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| | | Disciplinary Instruction | |
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< | Columbia University utilizes education as a disciplinary mechanism instructing students in proper values. The Center for Student Success Intervention (CSSI) described its mission for the Spectator, “Instead of ending with the completion of sanctions, student conduct will proceed with the center’s educational approach and guide students to learn from their experiences.” [[https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2022/10/25/new-center-for-student-success-and-intervention-aims-to-reimagine-student-conduct/]] Another discipline apparatus, the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) repeatedly references educational goals in its guidelines “A Report concerning allegations of Prohibited Conduct that would typically result in Sanctions no more severe than a warning or reprimand may proceed through Educational Resolution.” https://institutionalequity.columbia.edu/content/policies This ‘resolution’ is granted on the basis of mere allegations; a supposed alternative to ‘discipline.’ The disciplinary structures diagnose ‘failing’ students and offer them corrective work. | >
> | Columbia utilizes education as a disciplinary mechanism instructing students in proper values. The Center for Student Success Intervention (CSSI) described its mission for the Spectator, “Instead of ending with the completion of sanctions, student conduct will proceed with the center’s educational approach and guide students to learn from their experiences.” CSSI
Another discipline apparatus, the Office of Institutional Equity OIE repeatedly references educational goals in its guidelines “A Report concerning allegations of Prohibited Conduct that would typically result in Sanctions no more severe than a warning or reprimand may proceed through Educational Resolution.”This ‘resolution’ is granted on the basis of mere allegations; a supposed alternative to ‘discipline.’ The disciplinary structures diagnose ‘failing’ students and offer them corrective work. | | | | |
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Learning Rules | | | Criticism of these disciplinary procedures emphasize their punitive nature as though in opposition to an educational response. Without minimizing the real differences between forms of punishment, it is important to recognize that discipline is instructive by nature and Columbia’s apparatus explicitly models an educational structure seen throughout campus. The University not only contains disciplinary elements but the education disciplines. | |
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> | Learning Through Discipline | | | | |
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< | Examination as a Disciplinary Power | >
> | Disciplinary hearings, like exams, provide the University essential knowledge. Exams create individualized student metrics, allowing them to be sorted and known personally to the University. Likewise, the disciplinary process, “...transform[s] his pupils into a whole field of knowledge.” Foucault 186. In hearings, students are instructed to name co-conspirators, identify themselves in photographs, reveal past transgressions providing the University the knowledge it needs for its own burden of proof. Forcing students to reveal personal information demonstrates “...the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.” 192 These hearings range from informal chats to mandatory adjudications of formal charges; they all provide the University opportunity to exercise power over individual students through observation. Not only does the University gain literal knowledge, the exercise of interrogation and observation act upon the student as a demonstration of the University’s internal power. | | | | |
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< | The disciplinary procedure mimics many of the unpleasant aspects of education, arbitrary ranking and punishment. Duncan Kennedy's "Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy" describes law school’s function to behaviorally condition students for law firms, “Grading as practiced teaches the inevitability and also the justice of hierarchy, a hierarchy that is at once false and unnecessary.” Duncan 63. Likewise, disciplinary determinations are almost as random as the alleged misconduct violations. Forced appearance at hearings, while not explicitly physical, instructs the student in the University’s power over their body through the divisions of time and the withholding of resources (insurance, housing, education, work). These apparatuses refuse to follow their own rules, denying resolution to students who received disciplinary charges almost a year ago. These are not accidental features of grading or missteps in the adjudication of student disciplinary charges, their mirrored function reveals a mirrored purpose, discipline. Foucault described the technology of exams “observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement,”184 as an essential disciplinary mechanism of individually singling out students and normalizing them through ‘corrective’ discipline. The procedures of the disciplinary offices similarly normalize judgements on students and correct non-normative behavior through the labeling of individual transgressions. The individualizing hierarchy of the exams and the disciplinary process both punishes deviance and teaches appropriate behavior. | | | | |
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< | Learning Through Discipline | >
> | Resistance | | | | |
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< | Disciplinary hearings, like exams, provide the University essential knowledge. Exams create individualized student metrics, allowing them to be sorted and known personally to the University. Likewise, the disciplinary process, “...transform[s] his pupils into a whole field of knowledge.” Foucault 186. In hearings, students are instructed to name co-conspirators, identify themselves in photographs, reveal past transgressions providing the University the knowledge it needs for its own burden of proof. Forcing students to reveal personal information demonstrates “...the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.” 192 These hearings range from informal chats to mandatory adjudications of formal charges; they all provide the University opportunity to exercise power over individual students through observation. Not only does the University gain literal knowledge, the exercise of interrogation and observation act upon the student as a demonstration of the University’s internal power. | >
> | While more obvious repression is a response to the student solidarity movement, there is a long genealogy of the American university’s role in reproducing cultural hegemony. Small resistance to the logic of discipline through refusing to administer exams or calls to protect international students are insufficient because they do not address the base of the problem. | | | | |
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> | The very crisis that brings disciplinary pedagogy to the forefront contains a possibility of a way forward. On May 7th, Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted their call to action, “Over 100 people have just flooded Butler Library and renamed it the Basel Al-Araj Popular University…The Popular University is not only a demand for divestment. It is a living counter-institution, a revolutionary pedagogy in practice, and a declaration that another university—and another world—is already in formation.” The protest highlighted the University’s willingness to brutalize its students and the role of officially designated education as a cudgel to alternative education, “Disrupting academic activities in Butler Library during the reading and final exam period, as alleged, is among the most serious violations that can occur under the Rules.” Spectator | | | Conclusion |
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