Excellence, Dissent, and the Fair and Balanced.

Thanks for the link to the funnier note. The humor of it is interesting given your interest in the Colbert Report: choose Mac or Windows, choose Democrat or Republican. The alliterative genre we might call "parodic propaganda posters" highlights the either/or, the us-and-them, the binaries that are held at arm's length through parody.

Ah, parody. Like the Democrat Daily Show and "Republican" Colbert Report, the "fair and balanced" balancing act that we know from Fox News that really isn't fair and balanced. The Comedy Central parodic critique of fairness and balance. Maybe there is no fairness and balance given that both polarities emerge from the same structure: Fox fairness and balanced is as fair and balanced as Comedy Central's. Or are they?

If Comedy Central foregrounds the polarization in order to undercut ironically the possibility of fairness and balance, does this strategy open a third space that critiques polarization?

As I look at "Chepod," I am reminded of this.

When do we speak most about "excellence"? It doesn't strike me that we talk about it much within our own departments. Where it seems to pop up is when I speak to administrators, alumni, and legislators. I wonder if the concept of excellence only comes up in translation: that is, when there needs to be a universalist category for standards (which, I suppose, are at least partially universalist). We may also find the discourse of "excellence" in award descriptions ("Shashi wins the Pepsi-Cola Prize for Excellence in Scholarship") partly because these terms reify a material process that is contingent and historical rather than transcendent, as terms like "excellence" and suggest. Frank Donoghue compares it to "prestige" in terms of its lack of referent:

[P]restige, is dangerously nonreferential, eerily similar to “excellence,” which Bill Readings critiqued in The University in Ruins. Prestige is a dimension of a college’s public relations rather than its day-­to-­day practices; it is the province of development officers and enrollment
managers, not professors. ("Prestige," Profession 2006 157)

The non-referentiality of these terms and the branding of the knowledge economy may explain why, in one survey, respondents listed Princeton as one of the top ten U. S. law schools even though Princeton has never had a law school (Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The-Winner-Take-All-Society, 149 in Donoghue 157-158). Neither your nor my institution's law school will be able to rank as highly as Princeton's.

I like your formulation that, in terms of knowledge production, we produce dissent. You're right that it nicely dovetails with Bruce's point that tenured faculty are well-paid, professionally "successful" dissenters and that dissent may well be licensed by larger picture (capitalism? imperialism?) in ways about which we must not remain complacent.

In terms of "fair trade," I am reminded of how a Democratic Senator appeared on Lou Dobbs yesterday or the day before talking about protecting American jobs. He talked about securing borders in order to protect from illegal aliens and supported "fair trade" in a critique of NAFTA. He introduced a point by saying, "Some globalization-supporters of free-trade may call me a xenophobic protectionist, but..." I've only heard of "fair trade" as a concept in the supermarket aisle and at hippie open-air markets. Has it gained recently a kind of flexibility that allows it to be used in "securing borders" discourse?