The community college plays a central and expanding role in the development of the educational system in America. It is probable that the community college's transformation indicates the general path that this development will take. This paper is a critical analysis of the community college with regard to its context of a modernizing, technological society. The analysis draws upon the sociological phenomenon of technique to get at the force driving technological societies. Technique comprises interrelated technologies, exacting procedures and methods, and habits of thought and action all predisposed to follow the unrelenting force of efficiency. In a technological society such as our own, technique has evolved into a monolithic and unrivaled force. The essential argument is that a carefully informed study of the community college reveals its having become fully ensnared by technique.
The effort to substantiate this argument begins with an in-depth reflection upon a community college gathering having the ostensible purpose of collegial participation. Critical reflection yields clear symptomology of technique. Beginning with this illustration the community college exhibits the predicament of a total environment of technique. Gatherings such as these serve as fleeting and in the long run inadequate compensation for the loss of any traditional purpose. I argue that this loss is wrought by the continuous implementation of efficient procedure and technologies. Next, I highlight a number of personnel practices. The emerging criteria for personnel decisions and expectations show rigidity in favor of those persons having characteristics amenable to technique. Last, discourse at the national and state levels pertaining to community colleges illustrates total complicity to the dictates of a technological society.
Our understanding of the current state of affairs with community colleges is substantially enhanced through the study of technique and its broad implications for culture and social institutions. In the case of the community college, the omnipotence of technique is causing a crisis in terms of maintaining a meaningful institutional purpose. This crisis necessitates diversions and psychological compensations of all sorts. For example, a façade is constructed of rhetoric and image announcing a progressive and innovative time abounding in new paradigms. However, beneath this façade rests stifling uniformity and conformity in response to the predicament of a technological society. In light of this situation, the individual educator is urged to re-awaken the critical and subversive strain of higher education to combat runaway technique.
As concerns the foundation of an institution-
This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the important people, or the people in the Know. It will not shape the professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public, nor will it lead to the periodic scandals and crises, which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which the profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
C.S. Lewis to the graduating class Cambridge, WWII
As many of you know, the Cabinet received some training this spring regarding TQM and process management. Core and support processes are the central avenues through which we provide services to our customers. The purpose of mapping these processes is to allow us to increase our efficiency and effectiveness as a "supplier of learning opportunities." The underlying theory is that good things happen because of good people.
Campus-wide electronic message from a community college
The observations and reflections that follow emerge from several years of teaching experience within the community college system in Illinois. This treatment receives its over-arching theoretical guidance from the conceptualization of the sociological phenomenon of technique, a conceptualization having certain commonalties with the idea of instrumental reason as formulated in the Frankfurt School (Habermas, 1970) and which continues today in the field of education in critical studies of teacher education (Popkewitz, 1987). The sociological phenomenon of technique is most thoughtfully examined in the corpus of work from the late French social historian Jacques Ellul (1964, 1965, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1975, and 1981). Ellul’s central thesis is that the unbridled penetration of technique, the central dynamic of a technologically oriented society, into all domains of our lives is devastating to culture and the individual.
Contemporary writers such as Clifford Stoll (1995, 1999) and Neil Postman (1993) have brought a critical perspective regarding technique to a wider audience. A closer adherence to Ellul’s comprehensive argument as well as its development and implications can be found in the work of Richard Stivers (1982, 1994, 1999) and Willem H. Vanderburg (1985, 1998). For Ellul and those whose position is similar, the single most important and dominant element of the modern milieu is the conglomeration of techniques that form a system driven by ever-increasing levels of efficiency. This sociological phenomenon reaches a level of momentum eliminating or seducing any human or cultural alternative in its path. I wish to consider the impact of technique upon the community college.
The community college is a component of the modern social institution of formal education. The thoughtful study of any social institution requires attention to the institution’s integration and articulation within the broader social and cultural context. Today, the context of educational institutions is the latest stage of technological civilization. Whatever else may be considered relevant, this context is inescapable. Ironically, the best that has been written on the community college, Dougherty’s (1994) The Contradictory College and McGrath and Spear’s (1991) The Academic Crisis of the Community College, pay scant attention to the importance of this context. These wholly worthwhile and penetrating analyses parallel a number of the problematic symptoms identified in the thesis that follows; however, their diagnoses lack sufficient attention to the set of demands that flow directly from technological civilization to the community college. It is precisely in the coming to grips with the context of a technological society that offers the greatest promise for understanding the community college and its trajectory. The more we understand about the internal dynamic propelling technological societies, the more our understanding of the community college will be enhanced.
Community colleges emerged relatively late in comparison to other segments of higher education (i.e., traditional liberal arts colleges, state colleges and universities). They entered the stream of historical development and flourished within the context of a more thoroughly technological society. As a result, their connection to notions of traditional education is tenuous. Their emphasis is upon vocational training, specialization, and practical utility. One perspective, the one that dominates community college discourse, holds this disconnection from traditional notions of higher education to be conducive to progressive innovation. From this perspective, the more community colleges continue to jettison any attachments to the past, the more rapidly they will adapt to the unfolding of modernization now thrust upon them. And what is this cascade of modernization other than technological expansion? Compared to other institutions more rooted in the past and having a set of traditions, community colleges can be asserted to be at the cutting edge of educational innovation particularly with regard to the delivery of “educational products.” A pivotal ingredient aiding and abetting these innovations is the position of the teacher within community colleges. With rare exception, the community college instructor is thought to be proficient in teaching methods. To actively pursue scholarship is unusual, if not viewed as an act of betrayal. This institutionalized role for the community college instructor paves the way for turning the instructor into an efficient coordinator or technician of delivery systems for educational products. These systems include bringing educational technologies into all facets of learning as well as using social/psychological techniques to promote student output. If the community college is a leader and innovator as here outlined, it is only in the sense of being the lead lemming. I find that what is typically construed as progressive and innovative for the institution and, as a result, emancipatory for students, is actually destructive and utterly conformist to the imperatives of technological society. This critical assessment is my distinct contribution. It is a contribution that reveals itself only through a specific understanding of technological societies.
Technological society marks an epoch in human society. Epoch-making societal transformations such as the industrial revolution cannot be discerned through myopic attention to the bits and pieces of industrial hardware. So too, technological societies will remain misunderstood from the vantage point of piecemeal attention to this or that technology, scientific discovery, or new method to resolve a problem or inconvenience. Yet this is the typical approach to thinking about technology. What is needed is the identification of the unifying force operating within technological societies. In his exhaustive study of modernization, Ellul concluded that technique was the emergent and unwavering force of technological societies. Ellul’s effort to identify the characteristics of technique as well as respond to questions about his analysis remains seminal:
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
This definition is not a theoretical construct. It is arrived at by examining each activity and observing the facts of what modern man calls technique in general, as well as by investigating the different areas in which specialists declare they have a technique. (Ellul, 1964, XXV)
One of Ellul’s conclusions was that, from the mid-twentieth century on, technique had so permeated society and culture that human thought and activity were either in service to increasing the levels of efficiency (i.e., technique) in all domains or working to compensate for technique’s fallout. The fallout refers to the psychological, institutional, and cultural upheaval resulting from technique’s increasingly autonomous expansion. Lost would be the traditional sources of meaning and significance for human societies. This would, of course, produce a crisis of purpose for the individual as well as for social institutions (e.g., educational institutions). In actuality, the capacity to know the human dimensions of meaning, purpose, and qualitative distinctions of all sorts would evaporate. I caution the reader to note that these dimensions refer to the bases for a reasonable life common to human culture, instead of categories for academic, professional discourse.
