A case study to ponder
Imagine a university where the quirky love of chickens was part of the curriculum. Consider Pitzer, in California, and its president, Laura Trombley.
Although I have written on Virginia Woolf, while her focus is Mark Twain, we share a hermeneutics.
Not of the hermeneutics of suspicion (though we both suspect our object of concern is everywhere), nor the hermeneutics of faith (though we are definitely believers in our object's revelatory powers), nor even the hermeneutics of the subject (although we're both clearly prone to muddle the featherless bipeds of Plato and Diogenes).
No, we share the hermeneutics of chicken poop. We've learned from Latour, moreover, and we know it's not a case of fact. Of course chicken poop exists: on our shoes and boots, on our walkways, and definitely on the occasional egg that we bring in from the nest in the evening. No, for us, the hermeneutics of chicken poop is one of concern. What can it teach us, how do we learn it, from whom do we learn it, what is the importance of what we learn, and most of all why should we be open to learning it?
Take Laura Trombley's case study in the hermeneutics of chicken poop. Pitzer has a chicken coop, near its organic garden, behind the student center. Let's stop here to savor the wisdom in this: chickens to fertilize the organic garden, organic garden to feed the students (body and mind), students to feed the chickens and in turn to feed themselves (mind and heart). A visiting student (the messenger of wisdom from afar) emails President Trombley to tell her: Your chicken is sick. Can Scripps students know what Pitzer students do not? President Trombley swings into action, and consults an expert--their resident 'chicken whisperer,' who reassures the President, and she in turn reassures the student, that it's a simple case of dropping feathers. (Diogenes' chicken approximating Plato's man?)
The Scripps student challenges President Trombley, who is after all not her President. And she marshals facts to support of her case: two photographs taken at the scene of the coop, showing the runny butt of one chicken and the clean control butt of another hen. The hermeneutics of poop can now be employed, and President Trombley does so, at the staggering cost of one hundred dollars to "get the chicken fixed."
I draw two conclusions from this lovely story. Take it as a case study in knowledge production. It teaches us a number of things worthy of our concern: listen to outsiders, don't always trust experts, and above all don't assume that colleges (and college presidents) are above dealing with things as messy, runny, and hard to define as chicken poop.
Then take it as a case study in the gendered production of knowledge. Note that the president and her outside informant are both women, women who trust each other and trust the evidence right in front of their eyes, even when it contradicts expert opinion. The president even trusts her mother not to embarrass her when she comes for campus visits. Instead, she welcomes her mother, even letting her see her office and her computer, where those two photographs of chicken butts are displayed.
President Trombley clearly feels no contradiction between her little girl past and her presidential present. And why should she? She's comfortable with this foray into the hermeneutics of poop. As she tells her mother:"It's all part of being a college president."
Now if we can only get other college and university presidents to the same level of understanding. Just as studying chicken poop is part of being a college president, so studying chickens, and organic gardens, and the messy uncategorizable knowledges and practices tying them together, should be part of being a college student. Okay, a quirky one.
Showing posts with label administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label administration. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
STS and chickens
In today's Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeanine Carr writes about how her experiences raising Rhode Island Red hens persuaded her to leave the role of Department Chair to enjoy the slower pleasures of faculty life. http://chronicle.com/article/From-Department-Head-to/125431/
I've just spent five years writing a book on chickens while being a full time faculty member. My book is due out from Rutgers Press this month, and I'm feeling nostalgic for those years in which I shared many of the experiences Jeanine writes about: the pleasures of sitting with the chickens in the morning sun, the challenge of an egg-bound hen, the novice's notion that you have to put the birds back in the hen house at night. (Mine were free to go wherever they wanted during the day--on the lawn, in the fields, in the woods--but after the first night when I tried to shoo them into the henhouse at dusk wielding a broom, I soon learned that they came home all by themselves, lining up in their preferred order on the roosts.) In fact, I enjoyed sitting home with my birds so much, I was really reluctant to step in as the Acting Director of our STS Program. I'd already done administration--been Associate Provost at another university--and was sure I would hate every moment of my return to "the dark side." Instead, I have discovered that I am thoroughly enjoying this brief stint back in the administrative trenches, for much the same set of reasons that I hugely enjoyed writing my book on chickens. Our STS program includes a collection of young faculty members whose interests are as varied as the plumage of my birds: disability studies, food security, sustainable agriculture, embryology, bioethics, Alzheimer's and other cognitive dementias, the history of military technology, climate change, and more. They are united by their conviction that the relationship between science, technology, medicine and society matters, that it shapes our human societies just as we, in turn, have shaped the tools and technologies that conform us as users. These diverse commitments and engagements were also (I am now realizing) what drew me to writing my book on chickens, which I organized as an ABC book so that in each chapter I could explore another aspect of the scientific and cultural interrelationships between human beings and chickens. From Augury, Biology and Culture, to Gender, Hybridity, and Inauguration, I used my focus on chickens to draw me out into the world. And that's just what I am enjoying now about this brief year of directing our STS Program: the engagement with the world in all its complexities that the program's faculty and students share.
So thanks to Jeanine Carr for suggesting another way that chickens help put life--administrative life, this time--in perspective.
I've just spent five years writing a book on chickens while being a full time faculty member. My book is due out from Rutgers Press this month, and I'm feeling nostalgic for those years in which I shared many of the experiences Jeanine writes about: the pleasures of sitting with the chickens in the morning sun, the challenge of an egg-bound hen, the novice's notion that you have to put the birds back in the hen house at night. (Mine were free to go wherever they wanted during the day--on the lawn, in the fields, in the woods--but after the first night when I tried to shoo them into the henhouse at dusk wielding a broom, I soon learned that they came home all by themselves, lining up in their preferred order on the roosts.) In fact, I enjoyed sitting home with my birds so much, I was really reluctant to step in as the Acting Director of our STS Program. I'd already done administration--been Associate Provost at another university--and was sure I would hate every moment of my return to "the dark side." Instead, I have discovered that I am thoroughly enjoying this brief stint back in the administrative trenches, for much the same set of reasons that I hugely enjoyed writing my book on chickens. Our STS program includes a collection of young faculty members whose interests are as varied as the plumage of my birds: disability studies, food security, sustainable agriculture, embryology, bioethics, Alzheimer's and other cognitive dementias, the history of military technology, climate change, and more. They are united by their conviction that the relationship between science, technology, medicine and society matters, that it shapes our human societies just as we, in turn, have shaped the tools and technologies that conform us as users. These diverse commitments and engagements were also (I am now realizing) what drew me to writing my book on chickens, which I organized as an ABC book so that in each chapter I could explore another aspect of the scientific and cultural interrelationships between human beings and chickens. From Augury, Biology and Culture, to Gender, Hybridity, and Inauguration, I used my focus on chickens to draw me out into the world. And that's just what I am enjoying now about this brief year of directing our STS Program: the engagement with the world in all its complexities that the program's faculty and students share.
So thanks to Jeanine Carr for suggesting another way that chickens help put life--administrative life, this time--in perspective.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)