Introduction

The future is a scary place for the humanities scholar. Digital technology encroaches, ideas of utility and transference eclipse the call for self-actualization, and recession era politics ask of us the one question that no rhetor is ever comfortable answering: “what, exactly, does your class do for the students?”

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This concern, a material and capitalistic one, is often deflected by the postmodern scholar: “I’m teaching them life skills” our hero may answer. “When they leave my classroom, my students are better able to act as self-actualized, autonomous individuals. I’m empowering them.” This is an earnest defense, and mostly an honest one, but it is belied by the very modalities in which the humanist professor operates.

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The classroom itself is by its very nature hierarchical. As Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Selfe explain, “the traditional hegemony of the teacher-student relationship, supported by the evaluative power of grades and the ideology of the educational institution assures that most of our students respond as we ask them to" (Computer Conferences and Learning, 850). Through the administrative realities of assessment, scheduling, and instruction, all teachers become agents of discipline and surveillance.