These initial attempts to distil the makeup of technique are only an incremental step. An aspect of this step necessitates recognizing technique as a sociological phenomenon. Sociological phenomena are social/historical “products” that are super-individual. They are also elemental parts of the social world into which we are born. They arise without conscious planning and are perpetuated without conscious consent. The challenge for analysis is to make transparent the ramifications of a sociological phenomenon. To do this, a set of symptoms must be shown to be interrelated in accordance with an appropriate diagnosis. The challenge lies in this: A sociological phenomenon establishes predispositions among those in its presence. This tends to nullify the capacity to be aware of what is in reality an imposition. The Frankfurt School, particularly in the work of Habermas (1970, 81-122) following Marcuse (1964), identified this important facet of ideology as it applies to technological or post-industrial society. In this new context, fundamental questions are submerged by predispositions toward making things operate more effectively. Problems are then reduced to the singular plane of strategic planning for effective control as an end in itself. As a result, social institutions would be set adrift in terms of any traditional purpose while at the same time incorporating and organizing around the myriad of emerging technologies and techniques buffeting their borders. Though a unique context is at hand, the general rule of predispositions remains valid. When individuals or groups internalize or absorb the dictates of their context--in this case technique--the dictate takes on the appearance of deriving from volition or existing in the nature of things. Furthermore, the orientation actually demanded by the context is paradoxically embraced and regarded as inevitable.
In our current context, though embraced and wholeheartedly supported as the source of hope for the future, what could possibly be regarded as more of a fait accompli than technological expansion and the refinement of methods and procedures for every conceivable task or activity? Many of these techniques are human techniques directed at individuals and social relationships (e.g., instruction, child rearing, motivation, organizational teamwork, leadership, etc.). We begin to see the breadth of the shadow cast by the monolith of technique: a shadow that stretches across all social institutions, including the community college. To reach the vantage point necessary for us to see the full impact of this sociological phenomenon will require weaving together insights drawn from an emerging knowledge of the monolith of technique with the daily exigencies of community colleges today.
Furthering the conceptualization of this monolith requires a point of clarification and an observation. First, the broader makeup of technique as compared with a technology must be understood. Technology as conceived of in a machine is an element of technique made concrete. In developing a specific machine or any automated system, a set of human activities is reduced to a discrete sequence. Once circumstances prevail pressing activity in the direction of the highest level of efficiency, the drive for a mechanistic routine exists. With adequate momentum and no sufficient countervailing force, an endless march of one efficient means after another ensues. However, both exacting procedures and technology with the singular purpose of efficiency reflect the broader social/historical phenomenon of technique. They combine and integrate forming an enveloping system. This point of clarification is truly essential when studying the impact of technique on education because confusion on this score is rampant. For example, in October of 1999 (Illinois Community College Faculty Association et al.) a “Teaching and Learning Conference” on the subject of “Ethics Across Campus” issued a call for papers. Topics covered included “student decorum, ...teaching without technology, issues of faculty ethics.” This agenda would appear to be a countervailing force to the thesis of runaway technology in education. However, in the next sentence we find, “As always, the conference welcomes sessions which center on innovative teaching techniques.” Another example comes from an announcement (1999) from the Community College Humanities Association that, through a major national endowment, is “Advancing the Humanities Through Technology at Community Colleges.” The thesis drawn from a comprehensive understanding of technique proposes symmetry between efficient method and technology, and an additional symmetry between form and content. Furthermore, once a way of doing things or thinking becomes an exacting procedure under the singular rule of efficiency, it then becomes void of human content.
It is telling to call to mind today’s commonplace experience of the empty ritual or routine. Numerous examples of just such an experience of emptiness are found in workplace settings where efficient procedures rule the day. The goal of optimal performance within a system of efficient procedure requires that the participant divest herself in order to refrain from contaminating the process with the subject’s unique person (Garson, 1988). Failure to follow the procedure in an exacting manner threatens the uniformity of results that is the hallmark of efficient procedure. This holds true for fast food or aerospace parts production, or the handling of disgruntled employees, customers, or students. What has yet to receive even minimal attention is that efficient procedure is what meaningful ritual is not. One could look to any variety of culturally rich rituals, from the Japanese Tea Ceremony to the dances of the Balinese. These typically communal practices consist of elaborate gestures with symbolic significance conveying special meaning to that people alone: practices that are aesthetic, poetic, and yet reasonable to the culture’s members.
Let us briefly think hypothetically. We may begin with the application of technique or the insertion of a once vibrant culture into the milieu of technique. With technique’s avalanche of technology, technologically mediated communications, and efficient procedure, one criterion supersedes all others. How efficient is any and all activity? Certainly, the more embedded in tradition and custom a culture’s rituals are, the more inefficient do they appear. For example, the Japanese Tea Ceremony is a supremely inefficient means of making tea. Within the milieu of technique engineers, technicians, and efficiency experts would revel in producing similar-tasting tea within a fraction of the time. It could be made available at drive-throughs and convenience stores with the press of a button and with exacting standardization. The rule of efficiency forms a system applied to each and every practice. As efficiency extends itself, a simultaneous stripping away of the symbolically meaningful facets of culture occurs, leaving them lie as scraps on the floor. People come to find themselves in an environment that is unsettling and alien. As a consequence, some form of compensation is required to make the situation bearable. For instance, human relations therapies in the form of group and motivational psychology yield moments of emotional compensation through immersion in the group (e.g., retreats, team meetings, etc.). But these therapies are temporary in effect and in no way confront the force of efficiency. This sets in motion a tightening spiral. The extension of efficient procedure and technology carries with it disenchantment, which necessitates some form of psychological re-enchantment only to further facilitate the march of efficient procedure and technology and so on. The main contention of this paper with reference to the centerpiece of community college reform can be extrapolated from this scenario of feedback between technique and cultural disenchantment--a scenario to which we will return when concluding. Let us now turn to evidence of this contention at the community college.
A meeting/retreat held at a small mid-western community college is illustrative of technique’s impact upon the community college. The retreat was hailed as an opportunity for a representative cross-section of the college, sometimes referred to as a community, to openly think about the institution in terms of past, present, and future. This thinking would lead to the identification of strengths and weaknesses arrived at collectively and, in turn, would serve as a foundation for plans for the future. Representation and participation were signaled as being of paramount importance. Rather than remaining a subdued aspect or one element among many, collective participation was thematic for the gathering. Adherence to this practice of open-ended sharing casts a hue of unassailable participatory democracy. Any orientation in the form of goals or proposals arising out of this “grass roots” venture would undoubtedly be able to lay claim to collective approval.
This event was projecting the now obligatory image of shared governance and responsiveness to the university of ideas. Had participants actually received a formal invitation, this image would have been central. One would most likely find that attendees regarded, at the retreat’s immediate conclusion, the day’s events as having thoroughly complied with the announcements and expectations for the retreat. Indeed, at the level of image and formality, most all were heard, and active participation encouraged within a congenial atmosphere. Next we turn to observations of the day’s proceedings themselves.
The day’s events began at a location off-campus, a retreat from the scene and routine of ongoing patterns of interaction. Upon arriving, those attending casually and without particular direction partook of breakfast. At this initial point, spontaneous interaction and conviviality reigned. It was also an occasion for those coordinating and facilitating the event to extend greetings to attendees. Following this brief informal gathering, all members were seated in a large oval. All units of the institution, including the college board of trustees, were represented. The formal program began with the only individual presentation to the group from the institution’s financial officer, who identified the tight financial constraints in which the institution was operating. The morning session’s sequence of activities was described briefly, as was the role of the facilitators with an addendum, which called for brevity, as the program was full. This stated, the facilitators called upon each individual in the semicircle to offer up to the group their selection of one or two favorite films. Films readily came to mind and member after member openly identified his or her favorite films. With each individual’s selection came brief comments and side conversation of a jovial nature. The program was now underway.
Having completed this portion of the program, participants were handed a blank sheet of paper and a crayon or marker. After the facilitator recalled the need for brevity, those present were directed to envision their relation to the institution and to draw this vision on paper. Though this task was initially somewhat perplexing, the situation and encouragement fostered participation in the completion of the activity. In turn the drawings served as the focus and catalyst for the next phase of the program, when participants were assigned to small groups. These groups consisted of six to eight people seated around tables. Groups were prompted to begin discussion, with each member explaining their drawing and thus invoking responses or commentary. In this fashion, the drawing served as an image to be referred to as revealing that member’s sense of relationship to the institution. Ancillary concern included selecting a recorder who would write a summary of the group’s work on the flip chart or board provided at each table. The facilitators, while pleasantly reiterating the need for brevity and active participation, directed the attention of the groups toward organizational relationships and institutional strengths and weaknesses.
