The Experience of Neoliberal Education 9781785338649

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Neoliberalizing Undergraduate Experience
CHAPTER 1 John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age
CHAPTER 2 Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education
CHAPTER 3 Empathy as Industry An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania
CHAPTER 4 Dirty Work The Carnival of Service
CHAPTER 5 No Good Deed Goes Uncounted A Reflection on College Volunteerism
CHAPTER 6 From Service-Learning to Social Innovation The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning
CHAPTER 7 High Hopes and Low Impact Obstacles in Student Research
CHAPTER 8 The Experience Experts
CHAPTER 9 Moral Entanglements in Service-Learning
CHAPTER 10 Engineering Success Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water
CHAPTER 11 Caught between Commodification and Audit Concluding Thoughts on the Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education
Index

Citation preview

The Experience of Neoliberal Education

Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Series editors: Susan Wright, Aarhus University Penny Welch, Wolverhampton University Around the globe, universities are being reformed to supply two crucial ingredients of a purported “global knowledge economy”: research and graduates. Higher education’s aims, concepts, structures, and practices are all in process of change. Together with its sister journal, LATISS, this series provides in-depth analyses of these changes and how those involved—managers, academics, and students—are experimenting with critical pedagogies, reflecting upon the best organization of their own institutions, and engaging with public policy debates about higher education in the 21st Century. Volume 1 Learning under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education Edited by Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, and Susan Wright Volume 2 Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education Morten Levin and Davydd J. Greenwood Volume 3 Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy Edited by Susan Wright and Cris Shore Volume 4 The Experience of Neoliberal Education Edited by Bonnie Urciuoli

The Experience of Neoliberal Education 

Edited by

Bonnie Urciuoli

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Bonnie Urciuoli

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78533-863-2 (hardback) EISBN: 978-1-78533-864-9 (ebook)

Contents 

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction. Neoliberalizing Undergraduate Experience Bonnie Urciuoli Chapter 1. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age Pauline Turner Strong Chapter 2. Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision: Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education Richard Handler Chapter 3. Empathy as Industry: An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania Jack LaViolette Chapter 4. Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service John J. Bodinger de Uriarte and Shari Jacobson Chapter 5. No Good Deed Goes Uncounted: A Reflection on College Volunteerism Sarah Bergbauer Chapter 6. From Service-Learning to Social Innovation: The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning Chaise LaDousa Chapter 7. High Hopes and Low Impact: Obstacles in Student Research Anastassia Baldrige

1

17

32

56 73

106

112

137

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Chapter 8. The Experience Experts Bonnie Urciuoli

143

Chapter 9. Moral Entanglements in Service-Learning Christopher Cai and Usnish Majumdar

171

Chapter 10. Engineering Success: Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water Alex Posecznick Chapter 11. Caught between Commodification and Audit: Concluding Thoughts on the Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education Wesley Shumar Index

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215 235

Illustrations 

Figure 4.1. Two students with wheelbarrows

75

Figure 4.2. Group of students with shovels

77

Figure 4.3. Student sweeping

82

Figure 4.4. Group of students behind pick-up truck

90

Figure 4.5. Two students with bricks and mortar

91

Figure 4.6. Two students cutting rebar with hacksaw

92

Figure 4.7. Student with goggles and hammer at wall

96

Figure 4.8. Man and student with drill

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Acknowledgments 

This volume began with a session, “The Value of a (Neo)-liberal Arts Experience,” at the 2015 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, with the hopes that it would evolve into a volume, which it quickly did. The original papers by Pauline Turner Strong, Chaise LaDousa, Richard Handler, John Bodinger de Uriarte and Shari Jacobson, and Bonnie Urciuoli were expanded into chapters, another chapter was contributed by our discussant Alex Posecznick, and another by our interlocutor Wes Shumar. In addition, the inspiring suggestion was made to include reflections by students on their own experience of experience, and so we were happy to get chapters from Anastassia Baldrige, Sarah Bergbauer, Christopher Cai and Usnish Majumdar, and Jack LaViolette. We are very grateful to Sue Wright, Penny Welch, and Vivian Berghahn for shepherding our project through so quickly and efficiently. We are also grateful to Associate Dean of Faculty Penny Yee at Hamilton College for subvention assistance. Finally, we are also very grateful to our two external reviewers for their careful and insightful readings and comments on our first chapter drafts.

INTRODUCTION

Neoliberalizing Undergraduate Experience BONNIE URCIUOLI 

Once upon a time, the U.S. college experience was simply what a student experienced when attending college, and was heavily associated with elite institutions and liberal arts education. That notion certainly lingers. But in contemporary higher education, the idea of experience has also become a property of specifically defined and administratively structured activities that students do: first-year experience, study abroad, internship, and service-learning, much of it under the rubric of experiential learning. All these experiences are assigned value comparable and complementary to academics, and are treated as assessable in parallel ways, perhaps even on extracurricular “transcripts.” Administrative structures and even ancillary industries have arisen to manage them, and they have become an important element of college marketing. The idea that education could be grounded in an organic, subjectively distinct experience and at the same time reified and marketed as a product has its origins in two distinct developments in the history of U.S. higher education: the philosophy of educational experience proposed by John Dewey, and the relation between educational administrations and business interests critiqued by Thorstein Veblen. These developments emerged in the very early twentieth century and remain intertwined; indeed, since the 1990s, the second has taken on new life, enfolding the first into an education product. Strong (this volume) lays out Dewey’s belief in a mutually integrative and informative relation between education and experience, with practical activity leading to reflection and enhanced understanding. Contemporaneously, as Handler (this volume) points out, Veblen warned about the emergence of, as he put it, “captains of erudition” heading universities while working in tandem with the profit-oriented businessmen (and they were in fact all men) who dominated boards of trustees, undercutting what Veblen saw

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as the primary academic functions of higher education. Dewey’s philosophy and Veblen’s critique, considered together, account for much of contemporary higher education, its origins having been in place since the growth of U.S. universities concomitant with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century corporate expansions (see, e.g., Barrow 1990). There never was a simple, pure college experience, nor has whatever constitutes undergraduate education or the college experience ever been monolithic or static. Higher education institutions have always been deeply imbricated with general social and economic conditions, not to mention contemporaneously valued notions of personhood, and they have always had different meanings for different participants. So in many ways the history of higher education is plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But not completely la même chose: What changed was the course of capitalism over the twentieth century, and the emergence of a neoliberal ethos since around 1980, as Shumar (this volume) maps out. The segmentation, commodification, and neoliberalizing processes that affect higher education have come to operate across institutions in globally linked processes. The chapters in this volume present an ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which commodified experiences have constrained the value of classroom education based on academic disciplines. They constitute an auto-ethnographic critique of higher education (Meneley and Young 2005) that examines marketed forms of experience and the reconfiguring of enduring forms of inequality in what seem to be egalitarian entrepreneurial student practices. These chapters also examine the elements of experience through which service-learning becomes commodifiable, the establishment of expertise in administering first-year experience, the professionalization of undergraduate identity through experiences of technical education, and the neoliberal discourses of self-marketing and accountability that sustain the place of experience in the academic marketplace. Interspersed are student reflections on their own neoliberalized experiences. I use the term “neoliberalism” in the sense that the governing social principle is or should be the maximizing of market potential, making any practice or form of knowledge (or, as in this volume, any form of experience) valuable to the extent that it has market value (see, e.g., Harvey 2005; Rossiter 2003). Like the first volume in this Berghahn series (Hyatt, Shear, and Wright 2015), this one proceeds from the assumption that neoliberal principles are variously manifested across higher education, with no single model of a neoliberal university or college. These specifics can most effectively be demonstrated ethnographi-

Introduction ⽧ 3

cally, as Greenhouse (2010) argues. Shear and Hyatt (2015: 5) stress the existence of multiple neoliberalisms and the importance of understanding “neoliberalism as a relatively open signifier that can help us think about governance and social reproduction across scale and space” (7).

The Various Meanings of the Term “College Experience” This volume focuses on the idea of college experience in the United States. This term tends to evoke an iconic notion of four years of liberal arts (nonprofessional, nontechnical) education at an elite university or four-year undergraduate-only college, exemplifying Bourdieu’s (1986 and elsewhere) concept of symbolic capital—in other words, class-based prestige reflecting elite connections (social capital). College imagined as experience can presuppose those elite associations without specifying what they might actually consist of, which means that, in turn, college experience at less-elite institutions can carry a cachet borrowed from more-elite institutions. Thus, referring to college in terms of experience can effectively evoke symbolic capital affiliated with a general notion of college. At the same time, college provides cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986), which includes both learning to conduct oneself in advantageous ways (learning to talk, dress, and otherwise conduct oneself to one’s social advantage) and acquiring specific forms of knowledge convertible to market advantage. Both forms of knowledge can reinforce symbolic capital but lean in somewhat different directions, with the former focused on the projection of class-based personal imagery and the latter on one’s capacity for employment mobility. How can such a notion of college experience be commodified? A contradiction arises here, from the nature of liberal arts education. Historically, the function of elite higher education has been the reproduction of a class system through the unequal redistribution of social and cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). The very nebulousness of liberal arts academic content, organized by disciplinary criteria rarely oriented toward specific applications, has been to not be practical (i.e., vocational) but to graduate someone who exemplifies the institution’s prestige. This makes liberal arts education a tricky item to market in an era in which the content of one’s education is supposed to show return on investment by maximizing employability and future income. So reimagining the experience of liberal arts as somehow practical means rethinking its affiliated cultural capital while keeping the evocation of symbolic capital. One way to do this is to cast the whole notion of a liberal arts experience as a form of cultural capital that gives a mar-

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ketplace edge to the whole person. This can distance the discourse about college experience from institutional inequalities because it can be done at any liberal arts institution, prestigious or not, by emphasizing liberal arts as a curriculum over liberal arts as an elite institution. At the same time, college marketers routinely create website visuals and texts that borrow elements from prestige institutions, such that any undergraduate college or university program, however nonelite, can be marketed in ways that evoke Ivy League images of student life. Nor is commodifying the experience of liberal arts limited to casting the whole as a market edge. Those four undergraduate years can be variously segmented into specific elements, each with a distinct value. Nor is this process limited to liberal arts education, as Posecznick (this volume) shows. Elements of experience in liberal arts or technical education can be shaped to fit patterns of neoliberal self-management, particularly through what Handler (2008) calls paracurricular activities, developed to reside outside and parallel to the regular curriculum. Such activities are designed to demonstrate a specifically neoliberal subjectivity, often by student life professionals and administrators. Service-learning, whereby students engage in college- or universitysponsored extracurricular activities addressing community needs, has become especially paradigmatic of the paracurriculum, but paracurricular principles also structure student research, entrepreneurial activities, and first-year programs. When higher education administrators (and marketers) use the term “experience,” the term’s semantic content (denotata) is secondary to its capacity to connect its user(s) strategically with a particular perspective or set of interests. In such discourse, experience functions as what I have described elsewhere as a strategically deployable shifter or SDS (Urciuoli 2008): a semantically indeterminate term whose primary function is its capacity to align and contrast the user’s perspective—that is, to operate as a shifter, as with terms like “here/there” or “now/then” or “us/them.” This commonly happens in political speech: when terms like “freedom” or “growth” or “security” or “the American people” are used, their semantic vagueness facilitates their capacity to index political alliances. Neoliberal discourse is strongly characterized by SDS usage, much of which has moved from corporate into academic language. Strategically used, the term “experience” can present and justify specific notions about higher education to interlocutors oriented to think of education in terms of return on investment, highlighting elements of education that can be segmented and (up to a point) assessed under regimes of audit (Shore and Wright 2000). In this way it function-

Introduction ⽧ 5

ally parallels another neoliberal SDS, skills. Skills and experience take on complementary value in marketing regimes. Skills, particularly soft skills based on social behaviors (e.g., teamwork, time management), are constituted as nameable entities whose value can be recognized by potential employers. They can be acquired, possessed, and numbered. Experience is about a student’s character, and suggests a sense of moral improvement. Experience provides a way to talk about students “doing good” in the world in ways that increase the goodness of the doers. Despite the continuity between corporate and academic discourse, there are differences in how students and workers are neoliberally imagined. Student experience and worker skills are both subject to audit, but in different ways. Skills are imagined as constitutive features of contemporary workers, segmentable elements (forms of knowledge and social behaviors) that can be named and assessed. There is a flourishing industry in skills assessment that employers are urged to use on their workforce. While college juniors and seniors are routinely urged to visit their career centers for skills audits to list on their résumés and to think of themselves as skills bundles (Urciuoli 2008), they are not yet workers. Student experiences are subject to some degree of audit, as Bodinger and Jacobson (this volume) show, but the difference is largely in the consequences. For workers whose skills assessments come up short, there could be immediate material consequences in terms of limited raises or promotion. There are fewer comparable material consequences for students. Indeed, as Posecznick (this volume) shows, the presentation of skills in student capstone experiences is largely part of a general demonstration of student subjectivity rather than a specific assessment of those skills. To that extent, the presentation of student engineering skills—a type of skill with material consequences for people who depend on them for wages—is a form of experience in that it is a performance of subjectivity. Thus, how skills are commodified depends on whose skills are commodified. Student skills and worker skills are both imagined as things students or workers know or do that make them productive, but where worker skills are themselves the commodities, the products sold to workers or employers to make workers more productive (and thus subject to direct assessment), student skills are part of a larger commodification process. They are part of how an institution presents itself and its students as its product, to what are now routinely termed “stakeholders” (which is another neoliberal SDS), so as to convince parents, trustees, donor organizations, potential employers and students themselves that they are getting a product both viable and worth the price tag. In this way, skills parallel experience. The

6 ⽧ Bonnie Urciuoli

difference is that worker skills are defined in relation to specific jobs; there are no specific jobs against which student skills are defined while students are still students. Experience packaged in undergraduate education also parallels skills in that what count as experiences depend less on their somewhat underspecified content and more on how they can be segmented into somewhat standardized formats and brought into regimes of commodification based on promised outcomes. Especially notable about the formatting and commodification of experience is that discipline-based content is moved away from faculty control into administrative control, thus substantially disconnecting the content of experience from any particular academic disciplines. This allows them to be fungible as well as standardized. Even faculty-supervised activity can be subject to this repackaging. Handler (this volume) describes a shift from a research paper model, integral to a particular course and focused on student engagement with a particular subject as part of learning a discipline, to doing research, focused on the student as a performer of research, with the subject matter secondary and fungible, and perhaps not even integral to coursework (see also Baldrige, this volume). Service-learning, probably the commonest form of experiential learning, covers a wide range of possible engagements that are all equally segmentable into and countable as hours (Bodinger and Jacobson, this volume; and Bergbauer, this volume), entailing bureaucratic structures to maintain and monitor these forms. The packaging criteria reflect an institution’s reputation, the commodity’s intended consumer, and what those consumers perceive as use value. For students, research and experiential learning generally constitute résumé items. Using Bakhtin’s concept of voice (1981), LaDousa (this volume) shows how service-learning and social innovation are differently constituted and packaged as experiential learning. First-year experience might be less targeted to students than to parents who value reassurance that students will be safe, or to donor organizations (at least at liberal arts colleges without real retention problems) who want to be assured that students are being socialized as productive citizens (Urciuoli, this volume).

The Semiotics and Pragmatics of Commodification and Branding Through what processes does experience become packaged as a commodity? Agha (2011) argues that commodities are best understood not

Introduction ⽧ 7

as themselves things with inherent properties, but rather as emergent formulations that things pass in and out of, with the term “thing” including not only physical objects but also various intangible constructions: “From the standpoint of registers, commodities mediate social life not through the “circulation of things” but through the recycling of commodity formulations and their fractions . . . across diverse activity frames that recontextualize and transform them” (Agha 2011: 25). Agha further notes that commodification discourses index social roles and relationships (including voice). This is a central point when we consider which aspects of higher education take on value as commodities: Do those aspects correspond to what Bourdieu (1986) casts as institutional or social affiliations (social capital), associated prestige (symbolic capital), credentials or some form of embodied knowledge or practice (cultural capital), or some combination of the foregoing, all of which are perceived variously by, for example, students, prospective students, alumni, parents, faculty, administrators, trustees, donors, or prospective employers? What count as useful or desirable affiliations, credentials, and knowledge are all contingent, as Agha points out, on their use value, a semiotic property of the discursive conditions in which they are formulated as commodities (a point already touched on). Commodifying higher education represents education through the process of branding, particularly as embodied in its students. Using Peircian (Peirce 1955) terms, Moore (2003: 342–43) breaks the branding process into firstness, the construction of “the sensuous qualities of the brand”; secondness, the identification of “source identifying indexicalities of the brand”; and thirdness, the “ensuring of consistency of the brand’s qualisign characteristics and indexical associations across all channels and media.” As I have noted elsewhere (Urciuoli 2014), this branding process can be seen in the striking use of visual qualities in well-composed campus photography, particularly in the casting of student images in outdoor shots (firstness); linked to the college’s name, location, and other source identifiers (secondness); all carefully monitored for consistency of message (thirdness). Examples can be seen on the home page of any undergraduate institution that has an office of institutional advancement to take the pictures, provide the text, formulate rules for its consistent production, and get all that out to the public. Student experience is worked into the brand in various ways. Images of student life provide a recurring visual backdrop on college websites. Details of student life are a central draw for visiting prospective applicants, though as student tour guides point out, those details sometimes have to be edited for what parents will hear as safe (Urciuoli 2014:

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74–77). Framing those images and details according to the principles and themes covered in this volume reinforces the message that student experience carries neoliberal value. Thus, images of students on college websites stress engagement in productive activities in the classroom, on the sports field, in performance, and doing volunteer work and research presentations, and tour guide descriptions of campus life include such productive opportunities.

How Is Experience Neoliberalized? The neoliberal regimes that order institutions structure the imagining of what it means to be a student or, for that matter, faculty or administrator. Addressing the ways in which neoliberal regimes reconfigure people’s relation to each other, their sense of membership in a public, and the conditions of their self-knowledge, Greenhouse (2010: 2) points out that “neoliberal reform . . . has restructured the most prominent public relationships that constitute belonging: politics, market, works, and self-identity.” Greenwood (2015: 202–3) further notes that the primary goal of current neoliberal policy advocates, as for Taylorists of a century ago, is to create a system maximally rational in the Weberian sense, despite little real evidence that their policies actually produce better education. Neoliberal ideologies also set parameters on how people are supposed to view themselves, a point that Gershon (2011) takes up in her discussion of neoliberal agency, whereby one reflexively manages oneself as a set of useful traits or skills, as if one were a business. The notion of skills is not the only constituting aspect of a neoliberal self: one must also have a brand. In her research on people attending personal branding workshops, Gershon (2016) finds personal brand characterized not as transferable skills, but rather as an authentic quality that keeps a worker consistent across contexts, an authentic and unique quality arrived at, paradoxically, “through standardized and regimented techniques” (229). In so doing, and through use of key words, one signals one’s capacity to be a cohesive and unique self, predictable and stable across contexts, and at the same time able to deploy one’s skills to show needed flexibility. In short, the deployment of skills is running oneself like a business, and the defining personal quality is the brand of that business. Gershon’s concept of personal branding is particularly pertinent to the most explicitly neoliberalized modes of experiential learning, in other words the social innovation programs examined by LaDousa (this volume) in which students are urged to present them-

Introduction ⽧ 9

selves as change-makers. (Not that they are expected to work from any theory of social change; rather, and in accordance with Moore’s principle of thirdness, whatever they present as change should fit an institutional template.) Such neoliberal shaping of how one ideally imagines oneself and others of similar subjectivity also governs one’s relation to the institutions within which one operates. In these ways, student imagery linked to specific institutions can become central to institutional branding. Not only do students and their experiences become part of an institution’s brand, but also students are encouraged to define themselves in ways that function much as worker self-branding should. We thus see the emergence of forms of student interpellation—being “hailed” as a particular kind of subject (Althusser 1971)—in ways that highlight students’ relation to an institution imagined as maximally rational and staffed by meritocratic actors who define themselves in relation to the interests of their institution (Greenwood 2015: 210). One would think that in such a neoliberalized ideal, student experience would be subject to audit logic, and to a point it is, insofar as student experience is packaged and treated as commensurable units. But, as noted earlier, while some aspects of student experience are so packaged and measured, it is not often clear what kinds of outcomes are being sought. When it is clear what kinds of outcomes are sought, and thus possible to see how student performance might fall short of hoped-for outcomes, students face few if any serious consequences. In this sense students are not really the objects of audit. Instead, the presentation of audit seems to be part of the performance of producing studenthood, and the packaging and counting of outcomes part of the branding process. Working students into the brand connects a projection of student subjectivity to a market-friendly image of the school. Whereas students appear to be interpellated as part of the branding process, their subjectivities might not actually be all that appropriated because what matters is transferring the student performance to the appropriate media rather than students actually becoming transformed. Nor, frankly, are students interpellated all that easily (see Cai and Majumdar, and LaViolette, this volume). But performance is labor, and students do perform a lot of identity work for their colleges and universities that is, in effect, appropriated labor. At a historical moment in which students are pressured to plan every move with an eye to return on investment, such interpellation might have a crucial, if hard to measure, effect on student subjectivity. Packaging undergraduate education as individual cultural capital conveys the illusion that student-consumers are in control, masking the inequalities of social and symbolic capital. While all these “experiences”

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are cast as if they provide all students with the same cultural capital, Bourdieu’s fundamentally Marxian principle is still operative: what counts most as cultural capital is the capacity to act in ways that reflect a privileged background (see Khan 2011), in other words that also pack symbolic capital. This resonates with an older model of the “college experience.” Students thus advantaged least require the neoliberal cultural capital that packaged, paracurricular “experience” is designed to offer. There is an inverse correlation between the structural advantages with which students enter undergraduate education and their likely susceptibility to or need for neoliberal interpellation, especially in elite institutions (Urciuoli 2016). Neoliberal regimes depend on social actors taking for granted the principle of (allegedly) rational meritocracy ordering all social institutions while systematic inequities remain cloaked. For students, that means an “experience” of education that slides them as seamlessly as possible into the new work order. Showing how that operates is the point to this volume.

What These Chapters Are About This volume consists of eleven chapters, ordered to show the volume’s connecting threads. The seven chapters by Strong, Handler, Bodinger and Jacobson, LaDousa, Urciuoli, Posecznick, and Shumar analyze neoliberal constructions of undergraduate experience. The four chapters by Bergbauer, Baldrige, Cai and Majumdar, and LaViolette (recent college graduates known to one or another of the first seven authors) were invited as critical reflections on participation in experiential learning. Bergbauer and Baldrige participated in projects mentioned in the chapters by Bodinger and Jacobson, and by LaDousa. Certain themes recur throughout all eleven chapters, including the administrative imposition of commensurateness, the privileging of performance of experience over substance of experience, and the fungible nature of the content of experience, all framed by the volume’s two key principles: the role of experience in higher education, and the relation of higher education to capitalism. The origins of the role of experience in higher education are explored by Pauline Turner Strong in “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age.” Dewey argued that quality education must be grounded in quality experience generating growth and creativity, in turn creating contexts for future learning. When such processes are direct, active, and concrete, students can integrate successive experience into

Introduction ⽧ 11

previous experience, forming a continually modified conceptual frame. But in the face of pressure within and across institutions, as Strong shows in her examination of humanities education courses for adult learners and for first-year students, such an organic process becomes subject to the imposition of achievement metrics based on measurable goals setting up each experience as commensurate with the next, regardless of what the actual program is meant to do. The origins of the relation of higher education to capitalism are explored by Richard Handler in “Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision: Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education.” Handler recounts Veblen’s critique of the rise of “captains of erudition,” demonstrating the centrality of capitalism to the organization and administration of higher education right from the emergence of new academic bureaucracies circa 1900. He shows current marketing developments in higher education growing out of, as Veblen saw it, the bureaucratic management of a mass clientele that Veblen thought likely to undermine the academic enterprise. A recurrent theme in this volume is the structural replacement of faculty expertise with administrative authority, concomitant with expanding nonacademic bureaucratic structures, creating a product that can be marketed by yet more nonacademic bureaucracy. Handler shows this in the movement of student research out of the classroom and into new bureaucratic structures, in which research as integral to learning a discipline is displaced by the act of doing research, with the research content becoming fungible. Major universities have considerable resources at their disposal to set up service projects, and the emphasis on individual student performance of service provision might obscure the structural inequalities generating the conditions that service is designed to address. Or it might not. In “Empathy as Industry: An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania,” Jack LaViolette examines the university’s role in the creation of a poor urban neighborhood—the context in which student tutors pursue the kinds of good works that schools like to display their students doing. LaViolette’s chapter makes clear how much institutional histories (this is but one case) rest on race/class advantage at the same time that volunteer tutoring programs like this shift attention away from those conditions. It also makes clear, as do several other chapters, how little the perception of those served are ever addressed. Themes of commensurateness and fungibility are central to John J. Bodinger and Shari Jacobson’s “Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service.”

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Bodinger and Jacobson examine service-learning as a reverse take on Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion. The reverse lies in the imagining of manual labor, signified as such by its performers getting dirty (planting, painting, cleaning), not as disorder, but rather as the signification of value in service, the reconstitution of order. Voluntarily crossing the dirt line signifies the server’s performance of merit, highlighting the disordered situation of the served and showing what they should be grateful for. This contrast frames the server’s autonomy, moral agency, and individual merit, all elements constituting the role of the neoliberal volunteer service provider who, in getting dirty, puts dirt back into its place. All this is assessed as countable hours that are themselves the outcome. Performance of service is assigned value in increments of hours: the content of service is fungible, nor do the perception of those served or the unequal nature of the serving relations figure into the accounting. Based on her own experience counting hours in one of the servicelearning programs analyzed by Bodinger and Jacobson, Sarah Bergbauer’s “No Good Deed Goes Uncounted: A Reflection on College Volunteerism” demonstrates the fungibility of the accounting process. Bergbauer compares her experience of the same job as a paid employee and as a volunteer, showing how the difference lies in the framing. Volunteer service is framed as self-enriching and transformative, with the role of the server as the bureaucratic focus, making student labor available for appropriation to someone else’s marketing script. The principle of fungibility also features in Chaise LaDousa’s “From Service Learning to Social Innovation: The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning,” which connects the bureaucratized commensurateness imposed on experience to shifting conditions of neoliberal subjectivity. Using Bakhtin’s notion of voice, LaDousa contrasts an older experiential learning model, service-learning, to a newer and explicitly entrepreneurial model, social innovation. Both models presuppose the college as a sphere from which students operate apart from an elsewhere-existing “real world,” and both promise transformations, but the transformations have opposite orientations. Service-learning discourses stress movement away from (bursting) the college “bubble” (as such discourses routinely put it), whereas social innovation discourses stress activity (referred to as “bringing change”) within the bubble. And in both, the content is fungible, the performance format demonstrating the worth of the (service-providing or change-making) experience more than do the specific courses of action. Based on a service-learning project overseen by LaDousa and funded by an internal grant center at her college, Anastassia Baldrige’s “High

Introduction ⽧ 13

Hopes and Low Impact: Obstacles in Student Research” also addresses the institutional marketing value placed on the performance of volunteerism regardless of substance. Working in a literacy program in a nearby city and about to help tutor adults for their General Equivalency Diploma (GED), the volunteers were asked instead to help implement a federally funded digital literacy program in the literacy center’s classrooms and spent several weeks trying to cope with the indeterminacy of the program’s design and audience. None of this detail mattered to the sponsoring grant center, though they did make sure the student poster session was presented as student research on the college website. Orienting student subjectivity is central to the design of experience. In “The Experience Experts,” Bonnie Urciuoli examines the social engineering of student subjectivity in first-year experience (FYE) programs. First emerging around 1970 and financed from available internal budget resources, these programs were designed to build student retention at large public universities. Forty-five years later, they are routinely found in schools without retention problems and with dedicated staffing funded by external donor organizations. Framed by the notion that learning is not confined to classrooms, and beginning with highly structured orientation activities followed by first-year seminars, cocurricular, and extracurricular activities, FYE programs seek to produce an ideal student who embodies productive behaviors, constructive social relations, and a neoliberal subjectivity that can be marketed as an institutional product. But student subjectivity does not always go where it is pointed. In “Moral Entanglements in Service Learning,” Christopher Cai and Usnish Majumdar take up the question of students’ actual responses to neoliberal interpellation. As Cai and Majumdar show from their own service-learning experience, students sometimes face, as these authors put it, “ethically ambiguous entanglements.” However neoliberally framed their actions might appear, are actions with non-neoliberal motives, actions coherent with one’s family’s interests, neoliberal in the same way as actions theorized as those of institutional avatars maintaining an institutional status quo? Another take on student subjectivity, in a very different context, is provided by Alex Posecznick’s “Engineering Success: Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water.” Unlike the previous chapters, this is set in a for-profit technical institute primarily serving demographically underrepresented students training for technical jobs. Posecznick examines its Senior Capstone Project (SCP) experience, a competition among student teams, in which students demonstrate

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their medium-level hard (technical) skills, and perform their soft skills: teamwork, their capacity for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, their investment in their project, and their customer service skills. Such performance of subjectivity in a paracurricular activity—essentially a neoliberal performance of investment in an experience defined by the institution to promote its interests—cuts across liberal arts and technology, and nonprofit and for-profit institutions. And, as Posecznick suggests, the neoliberal logic in higher education generally could well have been inspired by technical education in particular. The final chapter, Wesley Shumar’s “Caught between Commodification and Audit: Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education,” locates the processes addressed in this volume in what Shumar terms the third of three phases of commodification in U.S. higher education. This third phase is characterized by the rise of accountability and audit cultures, by shrinking private state resources, and by the rise of a new neoliberalism manifested by the cannibalizing of existing resources. In this new neoliberalism, all problems are rationalized as technical problems, their solutions measurable as outcomes, with those measurable outcomes folded back into higher education as commodity. Shumar’s arguments outline the context in which student experience becomes commodified. Throughout these chapters, we see Dewey’s insight recast and bureaucratized by concerns foreshadowed by Veblen’s century-old insight about the entanglement of higher education and big business. In that recasting, student reflection is no longer central to experience. The emphasis is on student performance of investment in forms of experience ordered by institutional concerns, structures, and schedules, as described in these chapters. All this undercuts what Dewey valued about experience. What Dewey theorized as an individual and deeply organic process is replaced by standardized performances of subjectivity, valued in terms of their appeal to parents, donors, and employers, while encouraging students to imagine themselves as future workers. Neoliberal regimes might realize themselves in different ways but one critical element remains constant: Do they give students market value?  Bonnie Urciuoli is professor emerita of anthropology at Hamilton College. Her earlier work was on race/class ideologies of Spanish–English bilingualism in the United States and later the discursive production and marketing of diversity and skills in the United States generally and higher education in particular, and on constructions (and marketing) of studenthood in U.S. higher education.

Introduction ⽧ 15

Relevant publications include “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student” in Signs and Society (2014), and “Neoliberal Markedness: The Interpellation of ‘Diverse’ College Students” in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2016).

References Agha, Asif. 2011. “Commodity Registers.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21, no. 1: 22–53. Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. Louis Althusser, 127–86. London: Monthly Review Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barrow, Clyde W. 1990. Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 4: 537–55. ———. 2016. “‘I’m Not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man’: Typing the Neoliberal Self into a Branded Existence.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 3: 223–46. http://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.017. Greenhouse, Carol. 2010. “Introduction.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol Greenhouse, 1–10. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Greenwood, David. 2015. “Afterword.” In Hyatt, Shear, and Wright, Learning Under Neoliberalism, 201–14. Handler, Richard. 2008. “Corporatization and Phantom Innovation in University Marketing Strategies.” Anthropology News 49, no. 1: 6–7. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyatt, Susan Brin, Boone W. Shear, and Susan Wright, eds. 2015. Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Meneley, Anne, and Young, Donna, eds. 2005. Auto-Ethnographies: The Anthropology of Academic Practices. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Moore, Robert. 2003. “From Genericide to Viral Marketing: On ‘Brand.’” Language and Communication 23, no. 3–4: 331–57. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover.

16 ⽧ Bonnie Urciuoli Rossiter, Ned. 2003. “Processual Media Theory.” Symploke 11, no. 1–2: 104–31. Shear, Boone W., and Susan Brin Hyatt. 2015. “Reading Neoliberalism at the University.” In Hyatt, Shear, and Wright, Learning Under Neoliberalism, 103–28. Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2000. “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern, 57–89. London and New York: Routledge. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2: 211–28. ———. 2014. “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircean Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education.” Signs and Society 2, no. 1: 56–83. ———. 2016. “Neoliberalizing Markedness: The Interpellation of “Diverse” College Students.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 3: 201–21.

CHAPTER 1

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age PAULINE TURNER STRONG 

It must never be forgotten that education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays

Experiential education initiatives over the past century are heavily indebted—though often in a general way—to John Dewey’s philosophy of education, as enunciated in his concise Experience and Education ([1938] 1998) as well as a number of other influential works. Interrogating the understanding of experience that underlies today’s experiential education and service-learning programs, as this volume does, is very much in the spirit of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of a “sound philosophy of experience” grounding anything “worthy of the name education” (115–116). This chapter explores the conceptual origins of experiential learning as well as distortions of Dewey’s thought that have occurred over time, particularly in response to neoliberal accountability regimes, which Marilyn Strathern has aptly called audit cultures (Strathern 2000). This chapter is illustrated with examples from my own experiences as a teacher, administrator, and student, although the other contributions to this volume also provide apt illustrations. I argue that today’s experiential and service-learning initiatives would benefit greatly from tying themselves more explicitly to Dewey’s theory of experience, and evaluating their educational outcomes in ways consonant with that theory. Recent scholarship on Dewey makes this possible by offering correctives to misinterpretations of his educational philosophy and comparing his theories of education and experience to those of other influential figures, including Freire, Gadamer, Herbart, and Lyotard.

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Dewey’s Theory of Experience and Education Experience and Education, an example of Dewey’s pragmatic and experimental theory of knowledge, presents the learner’s subjective experience as both “the means and goal of education” (Dewey [1938] 1998: 113). As Dewey explained: “The philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies” (19). Dewey maintained that quality education must be grounded in, and must give rise to, quality experiences, arguing against the traditionalists of his time who would structure and measure education in terms of information transmitted and skills learned—now often called, following Paolo Freire (1970), the banking concept of education. Not all experiences are equally educative, Dewey stressed. An experience, in fact, can be “mis-educative” if it “has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (Dewey [1938] 1998: 13). Dewey offered as examples any experience that engenders callousness, boredom, carelessness, or disintegrated thought. Quality experiences, on the other hand, are those that “live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” and thus contribute to a “continuity of experience” (17) in which curiosity, initiative, freedom, foresight, and judgment are developed, all understood within a social context. As Dewey put it succinctly in another influential text, Democracy and Education, “The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 107). This capacity for growth is understood as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (76). All of this must be understood in a social context for, as Dewey’s adaptation of the Gettysburg Address suggests, he thought of education in our society as necessarily education for active participation in democratic life (Jenlink 2009). Dewey’s theory of education emphasizes that all experience arises from the dialogical interaction of the principle of continuity—let us call it the familiar—with the principle of interaction—let us call it the strange .1 In other words, one’s experience in the present involves the interaction between one’s past experiences—the familiar—and the present situation or problem, in all its contingency, unpredictability, and discontinuity with the past (English 2013). A quality learning experi-

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ence is one that builds on previous experiences and creates a context for more challenging and more complex experiences in the future. As Philip W. Jackson says of Dewey: “When he says that education is a development for experience, he means that the goal of education, its ultimate payoff, is not higher scores on this or that test, nor is it increased feelings of self-esteem or the development of psychological powers of this or that kind, nor is it preparation for a future vocation. Instead, the true goal of education, Dewey wanted us to understand, is none other than richer and fuller experiencing, the ever-expanding capacity to appreciate more fully the living present” (Jackson 1998: 138–139). Education, then, is not primarily a means to an end but an end in itself: “Since growth is the characteristic of life,” Dewey wrote, “education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 58). Or again, “The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education. . . . The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (107). Whether in the form of outdoor programs such as Outward Bound, peace education programs, study abroad programs, or service-learning, contemporary experiential education departs explicitly or implicitly from Dewey’s theory of experience. I use the term “depart” here in two senses: experiential education takes Dewey’s emphasis on experience as its point of departure, but at the same time its contemporary forms often entail a significant departure from the spirit of Dewey’s philosophy. Insofar as experiential education is an outgrowth of Dewey’s pragmatic theory of experience (Garrison and Neiman 2003), it emphasizes a student’s active experience and experimentation, coupled with reflection (English 2013) and personal transformation. As Fairfield (2009: 8) puts it, Dewey understood the learning process in terms of “the gradual formation and transformation of the self,” all within a cycle of learning in which new experiences are integrated with familiar experiences in order to form a new conceptual framework that is, in turn, transformed as students encounter unfamiliar experiences. (Fairfield usefully compares this cycle to Gadamer’s hermeneutics.)2 The role of a teacher in this model of learning is to facilitate a salutary, open-ended progression of experiences and to guide the student in reflecting on experience. To the extent that this process is rationalized into predictable, measurable bits of learning, however, contemporary experiential education is a dramatic departure from Dewey’s ideas, because Dewey’s notion of experiential learning was highly individualized, depending as much on the familiar, idiosyncratic structure of experience that the student brings to learning as on the new, challenging experiences that the student encounters.

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In other words, just as Dewey’s educational theories were in tension with the traditional education of his day, there is a clear tension between Dewey’s concept of learning “of, by and for experience” and many contemporary neoliberal applications of experiential education. Those of us engaged in humanities education today often find ourselves thinking and acting experientially when devising and teaching programs of study, but forced to assess learning in terms of what Lyotard calls “the mercantilization of knowledge” (Lyotard 1984: 51). In mercantile accountability regimes, as a recent review put it, “The new theoretical emphases are on statistics and the countable, on observation and testing, on the useful and on ‘what works.’ Its new watchwords are skills, competences and techniques, flexibility, independence, targets and performance indicators, qualifications and credentials, learning outcomes” (Blake et al. 2002b: 8). Apart from usefulness, flexibility and independence (which Dewey understood in quite expansive ways), these neoliberal watchwords are far from Dewey’s philosophy of learning. Pragmatism is grossly misunderstood when it is reduced to discrete skills and immediate, measurable outcomes; for Dewey, the desired outcomes of quality educational experiences are those that result in the transformation and growth of the experiencing self. The implications for evaluating and defending experiential education programs are profound: discrete, short-term measures are highly inadequate ways to gauge the long-term growth of the experiencing self. At the same time, Dewey’s philosophy of experience points toward more satisfactory approaches to evaluation, particularly in the emphasis on the values of usefulness, flexibility, independence, and reflection that are found in both Dewey’s philosophy and in contemporary accountability regimes (Shore and Wright 2000). With respect to reflection, we should turn also to Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic experience. In Art as Experience Dewey developed the idea that aesthetic experience is a particularly “full and intense” kind of experience, one that “keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form” (1934: 138). As intensified experience, art has the power “to perfect the power to perceive” (338) and to offer a “community of experience” (109). Connecting his theory of art to his theory of experience, Dewey wrote, “It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience” (196–7). It follows that aesthetic experience is particularly valuable in developing the capacity for growth.

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In the following pages I briefly discuss two educational experiments in which I have been involved—the Free Minds Project for adult learners and the Difficult Dialogues seminars and forums for traditional freshmen—in order to suggest that Dewey’s concept of quality educational experiences points toward modes of designing and evaluating experiential educational initiatives that are far more consonant with humanistic understandings of socialization, enculturation, and agency than are the measurable outcomes and performance indicators of the neoliberal age. Just as Dewey resisted the mechanistic, objectivizing, and homogenizing tendencies of his own time, today’s proponents of experiential education should resist those tendencies in our time through developing and defending narrative and ethnographic forms of evaluation that do justice to the transformative effects of quality educational experiences.

Experiment 1: The Free Minds Project I have been involved in developing and teaching in the Difficult Dialogues and Free Minds programs through my role as the director of the University of Texas Humanities Institute. The Free Minds Project offers adults who have faced barriers to beginning or completing a college degree the opportunity to reflect on their experiences and explore their intellectual potential through participating in a free, multidisciplinary humanities course that is taught in a community setting two evenings a week over the course of an academic year. A partnership between a research university, a community college, and a nonprofit organization (now the primary sponsor), the Free Minds Project brings together educational and social service organizations to help adults build more reflective and more fulfilling lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. The Free Minds Project is based on Bard College’s Clemente Course in the Humanities, an initiative founded by the late sociologist Earl Shorris and recognized in 2014 with a National Humanities Medal (Cheney and Newell 2016; National Endowment for the Humanities 2014; Shorris 1997, 2000, 2013). Clemente courses bring a multidisciplinary humanities curriculum to adults living in underserved neighborhoods and in prisons, aiming to provide a space for intellectual development and critical reflection that are typically absent in these environments. Whereas most educational efforts for such populations aim to build skills directly transferable to the workplace (if they exist at all), Clemente courses seek to transform students’ experience through stepping

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back and considering the works of such canonical authors as Plato, Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, and Sandra Cisneros. These programs, the Free Minds Project included, also offer some of the social support necessary for nontraditional students to succeed, such as child care, access to social workers, and a supportive intellectual community. Clemente courses honor the experiential knowledge that adults bring to the classroom, transforming that knowledge through opportunities for critical reflection, creative writing, and engagement with a range of classical humanities texts. A Free Minds classroom typically consists of twenty to twenty-five students, most of African American and Latino backgrounds, each of whom has a low to moderate income. Students have included minimum wage workers, government employees, veterans, first-generation Americans, retirees, the formerly homeless or incarcerated or addicted, and many single mothers. Some of these students have never set foot in a college classroom before; others have tried but not been able to achieve success in college. Some are prevented from enrolling in traditional college courses because of debt accrued during previous enrollments (Griffith 2016). Now in its twelfth year in Austin, Texas, Free Minds reports a strong record of success in developing adult learners’ continued capacity for growth. The program’s graduates have gone on to earn associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, to receive promotions, and to become more active participants in their children’s education. A 2010 survey of Free Minds graduates found that 77 percent had enrolled in other college classes, 83 percent used skills gained in the Free Minds classroom in the workplace, and 90 percent believed the program had a positive impact on their children (Foundation Communities 2018). Several graduates sit on nonprofit boards in the community, including the advisory board of the Free Minds Project. Many alumni stay involved with Free Minds, which offers them monthly workshops and mentoring opportunities. Nevertheless, as an anthropology and American history professor in the Free Minds Project, I have found that such measurable outcomes pale in comparison to the less quantifiable impact of the program on students’ lives. Among the Free Minds Project’s measurable goals are to improve critical thinking skills in 75 percent of students, as measured by pre- and post-class surveys and faculty evaluation in one-on-one conferences; to improve written communication skills in 75 percent of students, as measured by writing rubrics; to improve self-confidence and self-efficacy in 75 percent of students, as measured by pre- and postclass surveys; and to inspire continued college enrollment of 60 percent

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education ⽧ 23

of students within two years of completing the program, as measured by alumni impact surveys and college and university records. The foundations and institutions that support Free Minds require these kinds of measures, good examples of the new accountabilities that Strathern (2000), Shore (2008), Wright (Shore and Wright 2000), Lampland and Starr (2008), and others have analyzed. As is the case for many quantifying practices, the focus on measurable outcomes threatens to have a distorting effect on the program. Most importantly, this focus makes most visible an aspect of the program that is not necessarily central to the mission of Free Minds: starting students on a path toward graduation from college. While continued enrollment in college and, ultimately, graduation is an ultimate goal for some students who enroll in Free Minds, many students—and the program—consider enhancing students’ subjective experience of themselves and their world as a worthy goal in itself. Moments of learning in class—such as when a student ties his own experience as a learner to that of Frederick Douglass, or writes and recites her own “This I Believe” essay (Allison and Gediman 2006)—and moments of application outside of class—such as when a student feels inspired to take her family to a theater performance or an art museum—are better understood through a qualitative analysis of experiential learning than through the metrics of audit culture. Some Free Minds students complete a college degree, but even if they do not they leave Free Minds experiencing themselves as lifetime learners. If, as John Dewey believed, “the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 107), there are many ways in which Free Minds students can continue to enlarge their capacity for growth, only one of which is inside a college classroom. Indeed, given Dewey’s emphasis in Democracy and Education on the importance of education for citizenship in a democratic society, we might argue that the participation of Free Minds’ alumni in a neighborhood association, a union, a social movement, or the Parent–Teacher Association could be an even more important indicator of the importance of Free Minds in creating a capacity for growth than college enrollment or completion. Furthermore, a continued capacity for growth can be enacted only over the long term: How do Free Minds alumni exhibit an increased capacity for growth over the course of their lifetimes, and over the lifetimes of their children? How does this continued capacity for growth affect the families and communities of alumni? Answering these questions adequately requires narrative accounts or ethnographies, not short-term quantitative measures. To quote Dewey again, “moral equality”—the primary concern of a democratic community—“means

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incommensurability, the inapplicability of common and quantitative standards” (Dewey [1922] 1983: 299). At a time when humanities scholars are fighting for an appreciation of the importance of humanities education for a functioning democratic society, the Free Minds Project demonstrates how exploring and creatively responding to texts in philosophy, history, literature, and art history provide adults with transformative experiences necessary for thoughtful, active citizenship.

Experiment 2: Difficult Dialogues Seminars and Forums John Dewey’s philosophy of experience also helps me reflect on a second interdisciplinary educational initiative that I have been deeply involved in, the Difficult Dialogues program for undergraduates. Established in 2006 as a result of a call from the Ford Foundation for initiatives designed to address threats to diversity and academic freedom on U.S. campuses (Wechsler et al. 2012), the University of Texas’s Difficult Dialogues courses now form part of the university’s core curriculum for first-year students. The Humanities Institute sponsors teacher workshops intended to help faculty design and teach discussion-based courses on controversial issues; to date, these courses have involved race, gender, sexuality, religious and cultural differences, immigration, business ethics, cultural property, human rights, HIV–AIDS, and death. We also sponsor a public forum once a semester on a controversial topic such as sex education, immigration, climate change, or the Israel/Palestine conflict, inviting a panel of faculty and community experts to discuss their views. Crucially, the panel is followed by roundtable discussions among students, faculty, community members, and the members of the panel. The experiences that we cultivate in Difficult Dialogues seminars and forums include deep listening and nonjudgmental explorations of similarities and differences. We provide faculty and students with a variety of resources drawn from projects such as the Harvard Negotiation Project (Stone, Patton, and Heen 2010), the Public Conversations Project (Herzig and Chasin 2006), the Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan (Gurin, Nagda, and Zúñiga 2013; Maxwell, Nagda, and Thompson 2011), and our sister Difficult Dialogues program at the University of Alaska (Merculieff and Roderick 2013; Roderick 2008). We also offer workshops that help faculty and teaching assistants engage productively in difficult classroom conversations. Constructive dialogue across difference is challenging for all of us, and an excellent example of forms of learning that involve continued capacity for growth. Because this program offers credit-bearing courses,

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we have to assess student and faculty performance; however, we know that the ability of students to carry on learning conversations (Stone, Patton, and Heen 2010) in the classroom is only an initial indication of how well they will be able to transfer and build on their skills in the dorm room, at the Thanksgiving table, in a diverse workplace, or in today’s polarized political environment. In Fall 2016, the collective experience of discussing Michelle Alexander (2010) on mass incarceration, Mathew Desmond (2016) on eviction, Seth Holmes (2013) on immigration, and comedian Mike Daisey’s performance piece, “The Story of a Gun” (in the midst of a heated debate over concealed weapons on campus) stood us in good stead as we considered the results of a presidential election that evoked emotions in class ranging from the celebratory to the apathetic to the distraught. Our practice in analyzing the “What’s Happening Conversation,” the “Feelings Conversation,” and the “Identity Conversation” (Stone, Patton, and Heen 2010) helped us have a productive conversation across differences on the day of the election. This constructive experience radiated out from our classroom, inspiring a student government–led initiative for a sticky-note “therapy wall” modeled on artist Matthew “Levee” Chavez’s interactive Subway Therapy installation in New York (McClurg 2016; Schmidt 2016). The Humanities Institute also works to engage the general public in discussions of controversial issues. This effort includes our Difficult Dialogues public forums, but goes back to Citizenship Potlucks, which we organized together with the late performing artist Sekou Sundiata in order to discuss the meaning of citizenship after September 1, 2001 (Ellison 2012). Held in various public and religious spaces, these potlucks brought together members of the community to discuss the various meanings that citizenship and noncitizenship have in our community. We also collaborate with the Austin Public Library on a Controversy and Conversation documentary film series that invites the public to a screening and discussion of a documentary film on a social issue. These initiatives aim to create quality educational experiences for people not actively engaged with an educational community. Like the Difficult Dialogues program, our public initiatives are venues in which participants are encouraged to enter into challenging interactions that encourage growth, community building, and active democratic citizenship.

Reflections Education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk, Whitehead reminds us in The Aims of Education and Other Essays ([1929] 1967:

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33). Whitehead, of course, was speaking metaphorically, but it is worth reminding ourselves that packing articles in an actual trunk can be the first step toward extraordinary educational experiences. Speaking of my own education simply because I know it best, I can say without a doubt that some of the most memorable and transformative experiences in my own education have involved travel. For example, in high school I had the opportunity to participate in a homestay on the Navajo Nation as part of the senior seminar at Denver East High School, an extraordinary semester-long experiment in experiential education for urban public high school students (Nold 1973). This inspired a lifelong interest in Native American cultures. In the same senior seminar, I participated in a service-learning project that involved building a playground for Chicano children on Denver’s west side. This, together with travel as a college student to the Rio Grande Valley to learn about the Chicano movement there, challenged me to think about what place I, as a white woman, might have in a social movement led by people of color. Inspired by an Outward Bound component of the senior seminar, I traveled as a college student to the Boundary Waters on the Canada–United States border in order to participate in an Outward Bound canoeing program; even today, when I face a particularly challenging experience, I remember that I made it through the leech-filled Poobah Swamp. I have experienced countless other quality educational experiences, including in the seminar room, the performance hall, and the museum. But in reflecting on the experiences that have most profoundly shaped me, I would say that all involve stepping outside of the familiar, the comfortable, the recognizable. Most involve interacting with people who challenge my sense of self, enlarge my sense of community, and inspire some form of civic engagement. And all involve reflection over the long term—indeed, over the course of a lifetime. This, of course, poses a conundrum for those seeking to assess the impact of experiential education programs on students. How do we capture the often diffuse, always cumulative effect of educational experiences on the experiencing self? How do we trace the resonance that educational experiences have within a community? How do we demonstrate the impact that quality educational experiences can have on democracy itself? The reflective essay is one widely employed answer to this question, but we must remind ourselves that productive reflection on experience extends far beyond a semester or even a degree program. Quality education experiences continue to influence the experiencing self throughout a lifetime, and reflections on a lifetime of such experiences are necessary to truly gauge the impact they have on future growth.

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education ⽧ 27

As one experiencing self profoundly influenced by experiential education initiatives, I can see in retrospect that quality experiential education programs early on led me to seek out similar experiences in each educational setting I entered. My encounters with experiential education also meant that Dewey’s theory spoke to me when, as a college senior, I read his work. I decided to write my honors thesis on his philosophy of education, intending to pursue a career in outdoor education. Anthropology turned out to have a stronger pull, but decades later Dewey’s philosophy of education continues to speak to me, as I find myself directing humanities programs that aim to engage a broad public in reflective, community-building experiences. Understanding Dewey’s pragmatism in all the ways it exceeds a simple instrumentalism can help educational leaders develop quality educational experiences that do justice to human complexity as well as to the complexity of the social, political, and environmental challenges that face us. Understanding Dewey can also inspire us to document the impact of quality educational experiences in narrative forms that will do justice to the transformative effect of those experiences on the experiencing self and the communities that self helps to shape. The student writing in this volume exemplifies the promise of narrative forms of documenting and reflecting critically on educational transformation (often involving unintended consequences). While I do not offer such a narrative here, I can imagine its contours. My narrative would explore how different a homestay on the Navajo Nation was for me, a white high school student, and my black classmates; how my experience in the Boundary Waters was influenced by the sexism and prurience of my male peers; and how service learning in Chicano organizations in Denver, Colorado, and Crystal City, Texas, was impacted by my cultural and linguistic limitations (and by those of most of my fellow students). It would also explore how little cultural knowledge my peers and I brought into each of these situations, and what a burden that undoubtedly imposed on our hosts. (For example, I wish I had known better than to take a needlepointed pillow depicting an owl as a house gift to a Navajo family, given the Navajo association of owls with death.) Reflecting on what an adequate narrative of my own experiential learning would entail helps me see more clearly what I would like to ask of my students, of the programs I direct, and of all who engage in experiential education. Let us seek to make reflective essays the beginning of a lifetime practice of reflection that enhances the continuity of experiential learning. Let us regularly incorporate aesthetic experiences to encourage students to creatively consolidate their

28 ⽧ Pauline Turner Strong

learning. And let us work to ensure that experiential education programs are themselves evaluated through extended narratives and aesthetic practices in addition to the inevitable quantitative assessments. John Dewey gives us the logic we need to defend such practices as the most appropriate and generative way of developing quality educational experiences.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Bonnie Urciuoli for her encouragement, patience, and organizational efforts, without which this chapter would not have been written. This chapter brings me back to ideas that I first encountered as an undergraduate in Jane Cauvel’s outstanding Philosophy of Education class at Colorado College. The experience of working with Janis Bergman-Carton, Melissa Biggs, Evan Carton, Matthew Daude Laurents, Sylvia Gale, Pat Garcia, Vive Griffith, Kelly Maxwell, Amelia Pace-Borah, Libby Roderick, Doris Sommer, Roger Worthington, and other colleagues have influenced my thinking about experiential education and public humanities. I am indebted to Paul Fairfield (2009: 36) for bringing my attention to this chapter’s epigraph.  Pauline Turner Strong is professor of anthropology and gender studies, and director of the Humanities Institute, at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Routledge, 2012) and Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Routledge, 2000), she is currently working on how youth organizations have shaped North American cultural citizenship since 1910.

Notes 1. The “strange versus familiar” framing is inspired by the theme of the 2015 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. For a discussion of the roots of this common trope (making the familiar strange and the strange familiar) in Coleridge and T. S. Eliot, see Spiro (1990). More pertinent to this chapter, Myers (2011) traces the trope through Dewey’s fellow pragmatist William James, who wrote in “Some Problems of Philosophy” that philosophy “sees the familiar as if it were strange and the strange as if it were familiar” (James quoted in Wilshire 1984: 2).

