The Future of Academic Freedom

The Future of Academic Freedom

Interview with Randall Packer (adjusted by Trebor Scholz)
As part of WebCamTalk1.0
http://www.newmediaeducation.org

Trebor Scholz: Following the 'election' of G.W. Bush in 12/00, academic freedom of speech is under renewed attack. How do you integrate political discourses in new media pedagogy?

Randall Packer: Since September 11, 2001 the dynamics of this society have changed radically. Earlier we talked about the Steve Kurtz case. But there are also instances like that of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. His case led to the attempt of the governor of the state to fire him. If you do not have freedom of expression in academia where do you have it? Are there any spaces left that allow for it? There are artists teaching all over the university system who realize that it is a vital part of education to bring political issues into the classroom. One of these topics is advocacy. Are you trying to persuade students of your political opinion? How do you raise issues without putting students on the spot, without making them feel uncomfortable about their own perspective? How do you engage art students in political discourse as part of a new media curriculum? Two years ago, when the war in Iraq started, I was teaching at the Maryland Institute
of Art (MICA). As part of my "Electronic Media and Culture" course I asked students to go out and watch how the media was covering the war. As a young artist who has never consciously followed a war- should you not pay attention? My particular students were eight years old when the first Gulf War started. But surprisingly, they had no interest to closely follow this war. Throughout the United States there is wide-spread student apathy in relation to politics. Students feel reluctant to engage in conversations about politics with their professors because of a perceived need to conform to their opinion. At the same time these discussions are vital to their development as artists. In my class students compared "Fox News" to CNN, and other print and network-based media. They were asked how the media filters our perspective. We analyzed the manufacturing of popular opinion. Incorporating sound and images, students created daily entries into a personal blog that showed their responses to a particular news event. At the end of the semester students were asked to produce a piece using the material. This was also at the time when the CNN reporter Kevin Sites was fired for keeping a personal blog. One student evaluation for this course on Electronic Media and Culture read: "Why did we have to talk about the war when we could have spent more time learning Flash?" His question sums up the problem.

http://www.zakros.com/mica/emacS03/emacS03.html
http://www.kevinsites.net/
http://www.colorado.edu/EthnicStudies/faculty/w_churchill.html
http://www.caedefensefund.org

TS: I was acutely aware of Lynne Cheney's initiative that asked students to report their professors if they speak out against the war. Sustainable networks can counter these efforts to isolate and intimidate those who speak out.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i 021125&c=1&s=mcneil

RP: Right, but what do you? Do not you feel an obligation to engage students about these issues?

TS: I would relate the activity of teaching in part to the semantic root of the word professor- to "proclaim." I did have critical discussions about the war with students but I had friends who did not commit to directing public discourse in that direction because it would have an automatic, expected response. They assumed that a reduction of all debate centering around war leads to an atmosphere of distraction that sets the stage for cuts of medical benefits, for example.

An earlier example of the use of a situation of widespread focus on one conflict was the case of four NYPD officers who tortured the Haitian immigrant Abner Luoima with a broom stick while screaming racist epithets. This happened in 1997 and all four officers were convicted. On February 2002, only months after the attacks on the World Trade Center three of the four convictions were overturned. Two officers were set free outright. As the nation's attention focused on other topics, there was little or no protest against there release.

http://www.molodiez.org/right2fight/slc_article.html
http://right2fight.org

But in the classroom I start with the politics of technologies in the every day. Which interactivist technologies were used on the streets of the Republican Convention? What is represented when technologized images stand in for war, for a situation of trauma and suffering? How can we link more and more pervasive methods of surveillance to the politics of the database? We look at the history of cooperative media from Indymedia in Seattle (1999) to today's social software.

RP: Currently, I am teaching at American University in Washington, DC. This is a very politicized university but I am not having students work on political projects just yet. I do eventually plan on introducing a course I taught at Johns Hopkins University a few years ago, which offered students a history of activism in the arts, entitled "Art, Politics, and New Media:"

http://www.zakros.com/jhu/apmSu03/apmSu03.html

I need to re-think the way I am integrating political discourse in new media classes. Everything you teach students is political. Not talking about the Bush regime makes you complicit.

TS: Our actions are political in their consequences– not addressing the context in which we function does not mean we are mysteriously outside of it. Art and technology curriculum in the U.S. is more often than not focused on technological innovation. Student exhibitions often feature work that conveys a lack of urgency or human experience while it is focused on often decorative, technological play.

