The Binary Ties that Bind

THIS LIST of binary oppositions is familiar to most of us in higher education, from liberal arts deans to career services staff assisting students with résumé writing to part-time instructors engaged in vocational training. We make these distinctions in institutional deliberations and in hallway chatter. Some of these binary distinctions have a long lineage; the “pure–applied” distinction goes back to classical Greece. And some emerge on the current occupational landscape and thus directly affect our students—for example, the distinction between the “neck-up” knowledge economy and old “neck-down” industrial work. But collectively, they constitute a vocabulary of human activity, one of the ways— and a consequential one—that educators categorize courses and programs of study, the work faculty do or students are preparing to do, or the differential status afforded in many institutions to research versus teaching or to academic pursuits versus student affairs.

Like all dichotomies, these enable us to make quick distinctions. They're a conceptual shorthand for wrapping our minds around things, making a point in the flow of conversation, and moving on. But like all dichotomies, they also reduce complexity, seduce our understanding, and cut off deeper, more nuanced analysis.

And that's why we need to seriously rethink them.

I recently completed a study of the thought it takes to do blue-collar and service work—work that pundits label old-economy, neck-down labor—and the study left me with a heightened respect for the cognitive content of such work: the knowledge base, the processing of information, the problem solving and judgment, the aesthetics and deliberation involved. There was the carpenter reflecting on the structural problems that might emerge in building a staircase; the hairstylist confronting a botched procedure, trying to imagine what the previous stylist was trying to achieve in order to avoid a similar outcome; the plumber feeling behind a wall for what he couldn't see, visualizing the structures, thinking through the pros and cons of one kind of repair over another.

The study soon got me wondering about the narrow ways in which we define intelligence; for all the work of researchers like Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg, we still tend to associate intelligence with traditional verbal and quantitative tasks of the kind found in the schoolhouse and on an IQ test. And the study certainly got me thinking about social class and occupational status and bias, the assumptions we make about peoples' mental capacity based on the work they do. There was, as well, the topical and contentious issue of the way modern work is organized: the degree to which the structure of work enhances or impedes the ability of workers (blue-collar or white-collar) to use and develop their intelligence.

But the study also took me to the heart of the binary oppositions at the top of this essay, to their fundamental flaw, in a way that, I think, has implications for those of us who educate in K–12 or college and beyond.

AS ANY READER of About Campus knows, binary oppositions contribute to the definitions of institutional types—the trade school versus the liberal arts college, for example. They help define disciplines and subdisciplines and the status differentials among them: consider the difference in intellectual cachet as you move from linguistics to applied linguistics to Teaching English as a Second Language. They can define a topic of instruction as a “skill,” which in an academic context implies an applied technique devoid of a serious knowledge base. To define something as a skill in the academy is to ensure debates over course credit, budget, and even its continued presence on campus. The teaching of remedial writing and freshman composition provides a good illustration of this phenomenon. More subtly but nonetheless powerfully, the binary oppositions contribute to the formal and informal judgments we make about each other across departments and within them as well. Those who are “theorists” tend to hold more cultural capital than those whose work is “applied.” The same is true for those who define their career by their teaching versus those seen as emphasizing research or for those whose work with students is perceived to involve intellectual versus social development.

I am not going to deny the obvious fact that different types of institutions have their own traditions, purposes, and constituencies or that different disciplines go about their work in distinct ways, with different foundational assumptions, different methodologies, different criteria for evidence, and so on. And there's nothing wrong with making distinctions among different modes of mental activity—for example, distinguishing a theoretical consideration of a problem from the development of a technique to solve it or differentiating between counseling a student on career goals and teaching her about cell biology.

The issue, as I see it, is the confounding role that binary classification plays in all of this, for the binary oppositions carry with them troubling status distinctions and simplify the complex nature of knowledge and inquiry.