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education ⽧ 29 2. For the relationship between Dewey and continental philosophy, see also English (2013) and Sommer and Strong (2016).

References Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. Allison, Jay, and Gediman, Dan. 2006. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. New York: Henry Holt. Blake, Nigel, Paul Smeyers, Richard D. Smith, and Paul Standish, eds. 2002a. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002b. “Introduction.” In Blake et al., Blackwell Guide, 1–18. Cheney, Jean, and L. Jackson Newell, eds. 2016. Hope, Heart, and the Humanities: How a Free College Course Is Changing Lives. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City. New York: New York: Crown Publishers. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. ———. (1916) 1980. Democracy and Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. (1922) 1983. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. (1938) 1998. Experience and Education: The 60th Anniversary Edition. Grant E. Mabie, project editor. West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi. Ellison, Julie. 2012. “Lyric Citizenship in Post-9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st Dream State.” In Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, 91–114. New York: Columbia University Press. English, Andrea R. 2013. Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fairfield, Paul. 2009. Education After Dewey. London and New York: Continuum. Foundation Communities. 2018. Free Minds: A Program of Foundation Communities: Impact. https://freemindsaustin.org/impact/. Freire, Paolo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder. Garrison, Jim, and Alven Neiman. 2002. “Pragmatism and Education.” In Blake et al., Blackwell Guide, 21–37. Griffith, Vive. 2016. “How Colleges and the Government Deny Poor Students a Second Chance.” Washington Post, August 19. Gurin, Patricia, Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda, and Ximena Zúñiga. 2013. Dialogue Across Difference: Practice, Theory, and Research on Intergroup Dialogue. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Herzig, Maggie, and Laura Chasin. 2006. “Fostering Dialogue Across Divides: A Nuts and Bolts Guide from the Public Conversations Project.” Watertown, MA: Public Conversations Project. http://www.publicconversations.org/resource/

30 ⽧ Pauline Turner Strong fostering-dialogue-across-divides-nuts-and-bolts-guide-public-conversationsproject. Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, Philip W. 1998. “Dewey’s Experience and Education Revisited.” In Dewey, Experience and Education: The 60th Anniversary Edition, 131–149. Jenlink, Patrick, ed. 2009. Dewey’s Democracy and Education Revisited: Contemporary Discourses for Democratic Education and Leadership. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education. Lampland, Martha, and Susan Leigh Starr, eds. 2008. Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maxwell, Kelly E., Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda, and Monita C. Thompson, eds. 2011. Facilitating Intergroup Dialogues: Bridging Differences, Catalyzing Change. Sterling, VA: Stylus. McClurg, Jocelyn. 2016. “‘Subway Therapy,’ Wall That Became a New York Phenom, to Be a Book.” USA Today, December 22. Merculieff, Ilaurion (Larry), and Libby Roderick. 2013. Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education. Anchorage: University of Alaska. http://www.difficultdialoguesuaa.org/index .php/handbook/landing. Myers, Robert. 2011. “The Familiar Strange and the Strange Familiar in Anthropology and Beyond.” General Anthropology 18, no. 2: 1, 7–9. National Endowment for the Humanities. 2014. “Awards and Honors: 2014 National Humanities Medalist: The Clemente Course in the Humanities.” National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC. https://www.neh.gov/about/ awards/national-humanities-medals/the-clemente-course-in-the-humanities. Nold, Joseph J. 1973. “Outward Bound Approaches to Alternative Schooling. A Preliminary Paper.” Colorado Outward Bound School, Denver. https://archive .org/stream/ERIC_ED087658/ERIC_ED087658_djvu.txt. Roderick, Libby, ed. 2008. Start Talking: A Handbook for Engaging Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education. Anchorage: University of Alaska and Alaska Pacific University. http://www.difficultdialoguesuaa.org/index.php/handbook/ landing. Schmidt, Samantha. 2016. “Post-election ‘Subway Therapy’ Sticky Notes Taken Down—but Not Thrown Out.” Washington Post. December 19, 2016. Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3: 278–98. Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2000. “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Strathern, Audit Cultures, 57–89. Shorris, Earl. 1997. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: II. As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor.” Harper’s Magazine (September): 50–59.

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education ⽧ 31 ———. 2000. Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2013. The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor. New York: W. W. Norton. Sommer, Doris, and Pauline Strong. 2016. “From Practicing to Theorizing in the Humanities.” In Publics for the Humanities, special issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 85, no. 4: 67–81. Spiro, Melbourne. 1990. “On the Strange and Familiar in Recent Anthropological Thought.” In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, ed. J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt, 47–61. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Douglas, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. 2010. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. New York: Penguin Books. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. New York: Routledge. Wechsler, Harold S., Hilda Gravelle-Hernandez, Robert M. O’Neill, and Garret S. Batten. 2012. Pluralism and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned from the Difficult Dialogues Initiative. Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1967. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press. Wilshire, Bruce W. 1984. William James: The Essential Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 2

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education RICHARD HANDLER 

Human culture in all ages presents too many imbecile usages and principles of conduct to let anyone overlook the fact that disserviceable institutions easily arise and continue to hold their place in spite of the disapproval of native common sense. Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship

I trust we can be critical of the current situation in higher education without also romanticizing the college experience of our youth. For, as we learn from Thorstein Veblen (1918), since the rise of the research university in the United States, in the late nineteenth century, there has never been a time when the interests of a capitalist economy did not decisively inflect the university’s mission (cf. Kerr 1993: 55–67). People of my age (baby boomers) did not go to college during some golden era. Still, at the present moment, all that is solid about a liberal arts education does indeed seem to be melting into air. As Bonnie Urciuoli explains in the introduction to this volume, “Once upon a time, the U.S. college experience was simply what one experienced going to college, . . . but in contemporary higher education, the idea of experience has also become a property of specifically defined and administratively structured activities that students do.” She goes on to note that, on the one hand, classroom work has been rationalized as the teaching of skills, and that, on the other hand, outside-the-classroom experiences have been “assigned value comparable and complementary to academics.” Indeed, as Urciuoli observes, “ancillary industries have arisen to manage” and market these experiences. The present chapter will tease apart this configuration as it pertains to undergraduate research—with a detour through Thorstein Veblen.

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision ⽧ 33

Veblen was a passionate defender of the university as the seat of what he called idle curiosity, by which he meant the human proclivity to pursue knowledge for no sake other than knowledge itself. Writing a century ago, he already saw other values, those of the business world, overrunning the university and displacing its primary commitment to knowledge for the sake of knowledge with a lust for knowledge directed to the solving of economic and social problems. In the present chapter I explore the implications of this displacement as it is expressed in the contemporary vogue for undergraduate research among students, administrators, trustees, parents and donors. Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America—which Veblen scholar Stephen Edgell calls “one of the great unread books of modern social science” (Edgell 2001: 20)—was written in 1904 but not published until 1918. Written during an earlier Gilded Age, the book described the struggle within the U.S. university system between disinterested science (stemming from idle curiosity) and pecuniary motivations that, Veblen thought, had no place there. Veblen’s biting critiques of, as he put it, “captains of erudition” (university presidents and boards of trustees) who imitated “captains of industry” as they tried to remake the university along the lines of capitalist culture seems presciently apt to describe the present moment. But this alignment of university and business interests was new in 1904, when universities were creating bureaucratic structures and routines that long since have become invisible to us, or at least beyond or beneath critical notice. Veblen saw them as they were taking shape (Vidich 1994: 640); through his eyes we can see some of the implications of the distinction we are making, in the chapters in this book, between the curricular and the extra- or paracurricular. The fact that undergraduate research is moving beyond the curriculum that faculty control is cause for critical anxiety, but it can also prompt us to ask about the relationship of our own research to idle curiosity, science, and undergraduate pedagogy.

“Doing Research” When I was an undergraduate, 1968–72, research for undergraduates meant writing a research paper (which was often, also, a term paper that would be the main, and sometimes sole, basis for the determination of a student’s grade in a semester-long course). A research paper, by definition in those days, required a student to go to the library to find and read the secondary literature on a topic chosen by the student and approved by the professor. The topic had to be related to the

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subject matter of the course, and the exercise was designed to have students learn something about research in the humanities and social sciences, both by reading what professional researchers wrote on the chosen topic, by comparing those sources, and by writing an assessment of them. A particularly dedicated student occasionally produced something a professor thought could be worked up for publication in a professional journal, but publication was not the aim of the exercise. Rather, its primary aims were pedagogical, involving depth, focus, and initiative on the part of undergraduate students, or reading and writing beyond, but in relation to, the course syllabus. It was not even meant to be an apprentice experience. Professors knew that most students would not be going to graduate school, and they had no vested interest in asserting that their undergraduates were working on a graduate level. The term “research paper” has fallen out of the vocabulary of today’s undergraduate curriculum, at least at my institution. Instead, we speak of the opportunities our university creates for undergraduates to “do” or to “get involved with” research. In these phrases, what is emphasized is the student as an actor, an agent, a person who is doing something. After all, the word “research” can stand alone as both a noun and a verb. But in neoliberal liberal arts discourses, especially those that are promotional and aimed at parents and donors, we do not say that a student is researching, say, income disparities among unionized workers; rather, we say he is doing research on such-and-such a topic, the academic particulars of which are less relevant than the portrayal of the student as an active learner. Similarly, when we are pitching our institutions to prospective undergraduate students, we say they will have the opportunity to do research, a promise that makes clear the utterly secondary importance of the topic of study. The institutionalization of the new ethos of undergraduate research occurred at my university at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I am chagrined to admit that I occupied a central administrative role at that time (as dean of the undergraduate college from 2000 to 2010) and signed off on the creation of a new office to support paracurricular efforts, including undergraduate research, without quite realizing the implications of what we were doing. From our perspective in the trenches, our office was finding it more and more difficult to orchestrate the work required by competition for national and local fellowships and grants— work generated increasingly on both the demand side and supply side. Not only were students becoming more alert to these opportunities, but also donors were creating new programs. Even as late as the late twentieth century, grooming students for such opportunities had been the

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision ⽧ 35

work of individual faculty members and departments. By the turn of the millennium, that system was no longer adequate to meet the growing demand. And beyond the college, the university’s central administration was becoming more interested in prompting students in all of the university’s undergraduate schools to engage in research and compete for national awards. Thus we created the Center for Undergraduate Excellence (CUE). Bill Readings has argued that the word “excellence” “is like the cash nexus in that it has no content” (Readings 1996: 13). No one can be against excellence, and no one can define it in the abstract. As Readings remarks, “An excellent boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane. So to say that excellence is a criterion is to say absolutely nothing” (24). In particular, the term cannot tell us why the university aggregated oversight of (1) undergraduate research and (2) fellowship competitions together in one office, the CUE. While it might be true that research experience makes an undergraduate student a stronger candidate for a competitive fellowship, many programs (such as the Rhodes or Marshall Scholarships) are more interested in such qualities as “leadership” and “citizenship” than in scholarly excellence narrowly defined. The establishment of CUE was, then, not an attempt to group together programs that had similar curricular content. Instead, it was a response to administrative strain in the face of a proliferation of competitive opportunities for undergraduates that required faculty support and backing, at a time when (1) faculty had less and less time to help with the bureaucratic routines the competitions required and (2) students were becoming ever more avaricious for extracurricular experiences that demonstrated their excellence. The establishment of CUE, staffed not with full-time faculty members but with low-level administrators, might have seemed at the time to be a blessing for overburdened faculty, but we did not pay sufficient critical attention to the fact that it cut faculty out of the process of evaluating undergraduate excellence—and placed control of the process in the hands of low-level administrators. A comparison to an older award, election to Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), an honor society founded in 1776, is instructive. PBK celebrates liberal arts education; it cannot, therefore, be pan-university, since graduates of professional schools (engineering, nursing, education, etc.) are not eligible for it. Control of the organization, and of the process of electing students to the society, remains with college faculty. At my university a faculty committee, following guidelines established by the national organization, reviews the transcripts of all students in the top 12 percent of the graduating college class. Those whom the committee deems to

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have pursued a challenging curriculum that has both breadth and depth are offered membership. A challenging curriculum is defined in terms of credit hours (students who take light loads—having accumulated significant numbers of credit hours through high school advanced placement courses—are disqualified) and increasingly difficult course work (students taking introductory courses in the fourth year are disqualified). Breadth means coursework across the liberal arts (in particular, it means that students focused on sciences must also have taken courses in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, with similar strictures for students in each of those areas) and depth means coursework of increasing difficulty in the student’s major area of intellectual interest. At a research university such as mine, there are many faculty members who were elected to PBK as undergraduates, but few who are willing to participate in the organization as stewards, to keep it going, particularly in the time-consuming and time-pressured work of electing new members. Among those of us who have done such work, there is a sense that we are keeping alive a venerable organization in the liberal arts tradition we value. A crucial structural detail is that students do not apply for the honor; indeed, many of them have never heard of PBK (and when elected, they sometimes ask their faculty advisor whether it is an honor worth accepting, or a scam designed to extract membership fees). Thus PBK quaintly remains immune to the trend to objectify and commoditize the student experience as a bundle of paracurricular accomplishments that students have taken the initiative to acquire. It remains under faculty control. Whether it has enough cultural capital to survive, to avoid sinking into complete irrelevancy, is impossible to predict. The contest between faculty stewardship of intellectual standards, on the one hand, and student desire and administrative control, on the other, is hardly a new story in higher education in the United States. It could be that we are living in a particularly discouraging (from the point of view of liberal arts faculty) period, in which the values of the marketplace seem to be running roughshod over those of intellectual inquiry. But we should remember that ours is a second Gilded Age. And in the first Gilded Age, more than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen wrote a seminal analysis of this contest, the conceptual clarity of which can help us in evaluating the current state of play.

Idle Curiosity: Veblen’s Vision of Higher Learning We can start by contextualizing Veblen’s notion of idle curiosity within his remarkable (and explicitly antiracialist) use of the socioevolution-

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision ⽧ 37

ary discourse of his time for anthropologically relativistic critique. Veblen posited a few fundamental human instincts or bents as the driving forces of history (Ayres 1958; Shannon 1996). According to Veblen (1914: 25–27, 85–89) those that were beneficial to the common good were “the parental bent” (1914: 25), “idle curiosity” (1918: 5), and “the instinct of workmanship” (1918: 5)—Veblen’s trinity, as they have been called (Watkins 1958: 253). Those that were opposed to the common good he described with such terms as “pugnacity, self-aggrandizement and fear” (Veblen 1914: 43), which lead to social systems based on “predatory exploit” (42) and “pecuniary emulation” (Veblen [1899] 1934: 22). Such terms are quite general, and not much different from those that social scientists continue to use—the anthropologist’s understanding of culture, for example, as linked to a basic human need for meaning is not very different from idle curiosity, just as the psychologist’s understanding of aggression is not very different from pugnacity. But in Veblen this terminology of basic bents is more than a repetition of Western psychosocial platitudes; instead, he used terms like “idle curiosity,” the “instinct of workmanship,” and “pecuniary emulation” to develop critical distance from his own society. Indeed, we can read Veblen’s book on the higher learning as we might read such latter-day social critics as Jules Henry and Erving Goffman.1 It is anthropology “repatriated,” “anthropology as cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 5, 113) anthropology that mobilizes knowledge from other places and times (and from the anthropologist’s imagination) to facilitate a relativistic stance toward the social world where anthropology is institutionally located. In a critical tradition that went back at least to Rousseau (1755 [1973]), Veblen saw invidious social distinctions, the outgrowth of the self-aggrandizing instincts, as the root of all evil. And, like Rousseau, Veblen thought that invidious social distinctions became dangerous only once private property had come into being. Once wealth, congealed as private property, became available to be used not for the common good but to signify and support invidious social distinctions, unending mischief ensued. These processes were explained in Veblen’s first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class ([1899] 1934), in which he explicated what became his most famous concept, conspicuous consumption. Arguing against the classical economists who saw demand and consumption as functions of utility (people demand and consume what they need), Veblen asserted, “The motive that lies at the root of ownership is emulation. . . . The possession of wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally cogent can be said for the

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consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to acquisition” (25–26). In other words, once people had advanced beyond the stage of a subsistence economy, they produced and consumed wealth not to satisfy needs (whether biologically or culturally derived) but to create and maintain social domination based on invidious distinctions. Standing against the destructive bents of pugnacity and self-aggrandizement were the positive ones, idle curiosity among them. Yet, in Veblen’s sociology of knowledge, idle curiosity did not act in a vacuum. It was conditioned, first, by what a Marxist (and Veblen was Marxian in this regard) would call the technoeconomic base of a society. In particular, idle curiosity was linked to the instinct of workmanship. In work, people confront material realities and in doing so, over time, they acquire knowledge of the world that helps them achieve their purposes. This sort of practical knowledge can be taken up by curiosity for its own idle or purely theoretical purposes. But the growth of knowledge is not merely a matter of the interaction of workmanship and idle curiosity, since both “instincts” operate through people whose way of thinking is shaped by the entire sociocultural order in which they live. For example, people in what was then called a barbarian culture structured in terms of relations of personal domination come to understand the forces of the natural world in terms of similar personal (animistic or anthropomorphic) relations. And for people in Veblen’s world, in which the technoeconomic system was based on large-scale industrial production, the machine had become their central metaphor; idle curiosity was now organized as science, interpreting the world in terms of inanimate sequences of cause and effect (Veblen 1906). In both cases, idle curiosity cannot range completely freely; even the most creative thinkers and craftspeople work from within a given social world, and their results never completely transcend its basic postulates. Modern civilization, as Veblen saw it, had two ultimate values: scientific knowledge and pecuniary gain. The cult of idle curiosity was now a cult of science: “Modern common-sense holds that the scientist’s answer is the only ultimately true one” (Veblen 1906: 588). The home of science, of idle curiosity, was the university. Veblen understood the origins of the contemporary university in medieval institutions, but, like Max Weber, he thought modern civilization was secular, in the specific sense that it had separated religious from other cultural motivations. No longer was the mission of the university subservient to Christian theology; the knowledge of reality that was to be pursued for its own sake was “peculiarly matter-of-fact” (585), a “highly sterilized, germ-proof system [that] commands the affection of modern civilized

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision ⽧ 39

mankind no less unconditionally . . . than once did the highly personalized mythological and philosophical constructions . . . of the [medieval Christian] schoolmen” (Veblen 1918: 7). At the same time, practical work in the world had also become unmoored from Christian salvation, and was now pursued solely with an eye to pecuniary gain. Industry, the sum total of modern civilization’s economic effort, was pursued not to enhance “the economic welfare of the community, [but for] business profits. . . . Industry is carried on for the sake of business, and not conversely” (Veblen 1904: 19). More generally, what Veblen called worldly wisdom, in contrast to the wisdom generated by idle curiosity, had become, in modern society, “a wisdom of ways and means that lead to nothing beyond further ways and means . . . that is to say, gain and expenditure for the sake of further gain and expenditure” (Veblen 1918: 61). Only the cult of idle curiosity, seated in the university, offered an alternative source of ultimate value. The Higher Learning records Veblen’s dismay and rage as he witnessed, firsthand, what he considered to be the takeover of the university by businesspersons at two new, lavishly funded universities created by tycoons: the University of Chicago, where Veblen taught from 1891 to 1906, and Stanford University, where he taught from 1906 to 1909 (Edgell 2001: 16–23). The book analyzes what happens when pecuniary conditions and pecuniary accountancy go “into effect as a scheme of logic governing the quest of knowledge”—how they impact or distort “the ideals, aims, methods and standards of science and scholarship” (Veblen 1918: 6). We can summarize Veblen’s conclusions by saying that business rationalizes what should not be rationalized in the university, while at the same time imposing its own atavistic irrationality on what should be the idly rational conduct of science.

Bureaucratic Accountancy and Pecuniary Emulation in the Changing University For Veblen, the essence of university work lay in research, the quest for knowledge. Driven by curiosity, this quest could not be oriented toward practical problems. Curiosity was idle specifically “in the sense that a knowledge of things is sought, apart from any ulterior use of the knowledge so gained” (1918: 5). University research was not intended to provide solutions (as we say today) to society’s problems. Rather, scientists’ answers to the questions they set themselves led only to more questions: “The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before” (Veblen [1908] (1919): 33).

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For Veblen, graduate teaching was an integral part of research. He thought that graduate instruction was “distinctly advantageous to the investigator,” since it sharpened his engagement with theoretical speculation (Veblen 1918: 17).2 Graduate teaching was also crucial to ensure that science could be self-perpetuating, because scientists had to train their successors. Indeed, Veblen was wary of the new research foundations that were taking shape in the early twentieth century precisely because they separated research from graduate teaching: “Only in the most exceptional . . . cases will good, consistent, sane and alert scientific work be carried forward through a course of years by any scientist without students, without loss or blunting of that intellectual initiative that makes the creative scientist” (1918: 273). In one of the few passages in The Higher Learning where the voice of Veblen the critic was displaced by that of Veblen the scientist and teacher, he described the dependence of science on “that stimulus and safeguarding that comes of the give and take between teacher and student” (Veblen 1918: 273). Unlike graduate instruction, undergraduate instruction, in Veblen’s view, was not conducive to the work of scholarship. For him, scholarship was a creative endeavor that could not be bureaucratically measured and controlled: “The everyday work of the higher learning . . . is not of a mechanical character and does not lend itself, either in its methods or its results, to any mechanically standardized scheme of measurements” (Veblen 1918: 99). Nor should the social life of scholarship, according to Veblen, be organized into a bureaucratic hierarchy: “The exigencies of the higher learning require that scholars and scientists must be left quite free to follow their own bent in conducting their own work. In the nature of things this work cannot be carried on effectually under coercive rule. Scientific inquiry cannot be pursued under direction of a layman in the person of a superior officer” (97). Yet, undergraduate instruction, as it was developing in Veblen’s time to serve a mass audience, drawn from the middle class upward,3 could not but be bureaucratically organized. Veblen’s (1918) chapter “The Academic Administration” gives a sustained, and chilling, description of the putting-into-place of curricular systems and the bureaucracy needed to maintain them that we, today, so completely take for granted that we have lost the power to comment on their strangeness. At the heart of Veblen’s analysis is the observation that bureaucratic management of a mass clientele demands standardized units of academic product for students to consume on their way to certification.

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Because of the difficulty of controlling a large volume of perfunctory labour, . . . undergraduate instruction . . . must be reduced to standard units of time, grade and volume. Each unit of work required, or rather of credit allowed . . . must be the equivalent of all the other units. . . . For the greater facility and accuracy in conducting this scholastic accountancy, as well as with a view to the greater impressiveness of the published schedule of courses offered, these mechanical units of academic bullion are increased in number and decreased in weight and volume; until the parcelment and mechanical balance of units reaches a point not easily credible to any outsider who might naïvely consider the requirements of scholarship to be an imperative factor in academic administration. (Veblen 1918: 103–4)

In place of the give and take between teacher and student working together on a scientific problem the answer to which was unknown— which meant that the time required to arrive at that answer could not be predicted in advance—Veblen decried the new system in which prepackaged bits of knowledge (measured, ultimately, in a time unit, the credit hour) were passed mechanically from teachers to students with no need for either to exercise their idle curiosity. This new system was set up not to create new knowledge, but to sell instruction to a mass market. The reorganization of undergraduate teaching along these bureaucratic lines was part of a larger process of institutional growth after the Civil War. The land-grant universities, the older liberal arts colleges, and the new research universities—all were expanding by adding schools and other organizational units whose mission was something other than idle curiosity: “Many other lines of work . . . are undertaken by schools of university grade. . . . Their legitimacy remains an open question in spite of the interested arguments of their spokesmen, who advocate the partial submergence of the university in such enterprises as professional training, undergraduate instruction, supervision and guidance of the secondary school system, edification of the unlearned by ‘university extension’ and similar excursions into the field of public amusement, training of secondary school teachers, encouragement of amateurs by ‘correspondence,’ etc.” (Veblen 1918: 16). As Veblen noted, no one was prepared to challenge the assertion that “the university is the only accepted institution of the modern culture on which the quest of knowledge unquestionably devolves,” nor even the assertion that such a quest was its “only unquestioned duty” (Veblen 1918: 15). Indeed, the advocates of other kinds of schools and missions needed to be able to borrow, as it were, the university’s prestige to

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validate their own claims to seriousness of purpose. They could not, however, acknowledge that which troubled Veblen most: the threat to the higher learning posed by the inclusion in the university of schools whose missions were informed, at bottom, by the pecuniary ethos. The addition of professional schools to the university served pecuniary culture through the teaching of worldly wisdom or practical knowledge. Veblen protested throughout the book that he was not critical of professional teaching as such, only of its inclusion in the university. But beyond the benefits of a well-trained workforce—benefits he was willing to admit made some kind of rational sense for society—Veblen saw in university expansion the atavistic and irrational working of pecuniary emulation. The pecuniary ethos not only brought accountancy to the cult of idle curiosity, but also fostered competition where Veblen saw no scholarly need for it. The pursuit of invidious distinction and social domination motivated business-oriented university presidents— those captains of erudition—working hand in glove with the boards of trustees—drawn mainly from the business world—to manage the university as a business concern. Idle curiosity lost ground as a reigning value as businessmen guided universities as if they were department stores, which, in Veblen’s political economy, were, unlike farms and factories, economically nonproductive: “It is one of the . . . commonplaces lying at the root of modern academic policy that the various universities are competitors for the traffic in merchantable instruction, in much the same fashion as rival establishments in the retail trade compete for custom. Indeed, the modern department store offers a felicitous analogy” (Veblen 1918: 89). Veblen thought the pursuit of knowledge required cooperation and a rational division of labor, not the endless duplication of similar services that the captains of erudition, striving for their own glory and that of their institutions, promoted. Veblen saw useless organizational proliferation occurring both among and within universities. Within them, it led to a bureaucratic organization of academic departments competing for resources and custom (enrollments): “Even apart from the exigencies of intercollegiate rivalry . . . it is gratifying to any university directorate to know and to make known that the stock of merchantable knowledge on hand is abundant and comprehensive, and that the registration and graduation lists make a brave numerical showing. . . . It follows directly that many and divers bureaux or departments are to be erected, which will then announce courses of instruction covering all accessible ramifications of the field of learning, including subjects the corps of instruc-

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tors may not in any particular degree be fit to undertake” (Veblen 1918: 107–8). Following Veblen, then, we can think of the academic department as an organizational unit the origins of which are to be found not in a history of disciplinary formation, but rather in the history of capitalist merchandising: the anthropology department as, let us say, the “trimmings, ribbons, and notions” counter (Gibbons [1926] 1971: 124). The metaphor works fairly well when we think of our present-day liberal arts departments competing for majors, seeking to entice the students to spend, as it were, their credit hours on anthropology courses instead of courses sold by the other departments. Indeed, the regular major fairs that our students organize to help younger students choose their majors are laid out, in a rough-and-ready way, as a department store. Usually held in a large meeting room, each major has its own table or counter behind which its representatives sit, waiting to consult with any among the strolling shoppers who stop to talk. This sort of academic shopping suggests another manifestation of the pecuniary ethos that worried Veblen: education as conspicuous consumption. He was particularly incensed by the alacrity with which new universities adopted the medieval ceremonialism of academic robes and the associated “ritualistic paraphernalia” to be used in ceremonies suggestive of “some sort of scholarly apostolic succession” (Veblen [1899] 1934: 368–69). As “schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the higher learning,” as was happening in Veblen’s time in the process of university formation, “their dominant aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and leisure classes . . . for the consumption of goods” (370). Correspondingly, professors saw their time and efforts redirected from the work of science to that of undergraduate instruction, which itself was part of an undergraduate experience that in its outlines seems to have endured from the late nineteenth century to the present: The general body of students . . . are not so seriously interested in their studies that they can in any degree be counted on to seek knowledge on their own initiative. At the same time they have other interests that must be taken care of by the school, on pain of losing their custom and their good will, to the detriment of the university’s standing in genteel circles. . . . Hence college sports . . . take an increasingly prominent . . . place in the university’s life; as do also other politely blameless ways and means of dissipation, such as fraternities, clubs,

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exhibitions, and the extensive range of extra-scholastic traffic known as “student activities.” (Veblen 1918: 102)

Competing among themselves for student traffic, universities had to offer an abundant “stock of merchantable knowledge” (Veblen 1918: 107) and the full range of student activities, all to attract “young men who have no designs on learning, beyond the close of the college curriculum [and] whose goal is the life of fashion or of affairs” (25). Perhaps even the perspicacious and critical Veblen, were he to return to the university today, would be amazed at how abundantly this institutional pattern has been elaborated; but underneath its details, it would be familiar to him. As I have suggested, it is so familiar to us that faculty and administrators ignore it, half thankful to all the noncurricular offices of the university (like the CUE I helped create) that care for students’ needs outside the classroom, and half resentful of the resources they require—resources that should (in our dreams) be devoted to the higher learning.

The Curricular and the Extracurricular You will have noticed that Veblen included undergraduate instruction among the enterprises he saw as threatening to the university. This is somewhat shocking to us today because most of us, both faculty members and administrators, who work in colleges and universities would consider undergraduate teaching to be one of the central components of our calling. Yet, Veblen’s lament is not unrecognizable to us for all that. Most of us were trained in graduate schools in which this attitude had at least some salience. And while many of us chose an academic career, with the graduate training it requires, precisely because we wanted to teach at the undergraduate level, most of us also value scholarly research and expect to spend at least some portion of our working time engaged in it. Those of us who teach graduate students as well as undergraduates no longer question the fact that a graduate curriculum is organized in the same way as an undergraduate curriculum, in terms of semesters and credit hours (although this bothered Veblen [1918: 109]). We work within a bureaucratic framework that all of us conform to but rarely question. Why should a semester be fourteen weeks? Why should an undergraduate degree require eight semesters of coursework, and a doctorate six? What is a credit hour, and how many of them are required for the completion of an academic degree? Once accountancy

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has been institutionalized in accrediting agencies, we can rationalize the answers we now have for such questions; but, as reading Veblen made me realize, to a great extent we have lost the inclination to ask such questions in the first place—whether we are thinking about our graduate or our undergraduate curriculum. Within the limits provided by these bureaucratic structures, we control (we like to think) the curricula of our academic departments. We are free to provide the intellectual content of our choice for the undergraduate and graduate students in our programs. When these latter, having completed their coursework, advance to candidacy, we watch them move to the edge of the curriculum and beyond it, as they go off to carry out their own research project, to become “real” anthropologists as they experience the alchemical magic of fieldwork. (There are analogues in other disciplines: the fledging historian goes off to an unmined archive, the literary critic focuses on a neglected author or text, etc.) The doctoral dissertation these students write is curricular in the sense that it is required for the degree, but it is beyond the curriculum in that we consider it to be independent work. As faculty, our final act of curricular control over a student is to review her final product, requiring revisions if we think they are needed but ultimately signing off on it—and on the student qua student, who must now make her intellectual way independently of us, no matter how supportive we might continue to be in writing letters of recommendation, helping her build her professional networks and counseling her in a difficult job market. As graduate students go off to the field, the library, or the archive, the line between the curricular and the extracurricular dissolves. With our advanced graduate students, we are less conscious of our curricular control of their development than of their initiation into our profession. Our interactions gradually cease to be those of a teacher and a student, and become those of senior and junior colleagues in the same field. This does not happen at the undergraduate level. While we sometimes develop lifelong relationships with undergraduate students, and in exceptional cases work with one or two of them on joint research projects, the line between the curricular and the extracurricular remains well marked during the student’s undergraduate career. Often we know very little about a student’s extracurricular life, but we assume that in all matters related to their studies, it is to faculty advisors and mentors that they will turn for help. Yet, as I suggested at the outset, many, perhaps most, faculty members, at least those at large universities, have not paid much attention to the growth over the past two decades of paracurricular offices

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(such as the CUE discussed above) to which has devolved a certain amount of academic responsibility, including extradepartmental, university-wide efforts to support undergraduate research. Although many undergraduate programs continue to require their students to complete a final project, such as a term paper, and although they might also offer an honors major that requires supervised independent research, such department-based, faculty-controlled work has been overtaken by student-initiated research experiences—where the term “experience” is more important than the term “research.”

Conspicuous Research As we have seen, Veblen was appalled by the trend of his time in which universities (competing with one another) grew by including within “the corporation of learning” (Veblen 1918: 193) the professional schools, schools that purveyed knowledge not for the sake of knowledge but for worldly purposes. Captains of erudition and other advocates “of the practical in education” justified their position by claiming that vocational training had “the peculiar merit of conducing . . . to good citizenship and the material welfare of the community” (196). But Veblen saw such claims as rationalizations: “‘Practical’ in this connection means useful for private gain; it need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good” (193). Since Veblen’s time, university research has become ever more intertwined with the needs of business and government. Sociologist Arthur Vidich has updated Veblen’s arguments by noting that not only did the business ethos overrun the university in the first half of the twentieth century, but in addition the university became “a big business in its own right” (Vidich 1994: 656). During the Depression and then World War II, the federal government turned more and more to university researchers, and made ever greater funding available to them, to provide scientific answers to society’s problems. Another sociologist, Robert Nisbet, coined the term (with a nod to Veblen) “conspicuous research” to express his disapproval of the trend whereby abundant research funding drew professors away from their responsibility to teaching and the curriculum: “Instead of ‘conspicuous consumption’ as the hallmark of affluence, we may refer to conspicuous research. Ordinary research was not enough. It must be made conspicuous not merely through sheer bulk of project, but through one’s conspicuous exemption from all ordinary academic activities” (Nisbet 1971: 109). Thus did the heavily funded research university lead to the creation of a new

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“academic bourgeoisie” (ibid.). Writing at the high point of the 1960s student revolts (when I was an undergraduate student), Nisbet decried what he saw as “the degradation of the academic dogma” that had occurred since the end of the war (3–4). And since that moment, critiques of the university—coming from parents, administrators, politicians, and donors—have focused (among other things) on professors who pursue irrelevant research (think of Senator Proxmire’s Golden Fleece award) to the detriment of undergraduate education. There is more than a little irony, then, that today’s undergraduate students are taking the initiative in pursuing conspicuous research for their own worldly (as Veblen would have said) purposes. Talking to students about this issue, I learned that the word “involved” comes up repeatedly in discussions of research. In preparing this chapter, I spoke with some of my undergraduate students in the spring 2015 semester. Pranay was a senior with a leadership position in the Undergraduate Research Network at the University of Virginia (uvaurn.org). The network was founded in 2001 to encourage students to initiate research projects. I came to know Pranay when he asked for my guidance as he was writing a critical analysis of a service project in which he had participated. I took the opportunity to ask him to share his perspectives on student research. Pranay, it turned out, was as suspicious of the current structuring of undergraduate research as I was. He contrasted the expressed student sentiment of wanting to get involved to what he called self-directed inquiry growing out of a student’s academic interests. Pranay had been educated at an excellent science high school, and thus, he explained, when he arrived at the University of Virginia he had already been taught how to be an independent question-asker. But most of the young students who come to the network want to get involved with research as a way to develop a marketable self—most likely as a résumé item for medical school. Pranay went on to explain that students who enter research labs with this motivation often lose interest in science, since they are put to work mainly as trained monkeys doing routine tasks, and are rarely helped to understand the intellectual issues at stake. About the time I was talking to Pranay, I had an e-mail exchange with a recent alumna, Rachel, who had double-majored in anthropology and global development studies, and was then working for a development agency in Washington. A serious student, Rachel described her initial feelings of inadequacy as a freshman, surrounded, as she saw it, by so many talented students who did so many things so well: “I felt like I did not stack up to the people around me—wasn’t fit enough, didn’t excel

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at my musical instruments enough . . . , wasn’t very well-read, didn’t have good scores, wasn’t socially bubbly or super confident.” There was, however, one aspect of college life where Rachel felt she fit in: academics. In her words: “I remember feeling inadequate, except in the classroom where I could talk and push and pull ideas, and felt like I did well, and I felt good doing it.” And, at the end of a long e-mail exchange, she summed up the cultural analysis we were elaborating together by distinguishing intellectual exploration, which she and I agreed should be the central activity of a college education, from the work of building a model person. As she put it, college, as she experienced it, was not “a world of exploration [but] a world of expectation and careful scheming, maybe with some learning on the way. People say ‘I’d like to get involved’ more than they say ‘what is that?’” (e-mail correspondence, July 28–August 3 2015). In brief, to get involved is what it takes to become a model person, and a model person is a person with a résumé that lists the skills and experiences that employers or professional schools want to see. Research is one of those experiences, especially team research. Indeed, teamwork and research often go together in neoliberal higher education, because it is assumed that (1) the purpose of research is to solve problems and (2) complex problems require an interdisciplinary team, bringing complementary skills to bear, for their solution. I had the chance to study undergraduate research teams at another flagship state research university when I was invited to participate in an outside evaluation of various honors programs there. Many of those programs brought students together for team research. Participating students, we found in our interviews, talked readily about the nonacademic benefits of these programs, which offered them opportunities for service, networking, and internships. But we had to work much harder, as interviewers, to get them to talk about the academic focus of their research. This was not an accident, we learned, as we studied the administrative documents that defined these programs (and that came to us, as you can imagine, in a thick binder). The programs’ mission statements focused on teamwork and the interpersonal skills it requires, and not on the intellectual substance of research. Students would learn, one program promised, to manage team dynamics while working toward a common goal, and to set team norms for productive work while respecting diversity of thought. Students were taught recipes for writing both research proposals and research reports. They were taught how to smooth over differences so

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that final reports could be written in one voice. And they were taught how to put together research teams and match them to proposed topics, in a process, I thought, that was more like a personality contest than an intellectual evaluation—with young students competing to be team leaders, and all the students voting on which of the topics they had individually imagined should be allowed to go forward as team projects. Whereas some of the faculty mentors of research teams told us they expected all team members, whatever their academic majors, to learn the science underpinning the project, others told us it was a virtue of the program that a student with no scientific interest or expertise could participate. One faculty member gave the example of a team member who had discovered her talent, and future career possibilities, as a grant writer, even though, he explained, she knew almost nothing about the science of the project her group was working on. The kind of division of labor and task management suggested by this example is what we had expected of the corporate world, at least of those situations in which workers must know how to work on projects their managers assign them, without explicitly questioning the scientific or epistemological (not to mention political) implications of what they are being asked to do. To move on to what all this means for faculty, let me give a final vignette, this time from my own institution. A few years ago, a donor interested in social entrepreneurship gave money to sponsor a course in which student teams would write proposals for socially ameliorative projects, with the best proposal to be funded by the donor. There were strict limits on faculty participation: students were allowed to consult with faculty about factual matters, but they were not to seek the help of faculty in designing their projects or writing their proposals. At the time, I was struck by the proscription on faculty participation, but I quickly realized that this fit a fairly common philanthropic pattern that focuses on the student experience, privileged as something distinct from faculty–student interactions. This is not to say that donors do not cherish their memories of particular faculty members, because they do, or that donors are unwilling to support such things as endowed chairs in particular areas of study, because they are. But it does point to a way of thinking, on the part of alumni, about the college experience as something that concerns mainly students. And to enhance that experience, donors want to support activities that students, well, do. The result, all too often, is that students are set loose to solve a problem or carry out a project with almost no chance of succeeding. At best, they end up doing no damage and come away with a new sense of how difficult it is to act effectively in a complex world. At worst, they can do

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damage in the communities where they work, and either not know it or, realizing it, blame themselves without realizing that the university in effect set them up to fail. Thus I have often found, in my work developing an interdisciplinary major in global development studies (Handler 2013), that at my university there are more pots of money for undergraduate research activities than there are faculty members to mentor funded students. Apparently, it is easier to coax a donor or an administrator to supply $10,000 or $20,000 for student research than it is to find funding for faculty positions. And when deans and department chairs marshal resources to hire new faculty, they include money for young scholars’ research work— which might include money to support graduate students—but almost never money to help them mentor undergraduates. Almost always, the recruitment of faculty is understood as a process to enhance the scholarly and research excellence of the institution through the hiring of the “best” young people—while the new faculty member’s potential to contribute to research excellence through mentoring undergraduate students is not considered. Perhaps Veblen would have wanted it that way—for him, scientific work was advanced by cooperation between teachers and graduate (not undergraduate) students—but in today’s university, which vaunts the possibilities of undergraduate research, it seems strange, if not downright perverse. It would be a mistake to assert that donors and fundraisers have lost interest in faculty, but the example I just gave, of imagining the student research experience without faculty, is, I think, diagnostic. When I began teaching, at Lake Forest College in 1980, it was common to defend or justify the research work of professors by saying that it enriched the classroom. I heard the same argument when I arrived at the University of Virginia in 1986. But I rarely hear it anymore. It seems to me, at least at the research university, that the domain of faculty research, and faculty affairs in general, is becoming increasingly isolated from undergraduate teaching. In theory, faculty, who are both researchers and teachers, control the curriculum. They certainly control it for their own undergraduate and graduate programs. But they exert far less control over the undergraduate general education or lower division curriculum. In a large research university, where there is little contact between faculty members across departments, general education curricula tend to be apportioned among categories (usually sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts) in such a way as to ensure that all departments get a piece of the action (i.e., butts in seats) and at the same time have some responsi-

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bility to offer relevant introductory courses. To be sure, there is usually some sort of general curriculum committee that oversees these processes, but in my experience, they spend most of their time approving courses for particular categories and very little time asking whether the categories continue to make sense. These are “committees-for-thesifting-of-sawdust,” as Veblen once called them (Veblen 1918: 253). It takes a courageous dean and an active faculty to aspire to make such committees attempt more serious work. If this situation leaves departments in control of disciplinary curricula, it opens up the general undergraduate curriculum to all kinds of meddling—from administrators, trustees, donors, parents, and students. And, in the current neoliberal moment, such meddling tends to take the form of experiments in experiential education. What happens, typically, is this: a dean, provost, trustee, or donor comes up with an idea for curricular innovation (Handler 2008) to provide students with skills they are not getting in the classroom. Bypassing the faculty, they create a paracurricular program, one that they house in an existent administrative office or in one newly created for the purpose. They staff the program with low-level administrators, often ABDs, unemployed PhDs, or people with master’s degrees from education schools. Such administrators often have the educational background to understand and mentor undergraduate research, but their institutional role is not to work, as teachers, one on one with students, but rather to grow and manage an office. The new office requires them to get to work recruiting students to participate—since without clientele, the office will not survive. Meanwhile, students looking for items to put on their résumés find their way to an office that packages research and fellowship competitions as experiential additions to their undergraduate education. (For a case study of the creation of a similar office at a liberal arts college, see LaDousa’s chapter, this volume.) An office so structured cannot make academic integrity its highest priority; indeed, lack of faculty oversight means there is often little attention to academic matters. Still, for many of these programs faculty input is necessary or desired. For instance, take the example of CUE and similar offices set up to stimulate and sponsor undergraduate research. Faculty-mentored research is the gold standard. But faculty mentoring is time-consuming, faculty time is scarce, and administrators are not willing to hire more faculty for the purpose. (Faculty positions, after all, are more expensive than staff positions in these offices; perhaps more important, due to the tenure system faculty are much more difficult to fire than low-level administrators.)

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The upshot is that the research program places the responsibility on the student, first, to figure out the research project, and second, to find a faculty mentor. Students accept the situation because they want to be self-starters, the kind of persons who get involved. Often the program will construct resources (lists of faculty members and their research specialties) and advise students how to find a faculty mentor. As a result, faculty members find themselves besieged by students—often, student teams—who need a research mentor. Often the students have already obtained funding for their projects. Often their projects have little connection to the faculty member’s research or expertise, but the students have not been able to find a better match. Faced with such students, some faculty say no, some say yes. Occasionally the outcome is a happy one—a good match between faculty member and students, leading to good mentoring and good research. But often faculty members find themselves saying yes merely to help the students along, essentially signing off on the project and providing very little mentoring. And the faculty member who is tender-hearted and says yes to help out the students becomes a target for other students in search of mentors, leading to a situation in which one mentor oversees several projects, which means less faculty time for each project. For the most part, this faculty labor is unremunerated, although in a final irony administrators often attach honoraria to student research grants, so that, for example, a mentor can pick up an extra $1,000 for working with a student team. This, of course, is meant to mollify faculty members who are in general frustrated by the lack of raises and the consequent salary compression issues that plague so many institutions. But it does nothing to address the real problem, which is a lack of faculty available for the legitimate academic task of mentoring undergraduate research.

Doing and Idling This, then, is the situation in which many students today do research. Their research interests might grow out of classroom learning, but more often than not they stem from other experiences. Their research interests almost never stem from a developing intellectual relationship with a faculty member. They are prompted by student desire for experiences and skills that can be sold on the job market, and that indicate an individual striving to be involved. Taking a cue from an astute essay by Harvey Sacks (1992: 3) on “doing ‘being ordinary,’” we might say that to be involved is to do doing. Such doings, as our students

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are taught to understand, are bureaucratically structured and require personal skills related to teamwork, cultural diversity, and “time and resource management” (Bovée and Thill 2013: xxiv–v). Our students want to demonstrate to potential employers that they can manage time and solve problems; and if their intellectual maturity is indexed by their bachelor’s degree, it is not in itself a skill to be taken to the job market. Such an orientation to academic work is the opposite of the idle curiosity that Veblen championed. Veblen’s curiosity was idle in the sense that it was not aimed at the solution of practical problems. In Veblen’s vision, teachers and students idly pursuing knowledge went where the research took them; they did not devise the research to take them to the solution of a particular social problem, and no farther. But Veblen’s teachers and students were anything but idle as intellectual workers; such work was their passion and they pursued it (at least in Veblen’s utopian university) without regard to any form of routinized calendar. Today’s faculty members who are fortunate enough to have full-time tenure-track positions in institutions of higher education have the luxury of approaching their intellectual work with such an attitude, even as we, like our students, must manage our time and direct our idle curiosity with an eye to the calendars and criteria of grant agencies, academic journals, publishing houses, and promotion and tenure committees.  Richard Handler is professor of anthropology and director of the Program in Global Studies at the University of Virginia. His current research concerns the undergraduate curriculum in U.S. higher education and the national iconography of postage stamps. His most recent publication is “Toward a New National Iconography: Native Americans on United States Postage Stamps, 1847–1922” (coauthored with Laura Goldblatt), in Winterthur Portfolio, 2017.

Notes 1. Goffman’s terminology is celebrated (Berman 1972; Hymes 1984). The muchless-well-known Henry wrote a brilliant, scathing critique of American capitalism in which he coined terms that recall the spirit of Veblen; for example, he described the pecuniary philosophy that underpinned advertising with such semitechnical terms as “parapoetic hyperbole” and “impulse drift” (Henry 1963: 47 ff.; see Handler 2005). Henry does not cite Veblen’s writings on the pecuniary ethos, although he refers to Veblen’s instinct of workmanship (Henry 1963: 225).

54 ⽧ Richard Handler 2. Veblen used masculine pronouns almost exclusively in his discussion of the higher learning, but this reflected the institutions he was describing, not his personal values; on Veblen’s feminism, see Edgell 2001: 13–16. 3. In an incisive analysis of the University of Michigan, Nidiffer and Bouman (2004) show that at the moment Veblen was writing, the land-grant institution was deemphasizing its original mission, to provide low-cost education and thus upward mobility to the children of farmers and laborers, and becoming focused instead on a middle-class clientele who could pay higher costs to educate their children to become professionals. And many of these professionals would be social workers of various kinds, for whom the lower classes provided clients or, as we say today, target populations.

References Ayres, C. E. 1958. “Veblen’s Theory of Instincts Reconsidered.” In Dowd, Thorstein Veblen, 25–37. Berman, Marshall. 1972. “Relations in Public.” New York Times Book Review, no. 1–2 (February 27): 10–14. Bovée, Courtland, and John Thill. 2013. Business in Action, 6th ed. Boston: Pearson. Dowd, Douglas, ed. 1958. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Edgell, Stephen. 2001. Veblen in Perspective: His Life and Thought. Armonk NY and London: M. E. Sharpe. Gibbons, Herbert. (1926) 1971. John Wanamaker, vol. 1. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. Handler, Richard. 2005. “Critics against Culture: Jules Henry, Richard Hoggart, and the Tragicomedy of Mass Society.” In Critics against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Society, ed. Richard Handler, 154–85. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2008. “Corporatization and Phantom Innovation in University Marketing Strategies.” Anthropology News 49, no. 1 (January): 6–7. ———. 2013. “Disciplinary Adaptation and Undergraduate Desire: Anthropology and Global Development Studies in the Liberal Arts Curriculum.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 2: 181–203. Henry, Jules. 1963. Culture against Man. New York: Random House. Hymes, Dell. 1984. “On Erving Goffman.” Theory and Society 13: 621–31. Kerr, Clark. 1993. Troubled Times for American Higher Education: The 1990s and Beyond. Albany: State University of New York Press. Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nidiffer, Jana, and Jeffrey Bouman. 2004. “The University of the Poor: The University of Michigan’s Transition from Admitting Impoverished Students to Studying Poverty, 1870–1910.” American Educational Research Journal 41: 35–67. Nisbet, Robert. 1971. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–1970. New York: Basic Books.

Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision ⽧ 55 Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1755 [1973]. A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. In G.D. H. Cole, editor and translator, The Social Contract and Discourses, 27–113. New York: Dutton. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Shannon, Christopher. 1996. Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. (1899) 1934. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1904. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Scribner’s. ———. 1906. “The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation.” American Journal of Sociology 11: 585–609. ———. (1908) 1919. The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays. New York: B. W. Huebsch. ———. 1914. The Instinct of Workmanship. New York: B. W. Huebsch. ———. 1918. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Vidich, Arthur J. 1994. “The Higher Learning in Veblen’s Time and Our Own.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 7: 639–68. Watkins, Myron. 1958. “Veblen’s View of Cultural Evolution.” In Dowd, Thorstein Veblen, 249–64.

CHAPTER 3

Empathy as Industry An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania JACK LAVIOLETTE 

Drawing on my experiences as an undergraduate linguistics student from 2012 to 2016, in the following chapter I address initiatives and discourses related to community engagement at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and attempt to situate them within the scope of broad historical and ideological transformations affecting U.S. universities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I became involved with two volunteer groups related to literacy and multiculturalism as a result of my studies in sociolinguistics and education, which led me to visit two elementary schools in West Philadelphia multiple times a week for three semesters. At the same time, coursework in anthropology, urban studies, and discourse analysis piqued my awareness of the historical relationship between Penn and the impoverishment of West Philadelphia, of the pragmatic and corporatist dimensions of modern universities, and more generally of the ways that official discourses embed institutional actions within ideologies that rationalize their consequences. A critical wariness began to accompany my participation in volunteer work, a stance that informs my analysis of the “experience” of undergraduate community service. This chapter consists of two parts. In the first part I briefly sketch two histories: the general one by which U.S. universities abandoned their Protestant theological foundation and embraced the U.S. business ideals of expansionism, competition, and neoliberalism; and the specific history concerning Penn’s evolution from a local Quaker college to a respected but parochial university, to a globally elite research institution—a meteoric trajectory that left many victims in its wake. I then turn to discourses of community engagement circulated on Penn web-

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sites and contextualize them within these ideological developments, arguing that they are a primary expression of the corporatization of universities and suggesting their role in rationalizing problematic institutional histories. In the second part I reflect on my own experiences tutoring with my fellow volunteers, and on the day-to-day realities of working in extremely poor, racially segregated urban schools as an Ivy League student, perhaps the most iconic embodiment of privilege in the U.S. collective conscience. Before proceeding, I stress that this is by no means meant as a moral indictment of the individuals who make the local schools and the volunteer organizations function. As a participant in volunteer service I want to be clear that my criticisms of undergraduate volunteer work apply equally to myself and others. My desire to volunteer was in part grounded in a perception of injustice, but naïveté and paternalism were factors, as well. Furthermore, I would be remiss to omit that I have personally and intentionally benefited from Penn’s expansionism and cultivation of prestige, although I devote much of this chapter to critiquing it. With that said, I conclude that the institutional realities both of elite private universities and of underfunded public schools undermine the possibility for meaningful engagement at the undergraduate volunteer level.

