FACULTY FORUM

Monmouth College

Monmouth IL 61462

Vol. 11

(March 2006)

Faculty Editorial Board

William Urban and Steven Price

THE MONMOUTH COLLEGE FACULTY FORUM was established in June of 1963 by Dean Harry S.

Manley to "provide a means through which selected scholarly papers written by Monmouth College faculty would

be given a wider distribution." The source of papers was the faculty colloquium series, a program in which each

month one faculty member presented a report on recent research and reflection. Manley wrote:

The college underwrites this publication out of a conviction that it will:

1. Encourage members of the faculty to pursue their research interests and thereby stimulate scholarship and

faculty growth.

2. Enhance the interest of advanced students in scholarly writing and research.

3. Give the faculty a format for confrontation with their peers.

4. Support our academic policy that competent teaching requires continuing research by the teacher.

After a lapse of some years, publication of the series was resumed in 1991. In the spring of 1993 the Faculty

and Institutional Development Committee recommended local distribution in electronic form with only a few

printed copies for authors and institutional use.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How To Publish

By William Urban

    I would not have written this essay a few years ago. But circumstances have changed. As of November,

2004, when I spoke to this topic in a colloquium, most members of the college faculty were new, and it is important

that they and their successors recognize artifacts of our institutional history when they encounter them. In writing

this now, I hope that some of the attitudes I describe are artifacts, and therefore rare. And I hope that everyone

    It used to be said, certainly from the Seventies well into the Nineties, that one could not publish at

Monmouth College. The teaching load was too heavy, there were no examples of excellence on campus, there was

too little administrative help, and the library was inadequate.

    This was never completely true. If it had been, the faculty would have been totally unproductive. There was

something to the complaint, of course. But I believe that on the whole this statement was based on what some might

call selective self-referential reification.

    It was true that in the more distant past, more than thirty years ago, each instructor taught more classes than

today, eight (except Bernice Fox, who offered more for her Latin majors), and most were larger in size (except

Bernice Fox’s), often forty students or more. Twenty years ago there were still eight classes but much smaller ones.

But in either epoch there was more free time. There were no emails, no internet, and often no telephone. Fewer

distractions. Also fewer term papers, because reading the handwriting was just too difficult. Faculty just had more

leisure time. Some used this time to write.

    Professors were publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. Not Haldeman, perhaps, who was a great producer of

chemists who did publish. But there was Garvin Davenport in history (the successor of Lynn Turner_who was

president of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society, which named its most prestigious prize for him),

Albert Nicholas and Charles Wingo in education, Dorothy Donald in language (honored by France for her service),

Sam Thompson in philosophy, Charles Speel in religious studies, and many others.

    In 1961 the faculty began a practice of giving talks for colleagues. In 1963 Dean Manley established the

fate is at the heart of my story.

    Administrative efforts to encourage publication included introducing a Sabbatical program at a time when

Sabbaticals were not universal. And few colleges had as generous a program as the one introduced by Dean Amy,

one term in ten off. Since Monmouth College had three terms a year, that meant a three month Sabbatical every 3

1/3 years. President DeBow Freed tried very hard to honor those who published, establishing cash awards and an

award banquet for three categories of faculty achievement—teaching, publication and service. There were always

travel grants and money for research, and several of my early books were published only because they were given

received assistance from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and when that organization asked

committee service.

    Interlibrary loan was always available. It was more primitive in those days, but if the librarians had any

chance at all of getting my books, they did so. They always joked about my never ordering anything in English.

In spite of this a severe morale problem developed in the Seventies that lasted until recently. In part this

reflected negative national employment trends. The number of students attending college had increased dramatically

in the Sixties, partly thanks to Sputnik-inspired grants for science and foreign languages. Monmouth had benefited

from both the growth and the grants. But the introduction of the junior college system and the explosive increase in

the number and size of the state universities put a pressure on private liberal arts colleges at a moment when

graduate schools were turning out more Ph.D.s than could be employed. Hiring and tenure committees,

overwhelmed by the number of applicants for employment and retention, gave up the effort to evaluate teaching and

began to look almost exclusively at publication records. This also reflected a desire for status based on faculty

scholarship; “weighing” accomplishments became more literal than symbolic. And, perhaps, administrators realized

that professors who were staying up late nights writing that next book for promotion would not be interfering with

the smooth operation of the university. Whatever the reasons, the energy crisis and the end of the draft in the early

Seventies gave an additional push to an already discernible decline in enrollments and grants. This at the very

moment that costs were increasing dramatically. When the trustees announced that the budget had to be balanced,

even if it meant cutting back an oversized faculty, there was a reaction close to panic. Monmouth College’s survival

was not certain, and the employability of its faculty was in doubt, too.

to cut friends and colleagues. Never. Ever.

    The generally low morale created by the combination of terminal contracts and minimal raises was

exasperated by the frustration at realizing that the job market now emphasized publications. Some said that the

college was to blame for their not having published—too heavy a load, no administration support, no library.

The reaction to this was mixed. Most faculty members were supportive of colleagues who published, but

there was some resentment. There were hurtful comments, and ours is a thin-skinned profession. Slights that should

have been considered, well, only slightly, became barriers to personal interactions. Factions developed, and the fads

of the Nineties only made the situation worse. Old-fashioned scholarship did not count for much, certainly not as

much “cutting edge” subjects. Traditionalists countered that the profusion of new journals made it possible for

almost anyone to get something in print and that many editors preferred jargon-ridden essays for narrow audiences

rather than the kind of writing that would benefit students and the general public. The result was a generation gap

that did not disappear when the GI Bill generation retired. The elimination of the recognition awards about 1992, on

the grounds that feelings were being hurt, was probably the low point. The message seemed clear: Don’t try to do

anything outstanding. It was later articulated as “we are all working hard, and we are all doing a good job.”