As I studied the mind at work—in blue-collar work primarily but also in a range of other fields like surgery, teaching, and astronomy—I became less and less convinced of the legitimacy of many of the neat dichotomies that we absorb through undergraduate and graduate study and through professional academic life, the dichotomies that are part of our local wisdom. Take, for example, the distinctions between the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical, the conceptual and the technical. The use of a tool or technique, in disciplines from carpentry to astronomy, often involves mathematical abstraction and reflection on one's practice. And in many fields, the development and refinement of a technique—from computer simulations of population density in political science to brain imaging devices in cognitive neuroscience—are closely tied to and enmeshed in theoretical concerns. In fact, the techniques often embody theoretical abstractions, and it was difficult for the researchers with whom I spoke to know where the technical ended and the conceptual began. The distinctions in the classical binary dichotomies collapsed as these women and men did their work.

WE NEED TO RETHINK our shorthand, dichotomous vocabulary about what we do with hand and brain. First, it's simply not an accurate portrayal of the way things are. We academics pride ourselves on being clear-eyed and analytical, and many have challenged in scholarly work either-or ways of representing human reality. Yet in-house, we operate with a long-standing set of simplistic and bias-laden distinctions that affect everything from disciplinary insularity to course credit to the way we advise and counsel students.

Second, the binary dichotomies constrain our ability to think creatively about matters of curriculum, program development, and the internal structure of disciplines. Within some disciplines (let's take dance and visual art, for example), there are disruptive and unproductive battles between those who theorize about the discipline and those who practice it—and their students get caught in the cross fire rather than benefiting from a more integrated disciplinary environment. The binary dichotomies also interfere with the development of comprehensive programs: preparatory and developmental programs, first-year experience programs, learning communities. I saw this firsthand as we at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to develop preparatory programs that integrated courses that the institution defined as “skills” courses (like writing) and courses from traditional disciplines like history. On a broader scale, I think that the binary oppositions blinker our imagination as we try to address the long-standing but current issue of the vocational versus liberal study purposes of a college education.

Third, the issue of creating a vibrant integration of the academic and the vocational is a pressing one for all the community colleges and local state colleges that are receiving huge numbers of students hungry for a program of study that will lead to work—to a better shot at decent wages and job security. To have a prayer of meeting these students' needs while avoiding one-dimensional job training, these institutions will need to rethink at its core the ready distinction between the academic and the vocational, to find in the vocational the rich intellectual content natural to it and to vitalize academic coursework with the dynamic possibilities of the world of work. Since a number of these students come with poor previous education, this blend of the academic and the vocational could provide a fresh way to address remediation, building skills, enhancing economic opportunity, and providing a new kind of liberal education. A tall order, yes, but one not possible as long as our conception of curriculum is determined by the academic-vocational dichotomy.

Finally, binary oppositions reinforce the institutional separation of those in academic departments from those in student affairs. Many institutions seem to operate with a tacit model of the student that segments her into a brain and a social-relational self; faculty deal with the brain, and student affairs folk deal with all the other stuff, from learning how to manage one's time, to getting out of a financial aid tangle, to learning to appreciate diverse others, to identifying one's values in deciding on a career. Of course, in complex institutions like colleges and universities, there are divisions of labor. There is also the significant issue of training and expertise; we surely wouldn't want English or mathematics faculty acting as psychological counselors. But the distinction between the academic and student affairs domains is often so sharp that we underestimate all the actual and potential instruction that does and can go on in student affairs work and the many kinds of nondisciplinary development that are fostered through faculty-student interaction. I've worked on both sides of the divide—as a counselor, as an instructor, and as an administrator developing preparatory programs that attempt to integrate the various elements of a student's first year. Admittedly, it's difficult to think across the binary dichotomies, to unlearn the powerful socialization of our training. But I was struck by the educational benefits for students when faculty raised questions about career or about the barriers in a student's life that affected performance in a course. Likewise, there were all sorts of opportunities for advisors, tutors, admissions and financial aid staff, and those in residential life to augment instruction, to share intellectual interests, to teach—and to see even the most seemingly mundane guidance about financial aid, for example, a teachable moment about finance, allocating resources, and basic economics.

INSTITUTIONS function through systems of classification and definition. But some acts of definition are more useful than others. The binary oppositions that segment the things we do with our minds and bodies are reductive, inaccurate, and rife with bias. They hinder rather than help us think about institutional life in generative and humane ways.