Part I: Complicating the Notion of Community Engagement From Protestant Theology to the Free-Market Imperative of Expansionism Like their European predecessors, the first U.S. colleges and universities—Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and so on—were predominantly theological institutions. Although founder Benjamin Franklin placed equal emphasis on the teaching of Enlightenment-era universal knowledge, Penn, too, was a Quaker institution at its inception. Nevertheless, contemporary universities have replaced the moral and institutional agendas of early Christian colleges with that of (neo)liberalism, trending toward privatization, individualist meritocracy, profitability, and commodification. Thus, the role of urban U.S. universities in producing highly stratified communities must be understood as part of a historical transformation by which the university became disassociated from its origins in religious education and its realignment with the U.S. business ideal (Veblen 1918). Nidiffer and Bouman (2004) provide a compelling account of this evolution from mainly Protestant theological institutions—underpinned by the belief that spiritual enrichment and financial

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profit were mutually exclusive endeavors—to modern research institutions, whose business was not uncovering pure knowledge but rather attracting and accrediting children of the increasingly self-aware middle class. Whereas early-nineteenth-century schools sought to transform the underprivileged by admitting them in their classrooms, by the turn of the century, when Modernist faith in empirical science began to define Western intellectualism, this transformative capacity was achieved instead through increasingly elite students producing research on the plight of the poor. Nidiffer and Bouman cite the University of Michigan, which, upon its establishment, consecrated itself as the “University of the Poor.” Nevertheless, the free market led these institutions to compete with rival institutions that were growing in number. Attracting prospective students had the ironic consequence of decreasing the number of low-income students at the university. Whereas dissemination of knowledge was once the guiding principle, the production and commodification of knowledge and the fostering of prestige took its place. At Michigan, Penn, and elsewhere, this period in the late nineteenth century signaled the transition from the foundational principles underlying Protestant U.S. education to the logic of the free market. Like Michigan, Penn succeeded in cultivating this brand of prestige over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today appears near the top of most national university ranking lists. However, in what follows I present a brief sketch of Penn’s historical relationship to Philadelphia—drawn from Puckett and Lloyd’s (2015) institutional history—to argue that such prestige cultivation proceeds by processes not merely correlated with, but immanent in the impoverishment and so-called conquest of West Philadelphia, the area west of the Schuylkill River that Penn and Drexel University now occupy. The land originally obtained in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues for the College of Philadelphia was at the intersection of 9th and Chestnut Streets, near Independence Hall in what is now known as Center City. The campus remained at this central location until 1870, when Penn purchased ten acres of land—land still considered sacred by many Lenape Indians—just west of the Schuylkill River at 34th and Walnut Streets, in an attempt to escape the increasingly “vile” conditions of industrialized urbanity (Puckett and Lloyd 2015: 3). At that time West Philadelphia was still a semirural area, sparsely populated by wealthy estates, villas, mansions, underdeveloped farmland, and working- and middle-class homes (Miller and Siry 1980). However, by the first decade of the twentieth century—the first great period of Penn’s expansion— suburbanization had turned West Philadelphia into a small city in its

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own right, a city into which Penn’s land ownership would have to penetrate as part of its mission to become one of the world’s great research institutions. As Penn’s West Philadelphia campus slowly grew, so did the commercial and industrial developments around it, such that by 1950 college architectural centerpieces like the Quad were surrounded by “unkempt, mixed commercial-residential brownstones, trolley lines, and unregulated signage.” The irony of such urban blight is that many of the restaurants, bars, and cheap housing catered specifically to Penn students (Puckett and Lloyd 2015: 17–18). Despite the fact that Penn fostered the socioeconomic conditions that encouraged such a patchwork landscape, the university cited a need to improve the material conditions inhibiting its institutional greatness and tapped into an influx of post–World War II federal funding to expand farther into West Philadelphia for most of the rest of the century. Whereas for the first decades of the twentieth century the suburban communities into which Penn was expanding were largely white and not yet densely populated, the great migrations following each world war brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to Philadelphia. At the same time, segregation policies, white flight, and suburbanization had the effect of concentrating many of those African Americans in impoverished neighborhoods, including West Philadelphia. Census records show that West Philadelphia’s African American population grew from 18.8 percent to 52.8 percent between 1940 and 1960, a period concurrent with one of Penn’s greatest stages of expansion (Puckett and Lloyd 2015: 90–91). Nevertheless, African Americans remained greatly underrepresented on campus and among faculty, and excluded from the economic benefits produced by Penn. Following the isolated but highly publicized murder of a South Korean graduate student by a group of African American youths in 1958, the West Philadelphia Corporation was established with the hopes of spearheading urban planning efforts to shield the Penn community from its darker-skinned, unattractively poor, fear-inducing neighbors. Whereas these efforts— mostly large-scale construction projects—were construed as a form of urban renewal by board members and university administrators, they had the all-too-intended effect of criminalizing the African American communities that predated Penn’s expansion, evicting and displacing them into increasingly isolated areas farther west, the socioeconomic effects of which have spanned generations. Those seeking a complete institutional history of Penn’s expansion should look to Puckett and Lloyd’s 2015 work. For my purposes, what is important to recognize is that when Penn advertises its community

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engagement efforts in the twenty-first century, it does not mention its direct involvement in producing the socioeconomic inequalities that have become the target of undergraduate volunteer work, nor does it advertise that without such micro-imperial expansion, Penn could never have attained its current institutional pedigree. (And see Shumar, this volume, for a general discussion of this process.) In other words, Penn’s rise to its current eminence and the razing of large swaths of Philadelphia are not just concomitant, but are two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, were such a narrative to gain traction, it would create somewhat of an image problem for Penn, which must in turn sell itself to the parents and donors whose cash allows the institution not only to function, but also to generate millions of dollars in the yearly profits of their endowments. To rationalize its institutional relationship to West Philadelphia, Penn instead works the notion of community engagement into its brand, so to speak, through images and discourses that I argue act to commodify the idea of community engagement. Not only is this commodified engagement sold to prospective student families and donors, but, as others in this volume argue (e.g., the chapter by Bodinger and Jacobson), it is also sold to undergraduates, who are convinced that such service work is necessary for their personal growth and for their résumé. In Penn’s case, its actions contradict its discourses, and in the following section I argue that the benevolent images and texts about community engagement on Penn websites are undermined by institutional policies that continue to impoverish the surrounding community.

Juxtaposing Institutional Discourses and Actions: Commodified Engagement and the PILOTs Controversy The Community Involvement section (http://www.upenn.edu/life-atpenn/community) within Penn’s official “Life at Penn” page (http:// www.upenn.edu/life-at-penn) is as good an indicator as any of the types of discourses promoted by Penn when it comes to its institutional relationship to the community: Inspired by what Benjamin Franklin called “an Inclination . . . to serve Mankind,” Penn weaves civic awareness and action into campus life (Franklin 1749: 397). Under the banner “In Philadelphia”—and above an image of a white undergraduate stirring the contents of a large pot while she is surrounded by five young African American girls in school uniforms—it reads, “Philadelphia is a historic and vibrant city that has much to offer Penn students, faculty, and staff. Penn’s dynamic West Philly locale, in particular, gives

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the University meaningful opportunities to positively impact and be positively impacted by the local community.” Alongside these vague, buzzword-laden assertions are claims of massive, wide-ranging economic contribution to the Philadelphia community. Next to an aerial photo of campus with downtown Philadelphia in the background, for instance, are these words: “An independent report outlines the University’s wide-ranging impact on the state, city, and region’s economic development and prosperity, especially as a major employer, developer of significant capital projects, purchaser of goods and services, and hub of research and innovation.” Farther down the same page, a three-photo slideshow depicts a smiling white lacrosse player with his arm around the shoulder of an African American middle school student wearing lacrosse pads over his school uniform, a white female undergraduate gesticulating behind a microscope as three young black female students look on,1 and a science fair table at which two white undergrads help put blue latex gloves on a group of all black middle schoolers. Below, under a banner reading Penn & Philadelphia, a mutually beneficial relationship between Penn and the city is articulated: “To fulfill Penn’s commitment to local engagement” . . . (as though “local engagement” were an initiative to opt into rather than an inherent and constant institutional reality) “Penn collaborates with local communities on many bold initiatives. Penn seeks to promote safe neighborhoods, attract and support area businesses, encourage homeownership, and improve public education. The Netter Center for Community Partnerships oversees a powerful array of projects and programs, with multiple initiatives to improve West Philadelphia education, including developing early-childhood reading and math skills, raising interest in science, and bridging the digital divide.” Thus, we can see that this website—the fundamental purpose of which is to disseminate official representations of Penn’s guiding principles and relationship to the community—construes community engagement through evocations of civic awareness, images of (white) undergrads with local children (of color) sourced from university photo ops, and claims of wide-ranging economic contributions to the city. These multimodal discourses, though so generic as to have been produced by an algorithm, characterize the language that most U.S. colleges and universities use to describe themselves. For, as Bodinger and Jacobson (this volume) note regarding community engagement, “Service opportunities, both long and short, at once establish a college’s normativity [since all self-respecting colleges now offer students a chance to serve] and its singularity [since each college’s materials affirm what

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they claim to be their uniquely far-reaching commitment to service).” We receive the image of an institution deeply committed to the enrichment of its community, a community that transcends the boundaries of campus. Furthermore, these representations suggest that universities do not engage with surrounding communities except in the form of official collaborations. This last point is perhaps the most important, because it obscures the fact that Penn institutionally engages with West Philadelphia just by existing, in ways that yield asymmetrical results for Penn and the surrounding communities. When Penn says that it “seeks to promote safe neighborhoods,” the university does not acknowledge that such danger results largely from the concentrated, racialized poverty that emerged as a direct consequence of its twentieth-century expansionism. Equally bad is that safety is sought in a militaristic manner by deploying a massive private police force and security team that implicitly criminalizes Penn’s neighbors. Similarly, when Penn claims to be striving to “improve public education” through undergraduate volunteer programs directed by the Netter Center, we must evaluate these claims in light of the ongoing Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOTs) controversy and the state of Philadelphia public schools.

Payments In Lieu Of Taxes Whereas it might be unfair, or at least counterproductive, to argue that policy decisions made during the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement undermine contemporary discourses of community engagement, the contradictory nature of Penn’s current relationship to the community is perhaps best crystallized in its refusal to commit to Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOTs), a controversy that was the subject of numerous student protests from 2012 to 2016. Because of Penn’s status as a nonprofit institution, under Pennsylvania law it is exempt from paying property taxes on its expansive holdings. This is the case for many universities, but a growing number of them have committed to PILOTs, voluntary payments to the city that compensate for the millions in taxes from which they are legally exempt. At this time, Penn and Columbia are the only Ivy League schools to lack such an agreement. At the same time, the Philadelphia School District, which relies on real estate taxes for 28 percent of its budget, has suffered from chronic economic instability: a $304 million deficit during the 2013–14 school year forced Superintendent William Hite Jr. to lay off 4,000 employees, bor-

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row $50 million to meet minimum staffing requirements, increase class sizes to as many as 41 students, and reduce school nurse numbers from 298 to 197 for nearly 200,000 students (Catsambas, Chiang, and Mocan 2014: 2–4). On the one side we have a multi-billion-dollar institution refusing to pay some of the millions in real estate taxes it is not required to pay because of its nonprofit status, defying the norms established by the rest of the Ivies, and on the other side, we have a school system plagued by economic crises that would immediately and substantially benefit from an influx of tax revenue. Administrators rhetorically justify this decision by arguing that, in the words of one article published in the student newspaper, “[Penn] contributes to the city of Philadelphia in positive ways other than PILOTs.” While it is true that Penn is among the city’s most important institutions in terms of economic impact, it also contributes to wealth disparity as most corporations do: it creates high-paying and powerful jobs for faculty and administrators (and the prospect of these jobs for students), and a slew of low-wage jobs for poorer members of the community (Sassen 2001). Thus, paying PILOTs would be a realistic and meaningful measure the institution could pursue if it so chose, one that other universities have already opted into. Nevertheless, such a direct investment in the local economy would be costly, diverting funds from projects and initiatives that would reap more immediate and material benefits for Penn. Promoting the image that Penn is institutionally committed to social justice, on the other hand, has the opposite effect, appealing to the moral sensibilities of parents, students, and donors alike, and this is where official websites become a necessary component of the ideological apparatus of Penn. Rather than seeking a solution in large-scale institutional initiatives like PILOTs or implementing a living wage for staff, institutional discourses promote a slew of extracurricular clubs and student-run volunteer programs like those through which I tutored. Service trips are likely to become de facto photo-ops destined for the Penn website, as Bodinger and Jacobson point out in their chapter (this volume). However, these discourses and images deny that the need to improve West Philadelphia comes in part from a troubled and violent history of university expansionism; furthermore, they distract from the fact that elite schools structurally exclude people of color and the poor, and devalue critical social sciences in favor of STEM fields, such that increasingly few students have the life experience or coursework needed to meaningfully participate in localized community service. A

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neoliberal culture that encourages the “I can change the world” mindset teaches us to believe that our individual actions will accumulate into the change we wish to see. As Cororaton and Handler (2013: 90– 91) note, “If anything, performing such service teaches them that one chooses and consumes social problems just as one buys clothes, cars and vacations. It certainly does not help them to understand how their own privilege is socially and economically constructed. And worst of all, it allows them to go on believing that their desire to serve and to ‘give back’ is an expression of a universal humanism rather than a socially located, culturally particular, institutionally propagated evasion of political responsibility.” Are we to believe that an undergraduate can effectively participate in such work with an hour-long introductory meeting and weekly e-mails from coordinators? Rather than university-sponsored community engagement facilitating highly informed and committed individuals’ dedication to righteous causes, it often results instead in a self-indulgent and ritualistic inversion by which the upper-middle class symbolically works on behalf of the lower class without compensation (see Bodinger and Jacobson, this volume). And, worst of all, whatever work is accomplished cannot be said to be done purely in the spirit of togetherness or ethical and civic responsibility, because it gets repackaged and displayed on recruitment websites that function as institutional advertisements—which, insofar as they attract new students and new tuition dollars, ultimately contribute to the institutional expansion that continues to this day with no end in sight. Thus far I have argued that free-market ideology underpinning modern universities and corporations alike discourages serious investment in community engagement. Penn’s corporate agenda—an agenda mystified and hidden by the marketing rhetoric in which it is packaged— works in direct opposition to the goals of community engagement. It invests in profitable STEM fields with little relationship to topics of the inherently unprofitable endeavor of social justice, at the expense of students’ awareness of social issues; it chooses not to work local taxes into its budget, even though these would represent well under 1 percent of its yearly endowment; its lack of a living wage for staff perpetuates wealth disparity; and its history of land ownership echoes the European empires’ scramble for Africa and its consequences for local peoples. I will now turn to my experiences as a participant in such community service, to emphasize the specific challenges of working with low-income West Philadelphia children of color as a white undergraduate from a privileged milieu.

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Part II: Reflections on Two Years of Community Service During my final two years at Penn, I volunteered with two service groups run by Penn’s community outreach hub. The first involved one-on-one tutoring with fourth- and fifth-grade students who had difficulties reading; the second was an afterschool program for children from West African backgrounds, with the goal of encouraging positive attitudes among students toward French and West African languages, which most of their parents spoke at home. Thus, the two groups fall under the category of literacy-related service work, with particular sensitivity toward the marginalized position occupied by linguistic minorities in public schools, whose subordination to standardized testing regimes foregrounds mastery of standard English and turns multilingualism into an obstacle rather than a valuable resource. As the recent works of Nancy Hornberger (2003) and others have emphasized, language minority rights and literacy are profoundly complex fields, combining elements of linguistics, cognitive science, ethics, and pedagogy in the service of empowerment. Furthermore, no two multilingual communities are identical, undermining the scalability of initiatives designed for such communities. Effectively addressing issues of literacy requires knowledge of the community—be it a neighborhood, school, classroom, or family— within which such work takes place, a theoretical understanding of contemporary scholarship on language in multilingual contexts, sensitivity toward the deeply structural ways that nationalist discourses pervade pedagogy ideologies and praxis, and a respect for the generally denigrated nonstandard types of language(s) used by linguistic minorities. Most, if not all, of my fellow volunteers were kind and caring individuals, who, as far as I could tell, were motivated to volunteer for altruistic purposes. However, there were many occasions when the cultural rift between the undergraduates and the children became glaring, and in my opinion undermined the mission of fostering togetherness and a sense of community between Penn and local people. For example, on the last day of the afterschool program we had a picnic on campus, for which volunteers were supposed to bring food. One volunteer purchased a cheese and pepperoni (pork) platter, forgetting that the students, nearly all of whom come from Muslim families whose religion forbids them to eat pork, would be unable to eat the pork pepperoni. Of course, the volunteer was not trying to be insensitive, and was embarrassed when she realized what she had done. The episode, however, illustrates the students’ lack of basic awareness of the cultural backgrounds of the communities in question.

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Another afternoon, the volunteers had left the school and were waiting to catch the public bus back to campus. The Netter Center employs a fleet of vans with drivers to shuttle volunteers to and from their service sites, because public transportation options can be limited as you go farther west (and because they know that many undergrads are put off by public transportation). However, on this day van service was suspended and so we all went to the corner to wait for the bus. Two volunteers began talking about the area, expressing general confusion about our whereabouts, despite the fact that we were only seven numbered streets away from Penn’s campus. When I decided to walk back to campus, the other volunteers were surprised, seeming to conflate the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood with vast distance from campus. In other words, they seemed to feel as if they were in a different world, a seemingly internalized perspective that speaks volumes to the disconnect between campus and West Philadelphia in the minds of volunteers. While these are minor examples, and by no means discredit or invalidate other positive contributions to the sites, they illustrate that knowledge of the communities in which service work is performed is not treated as necessary within the context of undergraduate volunteering. This can pose difficulties in recruiting the types of undergraduates who could excel in service work, something I learned when I was on the student board of the literacy tutoring group. As a board member, one of my key responsibilities was the recruitment of new tutors; due to the number of similar volunteer programs on campus, organized recruiting efforts are often necessary for a group to attain visibility. At the time, I was enrolled in a class on inequalities in U.S. education. The course was an academically based service course, a category of classes at Penn that integrates volunteering into the structure of the class. At the end of one of the first classes, I made a brief announcement that my literacy group was looking for volunteers, if anyone was interested and needed to join a group to fulfill the class’s requirement. One student, an upper-class African American student from the Philadelphia area, approached me after class and said that he was interested in the group. I was thrilled that he had expressed interest. In class, he stood out as an impassioned thinker, and someone with a lifetime of familiarity with the city. Furthermore, although close to 100 percent of tutees are African American, we had only one African American tutor in my three semesters with the group, and no African American board members. He said that he would be willing to work with a very low-level student, and even volunteered to prepare a small presentation on the history of Philadelphia schools.

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However, due to bureaucratic slipups between Penn and the local elementary school we visit, our first visits to the school were considerably delayed. During this period, my classmate and many other tutors dropped out of the group. While I was unsurprised that he did not end up joining our group, I found the manner in which he did so to be notable. Namely, he simply stopped responding to messages—both e-mails and Facebook messages—from myself and other coordinators, well before it was evident that tutoring would be severely delayed. Clearly, our inability to begin tutoring early in the semester was a decisive factor in his decision not to participate; but why would he ignore my inquiries for so long, when we saw each other twice weekly in class? I never worked up the courage to ask him about it in person, so I can only speculate as to his motivations. It could have been as simple as a combination of bad e-mail response habits and a busy schedule. However, due to his initial enthusiasm and the ideas he espoused in our class discussions—ideas generally critical of white policy-makers in urban education—I suspect that he was skeptical of the dominance of white students in my service group, and was unsure how to express that to me. This small episode illustrates what I believe to be the greatest difficulty I faced as a white, upper-middle-class advocate for educational justice at Penn. The history of urban educational reform, whether conservative or progressive, is largely one of white actors making decisions on behalf of black communities. Though accurate, I believe, this perspective poses serious questions for students like myself: How are students who are white, educated, and from middle- or upper-class backgrounds—but also aware of the ways in which socioeconomic status plays into one’s subjectivity, and of the intricacies of educational inequality—to act if they are passionate about combating educational inequality? Is the relinquishing of control a fundamentally more important action than its well-intentioned reification? When does the desire to help isolated students become a paternalistic fantasy, eloquently justified in the language of twenty-first-century academic progressivism? Learning to think critically about race and class theoretically should make the white student more qualified to perform community engagement, but paradoxically, it also makes them aware of the ways in which they might be fundamentally unable to engage with certain kinds of issues in certain communities. An obvious solution would be to seek out tutors and mentors with similar childhood experiences to the students we tutor, but few such students can be found at schools like Penn. The journey from a socioeconomically isolated West Philadelphia elementary school to an Ivy League campus, if only a dozen blocks, is a profoundly unlikely one.

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As I mentioned, our tutoring that semester was delayed for months due to bad communication between my group and the elementary school. Namely, because our group works with students who are doing poorly in reading compared to their classmates, we needed the school to provide us with a list of students in need of tutoring. We had been working in that school for several years, and, to my knowledge, getting the student list had never been much of an issue. That semester, however, we did not receive the list until mid-November, despite weekly e-mails and eventually multiple in-person visits from our director. By that point, most non-board-member tutors who had signed up for our group had lost interest, many of them joining other volunteer groups instead. The root of that incident can be traced back to the summer before, when the school brought in a handful of outside hires to fill vacated positions in their administration, including a new principal. This principal wanted to spearhead her own literacy initiative, of which my service group was intended to be a crucial part when we were in contact over the summer. However, the principal underestimated the amount of work that this would take, and the responsibility made its way down to two lower administrators. According to the director of my group at the time, who met with them multiple times, they were seriously at odds with one another. The woman originally responsible for creating the student list did not do it, causing the other main administrator to resent her. He said that he would do it himself, but did not, and would go weeks on end without responding to our e-mails inquiring about the status of the student lists. But of course these administrators, while not helpful to us, were preoccupied with other things. Given the budgetary crises endemic in public schools everywhere and in Philadelphia particularly, it was unrealistic for us to expect badly funded and overworked school administrators to respond efficiently to our needs. I bring this up to emphasize that, in the same way that the institutionalization of volunteer work within universities can undermine the effectiveness of such work, the institutional realities of the host schools pose similar problems. Beyond bureaucratic structures, I believed this to be the case when it came to the codes of behavior expected of students in schools that have high poverty rates and disciplinary issues. The relationship between the punitive and totalitarian disciplinary techniques rampant in low-income schools and the criminalization of black Americans—also known as the school-to-prison pipeline—has been the subject of scholarship by many (e.g., Alexander 2012; Noguera 2003; Rocque and Paternoster 2011). The tools of legal punishment in soci-

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ety at large—ostracism, isolation, and intervention by law enforcement officers—are replicated in the disciplinary strategies of public schools, where the underlying assumption remains that order will result from the removing of so-called bad apples from the system (Noguera 2003: 342–43). When applied to education, the idea that struggling students will benefit from suspension has yet to find much empirical support, for obvious reasons. The elementary school I worked in was no different; multiple tutors had to switch tutees after one student was suspended or expelled. Undergraduate volunteers operate in a liminal space of authority when they enter their school sites. In my experience, the average ten-year-old perceives little difference in adulthood, and consequently in authority, between myself and the other adults in the school. On the other hand, faculty (often with good reason) treat the volunteers as a nuisance. We are seen as subordinate to them, and are expected to enact the codes of conduct and discipline that the school mandates. What is the tutor to do when they believe, like Wacquant (2000: 15), that these disciplinary techniques are the primary expression of inner-city schools’ transformation into institutions of confinement? The image that Wacquant paints of children “herded into decaying and overcrowded facilities built like bunkers, where undertrained and under-paid teachers . . . strive to maintain order and minimize violent incidents” (108) describes some of what I saw when I would visit the school.2 Although I never wanted to undermine the authority of experienced teachers who spend at least fifty hours a week in school, and although I am wary of Michie’s (2007: 8) and others’ caveat that white educators must not pity their students of color, I often felt pangs of discomfort shushing my tutee when she tried to start a conversation with her friend in the hall under a sign reading, “HALL EXPECTATIONS: REMAIN IN SINGLE-FILE LINE; SILENCE REQUIRED WHEN IN THE HALLWAYS,” or words to that effect. Thus, due to the fact that my service work took place within a public elementary school, I felt forced to either replicate problematic displays of authority that treat students more like inmates than young learners, or to counteract school policy and risk antagonizing myself and my group.

Conclusions In this chapter I have argued that the effectiveness of university-sponsored community engagement in local schools is counteracted by institutional realities of both universities and urban public schools. Histori-

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cally, the processes that allowed certain universities to reach a high level of prestige went hand in hand with the impoverishment, criminalization, and displacement of preexisting communities. Today, universities have internalized the neoliberal intuitions of the free market, ultimately evading their stated commitments to enriching the community while repackaging this evasion in the form of student-volunteer groups and selling the image of individualistic benevolence to parents and donors. On the other hand, school administrative culture often reproduces dynamics that ultimately denigrate the identities of their students, and the chronic underfunding of public schools makes effective bureaucracy almost impossible. This does not mean that I believe that decentralization is necessarily the answer. On the contrary, I believe that powerful universities like Penn are precisely the type of institutions with the resources to effect meaningful change in their communities. However, this change will not take the form of exporting typically white students to impoverished schools for two hours a week. Although volunteer work could figure into larger-scale efforts to reform community relations, the bulk of those efforts must take the form of universities assuming institutional accountability for low wages, refusal to pay PILOTs, imperial land-grabbing schemes, and campus cultures in which many students from nonelite backgrounds feel marginalized rather than empowered. Beyond public policy and small-scale initiatives, U.S. culture must do better to foster compassion and sympathy in young people, in particular white people, through types of education that emphasize critical thinking about intersectional identity, power structures, and imperial history. Student volunteers must be taught that the downtrodden state of the school sites where they work is a historical consequence of racist city planning efforts and suburbanization spearheaded by powerful, Anglo American institutions including universities. Until individualistic volunteer work dressed in paternalistic narratives is replaced by both work grounded in a critical understanding of colonialism and real institutional accountability, the critiques presented here and elsewhere in this volume will remain poignant but ineffective.  Jack LaViolette graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 where he studied linguistics. He is currently completing a master’s in social science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. While he is still refining his particular area of research, he is broadly interested in online discourse and

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metapragmatics, the relationship of the Internet to postmodern theory and epistemology, natural language processing, and educational linguistics.

Notes 1. For the visual trope of white adults sharing, while controlling, technological devices, see Spies 2011. 2. Nevertheless, I hesitate to suggest that students perceive themselves exclusively in these terms, because I also witnessed a great amount of happiness and play at my host school.

References Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. Catsambas, Marietta, Debby Chiang, and Leyla Mocan. 2014. “The University of Pennsylvania and Payments in Lieu of Taxes: An Examination of the University’s Role in Leading the Way in Philadelphia.” Columbia University Journal of Politics and Society (May 2014): 1–38. Cororaton, Claire, and Richard Handler. 2013. “Dreaming in Green: Service learning, Global Engagement and the Liberal Arts at a North American University.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 72–93. Franklin, Benjamin. 1749. “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania.” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT. http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=3&pa ge=397a. Hornberger, Nancy, ed. 2003. Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings. Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. Michie, Gregory. 2007. “Seeing, Hearing, and Talking Race: Lessons for White Teachers from Four Teachers of Color.” Multicultural Perspectives 9, no. 1: 3–9. Miller, Roger, and Joseph Siry. 1980. “The Emerging Suburb: West Philadelphia, 1850–1880.” Pennsylvania History 47, no. 2: 99–146. Nidiffer, Jana, and Jeffrey Bouman. 2004. “‘The University of the Poor’: The University of Michigan’s Transition from Admitting Poor Students to Studying Poverty, 1870–1910.” American Educational Research Journal 41, no. 1: 35–67. Noguera, Pedro. 2003. “Schools, Prisons, and Social Implications of Punishment: Rethinking Disciplinary Practices.” Theory into Practice 42, no. 4: 341–50. Puckett, John L., and Mark Frazier Lloyd. 2015. Becoming Penn: The Pragmatic University, 1950–2000. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rocque, Michael, and Ray Paternoster. 2011. “Understanding the Antecedents of the ‘School-to-Jail’ Link: The Relationship between Race and School Discipline.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101, no. 2: 633–55. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

72 ⽧ Jack LaViolette Spies, Sam. 2011. “Digital Sensitivity: New Technologies and Old Attitudes in Images of Africa.” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada. Veblen, Thorstein. 1918. The Higher Learning in America. A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Wacquant, Loïc. 2000. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 3, no. 1: 95–134.

CHAPTER 4

Dirty Work The Carnival of Service JOHN J. BODINGER DE URIARTE AND SHARI JACOBSON 

Introduction Service is a polysemic and seemingly ubiquitous component of the college experience. Peruse any college’s website, take any college’s tour, and amble through any college campus and you are bound to stumble across both general celebrations of service and depictions of the number and kinds of service opportunities the particular college offers. Service is hailed and normalized across the academy—by admissions officers, chaplains, student life staff, athletics personnel, off-campus study programs, and offices of development. Curriculum committees, charged with directing and approving what is taught on campuses, often laud and even solicit new courses and programs in which service constitutes some aspect of the disciplinary or interdisciplinary educational content. Across the country, first-year students are oriented to college life by way of service projects, and Greek organizations are mandated to enact a given number of service activities during the course of the academic year. Service is a key feature on student e-mail signatures and résumés, and central to what many think they are there to do as college students. Colleges increasingly provide prospective employers and graduate schools with two transcripts for students: one that details the student’s curricular record (courses taken and grades received), and one that details the student’s cocurricular record (sports played, clubs joined, and, notably, service projects undertaken and completed).1 Service opportunities, both long and short, at once establish a college’s normativity (since all self-respecting colleges now offer students a chance to serve) and its singularity (since each college’s marketing materials affirm what they claim to be their uniquely far-reaching commitment to service). Not only has service pervaded virtually every aspect of college life, but it has also established itself as essentially impossible to critique:

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Who would not want to help poor children? Its arguably hegemonic status makes it worth inquiring into exactly what service, as a discursive formation, does. For example, what kinds of knowledge does service sanction? What forms of morality does service establish? What understandings of citizenship? How does service at once instantiate and normalize particular economic relationships and indices of human difference? In its guise as a self-evident good, a practice whose worth “goes without saying” (Bourdieu 1977: 167), how does service eclipse an array of carefully theorized interventions that had already been developed in pursuit of social justice? Most broadly, given the centrality of college in the subjectivation of many young adults—that is, the ways in which college shapes young people into particular kinds of persons with particular values, desires, sensibilities, capacities, and dispositions—which modalities of being in the world does service foster, and which does it obscure or preclude? University materials are rife with images of students doing service who are getting dirty. They weed and till dirt on farms, wash dirty dishes in soup kitchens, haul off bags of construction dirt in New Orleans, nurture dirty animals at rescue centers, and mop dirty floors in homeless shelters. Indeed, dirt is arguably the paradigmatic marker of service, and even a quick glance at university texts reveals the sway of dirt in rendering service legible and intelligible. Tales of getting dirty loom large in student accounts of their service activities, contributing to the sense that they have endured a singular ordeal that has simultaneously distinguished them from others (and Others) and established unique bonds among themselves, thereby both individuating themselves and establishing a group of other similarly individuated persons. Yet why university elites (for service now extends beyond students to include staff, administrators, and alumni as well) are consistently made to get dirty, why service so often takes the form of some kind of manual labor, is not self-evident. Servers could, after all, help underfunded libraries leverage new information technologies or assist nonprofits with tax returns, forms of labor their university educations presumably equip them to do but that do not require them to get dirty. Though service does sometimes comprise such activities, one is hard-pressed to find them represented in university materials and rarely do they surface in student accounts. Thus, as representations of dirt travel from spring break service trips in New Orleans to alumni days of service picking up trash on beaches, from first-year orientation service projects weeding organic farms to offices of civic engagement offering year-round service opportunities, scrutinizing the significance of dirt in service discourse

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Figure 4.1. Two students with wheelbarrows, courtesy of Susquehanna University

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sheds light on the broader social, cultural, and economic implications of university service. At first glance, the dirty work of service seems to invert social, cultural, and economic norms, rendering the high low, turning the inwardgazing to outward-gazing, and generously offering up the self with no expectation of remuneration. However, a consideration of what dirt actually is points to a more complex picture. As anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) famously observed, dirt is basically “matter out of place.” Although soil in the garden is perfectly fine, soil in one’s bed linens is not. Similarly, when jellied toast lands on the floor, not only does the floor make the toast dirty, but the jelly—paradoxically—makes the floor dirty. Because of this, Douglas concludes that there is nothing essential about dirt, no inherent way to assess something and determine whether it is, by its nature, dirt tout court. Rather, dirt is simply whatever has transgressed the social categories that determine for any particular human community where things belong. Even further, dirt is arguably what animates these categories in the first place, makes them explicit to members of a culture by rendering them both knowable and emotionally compelling. Given this, we need to consider the possibility that service cements, rather than disrupts, social norms, because what makes the surfeit of images of dirty students worth looking at is, ultimately, a more far-reaching and consequential—if tacit—logic of privilege and difference. Although the temporary marking of university elites with dirt seems to witness that borders have been crossed and the privileged have been relocated to sites of need, without the dirt it would not be clear what happened and, especially, why it was noteworthy. In other words, the images are compelling in part because college students, unlike those they serve, are not imagined as normally or naturally dirty. The focus is as much on getting dirty as it is on being dirty. Furthermore, even though getting dirty as part of one’s service experience is meant to engender for the servers a novel affect of care that they presumably did not have before, student accounts instead point to how these experiences turn the subject inward, encouraging understandings of the self as the appropriate site and measure of transformation, and creating bonds among the servers far more than between the servers and the served. Finally, despite being couched in terms of giving back—that is, as selfless deeds of reciprocity—as service surfaces in university discourse it turns out to be embedded instead within the cultural logic of the audit, deployed as a seemingly objective way to measure the personal growth of students and the moral and economic worth of the

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Figure 4.2. Group of students with shovels, courtesy of Susquehanna University

university. Hours served and sites visited are rendered as quantifiable measures of individual and institutional value with little input from the served as to how it worked for them. As it is deployed in discourses of service, dirt is what anthropologist Sherry Ortner called a “key symbol.” It orders experiences, places them into cultural categories, and helps participants and observers “think about how it all hangs together” (Ortner 1973: 1341). In this sense, dirt offers unique insight into what, how, and why service does what it does. As elites across the country descend from their ivory towers to serve, it is time to consider the way in which their dirty work transforms the cultural logic normalizing inequality and injustice, and the ways in which dirt secures this cultural logic.

Digging in the Dirt: Studying Service as a Discursive Formation French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault ([1976] 1990) used the term “discursive formation” in part to elaborate on how certain orders of truth, or what is broadly considered to constitute reality, come

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to be established. How, he asked, did there come to be a field called psychology that studies a class of people called “homosexuals” when, prior to the modern period, neither existed as knowing or knowable entities?2 Furthermore, what were the implications of this for how everyday people came to understand themselves and governments sought to govern them? Foucault was also quick to point out that discursive formations were in fact able to contain within them apparent contradictions without risk of being called into question or dismantled. For example, some have affirmed rights for homosexuals and some have denied them rights, but until recently (thanks in part to Foucault’s insights), no one questioned whether “homosexual” was an essential category of human existence, or, furthermore, that one could (or should) study homosexuality through a set of theories and research methods called psychology. Service similarly lends itself to such an analysis. It is sweeping in its scope and iteratively frames and reflects how young people, their parents, and society in general think about labor, poverty, Otherness, gender, morality, and value. As is the case with other discursive formations, service is characterized by a number of apparent contradictions. For example, although universities and colleges are essentially sites of privilege, frequently serving affluent youth and presumably cultivating in all students the capacities, dispositions, and skills necessary to staff the more lucrative or, at least, venerated occupations and positions in society, many who attend and work in universities are in fact not privileged. The language of giving back that undergirds almost all service endeavors today is hard to read for poor students who might have worked all through high school and college. What, exactly, have they been given that needs to be repaid? Furthermore, how should they respond to imperatives asserting that their moral obligation over spring break is to give back through the donation of their labor to those less fortunate, when these students’ labor could be something on which they and their respective families rely for income? How does this compare to the service experience for a student who would otherwise be headed toward a beach with friends or family? Thus, even as service as a discursive formation establishes, normalizes, and regulates relations within and among subjects, and between subjects and institutions, its effects are not experienced in uniform ways. Clues to how service establishes certain kinds of people (e.g., privileged or needy) and certain modalities of citizenship and governance (e.g., volunteerism) can be found in a number of sites. To help us learn about service as a discursive formation, we collected and analyzed im-

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ages and texts produced and circulated by twenty colleges and universities regarding their respective service opportunities. This helped us understand the values these institutions espouse as well as the values they intend to instill in their students. Images and texts also demonstrated how colleges wanted to be publicly understood in their function as key sites for the formation of subjects who will be tomorrow’s adults, workers, citizens, and moral actors.3 We also conducted participant observation among student service groups. These included but were not limited to Habitat for Humanity; Big Brothers Big Sisters; Circle K; Pan-Hellenic Council; and a breast cancer awareness and support group. This kind of research allowed us to hone in on the varied and dynamic ways in which young people formed ideas about poverty, disaster, physical well-being, duty, and service, as they discussed with each other which activities were worth undertaking and which were not. It also highlighted how universities monitored student concerns about social justice and inequity. For example, at our field site, in order to receive financial support from student activity fees and to reserve campus rooms for meetings and activities, groups had to have faculty or staff advisors and had to fund-raise one-third of their budget. The latter arguably redirected student efforts from the cause at hand (e.g., homelessness) and toward entrepreneurial activities (i.e., fundraisers), and the former ensured university oversight. Finally, we interviewed several dozen students and staff involved in student life activities and surveyed 180 undergraduates about their mandated or voluntary service. These interviews and surveys focused on the personal stories and subjective experiences of serving students.

Grounding Dirty Work in the Neoliberal Era The desires of young people to shape the world around them in new ways is widespread, as is the conviction among U.S. intellectuals and policy-makers that education should be about more than academic subject matter. Still, the forms these desires and convictions have taken over the generations vary according to historical circumstances, and both students and education professionals have shifted in their approaches to and goals for social change and citizen formation. During the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, the role of higher education was disconnected from the practices of enlightened citizenship. What we today call service was cast primarily as acts of charity, individual generosity, or altruism, to be possibly performed by the wealthy for the needy. Here, the giving self was supported as its own measure of

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good, and the realization of service was not conceptualized at the time as an act of what one might call responsible citizenship. Near the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, this began to change, as psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey began to write of and construct educational institutions as social institutions, sites for the development of not only educated subjects, but also citizen-subjects that recognized “the interdependence of self and other” in democratic communities (Dewey quoted in Barber 1994: 90). In this understanding, as political theorist Benjamin Barber suggests, service was an exercise of enlightened self-interest performed by student-citizens serving a public good that they identified as fully shared, a “democracy as a way of life rather than just a political system” (87). Colleges and universities were seen as key sites for such practice. The mid-twentieth century witnessed yet another understanding of education, this time as both preparation for participation in an expanded economic sector—the boom economy and the individuating practices of suburban United States—or as a contribution to establishing and enlarging a technological, economic, and political elite poised to fight in the Cold War. Veterans returning from World War II used the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights— and pursued higher education as a means to support families and develop professional schools, and not to enact the social good. In the 1960s education was again reimagined in the United States as a site for social change and, this time, for political rebellion and reformation. Activism on college campuses became widespread as students became an increasingly potent force in protesting the Vietnam War and related invasion of Cambodia. They also demanded civil rights and sought to overturn the hierarchical ways universities had been run. Many campuses during that era were centers of contentious and violent disagreements about how education should work and the course the country should take. By 1970 when National Guardsmen fired on a group of student protestors at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine, no one could deny the commitment of many U.S. college students to reshape the world. In the wake of these student protests, a number of college administrators and trustees sought in the 1970s to reengineer university life, actually redesigning the hardware and software of campuses to hamper the capacity of students to protest collectively. Regarding the former, the case of the University of Texas at Austin provides an instructive example. Starting in the late 1970s, the university undertook substantial renovations to break up spaces that had been used for gatherings involving

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students. This included redesigning the student Union, encasing the entire university behind walls, and installing raised planters in the West Mall, which had been a traditional site for protests and public speaking (Macek 1990). In terms of the software of campus life, anthropologist Michael Moffatt (1989) has demonstrated how the development and growth of student life offices have been instrumental in bringing the extracurricular under the control of college and university administrations. As a result, students today who are concerned about economic inequality, for example, might find themselves directed to a university-run office of social justice or civic engagement that organizes and sponsors service projects in homeless shelters and soup kitchens, or service trips to the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans or rural schools in Central America. These offices respond to student desires to take action in a world they see as unjust, but with the university as their guide rather than their adversary. In some ways, universities are simply trying to avert a repeat of the disruptions of the 1960s while fulfilling their mission to develop students as citizens. However, on a broader level, their actions are imbricated with a robust set of political and economic reforms known as neoliberalism, reforms that envision a smaller role for the helping arm of government and emphasize the centrality of nongovernmental organizations, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurship in mitigating the effects of poverty, violence, and neglect (see the introduction, this volume, for a general discussion of neoliberalism). Service, as it is conceptualized and actualized on campuses today, rests on this neoliberal substrate. Neoliberal policies and ideologies concomitantly generate many of the needs service aspires to meet; shape how students and observers understand such needs; present as inevitable the way to meet such needs; and normalize the sensibilities and dispositions cultivated by service, sensibilities and dispositions that recursively turn out to be amenable to life in a neoliberal order. As both a by-product of neglect and decay and a marker of manual labor enacted, dirt provides an assessable component of service experiences, measuring exactly how much service was performed and providing a material witness to embodied transformation. On a symbolic level, dirt references the worth of both the server and the institution that has facilitated her service. It announces to observers and subjects alike a reckoning of moral accounts through manual labor, suggesting a form of penitence, and introduces a new logic of exchange. Animated by the culture of the audit, responsive to neoliberal temporal schemes, and generative of new narratives re-presenting the elite work of the univer-

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Figure 4.3. Student sweeping, courtesy of Susquehanna University sity in an era of increasing inequality, service and the dirt that marks it as knowable are as much a product of service’s neoliberal moment as the protests were of the 1960s.

Sowing Need, Harvesting Help I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. . . . There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. Margaret Thatcher

In a neoliberal economy, governments not only intervene little to protect their workers from international competition, but also, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s (1987) comments above

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illustrate, they refrain from providing citizens with a robust offering of social services. As scholars such as Jane Guyer (2007) and Philip Mirowski and Dieter Phlewe (2009) have argued, neoliberal economists posit economies as too complex for humans to anticipate and, hence, best left to market forces, construed as more efficient and flexibly responsive than central planning. While neoliberal accounts represent the near future as inscrutable and volatile, bringing pain to some or even many, they remain convinced that market forces will “ultimately prove beneficent [in] the long run” (Guyer 2007: 408). This dismantling of state-sponsored protections for workers in the form of, for example, tariffs and subsidies, combined with the retrenchment of government programs supporting the vulnerable, has multiplied sites of need even in wealthy countries, leaving citizens to fend for themselves or rely on the charity of family, friends, and strangers.4 Such reliance was what President George H. W. Bush had in mind when he called for “a thousand points of light,” referring to thousands of volunteers in the private sector giving their time to meet the needs of deindustrialized workers whose jobs had gone overseas or mentally ill citizens whose group homes had been shuttered in the wake of shrinking public funds. Concomitant with the precariousness of middle- and working-class material life that has followed from neoliberal policies is a set of ideologies centering on and celebrating the moral valence of responsibility, accountability, and volunteerism, as indicated by Thatcher’s comments above. In some ways, it is helpful to think of these as the cultural logic of neoliberalism: in order to make acceptable the neoliberal withdrawal of government from its helping functions, citizens need to be made to think of self-sufficiency as laudable and worthwhile, and dependence on state programs as corrosive and disfiguring. This ideology rests on the premise that, if everyone simply wanted to, they could (and should) fend for themselves. This process is what Foucault had in mind in his discussions of governmentality, a concept he developed to capture how populations in modern, liberal societies are socially organized and subjectively shaped. What Foucault pointed out is that governments seek to turn citizens into the kinds of people who desire and value what the government is prepared to offer them (e.g., a large military), and to shun what the government cannot or will not provide (e.g., universal health care). This is what Foucault referred to as “productive” power, in that it was a form of power which sought to produce people in particular ways that were amenable to being governed. This is very different from a model of governance that relies on repressive techniques such as censorship,

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spying, detention, or torture when, counter to the wishes of the state, subjects petition for rights or goods the state has no interest in or capacity to provide. As neoliberal policies immiserate workers and governments cut back on services, citizens develop new dispositions and strategies to manage and make sense of novel circumstances. Self-reliance and volunteerism have figured prominently among them, and observers have noted at a number of sites around the world the rise of self-help literature and programs of self-care (Farquhar and Zhang 2005; Illouz 2008; Leykin 2015; Matza 2009), celebrations of flexibility (Martin 1994), and the intensification of volunteerism (Muehlebach 2012). Service—mobilizing as it does legions of faith-based organizations, secular associations, and students—fills the gaps created by the retrenchment of public welfare. College chapters of Habitat for Humanity seek to redress the human suffering that follows when inadequate wages encounter unaffordable housing; Big Brothers Big Sisters campus groups help tend to children whose parents’ work commitments coincide with inadequate or overly expensive childcare, or whose emotional or physical health collapses from insufficient health care; and student service trips to post-Katrina New Orleans respond to the aftermath of crumbling infrastructure and racialized zones of abandonment (Giroux 2006). Service projects provide a tight fit with this narrative. Participant-observation unearths the degree to which programs normalize individual accountability, government ineptitude, and volunteer heroism. At our field site, a student service trip to New Orleans that partnered with Habitat for Humanity demonstrated how this neoliberal imaginary is narrated. In an information session about the program, one of the two codirectors opened with an affirmation of how important it was that recipients of aid be financially accountable: even though they had lost everything, they would not be eligible for new housing if they had debt, a scenario nearly impossible to imagine for people whose homes had been destroyed by a natural disaster. Recipients also had to work for their new housing, because being in need was construed as a necessary but not sufficient condition to warrant such provisions. Some form of reciprocal exchange was depicted as necessary if the provision of a basic need such as housing was to be legitimized. In the narrative that follows, note also how the codirector’s opening sentence marked New Orleans as a site of “muck and dirt” into which college students descended, at once establishing the Otherness of the city and implying how much transformation for the student-server the site and project will thus provide:

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New Orleans [is] very down in the muck and dirt and we had students who wanted to do that. . . . We do four days a week of service with Habitat and build a home. Homeowners can have almost no debt— they have to get them paid off before they are eligible for a Habitat house. They have to put in 350 hours of sweat equity to build their own house and [then more hours building] someone else’s. We do four days with Habitat, now Wednesday–Saturday because homeowners have jobs and usually show on weekends. It’s crucial to the service learning for students to talk to those homeowners. We have a regular whose stories are pretty awful who speaks to our students each time. A real journey—displacement, and now taking care of two disabled siblings.

The codirector then shifted to what observers would recognize as a neoliberal critique of government. He identified what he believed were nonsensical and burdensome regulations that led to government dysfunction, obviating the possibility that such regulations (e.g., needing a specialized license to drive a school bus) might have been in place for good reason, or that the apparent government dysfunction might have been the end result of years of underfunding or the widely noted incompetence of FEMA’s politically appointed director Michael Brown, who oversaw the post-Katrina aid:5 “FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Association] wants you to show a deed and you can’t [because there were no deeds in New Orleans]. . . . Students really get to see how state governments work. . . . School buses [could have transported people out of New Orleans], but needed people with CDLs [commercial driver’s licenses] and there weren’t [those] people.” His codirector echoed his skepticism about government’s ability to function, chiming in at the end of the presentation that the program would be of particular interest to students studying public policy, because they would learn about “everything [the government] did wrong. That is the end piece [of the program].” Finally, the first speaker argued that this program was particularly good for those interested in transforming themselves from being financially irresponsible to financially responsible. Representing the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath as a foreseeable consequence of survivors’ carelessness and negligent failure to plan ahead, he concluded, “Students think it is difficult to still be rebuilding in New Orleans. We try to get students to plan accordingly when they become adults. [These people] didn’t have flood insurance. You should have that when you go out on your own. How many have content insurance for your apartment?”

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In all, the presentation of the service project simplistically established the centrality of accountability, both for the victims of an unanticipated and overwhelming catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina and for the students providing their sweat equity to build homes for those deemed deserving. The implication was that those who had lost their homes and could not afford on their own to rebuild had been irresponsible by not having flood insurance; nevertheless, they redeemed themselves by expelling their debt and putting in what amounted to nine weeks of full-time labor in addition to their regular jobs. Student-servers were also imagined to learn valuable lessons through their direct contact with those who had erred and by witnessing in person the aftermath of what were represented as the victims’ poor choices. Students saw firsthand what was represented as the incompetence of their government and, because they were experiencing a singular project with direct and demonstrable outcomes (albeit for one household alone), they could leave convinced that it was far better for private organizations and individuals to resolve problems than it was for the public sector to do so. As one student opined in her assessment of her New Orleans service trip, “If it weren’t for Brad Pitt, Habitat, and us, these people would really be in bad shape.” Finally, getting into the muck and dirt served to drive home exactly how degraded the mix of government and irresponsible citizen was. The task of student-servers was to get into this filth and clean house.

Order, Disorder, and Self-regulating Individuals Because service so often involves interpersonal experiences and interactions, it is easy for students to draw conclusions about the role of individuals in their hardships. Subject to broader U.S. discourses of individualism and more recent neoliberal ideologies, students are prone to think of individuals as autonomous moral agents with an array of options that they sometimes fail to maximize. As discussed above, studentservers sometimes tacitly or explicitly blame the served for landing themselves in the circumstances that warranted the service on the part of the student, and they are encouraged to do so. One of the officers in the Big Brothers Big Sisters group on campus exemplified these assumptions, complaining in an interview about what she concluded was essentially the messy dysfunction of the parents of the so-called littles. (Littles are the children served and bigs are the adult volunteers.) Though the interviewed student did not explicitly reference dirt in her account, Douglas’s broader observation about dirt

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as disorder and matter out of place underlay her critique; as evidenced below, student servers were prone to see in the lives of the poor what struck them as chaos and disarray. In this interview, the officer began by detailing how her campus chapter had notified parents via U.S. mail of an upcoming meeting during which the parents of littles would be briefed on how the club intended to work with their children. The students also followed up with phone calls and voicemails for the parents, surely modeling the kinds of best practices taught to students by career services offices and in business classes and clubs. In the end, the interviewee reported that none of the parents came to the meeting and the students were frustrated with them. Whether the parents were scheduled to work when the meeting was called, whether they actually had transportation to get to the meeting, and whether they understood the invitation (some were not native English speakers) was not addressed by the informant. Rather, she appeared not to recognize that the circumstances that had led a family to seek support from Big Brothers Big Sisters might also be the circumstances that would preclude their presence at a meeting modeled on middle-class protocols for sharing information and putting in an appearance when properly requested. Indeed, each time she discussed meetings with littles not running well, she attributed the failure to parents’ inability or unwillingness to act in ways she considered responsible. This might include not recording on a calendar the date and time a little was supposed to be picked up, making apparently capricious last-minute decisions about not wanting a little to go out with a big, not having littles prepared to go out at designated pick-up times, and allowing the little to play video games while the big waited for him or her to get ready. Parents’ allegedly poor choices, their refusal or capacity to manage time in ways that accorded student sensibilities, and their apparent unreliability allowed student volunteers to conclude that they were the only dependable people in littles’ lives (though grandparents were sometimes construed this way, too). Student comments further highlighted the degree to which they valued the self-regulating behaviors associated with worker discipline, and invoked these behaviors when determining what children needed. Note how this student’s assessment of her own ability to schedule her time according to the clock and her autonomy to actualize the schedule once she had made it led her to rate her presence in her little’s life more positively than the presence of the little’s parents: “I act . . . as a reliable person in her life, someone that she can look towards. . . . I know that she knows that I’m going to see her every Sunday. I’m not going to abandon her. . . . But with the parents, there will also be times

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when we go to pick them up and they won’t be there.” Interestingly, even though the student went on to note that she would essentially abandon the little when she graduated, and even had to some extent abandoned her once already when she had gone to study abroad for a semester (which, she said, the little did not like), in the student’s mind these did not erode the worth of what she was doing. Rather, she saw her absences as reasonable because they were planned, the inevitable consequences of goals she had articulated and pursued and that had been undertaken in the service of disciplined self-improvement and career preparation. In contrast, she concluded that the parents who she presumed had abandoned their children did so because of poor planning or a capricious lack of self-control, neither of which she construed as being directly productive.

Buckets of Dirt In the mid-1990s scholars began to recognize a number of trends that they came to describe with the terms “audit culture” (Strathern 2000) or “audit society” (Power 1997). These terms sought to identify and analyze part of broader neoliberal processes discussed above, in which qualities such as efficiency and accountability—previously associated with the world of manufacturing and commerce—came to be invoked as well in assessments of individuals’ moral worth and interpersonal relationships. Scholars argued that the culture of neoliberalism had generated schema designed to standardize and evaluate an array of practices that had previously been understood through qualitative, rather than quantitative, frameworks. In the field of higher education, for example, this resulted in the convictions that “the desirable student is made up of qualities that can be measured” (Urciuoli 2003: 390), and that institutions of higher education should identify a discrete set of “demonstrable outcomes” that could be measured in ways that would allow “consumers” (393) to calculate the return on their investment, or, in the case of the European Union to “[standardize] the meaning of undergraduate degrees” (Brenneis 2004: 585). As Peter Gibbon and Lasse Folke Henriksen summarized more broadly, “audit culture” linked “standardization, audit, and certification” with two processes: first, “neoliberalism and contraction of the state,” and second, “a reconfiguration of everyday life in business, communication and social provision” (Gibbon and Henriksen 2012: 275). Students are primed to understand and perform according to this calculus even before they enter their institution of higher education,

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while they are still in the process of preparing their résumés for college. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016) reports that, in 2015, 26.4 percent of sixteen- through nineteen-year-old Americans volunteered, and websites offering students advice on preparing their college applications are rife with answers to the question of how many service hours applicants need to appear competitive. Some recommend keeping a log of hours served throughout the high school years while others advise finding a service project to which the student can devote at least fifty hours (fewer hours is not convincing) but no more than two hundred (more hours is unnecessary). First-year students, upon arriving for orientation week at the campus that is our field site, must participate in the one-day program SU (Susquehanna University) GIVE (Get Into Volunteer Experience), performing a mix of service labor projects on campus and in the nearby community. Later in the academic year, during the month of April, all students are encouraged to participate in SU SERVE (Students Engaging in Regional Volunteer Experiences) and to keep track of the hours they volunteer and then report them to the Center for Civic Engagement. There, the collective service hours are summed to produce a total number of hours for all volunteers affiliated with the university. The website for the program (https://www.susqu.edu/about-su/history-and-tradit ions/su-serve)—which is nested in the History and Traditions section of the university’s site, itself nested in the About area—explains that this service tradition began as a day-long event for students in 2005, but in 2012 was extended to the entire month of April and expanded to incorporate faculty, staff, and alumni. The target for volunteered hours has since increased every year, and, at the time of this writing in 2016, had risen to fifty thousand from its initial goal of ten thousand in 2005. Website photographs that accompany the text explaining and promoting this service challenge include primarily two kinds of images. The majority comprise shots of students doing manual labor: sweeping the main street of the town, carrying a bushel of sticks, raking leaves in a cemetery, scrubbing a fire engine with soapy water, and so on. The other kind of image consists of large groups of volunteers standing in front of the fruits of their labor: clean fire trucks, tidied riverfronts, clean streets, stacked bales of hay. With smudged faces and soiled clothes, they drape their arms across each other’s shoulders or strike the front-double-bicep pose of body-builders, performing their embodied transformation and sweat equity in the world’s well-being. Though, in the report cited above, the Department of Labor Statistics identified manual labor (food collection, preparation, distribution, and

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Figure 4.4. Group of students behind pick-up truck, courtesy of Susquehanna University

serving; and general labor) as the main kind of volunteer activity in the United States in 2015, with 20.5 percent of volunteers reporting having done these kinds of activities, 18.2 percent of volunteers reported tutoring or teaching and fundraising as their main service activities (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). Nevertheless, college and university websites show almost exclusively images of students laboring and, concomitantly, getting dirty. Pots washed, bricks laid, trash bags of garbage filled, walls painted, and yards of fences built lend themselves to the logic of the audit in two ways that more cerebral forms of labor do not. First, they are activities with quantifiable and apparently straightforward outcomes. Although they could tally the number of students tutored, no school wants to turn underprivileged children into some crass calculation of service performed. Furthermore, a young person tutored does not guarantee a young person transformed, and it would be difficult to demonstrate outcomes in this scenario. In contrast, standing in front of a newly laid brick wall witnesses in material ways the server’s accountability—that is, that she accomplished the task with which she had been charged. Manual labor performed under the guise of service also fits into audit culture because it tracks so closely with wage labor, and here the logic of equivalency begs critical reflection. First, in contrast to the intellectual labor they are presumably being prepared to do, college students serve

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Figure 4.5. Two students with bricks and mortar, courtesy of Mark Raedecke largely as manual laborers, performing the kind of work that is often compensated by hourly wages as opposed to salaries that accompany business and professional careers. They haul trash, wash dishes, clean streets, hammer nails, and so forth. One could, if one wanted, calculate the cost of this labor, which, in the case of the fifty thousand annual

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Figure 4.6. Two students cutting rebar with hacksaw, courtesy of Mark Raedecke hours of service to which our field site aspires, amounts to $362,500 of wages at the federal minimum that will never have to be paid. However, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out, wages are what owners exchange with workers for the workers’ labor-power

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(Marx and Engels 1972; see especially “Wage Labour and Capital”). In that sense, wages constitute a commodity—that is, any product of human activity that can be offered on the market for sale. Furthermore, like all commodities, wages obscure or fetishize the relations of production, leaving them to appear to be things in themselves that exist apart from human activity, when in fact they are materializations of it. Thus, although the ten thousand, twenty thousand, and fifty thousand annual hours of service appear as legible and like entities—countable, manipulable, exchangeable, and transparent—they say nothing about the causes and consequences of human suffering, nothing about ameliorating the systemic sources that generate and animate misery, and nothing about transformation on the part of either the recipient or the student-server.

