i agree with most of your points. maybe one or two exceptions. i don't think my students know who is tenured and who is not, and in many cases even what tenure is. funnily enough. the grad students are a totally different set, of course, being closer to colleagues than students since they themselves also teach and come to regard themselves as junior teachers in the dept. and they are not manipulative. but boy you are right that students can be manipulative, especially emotionally.
and you are right about the authority issue; after 2 years in cameroon, with students who were completely polite and often overly deferential, it was very hard to return to students who were impolite, insouciant, or indifferent.
one has to adjust or leave.
as for abiola, he has been in the states for a very long time. he has made his adjustments to ohio state, where he taught for a long time, before coming to harvard to end his teaching career.
what nigeria now means to him remains to be seen
ken
On 5/23/11 8:51 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
Ken, I have no strong disagreement with your points, as I myself tave an ambivalent attitude towards the evaluation as a process and as a component of how our pedagogy is evaluated by our employers. I didn't mean to dismiss all students or even most as engaging in the type of manipulation that I wrote about. But there are clearly some who do. They know that untenured faculty members need good evaluations and can therefore be manipulated or emotionally blackmailed into granting concessions and doing things that they would not ordinarily do. Conversely, they know not to try those tricks with tenured faculty. Obviously only students who know about the tenure system can use this information for the purposes I outlined. I think many of them may not know or care about tenured/untenured status. I agree that, for all its flaws, one should not simply cast aside the evaluation process but that one should sift through the extremes and locate thoughtful, substantive critique and suggestions. Over the years, and without going into details, I have picked up useful, actionable bits from student evaluations. Not only have some of those bits improved the effectiveness of my instruction, they have made the pedagogical process more enjoyable for my students and I. But one often has to wade through a thick brush of idiosyncratic, cosmetic, irrelevant, trivial, and sometimes personal comments to get to what is usable. Finally, and in defense of Irele, the student evaluation process may be more jarring to African (and other foreign) academics than it is to Americans because of the strong academic authority gap (between students and instructors) in many foreign foreign locales and the lack of the same in the States.
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:51 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
dear moses, gloria--
i have somewhat mixed feelings about these forms. i was there when they first instituted them, and teaching for the test became joined to hi SIRS forms, as they are called, both of which demean teaching. on the other hand, there are teachers who don't care about their students, blame them for the teachers' own weaknesses or failings. i have seen so many cases of teachers who did not heed students' complaints, complaints which even if not totally merited still indicate some problem. and i have seen myself get good and bad responses from students, sometimes for exactly the same course.
so there is variation, and to ascribe it to students' manipulations is to try to dodge whatever it is that sets the students off.
on the other hand, not all students want to do the work assigned; and if the bad grade comes, whether because of their slacking off or incapacities, it is the rare student who won't blame the profs for their grades. and hard for profs to hear the complaints as genuine.
with all respect, i think some of that comes from the statements you've made, taking the students' discontents too much as wily or manipulative.
i do agree that those overly concerned about these sirs forms could be so afraid as to warp their teaching, making it easier than it should be, less demanding with grades or paper assignments. that happens too much, i believe.
i also believe that if we respect our students they often sense it; if we can be open to them, they respond positively, willingly work more. it is a delicate balance, and i am still unconvinced that they will lead to better relations with the students or better classes. abiola's complaints represent only half the story for me.
but i am in a state school, with a mix of good, middling, and poor students, and the inevitably poor students have to accept the truth they don't want to face.... which an honest grade represents.
and it is easy for those getting good grades to believe they earned it, the teacher is a good evaluator, etc.
ken
On 5/23/11 2:48 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:--I agree, Gloria. There is even a conservative group that keeps a list of professors who they say are implacably anti-American. The tenured/non-tenured dynamic should also be factored into how we perceive student evaluation and into the question of whether or not one is free to speak/teach as one pleases without caring about the impact on evaluation. My experience is that tenure-track professors do a lot of things that do not come naturally to them in order not to incur bad evaluations. Some of it is an instinctive reaction conditioned by the anxieties of tenure; others are deliberate acts designed to exorcize bad vibes. If the act increases teaching effectiveness, fine. In that case, both teacher and student win. But often these things only add to the entertainment value of the class for the students, not to the intellectual content. Another experience of mine is that students--at least some of them--know who is tenured and who is not and often use that information to make demands and to emotionally blackmail some of their teachers. Some of them are very good at playing that game. In other words, they know who to mess with and who not to.
