The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education edited by Eric Margolis ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 2001 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Copyright © 2001 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here- after invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hidden curriculum in higher education / edited by Eric Margolis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–415–92758–7 (Print Edition) — ISBN 0–415–92759–5 (pbk.) 1. Education, Higher—Curricula—Social Aspects. 2. Curriculum planning— Social aspects. 3. Educational anthropology. I. Margolis, Eric, 1947– . LB2361 .H53 2001 378.1'99—dc21 00–062818 ISBN 0-203-90185-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-90189-4 (Glassbook Format) As always, my dedication is to Mary Romero Contents Acknowledgments ix 1. Peekaboo 1 Hiding and Outing the Curriculum Eric Margolis, Michael Soldatenko, Sandra Acker, and Marina Gair 2. Hiding in Plain Sight 21 Marina Gair and Guy Mullins 3. Schooled by the Classroom 43 The (Re)production of Social Stratification in Professional School Settings Carrie Yang Costello 4. The Hidden Curriculum of Dissertation Advising 61 Sandra Acker 5. “In the Image and Likeness . .” 79 How Mentoring Functions in the Hidden Curriculum Eric Margolis and Mary Romero 6. Training Capitalism’s Foot Soldiers 97 The Hidden Curriculum of Undergraduate Business Education Kenneth N. Ehrensal 7. Downward Mobility 101 115 Learning to Be “Flexible” in an Age of Uncertainty Caroline Childress 8. “Powder Puff Brigades” 135 Professional Caring versus Industry Research in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Curriculum Linda Muzzin 9. “Plotting Something Dastardly” 155 Hiding a Gender Curriculum in Engineering Karen L. Tonso 10. Preparing to Be Privatized 175 The Hidden Curriculum of a Community College ESL Writing Class Mary Jane Curry 11. Radicalism in Higher Education 193 How Chicano Studies Joined the Curriculum Michael Soldatenko Bibliography 213 Contributors 233 Index 235 Acknowledgments The editor would like to thank Mary Romero and Sandra Acker for their editorial assistance. Marina Gair was indispensable as a research assistant and helped shepherd this project through all of its many phases. The visual ethnography seminar, especially Guy Mullins, Luis Fernandez, Marina Gair, and Lydia Montelongo, helped develop the notion of making the hidden curriculum visible through photography. Guy Mullins deserves special thanks both for videotaping the inter- views reported on in chapter two, and building and maintaining the web site that allowed chapter authors to read each other’s work in var- ious drafts and thus helped this collection become more internally con- sistent than the usual edited volume. Most of all I would like to thank the chapter authors who conducted the detailed research that made this collection possible. It was a pleasure working with all of you. Peekaboo 1 Hiding and Outing the Curriculum Eric Margolis, Michael Soldatenko, Sandra Acker, and Marina Gair Most of those who write on hidden curricula focus their attention on “curriculum.” We want to begin by making a few observations on the concept of “hidden.” In her important article, “What Should We Do with a Hidden Curriculum When We Find One?”, Jane Roland Martin identified two sorts of hiddenness: “Something can be hidden in the sense of which a cure for cancer is hidden or in the sense in which a penny in the game Hide the Penny is hidden.” Is the curriculum yet to be discovered or has it been hidden by someone? Martin also noted that a curriculum can be revealed to some, while remaining hidden to others: “Until learning states are acknowledged or the learners are aware of them, however, they remain hidden even if sociologists, bureaucrats, and teachers are all aware of them. Thus a hidden cur- riculum can be found yet remain hidden, for finding is one thing and telling is another” (Martin 1994, 162). This discussion is helpful, but does not go far enough in investigating hiddenness. We hide to conceal or protect. To secrete. We hide our wealth in a hoard, we hide our feelings, we hide our intentions. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” a seasoned investigator has been called upon by the French police to lend his intuitive skills to solv- ing a mystery. He asks the police about their search for critical clues: “I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the cur- tains and carpets?” To which they reply: “Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned 2 • Eric Margolis, Michael Soldatenko, Sandra Acker, and Marina Gair over every leaf in each volume. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope . .” The investi- gator continues: “You explored the floors beneath the carpets? And the paper on the walls? You looked into the cellars?” To which the police again affirm, “We did.” “Well then,” speculates the investiga- tor, “perhaps the mystery is a little too plain.”1 In this sense some of the hidden curriculum may be intentionally hidden in plain sight, pre- cisely so that it will remain undetected. Much of the built environment, issues related to the body, the statuses of disciplines, and the ranks of higher education institutions are hiding in plain sight. We use hides to cover our nakedness. As another important story in Western culture teaches, curricula can be hidden by a general social agreement not to see. The reader will recall in the fairy tale “The Emperor Has No Clothes” that the vain emperor was bamboozled by two tailors who invented a cloth so light and fine that it looked invis- ible to anyone “too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality.” When presented with the new garment, the emperor thought, “I can’t see anything. If I see nothing, that means I’m stupid! Or, worse, incom- petent!” When he paraded naked through the city, “Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: ‘Look at the Emperor’s new clothes. They’re beautiful!’”2 Only when an (unsocialized) child observed that the emperor was naked was the truth revealed. Some of the ideological content of higher education intends to bamboozle, to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Disengaged intellectuals both pro- mote and deconstruct the clever subtleties and fine quality of ideology embedded in literature, television, rock music, fashion design, and so on because to do so seems competent and smart. Universities teach those who produce neither for use nor for exchange but produce ide- ology: labor management, mass communication, advertising, and the like. In this sense the university curriculum itself may be seen as a “hide” like a duck blind. The nineteenth-century writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1961) revealed human existence as a process of interpretation. Given that, one might consider curriculum itself to be a hiding place, a cache. Meanings are hidden in texts. Hermeneutics (the science of interpre- tations) emphasizes the non–apparent meanings of texts—meanings that may not even be understood by the authors. Because we humans tell ourselves lies and come to believe them, meanings can be hidden Peekaboo • 3 from us. Similarly, cultural meanings are hidden in symbolism; mean- ings that may involve obscure allusions and connections lurking in texts but remaining beneath the surface. It is also possible, as Vance Packard (1957) alerted us, that there are “hidden persuaders” that subliminally convey messages. Perhaps they can only be revealed by hermeneutic psycho- and socioanalysis. Fruitful work can be done in the secret garden of the curriculum where sexuality, power, and knowledge lie coiled like serpents. Moreover, at least in the West, knowledge is guilty knowledge. One turns away from certain curric- ula, hides his or her face in shame, hides his or her eyes. This process is one essential part of what Elliot Eisner (1985, 97–98) called the null curriculum—that which is left out. Another widely beloved story contains parallels relevant to the hidden curriculum. Elements of curriculum might be thought of as hidden behind the scenes, like the mechanisms run by the bumbling Wizard of Oz. Hidden curricula that are more or less overt—some- times called the “other curriculum”—fit this model. Leadership, entre- preneurship, manners, and class dispositions—the qualities once called “finishing”—and certain glib pseudointellectual styles are elements of this hidden curriculum. These aspects are what Dorothy Smith (1990) termed “the relations of ruling”: elements of superstructure, including the curricula of class consciousness, whiteness, patriarchy, hetero- sexuality, and of the West. Although these dispositions and relations are taught and learned, the reproduction of what Bourdieu (1973, 40) called habitus (discussed below) is very often hidden by a wink. Some of the behind-the-scenes machinery of social stratification is consid- ered “legitimate,” and in fact we “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” There are infernal mechanisms as well. We hide the evidence of wrongdoing. Many kinds of socialization are indeed covert, will not work if made visible, and in fact will pro- duce resistance if revealed.