Dirt and Inversion: Service and Carnival in New Orleans Dirt, as a sign of labor and service, slips between these registers of meaning and is differently understood in different places, marking different cultural subjects. Service offers tangibly assessable components of the college experience, understood as a self-realized set of subject transformations experienced across a coherently marketed set of touchpoints. Dirt works as a confirming token of this experience, together with the asymmetry of being able to remove dirt, or to enter dirtiness as a temporary state. Seen in this way, the asymmetry of dirtiness calls to mind a two-world condition that mixes the elevated and the earthly in a set of inverting practices that turn the world upside down. This is how Mikhail Bakhtin (1984)—Russian philosopher and literary critic— understood the practices of medieval carnival. He sees it as a necessary site for emancipation, where not only are the rules of everyday life turned on their heads, but also where the body—earthly and dirty and under-restrained—becomes the key location for experience and expression. Counter to everyday medieval hierarchies of the repressed body and body politic, the sensual and individual body in carnival is given a fuller range of experience, ratified through observation and a shared sense of community as public performance.6 In our example, service works as a performance of community, but also one that indicates a set of social relations or, in anthropologist Victor Turner’s terms, a particular kind of social drama. The served and the servers coproduce each other. The marks of service—here, those marks are dirt—are also markers of lived relationships, and encouragements of particular kinds of enacted recognitions.

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Bakhtin’s (1984) analysis of the carnival recognizes its emphasis on the basic needs of the body, and the role of the earthly over the elevated (or, again in Turner’s consideration, the exercise of the subjunctive mood over the indicative). Carnival performs a “symbolic degradation aimed at bringing elevated phenomena ‘down to earth’—to the material, bodily, or sensuous level.”7 Understood thus, carnival is “expressive rather than instrumental” (Robinson 2011), a celebration of the “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984: 10). Carnival upsets social hierarchies through debasements, a place “where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 8). In our analysis, however, the defiled self here is the college subject who, along with her fellow servers, willingly marks herself with the dirt of service labor as a badge of asserted community. Experiences of student service are spread across connections to local, domestic, and abroad sites, post-Katrina New Orleans among them. Service in New Orleans has a recently robust history; in addition, the city’s observation of the carnival of Mardi Gras is long-standing. The city is a site for the cultivation of service projects for a variety of college and university populations, often working in parallel, sharing the server experience as well as the temporary hardships of being outside the comforts of the familiar. Indeed, there is a wealth of service-centered programs and organizations in post-Katrina New Orleans, certainly an increase over pre-Katrina levels. Here the city works as a kind of Disneyland of dirt with the shared experiences of labor and the experiential self as focus—a sanitized version of dirt and danger, the comfort zone at once challenged and reinforced, articulated and appropriated through the vernacular of labor. The concept of the comfort zone—a place of careful danger and controlled, instructive uneasiness, specifically a predictably unpredictable world meant to be breached and reformed—is an important element of many service projects. Managed discomfort and risk offers a place of constructed disjuncture in student experience, at once an affirmation of the authentic where affect supports a self-measure of program value, and a place where ideas of self-challenge intersect with, and are informed by, careful orchestrations of experience. The discomfort of willing dirtiness is connected to affirmations of the uncomfortable and learning self. With the self as focus, the so-called discomfort zone also supports a narrative of contained crisis and rebirth, a kind of hero tale where the success of the central characters includes an evaluation

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of their own cultural positions as individuals. As anthropologist Jason Hickel suggests, “People do these projects in order to appreciate and get perspective on their own lives” (Hickel 2013: 15). The experience of discomfort does not unsettle the perception of an existing order as much as it reaffirms the serving individual’s position in that order—one’s privilege is recognized as a site from which one dispenses a generalized giving back that does not recognize an ordered and fundamental asymmetry of resources and opportunities. As one of the students Hickel interviews states, “‘I can’t think of a better way to appreciate [the privileges we have] than to go somewhere where they don’t have those benefits’” (16). Helping to realize how comparatively lucky we are through the experience of personal discomfort does little to help us recognize either social structural inequality or the “interdependence of self and others” (Barber 1994: 90) so central to Dewey’s understanding of the practice of a democratic community. The discomfort zone might be seen as a site for the subversion of existing orders, much as Bakhtin (1984) sees, in carnival, the replacement of a fixed order with the free slippage of signifiers. Others, however, including anthropologist Victor Turner, see such temporary inversions as safety valves that allow people to let off steam to help keep the dominant order in place. This tension between the dominant and the resistant marks much of the contemporary thinking about carnival but, as we understand it here, student service works as a marker of hierarchy inversion while it simultaneously cements hierarchies in place. A recognition of privilege does not lead to imagining a fundamental reshaping of the social order. Here we are also drawing on Bakhtin’s (1984) carnival as a transgressive space that often “abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups” in a process of what Stallybrass and White (1986) call “displaced abjection” (19). The inversion or topsy-turvy of carnival reaffirms the social hierarchies already in place: “‘The supreme ruse of power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in order to consolidate itself more effectively’” (14, citing George Balandier), in much the way that service allows for a ritualized engagement with a subjected other. Carnival works to temporarily suspend social hierarchy to create a site for a mix of signs and the reception of signs. For Bakhtin, much of this involved a careful attention to the uses of humor—triumphant on one hand, deriding or mocking on the other. Service is often a site for the self-deprecating humor of becoming dirty or sore while attempting to do things for which one has no practical knowledge or training. But the inversion of roles is key to many experiences of service. In the

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Figure 4.7. Student with goggles and hammer at wall, courtesy of Mark Raedecke awkwardness of manual labor seen in photos of students with tools, for example, their discomfort is part of the experience and a marker, as well, of class and position (a marker that is often also gendered). Ambivalence is a key component to thinking about service experience— the appropriation and use of dirt is a badge that shifts what it marks.

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Ambivalence flattens distinctions (everyone gets dirty) as it reinscribes them (for some people dirtiness is a temporary condition, for others it is almost permanent) The self as a site for ridicule, like dirt, affirms the subject hierarchy while performing its inversion. Using carnival as a way to frame service-learning is somewhat complex. Although we recognize Bakhtin’s (1984) analysis of carnival as profoundly subversive, we also recognize contemporary carnivals as being sites for carefully policed senses of danger, alterity, or subversion (any of which might mirror differences between experiencing college and the college experience as a trademarked product). As distinct from carnival, where the safety of order is challenged by the dangers of disorder (or matter out of place), in sites like New Orleans the dangers of disorder are made safe through the intervention of students—a place where perceived disorder is one element of the overall effect (or affect), as students move through this space at once cleansed and nostalgic, at one remove from the disorder of street carnival recently made safe. The alterity of carnival provides a particular example of the way that the bourgeoisie “uses the whole world as its theatre in a particularly instrumental fashion, the very subjects which it politically excludes becoming exotic costumes which it assumes in order to play out the

Figure 4.8. Man and student with drill, courtesy of Mark Raedecke

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disorders of its own identity” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 200). New Orleans—its own long history of exotic carnival increasingly commodified and defanged over the years—becomes the site for more recent articulations of a carnival reimagined and redirected. The role of place cannot be overstated—sites become saturated with meaning over time and use, potentially shifting as they are deployed in changing narratives. The displacement of elite bodies into non-elite, dirty spaces realizes place as a site of discursive formation. Here place is productive—students serve in dirty places to better mark themselves as having served. Also, being able to choose such places as sites for service is both an assertion over and a discursive rendering of those places. The places of poverty or marginalization are rendered as elsewhere, external to student everyday experiences and outside of student understanding except through the medium of labor. And the dominion of the servers is exercised over the served subject; it remains important that the serving self is most profoundly realized at the level of individual experience. The place of the soup kitchen, as a singular opportunity for the serving self, is ripe for individual intervention—the soup kitchen as collective, as a confirmation of structured and shared inequities, would not yield to an individuated response.

Time and the (Dirty) Other Place is also powerfully connected to realizations of service time. In his influential work Time and the Other, anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) examines challenges to (and the denial of) the coevalness of time by anthropologists on the one hand and anthropological subjects on the other. Fabian questioned why, in ethnographic texts, anthropologists most often spoke from an unquestioned “now,” while their subjects were made to speak from an unexamined “past.” The measure of time was asymmetrically rendered, reflecting distributions of power. In a similar way, the exercises of discipline and efficiency that are at the heart of neoliberalism work to render time in units that are consumable, and understood, by those participating in the marketplace. As in our earlier observations about the difference between little time and big time in Big Brothers Big Sisters, service time encourages students to think of needs in terms synchronized with scheduled, ordered time in the short-term amelioration of hardship, poverty, and social ills. Student servers work in time units that are convenient to themselves and their home institutions, like spring breaks or January “j terms,” not necessarily in components of time that make the most sense for the served.

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Time and place also serve as key dynamics of first-year orientation, especially in terms of service. In our institution, for example, newly assembled teams of first-year students are deployed to engage in mandated service projects that take them away from the new and unfamiliar place of college, to immerse them in the differently unfamiliar (or perhaps becoming all-too-familiar) local places of service. Through a shared experience of alterity, the eventual return to campus further inscribes the campus place as newly familiar. The shared service creates a group of people that experienced a similarly constructed and disciplined rite of passage, but the linking bonds are individuated: the group remains a group of individuals and does not form or recognize its class position as an element of the conditions that contribute to the necessity of service as an answer to perceived and recognized needs.

Dirt and Affect: Centering the Self in Orientation Service Projects That service stands as an introductory rite of passage raises questions about exactly how service transforms the ritual subject. Most students surveyed at our institution reported that the best part of their firstyear orientation service project was developing relationships and, as we might put it, a sense of communitas among their fellow initiates. The worst part, they reported, was physical discomfort, an ordeal they attributed at times to the weather (too cloudy, too sunny, too hot, too cold), but, even more often, to getting dirty. Whether benefits accrued to the served barely figured into student accounts, and fewer than a handful of responses expressed either satisfaction at providing a service that had been hitherto lacking or discontent that their labor had been unhelpful or unappreciated. Rather, the overwhelming majority of respondents understood the service experience as self-contained, an opportunity the university provided to them and for them, and thus relatable only through an assessment of individual experience.8 This contrasts significantly with what we know about volunteer tourists in other contexts. As Rheana “Juno” Salazar Parreñas details in her account of a wildlife rehabilitation center in Malaysian Borneo, volunteer labor at this site produced an initial affect that “heightened awareness of one’s own and others’ bodies through hard labor: heat, sweat, and muscular pain” (Parreñas 2012: 680). This corresponds to what we found among our students, but here the comparison stops. As Parreñas argues further, the affect of the volunteers she studied underwent “an extra step of attunement” (ibid.), one derived not only from the embodied experience of labor, but also from the satisfaction that an Other had

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been served. Although the students in our study abstractly opined that the primary purpose of a service project should be to provide a good or service that recipients would not otherwise have, when assessing an actual service project in which they participated they focused on the deeply personal, visceral, and individual nature of what they had done. In keeping with the broader discourse of experience, students were left to conclude that the most important and genuine learning experience was one in which they were, ultimately, the authority and the measure, and that the desired outcome of education was the experiential cultivation of feelings and dispositions—and the more intense, the better. In this analysis, student service can be understood in literary theorist and philosopher Michael Hardt’s (1999) terms as a kind of “affective labor . . . [that] . . . produce[s] collective subjectivities” (89). He recognizes the current paradigm of capitalist history as one where “providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production” (90). In our examples, student service programs perform both of these elements—the provision of some sort of service and the manipulation of information in the portrayal of that service in public materials, how both servers and institutions articulate their experience of service, especially in terms of affect. Hardt affirms, “Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we might define the labor involved as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt 1999: 94). Although Hardt is speaking especially about the service industry, we would argue that his observation links to ongoing understandings of service as experienced in connection with the academy, where such service labor affirms the existing order, and ratifies the laboring individual as the measuring subject. Attention to what might be called the performance of labor is affirmed through the spectacle, and the intimate and dirty experience, of the laboring body, “the affective labor of human contact and interaction” (95). The laboring body is made public—through program materials and the embodied experience of shared labor. As anthropologist Kathleen Stewart puts it, “Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (Stewart 2007: 2). The intimacy of this labor, in part asserted through becoming dirty as part of the embodied performance of carnivalesque inversion, both affirms and serves as a particular kind of affect. The significance of such public feelings “lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (3). Following Raymond Williams’s concept

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of “structures of feeling [as] social experiences in solution” (Williams 1977: 132), Stewart recognizes that these public feelings exert “palpable pressures” (2007: 3) in the public arenas where flows of power are in active circulation, such as the sites for service. The embodiment of such public feelings is key, however. Although servers might not really deliver tangible benefits (or benefits as tangible as others trained to the tasks for which they volunteer), the felt materiality of their labor is confirmed through their shared earthiness (as marked by dirt). To return to Hardt, “This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community. . . . What is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects” (Hardt 1999: 96). Here we could pose a partial answer to an earlier question in terms of affect and proximity: Why don’t college students serve in cleaner situations where they might be more adept, such as teaching coding, tutoring, or teaching how to navigate tax codes, for example? The proximity to labor in service is somewhat basely realized through activities that make one dirty and is confirmed through dirt. The service itself can be understood as an immaterial labor that produces subjectivity. Hardt connects this form of labor to Foucault’s concept of biopower, “the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (Hardt 1999: 98). In the examples of service work we examine, the agency of labor is made ambiguous. The laboring server coconstitutes both the object of service and the realization of service in specific circulations of meaning: the circulation of meaning among the servers (how participating in service confirms a set of sensibilities both in place and in formation, and how it validates subjectivities of self and other through the currency of labor or what we might call affective capital), and the circulation of images from college materials that make claims about the relationships of high and low (and the performed bridging of gaps between the two as a response to identified, tangible, and unquestioned need). The valorized, measuring self is bound in fleeting structures of feeling and establishments of communitas. This is not to suggest that students involved in performing service are either fully naïve or wholly cynical, seeking only to beef up their résumés and construct themselves as attractive participants in the neoliberal career marketplace, or who see poverty and social injustice as exoticized sites for experiencing the authenticity of dirty labor, sites entered and then exited. In large part, many are informed by good in-

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tentions and seek to do their part to make the world a better place. But the contemporary structure of what we might call the service-learning industry is powerfully informed by a neoliberal logic of consumption that transforms good intentions and individuated participation in giving back into a practice “emptied of any meaningful political reference and rendered compatible with neoliberal capitalism” (Hickel 2013: 12). To return to some of our earlier questions about discursive formation, it is important to consider what service in fact does, what the discourse of service makes possible and what it limits. How it shapes student apprehensions of poverty and misery, of citizenship and charity. And how we can further problematize the kind of reductive thinking that frames the problems of social inequality and hardship in terms of bad guys and good guys, ineffective government and effective individuals. With the expansion of student life and the increased administration of student activities assessed by audit, many contemporary models of service have become commodified experiences divorced from engaged or extended cultural critique and crucial questions of power and privilege. Furthermore, students are encouraged, above all, to see the true measure of an authentic service experience as one of efficient self-discovery and self-transformation. The elevation of efficiency as a prime component of neoliberalism promotes particular characteristics of student servers: the disciplined (but untrained) exercising service over the untrained and undisciplined. The serving self is the controlled and efficient self, connected to an imagined community of the alter needy, descending to deserving and dirty sites to experience and evaluate their own performances of service, both participating in and forming service itself.  John J. Bodinger de Uriarte is associate professor of anthropology at Susquehanna University. His research interests include tourism and questions of identity, representation, and Native American sovereignty. With Shari Jacobson, his current research also explores the expanding and increasingly normalized role of “service” in the U.S. college experience. In addition to Casino and Museum: Mashantucket Pequot Representation (University of Arizona Press, 2007), Bodinger has published in Museum & Society, Museum Anthropology, and Ethnohistory. Shari Jacobson is associate professor of anthropology at Susquehanna University. Her research on ultra-orthodox Jews in Buenos Aires and fundamentalist and evangelical Christians in rural America has been published in American

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Anthropologist and elsewhere. With John Bodinger, she currently studies the discourse of service in U.S. institutions of higher education, focusing on its relationship to neoliberal social arrangements.

Notes 1. In her thesis for her master of science degree at Florida State University College of Education, Crista Mary Coven (2015) argues that a 1977 article by Robert D. Brown and Richard S. Citrin from the University of Nebraska, that “gave a detailed overview of potential ‘Student Development Transcripts,’” served as “the spark that ignited the ongoing discussion around cocurricular transcripts.” 2. This is not to say that humans did not have emotions or that people did not engage in intimate same-sex relations—emotional, physical, and social—but rather that these relations did not have specialized terms to describe or fields of knowledge to study them. 3. It is telling that at our research site the university’s brand invokes students to lead, achieve, and serve. The coconstitution of the student self here both confirms leadership and affirms service. 4. Citing data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), anthropologist David Graeber (2009) points out that during the 1960s global growth rates averaged 3.5 percent per year and during the 1970s they averaged 2.4 percent per year. During the 1980s, however, during a period of neoliberal reforms, global growth rates fell to 1.4 percent and by the 1990s they averaged only 1.1 percent. The picture was even worse in poor countries. Furthermore, inequality increased in the wake of neoliberal reforms, and social indicators based on a composite of factors such as literacy rates and life expectancy declined dramatically (Graeber 2009). 5. Major news outlets such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the New York Times reported on this widely. As Time noted, “President Bush began emasculating [FEMA] soon after taking office. . . . Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s first FEMA chief, labeled federal disaster aid ‘an oversized entitlement program’ four months before 9/11,” and “[Michael] Brown and FEMA’s other two top officials have ties to Bush’s 2000 campaign or to the White House’s advance office, whose primary mission is making the President look good. None had disaster experience” (Time quoted in Thompson et al. 2005). 6. One of the tensions in carnival is in making distinctions between actors and spectators: Where is the boundary of performance, and what, exactly, is being performed? 7. This reflects many current trends in student life: the experiential is validated as the major touchstone for student learning, with affirmation through the self its most valuable measure. Such knowledge cuts learning into bite-sized pieces of what is felt. 8. Indeed, the reflective component for this day of service was framed by the following questions: “Why is it important to give back to the Selinsgrove community?” and “What will the community be giving you over the next four

104 ⽧ John J. Bodinger de Uriarte and Shari Jacobson years?” Both questions leave undefined the terms “community” and “giving back”; “giving back,” especially, stresses the evaluating and receptive self as authority.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, transl. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barber, Benjamin. 1994. “A Proposal for Mandatory Citizen Education and Community Service.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 1, no. 1: 86–93. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, transl. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenneis, Don. 2004. “A Partial View of Contemporary Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 580–88. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2016. “Volunteering in the United States, 2015.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, DC. Electronic document. Accessed 28 March, 2016. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0. htm. Coven, Crista Mary. 2015. History and Development of Co-Curricular Transcripts. Master’s thesis, Florida State University, College of Education, Tallahassee. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:252941/datastream/PDF/ view. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Farquhar, Judith, and Qicheng Zhang. 2005. “Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-cultivation in China’s Capital.” Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3: 303–27. Foucault, Michel. (1976) 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Gibbon, Peter, and Lasse Folke Henriksen. 2012. “A Standard Fit for Neoliberalism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2: 275–307. Giroux, Henry. 2006. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability.” College Literature 33, no. 3: 171–96. Graeber, David. 2009. “Neoliberalism, or the Bureaucratization of the World.” In The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, ed. Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman, 79–96. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guyer, Jane. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 3: 409–21. Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2, 26, no. 2: 89–100. Hickel, Jason. 2013. “The “Real Experience” Industry: Student Development Projects and the Depoliticisation of Poverty.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 11–32.

Dirty Work ⽧ 105 Illouz, Eva. 2008. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leykin, Inna. 2015. “Rodolgia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethos 43, no. 2: 135–64. Macek, Mark. 1990. “The Politics of Campus Planning: How UT Architecture Restricts Activism.” Polemicist 1, no. 6: 6–7. Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. Matza, Tomas. 2009. “Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show.” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3: 804–18. Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe. 2009. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moffatt, Michael. 1989. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1973. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5: 1338–46. Parreñas, Rheana “Juno” Salazar. 2012. “Producing Affect: Transnational Volunteerism in a Malaysian Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4, 673–87. Power, Michael. 1997. The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Andrew. 2011, September 9. “Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power.” Ceasefire. https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakh tin-2/. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. New York: Routledge. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thatcher, Margaret. 1987, September 23. “AIDS, Education and the Year 2000.” Interview for Woman’s Own, Douglas Keay, interviewer. Thompson, Mark, Amanda Ripley, Karen Tumulty, and James Carney. 2005. “Four Places Where the System Broke Down.” Time 166, no. 12: 34–41. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2003. “Excellence, Leadership, Skills, Diversity: Marketing Liberal Arts Education.” Language and Communication 23, no. 3/4: 385–409. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

No Good Deed Goes Uncounted A Reflection on College Volunteerism SARAH BERGBAUER 

Working at a day-care center always seems to come back to digging a miniature stegosaurus out of a T-Rex’s mouth. The dermal plates catch on sharp plastic teeth and have to be twisted and maneuvered so much that you cannot help but be impressed by the persistence of the fouryear-old who wedged it in there. I had done this careful extraction countless times sitting cross-legged on a YMCA day-care floor. This time, however, a pair of Greek letters replaced my usual blue employee shirt, and I was doing service. As part of a month-long service initiative by my university (in one of the programs described in Bodinger and Jacobson, this volume) to encourage and promote the service of students and others affiliated with the school, I went with twenty other members of the Greek community to a local YMCA to clean the day-care facility. It felt strange to wipe down dollhouses and high chairs using the familiar child-safe cleaner, this time as a volunteer. In my five years as a part-time YMCA employee, I had seen many student volunteers come and go “collecting service hours” (as their university puts it) for their résumés or school projects, but had never been one of them. There had even been specifically planned events to enable these students to volunteer. I had only ever participated as a paid employee supervising them. I remember feeling a resigned acceptance toward these volunteers, because they were untrained and so required energy from employees to manage. They clearly had a desire to contribute, but their lack of training and experience prevented them from helping in what I believed was a meaningful way. As a college student, I was now one of those well-intentioned, but not particularly helpful, volunteers “donating volunteer hours” (again, as their university puts it) toward the university’s goal of fifty thousand annual hours.

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On the university’s home page, next to statistics about the organizations and clubs on campus, there is a text box emblazoned with, “32,000 volunteer hours.” The university sends e-mails to students throughout the academic year highlighting opportunities to help the university “reach its goal of 50,000 hours of service” for the year and reminding students that the school is “collecting” hours all year long. These hours represent the accumulated efforts of students, faculty, and alumni. Quantification of service is a theme that pervades university literature and communications with students, as is the usefulness of documenting service for both the university and students. On its website the university claims that “service is at the heart” of the education students receive and that the “longstanding tradition of service instills in students a lifelong commitment to helping others.” The language the university employs, the emphasis on quantity rather than quality of service and positive benefits for students as a result of service, bring the claims that the university makes into question. Service as a pillar of the institution takes on an almost inverted role as a public relations and marketing tool for the university and as an opportunity for students to build résumés. Students in various clubs and organizations echo the language used by the university to talk about service. Greek organizations and clubs contribute to the university’s service statistics, and the documentation of the hours of service completed is emphasized in meetings. “This is a good opportunity to collect service hours” is a common refrain when discussing volunteering events, as is “be sure to log those hours.” It could be argued that this attitude toward service is a helpful way to encourage students to be socially conscientious, but the claims that are being made about the impact of this service often do not align with what is being accomplished with the hours collected. The quantification of service is justified by the university as “demonstrating the impact” that is made by students and alumni, who are “changing the world through their volunteer work,” as expressed in the university’s website language and e-mails to students. As a student who has contributed to these numbers, it is hard not to see a disconnect between this idealized interpretation of the service being done and the impact it actually has on the community. This disconnect was uncomfortably apparent on another service day that I participated in. Of the fifty students who were bused to a nearby town to do three hours of service, half went to a retirement facility and half to the local Goodwill. I went to the retirement facility, where we

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were to help caretakers pass out cake and coffee to the residents. The employees said that they needed one student to push the cart, and three to help pass out the food. The remaining twenty-one followed behind the cart, occasionally speaking to residents, but mainly talking to each other. I could not help wondering if the employees there directed us with the same resigned acceptance that I had while managing student volunteers at the YMCA. After an hour of this, we went back to the bus and rode back to the university. The students who had been volunteering at Goodwill told us that the employees working there that day did not know they were coming, and did not have a task prepared for them. Ultimately, they spent around half an hour sorting through some clothes, and then went to Dunkin Donuts. Despite how little had been accomplished for the nonprofits, our bus contributed around 150 hours to the university’s tally. The emphasis on quantifying service leads to more focus on the number of hours documented than on the specific outcomes of service projects. This is exemplified by the university’s desire to have students dedicate hours for the volunteering they already do, rather than focusing on achieving new and specific goals. As an e-mail to students said, “Sing in your church choir? It counts! Sit on a board of directors? Those hours count, too. Walk dogs at your local animal shelter? You get the picture: It counts!” This collecting of all possible hours sends a message to students that quantity is more important than quality when doing service. It also seems to be geared toward promoting the university and providing good PR for the school. As expressed by the university on its website and in e-mails to students, by “dedicating their hours” to the school, the students, alumni, and faculty “help demonstrate the difference” that the members of the university community are making “around the globe.” The focus is on benefits for the university, and the effectiveness or usefulness of the work for the nonprofits that students volunteer at seems to be a secondary consideration. It is not only the university that carefully tracks and quantifies service: Greek organizations and clubs also keep track of their service hours, to be reported to the university as well as to their national organizations. Some organizations use a website called the GINsystem (ginsystem.com) to record these hours. In a meeting that I attended, students were told that service hours could and should be double counted between organizations if they are members of both. At another meeting for a different organization that is categorized as a service club, the president told members that they needed to be more diligent about recording all hours of work done for the club. These hours could

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include sitting at a fundraising table, writing and sending letters, and spending time preparing for events. This desire to collect the highest number of hours possible for volunteer work reflects the attitude of the university toward quantifying service. Personal benefits for student volunteers is also a common theme, both in the literature and communication from the university, and in campus clubs and organizations. As the university website says, “Whether you’re building homes for low-income families, working to save the planet, or tutoring students in a developing nation, you do not just enhance the lives of others when you volunteer. You enrich your own life as well.” The availability of opportunities to do volunteer work is also presented as a benefit that the school provides to students. One of these opportunities is to work with the university’s Center for Civic Engagement, where “you might be able to find an on-campus job to expand on your love of service while building skills for your resume.” As the website advertises to prospective students, “You’ll have countless opportunities to make a difference during your time at [the university], starting with a service trip the summer before your first year.” The goals of the service trip before the first year include insight into the university’s attitude toward service. All incoming first-year students participate in a mandatory day of service for a variety of nonprofits in the community. The service day “serves a threefold mission: to introduce new students to the [local] community, to provide a bonding experience for those students and to introduce them to the university’s core ethic of service.” Once again, the university emphasizes benefits for students, rather than specifying the benefits for the recipients of the volunteerism. Although many students do undoubtedly enjoy the opportunity to bond with other students, there is also some skepticism about the day. Personally, I enjoyed my time at an animal rescue, but many students that I spoke to did not have positive experiences. Some were resentful that the trip had been mandatory, which they believed defied their understanding of volunteerism as a personal decision to do unpaid work for the benefit of others. Others expressed dissatisfaction with the work they did at their locations, which they did not think was meaningful. One student described his experience as being completely pointless. He was with a group who was asked to dig a large hole. The students at that location did not know what organization they were aiding, or what the hole’s purpose was. Another student who did not value their service as significant spent several hours cleaning a local playground. She said that after an hour there was almost nothing for them to do, and that the

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remaining hours spent at the location were wasted. The emphasis from the university was once again on the number of hours collected and the perceived benefits for the students, but not on achieving specific goals with the service hours. The self-serving element of service that is highlighted by the university is reflected in campus clubs and organizations. During meetings, executive members often mention the usefulness of taking part in service projects for future job applications. In one organization, exec members often tried to motivate members to participate in service opportunities by listing three motivators: bonding with other members, logging hours for résumés, and helping the community. While there was an apparent, if abstract, desire to help people, other motivators like building résumés were vocalized more often during meetings. During another meeting for a service club, a student referenced the benefit of having a leadership role in a service club when applying for future jobs. Because he was a communications major, he thought that holding the public relations position would enhance his résumé. Citing service hours on résumés is connected to the desire and motivation to quantify volunteer work. Some students say that they are diligent about logging their hours because they want to include this number on their résumés. Service is once again a tool to be employed for personal benefit, with the focus on the students rather than on the recipients of the service. If, as the university claims, the goal of service is for students to become socially conscientious, then the university’s understanding of service as a tool should be reexamined. The quantification of service, as well as the emphasis on quantity over quality of work, sends a message to students that volunteerism should provide personal benefit. The university’s language and attitude toward service are reflected in student clubs and organizations. As a student, I found my own understanding of service shifting throughout my four undergraduate years. I completed service hours at the YMCA and a retirement facility along with other well-intentioned but ultimately empty service projects. These experiences began to make me think of volunteering as a box to be checked in order to achieve future goals. The mandatory events, questionably helpful projects, and constant emphasis on personal benefit can lead to a cynical skepticism of claims made by the university, and about volunteerism in general. When the proposed aim of service is to benefit both local and global communities, counting hours seems like an unhelpful way to represent positive impact. If the university were to refocus attention on the benefits for the recipients of service, students could

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internalize this goal and make it the focus of their own volunteerism both during and after college.  Sarah Bergbauer graduated from Susquehanna University in December 2015 with a BA in anthropology, international studies, and Spanish. After graduating, she did a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at the International House Chiang Mai, in Thailand; and then taught English as a foreign language in Hanoi, Vietnam. Sarah currently teaches creative writing and debate in Hong Kong.

CHAPTER 6

From Service-Learning to Social Innovation The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning CHAISE LADOUSA 

Join Project Shine and help [a] large refugee & immigrant population to learn English! More than 25% of [Sparta1] speak a language other than English at home. Sign up for the 1/4 credit course. The Social Innovation Fellows (SIF) Program prepares students to use innovative approaches to address social issues. Student projects can change institutional processes; organize new networks of organizations; or develop for-profit businesses, non-profits, or student groups. Weeklong workshop during winter break. Two advertisements, the first for service-learning and the second for social innovation, found around a small liberal arts college. Sparta is a pseudonym for a small city near the college.

I first encountered service-learning as a way of framing what my students and I understood to constitute ethnographic research. An organization on our college campus had given us a grant to research adult literacy initiatives in a city in upstate New York during the summer (LaDousa 2014; LaDousa and Baldrige 2017; see also Baldrige chapter, this volume). We were required to present our progress to an audience of other faculty and students who had also received grants from the organization. Many in the audience praised us for participating in service-learning and for “giving back to the community,” as they put it.2 Five years later, the same organization asked me to participate in a conference hosted by Ashoka U (ashokau.org) devoted to expanding the presence on college and university campuses of what was described as social innovation. When I asked what social innovation entailed, administrators in the campus organization explained that it included the kinds of campus activities I had been involved with during the summer. I was wrong, however, to assume that the conference’s focus

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was service-learning. Panels and sessions only rarely touched on the notion of service, and made evident that social innovation, sometimes referred to as social entrepreneurialism, is a wholly different endeavor from service-learning. Service-learning and social innovation can be described with a single term: “experiential learning.” Multiple referential possibilities have emerged from a single phrase, in part, because both service-learning and social innovation rely on the notion that campus and the kinds of endeavors students are engaged in there exist in a bubble. “Service learning,” Butin remarks, “is supposed to foster respect for and reciprocity with the communities that colleges and universities are all too often in but not of” (Butin 2006: 479). In brief, the idea assumed in the image of campus as a bubble is that the real world exists elsewhere, off campus, and that students must leave campus to engage with it. The term can be used in a way that casts endeavors, especially academic ones, as excluding students from the real world. A brief search through the college’s website reveals that the term has been used to describe campus, academic work, and extracurricular activities in the college’s promotional materials, op-ed pieces, and reports on analyses in the vein of social science. While service-learning and social innovation are fueled by the distinction between campus and elsewhere, they promise different transformations for those who engage in them. Service-learning entails working with organizations off campus that typically engage people who are defined as in need, whether because of poverty, ability in the English language, and/or natural disaster. Students travel to destinations near and far to participate with all manner of not-for-profit organizations to engage in tasks ranging from cooking and serving food, to tutoring children and helping them with their homework. Social innovation can incorporate such travel, but also can entail travel to conferences explicitly dedicated to social innovation and the possibilities of its increasing presence on campus. And, unlike service-learning, social innovation allows for work on campus. At my institution, spaces and programming have been created whereby students might gather together to engage in what is called an “innovation lab,” to take a course related to social innovation, or to join a “leadership institute to develop their leadership traits.” I begin this chapter by exploring the differences in the ways that service-learning and social entrepreneurialism are embedded in the institutional context of the small elite liberal arts college where I teach. The different ways that sets of actors use service-learning and social innovation toward different ends inform what Raymond Williams has

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called “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977: 128–135).3 The theoretical notion was meant to bring into resonance the political economic and the symbolic aspects of institutions to allow for an apprehension of available social positions without relegating the effects of social practice to people simply inhabiting already determined social positions. Discursive activity is important to consider because, through it, social actors provide clues about how institutional positions are constituted and inhabited. Voices are socially circulating indexes of biographically specific or more generic positions constituted by, potentially, any aspect of the social world (Agha 2005, 2007; Bakhtin 1981; LaDousa 2014; Silverstein 2005; Wortham 2001). Students’ narrative reflections on their service-learning and social innovation endeavors show that engaging in these endeavors entails both inhabiting a voice distinct from the other possibility and providing a depiction of the college’s disposition to the world outside. The chapter concludes with the claim that differences between the two voices demonstrate that they differently engage with what has been described as a neoliberal disposition to the self and the world more generally.

Institutional Infrastructures of Service-learning and Social Innovation Service-learning has been around longer than social innovation, and, at the college, activities understood to constitute service-learning preceded those understood to constitute social innovation by at least two decades. Two entities on campus are largely responsible for service-learning activities. One of the entities is wholly devoted to service-learning, whereas the other entity is devoted to service-learning as well as social innovation. The first entity I call the College Outreach Program, or COP. It is housed in an office located alongside several other offices for religious denominations. The organization is directed by people who are not faculty. Their responsibilities include creating and maintaining relationships with not-for-profit organizations off campus. Without exception, discourse about service-learning contrasts the campus with the rest of the world in spatial terms. In order to engage with the world in service-learning discourse, one must leave campus. COP’s orientation to entities away from campus is explicit in the organization’s description on the college’s website. The organization’s “About” webpage states that the COP seeks to work with “County nonprofit agencies—creating positive change for our community partners as well as educational experiences for our students.” The nonprofit agencies

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are involved with a wide range of activities, but most of them involve people in a position of need. Activities that can engage students include afterschool tutoring and mentoring; serving in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food banks, and senior homes; and helping with the disabled, outdoor education, job training, college preparation, low-income housing, refugee resettlement, animal shelters, animal therapy, addiction recovery, and correctional facilities. Although COP’s partners are located off campus, the organization’s activities fit into the college’s programming and practices in several different ways. For example, an option for the college’s mandatory orientation program—an option that relatively few students choose—involves residing in a church basement in a nearby city for a few days working in groups assigned to not-for-profit agencies. COP has students sent to not-for-profit organizations farther afield as an Alternative Spring Break (ASB). COP trains ASB leaders to pair up and guide groups of students in college vans on trips to not-for-profits elsewhere. In its description of the event, the organization’s website stresses the dual benefits of getting off campus and providing service to people in need: “ASB leaders have an opportunity to reach out to students who may not have time to serve on a regular basis during the school year, to see the country and to meet some incredible people and to make a meaningful difference in just one week.” Less tied to the college calendar is MAVOC (Mayberry Association for Volunteering, Outreach and Charity). Run by an executive board of students, MAVOC hires site coordinators to work with the various not-for-profit agencies associated with COP. Site coordinators, the website explains, “recruit volunteers, facilitate programs and interface with community partners.” COP’s description of MAVOC evokes the notion of campus as an alienating bubble: “Mayberry Association for Volunteering, Outreach and Charity (MAVOC) encourages students to get off their couches, get off the Hill, and get into the community to create change. As part of the largest student-led organization at Mayberry, MAVOC volunteers make new friends, build leadership skills, and most importantly, make a difference in people’s lives every time they volunteer.” The description relies on and reproduces the distinction between campus and the community, the constituents of which remain unspecified, and claims that students’ volunteering off campus will result in a number of positive changes: Students will benefit through expanding social networks and the individual attainment of leadership skills, first, but the greatest benefit will be to the people in the community. Their lives will be different because of the students’ volunteering. COP’s representations of

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its activities draw on the notion that none of these benefits are possible in the campus bubble. COP explicitly drew on the notion of campus as a bubble when, a few years ago, it named a week on campus “Burst the Bubble.” During the spring semester, MAVOC organized special volunteer opportunities off campus and brought a number of speakers to campus to talk about their own service-learning endeavors. An article published in the campus weekly explained, “The purpose of Awareness Week, dubbed ‘Burst the Bubble,’ was to illustrate volunteer opportunities at [Mayberry] and to stress the value of community outreach. . . . Last semester MAVOC surveyed the student body and found that many felt that they did not know how to get involved with volunteering at [Mayberry]. Outreach Awareness Week was therefore designed to help students get more involved in the local community and to help show why outreach is so important.” The article concluded by invoking again the notion of the bubble: “MAVOC hopes that the events of Outreach Awareness Week will encourage more students to get more involved with volunteering and ‘bursting the bubble’ between [Mayberry] and the local community now and in the future.” Left out of discourse on service-learning, of course, is any notion that the kinds of deprivations that characterize those whom the students serve in volunteer work might also differentiate students at Mayberry, a point manifested in various ways in the student-authored chapters included in this volume. The spatial division between campus and community serves to pit undifferentiated college students against groups of people characterized by a common need or vulnerability. The other entity at the college involved with service-learning is called the Tower Center. It differs from COP because some of the service-learning offerings of Tower are inserted in credit-bearing courses. Professors can choose to include a component in their course where, in a nearby city, students sometimes tutor refugees and other immigrants in English, or sometimes tutor people seeking to pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. The Tower Center organizes orientation and transportation for the students, but the work is not compulsory and it is unpaid. The off-campus pedagogical efforts of the Tower Center also include summer grants for students and faculty working on research projects, such as the one my students and I conducted on adult literacy initiatives and presented to an audience of other students and professors. The Tower Center has a council consisting of faculty who convene and decide on the grant winners. The faculty who make up the board of the Tower Center can propose to invite scholars from other colleges and universi-

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ties to give talks on campus. Whereas COP is run by someone who is not a faculty member, the Tower Center is run by a faculty member who enjoys a substantial course reduction during a term of several years.4 The location of the Tower Center differs drastically from the location of COP. The Tower Center is housed in a particularly spacious section of one of the two biggest campus buildings, and has a conference room with some of the best communications equipment on campus as well as one of the prettiest views. Another way that the Tower Center differs from COP is that it has spearheaded the presence of social innovation on campus. The incorporation of social innovation in the Tower Center’s activities was achieved rapidly. This was possible because the Tower Center sought and gained an affiliation with Ashoka U, which “works with colleges and universities to foster a campus-wide culture of social innovation.” Indeed, the Tower Center eventually had Ashoka U designate Mayberry a Changemaker Campus. After telling the reader to “Change your campus. Change the World,” the Ashoka U website explains, “Launched in 2008, Ashoka U offers the Changemaker Campus designation to leading institutions in social innovation education. These institutions share the vision for higher education to become the next global driver of social change by transforming the educational experience into a world-changing experience.” The Ashoka U website explains the multistep process to become a Changemaker Campus, along with the fees required for each step. The Tower Center sent a team of faculty and students to Ashoka U’s annual conference held at one of its Changemaker Campuses. The Ashoka U website describes the exchange and its purpose: “During the three days at the Exchange, you’ll join hundreds of other innovators in higher education who are reimagining how to utilize colleges and universities as platforms to catalyze long-term change and social impact. Here inspiration is sparked and deep connections are formed with peers who share your passion for higher education.” Once the college attained the status as a Changemaker Campus, Ashoka U’s website included the college’s logo alongside those of the other thirty or so Changemaker Campuses. Social innovation, sometimes referred to as social change, serves as the basis for three of the Tower Center’s activities on and off campus.5 Social Innovation Fellows are students who have successfully developed a proposal addressing some solution to a social problem. The Tower Center’s website explains, “Previous grants have funded a combined SAT prep and social innovation training program in Ethiopia, the development of a portable solar device, and a life coach training pro-

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gram for at-risk students in the Washington, D.C. school system.” The Tower Leadership Institute “is a two-week intensive training program that focuses [Mayberry] students on developing transformational leadership skills such as global orientation, self-knowledge, ethical behaviors, and regard for the public good.” One week of the program occurs on campus and one week in Washington, DC. Finally, the Tower Center, in conjunction with the dean of faculty at Mayberry, offers grants for faculty who will teach courses that “incorporate the theory and practice of social change, using the lens of transformational leadership and social innovation.” One of the most institutionally significant endorsements of social innovation at the college came in the form of a semiannual letter to the faculty from the college’s president. The letter announced that Ashoka U had designated the college a Changemaker Campus, and announced the names of faculty members who were going to teach new courses that could further the curricular theme of social change, which remained undefined. The letter also announced the formation of the Leadership Institute and reiterated that the institute would foster social change through the seminars offered to chosen students. The letter began with a focus on the notion of social innovation: “The phrase ‘social innovation’ or ‘social entrepreneurship’ is increasingly used to describe the efforts of people who think creatively about how to tackle persistent social problems.” Never, however, did the letter evoke the notion of the campus as a bubble that might need to be escaped. Indeed, the letter concluded with the notion that the designation offered by Ashoka U simply reflects the positive offerings of the college to its students: “The changemaker designation is consistent with the belief that [Mayberry] equips young men and women not just to enter the world but to improve it—that the privilege of a [Mayberry] education comes with the expectation that those who benefit from it will use the knowledge, experience and skills they acquire . . . to effect positive change. The recognition is good for [Mayberry]; social innovation is good for society.” In the narratives offered by students in this chapter the relationship between academic knowledge and its use in the world—much less toward the world’s improvement—will fuel the reasons for which service-learning and social innovation exist in the first place. But, in the president’s rendition, social innovation has resulted in the college’s recognition by another institution, and the goals of the other institution have served to reinforce the goals of the college. Through various websites as well as the president’s semiannual letter to the faculty, the college has described social innovation, has

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given details about the ways in which social innovation activities will be fostered on campus, and has explained that social innovation is in keeping with what the college hopes to produce in its students. But, a webpage of Ashoka U has come to describe Mayberry College in particular ways: “[Mayberry] College was founded more than 200 years ago as a school of opportunity and transformation. It was conceived and established by a missionary who viewed education as part of the solution to the difficulties that confronted the . . . Indians he served. Today, in line with our tradition, we seek to nourish in our students a love of learning, a creative spirit, and an informed and responsible engagement with an ever-changing world.” Words like “opportunity” and “transformation” have been used in college publications not oriented to social innovation, but rather to issues of financial aid wherein students from lower-income families are described as receiving particular attention. While other authors of stories published about the college on the Internet have used the words “opportunity” and “transformation,” the webpage published by Ashoka U uses a term unambiguously associated with the terminology of social transformation: “solution.” The authorship of the webpage remains ambiguous, but the webpage proceeds to explain, “The [Tower] Center has integrated Ashoka’s ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ philosophy into its Social Innovation, Transformational Leadership, Public Scholarship, and Engaged Citizenship programs.” What the website fails to mention is that the terminology of social innovation has been used anachronistically to describe the very founding of the college. Furthermore, publications about social innovation, and not service-learning, have come to represent the college in the mirror of its own terminology.

Voicing Self and Institution Interview excerpts presented in the next two sections of the chapter demonstrate that students engage with distinct voices depending on whether they narrate activities that constitute service-learning or social innovation. The notion of voice was developed by literary scholar M.M. Bakhtin in order to account for dispositions among characters in the novel, as well as dispositions between characters in the novel and the author of the novel. Voices can range from those of biographically specific persons (Abraham Lincoln) to sociological types (president of the United States) to users of linguistic features that only vaguely correspond to types of people (users of certain vowels rendered in moments of impersonation as diphthongs). Bakhtin (1984) famously noted

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that there are, additionally, different linguistic means of engaging with voices (see also Irvine 1996; LaDousa 2006; Lee 1997; Vološinov 1986). One can make explicit that someone else (or even oneself) is being quoted, or one can seem to assume the point of view of another and perform the discourse of another as oneself. Linguistic anthropologists have been especially enthusiastic about employing the notion of voice in the study of discourse because the concept challenges the folk notion and default assumption in some scholarship on interaction that the person speaking (or writing) naturally inhabits the point of view of the first person and conveys thoughts or beliefs about the world through such discursive productions. Indeed, students who narrated to me their involvement with service-learning or social innovation demonstrated that the college’s disposition in the narratives helped to constitute the voice of the service-learner and the social innovator as distinct. That is to say, the service-learner and the student involved in social innovation gave evidence that their dispositions to the college are differently configured as they recounted their experiences. While service-learners see the college as something to escape so that they can engage with the world in a way impossible on campus, students involved in social innovation see the college itself as something in need of their work and efforts. As students take up voices as experiential learners, they differ in the ways they envision the college, and differ in whether they come to speak about the college in an authoritative manner. In sum, the service-learner achieves a kind of separation from other students by leaving the college to engage in the real world. The social innovator, in contrast, comes to speak as if he understands the very stakes of the college’s survival.

Voicing Experiential Learning in Narratives of Service-Learning One of the primary ways a student engages with a voice of service-learning is by taking up a disposition to campus. Although she did not use the term “bubble,” Tracy, a student who participated in service-learning endeavors during her four years of college, drew on the distinction between campus and elsewhere to differentiate the student engaged in service-learning from other kinds of students: I think people that don’t get off campus that much don’t really get it [service-learning]. I don’t know if that’s clear enough. It’s just, it’s so easy to live a life here without really seeing the world around you and the issues at hand. Whereas just twenty minutes away you can see

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some very real lives being lived out that are so different from ours. And I don’t think people really are cognizant of what’s happening. Like it’s so easy for a math major to just be here and do his work and like, never leave, and just immerse himself in like his football stuff and whatever things that they’re doing and not see, so. And also like if you look at publications on campus there’s very little that deals with off campus things.

Tracy described a scenario where being a student on campus constitutes a default condition marked by ease. Tracy picked mathematics and football to reflect what a student could become immersed in. Such interests potentially detract from the student’s attention to conditions of life very close by—“just twenty minutes away.” There, Tracy explained, lives are “very real.” Although she did not describe the life of the student as “unreal,” she did explain that the students’ lives are different from lives being lived elsewhere, but close by. These contrasts set up the possibility of the student who comes to devote attention to the world off campus, and break out of—in the image of campus as a “bubble”—the fields of study, extracurricular activities, and publications that characterize life on campus.6 Often, when students are narrating their particular participation in service-learning endeavors, they list those endeavors chronologically within their own progression from freshman to senior. For example, when I interviewed Johnny, a student whose service-learning experiences had been featured in a number of college publications, he began with Sweetdale Youth Soccer: “The main one that got me into it [service-learning] actually started. . . . Actually it was at the start of my freshman year, um, I kind of forget about it though because I did it at the start of my freshman year. But uh Sweetdale Youth Soccer” (LaDousa 2013: 42). Part of the reason why Johnny forgot that Sweetdale Youth Soccer was the first organization he worked with was likely because soccer was a personal pursuit of his. Johnny explained, “I like soccer I like playing with kids and uh service just kind of came with it and from then on I kind of continued on to other [service-learning] adventures from there” (43). Johnny proceeded to list the various organizations he had been involved with, including Helping Home (a soup kitchen in Sparta), a youth program in Sparta Park Center, Project Shine and its ESOL program, citizen classes at the Relocation and Welcome Center, For the Good Incorporated, the community garden at Sparta Park Center, Red Oak Grove Cares, ASB with Habitat for Humanity, and Mountain Justice Spring Break. Johnny followed the names of some

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organizations with a brief description of what they do, but some organizations he simply named (44–45). Tracy similarly listed the organizations she has been involved with. Tracy began her description by naming the umbrella organization at the college, MAVOC, and explaining that she had attained positions of relative authority in two of its initiatives: “I was site coordinator for two [MAVOC] sites. Challah for Hunger and Uptown Academy which is a, it’s the alternative high school for kids who got kicked out of high school on the way so they go there to finish their degree. . . . Challah for Hunger, it’s Jewish bread and we bake bread, sell it, and donate the money at the end of the year. Yeah, so it’s supposed to be a Jewish thing, but . . . .” Tracy has a relatively easy time describing the activities of Uptown Academy while her description of Challah for Hunger is a bit more vague. In some of her interview segments presented below, Tracy will show that she has an ambivalent relationship with organized religion. While one has a clear sense that Uptown Academy is oriented to people in need, just who benefits from Challah for Hunger is left unclear. Once Tracy established that she has served MAVOC in positions of authority, her description began to parallel Johnny’s. Tracy began at freshman year and proceeded chronologically: I just really like making food and baking, so like, my freshman year they were just like, “do you want to make food?” and I was like, “yeah I’ll go make bread with you guys.” Um, I didn’t know it was a Jewish bread. So, I ended up doing a lot of things I didn’t realize were religious things. I would just show up to make the food and people were like, “are you Catholic?” and I was, “no I just like doing this,” but, so I was really into Challah for Hunger my freshman year and then I took it over my sophomore year with my friend Andrea. So, I’ve stuck with that. And, Uptown Academy, I stopped that after awhile. And I was on the board for Alternative Spring Break and also a leader for that. And then that summer I was accepted to be an orientation leader on Outreach Adventure. Mine was an outreach in town downtown. So we lived there and during the week we went to pantries and houses to deal with hunger and homelessness.

Indeed, Tracy’s initial foray into service-learning was akin to Johnny’s because she already enjoyed doing something relevant to a service-learning organization. Unlike Johnny, Tracy continued to participate in her initial experience throughout her four years of college. She noted that disabusing other students of personal religious affiliations was a neces-

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sity during her engagements with organizations. Once Tracy finished her narration of her involvement with Challah for Hunger, she lists the other organizations she has worked with. Students reflected and reinforced MAVOC’s goal of partnering with off-campus organizations by listing the organizations they had worked with, and by including narratives of how such work became meaningful to them personally. Such narratives seemed to provide a contrast to the narratives the students offered to explain how they initially had become involved with service-learning—by doing something they already liked to do. Johnny, for example, looked into his own past to explain that he had grown up in a neighborhood segregated by race and class. He identified as white and middle class, and explained that he had been aware of the ways in which racial and class disparities intersect from his childhood neighborhood. But, he explained, until he engaged in service-learning, he “never really had gotten out and worked with people” (LaDousa 2013: 46). Johnny also devoted much of our interview to the description of a service-learning experience abroad whereby he did not feel that his experience had been meaningful or fulfilling. In contrast to his experiences with service-learning endeavors in the United States, Johnny’s service-learning experience abroad led to frustration. He noted that he occupied a stigmatized position in East Africa as a “white mzungu [someone of European descent],” and explained that people approached him there through the “interchanges” of tourism and development (47). Johnny’s narration of disappointment about his service-learning endeavors in East Africa seemed to be meant to contrast maximally with the interactions he has had with (racial and class marked) others during his service-learning endeavors in the United States. For Tracy, the personal fulfillment made possible by service-learning was realized in a particular service-learning activity. Tracy recounted: I was doing Project Shine to teach English too and then all of it really solidified when I went on ASB my freshman year, freshman spring break, and it was the all girls trip to North Carolina and we were at an elementary school and helping out with kids which was okay but, it was a night when we were free and we were going to a soup kitchen nearby and help them make dinner and it was based in the basement of a church I think and . . . . It was, really, interesting because before we served the people there was service in the church he was just describing the service at, as, “we are just doing unto others what god has done unto us. . . . We’re providing them services that god has given to us, and that’s just kind of why we do the things that we do,” and

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I’m not religious at all but that was the point where I realized oh yes, like this is why we do these things we’re doing because other people are less fortunate.

Once again, Tracy’s relationships with cooking and religion figured in her narration of service-learning. She began this narrative segment by mentioning the ESOL tutoring she had been doing. Then, she explained that it was with the move off campus, working for ASB, that she was able to realize personally the significance of service-learning. While the scheduled activities at an elementary school were simply “okay,” free time spent at a soup kitchen in a church involved Tracy in a church service where a man explained, “We are just doing unto others what god has done unto us. . . . We’re providing them services that god has given to us, and that’s just kind of why we do the things that we do.” Tracy’s quote of the man at the church service is memorable, in part, because Tracy is able to recount that she was able to formulate her own statement about service-learning using the social categories in the man’s statement and maintain the first person plural, “we.” The statement of the man in the church differed from Tracy’s—who has explained that she is not religious—due to his involvement with god. Tracy is able to render service-learning secular in her own statement, “like this is why we do these things we’re doing because other people are less fortunate.” Tracy’s narration of service-learning is similar to Johnny’s because the inequality that underpins the difference between students on campus and people elsewhere is precisely what makes the endeavor personally meaningful to the service-learner.

