Andrew and Catherine: 'Taking' Citizenship in the Academy

by Lucy S. 

This is another essay from my honor's thesis which I always have reasons to think about. 

I'm critical and often skeptical about the role of institutions among us, but if they can be a force for good, they must be humanized continuously. We have to keep reminding ourselves that we've set up these institutions to serve humanity, though it seems that humanity all too often serves the institutions. This humanization was exemplified for me one Friday evening a few years ago at the one year reception for the scholarship in his name. 

Andy was the teaching assistant in a Political Science class, “Democracy and the Other,” I took in the spring of 2006.  In late April, he was hit by an SUV as he jogged on the side of the freeway and died instantly. Our class did not know until we were told of Andy’s death that our professor, Catherine, was his mother.  What are the right words to describe our feelings when we were informed of both his death and of what we now knew was Catherine's most personal loss?  “Shocked and saddened,” I think, but it sounds cliché and inadequate, like a form letter.  “I can’t believe it,” we kept murmuring to each other.  It was a Tuesday.  We had just seen him the previous Thursday in class. 

Like most people, when someone I know dies, I realize that we should have valued the person more; we should have remembered we only have a limited amount of time with one another. Just when we cannot hear from them, we most want to.  A person's fragility, always there but camouflaged by everyday life, becomes painfully obvious – just this small person attempting to make sense of himself, those he knows, our society, and this world in his brief years here.  I look at everyone else around me, vowing to remember all of this, but my determination is overcome by the busyness of life, and soon again I take them too much for granted. 

Andy and I were not close friends, but I often sat next to him in our small class, which meant we were usually in the same discussion groups. Fundamentally decent is the way I described him in another piece I wrote – kind, approachable, treating all people in class conversations with respect. 

Sometimes after class, we talked about how to reconcile democracy for everyone with the fact that most Americans don’t know much about the political and historical realities of the U.S., let alone the rest of the world  This has been an intellectual, political, but also deeply emotional and personal concern of mine. Andy had no easy answers, of course, but as in our class discussions, he listened with interest, commented occasionally, and treated me (and others) in a way that encouraged dialogue. In creating space for relaxed, open discussion, he was a kind of answer to my question.  By being part of important conversations, people grow in their ability to participate democratically.

At the memorial, several people talked about their relationships with Andy.  Steve (his dad) said Andy had struggled with profound depression as part of his bipolar illness.  A graduate student close to him also discussed that depression, linked to Andy's pain over oppression and injustice.  Many aspects of Andy's identity, including some his parents hadn’t known, were shared as people described their experiences with him.  His parents were struck by how many “different Andrews” there were. 

Perhaps that is the limitation of the human condition.  We seek to know and be known, but there are barriers within us and around us which we have to climb or go around all our lives. Maybe some of my frustration at academia is actually frustration at these limitations to connecting.  But maybe carrying these highly varied pieces of the world in him was also Andy's gift, widening his perspective and magnifying his empathy,

That evening, I realized I would not have attended that reception if it were not for the institution.  I would not have known Andy, Catherine, or other people I’ve met since I went to this university.  I would not even have the same tools to critique the institution as well.  This is part of my love/hate relationship with academia.  I love that it brings people together to learn about important issues, to grow and interact with one another.

But the institution also squelches some of the humanity out of those interactions.  The institution – or rather, a multitude of bureaucrats – decides what constitutes a full-time student or teaching schedule. That schedule allows for too little else in our lives. We're thrown together for a semester as students and professors. We talk about things that matter very much, but we're not friends with most of the people because it's all too big and over with too quickly.  At some point, there isn’t enough space or time to fit everyone in. 

Savoring the experience is hard during the semester because I become increasingly overwhelmed by the work, finally wanting semesters to hurry and end.  When they are over, I miss the barely forming little community we'd only begun to create which is now gone. With Andy's death, that burgeoning community was even more poignantly ended.

How do we make our alliances strong and solid, a truer community?  Andy and Catherine were among those who in one sense run the university; Catherine, a non-tenured professor, ran our class; Andy assisted.  That's why I'm so torn when I criticize academia.  Am I criticizing the people who try so hard to humanize and improve it?  What if none of them were there because they felt it would be selling out, and we were left with only technocrats, barren of all ideals?  But Andy and Catherine, along with the rest of us who are students or non-tenured teachers at various levels, are not full 'citizens' of these institutions. This has made it extremely difficult to create the kind of communities we need in our educational spaces.