Yes, the good, hard working, curious, and respectful students make it all worthwhile. Every time a get a carefully worded "thank you" card from a student after a class it makes up for all the little annoying things.
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 12:42 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu> wrote:
'This is the kind of approach that I hate, that I'm very uncomfortable with in the American system, where the
student is given this feeling that the professor is a servant to them. In the American system, the student is aclient because they pay fees, and you have to satisfy them. It's very bad for learning.' Irele
To add to that critique of the student evaluation system, let us note that the less critical you are of the
American system the higher the assessment you get.
You are supposed to pretend that all is well and that the potential for neo-fascism is non existent.
You are often not judged on your teaching but on your submission to the system.
But there are also numerous wonderful students out there who make the teaching experience
worthwhile.
Dr. Gloria Emeagwali
www.africahistory.net<http://www.africahistory.net/>
www.esnips.com/web/GloriaEmeagwali<http://www.esnips.com/web/GloriaEmeagwali>
emeagwali@ccsu.edu<mailto:emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ayoola Tokunbo [toks_ayoola@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 8:03 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: " Abiola Irele at 75: Why I Returned Home."
By ANOTE AJELUOROU in Sunday Magazine <https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx> - Arts <https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
________________________________
From: toks_ayoola@hotmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: " Abiola Irele at 75: Why I Returned Home."
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 22:22:10 +0000
From: GUARDIAN [NIGERIA] of Sunday 22 May 2011
ABIOLA IRELE AT 75: WHY I RETURNED HOME...
Prof. Abiola Irele ranks as one of the leading literary critics on the African continent. Formerly Professor of French, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, he was for several years Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University. After retiring from Ohio in 2003, he became Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Among his many publications are The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (edited with Simon Gikandi) and two collections of essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. He is a contributing editor to The Norton Anthology of World Literature and General Editor of the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series. Last week Thursday at Ibadan, where he started out as a student and teacher, a colloquium was held in his honour, where ANOTE AJELUOROU sought audience with him on some of the literary theories he has propounded over the years and his appraisal of new writing from Nigeria. Excerpts:
How does the term 'Africanist' relate to you as an African scholar in view of Africa's poor, and indeed, failed attempt at modernity?
I don't call myself an Africanist. The term is usually used of Western scholars, who specialise in African studies. And I'm not in that category. I'm an African involved in African studies as a natural subject. My studies were in English Literature, and so I applied the methods that we were taught to English Literature produced by Africans. That was the pattern that I followed.
I took a degree in English and when Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart appeared, one of the very first articles I wrote was about Chinua Achebe. And I used the terms that we use in treating English Literature; I used those same terms in discussing Achebe's novel. So it was a transfer, shall we say, of methodology from the Western area to the African area. That doesn't really make me an Africanist.
An Africanist means someone who is foreign to the culture and comes to study it; it usually applies to Anthropologists. I don't do Anthropology or anything of the sort; I'm aware of the Anthropology that has been done on Africa, and I've read quite a lot of that. Sometimes I agree with it, sometimes I don't; but I don't do Anthropology as such and I don't do Africanist research. I do African studies; that is how I will like to define myself.
In the theory of alienation of the black man that you propounded, there is the possibility of harmonising the thesis, the antithesis and synthesis. But in reality, this hasn't quite happened from what African societies have turned out to be over the years, has it?