Honest people could disagree over that. And did.

Monmouth College: the load was too high, the students too average. Some faculty members were demanding a

significant increase in the ACT average, no matter what this did to recruiting efforts. Others voiced great concern for

the poor and underprivileged, and racial minorities, no matter that their ACTs were generally lower. Gender was

often expressed as a problem, but less so because the trend in enrollment was toward more women (and higher

ACTs). Claims that there was an imbalance on the faculty was balanced against a head count which revealed—no

surprise—that older faculty were overwhelming male. But younger faculty were almost 50-50, and that Monmouth

was much more balanced than other ACM schools. There were occasional suggestions that, because of past

discrimination, women should not be required to meet the standards of male faculty. This was not appreciated by

female professors who had managed to publish. There were even arguments that there had to be special classes for

the best students, taught by the best faculty, and, naturally, these had to be smaller classes. One had to be among ‘the

best faculty’ not to realize what their colleagues thought of that. In short, this was not the faculty’s finest moment.

    That generation is passing, or at least maturing, and the fads are passing, too. This process had already

began to end when Dick Giese became president in 1997. Three-quarters of the 2004 faculty were ‘Giese kids’, men

and women who have come since then. He deserves much credit for this, most importantly in the growth of the

student body, the increase in salaries, and the new buildings, but there were also changing national trends and

improvements in technology. At one of Giese’s first faculty meetings, the internet was made available to the faculty.

That surprising development, which no one had foreseen coming so quickly, changed our access to the outside

world. Professors who were familiar with the technology and had been waiting impatiently to use it, had their

websites up the very next day.

want to publish, you can do it. If you don’t want to, you probably won’t. I wouldn’t want to require anyone to have

    It is also relatively unimportant what one writes. I have been criticized by medievalists for writing narrative

histories, the type non-professionals read. Real scholarship, I have been informed, is produced in monographs. The

thicker and duller, the better. But that’s what I love about those who preach individualism—the herd instinct.

As for teaching, my dissertation advisor, Archie Lewis, always got a standing ovation on the last lecture of

each class. A good model, I always thought. (I don’t remember anyone else at the University of Texas being so

honored.) I’ve never gotten a standing ovation myself, but once when I was a guest lecturer at the University of

Kansas a student came up and said, “I couldn’t figure out at first why you and Professor Nelson are so much alike.

Then I remembered that you are both students of Archie Lewis.” I prefer to think that that was a compliment.

That’s why Archie’s picture hangs in my office. He was a teacher, scholar and gentleman. I should have

consulted him more often. When I first came to Monmouth College, I was asked to undertake college

responsibilities that required more wisdom and experience than I had; I did not have enough wisdom and experience

to refuse.

    In the end, my colleagues either forgave me or didn’t notice. They gave me the first Burlington Northern

Award for Teaching Excellence, with a cash award sufficient for me, together with a German government research

grant and a Sabbatical, to take Jackie and our three children to Germany for the summer and fall. I have enjoyed

taking on new tasks, going from serious histories to philosophies of history, to middle school history, to plays and,

more recently, to murder mysteries. I do not think I could have done that at a research institution. I would have been

confined to writing monographs. Well, maybe by now I could write murder mysteries. If I had survived the tenure

process despite not having published immediately, I now would be a quaint old fellow, an artifact of the bad old

days, and therefore allowed to do what I wanted until I took my silver-plated retirement gift and vanished.

    I did not write the articles and books because I had to. Lord knows, it wasn’t for the money, either. But

people just kept asking when the next publication would be out. There wasn’t any money connected to the Lee L.

Morgan chair, either, or for the years of coaching, or helping ZBT get off the ground. But sometimes one is uniquely

qualified to do a job. Perhaps only marginally qualified, but nobody else will do it. The old-fashioned name for this

is a ‘calling’. It is an appropriate term for Presbyterian education, even in a college like Monmouth, where the

church has moved away from the college as much as the college has backed away from the church.

    I was not a better scholar or teacher than many others here. Just ask around. But I understood better than

At research universities professors stay up late at night to write. Although they have relatively low teaching loads,

the time put into research far exceeds any saved from having fewer hours in the classroom and grading exams.

When I was first learning my trade, my days seemed overfilled. Each course was new. It was not until I had

taught each multiple times that I did not have to work evenings on class preparations. No mentor was available, but

my colleagues were very supportive. I have much to thank Doug Spitz and Mary Crow for.

I had them down pat. As chair I remember well some confrontations with a former dean over his efforts to get

With experience, new courses become less daunting. Also, if new courses are built on individual strengths, they will

not exhaust the instructor. New preps should provide insights and stimulate thinking.

the University of Kansas. I wrote, she typed. She proofread until computers and spell check came in. Family

members have to understand that when the writer is hunched over the typewriter or computer, that any interruption

should be important. Fire comes to mind. Or children’s problems.

willingly packed up the children to live in Italy for a year, then Germany, then back to Germany and back again.

Then to Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic. And endured my frequent absences during much of many summers.

Sabbatical in my thirteenth year.

    Sometimes research cannot even get started until new skills have been mastered. For years I used lunch

time to work on medieval Latin; in 1973 I went to Poland to study the language; I went to Beloit College two

summers to recover my lost Russian; I talked the dean into allowing me to teach Intensive Italian three times as an

overload. Returning to Germany regularly kept that language alive, and visiting family in Texas was a constant

opportunity to keep the Spanish from turning completely into Italian. I was less able to work on my Slavic

languages. Alas. But life is short and eventually one has to stop preparing and start working.

