DOSSIER TWO. WHY, For Some Pedagogues, It Is Necessary to Teach Long Sessions In Theory Classes On T &Th

The Memorandum of November 5, 1994 (like its predecessor), seems to reflect the widespread view in the Department/College that teaching on a TTh schedule is a "privilege" that an increasing number of faculty members are attempting to obtain. Yet in its margins, the text also hints that teaching on a TTh schedule is best regarded not as a "privilege" but ultimately as, in some unspecified way, an "illegitimate" act in urgent need of control because it comes into direct conflict with what the memorandum regards to be the ("legitimate") interests of students and the "bottom line" of the College bud get. In other words, in the discourses of this memorandum which sets the premises on which the Department/College discusses the issue, teaching on TTh is regarded with suspicion and represented as an act of self-indulgence which has to be dealt with ("disciplined") by administrative mechanisms (the threat of "budgetary consequences" which will minimize this supposed "self-indulgence").

Against the assumptions of the memorandum, we wish to argue that teaching on TTh—or any other day, for that matter—must be regarded not as an administrative/managerial question but rather as an intellectual and pedagogical issue typical of the contradictions of a bourgeois US university of the 1990's.

As we understand it, teaching on TTh as opposed to MWF is not about "privilege" nor about "getting away with something," as the pragmatic memorandum—anxious for a "quick fix" to an administrative "problem"—suspiciously hints. It is, above all, a question of the framing of issues in the classroom, a question related to how much time is needed in a rigorous pedagogical practice in order to unpack the issues, develop them, illustrate them, and situate them for students. The TTh schedule gives the instructor more time, while the MWF schedule limits the time for the sustained exploration of the issues. This is the main question here: how much time an instructor needs to deal with issues that she/he regards to be "connected" and which therefore cannot be dealt with productively in separate class sessions. For example, we both teach courses in theory. In these courses, which necessarily problematize the commonsense discourses students bring to the classroom and which they are only too ready to use, it takes quite a long time to set up the issues, unpack them, and make them available to students. For instance, in teaching Derrida's "That Dangerous Supplement" (chapter 2, part 2 of Of Grammarology), it takes at least thirty minutes to explain what Derrida calls the strange cohabitation of the addition and replacement in supplementarity—how "the supplement supplements."

Fairly elaborate explanations are needed to indicate to students how an "addition" stages the "anterior default of a presence." It takes another thirty or forty minutes to situate the concept of supplementarity in the chain of deconstructive concepts ("differance," "trace," "pharmakon," "hymen,"...). Having set up the conceptual apparatus, it then takes a considerable amount of time to read Derrida's reading of Starobinski's reading of Rousseau's reading of autobiography and subjectivity.... In a MWF class, not only can one not undertake such an elaborate and lengthy reading, but as soon as one begins to discuss the issues, the class time is ended and the students are gone. In the following (MWF) session, by the time one has recapitulated the important points of the previous session, there is little or no time left to move forward. Hence, under the pressure of time in a MWF class, not only can one not undertake such an elaborate and lengthy reading, but one ends up with summaries of summaries.

In a MWF session, the teacher with the kind of intellectual task we have described is forced simply to paraphrase and summarize highly complex issues, while in a TTh class one can not only go beyond paraphrase but actually beyond simply teaching theory to teaching theoretical thinking. Such a project as the one just articulated requires extensive labor— undertaken against all kinds of resistances. The idea that this kind of hard work is merely an effort "to get away with some thing illegitimate" (teach on a TTh schedule) only makes sense, we believe, from what is basically a deeply cynical, anti-intellectual position ("Newt thought") which assumes that the ("legitimate") teacher ought to be as eager as the most unprepared and impatient student to get in and immediately out of class (and thus opt for the MWF "short" schedule). In other words, the premises at work in the College and Department and reflected in the memorandum unproductively shift attention away from what the pedagogue does in the class room and how her/his needs are related to her/his pedagogical program and towards how many times per week the class meets: the not-so-subtle result is to substitute for a serious pedagogy a mere pedagogy of "being there" (or not). The Dean's office cannot tell the faculty to teach for profit. Any interference in the mode of inquiry in a class is a breach of academic freedom.

This brings us to the economic, social, and intellectual contradictions we mentioned above. Syracuse University represents itself as a "major" research university, that is to say, a university in which professors in the classroom do not simply rehash, summarize, and offer expositions of existing knowledges, but actually produce new knowledges by pressuring the boundaries of the already known. Furthermore, a "major" research university is one that subordinates all its practices to its main function, which is the production and dissemination of new knowledges. From this perspective, it would therefore follow that classes should be scheduled to enhance the process of the key activity of producing and disseminating new knowledges. If a professor needs an eighty-minute class, she should get it. If another professor needs a fifty-minute class, he too should get it. The scheduling office is here to serve faculty and students, not to harass them with pre-fabricated time-slots. However, while Syracuse University proclaims itself as a major research university, it continually raises the issue of "satisfying the consumer" of knowledges (the student who "pays" the University and is supposedly disadvantaged by TTh teaching). Thus while the University announces that its most important activity is learning and the production of new knowledges, in actuality all its daily practices continually marginalize that activity and thereby situate professors in untenable positions. The October 1, 1993 memorandum appears to take these issues into account by asking "Are there pedagogical issues involved ... ?" We think, however, that such memoranda should always be written from the position which acknowledges that indeed such issues are always involved and that they cannot be separated out from practical "problems."

We believe that academic freedom and rigorous teaching should be placed beyond the "bottom line." This means that the College should reunderstand the "problem" of T/Th scheduling in pedagogical and intellectual terms and recognize that TTh/MWF scheduling is a question of knowledge production and not simply a managerial matter. We do not see any reason at all why the University (and for its part the Department) should not live up to its own announced priorities of disinterested inquiry without regard to the bottom line in each class. In other words, we are asking the Department not to suppress the intellectual and pedagogical issues at stake in order to adopt a simple pragmatic "Newt" procedure which might be convenient in the short term, but which will finally be detrimental to the processes of profound thinking, deep teaching, and enlightened pedagogy.