TESOL in the Corporate University

THE AUTHOR Tim McNamara is professor of applied linguistics at the University of Melbourne, where he is also active in the Language Testing Research Centre His research interests include language testing, language and identity, languages for specific purposes, the history and theory of applied linguistics, and poststructuralist perspectives on language, with particular reference to the work of Jacques Derrida TESOL in the Corporate University ALLAN LUKE Queensland University of Technology Queensland, Australia Thanks to Alister Cumming for opening this debate in his provocative, meticulously argued piece I smiled when I read his memo: Would that any of us lived in universities brave or naïve enough to convene a “task force on theory.” Theory matters—and Cumming has done us a service by outlining the disciplinary and paradigmatic resources for TESOL as an academic and intellectual field But his memo also speaks to urgent questions about the status and viability of TESOL in the academy As Cumming suggests, we can frame the issue as a case study of the philosophy and sociology of science This approach can lead us toward a dialogue over theory But it also can lead us to the everyday worlds of academic faculties and departments where TESOL is taught, studied, and investigated Taking the latter route, I want to respond to this fictive memo on its own terms: It is a textual action within the institutions where we struggle every day over the grounds and conditions not just for teaching and learning, knowledge and ideas, cultures and languages—but as well over resources, capital, status, jobs, and, indeed, institutional survival I write from the perspective of a former dean and an educational sociologist who has taught and written on TESOL My case here is that TESOL will remain viable in the context of the corporate university But this viability is more directly tied to its status as a “service” field for a robust global profession and industry than to its theoretical coherence per se There are two affiliated caveats: first, that as the political economy and linguistic ecology changes, the field of TESOL will necessarily be unstable; second, that as a service field, TESOL will continue to risk marginalization and diminished status within university hierarchies and funding structures The field will survive, but that survival may be on a drip SYMPOSIUM: THEORY IN TESOL 305 Memos and policy texts are heteroglossic, with bureaucratic intentions and effects often written between the lines Bureaucratic texts are discourse bids to regulate, manage, and shape flows and exchanges of (human, material, economic, social) capital in institutional fields They frequently not mean what they say, and often disguise institutional strategies, actions, and plans We don’t need critical discourse analysis to figure this out As deans and heads of academic units, we read them in terms of their assumptions, scanning for possible material effects on the lives and everyday practices of professors and students The memo, then, immediately raises two unwritten, performative questions: Who is trying to what to us? What are the possible effects for the organisation and its peoples? These are not cynical questions but real, everyday, operational concerns in setting the contexts for the shaping and protecting, building and professing of a field Certainly, a memo such as this has a set of locutionary truth claims (e.g., that academic departments or schools require foundational grounds) In most departments, foundational claims are debated cyclically in faculty external reviews and evaluations, and they are frequently raised in appointment and tenure committee reviews Cumming’s memo asks that TESOL provide foundational justification, that we present our identity papers as a mature disciplinary field If we follow this trail further, it leads us in search of unified and noncontradictory first principles, affiliated epistemologies and methodologies, a coherent and consistent vocabulary for describing the world, and a set of teleological aims From Aristotle to Popper to Kuhn, the academic profession of a field in the Western academy has been premised on rationalist and logical claims But only the most naïve senior scholar and administrator would take such a memo literally In the universities we live and work in—some founded by industry and corporations, others by the state, some by religious orders, and yet others by colonial rule—there is always more at work Fields and disciplines, and their affiliated institutional structures, come and go, shaped by forces other than the capable defense of theory In the university board rooms I have worked in, appeals to knowledge, disciplinarity, or theoretical integrity are, at best, secondary concerns in the practices of institutional organisation, restructuring, and management Appeals to principles of social justice, linguistic, cultural, and educational rights are politely noted In the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, what counts as a successful academic department (or “cost unit”) is gauged through systems of institutional performance indicators: These indicators range from indices of research “quantum” (ranked publications, citation rates, and research funding), of teaching productivity (class size, enrolment and completion rates, cost-recovery of program costs, student survey results), and markers of impact and reputa306 TESOL QUARTERLY tion (influence on government policy, patents, graduate outcomes, copyrights, industry partnerships, etc.) This model of university governance is spreading throughout the European Union, Asia, and increasingly, the United States It is part of an ongoing reformation of the university, one as significant as the transition from the medieval, scholastic university to the secular state university that began in the 15th century, or the transition from the liberal arts university to the “professional” scientific training university in the early 20th century, or the ongoing transition in Asia and Africa from the colonial university to the postcolonial, national university We see these different versions of the university in contentious faculty and council meetings—for example, in the ongoing debates at Oxford, where the new corporate managerialism stands in direct opposition to scholasticism (and patriarchal privilege) of another age The new university is designed according to principles of corporate accountability, industrial efficiency, and “quality assurance”—as smoothly running machinery in the cost-effective production of human capital and knowledge for use by the state and the corporation I not wish to invoke a nostalgic version of a scholarly, principled university that perhaps never existed—an historical absurdity given the long-standing linkages of universities to the state, secular and nonsecular authorities, patriarchy and colonialism, and, particularly in the last hundred years, to corporations and a resurgent scientific/military industrial complex There were no good old days My point is that appeals to theoretical integrity are likely to fall on deaf ears in such a context The new systems are formalized in the competitive marketisation of universities, through international competitive “league tables” (e.g., Times Higher Education