The University in Crisis: Teaching, Tenure, and Transference in David Mamet's Oleanna

Nobody tells me anything. And I sit there . . . in the corner. In the back. And everybody's talking about "this" all the time. And "concepts," and "precepts" and, and, and, and, and WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? And I read your book. And they said, "Fine, go in that class." Because you talked about responsibility to the young. I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I'M FAILING.

David Mamet, Oleanna

I was always astonished as a student in higher education because I never had any idea of what everyone was talking about.

David Mamet

Scenes of Crisis

In what way does the University continue to hold open a kind of utopian state of exception? The phrase "state of exception" refers us to Giorgio Agamben's discussion, via Carl Schmitt, of a suspension of the law in a state of emergency. Agamben writes, "the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism" (3). This suspension can be invoked as a security measure (the kind of justified suspension of rights invoked, famously, by Clinton Rossiter in 1948: "No sacrifice is too great for our democracy, least of all the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself" [qtd. in Agamben, 9]), but it can also suggest the lifting of restraint that produces an idealized sphere of freedom and communication. In this utopian state of exception, one accesses not fewer rights but an almost primordial fullness, a state before rights, a state before the state, Locke's "America": "Thus, in the beginning, all the world was America" (Locke, 32). Within American higher education, such a space is often reserved for the liberal arts college, which is imagined, and presents itself, as a kind of purified version of the university. Frederick Rudolph quotes a "relatively obscure Republican politician" whose words at an alumni banquet in 1871 evolved into "the most widely known aphorism in the history of American education": "'The ideal college is Mark Hopkins [beloved professor at Williams College] on one end of a log and a student on the other'" (243). The wilderness of a naturalized space of pedagogical exception is whittled down to one log and, as in Oleanna, the David Mamet play I want to go on to consider, the University appears in the concentrated form of an encounter between one teacher and one student.

Arguably, however, it is not the quasi-natural location or the teacher-student relationship that defines the borders of the academic state of exception so much as the concept of tenure. Tenure, traditionally, opens up a protected space for the risk of learning, the risk of thought. And tenure, it turns out, is also crucial to any appreciation of Oleanna. David Mamet's 1992 play seems peculiarly attuned to the role tenure plays in what we might call academic border crises, and his professor-protagonist first registers this crisis in the form of a characteristically defensive review of his own motives in seeking tenure:

I asked myself if I was wrong to covet it. And thought about it long, and I hope, truthfully, and saw in myself several things, in, I think, no particular order. (Pause) That I would pursue it. That I desired it, that I was not pure of longing for security, and that that, perhaps, was not reprehensible in me. . . . That tenure, and security, and yes, and comfort, were not, of themselves to be scorned; and were even worthy of honorable pursuit. . . . What was the price of this security? To obtain tenure.

(44)

The apologetic invocation of personal security here seems somewhat at odds with the most familiar defense of tenure, namely, that it protects intellectual freedom. Instead, the professor's remarks recall the play's opening lines, lines that play with both the feudal etymology of the word "tenure" and the professor's economic investment in achieving it. He is speaking to his wife, we soon come to realize, about their imminent real estate purchase: "And what about the land. (Pause) The land. And what about the land? (Pause) What about it? (Pause)" (1). A...