RP: It is critical that student artists are aware of their role as critics of the relationship between individual and society. Art is no longer just about what Marcel Duchamp referred to as retinal art. It is not simply about the materials we use. The classroom is a laboratory for artists to develop strategies. It is about discourse, which gives us a context for the way we make art. Without that we are just empty eyes gazing at the environment. Moving to Washington was a transformational experience for me. My work became more intentionally political. You cannot be an artist in this city without being impacted by the fact that you are in what many think of as the "power center of the world." It is ironical though that the Washington arts scene is as apolitical as you can get. In Washington your daily life is made up of the inauguration ceremony, the White House, the Mall, and the monuments. Washington is like a stage set for America. Here, people from all over the world come to experience "the American moment." As a performance artist I was struck by the spectacular image, which the city projects. At the same time, I noted most clearly that the United States government is as far from embracing the arts as any country could possibly be. In Europe you have ministries of culture with serious support for the arts. Occasionally you even have an artist who is minister of culture. Vaclav Havel became president in the Czech Republic. We have a president in the United States who is quite artistic but that is another story… I looked around me and realized that this country really needs a platform for culture, a ministry. Shortly after Bush took office I e-mailed him and proposed the idea of a Department of Art and Technology. I felt that you could not really think about the role of the artist without also including technology. Like anybody who writes to the White House I received an auto-reply saying something like: "Thank you very much for expressing your views. Your opinion is important to us. We take every ema!
il very
seriously here at the White House. We wish you the best of luck." So, I created the Department. The US Department for Art and Technology has a website and there was a swearing-in ceremony in Baltimore. In 2002 I gave a speech at the opening of Transmediale in Berlin. The Transmediale director Andreas Broeckman played it straight following a somewhat playful approach. He issued press releases stating a line-up of European and American officials who would be speaking. One of them was the Minister of Culture of the United States of America. Many of the journalists did not even question that. When I delivered the speech I was sandwiched in between real government officials. My performative speech consisted of re-mixes from real political speeches combined with texts from German Dada artists. Most people in the audience realized that it was a performance by the time it concluded. I could not help but end with "Ich bin ein Berliner… Kunstler." One of the German media critics was absolutely baffled that the United States Government had sent a government official posing as an artist, the perfect ironic reversal.

http://www.usdat.us/archives/ (Archive)
http://www.usdat.us/secretary (Current)

Students in this country are so horrified to think about politics because they are accustomed to the model of the artist who creates art and the politician who deal with just that,– politics. And the two do not mix. The model of the artist that is projected to young people in this country does not connect to the larger social body. They are taught that artists work on the fringes of society. What they are doing is not really that important to the national dialogue, to the shaping of national identity. This, of course, is very different in Europe where artists are seen as contributors to culture. In the United States that is not at all the case. American students have no context for this model of the artist. It confuses them if they are coming into the classroom and are taught to contribute, to use their perspective as an artist to critique the world around them.

TS: In East Europe the artist was taken seriously, even feared. The smallest gesture was taken as a possible signifier of deviance. Artists retreated into inner exile or developed a coded language that enabled them to communicate to the few who could read it. In the auto-perforation performances of the 1980s in East Germany, for example, the body became a platform of expression that was out of the reach of the state, similar to much of recent Chinese performance.

RP: Related to your earlier reference about the Lynne Cheney/ Joe Lieberman report, there is an anti-Arab propagandist who runs a campus watch list. On his website he posts the "academic of the month" quoting academics who have spoken out against the government. He provides their e-mail address, affiliation, phone number, etc. There is a McCarthyist feature on this site called "Keep us informed," encouraging students to report their professors. This is not about dialogue but it aims at exposure and intimidation of those who hold critical views.

http://www.campus-watch.org/

TS: Here at the State University of New York a group of faculty and students currently organizes a teach-in on the case of our colleague Steve Kurtz. The teach-in and party that will follow (with DJSpooky and others) are meant to inform students about the case.

http://criticaldefensefund.org

RP: I could imagine that many students who engage in practices such as Steve's are discouraged because they must think that if they work with tactical media then they will be arrested, just like Steve Kurtz. Let me end with a quote by the Columbia University Law School Dean David M. Schizer who said

"Yet along with academic freedom comes academic responsibility. We are scholars, not advocates. . . . The classroom is sacred space. The duty of a teacher is to seek truth, not to disseminate propaganda. In training the world's future leaders, and in grappling with the world's hardest problems, our society needs academic freedom more than ever. We need honest, balanced, and collegial conversations - especially about controversial subjects. . . Hamilton's legacy must be preserved."

I find this statement full of contradictions. How can you teach and not advocate? How can you differentiate between truth and propaganda? How can we engage in meaningful discourse without expressing a point of view? How could anyone be so pure as to teach issues without any personal perspective? Should we not involve students in the multiplicity of opinion shaping? How do we preserve academic freedom?

About:
Randall Packer is internationally recognized as a pioneering artist, composer, educator, and scholar in the field of multimedia. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world including Europe, Asia, and North America. He is Assistant Professor of Multimedia at
American University in Washington, DC. His book and accompanying Web site, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (W.W. Norton 2001 / www.artmuseum.net), has been adopted internationally as one of the leading educational texts in the field. Packer is concerned with the aesthetic, philosophical, and socio-cultural impact of new media in an increasingly technological society. Since moving to Washington, DC in 2000, his work has explored the critique of the role of the artist in society and politics. He founded the virtual government agency US Department of Art and Technology (www.usdat.us) in 2001, which proposes and supports the idealized definition of the artist as one whose reflections, ideas, aesthetics, sensibilities, and abilities can have significant and transformative impact on the world stage. Website: www.zakros.com