.....EXTRACT FROM A JOB SPECIFICATION FOR AN UNSPECIFIED MID-WESTERN USA ARTS FACULTY
ADVERTISING FOR YET ANOTHER TENURED INCONSEQUENTIALITY.
".......aimed at the individual level must pay attention to the professional as well as personal needs of faculty, and must consider both the stage of faculty members’ careers as well as the stage of their lives. This multi-prong, multilevel approach should be coordinated and integrated to assure that new initiatives on the same or across levels synergistically and strategically work together to further faculty development and retention. And in particular, faculty development strategies should be in alignment with the institution’s strategic goals and faculty tenure and promotion criteria so that individual career development simultaneously enhances the institution and rewards faculty.
Below five broad goals are listed that reflect and pertain to different levels of the institution, moving from the macro toward the micro level:
Goal 1. Create supportive institutional structures and policies
Goal 2. Revitalize the Center for Teaching
Goal 3. Develop a mentoring program
Goal 4. Enhance the quality of life for faculty on and off campus
Goal 5. Increase support for faculty scholarship.
All five goals are important and warrant the attention and resources of the institution. Several specific objectives have been identified for each goal.
At no point whatsoever, is there even the briefest description of what this chair is supposed to be teaching. I think the safe assunption is that it really doesn't matter, and actually no one cares.
More self-interested examples of the bland leading the blind..............
5 Oct 2008
REGARDING AUDIENCES - ON THE dysFUNCTIONS OF PUNDITRY
Interesting and quite instructive that issue seems to be taken with a supposed lack of a focus in different approaches to the critical language developing around Dancefilm.
The prime aim of discourse is merely to be effective in motivating open discussion, rather than engendering partisan debate. In a truly Socratic tradition, argument needs be seen just like any other creative standpoint or artistic manifestation and remain entirely neutral. An engagement of points of view rather than didactical position statements.
The particular set of ideas around which so much syndicated outrage seems to be engendered is that of actually identifying the languages in which it might be agreed, effectively to engage with audiences - an aim as important, as vital and as central to the development of presentational artistic practice as are the initial imperatives driving the creative impulse per se.
It is the very presence of an ongoing pressure to conform to a particular and current zeitgeist, or indeed the arrogance of those who presume that their view on what constitutes something as ineffable, moveable and unfixed as a "zeitgeist", which allows so much slippage of intention, meaning and qualitative rigour in the creative endeavours of the world.
A pundit, be they veritably and academically gold-braided more gaudily than a Marx Brothers general, can and will never be in any position whereby they might require another individual or group to regard any point of view as erroneous, any more authoritatively than they are empowered to order the sun to shine on a prescribed hour or day.
The abrogative assumptions which are now a permissable sine-que-non of pseudo-academic authoritarian behaviour, so prevalent among Pedagocracies, ourageously assumes an automatic right to give permissions, like so many papal dispensations, to abjure quality measurement of, with or by "their" students.
This ivy clad, ivory-towered, boiler-plated attitude, prevails towards a veritably pathological demotion of craft-skills to the status of petty bourgeois affectation, at best and entirely irrelevant at worst.
In so doing, it ensures the fertilisation, legitimisation and perpetuation of the feudalistic anachronisms of tenured vested interest on the one hand and the elevation of mediocrity on the other.
All of this, with an added cordon securite which protects them from ever having to properly square-up to the struggle, knock-backs and the bloodied tooth and claw of Darwinian survival, which the making of art in the real world, brings as its natural inheritance.
The creative world is as much one in which strength, fitness, talent and superiority should be as entirely independent of environmental concerns or personal predilection as it must be on the Olympic running track or the Bear-pit of the Commodities Exchanges.
It is absolutely incumbent upon the artist, primarily to strive for unattainable levels of executable excellence. Once approaching the necessary and inevitable humility which accompanies hard-won glimpses of genuine competence, the artist perhaps then might qualify for the approximation of "a voice". With this voice the next goal would be a tenuous grasp on that which might be worth saying in terms of relevance to anyone outside the otherwise inevitable cozy coterie of sisters, aunties, cousins, teachers and funding bodies.
The moment there exists any pontification on the role of the artist, be it in the finest, elegant and most resounding of prosidies, in the fine tradition of a finger trying to point at its own end, the inherently corrupt position of the pedagogue will inevitably be incapable of understanding that it must, by its very existence, be standing in its own light, and worse, the light of those around it.
It is at just such moments that the pundits weigh in with vaccuous, oelaginous and entirely inappropriate personality garlands, such as "seminal", "luminary" and the ubiquitous "influential".
