It seems altogether appropriate to me that my last Duck post should be a post about pedagogy. The more years I spend in this business, the more convinced I am that our area of greatest impact, and the place where our academic vocations are most clearly on display, is the classroom. Whether in-person or virtual, hi-tech or low-tech, as a permanent member of a faculty or as a visitor coming in to guest-teach or participate in a single class session, the most unique and valuable thing that we do is to craft spaces for learning, and set up encounters of many sorts: encounters between students and teacher, encounters between students and readings, encounters between students and students, encounters between students and the world in all of its multifluous and grotesque majesty. “Uncomfortable facts” are our stock in trade, and helping students confront the limits of their perspectives and be thus made uncomfortable is our greatest good.
You may disagree. You may not think that classroom teaching is as central to the academic vocation as I do. You may think that my veneration of classroom teaching is unrealistically romantic, crypto-conservative, elitist, and perhaps even downright irresponsible given the challenges facing the world. So be it. While I am more than happy to continue a contentious conversion with any of you about this, we’ll have to do it in another forum than this one, because as we move closer to the date at which the new ISQ editorial team — of which I am a part, albeit a new and innovative part as my role on the team is to build out a revised web presence for the journal rather than being a traditional editor — takes on formal responsibilities for the journal, I hereby announce my resignation as a permanent contributing member of the Duck of Minerva.
As I do so, I will confess that I stand in awe of what this blog has become. In the beginning it was Dan, Rodger, Bill, and me, largely talking among ourselves in public. And look at it now: a large, intellectually diverse team, topics ranging from the extremely policy-relevant to the extremely geekily abstract (and sometimes both at once!), an institution that plays some indefinite but important role in the world of scholarly IR practice. I confess that I am a bad blogger; I write essays rather than posts, I free-ride on others’ work in putting up “morning linkage” posts, and I sometimes ignore other posts out there on the ‘Net when I put up my own thoughts. And I want to thank my colleagues here for being better at this than I am, but allowing me to be part of the community, and having a space to make my contributions. I take all of those lessons with me into the brave new world of a new web presence for ISQ, and I am convinced that my experience here will make me better able to help shape at least a corner of the online scholarly world to come.
Thank you all, and I’ll see you around the ‘Net, around at conferences, and around the world as long as I keep being fortunate enough to get invitations to come visit interesting academic places!
[Now engaging lurker mode. Obligatory obscure prog-rock lyric in parting: “Meanwhile, lurking by a stone in the mud, two eyes looked to see where I was. And then, something spoke, and this is what it said to me…”]
For what it’s worth I think the real crypto-conservatism is the insistence that everything a scholar does be ‘policy relevant’ – like academia is nothing more than a casually dressed, bespectacled wing of the intelligence services. Producing the most dynamic, challenging and transformative intellectual environment for the education of young people possible – what’s not radical about that?
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading your posts. All the best!
““Uncomfortable facts” are our stock in trade, and helping students
confront the limits of their perspectives and be thus made uncomfortable
is our greatest good.” Love this. Great post. Sorry to see you go, reading your stuff always made me feel smarter and dumber at the same time.
‘Smarter and dumber at the same time’- that is right on. Couldn’t have put it better. You’ve always made me learn, thanks for that, Patrick.
I find PTJ’s emphasis on academic “vocation” (and Philip’s rearticulation of
“crypto-conservative”) most meaningful. Better yet, most “telling.”
I have been working through the significance of vocation for some time, and I find this post itself a call against resignation (quite powerful given the announcement).
I am not trying to “read” too much into vocation and its consonants. There is indeed such a thing as reading too much when it does not enable saying (much, little, or anything).
Academic convocation, as a coming together along policy or any other market-driven ethos, is increasingly dictating the borders of our provocations in the classroom. That is, in my mind, why PTJ’s defense evokes a crypto-conservatism.
The less we can speak to the governing ethos that undervalues voices (in plural), the less our students can speak for themselves – and not for, by, or through us.
The least I can covey to students is that the classroom does not stand as a para-vocation on their paths. It’s not about providing a derivative or a parallel universe language. Not surprisingly, students who have graduated after having immersed themselves in the classroom and have enriched the experience of all (including ours) in those conversations, seem both more successful at work afterward but also more at home with themselves. They can at least say that the narrowing discourses of the marketplace are not leaving them with a vague and unarticulated “je ne sais quoi.” They can voice – to someone, be it themselves – their thinking.
The real crypto-conservatism in my view is the mystification – the encrypting – of narrowing thought into a “je ne sais quoi”