The notion of thesis, antithesis and synthesis was brought up by Prof. Dan Izevbaye at the colloquium on me, and he was trying to describe my struggle, more or less, in the African condition, the African predicament, the cultural contractions in Africa in the colonial context and the way that I went over to Friedrick Hegel, the German philosopher, to more or less look at the concept of alienation and what Hegel called the dialectic – the movement of the mind from thesis, antithesis to synthesis.
Well, for the African intellectual who has been given Western education, you know - that dilemma remains a constant. What is your relationship to the true culture in which you have been brought up? What is your relationship to your African background? In my own case, my African background was rather diverse. My parentage is Edo State; then I grew up basically as a Yoruba-speaking person. And, it's complex already within the Nigerian context. So, I have that problem.
Now, my relationship to what is Western assumes another dimension again. And, as Osofisan (Prof. Femi) said (also at the colloquium), it's an impossible proposition to resolve. That it's impossible to resolve in a definitive way. But it does not mean you do not look at it, analyse it and try and see how to come to terms with it and how to deal with it.
For example, take polygamy. In Europe it is treated as a kind of moral failing if you marry more than one wife. In fact, you will be sent to jail for committing bigamy if you do it. And they take it as a moral issue. For me as an African, I can see their own position in the judicial system, an ethical system in Western context. But they forget that even in Judeo-Christian situation, Abraham and the other prophets had more than one wife. In the African context, it's essentially a sociological and economic issue. I will not marry a second wife; that does not mean I will condemn those who do it. This is a polygamous society.
That's one way, for instance, of looking at it. What I mean is that you bring your own cultural background into play as a viewpoint on an issue, and then you make your own judgment in the light of what you might call the conflict between two ethical systems, two moral systems. That conflict of law was happening throughout the colonial period, and colonial period introduced it. And Christianity was a major influence in introducing that division between the African and Western culture; that dualism of culture. It's an ongoing problem; we'll resolve it little by little. We must discuss it; we must look at it.
I used monogamy because it is no longer the custom. Anybody who has got Western education would usually prefer a monogamous life.
>From Negritude thought to the modern, the African man has come to encounter the problem of alienation. But both the literate and illiterate are now trapped in continuing alienation from their culture. Why is it difficult for African societies to have a seamless integration of both old and modern cultures or even uphold their own?
The thrust of my inaugural lecture was precisely whether it was possible to integrate the two. I set one example there about children in the cities not knowing how to make pots from clay and so on. Well, because our forefather made pots of clay and ate from clay pots doesn't mean that we should continue to eat from clay pots. It's a trivial example but it applies to a whole range of issues. Let me even expand it: Because our forefathers used to trek, does that mean we should not use cars, telephones and so on. The cell phone is a major revolution; the digital revolution is a major revolution. Is it that because we have different means of traditional communication – talking drums, etc – does that mean we shouldn't use computers, internet, etc?
This is the kind of proposition that I'm trying to deal with. In other words, what I mean is this, borrowing from the West need not cause us any anguish. There are problems inherent in the technological civilization itself that we have to deal with. The Japanese are dealing with the quest of Nuclear contamination now and the impact of technology on the environment. These are issues we have to deal with.
We must accept that this is now a different kind of civilization with its own structure, mode of operation and instrumentalities. When you start from that point, then you can see the economic problems, the social problems; these are issues that we have to deal with. Let me also say another thing: I've come very often from Ilorin through Ogbomosho to Ibadan. Those villages on the way are destitute; the people are poor. Their houses are falling down. Those villagers must be rescued from poverty. We must do something about it and not imagine that they are living a happy life in those villages, in those conditions of poverty.
What I'm trying to say is that it is very easy to glamourise the traditional cultures and forget the inconvenience, the hardships even. We must begin very quickly to address those issues and ameliorate, alleviate their lives. Modern agriculture can help but you must be careful how you apply fertilers to prevent hazards. Technology has its problems, too. But we cannot do without it; that is what I'm trying to say. There is no way out. The only way to deal with it, take it and make our own impact on it, contribute to it, and resolve some of these contradictions. That doesn't mean that we won't play our own music; that doesn't mean that we won't speak our own languages; that doesn't mean we will not have our own philosophies, which can contribute to the wisdom of other people.