4 AM. (I wrote the first draft of this talk at 3 AM.) If you are thinking about something, you will dream about it or

think about it. Rather than toss and turn, get up and write it down.

    Come to work early. I used to come at six to use the college’s first computer; I now come at seven. Use

lunchtimes effectively. Give up prime time TV (not much lost there anyway). Work on weekends. Work during the

summer. Write, write, write.

several translations from Middle High German into colloquial English, and deepened my knowledge of the sources

considerably.

    I’ve been asked how to make time. These are my suggestions: First, marry the right person; second, give up

competing passions. I used to play chess well. That was very time consuming and, even worse, stressful—I would

replay the games in my head all night. I also enjoyed playing tennis, but getting better required playing more

regularly than I could manage; third, refuse entreaties to take on responsibilities. Men’s clubs, for example, take

only an hour or two a week, but that is equal to a full work week each year. Administrative tasks should be limited.

Becoming a dean is deadly to scholarship, because administrative paperwork is too much like research and too

stressful. Lastly, develop a schedule. One of my history colleagues thirty years ago was not finishing his

dissertation. His wife practically locked him in the house except to meet his classes; she turned down all social

invitations until he was finished.

    How can one keep fresh? First, make diversions truly diverting. Totally different from research and writing.

Physical activity is almost a necessity. I coached soccer for years. It was nothing like library work. Gardening,

which for many years was little more than mowing the lawn, has been very enjoyable—and it lends itself to Books

on Tape. Biking is great fun, but Books on Tape are far too dangerous on the road.

places to work there. One place for grubbing the footnotes, another for the rough first draft, another for corrections. I

enclosed the front porch to make a marvelous solarium.

    S tart writing right away. Often you can only see what you need to do when it’s on paper. You can throw

away what is bad. Throw away even what is mediocre.

    Learn to write well. That’s not easy. Since editing student papers is good practice, a heavy work load is not

all bad. Apply the same standards to your own work: find a strong topic sentence, cut back on wordiness, eliminate

flourishes; strike out most words ending in –ly and most adjectives. Read Mark Twain’s advice on writing. Follow

that I was not a good writer when I came to Monmouth, but I had become one. That was high praise. Bernice had

very high standards.

    Write on diverse subjects. Newspaper columns and book reviews are good practice, and they are diversions

from wearying research projects that seem to have no end.

    Make time for family. Jackie and I went camping, hiking. The kids hated it; now they do it themselves.

Children’s activities make tourism more interesting (there are only so many museums one can stand in any given

day). This was especially important during my teaching and research stints abroad; there was nothing like a hike up

to a castle to combine family, exercise and research interests. Time with relatives was important for us all. Two to

three times a year we packed children and pets into the car for the eleven hour drive to north central Kansas.

How do you get ideas? That’s a question I get occasionally, but usually it comes in the form of  “All the

good research topics have been done.” I could not disagree more, though it is obvious that all the obvious topics

have been worked on. Get off the beaten track. Become an expert in something that is not a current fad. I started in

Baltic history when nobody was interested in it. I now turn down offers for talks and chapters and books (I always

answer letters and email from graduate students or even just enthusiastic undergraduates). Just as today’s fad will

become out of date, what seems unimportant now may become tomorrow’s hot subject.

    Teaching at Monmouth gets one out of any narrow specialty. Anyone with a few years of experience will

smile at this. No graduate school training prepares for the variety of classes we have to offer.

    Read widely. The best ideas are not in your specialty. Hang out with people in other departments. Hang out

with interesting people. That is, unconventional people, people who do not always agree with you. Doug Spitz never

failed to provide a good conversation; he never seemed to sleep, and there was no important book that he hadn’t

read. Hang out with productive people. If they have time to hang out with you.

    Avoid too much alcohol, and people who abuse it. Alcohol wipes out many a promising scholar.

(Marijuana probably too. Although I understand it is less damaging to health and not fattening.) Avoid anything that

could get you more reading time at state expense than you really want.

    Avoid bad trips, but travel. Not just as a tourist, but live in some new place for weeks or months. Attend

conferences, but listen to papers on topics you don’t know anything about.

    Don’t get carried away by politics, either national or campus. I once asked Archie Lewis, probably about

1963, a year filled with explosive issues, why he wasn’t active in university politics. He said that one couldn’t be a

Too much stress and too much time. Do have political opinions, do get involved. But use common sense. Establish

your priorities. And combine your interests. If saving whales is your passion, write about whales. Move to Puget

Sound.

everywhere. Jealousy and conspiracies have existed on campuses since the Middle Ages, and they won’t go away.

Remember that publishing a popular book or winning a teaching award is the kiss of death at many major

universities.

    There are those who would distract you. Most mean well. Don’t forget that most distractions are

worthwhile in themselves. They may be more valuable than publishing.

But you were young then. As you mature, you will likely discover that much you were told in graduate school is

wrong.

    Teaching well may be more significant than writing for a handful of peers. That is nothing to be ashamed

of! If teaching turns you on, teach. If it doesn’t, look for another job. But if you are driven to write, do it!

Start anywhere. A discussion board is good practice. But don’t let such activities take on too great a role in

your life. Stay focused. Then move on.

for promotion or tenure. These articles would serve as benchmarks of what each generation of scholars does. The

writer might even learn that writing for a general audience is enjoyable. Our present requirement of giving a talk is

outdated because so many of us cannot find the time to attend all of them—the teaching staff has grown too large.

Rather than speak to a handful of people, something most of us can do with minimal preparation, each candidate

could write five to ten good pages in understandable prose on something important and interesting. Something each

is willing to be judged on for years to come.

