, Rosemary and Brehony, Kevin. 2005. Management as ideology. Oxford Review of Education 31/2: 217–235.
- 7.
Lynch, Kathleen, Grummell, Bernie and Devine, Dympna. 2008. New managerialism in education: Commercialization, carelessness and gender. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Webber, Michelle. 2008. Miss Congeniality meets the new managerialism: Feminism, contingent labour, and the new university. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 38/3: 37–56; Davies, Annette and Thomas, Robyn. 2006. Managerialism and accountability in higher education: The gendered nature of restructuring and the costs to academic service. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 13/2: 179–193. Here I would especially recommend Parker, Ian. 2015. The function and field of speech and language in neoliberal society. Organization 17/3: 1–17: ‘A reflexive attention to the role of “emotions” at work becomes part of the ethics of gendered care that ensures that occupants of positions of executive and middle management know their place, perform it, feel it’ (7).
- 8.
For ‘clandestine’, see Docherty (2015) above.
- 9.
See Wright, Billie, Dziech, B. W. and Weiner, Linda. 1990. The lecherous professor: Sexual harassment on campus. Urbana: University of Illinois.
- 10.
The extent to which such making visible will not necessarily lead to a more open and democratic scene of teaching can be gauged from the controversies surrounding the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework in the UK. See Patterson, Jess. 2015. TEF will mean more exploitation of academics on short term contracts. Times Higher Education, September 28.
- 11.
It is worth stressing again the complexity, subtlety and self-reflexivity of Purkiss’s work, qualities that I understand to set it apart from other texts discussed in this present book.
- 12.
‘Space’ itself is a problematic term in relation to ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, and to its account of patriarchal formulations. See the reading of the khora in Derrida (2012), p. 159, for example.
- 13.
Purkiss (1994), p. 211. For more on care and carelessness in this context, see Lynch et al. (2012).
- 14.
See Webber (2008).
- 15.
Interestingly, for Purkiss, existing patriarchal provision results in precisely these limits, Purkiss (1994), p. 194. Although not discussed by Davies, I would also cite, for example, the high proportion of female post-graduate hourly-paid teachers within literature departments as another way in which the institutional structure is not favourable. For more, see Webber (2008).
- 16.
See also, for example, Chris Lorenz’s critique of the view that ‘represents education as free and equal exchange between equally positioned buyers and sellers’, in which ‘the hierarchical relationship between teachers and those being taught disappears, and this suggests that the purchasers of education have a right to get what they have paid for’. Lorenz, Chris. 2012. If you’re so smart, why are you under surveillance? Universities, neoliberalism, and New Public Management. Critical Inquiry 38: 599–629, 621.
- 17.
The ironic return of a narrative of self-replication is inevitable, I would contend. My work, and the tensions within it, is not safely separable from ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’, for example. It is not comfortably outside the disruption of language to which it appeals. I will not try here to point out and second guess all of the ways in which my own reading is caught up in an ironic return: for the difficulty of such a move see Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. 2010. Childhood, queer theory and feminism. Feminist Theory 11/3: 309–321. It is for this reason that I am suspicious of arguments that insist upon the ‘modest’ nature of their enterprise. Such modesty demands that a text has an accurate assessment of its extent.
- 18.
See also Ai Media. ‘Making learning visible: First technology in education evaluation published. http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/making-learning-visible-first-technology-education-evaluation-published. Accessed 1 June 2016.
- 19.
For the idea of clarity within TED Talks, see the following: ‘Clarity: Chris Anderson, the curator for TED Talks, explained this best in an interview: “One of the most common killers is a lack of clarity. A presenter has a lot to say but they fail to put it together in a compelling and understandable narrative. There’s too much jargon, or a bit too much chopping and changing. Some people will try to cram too much in, and the audience doesn’t feel like it’s been brought along on a thrilling journey”’. Have an idea worth sharing. http://tedxfiu.com/have-an-idea-worth-sharing-be-a-tedxfiu-speaker/546. Accessed 1 June 2016. For an idea of the typically techno-utopian solutions to problems of university education offered by Ted Talks, see Shai Reshef. 2014. An ultra-low cost college degree. http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_reshef_a_tuition_free_college_degree. Accessed 1 June 2016. This is an argument for a tutor-free, online, and thus freely accessible university degree. There can be no lecherous professor here. Neither, however, can there be anything that is not instrumental. Education is understood in terms of eventual employment, the formative assessment is based on quizzes, the student does not have to meet anyone else during their learning, and the only options available are computer science or business administration. For more on neo-liberal and new managerial discourses of new technology, see Docherty (2015), pp. 64–69. For more on digitization and universalization in education see, Levidow (2006).
- 20.
I read this move in the opening argument of ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’, but only in terms of the status of harassment. There it is claimed that ‘the very notion that lechery can be expelled to purify the academy implies that lechery is a construction of the academy; the idea that the harasser’s lechery is separable from his professorship locates it within his professorship.’ Purkiss (1994), p. 191.
- 21.
But what would constitute ‘my reading’. How would it be possible to still the game and neatly separate ‘my’ language from that of ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’, for example? For more on the difficulties of a pure division within critiques of neo-liberal Higher Education discourse, see Parker (2015), especially pp. 9–11.
- 22.
For the impossibility of liberating discourse from technology, see Wortham, Simon Moran. 2006. Counter institutions: Jacques Derrida and the question of the university. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 101–103.
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Cocks, N. (2017). ‘[…] Not much like a Grove […]’: Openness, Object, and Agora in ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’ by Diane Purkiss. In: Higher Education Discourse and Deconstruction. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52983-7_2
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