During the brief interlude of opportunity for discussion, a fair degree of dismay as to one’s relationship to the organization was obliquely expressed over “being left out.” This included references that were often metaphorical or relied upon symptoms such as not being informed of campus initiatives or changes, as well as being incapacitated when seeking to supply input or somehow contribute. “I just want to be recognized for being somebody!” “I don’t really feel the work I do is appreciated!” “Nobody takes my ideas or problems seriously!” While these comments often lacked specificity, they were rendered in a heartfelt manner conveying a degree of consternation and alienation. It was not so much a matter of clearly identifiable barriers to being informed or expressing input, as it was a metaphorical reference to a lack of attachment to others united in a meaningful purpose. Thus, one’s toil is seemingly without purpose.
The clock ticking, groups moved on to the area of strengths, weaknesses, and the future orientation for the institution. With vague and momentary reference to weaknesses, participants stressed the need for organizational reform (i.e., committees and procedures) and the need for upgrading electronic information systems and for widening access to these systems across campus and beyond. Other factors stressed included the need to vigorously pursue formal measures of student academic performance, which would guide innovations in instruction. Last was the issue of marketing the institution in terms of various public relations mediums, such as a web site, as well as using the new technological mediums as means of instruction for students/customers. In furtherance of the spirit of active participation, each group moved from one group’s flip chart of points to another. Participants were encouraged to lend commentary in writing. The morning session concluded with a group-by-group verbal summary of their deliberations and any accompanying commentary.
My initial finding suggests the image of participatory democracy abutting a meticulously organized program. In the former, results or outcomes are admittedly unwieldy and uncertain, whereas in the latter, correct planning and implementation optimize predictable outcomes. Resting in the backdrop of what many took to be spontaneous participation was a masterful program leading an audience along a particular path.
Upon examining the retreat further, we come to find that the program actually consisted of a series of activities or human techniques drawn from the study of group dynamics. In fact, this is simply the carryover of educational psychology and organizational administration thematic within many departments of education. This theme is one vision of optimizing learning. We witness a set of techniques or procedures joined in modules, which those who have previously experienced or participated in (i.e., learned or more accurately believe in) come to mimic, directing them at others. The implementation of this plan is regarded as perfectly compatible with democratic participation and maximum respect for the individual. In reality the individual is swept away by a sequence of mirages of participation. The wedding of a submerged sequence of psychological techniques with a veneer of enthusiastic participation is an intriguing feat. It allows the incompatibility of procedures with predictable outcomes alongside the apparent dignity and contribution of individual participants. Once the convivial breakfast and statement of economic reality had served their respective purposes, attendees passed through a sequence of human conditioning rather than an engaging academic forum.
This can be illustrated. The activity having to do with film preferences was a procedure that, because of the nature of the setting, provoked discussion. The setting and its orchestration were far more effective in this provocation than if there actually had been an authoritative command: “Now talk!” The idea that one might choose to remain pensive or disinterested in this form of sharing is not regarded as a threat to a well reasoned argument (e.g., lecture), for in these cases the content or substance of the argument is the keystone, not whether assent (however subtly) can be achieved through manipulation. By contrast, programs of participatory sequences of activity are decidedly hollow in terms of meaningful content. The contagious nature of this shift is evident in the current effort to modernize education through the abatement of the traditional lecture and its replacement with “engaged” learning.
For our purposes, two additional surface-level occurrences warrant inquiry. Recall the heavy emphasis upon encouragement for the participants to contribute as much as possible; all suggestions were to be received enthusiastically. In one activity this took the form of flip chart postings and subsequent commentary from others. At least in one instance, this prescription appears to have been violated. Earlier it was noted that substantial, perhaps unequivocal, support existed for the college’s thinking of education as the process of assessing and expanding instructional methods and mediums. The idea is that through experimentation and evaluation of the variables of learning, the most efficient methods of learning will be discovered. Learning is converted into a laboratory/classroom in which the technology of education is engineered under the auspices of the organization’s CEO: an orientation and practice with seemingly endless opportunities for continuous improvement and innovation. When the opportunity for groups to stroll about and offer commentary arose the following quotation from Lewis Mumford (1944, pp. 258-259) was posted next to just such a set of propositions:
Witness Pestalozzi in How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, published in 1801. “I believe that we must not dream of making progress in the instruction of the people as long as we have not found the forms of instruction which make of the teacher...the simple mechanical instrument of a method which owes its results to the nature of its processes, and not to the ability of the one who uses it.” In that spirit the teacher, whose greatest gift is the capacity to inspire the love of his pupils and make use of that love for their own self-development, has been sedulously transformed into the pedagogical technician: the exponent and the victim of a method. Only with difficulty have real teachers survived that discipline.
The mechanization of education, if conceived as early as the sixteenth century, did not finally take hold on a large scale before the nineteenth century. Its ultimate perversion, as elaborated in the credit accountancy practiced in American schools and colleges, in which knowledge itself is reduced to that which can be automatically regurgitated in examinations and evaluated by mechanical devices, has become fully apparent only in our own day. But the essentially complementary nature of the various means that were invented for mechanizing the mind must be understood. Because of the ingrained anti-communal, anti-personal bias of the New World ideology, all the great devices of liberation--not least of course the machine itself--tended to work in precisely the opposite direction. The axioms of this new education were well laid down by Alsted: they indicated how far the dissociation from the historic, the communal, the organic, the personal, had gone.
When participants returned to their points of origin, the quotation from Mumford had disappeared. From all accounts this was a singular act of dismissal, an act antithetical to the theme/image of open collegial engagement. Given that the statement appears neither as obscene nor bizarre, its removal is worth speculating about.
Norms become visible or objectified at those points when negative reaction to a behavior or assertion occurs. In instances where a reaction identifies deviance or violation, the border of collectively acceptable behavior or thought is “announced.” In their immediacy, these responses reveal that in which the group share a collective unconscious. Within the cornucopia of ideas being put forward, why would those of Mumford provoke censorship? The issue is not one of identifying a rather childish and petty act, but instead, of giving due attention to the criteria of elimination. Amidst the seeming variety of voices, Mumford’s struck a dissonant chord. His forthright statement brings to the surface the unrecognized and unanticipated consequence of an avalanche of efficient procedures and technologies--the suffocation of the human community and the crushing of the truly personal. The action of dismissal places Mumford’s contention into the waste bin of the illegitimate or irrational, but if the contention is accurate, it demythologizes its target, and, in so doing, slays that in which an irrational, collective belief has been placed. In this case, Mumford’s tampering with a magical belief in efficient procedure and technology yields an irrational response.
The dismissal of Mumford’s critical position leads to a final point concerning contradictory experiences of group members. One can attempt to discern sources of consternation and wellsprings of hope for participants. As previously discussed, participants were dismayed by both a lack of inclusion and a lack of personal significance (i.e., powerlessness) within the ongoing operation of the institution. Participants could readily draw or point to their relationship to the organization by looking at a diagram. An employee could articulate his or her place in the formal organizational structure (knowing well there is an informal pattern also), yet a sense of insignificance was in evidence. “I just don’t feel a part of what’s going on.” When pressed for specifics, participants talked of not being informed of this or that campus change or activity.
Concomitant with a sense of distress and detachment was hope in the institution’s capacity to reorganize committees or representative bodies, develop effective procedures, and draw from the benefits of an expanded electronic information system. Here then were the sources of hope for the future of the institution. “People would finally be able to get things done!” Though not specifically related by participants as such, the implication is that alienation is synonymous with disconnection and therefore can be obviated through the tweaking of the organization and its electronic systems. What is initially mystifying, more so since this case is exemplary, is the extent to which a covariance exists without any effort to examine the possibility of a systematic relationship. Why would the continuous and intensified expression of human dismay in conjunction with the tentacle-like intrusion of efficient procedure and technology not be understood to be systematically related? Is it because when a systematic relationship is posited, as in the case of Ellul and others, its fate has been similar to that of Mumford found here? One can reasonably assert that technique carries with it a set of cultural predispositions that negate recriminations against it. To the contrary, the human creature ailing from increasing demands for adapting to and abiding by efficient procedure and an environment of technology is encouraged to believe that in these lies the cure.
