Artifacts Covered in Dust.

"A thousand years later, a second Egyptian scribe provides a succinct curriculum: 'Write with your hand, recite with your mouth, and converse with those more knowledgeable than you.' "
--Somewhere on here

I started this project informally, in the fall of 2005, while taking Social Research Methods with Dr. Starr. Our assignment was to keep a diary for the semester. In this diary, we would follow one question, determine how we'd try to answer it through different research methods. At the time the question was, "why am I in college?" It came out to a few thousand words, most of it now possessing a purely nostalgic value for me. Over time I would continue to wrestle with trying to articulate this answer, and eventually I'd see the question as mildly irrelevant. It was no longer a why, but a how.

Below are two excerpts. Excuse the constant hyperbole and gushing excitement. It was just after freshman year and I was really fascinated by everything around me:

Week 6: The Ethnography*
So we came up with this great idea. It's more of an outsider perspective than anything else, but I think it's pretty great. So far, I've enlisted my friend John and TK. The inspiration comes from this book called "The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice," written in 1971. It does an overview of several dozen colleges in the country from a countercultural point of view: whether you can buy grass, get birth control pills and what kind of books people are reading. This particular aspect is listed under "Mental Environment." Chapman College has one sentence: "People don't read." Some things never change.

But what I want to do is get two implants at every university. Have them stay there for two years. Take courses, live in the dorms, join fraternities, get completely involved in the social life. I'd have them keep a diary for these two years, and at the end, they would consolidate all this information into one final report, the compilation of which would be turned into a giant book. Or maybe keep a website, with each author logging in information every two weeks. Or maybe one student who actually attends could write, and another who is there just for that assignment, see what kind of perspectives I'd get. This would be great to do for every university we could afford to do. It'd be brilliant. It would go beyond these stupid ratings the Princeton Review does, and would reveal some localized truth about the school, or at least lift up the curtain so people could look and say to themselves, "Jesus Christ." I'm not just interested in the "party scene," but the actual mechanics of education. How well do students organize their own education? That's the focus. I like this. It's gravy.

Week 14 Discourse Analysis
The best thing to happen to my study. I wish I had had this during the entire process. It would have been absolutely perfect for my question. I had been doing so, I guess, from the start: just mentally collecting what everyone was saying about college. I watched two episodes of The Simpsons that dealt with college; both had visions of an eastern school as models; gothic buildings, large lecture halls, an autumn-like atmosphere. This is the most common image I see whenever I see college mentioned. What kind of nostalgia does this produce, and is it responsible for my disappointment? I could have been doing so much in analyzing films that are about college and note that probably less than 10% of the movie actually takes place in the classroom. What does PCU say about the college experience? Not a single classroom scene.

Why does everyone conjure up the same imagery when the generic term, "college students" is used. This is supposedly a time for experimentation and self-discovery, but does the environment really foster this in a positive way? How do people talk about college? In a sort of "been there, done that," method, where we remove current students from the conversation. We are still in school, so we lack the perspective that the adults do when they talk about their time in school. We are never included in the discourse, unless we are on MTV or our female counterparts in Girls Gone Wild, and the multitude of "fresh-coed" websites online. Are we told that we actually have to learn? Commercials capitalize on the vision of kids going away to school, but it always focuses on the transition, like cell phone commercials, etc. What is college all about, and why do people want to come here? What disappointments are in store? I still have no answer for the general question, but I have so many starting points. I have destroyed and constructed paths to answer this question properly, which I eventually want to do.

*It appears that someone has already started their own version of this, and it's very interesting to see how it's approached and conceptualized. It's a very sleek and attractive site, which seems to be parent-friendly something that the original Underground Guide definitely wasn't. There's a book available for some colleges, with some grouped regionally. The contrasts in the work between these two eras is an investigation in itself. I am using text from the College Prowler profiles as part of corpus to study.

The Goods

One of the concluding portions, discusses some of the concepts at stake in transparency:

The nature of student- institution relationships is often muddied in the materials published and distributed. Many contain statements that appear to acknowledge the student-centered approach, but often do not do so in reality. Institutions are far from being decentralized and deconstructed, but maintain a tenuous relationship with its students, current and future, by saying so (Connell 1998: 461). Wood (1939: 413) writes about how universities don’t make certain information, such as graduation and retention rates, readily available, painting an incomplete portrait. These numbers are available, but they often must be searched for, a practice that captures some of the more immediate consequences of marketization and commodification. A serious problem of trust is at issue because such a commodity-centered practice has strong ethical implications, especially because of the vulnerable state the students are placed in. On one level, the issue is determining when information is friendly and not just instrumental (Fairclough 1993: 142). On a deeper level, the question comes up about the effects of the academic institution’s authority, as well as the effects on the relationships between the collective identity of the institution and its participants (Fairclough 1993: 143).

Rodintzky (1968: 337) wrote that it was in the interest of the university to honestly reflect faults of the wider community, and concede that the imperfections of the political structure are also expressed in schools. Recent policy and population-specific studies strive for reformation through the printing of high-quality information need for more knowledge of curriculum. Students are conceived as consumers in publication materials, a relationship which is automatic and seemingly apparent. They are placed in a position of dependence where they often are not enabled to gain critical thinking until the university says so says so (Connell 1998: 469). Incoming students criticize glossy information for not being helpful, mostly being superficial, and containing little information on actual programs and how to prepare for them (Venezia 2005: 32). These critiques capture some of the material consequences that makes the case for students’ acquisition of empowerment through information.

Discourse analysis has become a resource for those engaged within institutional struggles, a way to overcome a sense of helplessness (Fairclough 1993: 158). What's at stake in using this analysis is establishing an individual control over the social goods being offered, as well as having the ability to articulate them as social goods. The dimensions of education as a “good” includes access to real information for the prospective and a clear understanding of a current students' relationship with their university. This paper advocates the practice of everyday discourse analysis, because it use cultivates a critical awareness of one's environment. Below are some of the reasons it might be necessary to foster a consciousness which Fairclough (1993: 142) deems as a necessary prerequisite for democratic citizenship.

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.