The tragedy that has befallen African languages would seem to be the height of the alienation issue, and it seems Africa has sold out on itself…
The phrase you used there, 'sold out' is loaded. There's the impression: colonial education, the colonial incursion and so on. In our context, English is introduced, and we created Nigeria, and a certain power of English language to the extent that even children of the elites do not speak the local languages, they do not speak English either. I'm against that! I'm for the use of English in very well-defined contexts; and I'm for the training of our children in indigenous languages so that they can relate to their fellow country people in the languages.
I'm also acutely aware of the power and beauty of our languages. I do not wish our languages to disappear. On the other hand, we need European languages; we need English. There's also the problem of finding a common language for the country for administrative purposes, for education and the uses of a modern civilization. It is the English language that we need for that. But we can develop our own languages, too. But we're not like Israel that revived the Hebrew, which is now unified.
If we try to impose one language over everybody, we're going to have trouble. So, it's a messy situation, yes; but we can work it out in such a way that maybe we find a solution so we teach African languages, and a European language. I will even add that teach the indigenous language of the area, then English and French. I think every African, who is educated should speak three languages – the indigenous, the English and the French; I think that is the minimum.
I don't think that the use of English is inimical to our development. Think of the millions of Chinese people that are rapidly learning English, and we're getting it here almost for free. No; let's not get sentimental here; language is a tool. It has its own value as well, especially in literature, in literary uses; we have very great literature. The oral tradition is very powerful tradition, and we need absolutely to preserve it.
What I'm advocating is that we keep our own languages; we cherish them, we develop and we also keep English and cherish it. That's why I'm worried about children of our elite that do not speak local languages. When you speak to them, they speak English back at you, and many of them speak bad English. This is the tragedy of the situation.
I grew up in Yoruba, and I went to school to learn English. I think it has not disabled anything in me.
YOU were at the heart of the start of a critical tradition in African literature. Could you give us insight into how it was at the time, the mood and how you got involved?
Well, when I finished here (UCI), I went to France, and had to study French and study the French-written literature and I also read African-American literature at the time. I knew I was going to come back to Ibadan to teach. And, when I was invited to write one or two things, and I began to write. One of the first articles I wrote was on the tragic conflict in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. That's how I started; and I kept being invited to come and write, give a talk and so on. Sometimes, I was able to write up my talks; sometimes I wasn't. I have manuscripts half abandoned; those ones that were complete, I published. And, they developed gradually.
I have never really published a complete book itself; that started with my Ph.D thesis. Although I got a good grade in my thesis, I wasn't happy because I did it as Sociology not really as Literature, and it didn't seem to me to have cohered. But I've published two chapters from it already. So, most of my work has been in form of essays; some are short, some are long but with lots of book reviews. I put them together as volume of essays.
Then things developed; I was appointed to Ghana to teach and then Ibadan, and it's been like that ever since. It's been a wonderful life; I've enjoyed, shall we say, the work. I can't think of any other occupation that I could have taken up other than teaching, lecturing, the intellectual, academic life. I can't think of any that I could have been good at.
Amongst some of the best known and earliest Nigerian writers – Soyinka, Achebe, Clark, Okigbo – which of them did you find easy or difficult to deal with at the time?
What was clear when I read Clark, Achebe, Soyinka, was that I'was at ease. The references are familiar, even when those references were European. I mean, J.P. Clark and I were peers here (then University College, Ibadan - UCI) together doing English; and as I read his text, all references, inferences from the English literature and then, of course, references from traditional culture, they were very clear to me. There was no question about that.