Before moving on, we can briefly summarize. First, an educational institution held a gathering with the ostensible intent of opening up the university of ideas by way of participatory democracy, with the goal to craft the future orientation of the college. The gathering achieved participation, but in reality as a consequence of a series of programmatically designed exercises-- practices to which seldom is the following question posed: If this institution is a community of people who spend much of their daily lives working alongside one another in accord with a meaningful pursuit, why is it necessary to plan in detail a sequence of activities drawn from the analysis of small groups to provoke interaction leading to the identification of collective purpose? Participants, when granted latitude for spontaneity, serious conversation, and the use of metaphor, reveal a profound sense of both alienation and powerlessness. Within the same social milieu hope for the future is based upon the belief in reorganization, procedural refinement, and the development of all aspects of electronic information systems.
My contention is that this case is illustrative at a number of levels. We recognize that beneath the surface of a myriad of mirages heralding the emancipation of individual choices and voices is an uninterrupted sequence of human techniques or methods: methods in programming the event (themselves products of methods drawn from elsewhere); methods having been proposed as the promise for current dilemmas in educating and for organizing the staff of institutions; methods as the panacea for the educational enterprise itself. Gatherings like this one may serve an ephemeral therapeutic function compensating for the uninterrupted growth of efficient procedure and technology. This would explain the overwhelming concern for participation and harmony--its function being to cast a spell of belief in methods of every variety (Stivers, 1999). With these tenets in mind, let us now look to other realms of educational institutions for additional symptoms of the impact of technique.
Technique is an ensemble of related and efficient procedures integrated with technologies, now playing a preeminent role in educational institutions. Viewed historically, the merit and prestige of an institution of higher learning rested upon a culture of scholarship. An institution’s credibility was grounded upon its capacity to attract and retain scholars who read, conducted research, and reflected upon both. In turn, the scholar or thinker wrote and professed to others as to the nature of their inquiries. The book and speaking were the primary mediums for learning and instruction and faculty stressed what was believed to be significant and meaningful--all of which undoubtedly contained a good share of cruelty, ideology, bigotry, and outright error. Yet, at the center was the person as student and as teacher. Some teachers were incompetent, some mediocre, and some in the best of cases, served as honorable mentors to young scholars who would one day chart their own course. The character and diversity or, as we will see, lack thereof on the part of its faculty defines an institution. One could conclude that then and now institutions reveal themselves through their criteria for personnel selection.
What of today? If the tenet put forward above is reasonable and generally applicable, we would expect to find ample evidence of technique’s encroachment upon personnel matters. For instance, not only will institutions seek members whose self-perception is to be one of an array of instruments (e.g., facilitators), but who, more importantly, demonstrate a willingness to embrace this belief and perpetuate the belief with colleagues and students (e.g., group work, motivational activities, technologically mediated communication). These empty routines suspend a mirage to compensate for the institutional and personal hollowness here attributed to technique.
One proposal from the nationally distributed Innovation Abstracts suggests criteria for modernizing the hiring of community college faculty.
Even the challenges on the immediate horizon--new technologies, economic constraints, changing demographics, and an influx of under-prepared students--will demand master teachers who are proficient in the use of technology and who are expert in human relations. ...Perhaps we should ask, “Will a person who has been successful in individual, advanced research be happy teaching the same introductory course semester after semester?” Instead of focusing so closely on degrees, we might look for a wider variety of characteristics that include expertise with technology, a dedication to student learning, the ability to use various teaching and learning strategies, a record of innovation, and a mastery of communication skills. ...Full collaboration with students, other faculty, and administrators requires professional attitudes, which stress commitment, responsibility, open-mindedness, flexibility, and the willingness to work hard, among others. Successful cooperation also includes a commitment to synergy, and an ability to accept criticism, handle conflict, and motivate others. (Vandermast, 1998, p.1)
In this case, we witness the disappearance of any reference to teaching as the passionate manifestation of the grounding of oneself in a discipline through a lengthy process of maturation. The quintessential idea of the teacher as someone uniquely and deeply absorbed by the meaning and significance of her discipline vanishes. In its place we find an emphasis upon collective adaptation to a world of instruments (e.g., technology and method). And, as here hypothesized, the assimilation to a world of technical instruments brings with it the requirement of willing submission to participatory groups. The author goes on to make the new expectations explicit by contrasting them with those of the traditional four-year institutions. For example, one inclined toward “advanced research” is unlikely to find fulfillment in the evolving circumstances of the community college. Thus, despite its pretense of exhaustive flexibility and openness, the new community college will not accommodate a person interested in advanced research.
What is to a degree startling in this case is the assumption that the model of traditional liberal arts education is not only off target for community colleges; it is its virtual antithesis. Though a contentious issue, the commitment to the liberal arts is one of the historically significant purposes of the often-contradictory purposes of community colleges. Dougherty, in a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the community college, captures the essential contribution of the liberal arts aptly, while also expressing concern over their covert diminution.
Taken alone, vocational education and adult education directed to literacy, job upgrading, or leisure activities cannot provide the critical literacy that is central to the democratic ideal. Their concern is largely practical rather than critical/theoretical. It is the liberal arts that have been the traditional home of the latter. ...But whatever the format, one still needs to have a strong liberal arts sector in the community college to provide the faculty and the culture that promote critical thinking for the entire college. (Dougherty, 1994, p. 250)
Within its compass of a broad and contextual understanding of the human condition, the liberal arts highlight the mediation of perception and self-understanding. It is in this sense that thinking is bridged by the theory of the active subject. This truth is negated when the practical or real world is presented as self-evident. The subject is then captured, so to speak, with only a list of options for adaptation to a world set upon a fixed path. The shift and subterfuge wrought by technique’s assault on the heart of the liberal arts curriculum is clear in the popularization of critical thinking within community colleges. Critical thinking is an integral and necessary element of the genuine liberal arts. However, its opposite, problem solving, is what is actually being promoted. The overwhelming emphasis on real world applications and connection to this world necessitates reducing the thinking subject or learning team into a problem-solving system. The fact is that if the liberal arts become thoroughly impregnated with technique they no longer perform a critical function with respect to technique. Rather, they too serve as diversions and therapeutic compensations for the rampage of technique. These subtle transformations in the meanings of concepts bridge gaps so that all can rest assured that somehow the essence of the liberal arts remains with us, but only the skeleton of the symbolic meaning of the word remains. The new path necessitates adapting to the immediate realities of a modernizing context as well as playing one’s part: the part of problem solving for the technological society. The temptation is too strong to resist interjecting that it is increasingly exceptional for the traditional four-year university to resist the path suggested in this case for the community college (Russo, 1998).
In these cases of personnel criteria, the symptoms connected to technique show themselves in recommendations for hiring faculty at community colleges. Above all else, an acceptable candidate must favor the refinement of methods of teaching as well as exhibit personality characteristics such as flexibility and cooperation. Drawing from the previous critical analysis, the prescriptions in this case tell candidates to be psychologically prepared for human techniques both as participants and as facilitators. Nowhere is consideration for the vitality associated with individual dissonance granted legitimacy, and with respect to technique dissonance is unacceptable if not pathological.
In January of 1999 Moraine Valley Community College of Palos Hills, Illinois advertised for eight faculty positions (Chicago Tribune, 1/17/99). Included were positions in information management, history/political science, sociology, anthropology, and Spanish. At the head of the announcement where is typically found a brief description or broad directives, the following appeared in bold, “Candidates must possess a strong commitment to the use of technology and innovation in the delivery of instruction.” Brief as it is, this case shows the re-emergence of the rigid parameters outlined earlier (e.g., Mumford, etc.). A candidate need not adhere to any political ideology or belief system, except an unequivocal willingness to utilize technologies and innovative methods in instruction. The expectation, by virtue of the disciplines listed, encompasses the humanities, social sciences, and apparently sweeps across all disciplines. This would mean that the very disciplines that have the potential for a serious critique of a world of instruments and instrumental thinking are being filtered so as to eliminate non-instrumental perspectives and practices. With such prescriptions, what are the prospects for a candidate openly critical of technique? The acceptance of technique has now extended to the point of being a criterion for tenure (Ettinger, 1999). At Sinclair Community College, their Institutional Effectiveness Model is linked to employee compensation packages, and pay is related to collective performance (Wells, 1999). What better way to shape behavior and curtail opportunities for the critique of technicism! Were this degree of rigidity and exclusivity shifted to nearly any other domain, the outcry would be deafening: “Assaults on academic freedom!” However, if the expectations for thought and action coextensive with technique were to become integrated and entrenched, an invisible and thereby effective ideology would be formed; I assert it has.