    But everything in life requires risks.

    Publishing means choosing among the various risks.

    Then pursuing the goal.

The Critic in the College Community

By Craig Vivian

George Byron

What has ever been produced, created, or imagined that has not also been questioned by critics? To be

critical seems to be a fundamental part of human nature. There have always been critics, and they have been

perceived differently by those around them. Some are praised, some are tolerated, and some are killed. What role

can or should critics play in academic institutions, and how ought liberal arts colleges to respond to the critics within

their midst? This paper will argue that critics are essential to the dynamism of institutions of higher education;

however, because of the encroachment of a corporate mentality into institutional development, critics are an

endangered species on college campuses. The critic, ideally, provides the antithetical impetus needed to challenge

and change the institution. In order to provoke change, a critic must have access to public spaces within the

institution, but corporations, by their nature, restrict public space. As academic institutions shift toward

corporatism, public space diminishes, and so too does the contribution of the critic to intellectual and institutional

progress.

The critic serves a political and social purpose. Whereas the art critic serves as a judge or connoisseur, and

the social critic serves to offer insights into the forces that govern us, it is the academic critic who serves to analyze

the institutions and disciplines that produce and pass on knowledge, as well as the knowledge itself. The production

of art would continue without the presence of art critics, because every artist, simply through his or her work, acts as

an art critic by challenging the existing body of art with the creation of more art. However, the contributions of

people dedicated to art criticism also lead to an advancement of art by stimulating discussion and reaction.

Similarly, in the absence of critics within academic institutions, scholars would continue to produce knowledge and

serve as critics through their contributions to knowledge. Institutional critics, however, facilitate this process: by

offering an antithesis to a thesis, they stimulate the community’s efforts to achieve a synthesis, or advancement.

This process is as crucial for institutional development as it is for the evolution of knowledge.

James Downey (1995) has described the university as a trinity: an admixture of corporation, collegium, and

community. He argues that this composition is a recent development, brought about by technological, economic,

and political changes. This description applies, in some degree, to all institutions of higher education and becomes

important in understanding the tensions on campuses relating to differing reactions to social and political issues by

various constituents. According to Downey, the corporate dimension of a college is of a “hierarchical structure,

with authority vested in a corporate board and delegated to designated officers. [It] cannot afford to operate as a

consensual community…[it] doesn’t have colleagues; it has officers, employees, and clients, and for its own

integrity it must deal with them as such (p.3). This hierarchy is seen as necessary to the orderly running of the

institution, and therefore as an essential component of it. What becomes problematic for institutions of higher

education is that corporations do not have public space in which to accommodate critical voices. In a hierarchy,

critics are generally seen as subversive, destructive, divisive, and disloyal. Simply stated, there are no critics in a

corporation. Although there may be room for “input” from outsiders in a corporation, this is business that takes

place in a “private sphere” and not in public.

If the corporate component of the trinity becomes central to the academic institution, private spheres

become primary in planning development and growth, as well as academic direction and initiatives. Private spheres

are housed within existing power structures and operate to promote private vision and self-interests. Under a

hierarchical structure, group-think primarily dominates private interactions: little innovation occurs and a limited

number of perspectives are examined. If a corporate structure, and its procedures, comes to dominate an institution,

public spaces are transformed: instead of existing as active and critical forums of communication and participation,

they are reduced to spaces where those in the collegium perform perfunctory “business” transactions devoid of

democratic interaction. The corporate component does not easily tolerate critical public spaces, because

corporations must work under the assumption that the institution is functioning correctly so as to preserve

confidence in the institution. Corporations must claim some degree of foundational validity in their operations, but

critics, by their nature, do not accept an absolute or imagined truth: they are continually examining and contesting

ideas— striving for better approaches or answers. A corporation, to maintain order, must at least pretend that it has

the right answers and goals, and cannot give a public impression that it is constantly questioning its goals, or

publicly searching for a better mission.

Critical public spaces are defined, in this essay, as areas where public discourse is unconstrained and all

ideas are publicly questioned, examined, or challenged by the members of the community. If a college community

is to flourish, students, as well as faculty and administrators, need to be able to take seriously different points of

Accordingly, “those who claim the right to criticize should assume the responsibility to comprehend others”

(Williamsburg Charter, 1986, p.6). Public spaces are civic arenas which are an integral part of the institution and

therefore viewed as positive communal spaces where one goes to participate in reasoned critical discussions of

important public matters. These spaces are not “pseudo” public spaces full of competing propagandas and private

ideologies aimed at distorting or selling a perspective. These spaces are also not philosophically equivalent to the

open market. Public critics are not as interested in developing a shared conception of Truth as much as they are

interested in the “personal challenge of assuming personal responsibility for finding their own will to meaning”

(Lakeland, 1993).

If the public spaces of an academic institution wither away, how will the institution function? One result

could be an institutional vacuum where meaningful public responses to political and social issues do not

exist—where no public reactions to political and social events are visible. They become socially or politically

“dead” communities in spite of any erudition or thinking taking place in the classroom. It seems reasonable to

suggest that “living” communities only survive in the presence of public spaces, for it is in public spaces that people

come together to speak and act—to publicly craft a vision. Although there have been many conceptualizations of

public space, Aristotle’s insights have continued to inform those who have seriously looked at the significance of

public and private spheres. When Aristotle studied the activities required to be a part of human communal life, he

found two: action and speech. He believed that from these activities there emerges the political and social

foundations of human affairs. When action and speech occur within a public sphere, common ground is created

where people are seen and heard as “equals,” and this space becomes the location where they can critique, judge,

discuss and advance a common and shared understanding of the good. In other words, the public use of space will

be political/social in nature. Hannah Arendt captures well how the critical aspect of thinking depends on the

attributes of a public space:

the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure

reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am

quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others [which results in

an] enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its individual

limitations, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose

place” it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration, and without whom it never

has the opportunity to operate at all. (1961, p. 220-1)

In other words, a critical mind is formed by association with other critical minds and will indeed benefit by

having public spaces in which to operate. In order to accommodate the critic, and critical thinking, certain public

spaces must be established which lend themselves to critical exchanges that promote questioning, probing, and

dissension. These public spaces also serve to ensure that a healthy balance is maintained between the three

components of the institution.

