LABORATOIRE EN LUTTE (2)
Motion votée par le CEMAf (Centre d’études des mondes africains) lors de l’assemblée générale du 11 février 2009
Réagissant à la stigmatisation des personnels et aux bouleversements profonds imposés sans concertation à la recherche publique et à l’enseignement supérieur, le CEMAf se déclare « laboratoire en lutte » et appelle à la suspension ou au détournement des activités organisées en son sein. À l’unanimité des membres présents, il demande :
- le retrait du projet de décret sur le statut des enseignants-chercheurs et la restauration des cadres nationaux des diplômes et des statuts ;
- l’arrêt du démantèlement des organismes de recherche, notamment du CNRS, et le rétablissement de l’ensemble de leurs missions nationales (opérateur de recherche, labellisation des revues, évaluation scientifique des laboratoires) ;
- le rétablissement des postes supprimés en 2009 dans l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche (chercheurs, ITA, enseignants-chercheurs et BIATOS), ainsi que la mise en place d’un plan pluriannuel de création de postes statutaires ;
- la suppression des chaires « organisme-université » ;
- la fin des procédures d’externalisation et la résorption de la précarité pour toutes les catégories de personnel ; le déblocage et l’harmonisation des carrières ;
- l’abandon de la mastérisation pour la formation aux concours d’enseignement ;
- la révision du contrat doctoral, pour une amélioration du statut et des conditions de travail des doctorants ;
- un moratoire des expertises à l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) et à l’Agence d’Évaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (AERES) ;
- une large consultation de tous les acteurs concernés et une meilleure prise en compte des propositions émanant des Etats généraux de la recherche afin d’élaborer une nouvelle loi d’organisation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur, et afin de mettre en place un système d’évaluation transparent fondé sur les principes de collégialité, d’indépendance et de compétence scientifique.
NÃO SE MUDA JÁ COMO SOÍA
Anúncio, no Público.
FOLEIROS & DOUTORES
Manuel António Pina
Jornal de Notícias, 11-5-2009
Terminaram as chamadas “Queimas das Fitas” e, salvo raras excepções, o balanço foi o do costume: alarvidade+Quim Barreiros+garraiadas+comas alcoólicos. No antigo regime, os estudantes universitários eram pomposamente designados de “futuros dirigentes da Nação”. Hoje, os futuros dirigentes da Nação formam-se nas “jotas” a colar cartazes e a aprender as artes florentinas da intriga e da bajulice aos poderes partidários, enquanto à Universidade cabe formar desempregados ou caixas de supermercado. A situação não é, pois, especialmente grave. Um engenheiro ou um doutor bêbedo a guiar uma carrinha de entregas com música pimba aos berros não causará decerto tantos prejuízos como se lhe calhasse conduzir o país. Acontece é que muitos dos que por aí hoje gozam como cafres besuntando os colegas com fezes, emborcando cerveja até cair para o lado, perseguindo bezerros e repetindo entusiasticamente “Quero cheirar teu bacalhau” andam na Universidade e são “jotas”. E a esses, vê-los-emos em breve, engravatados, no Parlamento ou numa secretaria de Estado (Deus nos valha, se calhar até já lá estão!).
HÁ QUEM AINDA SE ILUDA
Esta forma de pensar faz parte do problema, não da solução (simplesmente, porque não há solução):
End the University as We Know It
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings. The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:
1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.
2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.
3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.
Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.
MERECE UM MOMENTO DE ATENÇÃO
Ken Robinson: “Os certificados universitários não servem para nada”
O CENTRO DO ENSINO
Miguel Esteves Cardoso
Público, 06.02.2009
Gosto de publicidade e acho que se aprende muito com ela. Saber o que as pessoas e as empresas querem parecer e ser (quando forem grandes) é informativo e, às vezes, comovente.
Agora há muitas universidades e apesar de haver muitos alunos também não chegam para todas. A concorrência é cruel e há tantos cursos que se torna difícil inventar um que não exista já. Experimente. É um divertido jogo de salão. Quanto mais imaginário parecer, maior a probabilidade das inscrições estarem abertas.
A publicidade das universidades não é menos imaginosa. Ontem reparei que a Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa – cujo logótipo tem uma coroa de louro em cima do A como agradecimento a Apolo – começou a anunciar-se como “A única universidade no centro de Lisboa”.
De facto, não é mentira: é no Conde Redondo, tão perto do Marquês de Pombal como do Elefante Branco. Mais central não podia ser. Dá jeito estudar numa universidade tão bem situada. Sai-se das aulas e, passados uns minutos, pode-se estar na Smarta ou no Dolce e Gabbana.
Como irão as outras universidades contra-atacar? Todas estão bem situadas, dependendo do que se pretende. Há, por exemplo, o excelente ISPA em Alfama. Seria incapaz de contra-atacar com “A única universidade no coração do Fado de Lisboa”. Mas poderia, se quisesse.
Cheira-me que esta guerra, que aproxima, com saborosas promessas, o mundo académico do mundo imobiliário, ainda mal começou.
LABORATOIRE EN LUTTE
Arquivar em: "Reforma", Bolonha, Empresa, França, HP, Investigação, Unibomber |
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ISCTE: A EXCELÊNCIA DO JARDIM DE INFÂNCIA
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Salvemos o zombie
Arquivar em: "Reforma", França, Investigação, MJR, Revolta, Universidade |
Comments(1) Now we’re getting somewhere
Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th of June in Leeds.
The pornography industry is an under-researched culture industry. Its links to mainstream media and to the sex industry are intensifying. The mainstreaming of certain aspects of the industry in global popular culture raises questions about the adequacy, efficiency or appropriateness of existing policy. Other aspects of the industry, such as its labour conditions, its geographies of production and consumption practices associated with it have largely fallen under the radar of scholarly analysis, while much more attention has been paid to the potential for emancipatory uses of aspects of sexually explicit cultural expression. Meanwhile, technological aspects of the industry’s operation are challenging our assumptions about ‘choice’ ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’. With the proliferation of the pornographic product embedded in everyday life now more than ever before existing and new questions require our urgent attention about human rights, migrants, workers and communication rights, media literacy, media ecology and the public sphere, global production and consumption cultures as well as underlying politics of gender, class and ‘race’.
This conference aims to bring together scholars, policymakers and activists to discuss the global pornography complex. It is the second of two conferences organised within the British Academy funded projectSocialisation of the global sexually explicit imagery: challenges to regulation and research. The project has given birth to an international Porn Cultures and Policy Network, which involves scholars from a number of countries, engaged in comparative studies with an emphasis on policy. We are inviting colleagues to take part in this debate and colleagues who would be interested in working with the existing network to join us. Information on this and our first conference can be found on http://sgsei.wordpress.com.
Please send your 200 word abstract, along with a 50-word bio and contact details to Steven McDermott (cssem@leeds.ac.uk) by March 15th or earlier.
There will be a small fee to cover catering and room facilities. Please let us know if you require an earlier decision regarding your paper. If you would like to discuss a panel/round-table proposal and /or your paper please contact Katharine Sarikakis (K.Sarikakis@leeds.ac.uk).