The March 6, 1998 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contained the announcement of a position opening at Oakland Community College in Michigan for a dean of technology. According to the announcement, the occupant of the position would be “...providing leadership in the development of and continuous quality improvement of academic/student programming...helping to establish priorities in the allocation of resources. [And]...developing and implementing review systems for faculty courses and programs, campus services, and operations.”
Before initiating any critical analysis with this case, this writer recognizes that people regardless of station in life have value. This is, of course, true for all who contribute to any educational enterprise deserving of the name. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that--what would seem to be its equivalent--deans of buildings and grounds or food services are likely to be proposed, not that these positions are irrelevant, but that they augment education, as long as education’s central purpose is fostering wisdom through thinking. To assert this is no derision of those who contribute to education in any number of ways. Instead, as Postman (1993) and Stivers (1994) have made abundantly clear with regard to the impact of technology on culture, this case announces the institution’s arrival at a point where educational instruments and their engineering have taken center stage. The shift in practice and the medium of education changes what education is, and quite decisively. What formerly had been in large measure a qualitative and ongoing reflection upon the institution’s fundamental purpose is now the quantitative accountancy of the efficient transmission of bits of data. This shift carries with it, again echoing Postman (1993), an adjustment in the distribution of power and prestige in the organization, and more importantly, the very nature and purpose of the institution.
Academic deans who formerly may have been complacent or even enthusiastic about learning technologies now find themselves marginalized. They misperceived the mass importation of technique in all its forms as being nothing more than “better ways of doing things.” They failed to sense that the widespread transformation in the mediums of education (as with any major technological shift) would carry with it changes in centers of influence and content. It becomes all too clear that their job becomes that of facilitating further technical expansion and the corresponding human relations’ strategy for the institution. Using our opening example, we see that they thought it was simply going to be a better way of making tea. As the institution grows more dependent on information processing for its functioning and public relations efforts, the locus of influence shifts to those areas by necessity. Deans who are un-chameleon-like know that the shift in the medium of education carries with it different people with a very different orientation. While deans struggle with limited if not shrinking budgets for genuine academic positions, institutions pour funds into technology, support personnel, and human relations.
Undoubtedly, a very different response to this evidence exists. In fact, the situation could not exist as it does without the alternative. Technique’s demand on people requires a diversionary and compensatory mythology: a mythology that eliminates all forms of variation or diversity outside of those granted by technique. Is it not so that, like dominoes, institution after institution adopts the centrality of instruments, instructional techniques, systems of organizational efficiency, and human techniques of influence? The answer is that they have and that the change in personnel criteria is yet another aspect of the subtle impact of technique.
An invitation from the “Illinois Online Network” reads: “The ten representatives can be any combination of faculty, instructional support staff, academic advisors, and administration, with one qualification – all attendees must be interested in and receptive to the idea of using technology to enhance or extend instruction.” Is it not odd that an academic gathering requires . priori allegiance to the subject of the gathering? This allegiance reaches beyond acknowledging the significance of technologically mediated instruction for education to a dogmatic positive evaluation of it. Demands and requirements such as this are often legitimated by appeals to the necessity of institutions adjusting to a changing world. But what world? The technological society. In adapting to this hollow world of means, the institution may indeed survive, but at the same time it allows substance and individual character to become more and more peripheral.
Community colleges are at an intensified juncture with regard to adaptation within the overall structure of higher education. This branch of higher education operates within a historical struggle between high school and university, academic and technical, and the practical and theoretical. It is also at a critical juncture in terms of social class reproduction. The community college is seldom if ever regarded as an “ivory tower” or “an island surrounded by a sea of reality.” In spite of this, its now aging faculty has had a significant attachment to elements of a liberal arts education. And, as expected, this in turn gives rise to fruitful struggle: on the one side the prescription for adaptation and the shaping of technicians and on the other, to a degree, the fostering of critical self-reflection. Today the innovations and transformations are but demands for adaptation to a technological society. With rare exception, the carriers of these transformations are administrators and educational careerists with a toxic level of one branch of education department “philosophy” consumed by teaching techniques, mediums of education, and organizational systems. In an impressive analysis of the development of colleges of education, Labaree provides a number of insights pertaining to this issue and others:
While the educational psychology faculty dominated colleges of education academically, the educational administration faculty dominated them organizationally. This was a legacy in part of the social efficiency movement of the early decades of this century, which stressed scientific administration as the answer to the problem of U.S. schools, and in part the long-term tendency for educational reformers to view bureaucracy as the primary mechanism for carrying out any from of school improvement. But it also arose because school administrators were able to achieve professionalization long before either teachers or teacher educators. (Labaree 1997, 145)
What has changed is that the sense of being overwhelmed and the alienating character of efficient organizations (e.g., bureaucracy) have been recognized as troublesome. But instead of these factors serving to stimulate a resistance movement directed at what is at base an aspect of technique, even greater levels of efficiency could be achieved through mirages of decentralization fabricated by participatory groups and other applications of organizational psychology. Here, educational institutions are merely following suit with the more general human management movement accurately identified by one observer as the engineering of consent (Graebner, 1987). Even with the chimera of openness and receptivity, in a classic instance of projection, those imbued with this orientation regard education as method of classroom management. As unknowing sycophants to technique, they project their expectations onto the instructor as a well-adjusted technician.
The gradual transformation of the instructor into a cipher and education into efficient training has had occasions of dissent in the community college setting. Part of this is a product of the legacy of the aforementioned attachment to serious liberal arts aspirations. Today the defiance which might arise from quarters attached to this legacy--as a possible disruption of the monolith of technique--diminishes with successful human relations activity, is simply ignored and becomes irrelevant, or resolves itself through a combination of attrition and personnel practices. However, a quirk in the labor market for educators with Ph.D’s has produced an unanticipated potential for dissonance. In the absence of the expansion of position openings for Ph.D’s in four-year colleges and universities, there has been a rush of those with these qualifications to the community colleges, where the master’s degree tends to be the norm. This presents community colleges with a dilemma--a dilemma in hiring faculty, but more importantly, as hiring relates to the success of human relations practices and technique. The dilemma or contested issue is most often incorrectly presented as a choice between Ph.D’s on the one hand and people committed to teaching on the other. See, for example, The Chronicle of Higher Education (Hawarth, 1999). This falsehood deserves exposure.
It is difficult for community colleges to openly advertise the fact that they are rejecting applicants on the basis of their having a Ph.D. They recognize the prestige value associated with scholarship and their former aspiration of approximating a traditional college. In addition, there is the complication of terminal degrees--though often organizational in subject matter (Ed.D)-- among administrators themselves. The actual source of the dilemma is this: Applicants with serious advanced degrees may be attached to traditional liberal arts education. Furthermore, they draw legitimacy and confirmation from their own research, writing, and association with colleagues in their disciplines. This alternative foothold makes them both less vulnerable to assimilation and potentially more critical. Not unpredictably, this potentially sets them at loggerheads with an administration facilitating, through human relations, the final transition to education as an institution of technique. Therefore, this remote possibility of resistance to the actual center of adaptation--that being technique in all its manifestations--becomes a focus of concern for human relations strategists (i.e., cutting edge administration).
Unfortunately the threat is minimal. The teacher with a Ph.D. but no grasp of technique will offer little in the way of serious resistance to the new forms of domination. Future educators will have been bombarded with human techniques, if in the humanities pressured to become specialists, and receptive to technologically mediated education. As a high profile leader in the community college system put it: “Give up being the sage on the stage “ (O’Banion: 1994). This supposedly realistic vision is cynical with regard to the idea of wisdom and its foundation and transmission in the qualitatively distinct person. One would have to agree with O’Banion’s sentiment in that those who have nothing meaningful to say surely ought to remove themselves and take up their function as cyborg with technique. Acknowledging that wisdom is incompatible with the monolith of technique, those seeking to retain it must find crevices in which to ferment and ignite wisdom’s reflective critique.