Democracy and freedom have always been associated with a conception of public space, and in her paper,

particular strain of political thought: Benhabib first examines Arendt’s view of public space as being

“associational”—a view that public space emerges whenever groups of people come together and act in concert.

According to Arendt, these public spaces become “sites of power, of common action coordinated through speech

and persuasion” (ibid p.93). Benhabib criticizes this conceptualization for focusing primarily on agendas and

activities. If the critic is to locate herself in higher education, then the institution must have legitimate public spaces

devoted to “reflexive questioning of issues by all those affected…and the recognition of their right to do so” (ibid

p.95). Accordingly, public space must not be used solely for demonstrations of power or protests, as there is a lack

of dialogue and a proclivity to violence or force.

Benhabib presents a second view of public space based upon the work of Bruce Ackerman, a proponent of

fundamentally disagree, thereby allowing members of those groups to “resolve problems of coexistence in a

reasonable way” (ibid p.96). Ackerman imagines public space, restricted in this manner, will be used to enhance

public conversations, but performed in accordance with a certain procedure:

When you and I learn that we disagree about one or another dimension of the moral truth . . . we

should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and try to solve our problem by invoking

premises we do agree upon. In restraining ourselves in this way, we do not lose the chance to talk

to one another about our deepest moral disagreements in countless other, more private, contexts.

(ibid p.98)

This consensus building approach is commendable, but does little to engender the unanticipated insights

that occur during a critical discussion of issues by those who agree that their disagreements are worth talking about.

A problem with Ackerman’s approach is that public spaces are most useful when they become the sites where

contested issues are critically examined and where discussions are publicly evaluated.

Benhabib offers a third conceptualization of public space based upon the work of Jurgen Habermas and

referred to as a discursive model; a critical-participatory environment giving opportunities for all voices to be heard

and a commitment to legitimating society and tradition by developing “individuals who are increasingly more

dependent on critical and reflexive attitudes” (ibid p.104). This conceptualization implies institutional support for

full participation of all its members in the issues which they see as relevant. For universal participation to occur, it

requires that a common space is maintained in which members are allowed to meet through different media, and in

various arenas—print, electronic, and face to face encounters—all taking place within the institution, but none under

the influence of the institution. This type of participation will be “messy,” and, according to Charles Taylor, within

this public space there is an “ever-continuing controversy . . . [whose] potentially divisive and destructive

to define the common good” (1995 p.192). As argued previously, it seems impossible for a truly inclusive common

good to be created within a corporate structure that privileges private space and eschews public spaces and divergent

perspectives.

It is therefore incumbent upon academic institutions to give space and voice to the critic to counter the

conforming aspects of the corporate element within higher education, and to sustain the critically reflective tradition

of inquiry among faculty and students. If public spaces in academia disappear, the critic will be relegated to the role

of a complainer: one whose words and ideas are never given public exposure, legitimacy, or acknowledgement. A

key difference between oppositional and alienated individuals (complainers) and committed, activist, and reflective

members of a community (critics) is that the former are denied access to a public space. It is the critic, and the

public embracing of critical voices, that will lead to dialectical progress, since it is through public debate and critical

interchange that the institution will democratically and freely revise and re-form itself. These changes will be the

result of critical exchanges over the values, goals and communal issues that make their way into the public spaces.

It is also the case that these exchanges will allow the faculty and student body to legitimate and delineate knowledge

claims and intellectual foci.

An institution that makes no effort to preserve public space will be replete with alienated, apathetic, or

powerless individuals. Evidence of a lack of public space on campuses will be a faculty that does not model the

pursuit of justice, wisdom, and inquiry as citizens, and a passive student body. It does not suffice to be critical only

in the classroom, as that can only remain an academic exercise, regardless of its intent or the power contained in its

instruction. The academy must preserve and even augment public space since it is there, through critical discourse,

that the common “good” can be formed and developed, for “at its root, criticism is always moral in character”

(Walzer, 1988, p.9)—and it is a public critic with a sincere interest in furthering public discourse, and not the

individualistic complainer, who works to change conditions for the better.

References

NY,1961).

Winter 1993, v.43, issue 4 pp.488-503.

(Charlottesville, UPV, 1995).

How Do Girls Define Resistance and What Would They Resist?

Implications for Critical Pedagogy

By Monie Hayes

Our children are going to hell, and Hollywood, in a handbasket. At the same time, our girl children are

traveling their own road to perdition, one paved with good intentions—good, that is, where prevalent discourses of

femininity conflate “goodness” with self-abnegation while common cultural representations of women and girls

continue to objectify, diminish, and constrain us. The preceding statements summarize, respectively, much of the

current thought about kids’ relationship to popular culture and much of the recent scholarship about growing up and

assuming a gendered identity in contemporary Western culture. Not surprisingly, adults want to steer youngsters off

these paths. But the prevailing conventional and scholarly wisdom about kids in trouble, while it seems to grow

from an ethos of care about kids, casts both youth and gender as problems to be solved, realms of peril instead of

possibility. It further casts adults who would intervene in these dynamics as advocates for kids, here girls in

particular, in a didactic role, reading from a “We know what’s good for you” script. Moreover, such opinions often

are put forth as if viewing, listening, or logging on were somehow context-free, with little regard to the social

dynamics that inform viewing and response, and certainly color kids’ authorship of media messages.