Supplement, Shanghai Jiao Tong), through marketing cartels and alliances (e.g., Universitas 21), and through less explicitly marked bids for class distinction (Bourdieu, 1992) in the class ranking of universities and key departments (e.g., the Ivy League, Oxbridge, the Australian Sandstones) They are formalized in the government audits of research productivity initiated in the United Kingdom under the Blair government and now spreading to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the European Union, and East Asia In these systems, levels of government support are linked to the quantifiable ranking of research outputs and other performance indicators In this institutional context, debates over the theoretical coherence of an academic field have become peripheral to the day-to-day operation, structural governance, and strategic directions of universities So how to respond? My first recourse would be to go back and dissect the hierarchical structural and economic relations within the university and try to get to the bottom of this Who is seeking to appropriate and/or undermine TESOL? At the same time, I am equipped with data SYMPOSIUM: THEORY IN TESOL 307 on the bottom line performance indicators of the university, and with a principled defense of the field tucked away in my pocket, just in case Within this new corporate order, the case for defending TESOL is straightforward As is well documented in the field, TESOL is a historical response to two simultaneous historical phenomena First, the postwar decolonisation of non-English-speaking states and the global flow of migrant labor and political refugees to postindustrial states have generated a growing service industry in language teaching This accounts for the strong orientation toward critical approaches and educational equity noted by Cumming Second, the postwar expansion of Anglo-American economic power and technologically driven mass communication has gone hand in hand with the spread of English as lingua franca of corporate, geopolitical, and cultural exchange This development accounts for the increasing diversification of TESOL training providers and employers, and the emergence of a range of purpose-built, privately funded, small degree-granting institutions Hence, the push/pull dynamics of globalisation have required both the regional and transnational expansion of English language teaching The various analyses of the spread of English have been well documented in TESOL Quarterly and other key journals Ironically, then, in the context of the corporate university where appeals to equity and social justice don’t address the “bottom line,” TESOL is not at risk It has potential to serve and enhance many of the major strategic priorities of universities, with an uneven but extensive market for graduates; strong potential articulations with social policy, educational systems, and transnational corporations; major growth in online and digital delivery; and steady publisher demand for instructional and curricular materials It also provides fertile ground for the attraction of cohorts of fee-paying international students However compromising it might sound, TESOL stands as a “service field” within a university preoccupied with instrumental and applied value As such, it is not a discipline per se, but a sociopractical field of knowledge built around and through the institutional fields and practices of English language teachers Long-standing areas such as classics, music, ancient history, and, indeed, theoretical physics, without direct links to employment, economy and profession are more at risk—theoretical integrity notwithstanding In the political economy of the performative, social instrumental, neoliberal university, perhaps we should worry less about TESOL than about those disciplines and fields of practice whose very existence is being questioned because of lack of visible domains of application At the same time, the place of TESOL is also marginal and risky As a sociopractical field, its viability is a potential liability First, service fields, particularly those affiliated with historically feminised professions, tend 308 TESOL QUARTERLY to be low status in hierarchical value systems of university governance: Education, nursing, and social work are relative latecomers to university status, moving from apprentice or specialist training into liberal arts curriculum only over the past 100 years The result can be a marginalization of TESOL in the overall liberal arts and sciences curriculum, a service level of funding support—or the relocation of TESOL away from high-status, research institutions into smaller, provincial universities and purpose-built training institutions Second, the existence of TESOL is predicated on the continued growth and expansion of a form of intellectual service work in transnational, national, and regional settings In this way, its future depends utterly on the viability of that “market”—the ethical and principled aims, the unity, coherence, or technical elaboration of its theory notwithstanding In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu (1992) makes the case that value and power in the academy are not simply about how and whether one professes “truths” about phenomena in the world TESOL constitutes, in Bourdieu’s terms, a system of objectification: a way of defining and construing the phenomenal world Theory counts, and continued robust debates over the matters that Alister Cumming and colleagues have raised are needed We can also view TESOL as a social and intellectual field: a human system of exchange, where cultural, social, and economic value is constituted As a field, its growth, durability, and sustainability are contingent on the phenomenon in the world that it seeks to describe and normatively alter: the teaching and learning of English As that phenomenon, and its affiliated linguistic ecologies and economies, is pushed and pulled, shaped and reshaped by geopolitics, cultural contact and exchange, technology and ecology, and, indeed, the same corporate order that is reshaping universities, no doubt we will respond with new paradigms for language teaching and learning; new ethical and political stances regarding the field; new models of language development, acquisition, and use; and new models for training professionals The field of inquiry will survive, but its shape, its institutional location, its foundations, and its educational and ethical consequences will remain utterly contingent on these larger material forces and how we engage with them TESOL will ride globalised flows of human subjects, capital, discourse, and material resources that remain volatile, unpredictable, and unprecedented THE AUTHOR Allan Luke teaches literacy education, sociology, and discourse analysis at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia His most recent books are Struggles Over Difference: Curriculum, Texts and Pedagogy in the Asia-Pacific (with Yoshiko SYMPOSIUM: THEORY IN TESOL 309 Nozaki and Roger Openshaw) and Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education (with James Albright) REFERENCES Albright, R W (1958) The international phonetic alphabet: Its background and development (International Journal of American Linguistics, 24(1), Part 3; 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