Unless the views held be that of another artist in its own right and on equal terms, they can only ever be merely those of a critic, of whom John Updike so aptly opined, they are... "...as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea".
We need no more critics for criticism's sake. We need consensus on what constitutes quality and appropriateness of execution. We needs examine creative output in a common light-temperature of competency and fitness of purpose. Only having agreed the medium can one effectively begin to carve out the message.
The rest is babel.
At this point we have left, a sensible option.
We admit we are all merely consumers, well informed as we may be, and turn our available, useful time and attention to our fellow audience members.
The real challenge is in finding ways to apply necessary disciplines inherent in developing honest, coherent, respectful and preferably unmediated dialogue between audiences and the creative forces focused upon them by the artists who purportedly, are there to serve them.
If not the audience, then whom do they serve?
Surely not themselves and most assuredly not the egos of their teachers?
The prime aim of discourse is merely to be effective in motivating open discussion, rather than engendering partisan debate. In a truly Socratic tradition, argument needs be seen just like any other creative standpoint or artistic manifestation and remain entirely neutral. An engagement of points of view rather than didactical position statements.
The particular set of ideas around which so much syndicated outrage seems to be engendered is that of actually identifying the languages in which it might be agreed, effectively to engage with audiences - an aim as important, as vital and as central to the development of presentational artistic practice as are the initial imperatives driving the creative impulse per se.
It is the very presence of an ongoing pressure to conform to a particular and current zeitgeist, or indeed the arrogance of those who presume that their view on what constitutes something as ineffable, moveable and unfixed as a "zeitgeist", which allows so much slippage of intention, meaning and qualitative rigour in the creative endeavours of the world.
A pundit, be they veritably and academically gold-braided more gaudily than a Marx Brothers general, can and will never be in any position whereby they might require another individual or group to regard any point of view as erroneous, any more authoritatively than they are empowered to order the sun to shine on a prescribed hour or day.
The abrogative assumptions which are now a permissable sine-que-non of pseudo-academic authoritarian behaviour, so prevalent among Pedagocracies, ourageously assumes an automatic right to give permissions, like so many papal dispensations, to abjure quality measurement of, with or by "their" students.
This ivy clad, ivory-towered, boiler-plated attitude, prevails towards a veritably pathological demotion of craft-skills to the status of petty bourgeois affectation, at best and entirely irrelevant at worst.
In so doing, it ensures the fertilisation, legitimisation and perpetuation of the feudalistic anachronisms of tenured vested interest on the one hand and the elevation of mediocrity on the other.
All of this, with an added cordon securite which protects them from ever having to properly square-up to the struggle, knock-backs and the bloodied tooth and claw of Darwinian survival, which the making of art in the real world, brings as its natural inheritance.
The creative world is as much one in which strength, fitness, talent and superiority should be as entirely independent of environmental concerns or personal predilection as it must be on the Olympic running track or the Bear-pit of the Commodities Exchanges.
It is absolutely incumbent upon the artist, primarily to strive for unattainable levels of executable excellence. Once approaching the necessary and inevitable humility which accompanies hard-won glimpses of genuine competence, the artist perhaps then might qualify for the approximation of "a voice". With this voice the next goal would be a tenuous grasp on that which might be worth saying in terms of relevance to anyone outside the otherwise inevitable cozy coterie of sisters, aunties, cousins, teachers and funding bodies.
The moment there exists any pontification on the role of the artist, be it in the finest, elegant and most resounding of prosidies, in the fine tradition of a finger trying to point at its own end, the inherently corrupt position of the pedagogue will inevitably be incapable of understanding that it must, by its very existence, be standing in its own light, and worse, the light of those around it.
It is at just such moments that the pundits weigh in with vaccuous, oelaginous and entirely inappropriate personality garlands, such as "seminal", "luminary" and the ubiquitous "influential".
Unless the views held be that of another artist in its own right and on equal terms, they can only ever be merely those of a critic, of whom John Updike so aptly opined, they are... "...as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea".
We need no more critics for criticism's sake. We need consensus on what constitutes quality and appropriateness of execution. We needs examine creative output in a common light-temperature of competency and fitness of purpose. Only having agreed the medium can one effectively begin to carve out the message.
The rest is babel.
At this point we have left, a sensible option.
We admit we are all merely consumers, well informed as we may be, and turn our available, useful time and attention to our fellow audience members.
The real challenge is in finding ways to apply necessary disciplines inherent in developing honest, coherent, respectful and preferably unmediated dialogue between audiences and the creative forces focused upon them by the artists who purportedly, are there to serve them.
If not the audience, then whom do they serve?
Surely not themselves and most assuredly not the egos of their teachers?
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