One important strand of scholarship during the previous decade has, however, considered the ways in

which girls, as situated audiences, take up popular media, and the ways in which publications marketed to

adolescent girls position them to reproduce patriarchal, “lookist,” and consumerist personas and practices. Spurred

have identified girls as at risk in particular ways in our schools and larger Western culture, especially as they enter

adolescence (American Association of University Women, 1992, 1999; Debold, 2001; Finders, 1997; Gilligan,

1993; Girl Scouts of the USA, 2000; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). A branch of this

inquiry has considered girls’ literate practices, in particular the ways in which they respond and are positioned with

regard to popular genres (Cherland, 1994; Christian-Smith, 1993; B. Davies, 1993a; Enciso, 1998; Finders, 1997;

Gilbert and Taylor, 1991; Trachsel, 1998; Willinsky & Hunniford, 1993). These scholars find that such narrative

forms as horror films, horse stories, teen romances, and teen ‘zines operate as little more than primers for patriarchy,

serving to reinscribe middle-class morés of “ladylike” gentility as inextricably bound to happy endings.

Where kids are being sold a shoddy “identity kit” (Gee, 1987), it is, of course, proper to intervene and

invite them to interrogate messages that position them in delimiting ways as, for example, the man of action, the

“perfect” girl, or the savvy consumer. It is also appropriate to work with kids to confront the gender and class

inequity that popular media genres often reflect. But as literacy scholars, it is likewise appropriate that we

interrogate the assumptions, including our own, surrounding the phenomena of response as well as those implicit

within the electronic messages that increasingly are a part of our children’s lives, and that we turn our energies

toward considering all that these representations might mean to the young people who view and listen to them, often

with enthusiasm and sometimes with disdain. This is what I sought to do in my dissertation research, and I excerpted

indicates a rhetorical-political stance with regard to adolescent audiences’ extant savvy and a penchant for wordplay

since my research informants were members of a Girl Scout troop. I recount and consider one aspect of my

findings, which inform the title of this piece.

My findings underscore my conviction that an authentic apprehension of children’s relationships to media

is vital to developing a sound and substantive grounded theoretical base to support critical media literacy instruction.

Developing such insight is especially vital because media literacy pedagogy is gaining a stronghold among

education practitioners and scholars. In the 1990s, for instance, both the International Reading Association and

National Council of Teachers of English included media literacy among their literacy standards. In 1999, Girl Scouts

of the USA introduced its own critical media literacy program, Media Know-How, whose uptake I chronicled in two

group settings, including the focal troop whose implementation of the program this article reports. Any

understanding of girls’ relationship to media must extend beyond consideration of particular young people’s habits

and assumptions with regard to media to include an accounting for their relationships to their social worlds and the

cultural context in which any text or image, and the ideology it naturalizes or interrogates, circulates. This can offer

insight not only into how various textual messages mean for kids, but additionally, into why they are fraught. Taking

this approach can surprise us, but it can both complicate and inform our work with adolescents toward fostering

critical media literacy—and critical cultural literacy—in productive ways.

Again, many approaches to gender, adolescence, popular media and culture, and literacy learning itself

seemed based on the notion that there is a problem to be fixed and little recognition of the resources at

hand—namely, the young people we are ostensibly trying to “help.” What social and intellectual resources do they

bring to viewership, authorship, and response? What resources do they want to develop? A research stance that

considers their central role as participants in media literacy learning, production, and response can yield answers to

these questions. To generate a portrait of one critical literacy program and its mobilization by a specific group of

learners, I turned to the Girl Scouts of the USA and one adolescent troop’s implementation of the organization’s

Media Know-How program (Cryan/GSUSA, 1999).

I sought an adolescent troop, and was able to negotiate entry to observe one group of fifth and sixth graders

as well as the ninth and tenth graders who became my focal subjects, because of the pressures that accompany the

inculcation of gender at adolescence (Gilligan, 1993; et al. as listed above). This work alerts or reminds adults who

grew up in the era of “women’s liberation” that the notion that the girls they are raising and teaching are growing up

in a post-feminist culture is a myth in the discursive service of ongoing male privilege, veiled in genteel admonitions

not to make waves.

discusses the ways femininity is defined by contradiction and limitation and the consequences of the processes of

subjectification that girls undergo:

Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long

been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too

much; be polite, but be yourself; be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but

don’t comment on the sexism. Another way to describe this femininity training is to call it false

self-training. Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the

culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become. (44)

Thus the discursive norms of ideal femininity are at odds with each other in frustrating and delimiting

ways. Pipher is apt to remark the arbitrary and constraining ways that social discursive norms of gender can inhibit

girls, but her observations suffer the conceptual shortcoming of presenting restrictive cultural norms in opposition to

an idealized notion of the self, in particular as it is experienced in a romanticized childhood. I would argue that the

term “false self-training” most accurately conveys that the options girls face for enacting gender are narrow and thus

prohibit certain ways of performing one’s subjectivity in socially sanctioned ways. If girls’ felt motives fall outside

the recognized standard for “doing girl,” girls might not act upon them—or might face consequences for so doing.

What is false is what is not full. The fault of cultural standards for the performance of gendered identity is not that

they operate to sever girls from their previously fixed and authentic selves but that they work to constrict the

repertoire.

