An Interview with Laura Penny, Or

26 An Interview with Dr. Laura Penny, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Kanye by Jaime R. Brenes Reyes and Jamie Rooney Dr. Laura Penny teaches legions of students up from the ruins” (More Money Tan Brains eager to demystify society and its contents. 124). During her sojourn in London, Ontario, Currently a “contract-mode” (post-adjunct, Penny kindly allowed us (Jaime and Jamie) to pre-tenure-track) assistant professor in interview her on behalf of Te Public Humani- Contemporary and Early Modern Studies at ties @ Western. Te Public Humanities aims to Te University of King’s College in Halifax, she address common problems as well as opportu- publishes columns for major newspapers such nities that arise between the campus and com- as the Globe and Mail and the National Post and munity, thereby cultivating a renewed spirit of has written two books: Your Call is Important to citizenship through arts and humanities. Penny Us: Te Truth About Bullshit (2005) and More is also a major contributor to Halifax Humani- Money Tan Brains: Why School Sucks, College ties 101, a program that teaches the liberal arts, is Crap, and Idiots Tink Tey’re Right (2010). opening the way for “disadvantaged people to Her work reminds us that, despite sustained at- begin to participate in the life of the commu- tacks from every front, the arts and humanities nity, to engage in the political life in the widest are here to stay. sense.” As Penny discusses in the lines below, In mid-November 2013, Penny, an alum- the anti-elitist, contra-classist mission of the na of the Centre for the Study of Teory and Halifax Humanities 101 centres on ofering an Criticism, returned to Western under the aus- accessible liberal arts education to those who pices of Te Society of Graduate Students to de- are “outside” the traditional university orbit. liver her conversational lecture: “Full Fees and As a self-described “hood-rich” assistant Empty Pockets.” Penny noted the post-1996 professor (raised “prole,” currently living on a additions to the Western campus, especially bourgeois income), Penny is perfectly poised the new Richard Ivey School of Business; as de- to address our questions on the complex inter- tailed below, she has proposed an initiative to relations between Kanye West (pop culture), “burn down all the business schools and salt the stock market (anti-intellectual corporate the ashes so no more MBA-lings could spring values), and bullshit (the challenges facing Issue 3: “Pop/Corn” 27 Te Word Hoard Interview with Dr. Laura Penny academia). In this interview, Penny elaborates to do other things as well. Te idea of greater on what she would alter/amend if she were bullshit is that everyone should be an engineer, crowned Queen of Pop Culture. From the pop or that everyone should be a commerce stu- to the cultural, Penny adds critical theory to dent. And, if anything, I actually think that we the mixture without leaving behind the trendy [in the liberal arts] get a hard time for not be- and smarty. ing rigorous, which I don’t think is fair; other Her ofce door brandishes quotes from more careerist disciplines are a lot less rigorous Montaigne, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and of course— than we are. Kanye West. Tese intertexts are to hedge fund managers as garlic cloves are to vampires (she JBR/JR: In Te Star’s synopsis of your book, also teaches a course on vampires at King’s). More Money than Brains, they say that, “To- Kanye’s entranceway quote is “the greatest trag- day’s emphasis on training, money, and jobs edy of my life is that I will never get to see myself means the real purpose of higher learning— perform live.” If the Dionysian and Apollonian critical thinking and literacy—has been lost to birthed tragedy, Kanye is the baby-daddy of its the corporate agenda” (Robertson). At Western rebirth. (Penny might smile that “baby-daddy” University, many professors argue for the is in the OED.) As Penny argues below, Kanye maintenance of civic values “in the face of in- belongs in the academy; Homer belongs to the tense pressure to capitulate to corporate log- masses. But, beyond popularizing “high art” or ic” (Alison Conway, qtd. in Samu-Visser and legitimizing the scholastic critique of “low art,” Budabin McQuown 67). Within the univer- Penny is annihilating the distance between art’s sity, when are these civic values at odds with highbrow, lowbrow, and no-brow. Tere is no corporate values? brow that is safe from her—she’s interrogating LP: I’m not wholly compelled by the argument or furrowing them all, one by one. For that rea- that civic values are a given, because it makes us son, it’s a great tragedy that she will never get to sound like missionaries. And, I don’t think that interview herself. kind of missionary position—to be puckish—is necessarily a winning argument or that