Redesigning the Ruins
- Redesigning the Ruins
Shirley Neuman
Dean of Arts and Professor of English, University of British Columbia Coeditor, ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture (1993); editor, Autobiography and Questions of Gender (1992); coeditor, Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature (1988); coeditor, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (1986)
Footnotes
1. E.g. TheTechnical University of British Columbia, the University Act of which was passed in the British Columbia Legislature on 9 June 1997, or La Rochelle campus in France, in which the humanities include ‘Applied Languages’ but no philosophy or literature courses.
2. The example (from Deakin University, Australia) shows how readily academics collude in ‘performance measures’ which devalue the humanities and simultaneously reassert their own reward system against the push to wide dissemination of applied knowledge which lies behind much of the renovation of the university system. Deakin University's scoring system replicates the privileging of the sciences and applied sciences over the humanities in its valuation of the preferred form of publication of those disciplines – the refereed article – over the most prestigious form of publication in the humanities – the monograph. At the same time, the refereed article circulates among a small group of peers who share its generally highly elaborated methodological and terminological expertise; most refereed articles have a notoriously small readership. The valuation of the refereed article replicates traditional academic insularity and refuses the kind of broad-based dissemination required by the increasingly ‘applied’ agenda being set out for universities.
3. A point made by many writers on knowledge in post-industrial capitalism, among them Gibbons et al and Drucker.
4. Such courses are very far from Utopian. That most traditional of art schools, L'Ecole de Beaux Arts de Paris, for example, now offers a master's degree in multimedia which brings together in its student body and its instructors just such a professional mix as I have listed here, and which addresses both the theory and the practice of multimedia, thus going well beyond the ‘trade’ programs which are beginning to proliferate a round centres of the film industry; if medical schools have not yet quite moved to comparative courses about patients and practitioners, several now offer courses on The Patient and Society; while there is, as yet, no course on The Cultural Meaning of Forests, an upcoming conference at the University of British Columbia by that title has the possibility of such a course in view. Etc.
Works Cited
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