Voicing Experiential Learning in Narratives of Social Innovation Tracy explained that I should interview Shane because he was especially well known on campus as someone who had been involved with service-learning. She told me to ask him about the “bus story.” When I asked her to tell me about the story, she said, “It’s better when he tells it.” I had known Shane for some time because he was a friend of another student of mine. I called Shane for an interview about his experiences with service-learning, and he readily agreed. I began the interview by asking Shane about the “bus story” and its relevance to his involvement with service-learning. Shane surprised me by responding that the “bus story” was not about service-learning, but that he would share the story with me. For several minutes, Shane re-

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counted his adventures overseas whereby he survived a harrowing bus journey during which he realized the ways that people from extremely different backgrounds configured by wealth and citizenship could be made relatively equivalent in an emergency. I explained that I had heard that the story was about service-learning, and that the story was so well known on campus that a student had asked me to ask about it. Shane reiterated that the story had nothing to do with service-learning, but rather served as the focal point of his personal statement provided as part of his college application. He said that he told the story during orientation activities and that he was aware that the story had been circulated by other students as a particularly dramatic narration of a service-learning experience. That Tracy and other students had come to understand the “bus story” to be about a service-learning endeavor was understandable because the story involved many of the most important elements of narratives about service-learning. The story involved a college student, on the one hand, and people taking a mode of transportation not generally associated with affluence in a developing country, on the other hand. The parallel between the inequalities at the heart of service-learning activities and the inequalities in Shane’s story likely signaled for many students that the bus story was about some overseas service-learning experience. The emergency at the center of the story, however, enabled Shane to point out that inequalities can disappear in a moment when the life of everyone concerned is at stake. This, he explained, would not be typical of the relationship between students and others in servicelearning activities. Shane proceeded to explain that he actually had not been involved in much service-learning during college, but that, as Shane himself put it, he was a “poster child” for social innovation on campus. When I asked whether he might describe what social innovation is, Shane, like Tracy, evoked the notion of campus as a bubble: You know, we do function in this little bubble and we don’t often get to employ learning in the classroom so I think a lot of people are drawn during the summers at least to be like, “okay how the fuck do I apply all this stuff and how do I do something real?” Yeah, I think that’s kind of what draws people to experiential learning whether it’s defined that way or not and I think it’s only a tiny segment of the college that’s involved in service learning. Uh, it’s the demographic that goes to the college and the learning is very removed from . . . . You know it would be one thing if we were in New Orleans or New York

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where there’s kind of all sorts of opportunities to do service and feel like you’re making an impact. We’re really pretty isolated.

Several of the ways that Shane describes social innovation recall Tracy’s construction of service-learning. Campus and the learning that takes place in the classroom stand in contrast to the “real world.” When Shane mentions the summer, he is talking about the grants offered by the Tower Center for summer research. The summer is significant in the shadow of the notion that campus is a bubble because it marks the student’s ability to do something “real.” Shane reflected the Tower Center’s involvement in the offer of off-campus grants when he described the desire of students to “apply all this stuff [learned in the classroom]” as contributing to the involvement of students in experiential learning, and described the share of service-learning in the larger endeavor of experiential learning as “tiny.” Shane’s construction of the campus as a bubble was very similar to Tracy’s, but it differed in that he specified that the college itself is “isolated.” In narratives of service-learning, the nearby city serves as the primary location of people in need. There are places farther afield visited during ASB and other activities, but they are places very much like the city near the college in that people in need can be found there. Shane’s description differed subtly from Johnny’s and Tracy’s because, in Shane’s account, it seemed as though places in need are not equal in what they might offer the students. This, in turn, helps to explain that Shane’s focus was on the application of learning in the classroom in the real world, and not so much on leaving the world of campus to help others, as in narratives of service-learning. Indeed, Shane saw the college’s location in a noncosmopolitan environment as partly responsible for the apathy on the part of students at the college. When Shane turned to his own efforts at social innovation, he demonstrated that social innovation evokes the notion of campus as a bubble, but does not require the encounter with others in need at the heart of Johnny’s and Tracy’s narratives: I started talking about programming with the director [of the Tower Center] and then, I think there was this progression in the uh, in the world of higher education, especially among little schools with butt loads of money, if you build it they will come. And so we started thinking about a space, uh, and, I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but, um, where are students most creative? So we designed the innovation lab and applied for funding. And then we started to think about programming and went to the conference and I became

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the college’s poster boy of social entrepreneurship which I think was interesting because I wasn’t really, you know, a lot of times students are employed at those conferences.

In stark contrast to narratives of service-learning, Shane’s theater of operations was split between campus and locations elsewhere. Shane’s efforts on campus and off campus involved him in two entirely distinct organizational structures. Indeed, the organization on campus, the Tower Center, and the one off campus, Ashoka U, were working together to claim mutual affiliations. The president’s semiannual letter to the faculty served, in turn, to advertise those mutual affiliations. Shane noted that Mayberry College is “among little schools with butt loads of money.” Later in the interview he explained that he applied to the Tower Center to get the funding for the innovation lab. He was able to get the funding, he explained, because the Tower Center had made available funds for social innovation projects. The college’s website describes the lab: “This space is well-suited for group brainstorming and design. All rooms are equipped with wall-to-wall white boards and comfortable seating to spur creative thought. The spaces are designed to support student innovators as they work to develop novel solutions to persistent social problems. Students are encouraged to reserve time in the lab to collaborate with their peers on an issue they are passionate about.” Both Shane and the website describe the students’ activity in the lab as “creative.” Shane also invoked the notion that students caught in the bubble of campus are apathetic to explain that students had not, for the most part, come to use the lab. Shane likened the failure to use the lab to the apathy displayed by students by their failure to engage in service-learning activities. Shane then explained that he and the director of the Tower Center began to think about “programming.” The conference Shane refers to is the Ashoka U Exchange. The organization’s webpage description of the conference is offered earlier in this chapter; that description is preceded with a call to the reader: “Imagine a world where all higher education institutions serve as vehicles for positive, sustainable social impact and innovation.” Shane remarked that he went to the conference, but intimated that his trip to the conference was not like that of other students. He pointed out that he did not have to work at the conference, and he suggested that his participation at the conference made him a celebrity, or as he put it, “the college’s poster boy of social entrepreneurship.” Shane explained that the conference had used “so much jargon” in pitching social innovation initiatives that he found the conference to

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be less than stimulating. He noted that terms like “social entrepreneurship” and “social innovation,” the very names used to describe and pitch the conference, were examples of jargon. Interestingly, Shane understood the jargon used to describe the conference to have been developed because of the academic nature of the conference’s theme.7 When I asked Shane whether he thought the jargon was a sign that the conference organizers wanted to produce words that could be associated with them and the institutions that were in attendance, he replied in the negative, and explained that the jargon indicated the ways that the world of the college was out of touch with the “real world.” He said he hoped that, in future years, the conference and its parent organization would not need so much jargon to describe what affiliated people are doing. Shane concluded the interview by noting that the use of jargon in social innovation efforts was a major contributing factor in the lack of interest among students, and explained that students would continue to be uninterested in social innovation as long as the language used to describe it remained like it is.

Neoliberalism and the Narration of Experiential Learning Harvey (2007) notes that neoliberalism has been a mode of government—emergent in the 1970s—that imagines the individual as the locus of citizenship and the privatized marketplace as the arena in which citizens would optimally act as consumers. Concomitant with the rise of neoliberalism, Harvey remarks, has been the “withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (3). Indeed, beginning in the 1980s massive reductions in federal and state assistance have occurred at the same time that the federal government increasingly has shifted responsibility for the provision of services to states. Scholars have pointed out that neoliberalism has a general tendency to erase social formations and boundaries that shape interaction and access to resources of various kinds in favor of the image of an individual whose responsibility it is to maximize the ability to maximize profit from a market. Greenhouse explains, “In its valorization of the individual, its preference for markets over rights as the basis for social reform, and its withdrawal of the state from the service sector, neoliberalism overwrites older notions of the public based in organic solidarity with a strong mechanical overlay—as an improvement, or modernization, of more traditional social bonds” (Greenhouse 2010: 3). The emergence of neoliberalism comes with a changing disposition to the self in addition to a changing disposition to social distinctions

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and processes. Gershon notes, “A neoliberal perspective assumes that the actors who create and are created by the most ideal social order are those who reflexively and flexibly manage themselves as one owns and manages a business, tending to one’s own qualities and traits as owned and even improvable assets” (Gershon 2011: 542). The onus is on the individual to work on and improve “qualities and traits” of the self. A neoliberal approach divorces the circumstances of such improvement from the social histories and ties that inform the subject’s present. Urciuoli’s study of discourses of diversity has been one of the most focused and sustained projects tracing the rise of a neoliberal approach within a context of higher education (Urciuoli 2003, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014). Urciuoli has shown how the construction of communicative “skills” has found a locus of action and improvement in the longstanding U.S. notion of the individual. One is led to envision the self as the means to maximize one’s chances for successful outcomes—via the enhanced ability to communicate—as one engages with other individuals and with institutions. At the same time, the construction of communicative “skills” has come to make invisible the relevance of contextual features to moments of interaction. Urciuoli explains, “What started as an inclusive social movement [in the rubric of social inequality and the search for justice] becomes a market-valued line on an individual’s résumé, a transformation routinely effected in the process of higher education. Knowledge about diversity is abundantly commodified, and once diversity is reconceptualized as a skill, communication quickly appears in the discursive mix” (Urciuoli 2010: 164). Students marked by racial and class experiences within the elite liberal arts context in which they study find that the discourse of diversity on campus does not provide them a representational apparatus by which they might recognize themselves. They gradually realize that the value of their presence on campus lies in a hopelessly undefined notion of what constitutes diversity. Diversity itself becomes commodified as just another skill that can join other skills toward the production of students prepared for the postgraduate world of employment. The neoliberal disposition between a subject and an institution traced by Urciuoli can be used to understand the radical difference in the ways in which students use service-learning and social innovation to narrate their dispositions to the college. The narratives of social innovation are based in neoliberal constructions of the self and its relationship to institutions because it imagines the self to be an agent of the institution’s relevance. But whereas Urciuoli’s marked subjects struggle to reconcile the particulars of their experiences to what the institution values, the

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particulars of what would make the institution relevant remain so undefined in social innovation that students engaged in it do not particularly believe themselves to be implicated in their failures. The notion of voice brings into focus two aspects of what constitutes the differences between narratives of service-learning and narratives of social innovation. On the one hand, the construction of the student manifested in narratives of service-learning and those of social innovation is different. On the other hand, the student involved in service-learning and the student involved in social innovation come to construct themselves as having different dispositions to the college. When students remark on their experiences in pursuit of servicelearning endeavors, they reconstruct campus and academic work as a place and set of practices in need of escape. Real people and practices exist elsewhere, away from campus; in order to engage with them, students must leave campus. Academic pursuits are cast in this arrangement as otherworldly and myopic. When students describe themselves in narrations of service-learning, they are oriented to the past. They use the organizations they have worked with to constitute themselves as service-learners, and they tend to list the organizations in a sequence ordered by the progression of time in the student’s own life. Further focus on the student as a discrete individual is achieved by the moment of realization of what service actually entails, the student’s use of available time to help less-fortunate others. The distinction between student and other serves to differentiate students as those who participate in service and those who do not, and tends to make irrelevant inequalities between students (LaDousa 2013).8 The campus emerges as a place to be transcended and the student emerges as an individual9 because there has occurred a moment when the meaning of service has been realized. Social innovation diverges starkly from service-learning in that campus and academic practices do not constitute something to be escaped but rather improved. Like the service-learners, the student who narrated his experiences with social innovation looked to the past to describe moments of activity, such as the creation of an innovation space and attendance at a conference. But such activities occurred on campus, not off. They involved other faculty and students, not unequal others excluded from the college. The distinction between the campus and elsewhere, foundational to narratives of service-learning, collapses in narratives of social innovation. For example, Shane described both the social innovation conference and campus to be places of jargon, jargon being an index of the unreal, and expressed hope that both could be reformed in the future toward resonance with the real world. In narratives of social

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innovation, the campus and academic life more generally stand in for the individual in neoliberal approaches. One is reminded of the point made by Gershon, Greenhouse, and Urciuoli that neoliberal approaches erase the social particulars that constitute subjects’ lives. In Shane’s reflections on social innovation, the campus is a subject in need of reform. Campus can be improved by having its various aspects—including students and curriculum—brought into greater resonance with the world outside by—in the rubric of social innovation—making change. Just what would change and how, of course, is left rather vague. Indeed, the activities Shane refers to when he narrates his experiences with social innovation are oriented to what might occur, not what has occurred. The innovation laboratory that Shane has received funding to design is a space where students can meet to discuss and plan, and the conference that Shane has attended is oriented to audience members who are urged to think about how they might further the presence of social innovation on their campuses. Later in the interview, Shane explained that, in his opinion, the social innovation lab had been a failure. I asked why, and he replied that very few students had used the space. He attributed the lack of use to the apathy of students generally. Thus, social innovation stands in contrast to the campus and academic practices as they are. It rests on the claim that academic practices on campus should be brought to bear on social problems, and that the campus would benefit from such. Overlooked, of course, is that many courses (and entire disciplines) are oriented to social problems, a point developed in Handler’s chapter in this volume. A second way in which the voice of service-learning and the voice of social innovation differ from one another is what each is imagined to achieve vis-à-vis others and the college more generally. Service-learners used service as a way to distinguish themselves from other students. They often listed a series of organization with whom they had worked, and occasionally mentioned that they had come to occupy a relatively senior position in a particular organization. Shane, on the other hand, indicated that he had worked with Tower Center administrators to secure funds and build something that had not existed before. One is reminded of the way in which the college president offered in her semiannual letter to the faculty the details of the college’s association with Ashoka U. In social innovation, recognition by an organization has the ability to generate something new: a social innovation lab and the embodiment of celebrity in Shane’s case, and the designation of Mayberry as a Changemaker Campus and a suite of new courses in the president’s case.

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Indeed, in a moment late in my interview with Shane, he spoke of the college as if he were an authoritative source: “I think that, um the college’s [Mayberry’s] model and the model of education that dominates elite liberal arts colleges is going to be seriously challenged in the next ten to fifteen years, um, and maybe the richest institutions will survive but um, uh, if these institutions are going to survive they are increasingly going to have to prove that the education that they are offering is quote unquote useful in the real world.” Here, not only did Shane cast the institution as in need of reform, a common move in neoliberal approaches, but he also incorporated the insight in the very voice of a student. In social innovation’s rubric of stakeholders and leaders, it would seem that Shane has come to align his own future value with the future of the institution itself. Students (and everyone else concerned) should engage in social innovation efforts because they help to bridge the divide between the college and the real world. Again, specifics are entirely missing. In the mirror of social innovation, service-learning relegates itself to the past—to experiences one has already had—configured by students’ participation in the efforts of other organizations.

Conclusion In an essay on the uses of diversity in higher education, Childs, Nguyen, and Handler (2008) note, “The university is constantly in motion, ceaselessly striving to improve and develop” (172). Student reflections on experiential learning reported on herein suggest that social innovation, and not service-learning, is a notion that is useful to efforts to “improve and develop” higher education. Students who report on their experiences while they are engaged in service-learning inhabit a voice characterized by the ability to account for those experiences by listing organizations, and isolating a moment of personal realization of the importance of serving others. The voice inhabited by students who recount their service-learning experiences looks backward in time and sees the college as something transcended. Indeed, in narratives of service-learning, work with other organizations counts as evidence that the student doing service is unlike other, apathetic, students. Apathetic students find the isolation of campus satisfying. The voice of social innovation is like the voice of service-learning in that the distinction between campus and elsewhere is salient. The voice of social innovation, however, desires to reform campus and its practices such that the disjunction between campus and elsewhere can be remedied. The voice of social innovation looks forward in time to what might

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happen given the provision of space and time for people to meet. But, in contrast to the voice of service-learning, the voice of social innovation does not recount experience toward claims of personal growth. The voice of social innovation simply knows that things should change because things should not be as they are. This is not to say that the voice of social innovation achieves nothing. Indeed, much is achieved: Students and faculty create new social bonds through working with institutional sources of money; students and faculty get to attend a conference together in a city far from campus; and the president gets to announce the designation of the campus as something new, and to announce that the campus has yet again been included with the right sort of peer institutions. Finally, students get to imagine that they are involved in, and can speak for, the very future of the institution. Their involvement matters because the campus is in need of change and the future is uncertain.

Acknowledgments I cannot thank by name the students who agreed to talk to me about service-learning and social innovation because I promised them anonymity through the protocol approved by my institution’s Institutional Review Board. I also promised anonymity to the funding organization at the college. A number of students, however, I can thank by name because they worked in iterations of the project described at the beginning of the chapter. They include Emily Banzer, Megan Bates, Micaela Caterisano, Jeremy Cottle, Paige Cross, Trevor Howe, Madison Kircher, Chip Larsen, Justin Long, Grace Parker-Zielinski, Gabriel Rivas, Christopher Rogers, Melissa Segura, Elizabeth Wilson, and Anna Zahm. A special note of thanks goes to Anastassia Baldrige who was a student in the project and my coauthor. I have discussed this work extensively with Jim Collins, Alicia DeNicola, and Ilana Gershon, and I am extremely grateful for their insights and suggestions. Bonnie Urciuoli has been an extraordinary interlocutor and her ideas and suggestions have left their mark on every aspect of the project and its participants. I must also thank the two external reviewers for Berghahn Books whose suggestions were extremely valuable.  Chaise LaDousa is professor of anthropology at Hamilton College. He has studied relationships between language and education in a number of contexts including India’s rapidly changing political economy (Hindi Is Our Ground,

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English Is Our Sky, Berghahn Books, 2014), U.S. collegiate life, and U.S. adult education initiatives. Publications on the latter topic include “Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation,” in Signs and Society, 2014, and, with Anastassia Baldrige, “Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center,” in Ethos, 2017.

Notes 1. All names have been anonymized. 2. The college’s communications department sent an intern to interview us on our work, and to write a story to be posted on the college’s website. After spending an hour stressing that we were being paid rather handsomely to conduct research whereas the people we were tutoring and interviewing were not being compensated for their time in a literacy project that could very well offer them little in the way of better pay or work, we were disappointed to read the first line in the article about us: “Technological literacy is an invaluable personal skill in the information age, one that can open doors and allow individuals to escape the cyclical pattern of urban poverty.” 3. For an example of the concept’s use in an ethnography, see Ahearn 2001. 4. See Handler, this volume, for commentary on the changing relationship between faculty and students in the world of academic philanthropy. 5. The term “social change” is used interchangeably with the term “social innovation.” Its use is not based on any actual theory of social change. 6. Tracy’s use of pronouns serves to scaffold her depiction of the campus and elsewhere, and serves to differentiate herself as a service-learner. She begins with the first-person singular (I) to convey her depictions of campus and the people who inhabit it. She then uses the first-person plural (ours) when she describes the distinction between students and people who live off campus. When she shifts back to the first-person singular to describe students, she builds an image of a particular kind of student. Fascinatingly, the student’s interest in mathematics and football maximally contrasts with Tracy’s interests. 7. See Urciuoli, this volume, for ways that jargon (register items, or ways of speaking emergent from a social situation or purpose) is used to constitute expertise about students outside of academic areas of study in the curriculum. 8. See, however, LaViolette, this volume. 9. The term ‘individual’ is neoliberally conceptualized as a unit without specific race or gender identity.

References Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, no. 1: 38–59. ———. 2007. Language and Social Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

From Service-Learning to Social Innovation ⽧ 135 Ahearn, Laura. 2001. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist and trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butin, Dan. 2006. “The Limits of Service-learning in Higher Education.” The Review of Higher Education 29, no. 4: 473–98. Childs, Courtney, Huong Nguyen, and Richard Handler. 2008. “The Temporal and Spatial Politics of Student ‘Diversity’ at an American University.” In Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their Temporalities, ed. Elizabeth Ferry and Mandana Limbert, 169–90. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 4: 537–55. Greenhouse, Carol. 2010. “Introduction.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol Greenhouse, 1–10. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvine, Judith. 1996. “Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy in Participant Roles.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 131–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LaDousa, Chaise. 2006. “The Discursive Malleability of an Identity: A Dialogic Approach to Language ‘Medium’ Schooling in North India.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16, no. 1: 36–57. ———. 2013. “‘Everyone’s Got Room to Grow”: A Discourse Analysis of Service-learning Rhetoric in Higher Education.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 33–52. ———. 2014. “Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation.” Signs and Society 2, no. 2: 203–29. LaDousa, Chaise, and Anastassia Baldrige. 2017. “Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center.” Ethos 45, no. 1: 116–38. Lee, Ben. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token vs. Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, no. 1: 6–22. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2003. “Excellence, Leadership, Skills, Diversity: Marketing Liberal Arts Education.” Language and Communication 23: 385–408. ———. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2: 211–28. ———. 2009. “Entextualizing Diversity: Semiotic Incoherence in Institutional Discourse.” Language and Communication 30, no. 1: 48–57. ———. 2010. “Neoliberal Education: Preparing the Student for the New Workplace.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol Greenhouse, 162–76. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

136 ⽧ Chaise LaDousa ———. 2014. “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircian Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education.” Signs and Society 2, no. 1: 56–83. Vološinov, V.N. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wortham, Stanton. 2001. Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.

CHAPTER 7

High Hopes and Low Impact Obstacles in Student Research ANASTASSIA BALDRIGE 

During the summer of 2011 two fellow students and I received a grant from an internal grant center at our liberal arts college to work with Chaise LaDousa, our faculty advisor, on a research project in literacy centers in a city in upstate New York (LaDousa 2014; LaDousa and Baldrige 2017). The grant was one of several awarded to students and faculty for summer research projects every year, with preference given to groups doing research in the local community. We planned to assist teachers in literacy centers by tutoring adults in preparation for the General Equivalency Diploma (GED) exam, and to conduct participant-observation fieldwork exploring the relationship between modes of literacy and neoliberal conceptions of agency and personhood. A few weeks before our project began, one of the literacy zone administrators informed us that rather than tutoring adults for the GED, we were to participate in the implementation of a new federally funded digital literacy computer program, Learner Web, in the classrooms. Learner Web was initially developed by a large public university in 2006. It is a $5.8 million program funded by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, a U.S. Department of Commerce initiative meant to foster broadband access through infrastructural and education projects. Learner Web (learnerweb.org) is self-paced courseware intended to address “the primary barriers to broadband access and use among adults in the United States: affordability, lack of digital literacy skills, and a perceived lack of content relevant to their daily lives, needs, and future aspirations.” The software aims to expand broadband use among “low-income, low-literate, ESOL, and other vulnerable populations” by implementing learning plans concentrated on digital literacy, broadband consumer education, and an introduction to career pathways.1

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We were happy to alter our project for the benefit of the pupils, and to assist the teachers with the tasks and practices they considered priorities. We soon realized, however, that the implementation of the program was problematic in several ways. First, the program itself was incomplete, did not function correctly, and sent inconsistent messages about its aims and targeted audience. Second, the varying and disjointed aims of the program were poorly suited to the pupils’ goals and literacy practices. Finally, our participation in the literacy centers practices became linked to the program’s shortcomings due to misunderstandings about the source of our funding and our assigned role to work with the pupils on the program. We began our field research by completing an online self-tutorial for Learner Web to learn the software, but the program was indeterminate and inconsistent about its targeted pupils. According to its tutorial, the project was designed to provide digital help to people who were economically vulnerable or elderly or new to the use of broadband whether they were native-born or immigrants. Patterns emerged from the initiative’s descriptions. It seemed that anyone coming to the center would be (1) low income, (2) elderly, or (3) foreign; and that they (4) would not know how to use a computer or the Internet, and (5) would not have broadband access. As tutors, we were instructed to sit next to the pupils at the computers as they went through the software, which would enable them to learn how to use computers and then become savvy broadband consumers. This process, encompassed by the tutorial’s frequently used phrases “crossing the digital divide” and “closing the digital literacy gap,” seemed to parallel the pupils moving across the poverty line. Apparently, as soon as the pupils learned how to use the computer and Internet, they would be able to acquire jobs with higher incomes and use that money to pay for their own personal broadband access. The software quickly shifted its focus from basic and practical information about using computers to a consumer education report about the differences between broadband providers, and then to the process of choosing between buying Macs and PCs. Initially, the program also promised to present a learning plan about career pathways for the pupils, but this plan never materialized. We later discovered that this learning plan had not yet been added to the software and that there was no expected date for completion. According to the tutorial, once we introduced ourselves and met the pupils, we were supposed to create an e-mail account with them, a necessary precursor to creating a Learner Web account. We were then to guide them through the online screening questions to assign

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them the appropriate learning plans, then access those learning plans. Beyond that list, Learner Web provided no instruction as to what to actually do with the pupil once we were sitting at the computers with them. The program’s linking of pupils’ reading levels and computer knowledge was discordant with the reality of the classroom. In order to be assessed for a learning plan, pupils had to answer questions about their familiarity with computers. Many pupils were quite adept at using computers and the Internet—they wrote e-mails to family and friends, maintained their own Facebook pages, downloaded music, and searched for general information on Google. Some of these pupils attended the literacy centers to improve their reading comprehension and writing, and others were more interested in expanding their knowledge of math. If the pupils were familiar with computers and answered the software’s intake questions accordingly, the software ended because it did not contain any learning plans for pupils with computer knowledge. The teachers eventually instructed us to have all the pupils answer “no” to any questions about computer knowledge so that they would be able to access the program, regardless of their actual knowledge and familiarity. Still other pupils had not used computers or the Internet before but were more advanced in reading or math, so the basic learning plans in these subjects linked with an unfamiliarity with computers were not challenging enough for them. In addition to the issues with the program itself, integrating the program was also problematic because the vast majority of the pupils attended the literacy zone classes in order to prepare for the GED exam. Many of the pupils were in a great hurry to obtain their GEDs, and became frustrated when they were distracted from this goal by having to use the computer. For the pupils, the computer was not an additional source from which to learn decontextualized knowledge like that needed for the GED, but rather was a vehicle for highly contextualized purposes. When the pupils at the literacy centers worked on packets of math problems or reading passages and comprehension questions in a GED book, they expected to see questions and approached them understanding that they contained nothing immediately relevant to their own lives. When the pupils sat down with us at the computers, they largely did not utilize the same set of practices with which they had approached the GED books and packets. The disjunction between the envisioned practices and goals of Learner Web and the ways in which the program actually resonated with pupils can be conceptualized by Ilana Gershon’s

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(2010) theory of the ideology of technology. Gershon posits that people’s experiences with different forms of media shape how they approach and interpret the activity conducted within a particular form. Pupils who had used computers and the Internet had done so in highly contextualized ways, such as sending e-mails, maintaining their Facebook pages, or searching for things immediately relevant to their lives. The pupils did not seem to recognize a connection between using the computer and what they were working on in the classroom; they did not perceive the computer as a source of decontextualized knowledge like their GED books. Generally, after a few minutes the pupils would grow frustrated by using the computers because they perceived their engagement with them to be a distraction from their goal of preparing for the GED. The teachers and administrators told us that the literacy centers and the Learner Web program were funded by New York State, and that our involvement in the project was tied to this state funding. They vaguely referenced instructions from, as they put it, “Albany,” and were reluctant to appear critical of the program to the liaisons between the literacy centers and the project partners. After we researched it on the Internet, however, we learned that Learner Web was funded and designed by a complex association of federal agencies, universities, and other smaller nonprofit organizations at local, state, and national levels. Although the New York State Education Department received reports about the time we spent logged in to Learner Web with pupils, we never discovered why the teachers and administrators felt pressured to participate in the Learner Web program. As the summer went on, the teachers slowly shifted the focus of the classrooms back to GED preparation, and the frustrating attempts at integrating Learner Web fell by the wayside. The literacy zone administrators and teachers were happy to have student volunteers, and we were eager to work with them and with the pupils, but the implementation of Learner Web was at odds with everyone’s goals. The administrators and teachers felt pressure to implement the program, in part due to their belief that the funding for the literacy zone somehow depended on their compliance with the program. The teachers grew frustrated with the program’s shortcomings and resented that they had to engage the pupils in something that was irrelevant to and even in opposition to their goal of obtaining a GED. The pupils resisted and outright rejected the program for similar reasons, regarding it as a distraction and waste of time. We were aware of the teachers’ and pupils’ frustrations and were also discouraged because our interactions

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with pupils became more and more disconnected from the content they wanted to learn. Because we were cultural anthropology students, funded to “do cultural anthropology research” (as our research proposal put it), our project was not derailed by the changes to our original research proposal. Instead, the research morphed into a critical analysis of the program implementation itself and the ways in which it interacted with the concepts of agency and literacy we had set out to study. I was even able to expand the project into my year-long senior thesis because I developed relationships with the pupils and teachers and continued to volunteer in the literacy centers each week. In another field of study, it might not have been possible to integrate the challenges of the research into the research analysis itself. The grant center’s oversight required only that we participate in a poster session during the college’s fall Family Weekend, and that each student turn in a twenty-five-page analysis of our research at the end of the summer. No feedback or follow-up to the research we submitted was ever promised or given. On the one hand, the grant center’s hands-off approach could be interpreted as a measure of trust in the students’ and faculty members’ ability and interest in producing some worthwhile observation at least related to the original proposed project. Another possibility, which is not necessarily exclusive of the first, is that the grant center, and by extension the college itself, was focused primarily on what Richard Handler in this volume discusses as the neoliberal liberal arts discourse framing student research as something that students “do,” where the “academic particulars of which are less relevant than the portrayal of the student as an active learner.” Grant centers and institutions focus on including student research experiences in the college’s statistics and promotional materials as positive examples of “the opportunity to do research, [rendering] utterly secondary [the] importance of the topic of study” (Handler, this volume). Here, too, it was only important that we complete the box-checking tasks of submitting a paper meeting the minimum page-length requirement and that we show up for the poster session. The grant center and college were able to promote our research to demonstrate that students at the college have the opportunity to “do research” and that they take those opportunities to “do research.” Indeed, the college’s communications department published an article about our project on the college’s website before we had submitted any observations, and it used the very loaded words and phrases about the students and program goals we sought to deconstruct through our research.

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 Anastassia Baldrige graduated from Hamilton College in 2012 and is currently a third-year student at Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, she will clerk for a federal district judge in the Eastern District of Arkansas. Relevant publication includes, with Chaise LaDousa, “Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center,” in Ethos, 2017.

Note 1. “The Learner Web Partnership,” Learner Web, published 2010, http://www. learnerweb.org/btop/.

References Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The Break-up 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaDousa, Chaise. 2014. “Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation.” Signs and Society 2, no. 2: 203–29. LaDousa, Chaise, and Anastassia Baldrige. 2017. “Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured world of a Literacy Welcome Center.” Ethos 45, no. 1: 116–38.

CHAPTER 8

The Experience Experts BONNIE URCIUOLI 

Introduction First-year experience (FYE) programs are designed to organize the social and learning experience of incoming college students so as to maximize student retention and integration into approved forms of college social life. FYE programs include curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular components. The first two are the province of faculty, and the third is the province of nonfaculty specialists who are student life experts with institutional credentials comparable to those of teaching faculty and who have taken on value parallel to that of faculty. FYE administrators disseminate their expertise through publications, conferences, degree programs, and other means. These all look like the dissemination of academic knowledge, but what they disseminate is not the discipline-based knowledge disseminated by academic faculty. FYE specialists disseminate a model of a student that can serve as the basis for institutional policy. In this chapter I examine the institutional agencies generating this expertise. I show how experts have conceptualized the student experience of education and established programs designed to connect classroom and social experience to the production of an appropriately socialized student. I compare FYE programs in colleges and universities where retaining students is an issue and where it is not, illustrating the latter through my own school’s grant-funded FYE program. Drawing on professional literature, institutional websites, and Internet sites marketing FYE consulting materials to demonstrate the discursive circulation of registers of FYE expertise, I show how the model of studenthood emerging from the FYE professional literature in the 1980s first developed and then came to merge with the desirably neoliberal student model favored as the contemporary product of higher education. When first developed, FYE programs were not central to college marketing; their function was to increase student retention.

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But with increasing focus on the college graduate as a neoliberalized subject, FYE programs increasingly figured into elite liberal arts education, and by 2010 had become an important element of undergraduate institutional representation in the academic marketplace.

Why a First-Year Experience? U.S. News and World Report, whose higher education ranking systems considerably influence the academic market, has recently begun to include FYE programs in their rankings and reviews: Orientation can go only so far in making freshmen feel connected. Many schools . . . now build into the curriculum first-year seminars or other programs that bring small groups of students together with faculty or staff on a regular basis.In spring 2015, we invited college presidents, chief academic officers, deans of students and deans of admissions from more than 1,500 schools to nominate up to 10 institutions with stellar examples of first-year experiences. Colleges and universities that were mentioned most often are listed here, in alphabetical order.1

The top twenty-six FYE programs listed by U.S. News are found in both public and private colleges and universities of varying sizes and reputations. All are based on the premise that the transition from high school to college should be structured through a program of shared firstyear activities. These programs are designed to create a bond among incoming students that will transcend unproductive social distractions, optimize student academic and social performance, and above all keep students in school. Such programs have been in development since the 1980s, but they have particularly accelerated in the past decade, along with other college and university programs ancillary to academics that figure into how colleges present themselves on the higher education market. FYE programs also exist within an economy of grants from donor agencies through which higher education institutions continually develop new, and often entrepreneurial, programs. They are also compatible with the perceived need to demonstrate educational outcomes to stakeholders, especially corporate-minded ones. They are based on a construction of an idealized student who is a fundamental component of a college community. Upon that construction has been built a specialized administrative structure that, like other such grant-based structures, has come to exemplify a particular realm of nonacademic expertise.

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FYE programs start with orientation, often extended over several days and including outdoor or local exploring trips. They continue through the school year with components both curricular (seminars designed for and restricted to first-year students, and that might or might not be discipline-specific) and cocurricular (common readings, lectures, concerts). They sometimes extend to living arrangements such as first-year housing. Socialization with faculty advisors is a frequently highlighted feature, as are workshops or peer-oriented social events. FYE programs are frequently developed with grants from such agencies as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation or the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Program development can include specialized hires (through national searches) in student life administration, generally requiring master’s degrees. Administrative conferences, faculty development workshops, and resource centers all figure into the development process. We can get a sense of specific implementations from website excerpts from four institutions on the U.S. News list of 26 highest ranking FYE programs: two liberal arts colleges (the College of William & Mary, and Skidmore College) and two universities, one public (Ohio State University) and one private (Stanford University). Each school starts its first-year program with orientation, some including special exploration trips, and each has first-year seminars. Below I give other features of each program in addition to examples of website language describing program aims. The FYE at the College of William & Mary includes four programs that promote holistic student development by supporting a key community element: a peer-educators program of bystander intervention to teach students how to deal with “potentially unhealthy situations by offering assistance, support, and/or resources,” a presentation of “scenarios that reflect some of the issues that freshmen face during their first year in college and steps they can take to avoid pitfalls that may arise during their time at the university,” a third that “explore(s) further the various areas of diversity with current William & Mary students who will present this topic from the peer perspective,” and a fourth that follows up the first, presented by “current William & Mary students who are dedicated to promoting healthful relationships, reducing sexual violence, and supporting survivors.”2 FYE objectives are described as follows: 1. Connect with and engage in the William & Mary community 2. Cultivate intellectual curiosity and embrace the academic challenges of the Liberal Arts experience

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3. Further develop the life skills needed to manage daily responsibilities, make healthy choices, and navigate challenges.3

The FYE language heavily incorporates reference to the Tribe (as the college’s sports teams are collectively known) as a focus of school identity. Skidmore College’s program includes first-year seminars with a faculty member who also serves as advisor, a summer reading program, peer counseling pairing incoming students with older students, and cocurricular events such as lectures and films. Their FYE “aims to cultivate each student as a whole person. In the grand tradition of liberal education, we hope that students emerge from the first year, and eventually from the College, as engaged, thoughtful, and capable citizens of the world.”4 The FYE website also explains that “the thinking behind FYE is simple: learning shouldn’t be confined to a classroom, lab, or studio for a few hours a day. It’s really what the entire college experience is about. So the better we blend your academic and cocurricular experiences, and the more connected you are with faculty, staff, upperclass students, and first-year peers, the more successful and satisfied you’ll be.”5 Ohio State University’s FYE includes a precollege summer leadership conference and adventure trips, in addition to a success series of cocurricular sessions on several themes (e.g., academic engagement and career exploration, common readings, health and wellness, and diversity and global awareness). Their website states that “the foundations built during the first year are key to a student’s success” and that “First Year Experience (FYE) picks up where Admissions leaves off.” They describe their mission as a commitment to “creating the conditions for success at the university for all new undergraduate students” which involves programming to form meaningful relationships so that new students will better understand how to navigate the changing world around them, enhance their capacity to engage with new people and ideas, and develop the skills and connections required to meet the challenges they face both in and out of the classroom. . . . This programming extensively uses peer leaders, trained experts in the first-year student journey at Ohio State, having a broad understanding of the variables that may positively or negatively affect a first-year student’s experience. They represent the diversity of the Ohio State community in experience, interests and ideas. Peer Leaders guide students through their first year primarily by outreach and relationship development.6

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Stanford University’s FYE includes a specialized first-year advising program. It describes its FYE commitment as follows: “Underlined by the notion that education does not begin and end in the classroom, Stanford’s commitment to its undergraduates is inherently linked to every aspect of their life on ‘The Farm’ [Stanford]. The extraordinary resources here provide the support and tools necessary to explore and construct their future pursuits; most notable is the Undergraduate Advising & Research office which welcomes and integrates freshmen into the Stanford family from acceptance of admission.”7 First-year seminars are the curricular cornerstone of FYE programs. They are largely taught by faculty whose selection of course content depends on their own disciplinary training and interests. Seminar content is a variable, perhaps the most variable, content element of first-year programs. The desired outcome for first-year seminars is the establishment of close relations among peers and with a faculty mentor in an interactive class setting,8 which does not depend on specific course content. Other FYE content elements are much more consistent. Nonacademic program themes in these four programs consistently emphasize the importance of diversity and globalization in one’s perspective, and the importance of wellness, healthy peer relationships, and peer leadership in one’s social life, themes also consistent outside the four schools mentioned here. Also recurring is the notion that successful first-year programs lead to success that can be quantitatively assessed in terms of outcomes. The consistency underlying the nondisciplinary content of FYE programs stems from a general sense, shared among institutions, of what each component of such programs should accomplish.

The Development and Dissemination of FYE Expertise The University of South Carolina’s (USC’s) National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Students in Transition (established 1986) plays an originary and continuing role in FYE program development. USC first offered a first-year course (University 101) in 1972 “to build trust, understanding, and open lines of communication between students, faculty, staff, and administrators” and encourage development of “more positive attitudes and behaviors toward the University”; increase student retention (probably the primary motive); have students better “understand the multiple, essential purposes of higher education”; and “facilitate a major faculty development initiative, which would improve teaching in all undergraduate courses, not just the first-year seminar.”9 John Gardner, who founded the National Resource Center in 1986

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(having originated and for some decades directed USC’s University 101 course),10 and Lee Upcraft, at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, have for over thirty years been leading figures in the FYE literature (Upcraft et al. 2005). The National Resource Center situates itself as disseminator of FYE expertise, as indicated by its mission statement: Building upon its history of excellence as the founder and leader of the first-year experience movement, the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition serves education professionals by supporting and advancing efforts to improve student learning and transitions into and through higher education. We achieve this mission by providing opportunities for the exchange of practical and scholarly information as well as the discussion of trends and issues in our field through the convening of conferences and other professional development events such as institutes, workshops, and online learning opportunities; publication of scholarly practice books, research reports, a peer-reviewed journal, electronic newsletters, and guides; generating, supporting, and disseminating research and scholarship; hosting visiting scholars; and maintaining several online channels for resource sharing and communication, including a dynamic website, listservs, and social media outlets.11

Although the references to journals and scholarship suggest academic work, the kind of knowledge disseminated through the National Resource Center better fits Abbott’s (1988: 35–79) characterization of a profession. The defining area of a profession is based on a task, a human problem amenable to expert service. Problems are diagnosed as cases or types, abstracted from particular people in particular contexts, and disassembled with their treatment focused on elements of that disassembly. The profession sustains jurisdiction in its field by demonstrating legitimacy, thus maintaining clear borders with tasks objectively defined in fixed, static terms. Professionals can operate competitively on the open market through referral networks, to include marketing. Professional credentials are actively maintained through consulting and workshops, and professional structures are maintained through associations. This stands in contrast to knowledge produced by faculty who operate in what Abbott (2001) calls “the chaos of disciplines.” Disciplinary knowledge emerges in relation to previous forms of such knowledge and in response to institutional structuring of such knowledge at larger and smaller scales. Disciplinary knowledge and authority are thus re-

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produced in a fractal manner, recreating locally, within schools, the pattern of more general disciplinary networks found at the national or international level. Academic disciplines operate in a continual state of redefinition leading to considerable incommensurateness across disciplines in terms of what counts as important or useful knowledge. Yet disciplines are framed by modernist, professionalized administrative structures whose primary investment (even for administrators who themselves come out of academic disciplines) is in institutional problem solving. To stakeholders with corporate-oriented interests, particularly trustees, the professional problem-solving aspect of administrative structure doubtless makes more sense than does disciplinary based knowledge, which can appear quite esoteric. The central problem that FYE programs are designed to solve is that of student engagement at points of transition, particularly the transition of entering college. The Freshman Year Experience (Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates 1989) and Challenging and Supporting the First Year Student (Upcraft, Gardner, Barefoot, and Associates 2005) provide major conceptual syntheses. In the following discussion, I address how its expert knowledge is framed as practices that bring about desired outcomes, how that knowledge is expressed in a register of expertise that spreads and intersects with corporate and marketing registers as it reaches new audiences, and how the discursive results particularly index those audiences. To that end, I address the core academic FYE literature, an institutional report on FYE implementation, FYE pages on college websites, and FYE marketing websites. By moving through these representations of expertise, we can see how expertise is distributed downward and outward from its highest-ranking source. Carr (2010a) addresses several key points about expertise. Although spoken of as an object possessed, expertise operates as discursive practice, “inherently interactional because it involves the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge” (18). Thus, one learns to act as an expert in a process of socialization into a hierarchy of relations and values and, at the same time, into a register. Mastery of that register also makes it possible for experts to participate in the establishment of an interpretive frame through which objects of expertise are constructed and evaluated. A system of value is constituted through and mediated by the performance of expertise, and as denotative as that performance might appear, it is in fact performative (indexically creative) in that one’s expertise is established through processes simultaneously interpretive and interactive, and in which, as Carr (23) points out, who one talks to can outperform what one talks about (especially

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given the degree to which topic is a function of one’s interlocutors). Thus, Carr argues, expertise operates as second-order indexicality (Silverstein 2003). The discursive elements signaling expertise guide participants toward a frame of reference that makes sense and matters to them. That frame subsequently organizes how what count as relevant facts and values are constructed and assessed. This collaboratively sustained framework of ethnometapragmatic modeling is fundamentally ideological, constructing not only what is, but also what should be. We see this in the emergence of any literature that defines its field. The point of a foundational literature is to establish and define the objects of expertise. We see this in the noun phrases in the article titles in Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates (1989): “Today’s Freshmen,” “The Freshman Year Experience,” “Student Development,” “College Environments,” “Essential Programs and Services,” and “The Freshman Seminar.” Each of these noun phrases suggests a concrete object in this literature, the definition of a type against which particular tokens can be examined and assessed. The student is imagined as a type whose inner state, including inner needs, can be mapped out in ways amenable for effective policy development. Talk about the student is thus imaginable, and ideologized, as purely denotative, naturally reflecting a preexisting state (Carr 2010a, 2010b). The type can shift: Upcraft and colleagues (2005: xiv) explain why the term “freshman” has become rethought as “the first-year student.” But by and large, the fundamental terms of this set of notions about studenthood changed little between the 1989 and 2005 volumes, nor has it changed substantially since.12 The authors of this literature ground models of first-year students in theories of psychosocial development. Upcraft (1989) cites Erik Erickson’s work on personality and identity development of youth in social context, Nevitt Sanford’s work on student growth in a college environment as an interactive process of challenge and response, and Arthur Chickering’s work on seven vectors of college student development. Upcraft also cites work by William Perry and Lawrence Kohlberg.13 The student type that is modeled through this development approach emerges as a set of capacities that define one as a successful social actor. For example, according to Chickering the student ideally develops competence, autonomy, and the capacity to manage emotions; establishes an identity; and develops healthy relationships, a clear purpose, and integrity, all of which the institution has some responsibility in fostering (Upcraft 1989: 42–43). A good FYE program should therefore foster character development: assessment of the developmental status of incoming students makes it possible to provide the right experiences in

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the right order (Whiteley 1989). Much of the 1989 volume is organized around what can best aid student development: how best to model the college environment through academic advising, academic support programs, mentoring, counseling, and health and wellness programs. Several chapters address the goals of the freshman seminar, including its key elements, the amount of writing there should be, how writing should be graded, and how student engagement can be fostered and retention increased. Other chapters address issues facing demographically specific (diverse) populations (listed as Hispanic, black, and women, as well as adult learners, commuter students, student athletes, disabled students, and honors students). The 2005 volume follows the same pattern, updated by attention to progress made or new challenges faced since the earlier volume. Of particular relevance to this chapter is the freshman (in 1989) or first-year (in 2005) seminar. Where faculty generally see any course they teach in terms of disciplinary content, FYE administrators see FYE seminars specifically in nondisciplinary terms. Jewler (1989) outlines the elements of the USC University 101 program that he believes makes it effective. These include exercises that unify the class as a group, and units on best use of institutional resources, study skills, life skills, and so on; disciplinary content is clearly not a primary consideration. Hunter and Linder (2005: 279) classify first-year seminars as three types: (1) as extended orientation seminars, (2) as academic seminars that are all more or less the same in content or topically specific, and (3) as basic study skills seminars. What make these three types comparable are the goals toward which they are designed. Instructors are advised to specify these goals in the course syllabus. Goals can include orienting students to campus resources, fostering personal development, developing critical thinking and writing skills, introducing general education requirements and specific disciplines, encouraging career planning, developing a sense of campus community, increasing and enhancing interaction with faculty and other students, and developing student support networks (283). In short, even when FYE seminars do have discipline-specific content, they are structured toward specific outcomes regardless of content. Discipline-specific content is one of several equally important goals, making the discipline more or less fungible. The two volumes cited above are central to the FYE literature, so their contents can be reasonably taken as characteristic of the FYE expertise register—that is, its typifying linguistic elements and the elements’ pragmatic (social) interpretation. Throughout the chapters in these volumes, students and student college experience are modeled

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as relatively closed systems with discrete and clearly definable constituting elements that are related to each other in causal ways. These elements and conditions are recurringly referred to in terms of components, outcomes, assessment, skills, leadership, support, challenge, development, goals, objectives, effectiveness, involvement, resources, and partnerships. Program developers are urged to assess, review, identify, and examine. The use of these terms by experts—in literature, in workshops, and on websites—demonstrates Carr’s point that expertise is performed through the deployment of its registers, and that through such performance a system of value is constructed and maintained. Register deployment is thus not a simple process of referring to what is already there. The very process of describing and explaining brings into being a way of seeing and understanding the world at the same time that it brings into being the relations among expert actors that sustains that understanding. Hence the importance of the point made by Agha (2007: 145–49): registers are cultural models of action linking discursive production to images of person, interpersonal relations, and types of conduct, which links them as well to formation of social personas and identities. The FYE register effectively distinguishes the circle of people empowered to engineer the defining realities of student social life. Central to this performative establishment of expertise is the process of citation through which subjectivity is shaped. Goodman, Tomlinson, and Richland (2014: 455–61) point out that acts of citation locate subjects in relation to other subjects. The repeated formulation, transmission, and repetition of bits of knowledge moves those citing into alignment with the sources cited, at the same time reinforcing and disciplining perceptions of tokens into shapes that align with the cited type. Thus, through citational practices, “subjects learn to become distinctly recognizable cultural types” whose discourse is linked to “wider formations of knowledge and authority” (461). Such practices have shaped the volumes examined above, which are characterized throughout by cross-citation. As we see below, they are also cited by sources farther down the hierarchy of expertise, as presentation of FYE expertise moves outward and downward from its academic wellspring. The citation process reinforces the performative function of the language of expertise, reinforcing the interpretive awareness, shared among all users, that the discursive elements and their salient functions of instructing, referring, and explaining mutually constitute a system of knowledge and understanding, through which students and student experience become recognizable and valued.14 It is not just that the forms and functions

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connect users to certain aspects of context, but also that in the moment of use, those forms and functions articulate what users are aware of as a higher order (Silverstein calls it n+1st order, Carr calls it second order) of indexicality that informs their identity as performers of these expert practices. As Silverstein (2003: 226) says of oinoglossia, another instance of “higher-order indexical authorization,” its users “become, in performative realtime,” the people who are what they talk about. And, as Silverstein also says of oinoglossia (227), such indexical authorization has moved, along with register elements, out into a wider world of consumer definition.