it’s nec- Jaime R. Brenes Reyes and Jamie Rooney: Is essarily true. As for the corporate values, the big there “bullshit”—to use your term—in the lib- problem is that corporate values tend to be val- eral arts? ues of short-term expedience. Temporality as Laura Penny: No, I actually think there’s a lot we know it has been telescoped to the next fscal more bullshit in other more explicitly careerist quarter or, politically, the next election. So, ac- departments. At least in the liberal arts most of tually the thing I like about the liberal arts and us now are fairly frank about the fact that this that I think is valuable about the liberal arts is may not qualify you for a job, and you may have the “long-term.” Making kids read the Greeks, WH, Issue 3, 8 January 2015 Brenes Reyes and Rooney 28 the Romans—get acquainted with the Middle would say—cancerous growth of administra- Ages, get acquainted with the Renaissance and tion at every university. I do think that empha- the Enlightenment—gives them a sense of just sis on experience is something that comes from how short-term our values are. Tat’s the ac- administration, and it usually means buildings tual value of the liberal arts—seeing how many and services. It never means instruction; it never times we’ve made civilizations and destroyed means we’re going to pay people lots of money them is a good way to realize that what’s hap- to teach you. It never means how little they’re pening is contingent, is provisional, that this is willing to pay to teach people even though this not the only way to live and this is not the only is what they always talk about on the website. way people have organized themselves. Tey don’t talk about the fancy dorms on the Te empathy argument and the citizenship website; they talk about “how committed our argument, both of which are kind of moral- teachers are, [and] how much they love teach- izing, would also disclude a lot of our syllabi. ing you.” So, experience is just a code word for If you’re going to follow Martha Nussbaum’s aspects of university life that are not scholastic. argument—“Te humanities are important be- Tis is the kind of thing that administrators cause they teach us to be good citizens”—well think of when they think of experience—ba- then why are you getting your kids to read the sically the experience of everything peripheral Marquis de Sade? I would have to change my to learning. syllabus a lot if that was the goal of the liberal arts. So, it’s more again a sense of the long term JBR/JR: In your 1998 MA thesis in Critical rather than the short term; the corporate agen- Teory, “Spent: On Economic Metaphor in da at the university has to do with fulflling our Post-Structuralist Philosophy,” you propose a short term needs in a way that is going to be demystifcation of “the economic” as “the frst ultimately self-defeating. step towards revoking its dangerous deifcation” (7). In Canada, have the economic and business JBR/JR: I wanted to know about your own ex- elements of universities taken on a sacred sta- perience at Western, because the Western mot- tus, making them beyond legitimate critique to is to provide the best student experience in and judgement? Canada. And, they want to be global . LP: Economic language is essentially for us LP: Best student experience in the world! Suck what the Catholic Church would have been for on that U of T! the Middle Ages. It’s the main type of interpre- tative mode; it’s the thing to which all things JBR/JR: What do you think Western means by must appeal. I do think it demands demysti- experience here? fying because, on one hand, it does have this LP: Tis is something that has everything to do power and authority precisely because it doesn’t with the growth of administration, with the—I make much sense to people. In a lot of ways the “Pop/Corn” 29 Te Word Hoard Interview with Dr. Laura Penny right market fundamentalists are much better the general public thinks of as being the pri- postmodernists than any liberal arts person: mary functions of the university are falling to all market values are absolutely relative; a lot adjuncts, grad students: the underpaid. of them are fundamentally simulacral. So, my I’d say here is that if you look at things like basic argument in More Money Tan Brains is the dialogue on Massive Open Online Courses that a lot of things that people say about the lib- (MOOCs), that there is, on the one hand, they eral arts are actually much more applicable to want the university experience to be more bou- the fnancial class which, like the administrative tique-esque, to compete with MOOCs, but on class in the university, has grown precipitously the other hand, the actual job of dealing with and has gone from being managerial to being a undergrads is not one that the university val- parasite that’s eating its host.

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