Pipher is not the only feminist scholar to illustrate that the rules for enacting gender are contradictory in

ways that give girls coming of age in Western culture few satisfying options or to point out that social standards can

seem at odds with what girls understand to be their own motivations. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, who participated

in the 1992 AAUW research, explains that girls are especially vulnerable to feelings of loss and consequent anger as

they enter adolescence, when the inculcation of femininity intensifies. Reporting the findings of a study of

adolescent girls, Gilligan (1993) describes the process as one of psychic tumult and struggle precisely because it is

not natural. Gilligan’s findings echo Pipher’s claim that girls are caught in a web of cultural paradox where they are

led to be “good,” “nice” girls in a social world that is not always good and nice, in particular to them. Girls, who

prize caring and are judged by how caring they appear (Gilligan, 1982/1993, 1993; Nilan, 1991), learn that if they

don’t have anything nice to say, then they shouldn’t say anything at all. But they do so at great psychic cost, for in

order to maintain approval and interpersonal connection, they learn to behave in socially constructed “feminine”

ways that feel as artificial as they are.

One of the most pernicious cultural myths is that of the perfect girl. The omnipresence of this impossibleto-

emulate role model holds girls to “a standard that does not come out of their experience and an image that,

because embodied, calls into question the reality that they have lived in” (Gilligan, 1993, p. 158). In addition to

inculcating acquiescence, then, social norms of femininity inculcate self-doubt as girls approach and move through

adolescence. Gilligan describes the impact of such recurrent narrative and social tropes as perfect girls and

swaggering heroes upon the actual girls growing up in a patriarchal culture beholden to such myths. According to

Gilligan, girls discover that they are at risk:

if they continue to know what they know, and especially if they say it in public. What once

seemed ordinary to girls – speaking, difference, anger, conflict, fighting, bad as well as good

thoughts and feelings, now seem treacherous: laced with danger, a sign of imperfection, a

Where prevalent discourses of gender define femininity against a standard of consideration for the comfort

of others over one’s own, a recalcitrant girl risks not only correction but ostracism. The girl who dares to speak her

mind, to voice her perceptions—to “comment on the sexism”—risks being defined as different and socially rejected,

a particularly deterrent consequence for adolescents and especially harsh discipline for girls, given Gilligan’s earlier

observations (1982/1993) that girls are inculcated into an ethos of care; they come to construct their identities and

weigh their value and importance in the social world in terms of their relationships to others.

Gilligan identifies what adolescent girls thus experience as “the central dilemma of relationship: how to

speak honestly and also stay in connection with others” (1993, p. 150). In order to be “good,” and thus maintain

approval from significant others, girls must deal with those others less openly.

Girls’ accounts of the social practices of teen femininity indicate that assuming and enacting a gendered

with its participant suggestions for cultural, attitudinal, and school reform, demonstrates that feminism is not an

adult-down project. The project, in which GSUSA was one of a handful of national partners, was undertaken to

include girls’ perspectives in research and advocacy undertaken on their behalf. It represents a deliberate attempt to

bring girls’ voices into discussions of the problems they face and the solutions they imagine—and to take them

seriously. The case study reported in this thesis represents a similarly informed, more longitudinal effort on a

smaller participant scale.

which girls were invited to discuss their experiences and list issues that concern them as adolescent girls along with

the changes they’d like to see in their social environment; specifically, AAUW researchers coded preliminary

questionnaires completed by 730 girls, roughly one-third of the participant pool. The findings of the AAUW’s 1999

follow-up to the earlier study reveal that today’s schoolgirls remain oppressed and inhibited by a school culture

which values them according to their looks and marginalizes those who do not meet the accepted standard. The

findings confirm that it is not easy being an adolescent girl and that girls want support in meeting and negotiating

the social challenges they face. This includes a stated desire among pre-adolescent and adolescent respondents for a

discursive space where they might talk about the issues that concern them.

Most of the eleven- to seventeen-year-old girls invited to discuss their experiences reported sexual pressure

p. 3). Most name harassment as something they wish they could change about their schools. Yet many report having

taken part as well as having been a victim; this not only reveals the extent of sexual harassment in schools, but

demonstrates the fluidity of subject position and participant structure, specifically among adolescent social practices.

policing will be related to the performance of one’s sexual or gendered identity.

Summit participants named teen pregnancy more than any other issue as “the ‘major issue’ or struggle in

frequently than White and Asian-American girls. (Sixty-two percent of Latino girls, fifty-seven percent of Black

girls, thirty-one percent of Native American girls, twenty-one percent of White girls, and nineteen percent of the

Asian-American girls who completed a questionnaire named pregnancy as one of the most important issues or

struggles facing teen girls.) Moreover, girls’ characterization of sexuality as perilous extended beyond a cause-andeffect

appreciation of the risk of pregnancy; their depiction of the experience of sexuality was embedded in a

discourse of coercion along a continuum that ranged from harassment to assault. Girls reported sexuality as fraught

with social consequences—“a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” social practice that echoes Gilbert and

Taylor’s “slags or drags” discourse of teen femininity. Yet some respondents expressed the desire to be able to

interact with boys as friends, as well as to explore their sexual feelings and curiosity in a safe, respectful

interpersonal context without necessarily proceeding to intercourse. Fine (1993) writes of the missing discourse of

desire in pregnancy-prevention education, an absence that reflects cultural discomfort surrounding and “moral”

condemnation of female sexual appetites. Many feminist educators and scholars, myself included, welcomed her

observations as broadening the standard of wholesomeness. Yet this perspective was not apparent in the AAUW

informants’ responses; the majority of girls seemed to associate sexuality more with pressure than pleasure and did

not seem nearly as ill at ease with the desires they felt as with the social consequences of either avoiding or

exploring sexual activity. They found that boys condemned them as bitches or lesbians for rejecting their overtures,

while girls either branded them sluts for their involvement with boys (whatever form it might take) or labeled them

babies or prudes for abstaining from it. Instead of foregrounding desire, or volition, a discourse of acquiescence

reverberates in girls’ answer to the question, “What is something that someone has said to you that you wish they

hadn’t?” Girls voiced a hesitancy to say no to sexual overtures because they will be—or had been—judged “rude” or