The Hierarchy of Expertise: Spreading the Word(s) An important point about registers of expertise is that they come into contact with other registers and can be reshaped through processes of indexical reordering (and could also affect other registers). This is evident in the USC National Resource Center’s use of history of excellence, founder and leader, mission, or professional development events on their website (above), pointing to positions of alliance between educational policy specialists and external stakeholders. The occurrence of such terminology shared across fields of discourse demonstrates Silverstein’s (2005) principle of interdiscursivity, the social processes by which discursive elements and patterns move across social fields in ways that index (point to) shared connections or common positions or interest— in other words some commonality of social process. Here, common elements characterize registers of institutional expertise and corporate stakeholders but not academic or disciplinary registers, indexing not only shared values but also shared perspectives on what an academic institution is supposed to be, and in what direction influence flows. The kind of publication examined in the previous section defines the top of the expertise hierarchy, the point from which its authority flows. Socially, it is structured as a field of colleagues and potential or future colleagues who know each other through institutional relations as colleagues or students or faculty, or through networks of shared publication, marked by shared citation. In that sense, its participants are temporally and spatially (chronotopically) connected (Bakhtin 1981; Silverstein 2005: 6). As expertise is manifested farther from that social sphere, there remain some points of connection, and these crossover points are indexed by some degree of interdiscursivity. The connections are looser and the transmission of expertise is one way, from higher to lower, so to speak. The FYE report prepared by the University

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of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) in 2006 provides a useful example. Following a list of the people involved in FYE planning and their planning schedule, the report cites research on the high attrition rate prior to graduation, and research on the effect of FYE in and out of the classroom on student retention. The report continues by citing Upcraft, Gardner, and affiliated researchers: A first year experience program is larger than a single seminar course and represents an intentional and comprehensive program that consists of different components working together to increase academic performance, provide a cohesive learning experience, increase student persistence, assist in the transition to college, facilitate a sense of commitment and community to the university, and increase personal development. . . . While the exact components of a first year experience program vary depending on the structure of the university and the unique needs of its students, common areas of emphasis include new student orientation, the first year curriculum, academic advising, student support services (academic and non-academic), and administrative policies and practices that pertain to the first year (Upcraft, Gardner & Barefoot, 2004). An often overlooked component is the creation of programs that support and facilitate student contact with faculty outside of the classroom.15

This segment illustrates the summary of the key points discussed earlier along with the continued citation of the foundational sources developing those points. Next is a section detailing statistics on incoming and transfer students, including retention data, refined demographically. Next is a discussion of UMKC’s current FYE program and its aims or “learning outcomes” phrased as “students will . . . ” followed by verbs including develop, examine, demonstrate, recognize. This is followed by a lengthy list of recommended actions, who will do them, and the actions’ goals. This report, and others like it, appear to build on the research foundation examined above. As we move to websites like those examined at the beginning of this chapter—William & Mary, Skidmore, Ohio State, Stanford—we see the voice of authority becoming increasingly a voice from nowhere (Irvine and Gal 2000), with the participant structure much less directly indexed (and thus less perceptible), with little if any citation of research sources, and with straightforward and unconditional assertions of cause and effect, much like the type 5 statements in the continuum of facticity proposed by Latour and Woolgar (1979: 75–88).16 For example, in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for the First Year Experience

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states, note the verbs (which I italicize) that suggest the capacity of high-impact practices for causal relations: “High-impact practices are a set of purposeful learning experiences that have been shown to deepen student learning and engagement, raise levels of performance, retention and success for students, and that invoke intellectually engaging and effective educational practices.”17 This discourse of facticity neatly fits the next outward move for the discourse of expertise: its co-enregisterment with marketing language. Here another aspect of citationality appears, the one that animates branding through, as Nakassis (2012) argues, a kind of interdiscursivity “linking . . . multiple semiotic events” (626) while pointing to a sort of equivalence across them. In branding, the iteration comes in establishing that branded things are like each other in a certain way; hence the performativity of branding, the emergence of the brand as a thing. The citation involved in branding and the one involved in academic citation both bring into being states of social affairs, but not the same states. What is branded is the presenter of expertise but a different kind of expertise from that of the cited academic solver of problems. Here expertise becomes a commodity so the expert has a different relationship to the interlocutor. The brand that comes into being animates the expert as performer of the commodified FYE service. This kind of expert has knowledge to sell to education companies, as can be seen in the menu of products and services offered by the Pearson Education Company. Among their higher education consulting services are college readiness and completion services, including, under the subheading Student Success, an FYE program package. This packaging of expertise is a manifestation of the Pearson Education brand: a thing, but a different kind of thing from that found in the Upcraft and Gardner volumes. The reiterated statements of facts are a key element but so too are the elements of corporate register, because these elements might persuade someone to buy the expertise. Thus, in the following excerpt from Pearson’s FYE package, we see tropes like “reach the finish line” and “partnering with institutions,” which I have italicized in the following extract: A strong academic foundation is critical to college readiness and success. But in the long run, it takes more than academics to reach the finish line. Research from the Association of American Colleges and Universities has shown that students who participate in first-year experience programs have more positive relationships with faculty, are more

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knowledgeable about and make better use of campus resources, and exhibit better time-management skills than peers who do not participate in these types of programs. [Here the Pearson website cites specific AACU research.] The first-year experience is an opportunity to prepare new college students with the skills and knowledge they need beyond academics to persist to completion and meet their individual goals. Pearson is partnering with institutions to set students up for success through a quality first-year experience that includes a number of other high-impact practices like orientation, a student success course, and more.18

Where nonmarketing websites address student success in college, marketing websites (like this one) address students as future workers. Students appear as neoliberal agents (Gershon 2011) with the capacity to manage themselves like businesses, making use of relations with superordinates, local resources, and soft (social) skills such as time management. Students thus imagined as products of applied expertise will reach the finish line through nonacademic inculcation (again stressing disciplinary knowledge as fungible—any kind will do), assuring institutional stakeholders that such students will be the kind of products that their schools want to be known for: bundles of self-managed, flexible skills (Urciuoli 2008). Another model of marketed FYE expertise is provided by a small nonprofit company called Growing Leaders, whose primary service is the provision of “leadership training and development” to educational institutions, civic organizations, and churches.19 They provide an FYE leadership program called Habitudes, which has an accompanying and similarly named book. Their website makes the same points as does Pearson’s site, and in ways that, perhaps because of the emphasis on leadership, are even more corporately interdiscursive: Habitudes: The Habits and Attitudes of a First Year College Student makes use of our best-selling resource entitled Habitudes: Images That Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes. The images in these books teach students to lead themselves well. Topics covered include building strong character, personal growth, self-care, taking initiative, commitment, time management, responsibility, discipline, and more. With college drop-out rates on the rise and an increasing number of students struggling to adjust to life away from their parents, First Year Experience programming has never been more important. The Habitudes curriculum and first year experience books provide a tool to use in a classroom or group setting.20

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The items following the words “Topics covered” correspond to outcomes that FYE professionals seek to engineer for students. But these items are now presented as if pieces of a student that the company can sell to a college or university, which can in turn put them together and sell as its product: a whole student that stands for that school. This becomes clear in the list of outcomes that Habitudes promises to help students do: • Break out of the herd mentality to influence others in positive ways. • Develop critical thinking skills that produce better life choices, such as choosing healthy friends, improving study habits, and setting meaningful goals. • Capitalize on personal strengths to be career-ready at graduation. • Master the transitions from school to college and college to career.21

Habitudes concludes its pitch by stressing the so-called timeless truths that make up its curriculum (the ultimate factual voice-from-nowhere authority), the availability of its author to kick off the program, and its low expense and ease of use (turnkey program) that any staff or faculty can implement. Abbott (1988) notes that professions are characterized by referral networks, credentialing, use of distribution systems such as workshops, and professional competition. These dynamics are characteristic of FYE expertise development and dissemination at each point of discursive movement as discussed above. Once academic experts, through a chain of authorization (via cited research) has established the ideal student as a model made up of parts, which can each be improved, experts within institutions can bring that research into play in the establishment of nonacademic student services to improve those parts. Workshops can be held to implement the results of that research (particularly to instruct faculty). A base for expertise can be established outside academic institutions, either by large for-profit corporations like Pearson or small nonprofit (but still entrepreneurial) outfits like Growing Leaders. Schools can hire their consultants to supplement or substitute for in-house expertise. Each of these discursive locations has a different participant structure. And who are all these experts talking to? LaDousa (2014), using Bakhtin’s (1986: 95) notion of addressivity (the qualities by which discourse is oriented toward a particular addressee), takes up some comparable elements of the problem of the addressee in neoliberalized education initiatives. In his study, LaDousa and some of his students (see Baldrige, this volume) took an online self-tutorial

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to prepare them to tutor adult education students in digital literacy. In the process he found that some website pages of the online tutorial clearly consisted of instructions addressed to those acting as tutors and some talked about the capacity for digital literacy to transform poverty in ways that (as he and his students eventually figured out) address organizations that might benefit from use of the tutorial software. Not addressed by the tutorial were the actual students who might need to become digitally literate. There were some biographical website pages about students who had been neoliberally transformed by digital literacy practices (such transformation taking the form of productive organizational participation) but the important addressees appeared to be the organizations involved in creating the—if we might call it that— digital literacy product. We see something like that pattern throughout the discursive loci of expertise registers examined here. The discursive forms and functions of primarily academic expertise registers address fellow experts; we have already seen abundant examples. The in-house report addresses institutional staff, academic and nonacademic, and addresses them as implementers of policy, as can be seen in lists of recommendations like this: A. Curricular Support 1. Design First-Year Experience courses/seminars for all academic units specific to the needs of each unit and require enrollment of all first-year students. In recognition of the retention value of introductory courses designed for first-year students as well as the unique curricular policies and student needs of UMKC’s academic units, we recommend devising a campus model of unit-specific FYE courses. The expertise available within the division of student affairs needs to be sought as the curriculum is established. Proposed Accountability: Academic Deans/Provost At Deans’ Council April 10, 2006 the Provost recommended that Deans implement a course, seminar series, or informal gatherings throughout the year to guide FYE students’ studies in their academic units. Also forecasted was a Summit on Student Engagement to take place in September 2006.22

Students are addressed for a few pages at the end of the report’s appendices. Their status as addressees is indexed by repeated imperatives and directions for how to live student life. For example,

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Own UMKC as YOUR university (Develop a sense of belonging . . . ) • How you do this: 䡲 Read and live UMKC’s Core Values 䡲 Make a personal commitment to follow the Student Conduct Code 䡲 Review the Student Handbook 䡲 Participate in Welcome Week Activities23

College websites like those in the first section of this chapter address parents and perhaps donor organizations. These sites talk about students in the third person, which suggests that potential students are not primary addressees. The Pearson and Growing Leaders websites address potential institutional customers, and definitely not students. Throughout these websites, the student whose institutional welfare is at issue is primarily an object of reference, and rarely is an addressee. In many ways the aim of FYE programs is to design and bring into being forms of sociality that would easily fit into the social fields with which they are interdiscursive. They are explicitly “metasocial,” if I might coin that term, in that they propose desired terms of sociality and agency. The stress on learning how to learn and engaging productively with peers and mentors while identifying with the institution over one’s peers, all point toward ways of perceiving, interpreting, and acting that are equally useful during students’ time in college, and after college during students’ working lives. This institutionally engaged mode of sociality is the opposite of the kind of autonomous and seemingly uncontrolled student sociality characteristic of college fun. The latter, hardly referred to throughout these discursive sites, is the real problem for professionals to solve.

The Problem of Student Fun Experience-structuring is meant to prevent unwanted forms of sociality as much as it is meant to create preferred forms of sociality. Though rarely said explicitly, FYE programs are meant to contain and limit the autonomous student-centered sociality generally considered to be fun. When students are institutionally imagined as outcomes to be managed and problems to be solved, and when student agency is valued more or less in proportion to the extent that students meet those expectations, peer-centered social autonomy, disconnected from institutional oversight, takes a back seat. In her history of college student life from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, Horowitz (1987) traces the growth of

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student culture from students’ perspective, asking what being students means to students themselves. She makes a distinction between college men and college women who define a socially autonomous and significant college life, and those who go to college but locate themselves outside college life. This is both a social order that students pass on to each other and part of a larger social order that itself changes in ways that shape the student order. At the heart of that order is a world semiotically focused on being a student as a defining identity, apart from and in opposition to administrative or faculty authority, a world of meaning and value made by students for themselves. Moffatt (1989), focusing ethnographically on one large public university in the 1980s, argues that much of what had been autonomous, student-run extracurricular activities of an earlier generation’s college life had by then come under administrative oversight. In response, many students relocated their spheres of autonomy to informal interaction or fraternities and sororities away from college-identified activities. Moffatt notes the discursive disconnection of “community,” a key term in FYE register, from actual student sociality, as does Nathan (2005). Reference to community indexes an institutional agency, which is the antithesis of student-centered autonomy. Moffatt (1989: 71) locates community in student life dean discourse, an officialese that “emphasized student choice and . . . obfuscated deanly authority. Dorm floors should be ‘interdependent communities of caring individuals’ who ‘enhanced their college experiences’ together, the deans recommended.” The programming and other structured activities through which community was to be fostered was the on-the-ground responsibility of student preceptors. Nathan delineates orientation activities, the first-year seminar, and the community-building activities pursued by resident assistants. She points out how the mandatory first-year colloquium, using common readings to explore community, citizenship, and diversity, exemplifies the contradiction between imposed community building activities and the notion of individual student choice, a contradiction that the school Nathan studied tried to resolve through elective participation in official extracurricular activities. But from the student perspective what matters most are choices made outside the reach of official programming: choosing one’s own friends independent of college-planned activities; and managing one’s time and workload by one’s own, not official, prerogatives. Building on Moffatt’s observations, Nathan (2005: 23) elaborates the importance of fun as a defining condition of college experience. At the school she studied, Nathan found that the actual amount of time that

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students put into fun is considerably less than one would expect from the frequency with which students talk about it. But fun indexes the world of peers, following a direct line from the cultural patterns of nineteenth-century student life elaborated by Horowitz: a world of hedonism quite apart from faculty or administrators. The terms of participation in this world serve “as markers of the real ‘college experience’” (108). The archetypal locus of autonomy and fun are fraternities and sororities that, as hosts of parties, define the social scene even for nonmembers. Seaman (2005) suggests that the intense and fragmented nature of contemporary student sociality might be a response to conditions of fragmentation. He charts the ever-expanding menus of consumer choices available for activities and consumption, and the profusion of social and personal complications that characterize students’ lives. He also charts, from observation and interviews supplemented by news stories, the ways in which student practices like pregaming and hooking up push notions of choice to and often even beyond the limits that administrators, faculty, and parents would consider sensible. Seaman documents instances in which student fun becomes a fetish of autonomy (though he does not use those terms) and instances in which the world of autonomy/fun clashes sharply with the world of administrative regulation and/or student spokespersons on race or gender issues. The concept of fun turns out to be semiotically complex. Examining college fun in terms of student agency and the liminality of undergraduate life, LaDousa (2011) analyzes its continual performance and recreation of its defining terms, through the medium of signs on student rental houses at Miami University of Ohio. These house signs (e.g., Octopussy; Sex on the Beech; and Liquor Up Front, Poker In The Rear) are characterized by word plays on sex, liquor, and related themes, in addition to popular culture (James Bond movies) and local place (Beech Street) references. From a student perspective, none of this should be overexplained or taken seriously. LaDousa sees house signs as metacultural (Urban 2001), or, in other words, a cultural practice that indicates the interpretation and value of other cultural practices (as, e.g., movie reviews indicate how to select, understand, and evaluate movies). Metaculturally, house signs point to the party location, to the partying disposition of the house residents, and to the fact that it is all meant to be funny. House signs, skating as close as possible to (and sometimes over) the edge, indicate what it means to be a student from a student perspective. College sociality has long been characterized by playful elaboration of form, a don’t-take-it-seriously sensibility, and a clearly defined dis-

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tance from academic and administrative interests. Performing that sociality is a sign of belonging, an index with the potential to create or reinforce one’s insider status. The performative work through which such belonging emerges is grounded in masses of connections specific in time and space to that world, to the point where it is highly unlikely that participants could, even if they wanted to, identify or explain them all. Yet all that fun and connectedness is contained in a college bubble (LaDousa, this volume). The sphere of student autonomy might be more promising as an ideal than as a lived reality, perhaps because that bubble also exists within a hyperscheduled, competitive, heavily managed and inevitably fragmented contemporary institutional life that, as Demerath (2009) shows, starts well before college. Blum (2009: 109) describes how, in a residential college, all that fun is contained within a complex of specialized services and structures overseen by “an enormous phalanx of people with training in higher education administration or in various kindred fields,” professionals who “in many ways know the students much better than faculty do and are regarded as more central to the university experience.” The culture of student drinking (133 ff) thus coexists with a culture of intense performance anxiety (138ff). FYE activities can be understood as metaculturally competitive with fun activities. How FYE activities are actually implemented in any particular institution is not as easily determined as the cause-and-effect discourse of expertise might suggest. It also turns out that, at least in recent years, successful implementation involves casting FYE programs as part of the neoliberal solution to “why college?” and working FYE activities into the college or university brand.

FYE Function Shifts: From Student Retention to Student as Neoliberal Exemplar At the small college where I teach, concern with first-year programming began surfacing, as best I can ascertain, in the 1990s. Our then director of student activities, an FYE specialist, had done her graduate work in student life administration at USC at the very time that the expert literature discussed above was being produced. She particularly enjoyed studying theories of student social and psychological development. She also taught a section of University 101. In a 2001 interview, she explained to me how she tried to implement these principles, stressing the importance of socializing first-year students beyond orientation: “But if you were to carry that introductory process through the first semester

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or even at a minimum the first six weeks, because any research on first year students tells you that the first six weeks are critical, that’s makeit-or-break-it time for a lot of these folks academically, socially, spiritually, emotionally, etc.” One way to implement these principles, she said, would be through a first-year course to connect students to each other and to a faculty member. She also recommended “more time in front-loading, more time training our student employees around these issues too [such as] how to communicate effectively with someone who is different from you or not even just different physically or culturally but just has different opinions . . . that carries into multicultural issues as well.” She also recommended training student groups to be more inclusive. Implementation of such programming was at that time pretty much up to her, her staff, and the faculty teaching first-year seminars. She put considerable effort into the orientation program, with its communityoriented presentations and fun24 exercises led by orientation leaders, all meant to connect students collectively to their incoming class. The hope, she explained, was to connect first years to each other and to the school, and to disconnect them from fraternities, which she characterized as cliques sharing exclusionary identities that undercut a community of individuals on equal footing with each other. She left in the mid-2000s. FYE seminars and orientation planning continued separately but a coherent program did not develop until an FYE committee began drafting a plan in 2010–11, bringing it to the faculty in 2012. At this point, external funding had become available for support of more detailed FYE program planning, and private colleges were increasingly seeking it out.25 Our college secured a $250,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations for a three-year FYE pilot phase. The proposal for this suggested a clear path to outcomes, as is evident in the use of “will instill” and “will provide” in the following: “A coordinated FYE will instill an immediate sense of belonging in students and will provide the necessary academic and social foundations for their success.”26 The resources now available made it possible to fund a personnel structure that include an associate dean to develop faculty participation in FYE seminars, a dedicated librarian for their courses (master’s required), and a dedicated student life position for an assistant director of orientation and first-year programs (master’s required). The first position was recruited from the faculty, and the other two through national searches. The grant also provided support for first-year courses and summer advising. The school, with trustee help, provided for residence

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hall renovations to accommodate first-year clusters that (ideally) extend the effects of orientation through the whole first year. As the FYE associate dean pointed out to me, what an FYE program consists of depends on the kind of institution in which it is implemented. When she was first tasked with implementing the program, she attended many workshops, finding herself on one occasion in a break-out group addressing retention. There were people from schools facing serious budget cuts and 30–40 percent rates of first-year attrition; our attrition rate was about 5–6 percent and our budgeting relatively generous. Would we then need, she asked, the same kind of FYE programs with the same operation to provide the same outcomes? She questioned how predetermined FYE planning can really be. As she put it, there are threads running throughout the various initiatives but to what extent can such threads be planned out in advance, or results predicted? To what extent can decisions about curricular initiatives be made beforehand? Faculty, she noted, should be encouraged to think about what makes a course truly a first-year course and not just a limited-enrollment introduction, to think about creating a liberal arts perspective, and to make best use of resources available. But a program that addresses the whole student wants policies and procedures that encourage creative approaches and foster collaborations without overstructuring. In tension with this perspective are dynamics trending toward deterministic program conceptualization: FYE experts routinely pair explicit program structuring with cause and effect, and this has become the stock-in-trade of experts hired by companies like Pearson or Growing Leaders. Such determinism is reinforced by regional accreditation agencies, who expect institutions to clearly define educational goals and paths to outcomes, and by stakeholder expectations. A colleague who has worked closely with trustees told me that the trustees believe a first-year program is something that is needed, and that they are willing to fund elements not covered by a grant. As FYE patrons, trustees would expect definable and predictable results. Website information about FYE programming presents it to students and parents as a set of packaged elements with each productively targeting an element of studenthood. Emphasis is put on attending lectures, performance events, athletics, career workshops, and CPR and Safe Zone training, as well as the acquisition of time-management and study skills with a few “fun” events sprinkled into the mix. It is especially important to situate liberal arts graduates, who are not being trained for a particular occupation, in productive social spaces.

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Narratives of determined and dependable outcome especially matter to a school’s marketplace identity.

Conclusion: FYE, Market Value, and Neoliberal Personhood An FYE program can take on market value in at least two ways. It can become a commodity in itself (as a product for companies like Pearson or Habitudes) and it can also become part of a college’s market position. Either way, FYE programs frame students as models of neoliberal agency. How that works as a product for an outfit like Pearson is more straightforward than how it becomes part of a college’s market position. What started as a solution to a problem specific to large public universities takes on different value in small, private, elite colleges. The original 1980s to 1990s expert discourse conceptualizes students in terms of attitudes and behaviors, aiming to keep them engaged and productive through to graduation. Once published, that discourse advocates the development of programs to facilitate such engagement, resourced by any means available, often on a shoestring, as the UMKC document suggests27 At schools without a retention problem, no such provisions appeared necessary (as my two interviewees pointed out). But as the notion of FYE programs became institutionally desirable, funding did become available by the mid-2000s, particularly from high-profile private donor organizations. The very availability of funding made such programming more desirable and competing for funding became a priority. In so competing, elite schools emphasized the importance of orienting students toward a subjectivity that would best show off their neoliberally elite education. The very award of such funding would enhance the reputation of both donor and recipient. It is ironic that real resources become available when student retention, the problem originally meant for FYE to solve, is not an issue. Resources become available when high-end stakeholders look for maximal return on investment in student education, a particular priority in highly ranked and expensive liberal arts schools. Liberal arts courses themselves notoriously train no one for any particular job, yet such schools cannot seem too vocational or they lose their elite status. So other educational innovations, including FYE, fill the gap by fitting all student education to the same productive criteria. In the website blurbs at the beginning of this chapter, William & Mary and Skidmore make a point of tying together FYE and the liberal arts. This does not often appear in website copy, but that it appears at all suggests a marketable connection between FYE and liberal arts enhancing student return on

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investment, a connection not missed by those whose job it is to write academic website copy. The message of expert discourse all along has been that what happens outside the classroom is as important to student development as what happens inside the classroom. This fact resonates especially in colleges whose elite reputations are most valued by stakeholders. The quality of the academics in such schools is assumed rather than foregrounded, so the actual academic content matters less than the school’s student-shaping potential. Programs that treat discipline-based instruction as fungible (any coursework has equal and interchangeable value for any student) make sense if the outcome is a student type who embodies neoliberal agency: a self-controlling, self-maximizing unit that can slip neatly from being a productive student to being a productive worker. In addressivity terms, the texts describing those programs are less for students than for parents and donors: they assure parents that their children will be ready to take their appropriate place in the workforce (and, implicitly, with the appropriate connections), and they assure donors that their investment is well placed. The students themselves are as much products embodying the school’s brand (Urciuoli 2014) as they are consumers of its education. The FYE takes the shape it does through the registers of expertise. But it takes on its market value because of the way that expertise fits into the ultimately marketable model of the neoliberal student.  Bonnie Urciuoli is professor emerita of anthropology at Hamilton College. Her earlier work was on race/class ideologies of Spanish–English bilingualism in the United States; her later work is on the discursive production and marketing of diversity and skills in the United States generally and higher education in particular, and on constructions (and marketing) of studenthood in U.S. higher education. Relevant publications include “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student” in Signs and Society, 2014; and “Neoliberal Markedness: The Interpellation of ‘Diverse’ College Students,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016.

Notes 1. “First Year Experiences,” accessed 5 July 2016, http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/first-year-experience-programs. The original wording is no longer accessible.

The Experience Experts ⽧ 167 2. “First Year Initiatives,” accessed 5 July 2016, http://www.wm.edu/offices/ fye/initiatives/index.php. The original wording is no longer accessible. 3. “First Year Experience Mission, Vision, and Goals,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.wm.edu/offices/fye/about/mission/index.php. 4. “About the First-Year Experience,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www .skidmore.edu/fye/about/index.php. 5. “What is FYE?” accessed 25 February 2018, https://www.skidmore.edu/fye/ about/what.php. 6. “First Year Experience,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://fye.osu.edu/ aboutfye.html. 7. “The First Year Experience,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://admission .stanford.edu/student/first_year/. 8. “First Year Seminars and Advising: How Advisors Make a Lifelong Impact,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Acade mic-Advising-Today/View-Articles/First-Year-Seminars-and-Advising-How-Ad visors-Make-a-Lifelong-Impact.aspx. 9. “History of the First University Seminar & the University 101 Program,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.sc.edu/univ101/aboutus/history.html. 10. “A Program is not a Plan,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://www.inside highered.com/views/2011/01/13/program-not-plan. 11. “About the Center: Welcome,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://sc.edu/fye/ center/index.html. 12. In both volumes the contributors’ master’s and doctoral degrees are predominantly in education (especially administration), counseling, and psychology. 13. Sanford’s work in particular is seen as inspirational; see Upcraft et al. 2005:10. 14. Authorizing and persuading are equally functionally salient but float below the ethnometapragmatic radar. 15. “UMKC First Year Experience Committee Final Draft Report,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.umkc.edu/provost/strategic-planning-process/stu dent-success/first-year-experience-report.pdf. 16. In their study of the codification of scientific understanding, Latour and Woolgar posit a range of statement types by scientists from the most specific and conditional (type 1) to the most general and unconditional (type 5). 17. The webpage which I originally cited, https://newstudent.wisc.edu/practices/ (accessed 10 July 2016), no longer exists but a similar web page may be found at “First Year Resources,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://newstudent.wisc .edu/resources-2/resources/. A list of high-impact educational practices, including FYEs, can be found at “High Impact Educational Practices,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/HIP_ tables.pdf. 18. “The First Year Experience,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.pear soned.com/higher-education/topics-in-higher-education/college-readiness/ student-success/first-year-experience/. 19. “Who We Are,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://growingleaders.com/about/ who-we-are/.

168 ⽧ Bonnie Urciuoli 20. The webpage cited here no longer exists. It was http://growingleaders.com/ habitudes/first-year-experience/?gclid=CJ—hJiy-sgCFVQUHwod4KgPXA and was accessed 21 July 2016. 21. “First Year Experience Books and Freshman Leadership Program,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://growingleaders.com/habitudes/habitudes-for-college/ first-year-experience/. 22. “UMKC First Year Experience Committee Final Draft Report,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.umkc.edu/provost/strategic-planning-process/stude nt-success/first-year-experience-report.pdf 23. “UMKC First Year Experience Committee Final Draft Report,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.umkc.edu/provost/strategic-planning-process/studentsuccess/first-year-experience-report.pdf. 24. Perhaps not the same kind of fun as that analyzed by Moffatt, Nathan, or LaDousa. 25. For example, a search of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s database of awarded grants, using the search term “first year” yields a list of grants that suggests an upsurge in external funding of first-year initiatives over the past decade. “Grants Database,” accessed 25 February 2018, https://mellon.org/grants/ grants-database/?page=1&e=&grantee=&lon=-73.9529910&n=&q=first+y ear+&s=&w=&lat=22.7231920&per_page=25&z=2. 26. “Arthur Vining Davis Foundations Grant Will Support First-Year Experience Program,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.hamilton.edu/news/sto ry/arthur-vining-davis-foundations-grant-will-support-first-year-experienceprogram. 27. “UMKC First Year Experience Committee Final Draft Report,” accessed 25 February 2018, http://www.umkc.edu/provost/strategic-planning-process/stude nt-success/first-year-experience-report.pdf.

References Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist and trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blum, Susan. 2009. My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell. Carr, E. Summerson. 2010a. “Enactments of Expertise.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 17–32. ———. 2010b. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Social Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

The Experience Experts ⽧ 169 Demerath, Peter. 2009. Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 4: 537–55. Goodman, Jane, Matt Tomlinson, and Justin B. Richland. 2014. “Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 449–63. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1987. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hunter, Mary Stuart, and Carrie Linder. 2005. “First Year Seminars.” In Upcraft et al., Challenging and Supporting the First-Year Student, 275–91. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities, ed. Paul Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Jewler, A. Jerome. 1989. “Elements of an Effective Seminar: The University 101 Program.” In Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates, The Freshman Year Experience, 198–215. LaDousa, Chaise. 2011. House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. “Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation.” Signs and Society 2, no. 2: 203–29. LaTour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Moffatt, Michael. 1989. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Nakassis, Constantine. 2012. “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist 114, no. 4: 624–38. Nathan, Rebekah. 2005. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Seaman, Barrett. 2005. Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23: 193–229. ———. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, no. 1: 6–22. Upcraft, M. Lee. 1989. “Understanding Student Development: Insights from Theory.” In Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates, The Freshman Year Experience, 40– 52. Upcraft, M. Lee, John N. Gardner, and Associates. 1989. The Freshman Year Experience: Helping Students Survive and Succeed in College. San Francisco and London: Jossey-Bass. Upcraft, M. Lee, John N. Gardner, Betsy O. Barefoot, and Associates. 2005. Challenging and Supporting the First-Year Student: A Handbook for Improving the First Year of College. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

170 ⽧ Bonnie Urciuoli Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2: 211–28. ———. 2014. “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircian Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education.” Signs and Society 2, no. 1: 56–83. Whiteley, John. 1989. “Character Development.” In Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates, The Freshman Year Experience, 168–80.

CHAPTER 9

Moral Entanglements in Service-Learning CHRISTOPHER CAI AND USNISH MAJUMDAR 

We sat with our laptops on long chairs by the glittering pool, mid-day Zambian radio blaring across the water. It had been two days since we returned to Lusaka in May 2015, and we had hardly left the hotel, instead scrambling to review literature and document the development of our own reflections—to put into words anything that would help us process our experiences from the last time we had been here, a year ago. Though we were excited at the chance to write something potentially useful, we still had reservations about spending time in Zambia in this way: seeking to write a paper was itself a pursuit of cultural and professional capital, and was not part of our grant proposal. Nevertheless, we considered this the most productive work left to pursue. Everything else we had tried had failed to live up to our expectations. Later that week we visited the community partner with whom we had spent most of our time the prior summer, the Zambian Association for Children with Disabilities (ZACD). ZACD built assistive mobility devices for children with disabilities. One of their primary products is a standing frame, a tool to help children with cerebral palsy maintain muscle mass. As we stepped outside the taxi, Chrispin and Geoffrey, the two founders, ran over to give us hugs and help us unload our luggage. “Hello Ush! Hello Chris! It has been so long!,” Geoffrey exclaimed. Nervous and anxious, we asked if they had made any improvements to the shoddy standing frame we had made during our prior stay. Geoffrey and Chrispin led us to the ZACD office, which was a converted shipping crate, and showed us a picture of the new standing frame design they had made themselves. It appeared to be well crafted, supportive, and comfortable, far superior to the version we had cobbled together. “We made a lot of progress while you were gone,” they told us proudly. Jen, a physical therapist who accompanied us on this trip, took a look at the frame and other devices stored in the ZACD ware-

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house. Drawing from her clinical experience, she suggested a few minor revisions: modifying the angle of the seat slightly, and adding more support in another part of the frame. On the taxi ride back to the hotel we wondered, as we had wondered many times before, what role inexperienced undergraduates could possibly have in a project like this one. Jen had given more concrete advice in five minutes than we had the entire previous summer. ZACD appeared to be doing just fine without us. Were we so self-absorbed in careerism that we could not see the naïveté of attempting to save Lusaka with scrap metal and rubber bands? Moral musings aside, how would we explain our project to family members, our granting agency, or potential employers? What would we have to show for many months of work? These latter concerns seemed petty in comparison to our ethical reflections, but they were also more pressing and consequential. In the year of college that had passed since our last trip to Lusaka we had turned to anthropology; we had been occupied by our moral dilemma but also worried about the professional consequences of our actions. Weeks before returning to Zambia, we got together and wrote down all of our reflections, thinking that we could write a paper of use to others in our position. In his journal, however, Chris wondered, “But what about ZACD? Does this self-reflection do anything for them?” To this question we have no answer. Instead, we focus here on a somewhat different dialogue that grew out of our second visit to Zambia, the dialogue we had with our firstgeneration Asian American parents. In this chapter, written over the two weeks we were in Zambia that summer and the many months in the United States after we returned, we unpack our motivations and experiences designing and performing our service-learning project in Lusaka. We also discuss our parents’ responses to our expressed ethical dilemmas. In doing so, we seek to describe how the conflict we experienced between the critical anthropology we were learning from our professors at the University of Virginia (UVA) and our own neoliberal notions of self-management became entangled with the moral outlook of our parents, whose hard life experiences gave them reasons to question our priorities although they still recognized our altruistic yearnings.

Neoliberal Education and Anthropological Critique For many anthropologists, the term “neoliberalism” describes a set of principles that became hegemonic in the final quarter of the twentieth century and that have led to major structural changes in the global

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economy, through policies promoting economic deregulation, expanded free trade, and the privatization of social services (Harvey 2007). In anthropological studies of service-learning, neoliberalism has been understood as leading to the replacement of liberal arts thinking with a more market-oriented professionalization of higher education (Handler 2013). This has included the commodification of volunteerism (Hickel 2013), the replacement of critical dialogue with institutional promotional language (Urciuoli 2013), and the transformation of academic research from a quest for knowledge into a skill-building experience (Handler, this volume). Participation in service-learning to boost résumés has often been critiqued as economically instrumental and intellectually dishonest (Hickel 2013), embodying qualities incompatible with the virtues cultivated by a traditional liberal arts education. When we first encountered these critiques, we were impressed by how anthropological scholarship could crystallize diffuse concerns we ourselves had struggled to articulate. Yet as we have continued our academic journeys, we have also wondered if critiques of service-learning lead more to unproductive alienation than to critical dialogue. As Raphael Frankfurter (2013: 10) writes, “How do we see and learn from other lives if we don’t engage them, and process them in relation to our own evolving forms of self and social awareness? If previously unavailable experiential engagements with the realities of healthcare in the developing world are creating new moral framings, pragmatic considerations and ways of thinking about humanitarian engagement, then this is, perhaps, a welcome move in a field that has only recently been touched by ethnographic empiricism.” Following Frankfurter’s lead, we ask how students can engage with anthropological critiques of service-learning while remaining open to its potential to constitute a positive component of the undergraduate curriculum. Perhaps at best ethically ambiguous, service-learning nonetheless requires that we examine it with an attitude “between engagement and critique” (Handler et al. 2016: 1), one that can allow students to combine reflection and doing. As Frankfurter (2013: 10) would have us ask, how can critiques of service-learning “shape rather than burden” civic engagement? To explore these questions, we attempt to unpack a common object of critique in service-learning: the effects of neoliberalism on undergraduate education. But we do so based on a particular experience that developed for us as we worried about our Zambian project in dialogue with our families. We found ourselves asking, how does the professionalization of service-learning as a marketable skill become entangled

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with family or social values? To respond, we draw on our experiences as second-generation Americans to describe how immigrant notions of the American Dream became entangled both with our anthropological sensibilities and with the inauthentic or market-driven motivations that seemed to underpin our participation in service-learning. Through brief auto-ethnographic accounts, we analyze service-learning as an experience in which students can learn to navigate between competing ethical demands. Attending to the morally ambiguous ways servicelearning becomes entangled with other social forces will allow us to respond to, or to supplement, anthropological critiques of neoliberal higher education that themselves verge on the hegemonic. To be clear, we hope to avoid a dangerous relativism that equates undeniable moral shortcomings with cultural difference (Farmer 2004). We openly acknowledge the problematic flaws in our service-learning project, not the least of which is the effacement of Zambian voices in this chapter. Clearly, many of these flaws, as will become apparent, can be convincingly traced to the increased prevalence of neoliberal policies in higher education. Nevertheless, we agree with Aihwa Ong’s (2006) observation that anthropological critiques of neoliberalism are often undertheorized. By focusing attention on the ways neoliberalism is malleable rather than hegemonic (ibid.), we illustrate how neoliberal demands to be self-managing and self-sufficient become remade by immigrants from Asia. As we carried out our service-learning project, we became increasingly aware of the ethical dilemmas it posed for us, but these dilemmas deserve to be unpacked rather than dismissed altogether as neoliberal. Throughout the project, our family values, our belief in the universal right to good health, and our willingness to fashion ourselves into marketable individuals all became entangled. By probing such entanglements, we hope to provide practical and theoretical insights into the demands faced by undergraduate students in service-learning projects.

Entangled Motivations How did we arrive poolside in Lusaka? As first-year undergraduates, we had participated in a case competition that introduced us to the processes through which global health projects are evaluated. Our parents encouraged us to create a deliverable through this experience in order to build a better life and to pursue the American Dream. Thus, from the very beginning of our service-learning work, our interest in building skills developed not only as an attempt to make ourselves more mar-

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ketable to future employers, but also to fulfill obligations our families had placed on us. In February 2013 we were told, “You all are the next leaders in global health!” Cameras flashed, capturing our team standing in front of catered food celebrating the occasion. We had just won UVA’s inaugural Global Health Case Competition,1 a week-long frenzy of work and practice. This case competition brought together students from UVA’s eleven schools, including undergraduate and graduate students. Contestants were briefed on a scenario and expected to present a solution by the end of the week to a multidisciplinary panel of judges. Our team, composed entirely of first-year undergraduates, was given a thin socioeconomic case brief on Mumbai, which had been struck by a fictional epidemic of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. After spending many hours crafting a PowerPoint presentation, we presented our work to judges in the ballroom at the center of campus. We were awarded first place, and local papers recognized our accomplishment. We won by making a presentation tailored to the judges in front of us, not for the people of Mumbai, who remained a distant abstraction throughout the process. As Andrew Lakoff (2008: 401) argues, “scenariobased exercises” like this case competition reward generic frameworks of thinking, and do not lead to critical assessment of scenarios for their contextual specificity. This competition, in which the humanitarian mission to save lives is implicit but rarely articulated, nevertheless gave us standing in the UVA global health community. Now qualified to work on actual projects, we aspired to be humanitarians (Calhoun 2010) and believed that fieldwork in foreign settings of great need would provide the right kind of challenge for our team to continue developing global health skills. Just one week later, three team members, including the coauthors, gathered around a table at a university dining hall to make plans for the following summer. UVA’s Jefferson Public Citizens (JPC) program, we decided, would be our ticket to gaining real experience in global health. The JPC program funds teams of undergraduates and a faculty mentor to perform some combination of service, learning, and research with a community partner, at home or abroad. At that time, out of several UVA programs that were funding undergraduate travel abroad, the JPC program offered the most support (up to $20,000 per team). At the end of this experience, JPC teams are expected to present their work at a symposium and to write about it in an annual JPC publication. Enticed by the prestige and size of the JPC grant, we spent the summer sending e-mails to numerous groups working in Africa, seeking the

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right problem. Through a physician mentor, we eventually came into contact with Special Hope Network, an NGO in Lusaka. Special Hope provided education and medical care to children with disabilities in Lusaka. We decided we had found a suitable partner, and worked with that NGO to craft a grant that was successfully funded by JPC. The lead-up to our involvement in our service-learning project seems to support much of the anthropological literature critiquing the influence of neoliberalism in higher education. We saw the skills we gained in scenario-based exercises as readily generalizable to the field (Lakoff 2008). By seeking out and winning grants, without first having a country in mind, we saw our service-learning project as rooted in universal principles of development, rather than situating ourselves as political actors with our own interests (Handler 2013). We perpetuated the unequal stakes often accompanying humanitarian projects: we had the money, we chose the field site, and we decided that our summer experiment could become a source of health care for disabled children in Lusaka (Petryna 2006). Embodying neoliberal demands to build tangible skills and shift services from the state to individuals (Urciuoli 2013), we uncritically saw suffering in Lusaka as an exotic adventure for self-development. “We are being developed, not the kids in Lusaka,” Chris wrote in a letter to his parents. “Our mentors tell us it’s ‘all about the experience,’ but it seems like a great waste of money to send us all to Zambia for that,” Usnish worried aloud with his friends. As undergraduate students, we recognized the problematic nature of our service-learning project even before we established it. Why, then, did we continue on this troubled path? Both Usnish and Chris were raised to build their lives around obtaining tangible academic achievements. When Usnish was in high school, his parents researched every combined and accelerated bachelor’s of science and medical doctor (BS/MD) program available in the United States and provided him with a list to consider. As a high school senior, Usnish applied to and was accepted by a BS/MD program at Pennsylvania State University, yet ultimately chose to attend UVA in search of more time to explore academic interests. In the car on the way back from the Admitted Students’ Day at Penn State, Usnish’s father remarked, “If you decide to go to UVA, you must stay focused, can you promise that to me? We worked so hard to come to this country, to create this opportunity for you. You need to work hard and stand on your own feet, you shouldn’t do much hey-round [exploring] at this point.”

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Similarly, when Chris was a high school freshman, his mother researched every full merit college scholarship in the United States and presented him with a list of characteristics successful applicants displayed. She had circled the Jefferson Scholarship at UVA. “We escaped communists and worked hundred-hour weeks when we immigrated to the States. When we immigrated we had to rely on concrete skills rather than our language ability. This is your ticket to a better life.” When Chris enrolled at UVA as a Jefferson Scholar, his parents encouraged him to continue this practice of accumulating accolades in order to receive admission to a prestigious medical school. After they enrolled at UVA, both Usnish and Chris were encouraged to continue accumulating academic deliverables. Usnish often heard from his parents over the phone: “That’s interesting baba [son], but what’s your deliverable? When will you get something publishable? You’ve got to have an end result, or else who will care about your work? What will they see?” Chris’s parents similarly valued concrete deliverables: “There is nothing wrong with checking boxes. Set a goal early in your life and do whatever it takes to achieve it. This goal is valued by how much society and your family will recognize you and how comfortable a life [you’ll live],” said Chris’s mother. As we prepared to carry out our JPC project in Lusaka, the pressure to produce a deliverable manifested in our search for human subjects. Chris and Usnish applied for IRB approval to implement a functional mobility survey (known as the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory Computer-Adaptive Tests, or PEDI-CAT) for children in Lusaka (Haley et al. 2011). The goal of this was as much to produce data that could be used in a journal article as it was to measure the progress of children. A professional publication based on our work would be useful to our community partner, we reasoned, and it would also satisfy family obligations and help us become accepted by graduate school. Our actions in approaching Lusaka were, we now think, ethically problematic, and we do not intend to relativize away all moral culpability by citing familial obligations. Indeed, drawing a binary in our motivations would be a mistake: familial obligation was often expressed in the language of self-reliance and producing deliverables. What counts as familial obligation and what counts as neoliberal self-interest? By using the term “moral entanglement” we suggest our reasons for pursuing service-learning are a mix of both. How could we, then or now, disentangle the pressure to get a job from the request of a parent to honor the sacrifices they made as an immigrant? How can we separate pressure to generate a concrete deliverable from the desire to make a real

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contribution to our community partner? These questions sprang from the unstable compromises we made between competing value systems (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). With our motives thus entangled, we traveled to Lusaka in the summer of 2014.

Anthropological Anxieties and Parental Advice One of our tasks while in Lusaka was to measure the progress of children using the PEDI-CAT survey, a task that had been approved by our Institutional Review Board. We administered our survey in a dusty community care center in an impoverished sector of Lusaka. Dutifully adhering to survey protocol, we once asked a Zambian mother whether her child could do an activity from a standardized list: “Goes up or down an escalator.” As we showed her a picture of a mall escalator on a research iPad, our subject gave us a cold stare and said through a translator, “I walked many miles with this child on my back to get to this NGO. I have never been in a mall.” We were met with many cold stares as we asked about movie theater aisles, stairs, and busses, things these families had very little experience with due to unconsidered economic realities. In our notes, we recorded her answers as “Not applicable” to these questions, and by extension, to our research in general. Moments like these showed us the gap between the humanitarian project we had imagined and the realities of people’s lives on the ground. By implementing the PEDI-CAT in Lusaka, we recorded generalizable metrics that effaced local experiences of suffering (Adams 2016). More concerned with gathering data that could be easily communicated to grant funders and eventually included in professional publications, we required Zambians to provide our envisioned form of testimony before they could access our economic resources (Nguyen et al. 2007). Our question about escalators reflected not only an unknowing insensitivity, but also our belief in the apolitical nature of humanitarian development (Calhoun 2010; Fassin 2012). Put another way, by assuming that a survey developed in Boston could readily be adapted for use in Lusaka, we failed to situate ourselves as political actors and put our goal to publish ahead of the welfare of the Zambian mothers we proposed to serve. In letters and phone calls to our families, we struggled to engage in critical self-examination, worrying that despite our humanitarian aspirations, our presence in Zambia simply reproduced the political and economic inequalities that made it possible for us to be there in the first place. Writing to his parents, Chris expressed his desire to switch majors

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from biomedical engineering to anthropology, a discipline that, unlike engineering, could provide insights into the on-the-ground dilemmas he was experiencing. But his parents pushed back, in terms suggesting that critical reflection and intellectual freedom were far from universal values: “Do not exhaust yourself overanalyzing. We only want you to be happy, succeed and reach your goals, which is to have a decent life and carry this for your next generation. This is our American Dream. In China there is a phrase which has been passed along many generations. . . . ‘Good medicine is very bitter, but it is good to your mind and health.’ . . . [If on the other hand] you ask for opinions, you will get answers like ‘You need to make your own decision.’ This [only] increases your anxiety and stress.” Similarly, in telephone conversations, Usnish’s parents urged him to avoid over-analysis and consider his more immediate goals: “You sound so stressed, it’s because you’re over-analyzing. Don’t think too much—just focus on getting the project work you planned done. Focus on the deliverable.” In other letters, Chris’s parents drew a parallel between what we (newly empowered by our liberal arts education) saw as the neoliberal underpinnings of service-learning and the conditions of the immigrant experience they had known. Both of these historical–social configurations produced winners and losers, both reflected the inherent inequality of the world, and both showed that individuals had limited agency to effect change. Chris’s parents argued that in response to such limitations, individuals should focus their attention on achieving goals and their family obligations, rather than on navel-gazing, self-reflection, or overanalyzing their own moral motivations. When we first came to the United States, we only had a few hundred dollars in hand. Your father rode on a Greyhound bus for forty-eight hours with no food and only drinking water from the rest room to his school in California. I worked in a Chinese restaurant and ate customers’ leftovers for dinner and saved all our money to pay for tuition. Once I had a rich Taiwanese man spit on my tip to see whether I would still pick up his $5.00 bill. We did this so you wouldn’t have to. We just want you to be comfortable, not to overanalyze, and achieve the American Dream.

Usnish’s parents also often drew on the rigors of being a new immigrant, in doing so remaking the neoliberal demands of self-management as pragmatic ones. In their opinion, excessive self-reflection was unproductive in the face of concerns about survival and obligations to

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family and future. “Look, when I came to the United States in 1987, I worked many odd jobs—in the school cafeteria, in a gas station, as janitor—to help pay for my master’s degree in New Jersey. There were so many nights when I went hungry, just trying to make it through the next month. It was really hard times, but I managed to stand on my own feet. I did it for my family, I did it for your mom, I did it for you. Discipline and focus.” Neither Chris’s nor Usnish’s parents saw such an emphasis on vocational skills as oppressive. Rather, they argued that students possessed limited agency to challenge structural violence, and that the logical response was to build skills, to market oneself during the medical application process, and to focus on family goals. For example, in one letter, Chris’s parents, having described some of the rigors of their lives as immigrants, pointedly remarked, “You have never experienced that.” They went on to sympathize with his humanitarian aims, but urged him to stay focused on his professional goals: “We also understand helping underserved populations, but do not overanalyze. We want you to be happy, succeed, and reach your goal.” Similarly, Usnish’s parents were simultaneously understanding and pragmatic: “You might observe extreme poverty . . . [but] you alone can’t change anything, so there should not be any pessimistic feeling. Once you stand on your feet professionally and see some financial success, you definitely can contribute towards eradication of the world’s various issues.” In our discussions with our parents, their entreaties that we build our skills, produce deliverables, and check the boxes we needed to further our professional training became entangled, we heard, with their conceptions of the Asian glass ceiling and the perils of the current economic climate, which they understood partially in reference to the hard times they had experienced earlier in their lives: “After more than 25 year fighting here in this country, Dad and I believe that you need . . . strong skills and a recession-proof job,” Chris’s parents wrote. Contrasting their own beginnings in the United States, when they lacked the ability to speak English, they reminded him not to waste the opportunity he now had. “There is still a glass ceiling here and you have already paved your way to medical school.” Usnish’s parents similarly appealed to him to act pragmatically as an individual by contrasting his opportunities to the obstacles they had faced; but they also explicitly presented his opportunities as entailing obligations to the family: “As long as you keep focused and get things done in college, you’ll be the first in our family to be a doctor. Tama [grandma] and masi [aunt] were overjoyed when they heard that you

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were going to medical school. It’s a very honorable thing! Doctors are always respected, everywhere you go. Smartest move too: even during recession, if you’re in the right specialty you’ll always have a job. Our jobs as computer engineers are unlicensed, so we could lose our job at any time.” As we continued our project, we struggled to balance values instilled in us by our immigrant parents and the liberal-arts ideals taught us by anthropology professors in seminar rooms. The liberal-arts values of individual freedom of thought and critical self-reflexivity framed the neoliberal underpinnings of service-learning as morally bankrupt and a prop for the current conditions of global economic inequality. On the other side, the value system taught by our first-generation parents to their second-generation children stressed family duty over intellectual freedom, disciplined progress toward long-term goals, vocational education and collective decision making. Our parents’ values framed the rise of neoliberalism in service-learning as unfortunate, but inevitable: the rules the disadvantaged had to follow might be unjust, but follow them we must in order to secure our families’ futures.

Between Critique and Practice Our reaction to the anthropological literature in service-learning is not uncommon. Many of our peers who read ethnographic critiques of service-learning often end by feeling resigned or unable to engage ethically with their local moral worlds. As some students have told us, “It takes more guts to actually do things, even if you know how complex or problematic they are” or “I like what anthropologists say, but I just wish it was more accessible. I have so many things to do and I need to be realistic.” Of course, every discipline has barriers to entry. Yet such comments from alienated students suggest that anthropologists’ arguments, despite their theoretical sophistication, can make it difficult for them to engage both the students they teach and the people they study. Ian Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman (2016) have pointed out that anthropologists operate on the same moral plane as those whom they critique, if only because faculty often deal with similar practical and moral quandaries. Neither professors nor students have ever been immune from the professionalization and commodification of academic activities. Academics who critique students for yielding to the demands of neoliberal education must themselves navigate the academic market forces of publish or perish. A recent PhD who had decided not to enter academia once told Chris, “If you really interrogate many theoretical

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debates, you might find that they are more about anthropologists distinguishing themselves than settling any pressing issue.” Commenting on the professionalization of the social sciences, Wilkinson and Kleinman (2016: xi) argue, “What now passes as social science is in thrall to technocratic procedures and structures of career.” There is room for an anthropology of service-learning that critiques neoliberalism yet also helps students make do with ethically ambiguous realities. Imputing cynical motivations to students participating in service-learning might win academic arguments, but if done without imagining realistic alternatives, these arguments do little to shape practice. As Michel Foucault (2007: 45) wrote, criticism is “the art of not being governed too much,” either by the argument challenged or one’s own response to it. Critique involves balanced skepticism rather than cynicism and must therefore offer “a line of development” (28). One way to imagine alternative anthropological attitudes toward service-learning is to focus on the conflicting ethical demands students face on a daily basis. By attending to the ways neoliberalism becomes entangled with other value systems, we might avoid the cookie-cutter anthropological moral model that first decides to “unmask the symbolic hegemony” of neoliberalism and then examine the evidence (D’Andrade 1995: 400). What might it look like to write about service-learning between critique and practice (Handler et al. 2016) or to produce work that “shapes rather than burdens engagement” (Frankfurter 2013: 10)? In our case, two second-generation Asian American students engaged with commonly critiqued values of neoliberalism, leading to consequences that were always serious yet seldom predictable. Although our service-learning project was problematic, we believe that a premature decision to denounce such projects as merely self-serving, as always already coopted, could inhibit anthropologists from understanding the diverse ways students engage with competing ethical demands. We cannot answer the question of how to engage students without oversimplifying complexities or slipping into a false sense of moral clarity. Yet, in our experience, we have found that the most effective mentors helped us understand our project less as a story of good versus evil, and more as a process of working through ethically ambiguous entanglements. They helped us realize we will never be able to gain full control over competing ethical demands. Indeed, doing so would signal the end of critical reflection. Living with uncertainty, we learned, is a more useful reaction to conflicting demands than a premature dismissal of one or another position.

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This chapter, then, is our attempt to make sense of the long period of anxiety and critical reflection we underwent after returning from our second trip to Lusaka. We recognize the open-endedness of our discussion, but we also have found that writing it has been the most fruitful option we had of our available choices. Attempting to publish our reflections might or might not be an ethical response, depending on whom you ask, but the real opportunities to improve our writing, prepare ourselves for graduate studies, and ultimately become more critically self-aware medical professionals made us less concerned with this ambivalence. Given the limited agency we possess, we have attempted to balance an attention to ethnographic critiques with the demands placed on us by our social environments. As we finished our writing, we began our medical training—and in doing so have continued to navigate the ensuing moral entanglements.  Christopher Cai graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016 and is a medical student at the University of California San Francisco. Usnish Majumdar graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016 and is a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Note 1. For media reports on the case competition, see https://news.virginia.edu/con tent/first-global-health-case-competition-brings-together-diverse-perspectives.

References Adams, Vincanne, ed. 2016. Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2010. The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global [dis]Order. New York: Zone Books. D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. “Moral Models in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3: 399–408. Farmer, Paul. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

184 ⽧ Christopher Cai and Usnish Majumdar Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Cambridge: MIT Press. Frankfurter, Raphael. 2013. Transience and the Lives Therein: An Ethnography of Global Health and Care in Sierra Leone. Unpublished undergraduate thesis, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Haley, Stephen M., Wendy J. Coster, Helene M. Dumas, Maria A. Fragala-Pinkham, Jessica Kramer, Peng Sheng Ni, Tian Feng, Kao Ying-Chia, Rich Moed, and Larry H. Ludlow. 2011. “Accuracy and Precision of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory Computer-Adaptive Tests (PEDI-CAT).” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 53, no. 12: 1100–6. Handler, Richard. 2013. “Disciplinary Adaptation and Undergraduate Desire: Anthropology and Global Development Studies in the Liberal Arts Curriculum.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 2: 181–203. Handler, Richard, David Edmunds, Daniel Ng, Susan Tewolde, and Marta Woldu. 2016. “Between Engagement and Critique: Development Studies in a Liberal Arts Tradition.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement 37, no. 3: 261–78. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hickel, Jason. 2013. “The ‘Real Experience’ Industry: Student Development Projects and the Depoliticisation of Poverty.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 11–32. Lakoff, Andrew. 2008. “The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3: 399–428. Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, Cyriaque Yapo Ako, Pascal Niamba, Aliou Sylla, and Issoufou Tiendrébéogo. 2007. “Adherence as Therapeutic Citizenship: Impact of the History of Access to Antiretroviral Drugs on Adherence to Treatment.” AIDS 21: S31–S35. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Petryna, Adriana. 2009. When Experiments Travel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2013. “Introduction: The Promise and Practice of Service Learning and Engaged Scholarship.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 1–10. Wilkinson, Ian, and Kleinman, Arthur. 2016. A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 10

Engineering Success Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water ALEX POSECZNICK 

Introduction: How to Pour a Bottle of Water On the morning of Innovative-Tech Day in October 2005, there was a nervous excitement and energy on campus that had been building for some time among undergraduate, engineering students at Archimedes Technical Institute (ATI).1 Teams of students were ready to compete to see who had the best Senior Capstone Project (SCP)—who could demonstrate their mastery of engineering knowledge as applied to the production of a tangible, typically robotic, device. Under faculty supervision they had worked for about three semesters on the inception, design, and construction of their project, to culminate in Innovative-Tech Day. The competition was arranged in a large, indoor, common space on campus that was opened to the public. The competing students dressed in business professional attire, and organized booths or stations where their projects would run for wandering spectators who also asked questions. Professor Eiger, who I had shadowed as he organized the space, had given little thought to the layout aside from good access to a projector, computer, and the network,2 and enough space to demonstrate the project in action. Refreshments were off to the side, and all nonessential furniture had been cleared out. Starting a couple of hours before the event, students set up their projects at their assigned station. The tension in the air was palpable: a gear was not working properly, a teammate was caught in traffic and might be late, and so on. The space was open to the general population even during set-up, so for the hour or so between set-up and demonstration there were people wandering about and asking questions. They fol-

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lowed no particular path at that point, simply meandering through the tables and wanting to learn more. Most of the spectators were junior electronics-engineering students who were at earlier stages of their own studies and friends of the presenters. Some wandered about awe-struck or intimidated, some had infinite technical questions on how the teams went about achieving a given effect, and still others asked for practical advice on how to put the team together or come up with an idea for their own projects. All of the competing students on that day had attended at least one or two such competitions in previous years, and had a sense of what they could expect. Nagesh, who was competing that day, described how he had approached these teams when he was at their stage: I heard from Professor Chang stories about teams that did [designed] the ATM machine: Faruq and Frank. People were impressed because of the touch screen with fingerprint recognition. People talked well about it. They also talked about the electronic waiter that takes your order, and goes into the kitchen [and] brings out your food. I heard about how much time and effort [were needed], and costs, hardware and materials, and how many hundreds of millions of codes they had to write to interface hardware. . . . [When] they finish presenting, we go up and ask them about what they did. Then they explain, in terms of time and research. Some of the stuff, knowledge wise, they get on their own, not from professors. They get books and do their own research. They learn software codes from themselves.