A book we read and discussed extensively for our class, Bonnie Honig's Democracy and the Foreigner, later helped me recognize that reality as I compared the role of immigrants in the U.S. with those of students and adjuncts.  She begins with this premise:

In the contemporary United States, a variety of American institutions and values, from capitalism to community to family to the consenting liberal individual, are seen to be periodically reinvigorated by the country's newest comers, its idealized citizens: naturalized immigrants.  Again and again, the cure for corruption, withdrawal and alienation is... aliens… All of these uses of foreignness are double-edged, however … Their foreignness is itself a problem for the regimes that seek to benefit from its supplement.  (4, 7)

Immigrants and students are not a perfect parallel; there are similarities and differences in these two kinds of 'alien residents.'  Because of the way education is conceived of and structured, students in K-12 as well as all levels of college are 'foreigners' in these institutions, temporary residents who never gain 'citizenship' because we're just passing through.  The institutions don't belong to us.  Adjuncts likewise function as foreigners with temporary 'work permits;' others have lower tiers of 'citizenship' (clerical workers, janitors, etc.). Then there are those with fuller citizenship rights (tenured faculty, and fullest of all, higher level administration) who participate in decisions which determine how everyone, including the 'foreigners' (who vastly outnumber the 'citizens') will live while we 'reside' in these places. 

Like desired immigrants, these 'foreigners' are collectively sought after for what they can do for the institutions: bring in money (tuition, government funding, etc.), function as a cheap source of labor, reaffirm the worth of specific departments and the institution as a whole, and be held up as representations of fresh promise, possibility, and (generally) youth.  The small layer of full 'citizens' wants the temporary residents to be 'law-abiding' and hard-working, to be 'good foreigners.'  Only so many are let in, especially in competitive universities; many are funneled away by the system. Thus, the 'foreigners' can think of themselves as both lucky and as having earned their place because of their virtue and attributes. But as a class, we never become 'citizens' with full democratic rights under the current systems. As only 'visitors' we have no democratic voice in institutions we temporarily inhabit, even when there five or six years or longer.

           

Although college students are adults, they're controlled and in some ways treated as children (bringing notes to excuse absences), rather than as full and equal participants in a community.  And students, like immigrants, are seen and treated as problems if they don't perfectly conform to this control.  Ideal students are similar to what Honig calls the “supercitizen immigrant … an object of identification.”  Like that idealized immigrant, these students “manage to have it all – work, family, community,and a consensual relationship to a largely nonconsensual democracy.” 

But this meritocratic, sentimentalized image masks the realities for actual immigrants as well as schools' 'foreigners' –  that “work in late modern capitalist economies often demands hours and mobilities that are in tension with family and community commitments.” (78)  Acting as a “supercitizen immigrant” without challenging the undemocratic nature of the community that we, as a class, are not really part of, allows us to be played against our fellow 'foreigners' in the usual capitalist competitive individualism rather than working in solidarity to create 'citizenship' for all.

If we are ever to have a more genuinely democratic society, we must, as immigrants have repeatedly done, “make room for [our]selves by staging nonexistent rights,” though they are “illegitimate demands made by people with no standing to make them.” Drawing on Jacques Ranciere's Dis-agreement, Honig says they “mime the speech acts of their would-be superiors” and have “historically…banded together to take or redistribute power” (100-101).  As 'foreigners' who push democratization further, we can recreate the notion of who citizenship belongs to (as other foreigners have done), and make these institutions serve us, the teachers and students who are the fundamental reason for their existence.  Catherine returned to talk with our class – a brave, strong, graceful act – despite the university counseling service's fear that she might 'use' us for therapeutic purposes or behave 'unprofessionally.' She claimed her right as a member of that community to reconnect and say goodbye. 

In the months and years since then, my family and I have come to know Catherine and Andy's dad, Steve better.  Once, we discussed whether I had sounded crazy trying to explain to another professor why it upset me to sit in a nice, calm, clean class after talking by phone to loved ones in acute pain, knowing how they are kept separate from 'this.'  Later, I had realized I can't just say these things without laying out the connections more clearly.  Anyone could say, "Let me get this straight – you're upset with this institution because your loved one who lives in California, whom we've never met, uses drugs and has serious problems? Why is that someone's fault here?" And it's true; it sounds crazy when put that way. But I know that the people who run things in this country have all come out of these institutions, and continue to uphold or create policies and laws that are devastating to the people kept out of these institutions. Steve asked if I realized that these are the issues that most concerned Andrew, the question of academia's place in society. 

   
These institutions have the capacity to be dramatically different, to help people make meaning and connect with one another, but too often, they function in ways that alienate. Too many of us here walk around in our own private pain, doing academic work that begins to not make sense and even hurts us when disconnected from the rest of our lives.  For those who care deeply about what we learn and do in these places, our sense of personal worth becomes bound up with our work (as students or teachers), so it is devastating if we feel somehow inadequate in that work.

I have no simple answer to this, but I believe that, as Catherine did when she came back to our class to reconnect, we have to find our own ways to resist that dehumanization. We need to create that better kind of community, which cares for the well-being of all of its members, with the goal that no one feels or is treated like an alienated 'other.' Our dialogues with each other, as enacted by Andy and Catherine, are a way of 'taking' our 'citizenship' and re-forming the institution as democratic space.  I wish Andy was still in this space with us.