If we wish to extend the choices and mitigate the costs girls encounter, we need to couple our awareness of

discursive dynamics and gender ideology with a consideration of actual girls’ experience, to find out what they

perceive their problems to be. Adults can most productively work with girls to explore their desires, barriers to their

fulfillment, and the consequences of fulfilling or them or not, in our attempts to include girls’ voices in the work of

feminism and determining what form that will take.

Girl Scouts of the USA and Media Know-How

A look at the history of Girl Scouts, in particular a consideration of the organization’s “curriculum,” from

such past programs as a 1969 series of summits and program intended to confront racial prejudice to more recent

programs encouraging girls’ involvement in sports and development of financial and computer savvy, shows the

organization to be at the crest of public and professional awareness about the issues that affect girls’ lived

experience. Thus, observing a focal troop’s uptake of a Girl Scout program seemed a good way to take some girls’

attitudinal pulse, and to consider how institutional agendas meshed with the girls’ motives. I have not doubted since

my original reading of the Media Know-How booklets for Scouts and troop leaders that this program was informed

by an awareness of the exhortations to consumerism and the measuring of oneself against a false physical ideal,

along with the derogation of women some popular lyrics seem to condone—indeed, the booklets explicitly mention

these trends (Cryan/GSUSA, 1999). These elements, along with my own critical concerns and those expressed by

my colleagues, previous research participants, and even my children and their friends, who already at a tenth

birthday sleepover lamented the “girl in jep” formula they recognized in preteen suspense films, led me to expect a

Media Know-How project that interrogated prevalent images of femininity and offered an agentic

alternative—which is in fact what members of the focal troop ultimately produced, though through a text more

closely aligned with the AAUW informants’ voiced concerns about the politics and consequences of sexuality than

with my own prior research informants’ expressed desire for popular cultural representations of feminine personae

that included “an awesome girl kicking rearend” (Hayes, 1999).

Girl Scouts of the USA has a long and varied history that reflects both the social practices it has endeavored

to reproduce and the progressive ideals that have been part of the cultural context the organization has sought to

expand. In this way, according to Halpern, it is similar to many after-school programs:

[T]he after-school field has a rich and interesting tradition . . . After-school programs have defined

themselves in terms of protection, care, opportunity for enrichment, and play while simultaneously

defining themselves in terms of socialization, acculturation, training, and problem remediation.

Providers have argued that program activities should be shaped by children’s interests and

preferences and yet also by what they as adults thought children needed. (2002, p. 179)

Consideration of the history and programs of GSUSA uncovers many of these tensions along with contrasts

between the organization’s present and past social practices. From its liberal roots in opening opportunities for

outdoor excursions—among other more and less traditional activities—to girls without challenging gender divisions

to its overtly collectivist current-day incarnation, the organization itself is a window into overlapping and protean

discourses of gender, youth development, and community. For instance, the organizational slogan is now “Where

girls grow strong” where just a few years ago it was the more individualistic “We grow leaders, one girl at a time”

(http://www.gsusa.org). In an organization with the Girl Scouts’ long history, numerous programs, and diverse

localized program uptake, it is not surprising that accounts of the organization should suggest a wide range of

meaning or experience for girls. Again, the focus of my research was on girls’ interpretations.

GSUSA traces its history to 1912, when the organization was founded by Savannahanian Juliette Gordon

Low. The initial unit included eighteen girls. Low’s organization was a reflection of the British Scouting movement;

in fact, it was modeled after the British Girl Guides, which was in turn an offshoot of the recently organized British

Boy Scouts, founded by Sir Robert Baden-Powell (Jacobson, 1985). In keeping with the ethos of the age (Neil,

1912), Low founded the organization in order to provide wholesome outdoor activities for girls, who customarily

were “cloistered” in their homes (http://www.gsusa.org/ organization/briefhistory.htm). An additional goal of the

program was community service (par. 1). Current program goals include fostering the development of girls’

potential and self-esteem, respect for and cooperation with others, reflective and ethical decision-making, and

contributions to the larger community (http://www.gsusa.org/programs.html).

The organizational structure of GSUSA is one of regional Councils (Iowa, for example, has five; Missouri,

nine) and local troops, several of which might coexist across and within age divisions in any town or city. More than

400 employees currently work at the national headquarters in New York (http://www.gsusa.org/organization/

facts.htm). But despite the full-time national cadre, it is council staff and troop leaders who carry out Scouting

programs at the local level. GSUSA bills itself as the largest voluntary organization for girls, open to all girls ages 5

through 17 (or K-12) “who subscribe to its ideals as stated in the Girl Scout Promise and Law” (p. 2). Today’s

GSUSA troop articulation now comprises Daisy Girl Scouts (Daisy was Juliette Gordon Low’s nickname), ages 5-6

and grades K-1; Brownie Girl Scouts, ages 6-8 and grades 1-3; Junior Girls Scouts, ages 8-11 and grades 3-6;

Cadette Girl Scouts, ages 11-14 and grades 6-9; and Senior Girls Scouts, ages 14-17 and grades 9-12. Daisies joined