After class on November sixth, I was considering how eco-composition is more than just writing about nature. It is writing about how we have evolved as a result of our nature both physically, psychologically, and intellectually. Geographic locations have created different races and cultures, and that has led to different ideals, mentalities, beliefs, and religions.

It is a thoughtful way to begin considering how we can provide our students with perspective. If we can impart on them ideas of how history has led to our current thought processes, ideals, and moralistic views, maybe they can then be thoughtful about their in-class interactions and arguments that they are beginning to formulate in their writing.

Sometimes, I think, it can be hard to provide our students with new perspectives. They get defensive when their ideas are challenged, and it is so easy for a teacher or a classroom full of students to further push one student into their narrow perspective. If we can show them how each perspective is reflective of location and differing intellectual ideals, maybe we can allow them to open up to understanding. This would be helpful for all the students because while one may seem particularly disagreeable to us as teachers, all of the students must learn that their perspective is created through certain cultural values, and we’re really all “drinking the kool-aid” to one degree or another.

Fredrik deBoer is a PHD graduate from Purdue university. In his New York Times article, he rallies against what he sees as the downfall of the original intentions of the University: to be an institution of education for the people. He writes: “Enrolling at a university today means setting yourself up in a vast array of for-profit systems that each take a little slice along the way.” Both student and faculty alike have become something of a slowly shifting beast: no longer do the offices and bureaucracy serve us — we serve them, it, the numbers, and statistics that feed more funding, more money, more corporate greed, bigger wallets.

The bureaucracy has grown so sticky and thick. At first, I assumed it was only my undergrad university that was terrible in what I’ve come to call its customer service. As a graduate, I’ve quickly come to learn that is not even almost true. deBoer writes: “This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it.” The employees who run the offices are placed there and forced to withhold sympathies. They are often too old to read the screens that offer the information needed to actually help those who need it. Wrong information is spread through careless errors and college life becomes a constant headache of the what-ifs of what will go wrong.

It becomes more and more evident that through student loan entrapment, additional hidden fees, paper pushing, corporate named stadiums, and parking fees & fines (amongst a ton more) that the players in the university system are not there for the benefit of education of educating. Universities have become corporatized, and deBoer so casually points out that “corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

In Peter Elbow’s “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic,” Elbow talks about the need for readers to “listen caringly” (75). As Elbow also goes on to claim that writers only get to “decide . . . [intention],” as the reader gets to “decide what [was] heard” (76), I believe Elbow would view the act of revision, with audience in mind, as an act of “writing as listening.” The reason behind this is because Elbow, quite often, refers to the writing process as a speech-related act, as “dialogue” (79), in which the writer presents and the audience interprets. Additionally, those writings not intended for an audience outside of the author, those writings that Elbow refers to as “monologue” (79), could be interpreted as being “writing as listening.” However, both of these acts, audience-focused revision and private writing, can be said to merge the act of writing/speaking with that of reading/listening, as the writer is forced to become a member of the audience, either because he or she is the sole intended audience or because he or she needs to understand how the writing will be interpreted by a wider audience. By transforming into a reader/writer, a writer would be forced to both speak and listen to what is being said/written.

Additionally, Elbow may view the writing that grants us an “[awareness] of the positions from which [we]  write” (79) as an act of “writing as listening,” as we write down our thoughts and then gain insights into ourselves from reading/interpreting these thoughts. These insights can lead to further writing, which can eventually lead to more insights.

According to Elbow, we should try to distinguish writing in its own category separate from academia. From the start of this article, I was full of questions. Firstly, I wondered what a writer actually is and does, according to Elbow. How can you express ideas externally from the confines of culture, history, etc? Are our minds that our producing this writing not totally and wholly developed and defined by our history and our culture? I don’t see how we can disconnect one from the other, and in turn, how we can disconnect our academic mentality from our writing. Isn’t academic writing just focused, specific forms of expressing cultural, historical, and scientific ideas? Just the same way we write about our lives, we’re writing about an author’s life’s process when we analyze his or her work. Similarly, when we write about a specific research project in the field of chemistry, we’re looking at processes that we are only able to learn and understand, at least initially, by somehow making connections and comparisons to our own lives and experiences.