Well said, Tim. The New Yorker article was another good one, at least lending confidence to the author’s review of what happened. I notice, thinking about the production of history, between the NY author’s reading position—she can see all the twists and turns and produce a narrative of twists and turns. Whereas the university cannot but move from one confrontation, or event, to the next and has no capability to render smoothly a deeper history. It’s captive to the next moment of narrative framing. I am queasy about saying author is in stronger narrative mode than the university armed with spokespersons, decision makers, lawyers, hearing examiners, and publicists. Just suggesting the New Yorker style of investigative narrative is very powerful, and perhaps especially privileged.
Yes to all of this. You get at something really intricate here about what institutionality prohibits and makes possible. What it makes possible is a kind of extremely cramped and particular decision space full of particulates and binaries--is this person X as they said or are they Y? That's a question that can be answered because the institution constantly iterates concretized, legalistic descriptions of its own categories that may or may not have anything to do with how the members of an institutional community read or work out their own sociality. (I recall listening to students here who were frustrated and annoyed at a survey but the survey authors explained that they were using US Census categories because they didn't have the authority--or the reason--to iterate categories that couldn't be reported to agencies that monitored the institution.) The university, either in its individual leaders or its whole apparatus, can't follow a human story to human places even though the credential it confers is an important precondition of many human possibilities and even though in its own materials it will often claim credit FOR the human possibilities that began or could be rooted in the education the university provides. You can see many moments like this in this story. For example, I'm sure most of us reading see the moment where Fierceton's aunt tells the university's investigator (and the reporter and the court) that a teenager was storing up her own blood so she could systematically smear it around the house to authenticate a narrative of abuse. That's not completely unthinkable if we're in the widest imaginable space of human psychological disorder--"Munchausen's Syndrome" for example encompasses some of that kind of disturbed behavior--but all of us would need so so so much more evidence before we even entertained that narrative as plausible--the Ocaam's Razor explanation here is that the aunt is the person who is either delusional or spreading deliberate disinformation. But that sort of generalized capacity for thinking through contested stories and contradictory claims takes *starting* from a generalized place. By the time a high-ranking administrator is asking about a student in their administrative capacity, all of that inquiry is already impossible. I don't think that should be the way it is, but it is that way in our current dispensation.
Well said, Tim. The New Yorker article was another good one, at least lending confidence to the author’s review of what happened. I notice, thinking about the production of history, between the NY author’s reading position—she can see all the twists and turns and produce a narrative of twists and turns. Whereas the university cannot but move from one confrontation, or event, to the next and has no capability to render smoothly a deeper history. It’s captive to the next moment of narrative framing. I am queasy about saying author is in stronger narrative mode than the university armed with spokespersons, decision makers, lawyers, hearing examiners, and publicists. Just suggesting the New Yorker style of investigative narrative is very powerful, and perhaps especially privileged.
Yes to all of this. You get at something really intricate here about what institutionality prohibits and makes possible. What it makes possible is a kind of extremely cramped and particular decision space full of particulates and binaries--is this person X as they said or are they Y? That's a question that can be answered because the institution constantly iterates concretized, legalistic descriptions of its own categories that may or may not have anything to do with how the members of an institutional community read or work out their own sociality. (I recall listening to students here who were frustrated and annoyed at a survey but the survey authors explained that they were using US Census categories because they didn't have the authority--or the reason--to iterate categories that couldn't be reported to agencies that monitored the institution.) The university, either in its individual leaders or its whole apparatus, can't follow a human story to human places even though the credential it confers is an important precondition of many human possibilities and even though in its own materials it will often claim credit FOR the human possibilities that began or could be rooted in the education the university provides. You can see many moments like this in this story. For example, I'm sure most of us reading see the moment where Fierceton's aunt tells the university's investigator (and the reporter and the court) that a teenager was storing up her own blood so she could systematically smear it around the house to authenticate a narrative of abuse. That's not completely unthinkable if we're in the widest imaginable space of human psychological disorder--"Munchausen's Syndrome" for example encompasses some of that kind of disturbed behavior--but all of us would need so so so much more evidence before we even entertained that narrative as plausible--the Ocaam's Razor explanation here is that the aunt is the person who is either delusional or spreading deliberate disinformation. But that sort of generalized capacity for thinking through contested stories and contradictory claims takes *starting* from a generalized place. By the time a high-ranking administrator is asking about a student in their administrative capacity, all of that inquiry is already impossible. I don't think that should be the way it is, but it is that way in our current dispensation.