The New York Times reports today that a Diversity Plan Shaped in Texas Is Under Attack. To replace Affirmative Action, the state implemented a plan which guaranteed admission to its public universities to the top 10% of the graduating class from any public or private high school. However, wealthy parents are complaining; they say the plan gives an unfair advantage to poor children b/c its easier to get into the top 10% of a poor school than it is to do the same in an elite public or private school.
Huh?
OK, what exactly is the advantage? Is it because children of poor farmers in rural school districts can't afford computers so they aren't distracted by the Internet? Oh wait, I know, children with unemployed parents in the inner city have their parents around more to help them with their homework.
Hey, I've got a couple really subversive ideas. Those wealthy parents could move into these poor neighborhoods and send their kids there. That way they'd get the advantages too! Or, even better, these wealthy folks could send their money into these poor neighborhoods so that their schools became just as tough as the ones their poor, disadvantaged children have to attend.
I'm not suggesting this "talented tenth" solution is ultimately the best or the most ethical, but this argument is just absurd.
Quoted in this NY Times article, "It's a big-time social class story," said Marta Tienda, a Princeton University professor of sociology and public affairs who has studied the effects of the rule. "School type is the proxy for social class." This connects with my recent posts re the future of the university. Collin Brooke has recently had something to say on this as well.
The case of the Texas system points to the twin and contradictory functions of education. On the one hand, education is supposedly the great social equalizer, and an integral part of democracy as has been recognized since Plato. On the other hand, educational institutions are a key social sorting device: the notion being only the wealthy and the rarest of other students get to attend the elite universities from which the ruling class of our society is selected. Here we can see the commodfication of education that typifies ruined university (a la Bill Readings). For some time education has been a "proxy for social class." However, now it would seem that relationship has become more intense. In getting a degree one is purchasing an identity that has cultural currency.
As I have been suggesting this commodity function obstructs the intellectual work of the university just as the early twentieth-century university's Anglo-American nationalist function obstructed literary study through the creation of an ethnocentric canon. Collin cited a line from Readings' book on the potential for cultural studies to open a space for something to replace the ruined university. This got me thinking of the following line from Brian Massumi's Parables of the Virtual: "Residually marxist rhetoric aside, class interest is the removed of radical cultural studies (which, like all processual removals, returns to haunt). What is potentially unique about cultural studies is its institutional calling to substitute affect for interest, more or less vague affective tendency for sharp class self-defense" (254).
Massumi is exploring the possibility of cultural studies becoming a political-intellectual process that can pass through the lines of Science, Art, and Philosophy (as these are explored in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?). In short, Massumi suggests this revised cultural studies as an ethical process that is fundamentally pluralistic. This dissensual ethic is perhaps at work in blogging communities, and it is clearly dependent on the degree to which a discourse solidifies. Such reterritorialization is perhahps inevitable, and also perhaps a mark for moving on.
Of course, if we were to really engage in such a process then the cultural identities that make education a proxy for class would never have an opportunity to form. I wonder if this is something that we could allow to pass?
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