Let us now look to two additional cases whose sources appeal to the wider scope of the community college system. One case is drawn from the nationally distributed Leadership Abstracts. The other is a document created by the Illinois Task Force on Academic/Occupational Integration. These two cases address community colleges as a whole and abound in prescriptive and proscriptive statements. What is now to be anticipated is the mutually reinforcing relation between technique and human relations in education. This presents itself in the form of an unwavering and dogmatic support for the expansion of technique as education’s mission, with the accomplice of orchestrated human relations facilitating this mission.
The following excerpts represent a paradigmatic theme of Leadership Abstracts. The theme is the necessity for innovations (e.g., methods and technologies) and the essential role of leaders in bringing this about (i.e., human relations). The vice-president for administration at St. Petersburg Junior College in Florida essays the situation for leaders:
The third and often the most important consideration involves the college’s organizational culture. A common problem with TQM or process reengineering is that it ignores cultural values, norms, informal communication, and power relationships. Each of these cultural characteristics can completely cripple technology or institutional improvement initiatives. Care must be taken to involve the people who can make the improvement work, and for leaders across the organization to consistently reinforce the relationship of the proposed change to the organization’s core mission of learning. Also, leaders must carefully consider how resistance to change will be forestalled or handled when it inevitably arises....
Rigid support, however, of proposed solutions is the downfall of many information technology innovations. It is unlikely that you or your team anticipated all probable outcomes--particularly those relating to organizational culture. You may have to take more time to work with those involved to help them understand the need for change...
The reality of modern community college leadership is that information technology innovations can and do span the entire institution, weaving through the fabric of the formal and informal organization. (Johnson, 1997)
It is difficult to imagine a more acute and succinct observation or one more telling in its self-admission than this series of statements. From the quotation above, the engineering of the community college along the lines of technique is an accomplished fact and yet one not without hurdles, hurdles that are to draw the careful attention of valiant leaders. Johnson clearly articulates the specific character of the barriers to what has to be construed as the “progressive” development of community colleges. The leader, confronted by pre-existing patterns of behavior and attitudes, faces the predicament of technique’s sweeping changes to colleges in the form of technology and organizational efficiency (TQM). The barrier to technique’s furtherance reveals itself to be none other than people and culture. However, when the thoughtful critics of technique assert its pervasive and overwhelming impact upon the human psyche and culture, they are responded to again and again with the refrain: “People control technology and, anyway, it is simply a different means to an end!” This apparent contradiction requires examination.
It can be argued that those who abide by the perspective represented by Johnson above fall prey to both reification and circular reasoning. First, those most fervent in their promotion of technology and models of organizational efficiency for education reveal little understanding of any technique let alone its ensemble. Rather than looking deeply into the growth of procedure, method, and information technology as factors related to the quality of education, they become for them synonymous with education’s improvement. Once this occurs, then a potential indicator becomes that which it was intended to indicate. As a consequence, though these are only means of education, their sheer increase in volume and extent of utilization become the measure of education’s progress. The deeper and qualitative ends become peripheral slogans to be placed on vision statements, to draw in the slightly disaffected, and to serve as group mantras. This is true despite mountains of writing and talk about qualitative goals and outcomes. Quality rests in personal character and the relationship between humans in a meaningful pursuit. It cannot be operationalized through an efficient procedure or organizational plan. The two are antithetical to one another. Efficient procedure is certainly appealing in terms of predictable results (e.g., accountability). However, the price to be paid for this standardized procedure is stifling uniformity and an uneasy sense of isolation and purposelessness. In response to this predicament one observes an endless stream of participatory groups and institutional initiatives as forms of compensation. These practices are welcomed by a lonely crowd needful of momentary respite from an absence of meaningful collective purpose. Yet, as we have seen, these responses themselves having the hollow center of technique, never satisfy, only perpetuating the illness for which they were thought to be the cure.
In brief, institutions gradually one by one follow the hollow path of developing the means of education as ends in themselves: a practice which does indeed adapt institutions to the technological society. But adaptation for its own sake is the epitome of pointlessness. It is clear, however, that these changes are not merely innocuous. There is at least some friction (a type of inefficiency) between the extant culture and technique’s further penetration. In the discourse at hand, minor friction or inefficiency is not only observed, but falls under a spotlight of what borders upon suspicion. The responses of consternation, dismay, or serious criticism over said changes are neutralized in terms of any legitimacy. Those lacking the appropriate orientation toward the technological society simply have a “lack of understanding.” In short, there can be no legitimate critique of technique, only errors in judgment, waywardness, and, above all, a lack of realism. The institution’s personnel criteria, policies related to professional growth and tenure, and the administrative use of human techniques typically in the form of participatory groups, all coalesce to neutralize voices of criticism pertaining to aspects of technique.
The idea of leadership in conjunction with technique is telling. A frequent response to a pressing criticism of technicism is that its critics are unrealistic. The supposed leaders who offer technicism as a panacea for institutions use necessity of adaptation for survival as their ultimate defense. Another article from Leadership Abstracts with a similar advocacy for technicism concludes, perhaps inadvertently: “This future for the community college is not so much defined by the application of information technology as it is driven by it.” (Doucette, 1997) Is this not the autonomy of technique, which its purveyors so fervently deny? Habitually, those zealous in their support of these innovations in education use this logic as if it constituted some new form of manifest destiny. Better to say that technique accesses educational institutions and its constituents in successive waves. While the tsunami of technique generates in intensity in the technological society, educational institutions prepare for the rising tides by dismantling the few remaining breaker walls. The illumination of the impact of technique requires the recognition of its relative autonomy. While innovations (i.e. efficient methods) of every variety are encouraged they all fall within the parameters of technique. In fact, they are extensions of technique. If criticism does arise, it is dealt with through dismissal or therapeutic human techniques of adjustment. When the critique of technique is placed into these contexts, the confrontation of wills is neutralized. This reveals an additional aspect of technique, which is that it is a medium at odds with cherished beliefs other than a belief in technique. Any hesitation or skepticism regarding technique is recoded as an issue of inadequate preparation. Likewise, institutions are no longer good or bad, only more or less efficiently programmed.
The written proposal (1997) from the Illinois Task Force on Academic/Occupational Integration (ITFOA/OI) also offers prescriptions for the modernization of the community college. Where does their call for change begin? For this collaborative body, reform begins with taking into account the wary eye directed at traditional mediums of education. The archetype and principal culprit is the archaic lecture, “archaic” because of the “...changing structures and educational needs of the work place...(and the) realities to which educational institutions must address themselves. (ITFOA/OI, 1997, p. iii) Once again, the prescribed course set to guide educational institutions is predicated upon exigencies outside and beyond the capacity of human intervention. Mirroring the loss of significance of the person in the technological society at large, educational institutions attack one of the last vestiges of the person as a distinct source of meaning or substance: the lecturer. The reduction of the significance of the person is intricately tied to the institution’s synthesis with the world of technique penetrating at every border. The idea of a resilient, let alone defiant, institution has no opportunity for survival. Any serious foundation or purpose capable of subordinating technique slips beyond the imaginable.
Consistent with the symptoms of technique heretofore covered, this proposal emphasizes the promise of options and alternatives in the form of a plethora of mediums and arrangements for instruction. In reality the movement for integrating academic and occupational outcomes is based upon the necessities of surviving in a technicizing society. Abiding by these currents mutates the serious content of education into the endless comparison of methods and the promotion of technologically mediated communication. The task force provides some of the particulars:
Finally, new educational and informational technologies provide faculty and institutions the opportunity to go beyond the four walls of a classroom and the confines of a calendar. Multimedia presentations, simulations, computer-assisted testing, customized texts, and electronic libraries are common applications, and the use of the Internet and World Wide Web is just being tapped. (ITFOA/OI, 1997, p. iii)
The collaborative team making these assertions discounts the limitless vistas of literature, history, ethnography, storytelling, etc. We are led to conclude that the human mind and its imaginative capability--absent of technology--is incapable of moving beyond the desks, carpeting, and paint of the classroom. More to the point, the enthrallment with technology entails nothing more than bringing electronic visual images into every phase of education, another case of utter assimilation. Here also the transformation is deemed necessary in the face of the practical world. Accordingly, privilege and a decisive role is granted to business and industry for education’s reformation. These sectors are the most rapidly technicized and in need of appropriately conditioned employees.
