What People Say They Are Told

A continuation, not sure from where:

This credibility depends on how public relation departments shape their connection to the students and public at large. These messages are then directly affected by the American cultural and economic context, which characteristically needs education to justify itself. This is a difficult task, particularly because the nature of the university tends to draw hazy lines between educating students and serving wider public (Rodintzky 1968: 336). Because of its bureaucratic makeup, a university is fragmented entity and ends up making many contradicting decisions to please different groups (Giardina 1974: 121). At the center of these decisions is a process which prepares a student to participate in their community, which is one of the primary missions commonly expressed in published materials. In his critique of the Bachelor’s Degree, Giardina articulates that a student is expected to

gain a certain set of skills which will enable him to think critically about himself, his environment, and his relationship to that environment, both in terms of values which the environment attempts to impose on him and in terms of the values, which he, in turn, attempts to impose upon it (1974: 115).

The purpose of higher education has clearly acquired different contours since its consideration as a purely cultural marker. Giardina and other academics value critical thinking, but this is not how education is often conceptualized in the public discourse. Society at large determines curricula of state-supported schools, mostly through abstract expectations of its educated members, and often in a business-oriented frame. Because many institutions are funded by the state, it's no surprise that the public higher education system has to defend itself by its level of productivity (Engel 1984: 19).

“Concrete” judgments are primarily based on the results gathered from quantitative studies of education, framed in the market model of research (Engel 1984: 23). Because these models dominate research and influence the discussion of public policy, the business approach to higher education shapes what we expect, and consequently, what we want to be told. Degrees are as much economic markers as they are cultural markers and add figures to a salary; others say that not much else is added to the community. Engel (1984: 24) argues that looking at education for purely economic growth defy measurements; and most adhere to Milton Friedman's "neighborhood effect," where the economist proposed that secondary forms of education have weaker positive effects than early education.

Most research in this field emerges from the United Kingdom, but several conclusions can be applied to American higher education. In the UK, universities come under increasing government pressure to act as a business, even though it is clearly not (Fairclough 1993: 143). It is still expected to be a vehicle for competition and it is this competitive expectation that shapes how universities promote themselves. Ian Connell (1998: 457) saw marketing texts like mission statements as another symptom of incorporating into the "commodity market," as they were drawn up as a form of self-justification. Like the United States, the UK Government considers student demand for education alone insufficient for planning higher education-- there must be a sufficient need for manpower as well (Connell 1998: 459).

Education's power is planted in its public acceptance, a relationship which must be constantly negotiated and recreated. Pieczka (2002: 306) would consider this a form of the kind of social corporate responsibility that keeps the public content about any institution’s actions. Higher education does wield power, but a very narrowly defined kind. The popular focus is usually on highly selective institutions, not the ones 80% of students go to (Venezia 2005: 02). These are taken as success stories, which offer some sort of proof that education works on an abstract level. These choice examples perpetuate the common-sense assumptions of discourse, and be easily shaped by the ideology in power (Fairclough 2001: 64). Because one kind of school is promoted heavily, this discourse makes some options desirable and accessible, some educational process legitimate and others less approachable. Community colleges, for example, are often thought of as last resort, where students simply say, "you don't want to go there" (Venezia 2005: 29).

These ideas about community college are internalized and communicated because the available discourse, and its structure, does not credit them with enough legitimacy and respect. This theory is rooted in Michel Foucault’s discourse, where the multiple power and knowledge structures that are embedded in social institutions create meaning (Swales 1995 239).The most common elements, the ones which seem invisible, are those which affect discourse the most. Criticisms are best articulated with a full knowledge of what values are commonly transmitted and how they are considered legitimate. It is what Fairclough (2001: 33) considers as finding the hidden agenda of education and its role in reproducing class and social structures in addition to its primary mission. It is not only a process of analyzing the marketing, but understanding how structures shape this marketing. Abstract knowledge is defining feature of professions, best studied when they are put into practice (Piezcka 2002: 302).

Values and attitudes are often explained by abstract social theories. Fairclough (1993: 134)advocates a critical analysis of discourse by applying these insights to language texts. He begins his method by conceiving language as a social action, with the capability to make promises and establish relationships (Fairclough 2001: 7). Three important aspects that he outlines to help understand the nature of words are: language is part of society and not external to it; consequently it is also a social process; this process is inevitably conditioned by non-language parts of society (2001: 18).

James Paul Gee developed specific ways to study words by building on Fairclough's theory. He writes that we use language to make things significant, giving them their recognized meaning and value (Gee 1999: 11). Language use recognizes identities and roles; signals a type of relationship; conveys a perspective on social goods; normalizes politics; and connects to these concepts together (Gee 1999: 110). These dimensions of language exist within their own context, and it’s in these contexts were meaning is determined, not just as abstractions (Gee 1999: 53). It's a general function of semantics, where we understand that all meaning is local, and it's our proximity to the text that determines its importance (Gee 1999: 76). Further uses of his tools will be explained throughout the rest of this paper.