But let me make a point here: We keep saying Soyinka, Clark, Achebe over and over again. We need to get passed them to the younger writers. In the area of poetry, there is Niyi Osundare (now, a Distinguished Professor of English at The University of New Orleans), for example. Mention was made that when I started as a publisher at New Horns house, there was Harry Garuba's poetry collection Shadows and Dreams; it was the very first volume I published. My intention at that time was to concentrate on bringing out the younger writers. Also, part of my ambition was to translate from the French into English. And, I did quite a number of things, which were translations from the French into English. Unfortunately, I couldn't continue that business because I left the country, and I couldn't keep it going from abroad.
However, I'm still very anxious to make known the younger writers. Now that I have come back, I'm going to be reading them. I'll possibly be writing reviews in the newspapers, possibly in The Guardian. For example, there is this young woman, Lola Shoneyin; I've got her book The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. I look forward to reading her. There is also Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Adichie; I've read them. There are lots of young poets. So, I want to read them systematically and write essays about them. Ben Okri, too, for instance; I taught Ben Okri's The famished Road at Harvard University over a three-year period. These are ways these young writers can be treated; of course Okri is no longer a young writer in that sense.
And, of course, Nigeria literature is growing. There is a sort of renaissance now. What is being published now is not as much as one would like but it's picking up, and this is very encouraging indeed. So, I think that what you might call a Nigerian culture will be promoted, will rise in strength; it will arise.
One thing I'd like to do at Kwara State University, where I'm a college dean, is to make the place a major centre of intellectual activities using Ibadan as a model. Well, there are several models abroad – Harvard, Yale, Oxford – they have wonderful facilities, a tradition, hundreds of years of university tradition. But we're starting.
You have so much to do from the catalogue of things you'll be interested in. It would seem as if you'll never retire, would you?
I'll continue to work. The last thing I'll see happen to me is when I'm no longer able to read, to write and so on. I want to be able to continue to work. Of course, at 75 you begin to feel the burden of age. The knees, ankle, the back are painful, but I'm still walking around. I still must be able to work.
SOME years back conditions in Nigerian universities forced some of you out. Now, you're back again into the same environment full circle. What could have changed? What is the motivation?
Well, what changed is that I felt I'd done enough over there. But I began to have a sense of 'I don't really ultimately belong over there'. And you know, there are problems as an African, as a black person. I don't want to abuse the American university; they've been very welcoming to us, and they've been very fair. But there's still a strong element, fairly discernable element of racism in the American system, which you encounter in small ways, in big ways, all the time, which made me uncomfortable.
In the bigger universities, it's as if it's a privilege they are doing you. And, sometimes the students doubt whether in fact you're capable; they have not read you; they haven't taken the trouble. I was teaching Aime Cesaire, one of them — a girl — she wanted me to give her the literal meaning of every line in the poem. That's not how to teach literature. A poems works by images, and I was explaining those images. And she kept asking what the lines meant as if it was prose. I couldn't do that.
This girl then said, in the assessment of professors that students do at the end of the year, and she wrote, I knew that it was her (they do it anonymously), that although Irele is a very brilliant man, he can't explain anything to us. She wanted a literal explanation of Aime Cesaire; I'm not going to do that. I did an edition of Cesaire's poems, a commentary. She didn't bother to even read that commentary. They expect you to be their servant; it's incredible. I'm going back to teach in the summer, and one of them who wants to enroll in my course has sent me two emails already asking me what they are expected to do, how many pages do you want us to read, how many books do you want us to read?
This is the kind of approach that I hate, that I'm very uncomfortable with in the American system, where the student is given this feeling that the professor is a servant to them. In the American system, the student is a client because they pay fees, and you have to satisfy them. It's very bad for learning. But let me not exaggerate; I've had some great students, particularly graduate students where you have one-on-one relation. I have some great experience. Although it's not been one-way but there is that aspect where you're not fully comfortable, and I felt let me go back home!
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
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-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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---Mohandas Gandhi
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-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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