Central to the task force’s proposal is constant concern for the perceived gap and inefficient relationship between educational institutions and the practical world (i.e., technological society). In a supreme example of doublethink, integration and assimilation into the meticulous demands of the practical, technical world is heralded as somehow the ultimate promise of individual fulfillment. Rather than envisioning education and the classroom as oases for reflection, students and educators are prompted to seek fulfillment through tighter integration as problem-solving technicians within what amounts to self-help groups.
Not to be caught unaware, the proposal identifies the need for leadership when “...engaging skeptical instructors and administrators.” (ITFOA/OI, 1997, p. V) This leadership responsibility is best met, it is suggested, by connecting faculty with those who have established programs, as well as placing faculty into direct experience in the private sector. There is no lack of psychological subtlety in promoting these programs. Enthusiastic readers looking to this proposal for guidance are cautioned to avoid “...etch[ing] in stone methods”; rather, “...the intent is to raise the level of awareness.” (ITFOA/OI, 1997. P. 2) As we have seen, the flag of participatory democracy and even academic freedom must be flown while the insidious assault on individual autonomy marches onward. These psychological techniques and social conditioning exercises shape the paths and orientation of participants such that they make the choice planned for them. Given these circumstances, a high degree of compliance is to be expected. The legitimate critique of technicism is once again denied.
The assertions of the task force are illustrative with an additional point. The proposal is acutely attentive to what the collaborative team sees as the isolation or resistance of individual faculty as well as academic divisions. These divisions are literally referred to as islands. One is forced to infer that their position holds the distinctiveness of the individual or a discipline and the conviction or attachment upon which it is based are flawed. We see that the movement toward integration stretches well beyond the relationship of the academic and occupational. It expands to incorporate disciplines and individuals into an efficiently operating whole. The wayward individual or discipline attracts intensive scrutiny in the midst of what is portrayed to be the greatest opportunity for individual initiative and innovation.
With this case and others, we find co-mingling with the autonomy of technique a watchful and suspicious eye upon any divisions or islands of refuge. The island could be the uncompromising attachment to a discipline or, more commonly the peculiar individual. Averting the intrusive gaze of participatory groups, the individual’s purpose and motivations remain a mystery. This area of analysis provides another instance of illumination. The expansion of technique requires submersion of the individual into a chorus of voices praising technology and method. Conversely, liberation lies in the individual’s resistance to both the autonomy of technique and subjugation to manipulative participatory groups (Ellul, 1971, pp. 233-300).
These cases reveal the exhaustive and pervasive transformation of the community college by technique. Virtually any discussion of education from pre-school to higher education eventually turns to organizational systems, instructional methods, information technology, and the successful adaptation to the real world. Those already adjusted and faithful to this myth turn to small group psychology to facilitate the adjustment of others. The apparent frenzy of opportunities and miraculous innovations all occur within and because of the envelopment of technique. Mesmerized, and armed with an arsenal of human techniques and the drive to refine them, educational institutions rush to fall in line to serve technique. This orientation and associated activities are being ardently institutionalized. Caught in the throes of the sociological phenomenon of technique, community colleges exude complicity through the establishment of exclusionary personnel practices and group participation requirements. The success of institutions is once again equated with adaptation to the technological society. Their assignment is to assimilate the community college sector into the wider technological system.
It is time to put my thesis into perspective. First, the critique of technique is inseparable from a belief in the value and legitimacy of human freedom as expressed in conscientious resistance. And while the restrictive nature of some form of domination is a necessary condition for resistance to arise, without clearsightedness and the mustering of willpower, nothing of significance will occur. Whether the struggle to be fully human faces overt domination or that which is subtle and insidious, the challenge must be identified and thoughtfully confronted. In either instance, what should be of greatest concern is the specific character of what unknowingly manipulates, constrains, or habituates human thought and action. This basic challenge is re-occurring, but its character and source fluctuates with each new epoch. With regard to gaining perspective, we may begin by briefly surveying positions held on higher education’s response to challenges understood in this specific sense.
Despite the flippant portrayal of branches of education as ivory towers, only with extreme difficulty could one, after minimal examination, contend that these institutions do remain sacrosanct. However, this acknowledgment does not preclude opportunities for a degree of reflection and serious critique: the basis of theory. Habermas (1971, pp. 301-317) tells us that the etymology of theory carries with it the idea of looking on, and that this looking on requires the prerequisite of freedom from being immediately embroiled in the practical and absorptive activities of the world and social milieu. What could be more antithetical to this prerequisite to the act of theorizing than the incessant drive to complete the integration of the community college, other institutions, and the individual into the technological society! To innovate or modernize education according to this plan is to bastardize theory into mechanistic problem solving and a conjuring of human relations’ techniques. And we must continue to remember that the justification for this transformation from start to finish is always adjustment to reality. Despite this, it is worthwhile to recount that this justification for compromise and assimilation has been challenged. That is, the value of conscientious resistance or radical criticism has a history in education.
On this score Jacques Barzun delivers a razor-sharp lesson to today’s educational reformists. He harkens back to an Oxford guide from the 19th century. The guide brazenly proclaims that the university had developed a reputation for “...unfitting [constituents/students] for practical life... “ (Barzun, 1991, p. 159) Today, this reputation would likely be regarded as a public relations and marketing fiasco. For Barzun, the tragedy of contemporary education is its fitting rather than unfitting constituents for smooth adjustment to a world as given. Stated otherwise, Barzun finds value in nurturing a form of conscientious objection to adaptation. William James is singled out as supportive of just such a position. According to Barzun, James held that the apparently absent-minded and impractical occupants of the ivory towers were in fact present-minded, though elsewhere from the dominant worldview.
Barzun goes on to suggest that this otherness or being otherwise disposed is extremely valuable. The periodic intrusion of this otherness into the commonplace is precisely the dissonance that “...the whole world is looking for.” (Barzun, 1991, p. 159) These words are bold, personal, and diametrically opposed to the thrust of educational reform directed at blind adjustment; in our circumstance, the technological society. Much of current reform is based upon the pseudo-principle of success through unqualified adaptation to evolving circumstances. This is a presupposition deserving to be challenged by vigilant questioning with the potential response of conscientious resistance. For those who find conscientious resistance still salient, what should be of utmost concern is the search for the present and likely hidden constraints on genuine human possibilities and choices.
In this respect, the assertion of the domination of technique is particularly elusive. The contention that it is a force to be reckoned with defies theoretically established categories of domination. To point to technique as the culprit is to defy the conventional political and economic categories of domination. As a result, technique is twisted by a form of reductionism into these pre-existing categories or dismissed as a phantom. Unfortunately, these categories, pivotal to leftist critique, separate the left and critics of technique from what would be contentious though possibly fruitful dialogue, fruitful because both orientations hold unqualified adaptation and assimilation in contempt. Furthermore, both recognize the potential dormant in reasoned confrontation. This is one avenue for dialogue that ought to be pursued following the groundbreaking work of Habermas (1970) and Marcuse (1964) and, specifically with regard to education, the critical studies of teacher education with Popkewitz (1978) and Labaree (1997). With this theoretical backdrop attention could be turned toward the current conditions at community colleges astutely captured in Dougherty’s (1994) The Contradictory College and McGrath and Spear’s (1991) The Academic Crisis of the Community College. Suffice it to say that though marginalized there are sources historical and contemporary which vigorously espouse the role of challenge and fundamental critique as responsibilities for higher education. These sources hold the anticipated future of social change as suspect in determining the proper course for higher education to follow. By their very constitution, these sources pursue questions and provide exhaustive criticisms reaching purposefully beyond practical questions and problem solving: both of which submit to reality as if given. This is why the yet to be widely objectified monolith of technique results in an educational discourse predicated upon a blind acceptance of the autonomy of technique. By contrast, a substantive critical theory, having a historical consciousness, is informed of the fact that increasing levels of organizational efficiency and technologically mediated communication fail to offer any fundamental examination of the structure in which they are embedded. When the criteria of efficiency and means are exalted, the qualitative ends fade into the mist, replaced by awe in the power of instruments and procedures.
