Inclusion and Authority

From my limited engagement, pressure for programmatic forms of inclusion in higher education comes from those who do not feel part of the common enterprise that is the university or school. While those who identify as marginalized are part of the enterprise, they do not feel included. Accounts for the sense of exclusion vary but tend not point to criteria for which contrary, plausible explanations can be tendered. In other words, the sense of exclusion is sui generis and cannot be gainsaid except at the price of reinforcing the sense of exclusion. As Rosaria Butterfield has observed, a rhetorical technique of proceeding "by innuendo, by questioning, by self-assertion, and by victimhood" has become the style of argumentation in the post-modern age.  Exclusion purports, on such an account, to be self-evident.

Remedies for a sense of exclusion vary. Actual inclusion is not, however, one of them. After all, those who feel excluded in a program of higher education have been included in that program. The remedy must include something more. But what? The purported givenness and the necessary subjectivity of the inchoate sense of exclusion makes it impossible to respond in a rule-like way. Thus, those charged with exercising institutional authority are bargaining against themselves when dealing with the marginalized. Justice, in the sense of rendering each her due, is irrelevant because there is no criterion of what is due. In place of a measurable obligation is an insatiable desire. To negotiate under such circumstances is to fail to exercise authority.

Even so, hiring a professional to represent the marginalized seems a common response. To believe that reinforcing the feeling of exclusion will reduce it is fatuous. Such a response merely buys time. But such is the typical response of those who, granted authority, deploy it bureaucratically. Keeping the enterprise rolling at at the expense of the common good of the enterprise is a regular example of failure to exercise authority.

Another typical bureaucratic response is to require other participants in the common enterprise to engage in performative activities designed to propitiate the feeling of exclusion of the marginalized. Mandated hypocrisy is more than another failure to exercise authority; it is an abuse of authority. Even so, performative hypocrisy cannot be the end: "When orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."

All of which is to say that authority exercised in the managerial mode is not authority at all. Such authority carries no moral claim to submission. It is mere power. Of course, its power cannot be ignored with impunity. Penalties will certainly follow its disregard. Which is to suggest that resistance to bureaucratic power may take the form of morally justified resistance or, more likely, of being a willing witness to one's elimination from the enterprise.