Professors Eiger and Chang oversaw the Innovative-Tech Day, and advised the competing teams. During set-up, they occasionally walked through the space, but without paying much attention to the students or projects. They were occupied with welcoming all of the judges—a variety of nonengineering, ATI faculty and “industry” people. Industry people were guest judges carefully selected from prestigious technical companies like GE Medical, both because they lent the competition more legitimacy, and because they were prospective employers for these students. Judges were given the royal treatment: Chang and Eigar greeted them in another room on campus where a private lunch awaited them, and where they discussed the basis for evaluation of these projects. During the whole day, Professors Chang and Eiger spent their time going back and forth between their teams of students and the VIP judges off in the private room. Several times, the guests’ lunch ran long and the presentations or demonstrations were delayed. The student who had been stuck in traf-

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fic arrived. The troublesome gear fell into place. Forty-five minutes after the scheduled start time, the judges finally came out to begin. At the October 2005 competition only four teams were competing— Mobile Robotic Arm (the team was listed first in the Innovative Tech Day agenda), Net-Fridge, Universal Identity Card, and Arithmetic Tutor. Led by Professors Eiger and Chang, each of whom introduced the teams that they had advised, the judges moved up to the tables to hear a brief presentation that included potential market applications, and to see the project in action. There was a crowd of fifty to seventy-five spectators in tow behind them. The audience stood on their toes and on chairs to peer over their friends’ heads and a low murmur buzzed throughout the demonstrations—except for high moments in the performance, when absolute silence fell across the room. The four members of the Mobile Robotic Arm team were all men of color in their mid-twenties to late-thirties. They had met in ATI’s associate degree program and continued on for their bachelor’s degree together. The invention was a mounted robotic arm, with a somewhat sophisticated crab-like hand that was mounted on a four-wheeled platform. A small camera was positioned on its back and the whole was operated by remote control. In earlier interviews Professor Eiger, the team’s advisor, described the project as not particularly original, but found that the team was strong and stable. This seemed to be an important factor in the eventual positive outcomes for the team—at least from Eigar’s point of view. They were set up at a booth, in front of which was the Mobile Robotic Arm itself. Visuals from the Mobile Robotic Arm’s mounted camera were being projected behind the team throughout their demonstration. The team first made a formal PowerPoint presentation about the project, including both technical aspects of the work and the potential for it as a product on the market. The team then performed the demonstration. On the floor in front of the booth the team placed an open bottle of water, a plastic cup, and the Mobile Robotic Arm itself. It took several minutes of maneuvering, during which the Mobile Robotic Arm knocked over the bottle a few times. The team members worked furiously at the control station, in low whispers, trying to achieve their objective, while the audience chatted and joked. At a key moment, when the bottle was knocked on its side again, a judge in the competition picked it up for them and repositioned it a little closer to the open hand. It was soon after that the objective was met: the Mobile Robotic Arm picked up the bottle and successfully poured the contents into the cup. There was much applause.

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After the demonstration was a Q&A period when the judges asked questions. The entirety was collegial, and they often translated between technical and layman’s terms for the benefit of all students present: JUDGE 1: Yes. So I’d like to know what’s the total number of mechanical degree of freedoms of this robot? VOICE FROM CROWD: Is it a hundred? VOICE FROM CROWD: Fifty? JUDGE 1: So you have one dimension, lifting up. You have rotation, two dim . . . PRESENTING STUDENT: Right. JUDGE 2: So how many total degrees of freedom? PRESENTING STUDENT: Alright. JUDGE 1: Independent variables. PRESENTING STUDENT: Independent. Independent. It moves to the left from the body. JUDGE 1: Alright, so that’s rotation about one axis, which is one degree of freedom.

Judges either asked only “safe” questions, or helped students along to answer them in a technical register. As the Q&A came to an end, the crowd of students, family, friends, faculty, and staff began to move to the next booth. Students from other teams, who had been scoping out the competition, rushed back to their own booths to be ready for their own presentations. The Mobile Robotic Arm team gave a sigh of relief, and after some clean-up, joined the audience. There were still three more teams to present: Professor Chang’s Net-Fridge team had designed a freezer that could access an item remotely, and release it into a defroster, where it would be waiting for you when you got home. Professor Eiger’s Universal Identity Card team had designed a single card that would unify and replace all of your credit cards, identification, medical insurance cards, keys, and so on. Thus a swipe of the card would bring up virtually all relevant, personal information for the vendors selected. Professor Chang’s Arithmetic Tutor team had fallen apart, but was permitted to participate that day. The device for teaching kids math was only half-finished because a week before Innovative-Tech Day, it was revealed that one member had done nothing on the project. The sole, somewhat embarrassed, female student of the day thus presented a half-finished project by herself in half-whispered words. This

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was better, however, than the Automated Home team, which the faculty had withdrawn a couple of weeks before the competition, without explanation. The SCPs and the Innovative-Tech Day competition figured critically as a capstone to the engineering-education experience at ATI in ways that aligned with an ideal, professional, neoliberal, engineering subject. However, much of the activities were what Handler (this volume) calls paracurricular—they existed parallel to the formal curriculum. This engineering subjectivity, as enacted either in curricular or paracurricular activities, were actually the product of complex negotiations of knowledges, practices, resources, social capital, relations, and so on, that coalesced around three overlapping areas. First, the project was intended to demonstrate a depth of technical knowledge through the production of a device that generally worked— that was the hard skills. The formal curriculum was very clear on laying out auditable outcomes based on those hard skills. Even hard skills, however, needed to be socially enacted and performed in the paracurricular activity, and were a complex part of the landscape. For example, if the project itself was too complex, then students would be unlikely to produce a working device, whereas if it was too simple, it would not reflect a sufficient depth of technical knowledge. Second, the project demonstrated students’ soft skills. In other words, the assembly of a team of peers was guided by a faculty advisor, but the team was managed internally, and was seen as paralleling the kinds of professional team experiences that students could expect to face in “real” (i.e. work) life. The faculty advisors acknowledged that, in professional life, much of success or failure would rely both on one’s own technical abilities, and on the ability to work with a wide range of peers and coworkers. Students thus both attempted to work out differences among themselves, but also diligently tracked and recorded division of labor within the team as a contingency against disaster—measuring and self-disciplining in an almost Foucauldian way. Overall, for faculty and judges, the labor put into the project in the team also pointed to the dedication of individual students. It reflected hours of work in the labs on the device, in the library or online learning code, in living rooms discussing the project with the team, and so on. Even more important, this labor was seen as reflecting personal investment in the profession. Finally, the selection of the project demonstrated a different sort of soft skills: it was a test of students’ innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. Engineering in ATI was explicitly interwoven with potential careers and markets. Throughout the year or more of work on the project,

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various faculty members would ask students to explain and sell their idea to various constituents; by the time of the competition, the presentation was expected to be polished and professional. Although the SCP was compulsory, participation in Innovative-Tech Day was an entirely voluntary, paracurricular experience for students in this engineering program. In other words, although everyone had to produce the device, only select projects would be showcased in the competition. The competition, which was held roughly three times annually, sutured together many different and overlapping activities and experiences that together were considered constitutive of the engineering education experience, but that were not part of the formal curriculum. Much of the work that led up to the day’s events had come from courses or textbooks, but teams had also stitched together answers to technical questions from the Internet, the library, other students, other faculty, and other sets of experts that were completely unaffiliated with ATI. Furthermore, many soft skills were required to divide labor, organize tasks, manage time, and achieve goals collectively. Although labs and tools were available on campus, resources were also key, because teams had to absorb the various material costs for actually building the device itself. In this chapter, therefore, I will describe the ways that these three overlapping and interpenetrating aspects of the engineering subjectivity were performed throughout the production of the SCP, and how that enactment aligned with a neoliberal project of self-making and branding that frequently took place outside of the classroom. It is important to see how students and projects were being showcased in the Innovative Tech-Day competition for other aims, including the recruitment of students into the program, the communication of expectations to more junior students, the building of institutional contacts with industry, and the securing of professional opportunities for the strongest students presenting. The juxtaposition of the neoliberal experience in a technical program is intended to contrast with the neoliberal experience of more-liberal arts-based educations covered in this volume, where the ideological undercurrents are differently configured. Liberal arts educations have increasingly come to emphasize both inclass learning of discrete skills and paracurricular experiences, which together rationalize the market-value of postsecondary credentials. The work in this chapter, however, might suggest that the neoliberal shift has been less jarring in professional–vocational fields, which have longer histories with market forces. In fact, in many ways the neoliberal logic in higher education could emerge from or be otherwise modeled after professional–vocational educations like those described here.

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Archimedes Technical Institute and the Senior Capstone Project teams This study was undertaken as a pilot, ethnographic project in 2005, and was mostly centered in interviews, participant observation, video recordings, and content analysis of curricula guides. ATI was part of a large, multi-million-dollar corporate system of proprietary, for-profit colleges offering degrees in technology and business with more than thirty thousand students. By 2017, during the writing of this chapter, this particular campus no longer exists, although there remain more than fifty operating campuses in the corporate system. ATI offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in technical- and business-related fields. As a proprietary college, ATI was a for-profit, degree-granting institution owned and run as a publicly traded corporation, with a fluid educational structure intended to respond quickly to changes in the labor market. The college was marketed as having an education that was accessible to urban, career-oriented students, based in cutting-edge technology, and centered in learn-by-doing methodology. The institution thus emphasized practical skills in anticipation of career growth. The campus where this study took place was located in the urban northeast corridor that runs roughly from Washington, DC, to Boston. It maintained a student population of about 1,500 in a small facility, and was one of about a half-dozen ATI campuses in that region. With about seventy full-time nontenured faculty and fifty contingent faculty, the campus maintained an urban, racially diverse student population that lived off campus, with a male population significantly larger than the female. A large number of students were older, non-traditional students, worked at least part time, and had obligations outside of their academics. The curricula were designed by committees of educators and reproduced in identical form throughout the locations across the country. Like chain stores and fast food restaurants, the curricula, campuses, and education system were theoretically designed so that one could move about the country knowing that your experience in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in the Northeast would be consistent. The reality is, of course, a bit different. Differences were evident even in walking through campuses: one Midwest campus was located on a lush green campus, with sleek buildings, dorms, and open spaces, whereas the campus where I conducted this study was located on three floors of a single building in a semi-industrial, gentrifying neighborhood. On another level, state laws had an impact on the context in which the

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schooling took place, such as that in some states the institution was known as Archimedes University and offered a bachelor’s of science, while in others it was ATI and instead offered a bachelor’s of technology. Although substantively the same in curricula, the corporation adapted its processes and nomenclature around the local conventions and laws. Unlike other elements of the curricula, the SCPs in the engineering programs were notably vague. While the corporate course guide on a microprocessors course was fifteen pages and nearly five thousand words, the corporate course guide for the SCP lab was two pages and under three hundred words. Thus, although this class was required across ATI campuses across the United States, faculty were allowed far more discretion, flexibility, and control than any other aspect of the program. Professors Eiger and Chang who oversaw these projects had elaborated a rich and robust set of paracurricular traditions at this campus. Some of these traditions had been inherited from earlier faculty leaders, other parts had been adapted from colleagues at other campuses, and some had been devised by Eigar and Chang locally. The Innovative-Tech Day competition was absolutely not part of the formal curricula, but nevertheless held a very important place in the local culture of engineering students and faculty. At the Innovative-Tech Day competition, student teams would compete with one another through their SCPs: faculty and guest judges would evaluate how well their projects embodied engineering knowledge and practice. Throughout this chapter I will draw on the experiences of teams of students that participated in (or were denied participation in) Innovative-Tech Day either in June 2005 or in October 2005. The opening passages in the chapter focused on the participants of the October Innovative-Tech Day including the teams on the Mobile Robotic Arm, the Net-Fridge, the Universal Identity Card, the Arithmetic Tutor, and the Automated Home (withdrawn before the competition itself). I will also, however, draw on the experiences of other teams of students, including the Electronic Waiter, Voice-Activated Wheelchair, the Fingerprint-ATM, Magnetic Chess Set, and the Safe Home, all of which competed in June 2005.

Engendering Neoliberal Subjectivities in Education As an analytic framework, has neoliberalism run its course? Not if we consider the ways that higher education has been systematically restructured over the past decades. Harvey (2005) noted that neoliberalism has become so hegemonic, pervasive, and naturalized into our

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lives that it becomes difficult to discern. From the structural precarity of labor among the faculty (Giroux 2014; Nikolaidis and Maroudas 2013; Peacock 2016; Teeuwen and Hantke 2007), to the marketization of higher education (Posecznick 2017; Shumar 1997; Canaan and Shumar 2008; Tuchman 2009), and the knowledge-production economy and audit culture (Apple 2005; Aronowitz 2000; Shore 2008; Shore and Wright 2015), the university has seen massive neoliberal shifts; this book contributes to understanding these shifts. As Hyatt, Shear, and Wright (2015: 3) have argued so effectively, “universities—and the people who teach, learn and work at universities—are thoroughly implicated and embroiled in processes of economic and cultural production.” In contrast to Dewey’s vision of structured experience (see Strong, this volume), current audit/market regimes turn all experiences into discrete, marketable things to be possessed, measured, listed on résumés, and sold. As these experiences become commodified, individuals are asked to discipline themselves in line with a neoliberal, supposedly meritocratic ideology that fetishizes individual agency in a free market. ATI’s students were considered to have succeeded or failed based on the measurement of meritocratic, individual performance. Although structured, paracurricular experiences at ATI did socialize individuals into a professional community, it also did so in ways that were inextricably entwined with the ideal neoliberal self, or as a variation of the performance genre that Gershon (2016) called “personal branding.” Indeed, in many ways these performances were attempts to brand themselves as engineers, and their whole being as engineers were up for evaluation in that process. As such, I build on the vividly insightful observations of Urciuoli (2008) on the implications of the new skills discourse on governmentality in education and the workplace. Herself inspired by Silverstein, she unpacks the “worker-self-as-skills-bundle” as a semiotic cluster of loosely associated understandings “that are referentially successful to the extent that users share, or buy into, specific presuppositions about workers and labor: who workers should be, how they should work, and how they should be evaluated” (212–13). Of particular interest to her is the deployment of hard and soft skills (further explored below), which she further found increasingly privileged and valued the soft skills over the hard, given the discursive practices, and in corporate culture. This chapter unpacks how the worker-self-as-skills-bundle is arrayed among engineering students at ATI. Again, although I will demonstrate the interpenetrating nature of the different sorts of skills being cultivated, for analytic purposes I will examine how they coalesce into three

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sub-clusters of the “worker-self-as-skills-bundle” which further conform with the performance of Gershon’s (2016) “personal branding.” The first of these subclusters centers on the demonstration of hard or technical skills and knowledges, which are central to the engineering subjectivity as a professional or a student. The second cluster of skills I will discuss are those that Urciuoli (2008) would most likely describe as soft, including the ability to work well in a team, or demonstrate commitment to those in authority. The final cluster of skills are also soft, in that they are related to neoliberal governmentality, but are centered in performing creativity, originality, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Again, these are separated out only for analytic purposes, as it should become clear that each overlaps, interpenetrates, and is frequently loosely associated with the others. Furthermore, through the gaze of neoliberal, meritocratic individualism all of these clusters are interpreted absent context: gender, race, and class have no place here. Based on this ethnographic work, the ability to perform these clusters in front of an audience was critical to taking on an emerging engineering subjectivity, one that brought together different sorts of skills and qualities; and this performance pivoted around and was manifested through the SCP.

Performing Hard Skills through Technical Knowledge Engineering as a field is often regarded as one centered in hard or technical skills, and so it was at ATI. Hardware and software are two complex concepts that can refer to sets of technical expertise, skill or talent, tangible components, or even types of people. On the surface, students and faculty often described these two areas as distinct and complementary. They described hardware as both the physical components of the project and the technical skill required to effectively identify, build, assemble, and troubleshoot them. They described software as the coding or programming of an SCP. Often described as the brain of the project, software allows the artifact to make decisions, take actions, and interact with the user. As Moses, another student on the Mobile Robotic Arm team, responded when I asked what he was doing while he was in a lab working on the coding, “I’m trying to breathe life into this thing.” Software refers to the coding, the skill sets, and the knowledge necessary to make an artifact think, act, and interact. The hardware/ software differentiation is, however, specious. Students seemed to have a difficult time articulating the difference between the two, and often fell back on the kinds of activities connected with them. Students con-

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curred, at its simplest, that hardware was something you assembled, and software was something you typed into a computer. Regardless, hardware and software skill needed to be demonstrated collectively through experience and then performed publicly; at ATI this was best achieved through building a device that actually worked. Professor Jenney, a nonengineering faculty member who served as a judge in several competitions, recognized that in the end, this was critical for a positive outcome with the SCP: You feel kind of disappointed if you don’t see it working. You somehow . . . instinctively . . . you start valuing the project less—which is not totally correct because—and we realize this. There was a project just recently where they had this chess board and it didn’t work [June competition]. But if you think—if you have to step back and think—oh my goodness, how much work was involved and they went through a tremendous amount of work that was involved in there. Just unfortunately, it didn’t work. [chuckle] I think it didn’t work from the start. So. So I think that’s different also. If it worked from the start and all of sort of sudden [sic] there’s some sort of glitch and it doesn’t work at the presentation that’s different than if it didn’t work at the start. So it was just a project that was too complex.

There was therefore a great deal of nervousness about whether the project will work, and in particular whether it will work on the day of the competition. Professor Jenney indicated that if “their project has been working and they actually show a little movie clip at the PowerPoint presentation that it’s working and then all of a sudden come the, you know [giggle], the day of the contest and nothing works.” In fact, the Mobile Robotic Arm team videotaped a demonstration and had it ready to show in case their project failed to work during the competition. Chang, however, believed that if there were a few technical problems, it could actually help the demonstration—by giving them a chance to really perform their technical expertise in front of the evaluators: “And sometimes they [the students are] able to show and troubleshoot their project. You know, like if something goes wrong, to patiently like be able to try to explain and try to fix it on the spot. That’s actually important for some companies, yeah. And actually the students who fix it on the spot, they’re [the judges are] actually impressed.” Indeed, the Net-Fridge team (October competition) encountered some difficulties with releasing the right compartment from the freezer. After several minutes of troubleshooting, they were able to get it working again. This team took first place at the October competition.

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Technical expertise thus needed to be accounted for both in the production of a working device and in perceived complexity. Students feared hearing that a project was too simple. Even at the point when the project was first being designed, professors were interested in whether a project was complex enough. Professor Chang3 explained, “I’m looking at it to see if it is possible or if it is more work, if it is less. If it is less work, we ask them, we still encourage them to do it, but we will ask them to do extra, to you know, the thing that they say, we will say look in addition there is another area you should add to it. But if it’s more work we do not turn them down, we just say look, if you really want to do this we have to talk because it’s going to be a lot of work and of course the outcome will be [a] very good outcome.” If students chose a project that was too complex, they could doom themselves to failure, as in the case of the Magnetic Chess Set (June competition). Although it was impressive in concept, the team was never able to get the project to work, and as a result the judges evaluated them more harshly. On the other hand, if an idea was not complex enough, it ran the risk of being seen as insufficient. It was also the case that technical knowledge was often interwoven with other areas of concern such as labor, diligence, originality, and so on. In one team session, Professor Eiger stated that Michael (Mobile Robotic Arm, October competition) was not active enough. Eiger said, “We need to get you more involved.” Michael said that he would design and build the physical sensor that would allow the robotic arm to maneuver. He said that they had decided to add these features after Professor Chang’s comments that the project needed to be more original. Eiger went on to privilege the hard skills, saying not to worry about originality: “Just make it work.” After a moment, however, he agreed that a sensor to monitor heat, and a fan to control it, would be a good idea. These overlapping categories are thus constantly, actively being negotiated. Students are aware of technical complexity as an important factor in evaluation, and learn to play with it to please the faculty and the judges. During interviews with two students, Umar and Usman (Universal Identity Card team, October competition), Umar revealed that programming language was a way that students would play with the perceived complexity of their projects. “Sometimes a project is too easy. If that’s the case, it may not meet the approval of the professors, so in order to make it look more complicated, you need to use a more complicated programming language like ASCII. However, if the project is already complex, then you use the simplest programming language available because you have more to work on.”

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In other words, technical complexity in a project was a variable that could be adjusted to meet faculty expectations about demonstrating hard skills. However, this was a tricky proposition, and could easily backfire, as it did for Avanish and Anil in the Automated Home (withdrawn from October competition). In early May 2005 Chang expressed concerns about Avanish and Anil burning circuits in a team session, and indicated that it was probably related to using too much power. He asked what they were using. When Anil said they were using an outlet, Chang cried, “[Are] you crazy?! You did it from [an] outlet?” Anil indicated that he wanted to impress judges by showing that they could use an outlet instead of a battery. Chang said that small devices like their project could not take more than 10 volts, and they were using 150. “No wonder the circuits are burning. It’s also dangerous!” Anil said they had been extremely careful, but Chang was shaken at their seeming lack of technical knowledge. He advised them to buy a cheap toy, pull it apart, take out the battery, and use that. He said they should never use an outlet, exclaiming, “I never heard of it! It should be blowing up!” While Umar recommended playing with programming language to increase the appearance of complexity, the judges interpreted Avanish and Anil’s ploy with power sources as foolish and dangerous. The Automated Home project was intended as a system to allow users to remotely operate security cameras, home irrigation, and various appliances (like lighting). When Avanish and Anil gave me and Chang a private demonstration at the end of May 2005, Chang remained unimpressed. They were showing us a live video of the street outside of Anil’s bedroom from a projector, which was choppy and poor in quality. When a car passed, it would appear as a still image on the left side of the screen—and the next image would be of the bumper exiting to the right of the frame. “What’s this?” Chang asked. “This is not real time for me.” Chang continued to indicate that this project was far too simple, and could be done by purchasing a webcam in Best Buy for $50. Avanish and Anil were unable to overcome the faculty’s perception that they lacked technical expertise, and a few days before the October competition, I heard that they were withdrawn without explanation. At that point, I also stopped seeing either of them on campus and they did not respond to my outreach. Faculty expertise and authority, in part, came from recognizing which projects demonstrated which sorts of knowledge to a satisfactory extent. And depth of knowledge was not always clear on the surface. At the Technology Day competition in June, a student in an associate’s degree program walked in with his own project and squatted beside the

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other SCPs, to the chagrin of Professors Chang and Eiger. Apparently, the student had the tacit approval of some faculty member to do so. He had built a robotic arm that responded to sensors in a glove—the arm moved in precise coordination with the movements of his wrist, fingers, arm, and so on. For a time, this associate degree student became the center of attention during the June competition. Students crowded around his booth to watch his demonstration—amazed at the fact that one associate degree student, without the benefit of faculty supervision or teammates, could devise something that appeared to be superior to many of the competing teams. Chang, in particular, was infuriated and continued to talk about this for months: He’s not supposed to be there, but because some miscommunication some faculty just want to put him in. But realistically, he didn’t design that. He assembled [it]; most of [what] the [associate’s degree program] students do is assemble. But they don’t really . . . even the codes, they don’t even write it. But pretty much, if you’re asking me, he could buy that whole product. I’m not saying it’s not fair; it’s just that this is rather misleading. . . . It’s a good idea that people [get a chance to] see it, but did he really do everything by himself? I mean that’s not his. Go [to] the Internet or something—they sell these things. So, that’s why I was not very pleased that he showed up. . . . It’s [a] miscommunication I think. One faculty did not talk with me first—went directly to talk to the Dean, and the Dean just [said] OK. Because if I’d be honest, I was not OK about it.

According to Chang, although this automated arm appeared to be more technically complex than many of the SCPs, the student simply purchased a kit and assembled it rather than build it from scratch. Chang was concerned that evaluators and guests would not know this, and in fact, called an impromptu meeting at the competition, where he privately informed them of the truth about that student’s project. The project did not demonstrate sufficient technical knowledge. Other moments, however, attested to the ways that technical knowledge become deeply entwined with other sorts of skills. Nagesh, from the Net-Fridge team, recounted a number of stories he had heard: I heard one week before the project was to be presented, everything was working fine. Two days before—a transformer blew up. Sensors or board, and it burned. It was a nightmare. The team still presented, but had to explain the problems and what had happened to them.

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They didn’t get a good place—they came in last place. It wasn’t working, and all other teams had working projects. What happened was, the team member didn’t show up, and that was a nightmare for him. Last semester, one guy didn’t show up. There were three. They asked why and he said he had interview or some other lame answers. And he failed Capstone Projects. Because he didn’t support the group. You have to stay focused.

Although Professors Eiger and Chang indicated that no such student had missed the presentation in the previous semester, this story circulated partly to bring together the hard and the soft. In this nightmare scenario, everything fell apart—the technology failed, as did the team. The story, which might be a bit of gossip or local legend, demonstrates how technical knowledge, hard work, and chance come together to affect the outcomes of these projects. However, other moments also pointed to the ways that these various aspects of the worker-self-asskills-bundle were sutured together. I was coming down the stairs and spotted Professor Chang in the busy hallway outside the labs talking to Erick from Professor Eiger’s Electronic Waiter team [June competition], and Professor El-Amin. They all knew of my pilot study at that point, so I nodded a greeting and stepped in to listen to the conversation. Erick was holding the robot, essentially the same as it had appeared when I saw it the day before. He was explaining how much the teams had spent out-of-pocket on building the robot, pointing at different components and explaining prices. Professor Chang was shocked, and said that it was far too much. He exclaimed that spending $1,000 on these parts was ridiculous and would look bad to the judges. Erick protested that it was not $1,000. He did some quick math and said it was closer to $500. Professor Chang was still upset and said that he was spending too much money. He said that the judges were not going to look kindly on spending a lot of money. He said that part of the evaluation was in being efficient and creative, using limited resources to produce a viable invention, a sentiment I had never heard before. Erick protested some more. He seemed to think that Professor Eiger (the team’s faculty advisor) was not appreciating what they had done. He said that he was being punished for creating something that was too good. Professor Chang said that that was not Eiger’s intention. He said that it was not about the project—the project itself was good. The problem was in how he presented it to the judges, and whether he would

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do so from the right angle. He told Erick that he had to be a salesman, and that if he explained his project during his presentation the same way he was presenting now, he would not do well in the Innovative Tech-Day competition. I walked with Chang back to his office in hopes of meeting his next class. As we went, Professor Chang described the problem with the project a little differently. He said that the robot that they had built did not show enough technical knowledge. They had bought expensive components and just connected them all, but had not done any ‘engineering’ at all. There was no ‘design’ involved with the electronic waiter. The entire project was inefficient and expensive. Chang could not understand, for example, why it had four wheels instead of just two. Under the regimes of audit culture, the quality of educational programs is partially defined by the ability to achieve certain discrete, learning objectives. As the above passage with the Electronic Waiter team (June competition) sutures together all three aspects of neoliberal subjectivity that I am pointing to in this chapter, it immediately dispels the simple myth that learning is the simple acquisition of discrete skills. And yet, these hard skills were crucial to the performance of personal branding for these students. Innovation/creativity, hard work/commitment, and technical knowledge are all deployed in this performance.

Performing Soft Skills through Teamwork and Commitment There are different sorts of soft skills at play in the production of engineering subjectivity, and they all involve governmentality—in other words, they demonstrate internal sets of values or personhoods that aligned with the faculty, the institution, and the field. A good deal of this was related to how labor was divided within the team, and what that said about students’ values and commitments. The fact that SCPs happen as teams reflects an understanding that the work that needs to be done is more than a single student can handle. Participants’ divisions of labor, both actual and perceived, become cruxes for tensions related to the SCP. When professors Chang and Eiger hold sessions in later phases of the project, they most often initiated the class with updates from each participant in their set of tasks. During the SCP presentations, every PowerPoint presentation included a table indicating division of labor, identifying team members and their roles. Each project identified different tasks or areas of project development, and presented an equitable distribution of student responsibility. Professors and evaluators alike frown on an uneven distribution of such

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tasks. As Professor Jacobs mentions, “Yeah, they always put their organization chart up there and you see who is primary and who is secondary, and occasionally you see a project where someone is secondary on everything.” These tasks/areas of responsibility are identified by the teams (or by the student who creates the PowerPoint presentation); they reflect both a fundamental understanding of the project and how it is put together, and a degree of participation in the team. Sometimes there is a one-to-one match between the number of tasks and the number of students, and other times the number of tasks is such that each student is primarily responsible for more than one task. In some cases these tasks seemingly emerge from student interactions, and in other cases the professor had assigned them—and might include activities like construction, technical documentation, or programming. Overall, these tasks/activities were clustered into hardware or software, as described in the “Performing Hard Skills through Technical Knowledge” section above. Students often identified themselves as skilled in one task or activity over the other, or even as a hardware or software person. In fact, a number of students mentioned their skill in sets of tasks as a critical factor in deciding on membership in their teams; in order to have a complete project, all teams needed both sorts of students. Students therefore needed teammates who could skillfully manipulate each area and complement their own skill sets; this coordination of skills meant that students must be able both to identify others’ abilities and to convey or articulate their own abilities. A student named Waheeda, for example, when forming her team for the first time, described herself as skilled with hardware, but not with software; she was searching for students who were good with software. Another student, Marcel, described how his team was able to move forward because of this even distribution of knowledge: “At first, I thought it would be easy because we have the technical background. I’m good in software and hardware, and others are good in both.” Succeeding with SCPs, then, involved not only having technical expertise in hardware and software, but also the ability to present oneself as having such expertise, to present oneself as actively contributing to either the hardware or software of the project in particular, to identify such expertise in others, and to work with others to plan and evenly distribute labor toward completion of the project. These complex relations emerged throughout the development of the SCP. Being perceived as a student with technical expertise was helpful to being named to a team; however, once on a team, it was being perceived as contributing

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to the labor for the project that seemed to take on greater importance. The notions of contribution and pulling one’s weight are aspects of participation, and were constantly monitored by student and faculty alike. In many cases, the professor became actively involved in division of labor and task management directly, such as when Mauricio described Professor Eiger as the project manager. As with team formation, the professor sometimes stepped in to take control when it appeared to him that the students were not doing so on their own. Teams that were able to set their own tasks and deadlines were described as successful. In the first session I sat in on with the Universal Identity Card team, Eiger moved around the room asking for updates on tasks; they had all been completed on time and some tasks were ahead of schedule. Eiger indicated that these students were doing a “great job,” but were making him look bad as a professor (to me as an observer) because he had so little to contribute to the discussion. One of Eiger’s big concerns was in identifying what he called “hitchhikers”—those who do not contribute to the team by completing tasks and meeting deadlines. In such cases, he would become more and more involved with division of labor for the project: “First I’ll say, ‘you know you need to be doing a little more work on this.’ Pretty much, if that doesn’t work—‘now, this is what I want you to do. By next week you should have your [next task completed]’ this is. And then, if that’s not happening I try to split off a piece of the project to where that person has to do it. He or she is responsible for a part of the project that no one else is doing. So if that piece is not working—it’s totally their responsibility.” Professor Chang seemed more willing to take on this role of assigning tasks at an earlier stage: “For example, it’s like look, they have to talk with me; you see I also assign task for them. I say OK, maybe your team member here should do this task, this one should do this, and then after that you can combine these together. I’m the one in the middle to tell them to do all of these things. And they actually, as I said if they followed the team—the team concept—usually they do fine, but also be aware, team concept doesn’t mean that your partner do all of the work. You have your own individual tasks to complete.” Although according to Professor Eiger it has occurred infrequently, the ultimate sanction for not participating was the involuntary removal from a team. Rather than outright failing hitchhikers, Professors would remove them from the team and ask them to complete an SCP on their own. Because this occurs during later phases of the project, it can appear a daunting task for such students—all of whom have dropped out rather than move forward with the project on their own. (In contrast,

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Taquanna of the Arithmetic Tutor team, was forced to complete the project by herself because her partner dropped out—a constant danger for those teams with only two students.) The threat of losing a member, either voluntarily or involuntarily, surfaced in most teams. Nathan and Nagesh expressed concerns about the project when they learned that Neil’s lack of participation/contribution was caused by his dilemma about dropping out of the program. The Universal Identity Card team moved from a successful team to a “disintegrating” one when one member dropped out and another transferred to another campus. Waheeda expressed fear that although she was contributing to the team, the professor’s perception that she was not would lead to her being removed from the team. In each case, contribution is based on techno-social participation in the SCP. Their participation is related to the completion of technical activities that are based on technical expertise; however, these activities are embedded in a complex social web, such that the technical and social become intertwined. If the team as a whole is not seen as making progress, it is seen as not successful as a whole and can be penalized. Throughout the course of this study, I observed Professor Chang repeatedly chide Anil and Avanish on their lack of performance and progress. In May, at a class where they were reporting progress (or, more precisely, difficulties), Professor Chang became noticeably upset with them. Chang exploded, “I am confused!” He said that they were improving, but every time he saw them they were testing the same software and hardware. Avanish agreed, but argued that were he to spend too many hours working on this project, then all of his other classes would suffer. (In interviews, Avanish was one of the students who had brought up the SCP’s onecredit status as being problematic.) Chang nearly shouted, “Manage your time!” This difficulty with managing tasks and deadlines in the SCP crossed over into personal attribution in general class performance, as Chang revealed, “Other professors tell me things about you. It has my mind spinning.” Chang went on to say that professors asked why he was missing so many classes. His partner, Anil, quietly ignored the growing conflict and continued to type away at his laptop. Absence from classes under certain circumstances is actually endorsed by the professors. In an interview in August, Chang suggested that if a student is absent from a class, and is found in the lab working on the SCP, that absence could be overlooked. Understanding the rules of participation in engineering schooling thus has a significant impact on one’s eventual success or failure.

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Despite Avanish’s protests that he was not absent often and that professors should not be discussing his performance anyway, Chang insisted that it was his role as chair to confront students on such problems. Chang replied that it was not the role of professors to have to confront students with accusations like, “You lazy bastard!” He then turned to Anil and said, “You too.” Anil said nonchalantly, “I never miss class,” which Chang ignored, returning his frustration to Avanish. Later, when asking for what progress they each would make by the next week Chang interrupted Avanish: AVANISH: I’m going to go home and . . . CHANG: Take a nap? AVANISH: . . . make sure that the circuit works—that it doesn’t burn.

Avanish was having great difficulty in presenting himself as fully embracing the engineering subjectivity. Although this particular incident seemed to target Avanish, other such meetings would criticize the project overall. In the end of the semester, it seems that Chang decided that the team had not made enough progress, and the team was pulled from the presentations. Access to the presentations was an important gateway to success, because it was required to move on in the program and in the SCP class. Unlike with individual hitchhikers, such teams are often “delayed,” not “derailed,” and faculty encourage them to take an extra semester or two to work on the project. Reportedly, sometimes these students drop out, sometimes they continue with their project, and sometimes they drop the project entirely and find new teams. At any rate, the way that labor was engaged and divided became a way to identify students aligning with engineering subjectivities in other ways. As Professor Jenney put it, “Well certainly, I think how original the idea is is going to make the project stronger, so yeah I end up comparing them to other projects in that sense. What interests me more, what I feel is more useful or creative is definitely going to impact my evaluation of that project. Uhm. If I feel like it’s something kind of like that they just built to get through the senior capstone project, uhh, [laugh] then yeah, I kind of get, I guess, unmotivated to ask questions.” Or, as Professor Eiger described, “I see it right from the beginning that they’re just not interested, you know? ‘Yeah yeah, I’ll do the documentation—you guys do everything else. I’ll be in charge of the PowerPoint presentation.’” Students who were not invested attempted to work on tasks that professors believed take the least effort. During the

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semester Michael of the Mobile Robotic Arm team often reported that he was working on the paper report and the PowerPoint presentation; Eiger pressured him to take on more tasks because of this pattern. Although there are certainly many students who see the SCP as nothing more than a technical exercise to complete, articulating this to faculty or evaluators was akin to treason. Many of the students who had difficulty in successful participation encountered difficulty in being seen as invested in their project. In interviews, Avanish expressed doubts about how important this project would be for him in the long run. He said that the industry people certainly seemed to like it, but that was hardly a guarantee of getting a job. He openly told me, as he told Professor Chang, that the other courses he was taking would remain his priority. Since the SCP was worth only one credit, Avanish opined that it should not be a priority, saying “The danger of a hurt GPA won’t come from the Capstone Projects.” Investment was also seen as contributing to a student’s success in both schooling and the profession. Yet despite the number of exceptions that can be named, faculty still held to this category as one that defined success. Professor Jenney explained, “You know, if they’re just kind of like goofing off and they are just getting by, or I mean I know of this one situation of a student who was an excellent student and uhhm and he did have a project that kind of was not very impressive and it was just kind of one of those I need to graduate projects. And he’s a hard worker so that’s an exception, he got an incredible job at Motorola, and that’s an exception.” Thus the performance of being invested in their engineering education was something that students could negotiate, hide, and play with. Although Nathan of the Net-Fridge Team was always regarded by faculty as a top-performing student, he revealed to me that he had lost interest in the project and no longer cared about it. At that point in August, Nathan had not worked on the project in some time, and was unmotivated to work on it at all. Nagesh, who was also present, laughed and called him “Mr. Short Attention Span.” And yet no faculty ever indicated that Nathan was not invested in his project. In contrast, Erick, described earlier, declared that the SCP was nothing more than a technical exercise; that attitude came across in his presentations. This was why there was such surprise when, although they did somewhat poorly in the presentations, the team did well in the Technology Day Competition. As Professor Jacobs shared, “Last semester it was the, the one I was talking about earlier that had the terrible PowerPoint—it was the waiter, the fast food waiter kind of thing. They did such a good job

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in the lab or whatever, I was going to put them last, and I ended up putting them second and I think they came in second.” Thus the division of labor and general attitude toward the project were seen as windows into students’ personal investment in the profession, and indeed their whole being: The entrepreneurial self is taken to be a bundle of skills, qualities, assets, experiences, and relationships, and it is this compilation that must be enhanced, with the sole exception of one’s qualities. . . . One’s qualities are assumed to be authentic and unchanging. . . . It is qualities, as understood in this fashion, that demarcate the style by which one manages oneself and differentiates oneself from others: qualities are considered the source of brand uniqueness. Thus the techniques for creating a personal brand are meant to reveal one’s self-managerial style, who one will predictably be in all contexts, supposedly. (Gershon 2016: 225)

These soft skills supposedly revealed consistent qualities related to teamwork and commitment, and students were actively performing them as part of a personal, engineering brand. But students also needed to perform their inner entrepreneur more explicitly.

Performing Soft Skills through an Entrepreneurial Spirit and Originality Much time, work, and negotiation went into the process of deciding what the project should be. To the faculty and judges, the SCP reflected elements of students’ characters and qualities. The students were not only being asked to build something, but also to be socially aware salespeople who could position and market a product. Faculty members asked their students to “believe in” their project, and to be original and creative. Professor Jacobs suggested, One semester a group did this vending machine, and they cared about it, but there was nothing to it . . . but it was just a vending machine and they didn’t understand why they didn’t win. And they didn’t ask me, because I would have told them: we have vending machines; we don’t need your product. We like vending machines that carry more than two bags of corn chips. You know it’s not very impressive. Even though they did a lot of building, but this isn’t, you know a building school. It’s about ideas and what they brought to it, the problem they found needs to be solved.

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In order to be successful the students ideally would position their project as something new, original, and creative, but fitting in with a certain historical narrative. In the presentations, each team was asked to fill in the project as part of a historical, technological narrative— with their product at the zenith. Thus the Mobile Robotic Arm team began their presentations with a history of robots, all the way down to the Czech origin of the word. The Net-Fridge team began their presentation with a history of food storage, from salting to refrigeration. The Universal Identity Card team opted for a history of all currency, from coinage to electronic transactions as the heritage from which the project springs. By laying claim to a certain technological history, they also were laying claim to a legitimacy of human invention and applied scientific thought. And yet they balanced this respect for the past with a break into something new. Umar and Usman described how the Universal Identity Card started out as a card to be used in medical vending machines, allowing prescription drugs to be dispensed for late-night needs. As they moved on, the project just grew and grew, as different members added new and different features to the project; eventually the medical vending capacity was dropped (largely from a sense that the liability would be too great if an error were made). Some students believed that the professor was not always the best to help in this area. Nathan and Nagesh reported in a conversation that Professor Chang had an idea that he wanted them to work on before the Net-Fridge came about. Chang wanted them to develop a railroad car that could detect poisonous gas and lock down and hermetically seal off the car from everyone else. Nathan, Nagesh, and I all spontaneously burst into laughter at this thought. Nathan suggested he was not quite comfortable with a project that would “sacrifice the few to save the many.” Instead, the Net-Fridge emerged from thinking about the kitchen, and the most used appliances. Nathan’s plan was to automate an entire kitchen—with food moving from freezer, to defroster, to stove, and so on—but abandoned these plans because of time constraints. For this team, the idea was Nathan’s from the beginning, and all agreed that the process of selecting the project was “not democratic.” The notion of project originality, however, was a contested space that did produce real tensions. At a practice-presentation in May, Erick voiced dissent that originality or creativity should play any role in evaluation. When the criticism of the Electronic Waiter was the lack of being convinced that there was a need for such an invention, Erick’s response was that he did not need to “prove anything to anyone.” He suggested that their project was not a great idea, and that they had only

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chosen the topic because they had to choose something—in effect arguing that it was only a technical exercise. Eiger seemed a little shaken and said that he knew this wasn’t a “cure for cancer,” but that they did have a very real and solid reason for creating this product. They would need to sell it to the audience. Project originality was something that haunted the Automated Home team of Anil and Avanish. At their practice presentation, a professor pointed out that there were already commercial cameras and security systems out there in the market that could do more than what they were designing. Similarly, during the Universal Identity Card presentation, an audience member pulled out a magazine in which a similar product appeared. The team members quickly pivoted, and incorporated this into their performance—replying that they were obviously on the very forefront of the technology. The SCP is a historical artifact—the product of constant negotiation between team members, faculty, and audience. The project itself served in multiple ways as a way to position the students as legitimate (or not). The process of what the project began as, how it changed, and what it became during these performances illustrates the mediated, social character of technological design. In addition, acts that identified a team’s project as original were used to identify a student as successful or failing. Professor Jenney, a regular judge in the competition, said “Of course how the students present—their communication skills—has a big effect also because if I don’t understand what they’re saying then I lose interest.” Professor Jacobs echoed these thoughts with his cynical edge: “Everything comes down to the oral presentation. So maybe they did a lot of work, and maybe their presentation style is terrible—it makes me think they didn’t do the work. Maybe I’m wrong, but it all comes down to effective oral communication.” Faculty and students readily recognized how important it was to be able to speak effectively for these projects. In fact, communication was so often described as a crucial skill that faculty sometimes privileged it over technical skills. Chang described it this way: First thing is they got to know how to communicate. You know. Communicate like layman’s terms, like a layman person. To use it like customer service. Make sure they understand like simple terms. That’s one thing they should do. Second thing is they should have better written skills too. Able to communicate in technical terms into layman terms and to able to translate or do it on paper, so people will understand what they are trying to say, and have better population

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of a presentation and written. Like PowerPoint when you present something that people understand. That is partially [important] to consider [when thinking about whether a particular student] have a good calling in engineering. Now if you have that without the good knowledge, you’re not the good engineer either. But if you have a very good technical knowledge but you cannot communicate then you are not a good engineer either. So realistically, the characteristics to be a good engineer, you need communication, written skills and technical knowledge.

Communication is essential to any performance, but here it was privileged as important to engineering, which was something I had not encountered in the literature. In fact, the literature in some way broaches the subject of engineers being stereotyped as poor communicators and speakers (see, e.g., Downey 1997). These stereotypes most often, however, seem to describe this as a shortcoming in a layperson, but not in an engineer—on the contrary, sometimes the lack of soft skills is described as a prerequisite for being a good engineer. The fact that here effective communication and people skills were invoked as an important skill to have as an engineer specifically, reflects a social reality about the prestige and legitimacy of this institution and its population. As Eiger describes, “What they tell us, why they hire our people, what they look for is under the broad topic of people skills. They figure they have enough knowledge to deal with equipment or do the technical work that’s required. But what they are concerned about is how do they deal with customers. Which is kind of an odd thing that they are more concerned about that than they are about technical abilities.” Since these students were by and large being hired as technicians and not as researchers or designers, these social skills became even more important in the eyes of potential employers. Eiger went on to describe the intentional shift in pedagogy to reflect these demands: “We put a lot of emphasis on the presentation skills. More so maybe then is required we put a lot of emphasis on that. For the most part, and I don’t mean this as a put-down, what they’re doing is not, is not state-of-the-art. They’re putting something together. Going through the . . . trials and tribulations of building something and making it work. It’s not necessarily . . . it’s not a master’s thesis . . .” Professor Eiger saw a certain kind of engineering schooling taking place that will lead to a certain kind of profession—one where customer service skills will be just as valuable as technical ones. And the SCP was the main vehicle for the student experience required to gain and/or demonstrate such soft skills.

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Conclusions: What Gets Left Out When Showcasing Neoliberal Subjectivity? Engineering holds a particularly privileged place in the discursive hierarchy of credentials and professions, as simultaneously well-remunerated, rigorous, intellectual, and practical. Obtaining the credential and being socialized into engineering social worlds was therefore potentially transformative to one’s standing in the social order. Marcel, who is originally from Haiti, speaks to this possibility: “We don’t have much money—just dreams. Dreams do come true. I never thought I would be here and learning electronics but I always wondered how stuff worked and communicated. I was fascinated by robotics and these were my dreams.” For Marcel, the field itself figured prominently in personal, aspirational narratives. And for this reason, it was particularly troubling that there were nuances of the professional field that remained hidden. All of the students described in this project were either students of color, or immigrant white students (most of them Eastern European). As is typical in neoliberal spaces and with neoliberalized activities, what gets least acknowledged is structural forms of inequality as layered in race, class, and gender (and their potential intersections). For example, although accredited, ATI did not have a stellar reputation, and the program operated on the periphery of legitimate engineering. All of the professors, who were the products of more traditional engineering programs, showed something like pride and awe in their students’ ability to complete these projects. All of the professors indicated that as seniors in their more-traditional undergraduate programs they would not have been able to do what their students were doing. And yet simultaneously there also seemed to be some disparagement of the students because they would most likely become “field-engineers.” And what precisely was a field-engineer? Professor Eiger split the professional world into two separate tracks: engineering-engineering and field-engineering. According to Eiger, when engineer-engineers encountered field-engineers, “They don’t consider them engineers. They see them as a higher level of technician. I think an engineer would think of himself as someone who designs and creates things—pushes the state of the art; our people don’t normally get into positions like that. Field engineers are, in their opinion, if I were out there—when I was in it—I would consider them, uhh, high level technicians.” Professor Eiger, who spoke very frankly where others hesitated, said that his opinion had shifted when he moved from the profession to teaching at ATI;

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he now saw these as two different, legitimate, professional tracks for engineers. One of these tracks leads to graduate study, research and development, and the other to repair, maintenance, and field activities, which is why this program focused so much on communication (or customer service) skills. Professor Eiger further admitted that this distinction was not much discussed, and that most students probably did not realize that they were headed toward a career in field-engineering. He thought that they imagined they would be heading toward engineering-engineering instead. He described his reluctance to bring up these distinctions, saying, “I don’t think it’s my place to go into the freshman class and say, ‘By the way . . . .’” And so, students who were able to successfully navigate their engineering schooling and the SCP were actually participating in a particular sort of engineering. Thus, the curricular and the paracurricular experiences at ATI prepared traditionally underrepresented students for a vocational sort of engineering that was systematically devalued in the profession. Some students seemed to sense this unspoken tension. Erick, for example, was vociferous in his calling out of the entire SCP as a kind of game or performance; he did so publicly to anyone willing to listen. In his public argument with Professor Chang and Professor Jaspad, another ATI engineering faculty member, about spending too much money on his project discussed earlier, Erick threw up his hands and said that none of this mattered anyway because this program was “not ‘real’ engineering anyway.” Erick insisted that engineering was all about calculus up to and including Calculus III. Since this program did not include Calculus III or advanced physics, he said that they “could not even pretend that what we do is engineering.” He said that the program was electronics—not engineering. The professors then argued with him for some time to convince him of the legitimacy of this program, to what seemed to be an impasse. Chang and Eiger cared a great deal about their students, and crafted a paracurricular space that they believed would best serve them in their attempts to find employment. Students would learn how to perform a professional brand that included the performance of technical knowledge, labor, diligence, commitment, and an entrepreneurial spirit. The professors built a capstone experience that was centered in cumulative and collaborative expertise, and it seemed they were somewhat successful in placing their students in jobs. But they were not willing to discuss the tiering of the field or their peripheral positions in it. Furthermore, the performance neither acknowledged the ways that race, class, and

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gender impacted the performances themselves, nor the fact that underrepresented students were being systematically tracked into second-tier engineering that would bring limited social and cultural capital in the profession. Neoliberalism’s unwillingness to acknowledge systemic or structural inequalities reduces every outcome to questions about free agents in open markets. These performances of personal brand are narrowly focused only on the bundles of skills/qualities that individuals can display and sell to potential employers, without thoughtful consideration of how access to particular resources facilitated the acquisitions of those skills. It is thus dehumanizing in that it erases so much of what is central to these social worlds and lived experiences. These various bundles of skills and qualities included not only knowing how, but also managing complex, emerging social relations with others (again, Urciuoli 2008). It required the use of certain words or phrases, enacting certain messages through the right body language, being likable and persuasive, having particular attitudes toward the self or the profession, the ability to listen and be listened to, the ability to see and be seen, and having had the right sorts of experiences—and we know from decades of research that these vary tremendously across gender, race, and class lines. However, these soft skills in particular pointed to other supposedly consistent and inherent qualities that either did or did not line up with the ideal engineering student. The faculty and the students both actively negotiated these tensions. In many ways, neoliberalism is a new guise for enduring social inequalities, and there are historical resonances at ATI with other sorts of professional tiering and tracking that have been enacted in other times and places. And yet the experiences described here were also neoliberalized by being bundled up with the marketing of the program to students, and to industry professionals, who could potentially hire the ATI graduates. The ritual performance of an engineering subjectivity through the SCP therefore reflects only a small sliver of what is a far broader and more complex professional, social world. The story that ATI graduates needed to present, however, could not accommodate such nuance. “Job seekers, in short, are supposed to identify their ‘story,’ the narrative that provides a working history whose lead character is a predictable self composed of recognizable and named qualities [emphasis added] that will determine how the person will act in any future circumstances” (Gershon 2016: 226). The SCP and paracurricular experiences provided a space for marketing and branding the self in precisely this way, and might represent the model for a more seamless professional-vocational-educational experience more broadly.

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 An anthropologist by training, Alex Posecznick is a member of the associated faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he manages programs in education, culture and society, and international educational development. He is the author of Selling Hope and College (Cornell University Press, 2017), an ethnography of admissions at a less-selective college. This chapter provides new layers of analysis to a project from his time as a doctoral student.

Notes 1. The names of the institutions (such as Archimedes Technical Institute) and all research participants have been changed to pseudonyms to protect their identities. 2. Wireless technology was still inchoate at that time, and stations were connected by long, blue Ethernet cables to ATI’s network for Internet access. 3. As Professor Chang is not a native speaker of English, quotes from his interviews are not always routine academic English. Aside from some points of clarification, these quotes appear as close to as transcribed as possible.

References Apple, Michael. 2005. “Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture.” Critical Quarterly 47, no.1–2: 11–29. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0011-1562.2005.00611.x. Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press. Canaan, Joyce, and Wesley Shumar, eds. 2008. Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. New York, London: Routledge. Downey, Gary. 1997. The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits Among Computer Engineers. New York: Routledge. Gershon, Ilana. 2016. “‘I’m Not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man”: Typing the Neoliberal Self into a Branded Existence.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 3: 223–246. http://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.017. Giroux, Henry. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyatt, Susan, Boone Shear, and Susan Wright, eds. 2015. Learning under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education. New York: Berghahn Books. Nikolaidis, Evangelos, and Leonidas Maroudas. 2013. “Institutional Changes and the Expansion of Flexible Forms of Employment in Higher Education: The Case of Greek Universities. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 11, no. 3: 127–45.

214 ⽧ Alex Posecznick Peacock, Vita. 2016. “Academic Precarity as Hierarchical Dependence in the Max Planck Society.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1: 95–119. http:// doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.006. Posecznick, Alex. 2017. Selling Hope and College: Merit, Markets, and Recruitment at an Unranked School. New York: Cornell University Press. Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3: 278–98. http://doi .org/10.1177/1463499608093815 Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2015. “Audit Culture Revisited.” Current Anthropology 56, no. 3, 421–44. http://doi.org/10.1086/681534. Shumar, Wesley. 1997. College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education. London and Washington, DC: Falmer Press. Teeuwen, Rudolphus, and Steffen Hantke, eds. 2007. Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat: Adjunct Labour in Higher Education. New York: Rodopi. Tuchman, Gaye. 2009. Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2: 211–28. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.2008.1548-1425.00031.x.

CHAPTER 11

Caught between Commodification and Audit Concluding Thoughts on the Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education WESLEY SHUMAR 

Opening Stories At a rising university in the Mid-Atlantic, an energetic and enthusiastic young university president was addressing a group of new faculty in early 1999. The new faculty were all very excited and nervous to begin their work at this upwardly mobile private research university. There was significant anxiety about research and tenure expectations, and several of them asked the president about them. But the focus of the president’s address was his free-market orientation and his administration’s open-door transparent policy. He ended his address with the statement that the students were his customers and that each of them had his personal e-mail address, and they were free to contact him directly any time, especially if they had customer complaints. This left the new faculty in the room somewhat speechless—and not necessarily because they were offended by the market metaphors. This president was famous for having had a big impact on the success of this regional university that capitalized on the increased importance of universities in the urban economy. What surprised the faculty about the president’s comments was how very far removed they were from faculty concerns. After the president spoke and took a couple of questions, he had to leave for a pressing meeting. At that point the provost took over the discussion with the new faculty. The provost sat down in front of the group and in a very measured way began by saying, “Well, the students aren’t literally our customers.” He then proceeded to point out that the maxim in the marketplace, that the customer is always right, cannot really be the case in higher education. Students must do the work they are assigned and be graded on that work. Again, the new faculty did

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not wish to take up this discussion of the commodification of higher education. Rather they were polite and asked other questions. The irony of the moment around the question of higher education as business and whether students were customers was marked by the discomfort the faculty felt at the meeting and the wry way the provost attempted to support the president while saying “of course we don’t mean this literally.” It was a moment of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 1997). The year 1999 was an optimistic moment in the commodification of higher education in the United States, a moment when there was very little tension between the utility of a university degree and the marketing of that degree as a commodity. In Marxist terms, there was little tension between use-value and exchange-value. Almost every school had some scale that they could point to in the U.S. News & World Report guide to higher education—best regional four-year college, best school focused on particular curricula.1 But all that would change in the next few years. In thinking about the commodification of higher education, and the commodification of culture more generally, we are reminded that there is a pressure in Western capitalism for different cultural institutions to be colonized by the economic. Some countries, recognizing this pressure in consumer capitalism, put limits on the ways in which the economic can colonize the cultural. But in the United States there do not tend to be those limits or a cultural valuing of such limits. Rather, in the United States there is a dominant ideology that suggests the economic is a more rational way to organize all of social life, and therefore commodification tends to be fully embraced in a number of social arenas that are not economic per se. And furthermore, there is a tendency in the dominant culture to not see what is lost when economic logic colonizes other social logics in education or another social arena. The preceding chapters in this volume have examined the effect of such logic on the segmentation and commodification of the undergraduate experience. In this final chapter I examine how U.S. higher education came to the point where the economic logic came to dominate.