We may begin to draw the threads of this critical reflection together by revisiting our starting point. The opening case was that of a gathering for members of an educational institution. What was found was that those working within an environment of increasing technicism failed to achieve any real semblance of attachment to others in a meaningful purpose. Associated with this condition was the organization’s use of human techniques, hollow themselves, only capable of providing ephemeral therapeutic satisfaction. Conversely, is it not true that an authentic and substantial culture derives its strength from meaningful ritual and associated symbols? Where this holds true, culture involves a way of life within a stream of tradition bolstered by its rituals and collectively shared symbols: practices serving to solidify relationships, establish responsibilities, and confirm mutual obligations. The culture serves as a “stage” upon which the drama of life is lived out in concert with others. This paper initiated an examination of the community college in the throes of technique with just such an understanding of culture in mind. In this regard, central features of American culture as the communities of the community college deserve at least brief attention.
One analysis of American culture that draws considerable scholarly and popular acclaim is Habits of the Heart (Bellah, et al, 1996). This social/historical study of American culture supplements its contentions with an exhaustive series of extended interviews. The authors conclude that there is widespread acknowledgment of both the fragmentation of community and shallowness of individual purpose on the part of Americans, much of which comes from direct interviewee admissions. Their further assertion is that Americans are seldom capable of conveying any semblance of attachment to a broad national or cultural mission. Instead, American aspirations hinge on self-gratification through consumption, with community turning into fleeting lifestyle enclaves. Yet, in the midst of this narcissism we find appalling personal dissatisfaction evidenced by the proliferation of therapies, many of which are ironically self-help.
This characterization targets the society of unparalleled technological prowess and ingenuity. Additionally, this society is impossible without a similarly unparalleled level of organization. One could reasonably assert that American society operates with clockwork precision. This precision of activity involves masses of people to carry out numerous operations in virtually all domains of activity. The functioning of the modern city, airport, or university runs rampant with schedules, deadlines, coordinated activities, and planning. These are marvels of organization if we acknowledge the complexity of the coordination of variables. Yet, despite these structures and the associated patterns of human behavior, researchers like those in Habits of the Heart (Bellah, et al, 1996) find only a desert when it comes to a fundamental sense of purpose or community. In sum, objective order in the form of patterns of behavior or structured activity is of little to no value as an indicator of the vitality of a culture. The German social historian Max Weber identified harbingers of these social and cultural factors from his vantage point in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weber recognized that the increasing rationalization of modern society was coincident with cultural disenchantment (Gerth and Mills, 1958, 51).
Today it is clear that this rationalization was a far cry from the traditional meaning of a more rational life based upon normative reason. Technical rationality and instrumental reasoning, themselves manifestations of technique, reduce elements of traditional meaning to subjective whim. These and other manifestations of technique are no longer an element of culture or even the technological society’s infrastructure. Technique is nowhere cordoned off. Thus, commercial advertisements for computers, cell phones, and Internet access have taken to displaying nuns, monks, and mystics happily “getting into” this world. What a fascinating and yet tragic display of an unconscious effort at the re-enchantment of the world by grasping at anything presumably outside the encircling technological system. This is truly revealing of the vampire-like dynamic of technique today.
In education, change and innovation, which are ultimately adjustments to the autonomous development of a technological society, are fostered through a variety of practices having a distinctively enchanting, psychological character to them. Along these lines is one of the recent developments in the study of technique centering upon the uses of information and management strategies for their psychological effect (Stivers, 1999). Take for example politicians, business leaders, and futurists offering proclamations about the nature of jobs and work quickly approaching us in this frantically changing world of ours. They point to data supportive of these claims. With little to no hesitation, this data is dispersed and adopted by educational innovators, chiefly administrators, and bodies that set the agenda for educational discourse. This data is compared with the current state of affairs as represented by data from educational institutions (e.g., the number of computer-related courses and their utilization). The mismatch of these numbers is immediately taken to demonstrate just how gravely out of sync is the community college. The significance of these numbers warrants a call to action. Progress toward the goal of coordinating the two measures will then be likewise measured. A variety of incantations in the form of dramatizing the data and also facilitating the call to action with administrative orchestration will invariably follow. Thus there is a purported appeal to the facts in getting everyone on board through the psychological effect of participatory groups and reward systems. This is how a pseudo-collective purpose is manufactured to fill a vacuum. The placebo effect of participatory groups is psychologically overpowering. To this situation is brought the dramatic news of what is and what must be done. These practices serve to compensate for the cultural and personal chaos--at the level of meaning--that results from the ramifications of technique that lie at the source of the necessity for the educational reform in the first place. Technology expands exponentially and with it come numerous unanticipated consequences (Henshel, 1990) from pollution and traffic congestion to early signs of Internet addiction. In a fashion, technique is a mysterious force not unlike the force of nature as experienced by peoples lacking the science and technology to control it. We, like them, turn to whatever can allay our fears when faced with a force beyond our control, but nonetheless upon which our lives now rest. In either case we seek a sense of control regardless of its rational basis. Educational institutions such as the community college are caught in this labyrinth.
I seek to illuminate the profound impact the sociological phenomenon of technique has upon community colleges. This thesis can be extended beyond community colleges to virtually any domain of education. Despite evidence at the level of lived human reality that technique precipitates alienation, insignificance, loss of purpose, and an assault on meaningful ritual and community, the current prescription is heavier doses of more of the same. The possibility for a rebirth of meaningful pursuits in education finds its only resource in the individual educator willing to resist collaborating with the enemy of technique. Choosing such a path will require fortitude and conscientious objector status in an environment of autonomous technique. One should look for comradeship with those willing to make a similar commitment. The conditions for this resistance to arise are dimming. For one, the traditional approach to educating students is being replaced by “...cost per unit of learning per student.” (Boggs, 1995-96, p.26) Here Boggs in a concise but certainly unexceptional phrase abides by the monolith of technique. With such a pronouncement, the thoughtful and qualitative reflection upon an institution’s merits is mutated by technique into an accountancy of learning. And with quantitative efficiency comes the final solution for education whereby a human institution is purified of any measure other than input/output ratios, a singular measure which, once paradigmatic, leads to grave consequences because of its abstraction of human thought and activity from its cultural context (Vanderburg, 1998). Second is what can quite accurately be described as the psychological conversion to the world of technique described throughout this examination of technique and the community college. If one were inclined to regard the aforementioned advocacy for resistance as unbalanced, a last example is worth scrutiny.
A community college assistant professor in journalism and English tells of a dramatic change of heart. This change involved recanting a position taken in an editorial some three years earlier where he opposed distance learning. “A year after my attack on distance learning, I had an epiphany during an in-college workshop on the Internet...Suddenly, I realized that the World Wide Web is a new medium with the capability of revitalizing and transforming the form and content of many college courses. [Concluding with]...Yes, we live in a Brave New World. Then again, it should be appropriately christened a Brave New WWWorld.” (Mielo, 1999)
Under the unremitting and antiseptic conditions of technique, morale and collective purpose teeter precariously. In lieu of their misperception of this reality, educational reformers rush to provide leaders, facilitators, and organizational strategists to lead us into the manifest destiny of a technological society. However, these instruments are only that: instruments, ephemeral in effect because they are hollow despite the captivating mirage. Technique is a monolith pointing us toward a thousand different tasks at the behest of efficiency for its own sake. So what is the situation for those deeply concerned with the heart of education? Those who identify with the opening quotation from C.S. Lewis find themselves now in the milieu of technique epitomized by organizational strategies such as total quality management. One vision of the relationship is this: The fragile individual is being implored to add his or her voice to a harmonious chorus having the refrain, “If we would only believe as one, then the solution to education’s quest is just an innovative technique, instrument, or organizational strategy away.” But this is a refrain that represses the critical human voices that maintain the vitality of what is personal and meaningful, and bear a glimmer of hope for the future of community college education.
Manuscript Preparation - Rose Harkness and Don Williams. Principal Critical Review - Richard Stivers, author and professor of sociology at Illinois State University. Insights and Criticisms - David Brown, Andrew and Eve Dvorak, Audrey, Philip, and Susan Goudreau, Kent Johnson, and many of the students at Highland Community College.
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