"Copy, Cut, Paste": A Reflection on Some Institutional Constraints of Teaching a Big Intro Course

The phrase copy, cut, paste might be taken to epitomize a quick fix or effective editorial intervention in era dominated by the computer. However, I want to stretch this metaphor further to describe a situation when, through administrative decisions, a flagship course like Women: An Introduction to Women's is selected, revamped, and moved from a relatively marginalized space occupied by Women's Studies in the academy to a larger area of cross-curriculum education or courses being offered to all incoming university students. What happens when a Women's Studies course becomes a vehicle of mass education, when number crunching and rationalization of delivery increasingly supercede concerns with feminist politics, value, and ethics? Is it a case of institutional commodification of Women's Studies? Or is this mainstreaming of the discipline motivated by a desire to raise consciousness and, as Sneja Gunew puts it, to train agents for social change (2002, p. 51)? I have to adroit that in framing my response to the question of the Big Divide between the humanities and social sciences in terms of institutional constraints I echo many points raised by the late Bill Readings in his jeremiad on the ruins of the modern university; hence, in what follows I perform my own bit of copying, cutting, and pasting. It seems that in our everyday experience as course directors of large introductory classes like Women, we often have to address challenges similar to the larger issues faced by Women's Studies as a discipline housed in the university, institution that, according to Readings, is busily transforming itself ... into a bureaucratically organized and relatively autonomous [profit-driven] corporation, where the administrator replaces the professor, where students think of themselves as consumers rather than as members of [an academic] community, and where knowledge is replaced by processing of information (1996, p. 11). Significantly, our dilemmas concerning Women intersect with feminist debates about autonomy, summarized, for example, by Diana Tietjens Meyers. Feminist critiques of an androcentric phantasm of the autonomous individual as self-originating, self-sufficient, coldly rational, shrewdly calculating, [and] self-interest maximizing (2000, p. 152) have inspired both skepticism about and defence of the value of autonomy. What kinds of autonomy do we want to promote through the design and delivery of our intro course? We have realized that our attempts to foster in our students a positive sense of autonomy as self-knowledge and self-definition (p. 153), as well as a degree of control over one's own self-realization, have been adversely affected by the climate of the neo-liberal market economy, where the androcentric autonomous individual has been reincarnated as the subject of consumerism, a persona out students adopt with alarming frequency. When Women becomes a nine-credit foundations course for 360 students, it slips closer to the commodity status and has to be made marketable. At the same time, its potential to radicalize the students through consciousness-raising and offering narratives of emancipation tends to be minimized. We are surrounded by calls to make the material more palatable and less offensive. Interestingly, the language used in voicing such demands is derived from business culture and technology. Thus content selection follows a shopping cart model, tossing up tidbits of information to suit general interests of a diverse group of students. There is a marked suspicion of any intellectual challenge as from year to year we have been encouraged through student feedback to simplify and dumb down the syllabus. On a good day, this anti-intellectualism takes the form of downplaying feminist theory in the name of activism. There is also a refusal of historical knowledge and continuity of memory, expressed through a consumerist trend to upgrade the information. …

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