|
« AAUP Homepage
|
From the General Secretary-A Darkling Plain?
By Mary A. Burgan
The Mall in Washington, D.C., glittered in the unexpected Indian summer heat on the fall afternoon of my second visit to the site of the Solar Decathlon. I had seen a Washington Post piece on the construction of energy-saving houses under this U.S. Department of Energy program, and the fact that they were designed and built by student-faculty teams from fourteen competing universities lured me out. Of course, I was interested in the faculty's participation, but I was there for other reasons: I worry about global warming. I love gadgetry. And my scholarly work has centered on material culture.
Only a few visitors were tromping around the brown grass of the exhibit site on that weekday afternoon; so many had been there on the previous Sunday that I couldn't get an intimate tour of all the buildings. I got better access this day by telling students and advisers that I was preparing an article for Academe. When I tried this ruse on an undergraduate engineering student to get into an exhibit that had been closed to keep the temperature down during the air-conditioning phase of the contest, he finally let me in, but not as a reporter. "If they ask me who you are, I'll tell them you're my grandmother," he said. I chalked that sting up to the perils of frontline reporting.
I learned a lot about solar energy at the decathlon, but I learned more about education applied to practical problems. If the faculty's not there, such ventures will not happen, I was told. But I also learned that if the faculty is there, the students will feel endorsed, certified, and even entertained. I cite the example of a faculty sponsor of the University of Missouri-Rolla House, who acted as a pitchman while a group of us waited to get in—touting the inventiveness of a moveable bookcase wall designed by one of his students. When I got to this feature of the house, I told the student designer that I already knew about it from the faculty member's spiel at the entrance. "Oh, that's our adviser," he said fondly. "He's one crazy dude."
In another interview, a faculty member from the University of Virginia's School of Engineering confided that the project had brought architecture together with engineering at the university; the fields rarely talk to one another. Later, an indiscreet student at the Auburn University House observed that it was a female interior decorator who helped to make the university's entry a home rather than "a box covered with pennies." (The futuristic University of Virginia House boasted copper cladding reclaimed from an old barn roof.)
The theme of the AAUP's 2003 annual meeting is "liberal education and social responsibility." During most of its history, the Association has stayed clear of curricular debates; but it has also been aware that in the past two decades, the proliferation of knowledge and theory has armed an academic battlefield for contending versions of pedagogy, disciplines, and ideologies. Some of our colleagues now question whether in the welter of ideas and theories, the ideal of a coherent and useful scheme of liberal learning may have been fatally weakened. Indeed, some leading reformers have told me that academic freedom has been used as an instrument of this curricular and pedagogical disarray. "Some faculty members cite their academic freedom when they refuse to cooperate on new programs," they tell me. "Does tenure mean never having to accommodate the curriculum?"
Although the Solar Decathlon was sponsored by engineering rather than arts and sciences, it offered some answers to such questions. Faculty and students enacted them with one another under the constraints and deadlines of building a house that worked. The Association will also assay these kinds of questions at its annual meeting—not as an arbiter of disciplinary interests, but in terms of its own conviction that faculty should be leading rather than following current efforts to ensure that liberal education remains the foundation of undergraduate training.
Remembering the Mall panorama of last October, I think of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." There Arnold's despair at the intellectual chaos of his own time images the modern world as a "darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight." But the bustle and ingenuity of faculty and students made that plain in Washington a site of construction. Some of those faculty involved in the Solar Decathlon will be at our annual meeting in June. They will help us think about how we can work together to create a brighter world. Join us!
|