Posthegemonic Comments
Hi Jon, have you seen the rebuttal to this video yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7...h?
v=7eixWcKhlXY
By the way my blogpost is finally up. Sorry it was late this week.
Heh, thanks for the link. Though it's not much of a "rebuttal," is it? And not only because the response doesn't seem to understand what it's responding to; also of course because it's no more "propositional" (and no less "presentational," whatever these terms are supposed to mean) than the original video.
Rather a depressing 'dialogue of the deaf' going on here between students and, I presume, the academic whose 'rebuttal' seems to combine the worst of cod neuroscience with a nostalgia for the Socratic method. The students' video, whilst generally more interesting, did at times demonstrate a worrying eagerness to adopt the pose of the 'Beautiful Soul' - "I didn't create these problems but I have to live with them" - like everyone else on the planet, honey, and anyway we're all implicated in the situation to some degree, you included. "Only 30% of my readings are relevant to my life" - right, because your life is the centre of the universe and relevance to it the only and objective measure of value.
We're doubtless familiar with the pose of the 'Beautiful Soul', both from our own interactions with students and, if we're honest, from our own responses to the changing nature of higher education. I wonder if there's any way to help both acaedmics and students to traverse these mutually implicated fantasies? Sadly, all the academic work I've read on the 'new' university is written purely from the academics' point of view - the destructive nature of audit culture on 'our' working environment etc., with rarely a thought for the impact on students themselves. Whilst all the stuff coming from students seems to boil down to a series of querulous demands for 'more' - 'more tuition', 'more help with essays', 'more pastoral care', 'more cuddly lecturers', with rarely a thought about how this complicity with their own infantilisation might negatively effect them.
Thanks for putting this up. I don't really surf YouTube much but this really interested me. This video speaks to students. The way of learning in University today is extremely flawed. I like reading articles and discussing them with people but seriously who has the time for the number of pages we are expected to read. Those of us that are paying for our own education have to work full-time to avoid the serious debt that faces us. If we don't show up to class, don't finish all our readings, don't read $100 useless textbooks, maybe we should look at the lack of government funding. Make education CHEAPER and ACCESSIBLE! Sorry to rant a bit here and clearly this is only one thing I took from the video.
Jezzer, Amanda, thanks for your comments.
Things were different when I were a lad, of course: most obviously, I did no paid work during termtime. for this reason, among others (no continuous assessment, for instance) I had the luxury of time, and of pursuing my own interests. Hence my beautiful soul! 
But this pedagogy premised on excess, on the otiosity and directionlessness that only a very elite system can offer, is everywhere under threat if it hasn't disappeared altogether.
Academics and students alike seem to have (mostly) bought into the mantra of efficiency, productivity, and usefulness. I think that there should be sustained defence of the inefficient, the unproductive, and the useless.
With the awareness that true uselessness is a challenging goal indeed.
I did no paid work during termtime.
That's insane. I don't even know if it's desirable! Now, the soundtrack to the "rebuttal" on the other hand testifies to the horrors of non-student life. If that's what being tenured sounds like, I'll take dumpster diving and precarious labor.
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