Having attending the new faculty orientation for the American University of Beirut, I can now say something about the structure of higher education at AUB. Like higher education in the United States, AUB is shaped by the mandates of neoliberalism. This is partly because AUB is accreddited in the United States and must fulfill the requirements of U.S. educational consortiums (the Middle State's Association) in order to continue being accredited. The mandates of accreditation are that learning be quantified and the labor of teaching be converted into statistical measurements and "outcomes." Thus, at AUB, as in the United States, higher education is partitioned into quatifiable tasks with measurable statistical results.
AUB has a center for teaching effectiveness that encourages faculty to write clear learning objectives (termed, internationally, as "Student Learning Outcomes" or "SLO's") and to have measurable assessment "tools" such as an exam. Individual class assessments get collated across the University so that AUB can ultimately demonstrate to its accreditors that students have learned X amount as shown in their outcomes assessment.
These assessment requirements turn the qualitative nature of humanist thinking and learning into something that can be quantified. Education moves away from personal enlightement and critical inquiry, into a measurable substance. Students are rendered as vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge until that knowledge reaches the vessel's "red-line" and we can say that student is "full." In the U.S., the rush to quantify education has been extended to increased quatificaiton and suveilance of faculty workloads and "productivity." Texas A&M, for example, has assigned a "productivity index" to each faculty member. Presumably, there are a team of administrators working, like sound technicians to establish the most productive mix of faculty productivity ("a bit more finance and accounting education. . . ease off on the ethnic studies and literature. . . more athletics . . .")
In other ways, however, AUB is very different in structure than U.S. higher education. Whereas public higher education in the U.S. is now dominated by the rush to hire vice presidents and other adminstrators who can manage all of the new "data" within higher ed., at AUB the leadership of the University is largely comprised of people who maintain their scholarly commitments to teach and research. Moreover, there is a very small leadership team (although it is slowly growing). This means that faculty are close to their Dean and Provost, without a layer of dean-lets and VP's to mediate. I'm told that the University of California system has one administrator for every ladder-rank faculty member; this certainly is not the case at AUB.
Another distinct feature of AUB (compared to the public higher ed. system's I know in the U.S.) are that faculty are still in control of decision making at the University. Faculty senate, I'm told, is powerful at AUB -- sometimes dominated by the factions that shape Lebanese society -- and shared governance is treated not as a concession to disgruntled faculty, but as the norm.
I am still regularly asked why I would come to the Middle East to teach and study American Studies. I find this a curious question (especially at AUB, which is an institution founded by U.S. protestant missionaries). Would anyone doubt the usefulness of getting a degree in Middle East Studies in the U.S.? Do we doubt the scholarly enterprise of area studies in the U.S.? Of course not; in fact, the U.S.-based area studies scholar is accorded privileged status within her field. The point is that we assume the exceptionalism of the United States when we treat American Studies as something that can only be understood IN the U.S. A more critical approach, in my view, would be to undermine this exceptionalism by treating American Studies as an area study; and to view "America" not as the U.S., but as an imaginary that is sometimes linked to the U.S. nation/state, but sometimes is detached.
Okay, enough about higher education. Boys still doing well. Tae Kwon Do begins regularly this weekend. Dogs: recovering from their humiliating hair cuts, enjoying taunting cats. Kelly: enjoying time away from a job, very busy nevertheless. Next adventure: public transportation to kids soccer classes and car rental to travel to the Bekaa in two weeks.
