I managed to convince the moving company to cart me from Chicago to Wisconsin where I was to begin a 2-year Visiting Assistant Professorship in the English department at a predominantly white state institution. Tenure-track was possible. I settled in. I still needed to commute by train to teach a summer graduate course back at the university in Chicago.

It was a busy summer. A local church, conducting a drive to collect shoes, needed boxes set up at my new campus; the local shelter serving predominantly Black women was glad to have me as a board member; and soon, the Kenosha hospital would accept knitted preemie-baby blankets from students, faculty, and community members. I imagined other possibilities, working with some of the just over 300 Black students predominantly from Milwaukee. Maybe a few understood that education wasn�t about moving up and away from the community, contrary to higher education�s selling point to students of color�

But, a couple of weeks before the term commences, I�m in this office, behind a closed door. The office I�m assigned to use belongs to a full-time faculty member, who isn�t on sabbatical. He arrives and shoots obscenities at me. I catch a glimpse of the English department staff as I left the office to speak with the dean. But it�s not this business that concerns this man. Nor is he interested in the staffer who told the dean or chair I was confrontational. He never mentioned that he called me honey or baby.

He, the equal opportunity officer, has left the office. I�m not permitted to leave. He�s handed me the phone, and I must speak to this stranger, this psychiatrist because, he said, anyone who left Chicago and came to this campus without a car, anyone who has no assets and no home couldn�t possibly be adjusted. I had to speak to this woman or he, the �Black� man, the equal opportunity officer, the white administration hired to weed out the maladjusted and keep watch over the adjusted, would notify the administration that I wasn�t fit to teach! Or maybe I would just return to Chicago? No. Then I must speak with this woman�

In �The Status Degradation Ceremony: The Phenomenology of Social Control in Higher Education,� [1] John F. Welsh argues that one of the functions of higher education becoming gradually understood, �is its operation as an agent of surveillance, enforcement, discipline, and social control.�

Discipline can be preemptive, writes Welsh, occurring before �any actual deviance or failure has occurred.�

The social function of discipline protects �the structure of the power relations and the proffered propriety of organizational and societal policy,� explains Welsh.

As a result, Welsh writes, the prevailing literature on higher education doesn�t �adequately� address the role of colleges and universities as �agents of social control.� �Pro-administrative bias� in higher education accounts for this outcome, he suggests, because the �tendency is to study higher education from a point of view that is not critical of its basic expectations, structure, and operation.� Consequently, the victimization or targeting of individuals by the �social control apparatuses in higher education,� that is, the function of enforcement and discipline and the �process of resistance to them,� are less understood.

Welsh�s argument is that colleges and universities, far from �absolute havens of social consensus and individual freedom,� operate the �social degradation ceremony� as a means of maintaining social control in higher education, particularly at the level of the individual.

But I�m troubled by a thesis that looks at the individual, as Welsh claims, apart from �the more collective dynamics of class, race, and gender. I know I live in the U.S., and, in the U.S., class and gender and particularly race matter. Welsh�s individual whitens as it erases the prevalent targets of social controls at higher education, particularly in the last 40 years when civil rights laws opened the doors of higher education to more faculty and students of color. Consider Norman Finkelstein�s perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or consider bell hooks� race, gender, and class interests.

Welsh�s examination of the �degradation ceremony,� then, begins with the targeted and disciplined individual but that individual isn�t without racial, gender, and class markers. Specific individuals with racial, gender, and class difference are generally the objects of surveillance and discipline. These individuals are targets because they represent repressed narratives of specific collectives of people which are, in turn, subject to social controls. It�s not just individuals subject to higher educations� degradation ceremonies, but also whole collectives of thought, knowledge, and people.

Higher education mirrors the State in that we experience, to use Professor Henry A. Giroux�s words, the social order of �authoritarianism, especially fascism.� �Anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-socialistic� is the order of the day regardless of who is president of the U.S. This social order, writes Giroux, is characterized by a system of terror directed against perceived enemies of the state, a monopolistic control of the mass media, an expanding prison system, a state monopoly of weapons, political rule by privileged groups and classes, control of the economy by a limited number of people, unbridled corporatism, �the appeal to emotion and myth rather than reason; the glorification of violence on behalf of a national cause; the mobilization and militarization of civil society; [and] an expansionist foreign policy intended to promote national greatness. (�Democracy and Authoritarianism-Politics and the Subversive Imagination,� The Black Commentator)

The individuals representing resistance will be run out of those classrooms at institutions of higher education.

We�re in the long night of adjustment to �surveillance, enforcement, discipline, and social control� and degradation ceremonies. Nothing can be done about it, girl. Save yourself, first!

Well, what�s at stake? What�s the consequence of our failure to do nothing?

On March 12, 2010, that�s 2010, the Texas Board of Education surveillance of the subversive in Texas�s curriculum resulted in a vote to add �balance� to the social studies and history curriculums. Social control is the order of the day! (See also Tolu Olorunda, �Texas Board of Education Writes Hip-Hop out of History,� The Daily Voice). According to board member, Dr. Don McLeroy, �we are adding balance�History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.�

Don�t laugh!

Balancing the social science curriculum will mean putting �a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers� commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light,� (�Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change�). The New York Times article stressed the significance of this vote: Texas is �the largest buyers of textbooks.� �They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world,� said Mary Helen Berlanga, a member of the board, left the meeting Thursday night.

Balancing American history will mean that the history of Brown and Black people will be eliminated if not distorted to favor the world�s minority: Euro-Americans. According to the NYT, students will learn about �the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.�

And the American citizens outraged, the Left standing en masse with the Brown population of Texas? Why should the so-called Right listen to the large Brown population when they have good friends on the Left, sitting back in silence?

The Texas School Board thought enough of Black Americans to ensure that students (particularly Black and Brown students?) learn that the Black Panthers were violent and Dr. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, was for non-violence (while white high school students join their parents in the NRA)!

In economics, students will learn about Milton Friedman and the free market theory. Free-enterprise system will replace the word capitalism. You can bet the students will not learn how rich countries became rich or how poor countries became poor. As Rick Rowen states (The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism), at the universities where mostly neoliberals hold shop, college students in business or economics courses don�t learn the history of the monetary, trade, and industrial policies that create rich and poor countries.

So perhaps the Texas School Board is solidifying a balance between the neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies. In the college and university classroom, I had better speak positively about the free-enterprise system or not speak at all. I had better show the Black Panthers as a violent group or not speak of them at all. I had better lecture on King�s dream and not on his condemnation of American violence around the world. It�s best for me, as a Black woman, not to talk about Red, Black, and Brown people at all unless I speak of our propensity to wallow in poverty and violence.

I have a feeling that other states will follow Texas and balance the K-12 curriculum and the textbooks. Higher education will have as its front line army of Spies watching and pointing out to the administration the maladjusted among the individual faculty and students of color.

If we remember Orwell�s 1984, while we can without being targeted and disciplined, we�ll recall Winston�s encounter with Mrs. Parson�s two children. They were playing what was �not altogether a game.�

The mother, Winston thinks, must be leading a �life of terror.� In another year or two, he adds, the children �would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy.� As members of the Spies, �they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it.�

Degradation ceremonies are out in the open! The budget for war eats way money for education at the colleges and universities across the country. Guess what courses, programs, and faculty are given the ceremonious boot? Student activities honor the degradation ceremonies: nooses and hoods, ghetto parties educate new armies of hatred - and no one is targeting or disciplining these activities.

He called. He�s left the office, I told her.

The little foot soldier with the big title with the big task of policing at the institution�

There�s no one here to convert!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.