Three Phases of the Structure of U.S. Higher Education We can think of the commodification of higher education in the United States as falling into three separate, but overlapping, phases. Below I map out my thinking about these three phases of the commodification of higher education in the United States. I have pointed to this model briefly elsewhere as well (Shumar 2016). In this chapter, I will focus

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on how these structural and cultural phases of transformation created a context that shapes the experiences of all participants in higher education in the United States—faculty, administration, and students. The U.S. system is large and complex, and public institutions and private institutions experience the same pressures differently, but there are nevertheless some general insights that we can gather from thinking about these macro structural and cultural processes. All members of the higher education community would experience these pressures, including students, administrators, faculty, and families sending their children to college. In this chapter I will focus primarily on the ways in which commodification has shaped and constrained the experience of faculty in higher education, a process instrumental to the structuring and marketing of the undergraduate experience.

The Commodification of U.S. Higher Education, Phase 1 College for Sale (Shumar 1997) is a book about the transformation of higher education in the 1970s and 1980s. There were other books coming out at the same time that were similarly documenting the changes in U.S. higher education (Readings 1996; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Although we can trace higher education’s relationship to corporate capitalism back to the late nineteenth century and beyond (Barrow 1990; Nasaw 1981; also see Handler, this volume), there were dramatic commodifying practices that changed the shape and nature of higher education in the 1970s. I argued that this was a response to an economic bust in higher education brought on by the federal government’s decision to reduce funding and a decline in the traditional college age population as the baby boom was coming to an end and baby boomers were finishing college. These structural forces were also augmented by the fact that higher education had gone through two major boom cycles: the GI bill after World War II and the 1960s expansion. Together these cycles created a kind of economic bubble in higher education. Institutions had expanded to be able to accommodate this larger number of students and they needed the tuition revenues to keep the institutions solvent. The 1970s also saw the collapse of the postwar run of capital accumulation that had created the golden era of U.S. economic expansion. The stagflation of the 1970s signaled that the Fordist/Keynesian economic model, which itself was a response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, had run its course. And so there was both a further withdrawal of federal and state funding promises to universities, and a with-

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drawal of support for a welfare system that supported all sorts of social institutions. The immediate solution to the university’s crisis was that many colleges and universities in the United States took in the marketing and advertising strategies of consumer industries. They began to think of education and curriculum as a product, a product that could be marketed differently to different segments of the population. Universities began to create new products for a new buying public and to woo students to the university with the promise of an interesting four-year experience while they earned the credentials needed to compete in the new marketplace. The result of this process led one university president to claim that the students were his customers. For this discussion, there are several important points. First, this commodification began before the discourse of neoliberalism had become entrenched. To be sure, there was a beginning in the withdrawal of state funding and the idea that the market should provide solutions to larger social problems and civic needs. But this was also the tail end of the postwar movement to create hedonistic consumers so that the consumer capitalist system would work. As Christopher Lasch (1978) complained at the time, it was a culture of narcissism. The big issues of the time were maintaining high levels of consumption and coping with inflationary pressures. As we know, the economic crisis of the 1970s was brought on by the successes of the 1950s and 1960s during which all the major economies of the world were modernized and brought on line so that the productive capacity of the globe reached new levels and outstripped the capacity of consumers to purchase. In the 1970s, as institutions and governments stumbled toward a solution to the economic stagnation, there was also movement toward neoliberal economic ideas such as opening up the free market and financial deregulation, even though these solutions were some of the very same tactics that helped fuel the financial meltdown of the 1930s (and indeed would again fuel the meltdown of 2008). But these were tactics in the moment: a well-articulated neoliberal ideology would come much later. This moment of economic decline and the withdrawal of support for higher education not only led to the commodification of education as a product marketing to specialized target audiences, but also led to the rationalization of production. Many universities throughout the boom period overproduced PhDs, and there now appeared a market of cheap labor to teach in universities in temporary positions and part time. The full-time tenured faculty member was still held out as a sign

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of academic quality, but in many universities (to this day) the majority of classes and students are taught by contingent faculty. In terms of the experience of faculty, this whole commodity spectacle of higher education led to a situation of financial instability and a crisis of legitimacy. We still see stories in the New York Times and other major newspapers about university faculty who live in their cars in order to survive. There is also a sense in which the customer is always right, both because they are the paying customers in higher education, but also because faculty members need to get good course evaluations. In 1997 Mark Edmundson wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine about students coming up to him at the end of his course on Freud and telling him how much they enjoyed the course. He mused about the fact that he felt pressure to make a course that should be a bit uncomfortable instead enjoyable because he needed good teaching evaluations. He also thought further about the impact on higher education, that the socalled customer needed a good experience. Many faculty in many universities were struggling with the same set of experiences. And people really struggled with how much to make the experience enjoyable and where the line was between learning, even when it is uncomfortable and enjoyable.

Commodification Phase 2 Regional Economic Development and the University In 2003, Evan Watkins, a professor at the University of California, Davis, gave a talk at Rethinking Marxism (a conference put on by the journal of the same name) on what he referred to as marketing “universitization” (Watkins 2003). In this talk Watkins suggested that the factory town used to be the form of imagination around which communities were thought in U.S. popular culture. If the factory town was the ideal of the golden era of U.S. capitalism (1945–69) then, he suggests, that ideal is being replaced by the university town in the current era. For Watkins, this is not only a process of social imagination but also interestingly a form of commodification. Here what is being commodified is a vision of the social life of the university town, and that vision is being sold not only to university towns but, perhaps, to other towns as well. In some ways this second phase of commodification of higher education is a continuation of the first phase. But now universities were not only selling education as a product to a consuming public, but also were becoming the regional economic development drivers. In this phase

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universities have begun the production of sites of consumption and the reworking of space to accommodate both the new realities of the consumer culture and the impact of globalization on an economic region. Universities themselves were becoming crosses between a shopping mall, a corporate research park, and a country club (Shumar 2008). The process of turning a university campus into a mall space is just the first step in the further development of the university’s role in the new knowledge economy where the consumer and the producer are merged, what Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) have referred to as the prosumer. In essence, I take this to also be part of Richard Florida’s (2012) notions of economic development and ideas about the creative class. He argues that urban areas need to attract skilled knowledge workers to their area if they want to be part of the high paying industries in the global economy. And in order to do that one has to recognize that these knowledge workers are themselves consumers of bourgeois culture. In order to attract them to work, an area needs artists, theaters, cafés and so on, the things that the knowledge workers want.

The New Regional City Next I turn my attention to a major city in the Mid-Atlantic with an elite university that has always played a big role in the city’s economy but that more recently stands to greatly transform the local political economy with the vision of urban redevelopment that it has been putting into action. On the one hand, this city is not a global city, at least not in the Castellian (Castells 2002) sense. It is not a center of finance, media production, or trade. It is not a center of corporate headquarters for major corporations. It is not a knowledge economy center for new informational or high-tech industries. So, in short, it is not London, New York, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. It is a global city in the Sassenian (Sassen 2001) sense of a global city. The local political economy is dominated by health care and education, two industries that used to be a central part of the older welfare economy but are now a leading edge of the neoliberal economy. Furthermore, there are other industries such as pharmaceuticals, nano and other high tech, and some regional finance. And all of these industries have to respond to the pressure of the global marketplace and are impacted by shifts in that global marketplace. So, as Sassen argues, leaders in these industries, and planners and policy-makers in the city, need to strategize globally even if much of their activity is regional or national.

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Several years ago, a major university in the city announced that it was planning to develop the area from the edge of the campus across the train yard to a large river. The vision for this plan was to take a lot of unused and ugly space and turn it into green space, office buildings, and campus research facilities with footbridges that would link the center city area to this farther-out part of the city. What interested me in this vision is that it combined the productive space of the new global neoliberal economy with a consumer space that would turn the whole quasi-industrial train yard/postal hub into a large outdoor mall. Furthermore, this is a huge vision, a massive development project that is now nearing completion and involves office towers, hotel space, green areas, cutting-edge medical facilities, and consumer shopping areas. And this large vision is driven by a large university, and not by a private developer or a city-appointed development commission. In fact, the vision has involved several universities in the process. The university has had experience in the past with this kind of urban renewal/development. Years ago, it developed a whole section north of the main campus to create a science center around the university. That development was an earlier version of a similar vision but it was mostly a corporate research park that was connected to the university. That development involved the displacement of a whole community of working-class people of color and was hugely unpopular. Many people in the city have strong memories of that displacement, and the whole experience gave the university a bad name. (For a student perspective on the effects of such expansion at a comparable university, see LaViolette, this volume.) After this original development that created so many bad feelings a number of other development projects were undertaken that have been less destructive to inner-city neighborhoods. Partly this is because most of the inner-city neighborhoods around the campus have been uprooted. And maybe partly this is because the damage is subtler now. First the university developed a large outdoor shopping mall discussed above. Then it has been developing luxury condos and luxury apartments in sites near the campus. Each of these projects is a partnership with private developers who develop the university’s property and then are permitted to lease the building created for a period, such as thirty to forty years. These partnerships have not only gone into developing the campus and further connecting sites of living, consumption, and production, but have also set the stage for the major development project to the river that is well under way.

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This most recent development project is a massive undertaking. The university raised multi-millions of dollars to support this development and other aspects of its mission. This development hopes to link the downtown sections of the city, and should also be a major economic boon for the area. It should support medical research, high tech research, and local commerce; it should also draw many professionals to the area. This kind of development project is also happening on a smaller scale with another major university in another part of the city. Furthermore, we can see these kinds of projects at universities across the country.

Space and Critique Different U.S. universities have different neoliberal visions of what the university is and how it can fulfill its mission to aid a state, region, or even the whole nation to be more economically competitive. But what is true across all these visions is that the university is seen as an important institution in making an area more globally competitive; that vision sees the university as an economic institution. As a result, universities, which in the past might have been seen as part of the civil society, are now reinvented as economic drivers. This is another way in which commodification is an ongoing process. If the first phase of commodification in U.S. universities was about reifying a social learning/knowledge production process—turning it into a product and selling that product in a marketplace, finding customers for that product and rationalizing production—the next phase of commodification is very different. As briefly discussed above in this chapter, this new phase is about reorganizing social space such that global consumer capitalism and the needs of a postindustrial productive system can be brought together in creative new ways. This new phase of commodification dovetails more completely with the neoliberal era, an era where the university is imagined as a private individual seeking to maximize the accumulation of capital within its regional purview. In this vision, the social process of knowledge production is deeply linked to the economy. There is no knowledge now that is separate from knowledge linked to economic development. What is further interesting to me is the ways in which the vision of the university is echoed in the image of what a town or city should look like. Watkins’s (2003) idea of the university town is in fact a very complex idea where universities are transformed into spaces that are corporate research park/country club/shopping mall. And this model is

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the living space where work gets done and lifestyle gets consumed. Interestingly, one could say that on one level this is a particular extension and commodification of the student lifestyle, but increasingly at places such as the elite university described above, the residents of condos being incorporated into the campus include other professionals such as faculty, researchers, and perhaps local business people in the high-tech sector. And so the university reaches out to new community members who might not have traditionally been part of that community. At the same time, this model of the university as corporate research park/country club/shopping mall is also a model for other neighborhoods and parts of the city or town. This is where the university town is a double metaphor. This is seen in a particularly powerful way in the new development project that the elite university is part of. This new development of the waterfront is just a very large elaboration of projects they have already experimented with on campus and it is a project that will encompass a fairly large chunk of the city. And so, these processes of development are being worked out in this city, in the same way that corporations like Google and Microsoft, and high-tech corridors in certain cities, take on the new university model. These corporate centers of knowledge production and high tech are imagined as campuses that are research park/country club/shopping mall. And in many of these reworkings of space there is a reimagination of public space and public funding, because public funding is used to support private economic development, ironically a new kind of welfare state (Harvey 2000). Through this process new identities are being created. As people live these productive consumer lives they become subjects in the new urban spaces; they are engaging in prosumer practices, merging being a productive worker with being a consumer in spaces that were designed to support this prosumer identity. And so the work of Richard Florida on the power of the creative class and David Brooks’s (2000) work on bourgeois bohemians (bobos) is not so much predictive of economic development as it is an observation of the effect of these neoliberal reworkings of urban areas. Bobos and the creative class are in fact the subjects that are produced by the new prosumer spaces such as the prosumer spaces developed by the elite university, though to be sure there can be a cyclic interaction where the production of the creative class can lead to more development, and so forth. I will end this section with four concerns that I have that are not new and that are shared by others who write about these issues. The first concerns the issue of public space. As these new kinds of corporate

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research park/country club/shopping mall spaces are created, they become the twenty-first-century version of the mall space in that there is reduced opportunity for public interaction and public discussion. Second, there is an official cordoning off of the undesirable elements in society. Just as other towns have worked to zone out the poor in order to make a pleasant downtown atmosphere, so these new development projects create spaces where disadvantaged people have no place to be and are not welcome. And so the poor are removed even farther from consciousness. Third, and related to the second point, Gershon’s (2011) notion of neoliberal agency characterizes the identity being valued here, but that means that different kinds of people—people not appropriately participating in the market—must be cordoned off too. Fourth, universities should be the spaces that have been set aside that make reflection and critique possible. If they are the drivers of the new corporatized vision of public space and urban living, then where is the space for critique? How are the subjectivities that engage in critique to be produced? Of course, I am a product of these forces too. I do not want to deny how desirable these forces are and how they call out to the person I am. These changes to the university have many nice features. The life made possible for the middle class in this information-rich, laterally organized, espresso-infused culture is very desirable on many levels. But that life is also very much an ideological screen; what is pushed out of consciousness are our larger social problems, the environmental consequences of lifestyle, the injustice of a growing income gap, and in general the individualization of social life and the social Darwinist ethos that goes with neoliberalism. University faculty struggle with their own sense of selves in this context. Faculty who find the work they are doing desirable and supported live in an information-rich environment where the work they do is valued and the context in which it is done is stimulating and supportive. For that segment of the faculty, the experience of the university could not be better. But for many other university faculty the university is now a pale shadow of what it used to be; their lives are at risk because they lack a living wage and experience multiple forms of alienation. The university is becoming a more divided and strange place for many faculty.

Commodification Phase 3: The Rise of Accountability and Neoliberal Culture At the same time, commodification was coming to universities in many other parts of the world. This commodification was a two-part process

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of again trying to make universities regional economic drivers in the form of the creation of knowledge economy zones. Universities were more pressured to compete with each other to try and create greater market efficiency. These processes were often referred to as marketization and there was a strong emphasis on aspects of neoliberal ideologies, especially the efficiency of markets and the need for workforces to be hard working and merit worthy. Canaan and Shumar commented on the difference between commodification in the United States and marketization in the United Kingdom: Further, the political economic position of each nation is due in part to the relative economic wealth of each nation. The US can “let 100 flowers bloom,” i.e., have a system in which there is investment in diverse kinds of institutions, thanks to the US having the largest economy in the world and to the fact that education has not been organized by the nation-state, but, at best and only in part, by the local state. In the UK, where a welfare state was introduced in the early post-war era, and which has a much smaller economy relative to that of the US, HE [higher education] was subsidized by the state which put more limits on its capacity to let 100 diverse flowers bloom. The situation was similar in most other industrialized nations where HE was organized at the national level. (Canaan and Shumar 2008a: 15)

At that moment, the disciplinary apparatus of marketization was very strong in the United Kingdom where excellence was seen as a scarce resource. Excellence had to be measured and accounted for. Faculty and institutions were disciplined if they did not have the right amount of funding and the right number of articles, if they were not passing students in significant numbers, and so on. These pressures led researchers to talk about accountability and audit because these concepts had come to the institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom and elsewhere (Shore 2008; Shore and Wright 2000; Strathern 2000). Also at that moment, the United States was still in the full flower of hedonistic consumption. However, the movement toward a more disciplinary neoliberalism was beginning. Buoyed by a still booming economy, U.S. News and World Report was happy to report in 1999 that every university could be excellent in its own way. Each could be the best regional college, the best comprehensive university, the best research university, the best university for specific skills; there were lots of winners. A more draconian system of measuring quality and being accountable was on the horizon, but had not yet arrived.

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As a result of the financial meltdown of 2008 many private universities saw their endowments shrink and many state universities had their appropriations rolled back as state governments struggled to deal with the financial shortfall as a result of the collapse. For a lot of U.S. universities, these rollbacks began before 2008, especially at state universities. Many of the state universities are in the worst position with very large reductions of their operating budgets, requiring retrenchment plans to be developed. But it is also the case that many less-well-endowed private universities and colleges are or will be in bad shape too, especially if they face major enrollment declines. In the flagship journal the American Anthropologist, Justin Richland (2009), after reviewing the new sociocultural research of 2008 that focused primarily on the human consequences of neoliberalism, would trenchantly conclude, In reflecting on and reading through the manifold paradoxes and ironies that neoliberalism cast in the social field so effectively described by cultural anthropologists published in 2008, I cannot help but be struck by what is perhaps the greatest irony of all. For all its seeming force and inevitability, by 2009, the whole neoliberal edifice of privatization, deregulation, and consumer-driven global economics seems to have come crashing down around our ears. What does this mean for the cultural anthropology produced last year? Do we already live in a world different than the one described in the pages of our leading journals, some of which only reached our desks less than a month ago? (Richland 2009: 174)

Well, if we already live in a world different from the one described in the pages of our lead journals, it is because we have moved from a neoliberal economy to a crisis economy. And the strong state that journalists like Naomi Klein have been trying to show us existing beneath the rhetoric of a small, less-interventionist state has now become a roaring lion with the potential to be a fascist state. So, on one level the neoliberal gloves are off. On another level, Aihwa Ong’s (2006) notion of neoliberalism as a disciplinary apparatus has never been more poignant as we go from, as Slavoj Zizek (2009) would say, neoliberalism as tragedy to neoliberalism as farce.

Cutting Costs At a conference around 2010, I attended a session on the fiscal crisis of a large state university. The panel for this session was, interestingly,

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two deans from the university system, both political progressives with a long history of engagement with left-wing political thought who took the opportunity to talk about their recent experience at the university. They each acknowledged their unusual status and thought of themselves as people who have an opportunity to make a change. One dean pointed out that in the past few years she had had the opportunity to make a number of strategic hires and increase the number of good faculty in the college. They talked about the current moment as one of unprecedented transition where the funding model for the university has changed forever. The change is to move to a high-fee, high-aid model similar to the private university model. They spoke of the history of state education, which had low tuition, similar to the older European systems of higher education. Although Europe had abandoned public funding of higher education well in advance of the current fiscal crisis in the name of the superiority of marketization, this state university has slowly been slipping toward higher costs and the current crisis has been the impetus for a huge shift. The deans pointed out that access is suffering with a conscious downsizing of the system, unprecedented fee hikes of 15 percent overall this year and 15 percent overall next year. At that time, one of their budgets had been cut by $51 million, or 20 percent of their core funding in one year. At all campuses all nontenure track faculty had been given notice that they might not be rehired in the next year. And there was talk of language programs throughout the university being cut. Finally, there was talk of creating a digital campus. This would not be for-profit but would be based on the University of Phoenix model. Both deans agreed that the problem in the university system was not with the upper administration at any particular campus, but rather perhaps a larger political failure. As the formal presentation ended there was a very interesting discussion that went on. Several of the left-leaning graduate students stated that the faculty had indeed gotten too fat and that cutting those big salaries is a good idea. So why not let the system downsize some? But another theme in the discussion was how to think about the problem. Was this problem simply a problem of money? One of the deans argued that it was. He suggested that if he did not do the hatchet work that was required, someone else worse than him would replace him in the job. And so, he ended the session with a plaintive, “What should I cut?” While I had great sympathy for the deans, it is dangerous to confuse analysis with strategy. And in my mind, to call for strategy—what to

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cut—before a thoroughgoing analysis is a problem. Central to the problem here is the conceptualization of the role of the state, the nature and role of higher education, and the relationship of the economy to other sectors of the society. At the core of the U.S. system of higher education is the belief that families should pay for higher education if they are able and that the state’s role in funding higher education is primarily to support those families who cannot afford it themselves with grants and loans. Loans of course play a large part in this system and many families come away from sending their son or daughter to school with a very large debt, anywhere between $50,000 to $150,000. This is a model, in fact, that Europeans, transfixed by neoliberal economic ideology, have been seeking to emulate. But in the United States this system was in place long before the current wave of neoliberalism. The importance of that fact is that over time political actors have been able to shift more of the financial burden for higher education from the state to the family with very little attention. By changing the mix of grants and loans, the income level for eligibility, and the interest rates on loans, families can take on more of the financial burden of education, as they have over the past thirty years, without even realizing it and without this becoming a matter of public debate. What is directly experienced by working-class and middle-class Americans is the sense that one is paying a lot for a good that seems to provide a diminishing return. And, further, people believe that the risk of taking on student loans is something that is indeed becoming greater as the prospects of good jobs to pay off those loans seems less sure. Earlier in the chapter I identified this conflict between cost and payoff as a kind of legitimation crisis in higher education; I think the current economic crisis has brought that crisis to a head. I was talking with a group of sociology students a while back. One of them talked about how a friend who had graduated from another university recently was working delivering beer from a beer distributor.2 The students were joking about the fact that what one can do with a university degree in sociology and $100,000 of debt is deliver beer. In this conversation, the students assumed a somewhat lighthearted and ironic stance. And for me the most interesting piece of this conversation was the stance they took, as a piece of what Herzfeld (1997) has called cultural intimacy. On the one hand, they recognized that perhaps delivering beer is not the only job they could get with a college degree and that there might be particular reasons why their friends did not do better on the job market. They might even have a glimmer of

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the realization that over time they will do better on the job market. But what the story does mark for them is the fact that there are diminishing returns. A university degree costs more and more and students go into deeper debt for jobs that provide smaller incomes and fewer benefits. The story is a hyperbolic trope that is funny because it underscores the pinch they are all feeling. In this way, it is similar to various forms of comedy that are funny because they exaggerate the reality that individuals could be feeling at the time. What is not funny is the increasing number of students at my university who are having trouble renewing loans, getting new loans, and finishing their degrees because they have run out of funding. Every week in my office there is a crisis where there is a third-year student who cannot quite figure out how to get funding for the fourth year. These are very difficult situations because the students and their families have already invested a considerable sum of money in a university education. If they are not able to secure the final year of loans the student does not get the degree and the family still has the debt that must be repaid. So, anxieties are very high. Administrators need to cut faculty positions as funding from the state decreases, students and families believe they are not getting their money’s worth from higher education, and many faculty sense their work is not valued, they are not paid much for their services, and, increasingly, they are being asked to show the benefit of their teaching. Early in 2011 Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa captured public attention with their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education proclaimed it to be “the most significant book on higher education written in recent years” (Vedder 2011). The authors were discussed on All Things Considered and a number of other media venues for the educated elite. Arum and Roksa suggested that students are neither challenged nor motivated. Faculty are either part-time or captured by the academic ratchet; the system of higher education is in great need of audit and accountability. Arum and Roksa’s (2011) book is an interesting and contradictory text. As sociologists, they understand that there are larger social forces producing the patterns that they see in higher education. And yet their imagination is partly captured by neoliberal ideas of the self and responsibility. They want to hold someone accountable and rather than hold the powerful accountable and question the system of power relations they want individual students to work harder and faculty members to be better teachers. Their ambivalence is nicely captured in this passage:

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From our standpoint, the evidence of student and organizational cultures’ inattention to learning and high levels of societal investment makes discussion of higher education’s accountability both largely inevitable and in certain respects warranted. We are deeply skeptical, however, that externally imposed accountability systems will yield desirable changes in educational practices—for reasons that we will discuss in the concluding chapter of this book. More immediately, as social scientists we raise two additional core reservations regarding such endeavors. First, it is not clear that the state of knowledge in the field is adequate to the task. Specifically, as we will discuss in detail below, there is only a very limited tradition of social scientific efforts to measure learning rigorously across individuals and institutions in higher education, and even less of a scholarly research corpus that attempts to identify individual and institutional factors associated with improved postsecondary student performance. Given these limitations, it is doubtful that the implementation of an externally imposed accountability system would yield outcomes that would be either meaningful or productive. (Arum and Roksa 2011: 478–85)

In their article, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” Cris Shore and Susan Wright (2000) discuss the new technologies of audit in higher education. Their very critical view of audit and its movement from finance to other institutions such as higher education is largely lacking in Arum and Roksa’s (2011) account. What is also lacking from Arum and Roksa’s account is a robust understanding of the ways in which the commodification of U.S. higher education has pushed for a system that suggests the customer is always right and that learning, even learning difficult ideas, should be fun. What the authors have inadvertently captured is the double bind that university faculty are now in. University faculty must keep their students happy, and they must receive good teaching evaluations. Departments must increase their number of majors, and universities, especially private universities in the United States, need to keep more students coming to the university.3 At the same time, college departments and faculty are being pressured to show that students have learned. This has meant creating systems of defining what a learning outcome is, and how to measure those outcomes. After these systems are put into place the university must see how well it does on its measures of learning. Part of what happens in this process is that the social relationship of mentoring and learning is reified again into a product. In the past, all that universities cared about was selling the product, because the product was just an image, a credential. But now the product is some

Caught between Commidification and Audit ⽧ 231

notion of a fixed piece of knowledge or skill that gets transferred and can be measured: a very unfortunate way to think about the learning relationship and what students are doing at a university. Structurally, all this leads away from learning as a diffuse, often difficult, and hard-to-measure process between faculty and student. In this third phase of commodification, it cannot be left up to faculty to keep students happy enough to justify the costs of higher education. And so, learning is recast as skills acquisition or (as in the preceding chapters) giving back or change-making, most of which lie outside faculty purview. All these can be packaged as experience in ways that difficult classroom experience cannot, especially because they rest on the (fictive) notion that they can be measured as (or as if) learning outcomes while providing something for students to feel good about. They become commodities that also fit Gershon’s (2011) model of neoliberal agency, enhancing their appeal to parents, donors, and future employers. That logic justifies institutional cost-cutting, particularly the reduction of fulltime faculty (and in turn faculty authority), and the displacement of what used to be faculty work onto low-level administrators.

Conclusion In the United States as well as other countries, the commodification of the university has been a long and complex process. I have broken that process into three phases, but really they are overlapping, and in other countries the process is quite different. At each stage of the process faculty have had to deal with this process and their experience has gone from one where the sense of legitimacy was lacking, because we were just selling credentials, to one where there is a genuine pressure on people to both encourage students to enjoy the process and to rate them highly, but also to show that students have acquired measurable amounts of knowledge. Public and private universities experienced this commodifying process a bit differently, but each experienced a withdrawal of state support for a more democratized vision of high-quality higher education for all (Newfield 2008). In addition, each has been under increasing pressure to create a product that promises students experiences they can enjoy. Further, universities are pressured to promise parents that their children will find good employment and to promise employers and the nation that the students will be well-trained and able to function in an advanced economy that is constantly shifting. Finally, all of this learning should be measurable and quantifiable.

232 ⽧ Wesley Shumar

The experience in higher education is beginning to mirror that experienced by K–12 teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act. As Gershon (2011) suggests, neoliberal ideology sees all people and organizations as businesses, and matters of scale (or structure) are not taken into consideration. A neoliberal subject carries itself as a business and interacts with other businesses in a self-maximizing rational way. It is individualized market reason where, as Gershon (2011) says, all sense of scale and the social are eliminated and there is just a play of subjects, be they global corporations or human individuals. So we can audit and evaluate every institution and everybody as an individual. Learning is entirely the responsibility of the student, school, and teacher. But, of course we know from years of research in the sociology and anthropology of education that language, culture, and socioeconomic status have a big impact on how well students can do on standardized measures of content learned. So as this auditing system comes to universities, many universities will be in the uncomfortable position of still trying to sell their credentials, but being unable to measure up to the standards of learning being put into place. Of course what this will do, as neoliberal policies always tend to do, denying structural inequality as they do, is to put elite institutions and elite individuals at even more of an advantage than they were.  Wesley Shumar is a cultural anthropologist at Drexel University whose research focuses on higher education, ethnographic evaluation in education, and digital culture. His current work in higher education focuses on the spatial transformation of American universities within the consumer spaces of cities and towns. He is author of College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education (Falmer Press, 1997) and coeditor with Joyce Canaan of Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University (Routledge, 2008). His most recent book is Inside Mathform.org: Analysis of an Internet-Based Education Community (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Notes 1. and so on. That year Joyce Canaan (with whom in 2008 I edited Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University) and I marveled that in the United Kingdom there was a very disciplinary system around audit and accountability, but that the United States was still in the throes of consumer capitalist expansion, all products having value in the marketplace of higher education. Ironically all of this came to an end in the United States at about the same time we published our edited volume thanks to the real estate crisis.

Caught between Commidification and Audit ⽧ 233 2. .This job might require some explaining for people who do not live in the state of Pennsylvania or in the United States. After prohibition, a few states opted for a state control system of liquor distribution. In Pennsylvania we have a weird system where wine and spirits are sold in a store owned and operated by the state. The system with beer is even stranger: There are stores that can get a deli license and that are allowed to sell up to two six-packs of beer to a customer at a time. And very recently there has been an expansion of the sale of beer and wine by small stores. If you want to buy cases of beer or draft kegs, you need to buy them at beer distributors that are private businesses licensed by the state of Pennsylvania. Working for a beer distributor is a time-honored, but low-end job that a Pennsylvania college student might point to. 3. Increasingly many flagship state universities have become essentially private universities with some state support. While their boards might include public appointees, their apportionment from the state has decreased so much that the university is increasingly dependent on tuition revenue and other forms of grants and gifts.

References Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kindle Edition. Barrow, Clyde W. 1990. Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster. Canaan, Joyce E., and Wesley Shumar. 2008a. “Higher Education in the Era of Globalization and Neoliberalism.” In Canaan and Shumar, Structure and Agency, 3–30. Canaan, Joyce, and Wesley Shumar, eds. 2008b. In Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. New York, London: Routledge. Castells, Manuel. 2002. “Local and global: Cities in the network society.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (Journal of Economic and Social Geography), 93, no. 5: 548–558. Edmundson, Mark. 1997. “On the uses of a liberal education: 1. As lite entertainment for bored college students.” Harper’s Magazine, 295: 39–49. Florida, Richard. 2012. The Rise of the Creative Class: Revisited. New York: Basic Books. Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 4: 537–55. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-state. New York: Routledge. Lasch, Christopher. 1978. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1st ed.). New York: Norton. Nasaw, David. 1981. Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

234 ⽧ Wesley Shumar Newfield, Christopher. 2008. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richland, Justin. 2009. “On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review.” American Anthropologist 111, no. 2: 170–76. Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. 2010. “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital Prosumer.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1: 13–36. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3: 278–99. Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2000. “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Strathern, Audit Cultures, 523–26. Shumar, Wesley. 1997. College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education. London; Washington, DC: Falmer Press. ———. 2008. “Space, place and the American university.” In Canaan and Shumar, Structure and Agency, 67–83. ———. 2016. “TED: The University Intellectual as Globalized Neoliberal Consumer Self.” Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences 9, no. 2: 89–108. Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Vedder, Richard. 2011. “Academically Adrift: A Must-read.” Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/academically-adrift-amust-read/28423. Watkins, Evan. 2003. “Marketing Universitization: Presentation in the session the not so silent takeover: Universities and the marketplace.” Paper presented at the Marxism and the World Stage conference of Rethinking Marxism, Amherst, MA, November 6–8. Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso.

Index

NOTE: page references with an f are figures. Abbott, Andrew, 148, 157 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Arum/Roksa), 229 academic bourgeoisie, 47 academic departments, 43, 45 academic discourse, 5 accountability, rise of, 224–31 accountancy, bureaucratic, 39–44 accrediting agencies, 45 activism, 80 actors, 10 affective labor, 100 African Americans, 59, 60, 66 Agha, Asif, 6, 152 The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Whitehead), 25 Ako, Cyriaque Yapo, 178 Alexander, Michelle, 25 All Things Considered, 229 Alternative Spring Break (ASB), 115 American Anthropologist, 226 American Dream, 174 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 145 anthropological critiques, 172–74 anthropology: challenges of, 98; as cultural critique, 37 Archimedes Technical Institute (ATI), 185, 189, 190, 191–92, 194, 195, 210 Arithmetic Tutor team, 187, 192, 203 Art as Experience (Dewey), 20 Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, 145, 163 arts, 50 Arum, Richard, 229, 230 Ashoka U, 112, 117, 118, 119, 127, 131

assessments, student, 150 audit cultures, 17, 88, 215–34 Austin, Texas, 22 authority, 148, 160 Automated Home team, 189, 192, 197, 208 awareness, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 93, 94, 97, 119, 157 Balandier, George, 95 Baldrige, Anatassia, 6, 10, 112 Barber, Benjamin, 80 Bard College, 21 behaviors, self-regulating, 87 Bergbauer, Sarah, 10 Big Brothers Big Sisters, 79, 84, 87, 98 Blum, Susan, 162 Bodinger, John J., 5, 10, 64, 106 Boltanski, Luc, 178 Bouman, Jeffrey, 57, 58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 7, 10, 74 bourgeois bohemians (bobos), 223 branding, 6–8, 9 breast cancer awareness, 79 Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, 137 Brooks, David, 223 Brown, Michael, 85 budget crises, 68 bureaucratic accountancy, 39–44 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 89, 90 Bush, George H. W., 83 Butin, Dan, 113 Cai, Christopher, 10 Canaan, Joyce, 225 capitalism, 216, 219 carnivals, 93–98 Carr, E. Summerson, 149, 150, 152 Castells, Manuel, 220

236 ⽧ Index Center for the Study of Higher Education (Pennsylvania State University), 148 Center for Undergraduate Excellence (CUE), 35, 44, 46, 51 Challah for Hunger, 122 Changemaker Campus, 117, 118, 131 change-makers, 9 chaos of disciplines (Abbott), 148 Chavez, Matthew “Levee,” 25 Chickering, Arthur, 150 Christian theology, 38, 39 Circle K, 79 Cisneros, Sandra, 22 citizenship, 35, 74, 78, 80. See also service civil rights movement, 62 Civil War, 41 Clemente Course in the Humanities (Bard College), 21 cognitive science, 65 Cold War, 80 college experience, 32, 161; definitions of, 3–6; first-year experience (FYE) programs, 143–70; gaining life perspective from, 95; service, 73, 94 (see also service) College for Sale (Shumar), 217 College of William & Mary, 145, 154, 165 College Outreach Program (COP), 114, 115, 116, 117 college sociality, 161 college volunteerism, 106–11. See also volunteering commitments: to service, 73; and teamwork, 200–206 commodification, 6–8, 57; of community engagement, 60; cost cutting, 226–31; of higher education, 215–34; Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOTs), 60–64; regional economic development, 219–24; rise of accountability, 224–31; structure of, 216–31 commodities, 6; college experience as, 3; value of, 7. See also commodification

communication, 209 communitas, 99, 101 community engagement, 99; commodification of, 60; neoliberalism and at University of Pennsylvania, 56–72; overview of, 57–64 Community Involvement section (“Life at Penn”), 60 community service (University of Pennsylvania), 65–69 computers, 137–42 conferences, 143 conspicuous research, 46–52 Cororaton, Claire, 64 corporate discourse, 5 corporation of learning (Veblen), 46 corporatization of universities, 57 correspondence, 41 cost cutting, 226–31 Coster, Wendy J., 177 cost of degree programs, 228, 229 craftspeople, 38 credit hours, 44 crises, budget, 68 criteria for research, 35 Crystal City, Texas, 27 cultural diversity, 53 culture, growth of student, 159–60 curiosity, idle, 33, 36–39, 53. See also Veblen, Thorstein curriculum, 36; first-year experience (FYE) programs, 156, 157; Veblen, Thorstein, 44–46 Daisey, Mike, 25 degree programs: costs of, 228, 229; first-year experience (FYE) programs, 143 democracy, 18, 80, 95 Democracy and Education (Dewey), 23 Denver, Colorado, 27 departments, 50, 51; academic, 43, 45; liberal arts, 43 Desmond, Mathew, 25 Dewey, John, 1, 2, 11, 193; Art as Experience, 20; citizenship, 80; democracy, 95; Democracy and

Index ⽧ 237 Education, 23; Difficult Dialogues seminars, 24–25; Experience and Education, 17, 18–21; Free Minds Project, 21–24; philosophy of education, 17–31; quality of education, 21; reflective essays, 25–28 Difficult Dialogues seminars, 21, 24–25 digital literacy, 137, 138 diphthongs, 119 dirt (as a key symbol), 77, 93–98 dirty work (of service), 74, 75f, 76, 77f, 90, 91f, 92f, 96f; centering self in orientation service projects, 99–102; in the neoliberal era, 79–82 disciplinary knowledge, 148, 149 disciplinary strategies of public schools, 69 discursive formation (Foucault), 77–79 disorder, dangers, 97 diversity, 129, 151 doctoral dissertations, 45 documentation, technical, 201 doing and idling (Veblen), 52–53 Douglas, Mary, 76, 86 Douglass, Frederick, 22, 23 Drexel University, 58 Dumas, Helene M., 177 East Africa, 122 economic declines, effect of, 218 economies, 39 Edgell, Stephen, 33 Edmunds, David, 182 Edmundson, Mark, 219 education: capacity of growth, 18, 19; college experience (see college experience); higher, 2; literacy, 140; neoliberal, 172–74; overview of, 1; philosophy of (Dewey), 17–31; quality of (Dewey), 21; subjectivity in, 192–94; undergraduate, 2 e-mail, 67, 68 emulation, pecuniary, 39–44 Engaged Citizenship programs, 119 engineering, 189, 210

entrepreneurial spirit, 206–9 Erickson, Erik, 150 ethics, 65 European Union (EU), 88 events, volunteering, 107 exams: General Equivalency Diploma (GED), 137, 139, 140; Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory Computer-Adaptive Tests (PEDICAT), 177, 178 excellence (Readings), 35 expansionism, free-market, 57–64 Experience and Education (Dewey), 17, 18–21 experiences: FYE programs, 143–70; neoliberalization of, 8–10; Senior Capstone Project (SCP), 10 experiential learning, 19, 112–36; neoliberalism and the narration of, 128–32; voicing in narratives, 120–24 expertise: first-year experience (FYE) programs, 164; hierarchy of, 153–59; performance of, 149, 152 extracurricular activities, student-run, 160 Fabian, Johannes, 98 Facebook, 67, 139, 140 faculty, 53 FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Association), 85 Feng, Tian, 177 first-year experience (FYE) programs, 1, 143–70; curriculum, 156, 157; development and dissemination of, 147–53; expertise, 164; function shifts, 162–65; funding, 165; goals, 151; hierarchy of expertise, 153– 59; market value, 165–66; need for and types of, 144–47; objectives, 145–46; student fun, 159–62 Florida, Richard, 220 Fordist/Keynesian economic model, 217 Foucault, Michel, 77, 83, 101, 182, 189 Fragala-Pinkham, Maria A., 177 Frankfurter, Raphael, 173, 182 Franklin, Benjamin, 57, 58, 60

238 ⽧ Index free-market expansionism, 57–64 Free Minds Project, 21–24 free trade, 173 Freire, Paolo, 18 The Freshman Year Experience (Upcraft, Gardner, and Associates), 149 Freud, Sigmund, 219 funding FYE programs, 165 fundraising, 109 Gardner, John, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155 GE Medical, 186 General Equivalency Diploma (GED) exam, 137, 139, 140 Gershon, Ilana, 8, 129, 130, 131, 140, 156, 194, 212, 224, 231, 232 Gettysburg Address, 18 GI Bill, 80, 217 Gilded Age, 33, 36, 79 GINsystem, 108 GIVE (Get Into Volunteer Experience), 89 Global Health Case Competition (UVA), 175 goals of FYE programs, 151 Goffman, Erving, 37 Goodman, Jane, 152 Goodwill, 107, 108 Google, 139, 223 governance, 78 governmentality, 83 graduate curriculum, 44 graduate students, 45 graduate teaching as part of research, 40 grants, 117, 141, 144, 176, 178 Great Depression, 46, 217 Greek organizations, 107, 108 Greenhouse, Carol, 8, 9, 131 Growing Leaders, 156, 157, 159 growth, capacity of, 18, 19 Guyer, Jane, 83 Habitat for Humanity, 79, 84, 86, 121 Habitudes, 156, 157 Haley, Stephen M, 177 Handler, Richard, 4, 6, 10, 64, 131, 173, 176, 182, 189, 217 hard skills, 189, 194–200, 201

Hardt, Michael, 100, 101 Harper’s Magazine, 219 Harvard Negotiation Project, 24 Harvey, David, 128–32, 173, 192, 223 hegemony, 173, 174, 192 Helping Home, 121 Henry, Jules, 37 Herzfeld, Michael, 216, 228 Hickel, Jason, 95, 102, 173 hierarchy of expertise, 153–59 higher education, 4, 43, 129, 215–34; cost cutting, 226–31; critique of, 2; idle curiosity, 36; regional economic development, 219–24; rise of accountability, 224–31; role of, 79, 228; standardization of, 88; structure of, 216–31 The Higher Learning in America (Veblen), 33, 39, 40 Hite, William, Jr., 62 Holmes, Seth, 25 Hornberger, Nancy, 65 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, 159, 161 humanities, 50 Hurricane Katrina, 84, 85, 86, 94 Hyatt, Susan, 193 idle curiosity, 33, 36–39, 53. See also Veblen, Thorstein immaterial labor, 100 innovation (social): experiential learning, 112–36; institutional infrastructures of, 114–19; voicing experiential learning in narratives, 124–28; voicing self and institution, 119–20 Innovative-Tech Day (2005), 185, 187, 189, 190, 192 instinct of workmanship, 37 Institutional Review Board, 178 intellectual relationships, 52 internships, 1 Ivy League colleges, 4, 67 Jackson, Philip W., 19 Jacobson, Shari, 5, 10, 64, 106 Jefferson Public Citizens (JPC) program (UVA), 175

Index ⽧ 239 Jefferson Scholarship (UVA), 177 Jewler, A. Jerome, 151 Jim Crow era, 62 Jurgenson, Nathan, 220 Kent State University, 80 Klein, Naomi, 226 Kleinman, Arthur, 181 knowledge, 3; economy zones, 225; growth of, 38; pursuit of, 42 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 150 Kramer, Jessica, 177 labor, 90, 96, 100; agency of, 101; dirt (as a key symbol), 93–98; service, 100. See also service LaDousa, Chaise, 6, 8, 10, 51, 112, 130, 137, 157, 161, 162 Lake Forest College, 50 Lakoff, Andrew, 175 Lampland, Martha, 23 land-grant universities, 41 languages, 65; programming, 196; programs, 227 Lasch, Christopher, 218 LaTour, Bruno, 154 leadership, 35, 113, 115 Learner Web, 137, 138, 139 learning, concept of (Dewey), 20. See also education Leslie, Larry, 217 liberal arts, 3, 43 Lincoln, Abraham, 119 linguistics, 65, 119, 120. See also voicing literacy, 56; digital, 137, 138; education, 140; learning centers, 139 littles, 86 Lloyd, Mark Frazier, 58, 59 Ludlow, Larry H., 177 Magnetic Chess Set, 196 Majumdar, Usnish, 10 manual labor, 74, 90, 93–98, 96. See also service marketing FYE programs, 143, 144 markets, 4, 8; potential, 2; value (FYE programs), 165–66

Marshall Scholarships, 35 Marxism, 38, 216, 219 MAVOC (Mayberry Association for Volunteering, Outreach and Charity), 115, 116, 122, 123 Mayberry College, 117, 118, 119, 131, 132 mentoring, 52, 147 meritocracy, 57 Miami University of Ohio, 161 Michie, Gregory, 69 Microsoft, 223 Mirowski, Philip, 83 mission statements (USC), 148 Mobile Robotic Arm team, 187, 188, 192, 196, 205, 207 Moed, Rich, 177 Moffatt, Michael, 81, 160 Moore, Robert, 7, 9 morality, 74 Mountain Justice Spring Break, 121 multiculturalism, 56 Nakassis, Constantine, 155 Nasaw, David, 217 Nathan, Rebekah, 160 National Humanities Medal, 21 National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Students in Transition (USC), 147, 148, 153 Native American cultures, 26 Navajo Nation, 26, 27 neoliberal capitalism, 102 neoliberal culture, rise of, 224–31 neoliberal education, 172–74 neoliberalism, 224; and community engagement at University of Pennsylvania, 56–72; current wave of, 228; definition of, 2, 172; experiential learning, 112–36; and the narration of experiential learning, 128–32; neoliberalization of experiences, 8–10 neoliberal personhood, 165–66 neoliberal subjectivity, 185–214; in education, 192–94; entrepreneurial spirit and originality, 206–9; hard skills through technical

240 ⽧ Index knowledge, 194–200; hidden nuances of, 210–12; soft skills through teamwork and commitment, 200–206 Net-Fridge team, 187, 188, 192, 195, 198, 207 Netter Center for Community Partnerships, 61, 62, 66 New Orleans, Louisiana, 81, 84, 85, 86, 93–98 New York State Education Department, 140 New York Times, 219 Ng, Daniel, 182 Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, 178 Ni, Peng Sheng, 177 Niamba, Pascal, 178 Nidiffer, Jana, 57, 58 No Child Left Behind Act, 232 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 81, 176 nonprofit agencies, 114, 115 not-for-profit organizations, 113 objectives of FYE programs, 145–46 Ohio State University, 145, 146, 154 Ong, Aihwa, 174, 226 originality, 206–9 Ortner, Sherry, 77 Outward Bound, 19, 26 Pan-Hellenic Council, 79 Parent–Teacher Association, 23 Parreñas, Rheana “Juno” Salazar, 99 Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOTs), 60–64, 70 Pearson Education Company, 155, 156, 157, 159 pecuniary emulation, 37, 39–44 pedagogy, 65 Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory Computer-Adaptive Tests (PEDI-CAT), 177, 178 peer relationships, 147 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 7 Pennsylvania State University, 148, 176 Perry, William, 150

personhood, neoliberal, 165–66 Petryna, Adriana, 176 phases of commodification, 216–31 Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), 35, 36 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 59, 60, 61. See also University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia School District, 62 philosophy of education (Dewey), 17–31 Phlewe, Dieter, 83 Pitt, Brad, 86 place: role of, 98 (see also New Orleans, Louisiana); time and, 99 Plato, 22 policies, 81, 83, 84, 150 politics, 8 Posecznick, Alex, 4, 5, 10 poverty, 62, 86, 87 PowerPoint presentations, 201 privatization, 57, 173 productive power, 83 profitability, 57 programming languages, 196 Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan, 24 programs, first-year experience (FYE), 143–70 projects, service, 84 Project Shine, 121, 122 publications, FYE programs, 143 Public Scholarship programs, 119 public schools, disciplinary strategies of, 69 Puckett, John L., 58, 59 quality of education (Dewey), 21 Readings, Bill, 35 reciprocity with communities (servicelearning), 113 Red Oak Grove Cares, 121 reflective essays, 25–28 regional cities, 220–22 regional economic development, 219–24 registers, 7, 93, 143, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 160, 166, 188

Index ⽧ 241 relationships, 93; first-year experience (FYE) programs, 146; intellectual, 52; peer, 147; service, 74; University of Pennsylvania, 61 Relocation and Welcome Center, 121 reputations, 6 research: conducting, 33–36; conspicuous, 46–52; criteria, 35; graduate teaching as part of, 40; obstacles in, 137–42; outcome of, 39; papers, 34; undergraduate, 32–55 resource management, 53 retention, students, 162–65 Rhodes Scholarships, 35 Richland, Justin B., 152, 226 ritualistic paraphernalia, 43 Ritzer, George, 220 Roksa, Josipa, 229, 230 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 Sacks, Harvey, 52 Sanford, Nevitt, 150 Sassen, Saskia, 220 scholarship, 68, 173 sciences, 50 Seaman, Barrett, 161 self-awareness, 173 self-confidence, 22 self-control, 87, 88 self-discovery, 102 self-efficacy, 22 self-identity, 8 self-management, 172 self-regulating behaviors, 87 self-transformation, 102 seminars, 163 Senior Capstone Project (SCP), 185, 189, 190, 191–92, 194, 195, 200, 201, 203, 205, 206, 212 Senior Capstone Project (SCP) experience, 10 service, 73–105; centering self in orientation projects, 99–102; college experience, 94; dirty work in the neoliberal era, 79–82 (see also dirty work); gaining life perspective from, 95; goals of,

110; labor, 100; in New Orleans, Louisiana, 93–98; opportunities, 73, 107; projects, 84; quantification of, 107, 108; role of place, 98; selfserving element of, 110; studying, 77–79; subjectivity lessons, 86–88; Time and the Other (Fabian), 98–99; trends, 88–93. See also college volunteerism service-learning, 1, 4, 97, 130; critique and practice, 181–83; entanglements, 171–84; experiential learning, 112–36; institutional infrastructures of, 114–19; motivations, 174–78; neoliberal education and anthropological critique, 172–74; parental advice, 178–81; voicing experiential learning in narratives, 120–24; voicing self and institution, 119–20 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. See GI Bill Shakespeare, William, 22 Shear, Boone, 193 Shore, Cris, 225, 230 Shoris, Earl, 21 Shumar, Wesley, 2, 10, 11, 60, 217, 225 Silverstein, Michael, 153 Skidmore College, 145, 146, 154, 165 skills, 5, 6, 8, 14, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 32, 48, 51, 52, 53, 61, 78, 109, 115, 118, 129, 137, 146, 151, 152, 156, 157, 164, 166, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 206, 108, 109, 211, 212, 225, 231 Slaughter, Sheila, 217 social actors, 10 social awareness, 173 social capital, 7 social entrepreneurialism, 113, 128 social inequality, 129 social innovation: experiential learning, 112–36; institutional infrastructures of, 114–19; voicing experiential learning in

242 ⽧ Index narratives, 124–28; voicing self and institution, 119–20 socialization, 145, 149 social learning/knowledge production process, 222 social norms (service and), 76 social sciences, 50 social services, 173 soft skills, 5, 14, 189, 190, 193, 200–209, 212 Sparta Park Center, 121 Special Hope Network, 176 stakeholders, 5 Stallybrass, Peter, 95, 98 standardization, 88 Stanford University, 39, 145, 147, 154 Starr, Susan Leigh, 23 STEM fields, 63, 64 Stewart, Kathleen, 100 Strathern, Marilyn, 17, 225 Strong, Pauline Turner, 10 structures of feeling (Williams), 114 student-run extracurricular activities, 160 students, 45; assessments, 150; college experience (see college experience); experiences, 7; experiential learning, 112–36; fun (FYE programs), 159–62; growth of student culture, 159–60; interpellation, 9; obstacles in research, 137–42; responsibilities, 52; retention, 162–65; service (see service) studying abroad, 1 SU (Susquehanna University), 89, 90f subjectivity, neoliberal, 185–214; in education, 192–94; entrepreneurial spirit and originality, 206–9; hard skills through technical knowledge, 194–200; hidden nuances of, 210–12; soft skills through teamwork and commitment, 200–206 subjectivity lessons (service), 86–88 suburbanization, 59 Sundiata, Sekou, 25

SU SERVE (Students Engaging in Regional Volunteer Experiences), 89 Sweetdale Youth Soccer, 121 Sylla, Aliou, 178 symbolic capital, 7 teaching, graduate, 40 teamwork, 53, 200–206 technical documentation, 201 technical knowledge, hard skills through, 194–200 Technology Day competition, 197 Tewolde, Susan, 182 Thatcher, Margaret, 82 theories, education (Dewey), 18–21 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 37 Thévenot, Laurent, 178 “This I Believe” essay (Allison and Gediman), 23 Tiendrébéogo, Issoufou, 178 time and place, 99 Time and the Other (Fabian), 98–99 time management, 53 Tomlinson, Matt, 152 Tower Center, 116, 117 Tower Leadership Institute, 118 Town Center, 126, 131 traditions (of service), 107 transformation, 76, 102, 119 Transformational Leadership programs, 119 trends, service, 88–93 Turner, Victor, 93, 94 undergraduate curriculum, 44 undergraduate education, 2, 6 undergraduate research, 32–55 Undergraduate Research Network (University of Virginia), 47 undergraduate students, 45, 56–72 United Kingdom, 225 United States, 225; college experience in, 3–6; growth in universities, 2 Universal Identity Card team, 187, 192, 196, 203, 207

Index ⽧ 243 universities: addition of professional schools to, 42; competition, 44; corporatization of, 57; extensions, 41 University of Alaska, 24 University of California, Davis, 219 University of Chicago, 39 University of Michigan, 58 University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC), 153–54, 165 University of Pennsylvania: community service, 65–69; expansionism, 57–64; land ownership, 58, 59; neoliberalism and community engagement at, 56–72; Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOTs), 60–64 University of Phoenix, 227 University of South Carolina (USC), 147, 148, 153 University of Texas: at Austin, 80; Difficult Dialogues program, 24; Humanities Institute, 21, 24, 25 University of Virginia (UVA), 47, 172, 175 University of Wisconsin–Madison, 154 Upcraft, Lee, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155 Urciuoli, Bonnie, 10, 32, 129, 131, 156, 173, 194 U.S. Department of Commerce, 137 U.S. News and World Report, 144, 145, 216, 225 value, system of, 149 Veblen, Thorstein, 1, 2, 57; bureaucratic accountancy, 39–44; conducting research, 33–36; conspicuous research, 46–52; curriculum, 44–46; doing and idling, 52–53; The Higher Learning in America, 33, 39, 40; idle curiosity, 36–39; pecuniary emulation, 39–44; The Theory of the Leisure Class, 37; undergraduate research, 32–55

Vietnam War, 80 voicing: self and institution, 119–20; service-learning, 120–24; social innovation, 124–28 volunteering, 57, 66, 69, 78, 86, 89, 115; events, 107; personal benefits to students, 109 Wacquant, Loïc, 69 water (bottles of), 185–214; entrepreneurial spirit and originality, 206–9; hard skills through technical knowledge, 194– 200; soft skills through teamwork and commitment, 200–206 Watkins, Evan, 219, 222 Weber, Max, 38 welfare systems, 218 Western capitalism, 216, 219 West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 61, 62, 66, 67. See also University of Pennsylvania White, Allon, 95, 98 white flight, 59 Whitehead, Alfred North, 25, 26 white mzungu (someone of European descent), 122 Wilkinson, Ian, 181 Williams, Raymond, 100, 101, 113, 114 Woldu, Marta, 182 Woolf, Virginia, 22 Woolgar, Steve, 154 works, 8 workshops, 157 World War I, 46 World War II, 59, 80, 217 Wright, Susan, 193, 225, 230 Ying-Chia, Kao, 177 YMCA, 106, 108, 110 Zambian Association for Children with Disabilities (ZACD), 171, 172 Zizek, Slavoj, 226