Center for Theory A Proposal

Concept

I am proposing a new research and teaching unit at the University of Texas at Arlington. This unit will not only span humanities and social science disciplines in Liberal Arts; it will involve a consortium of universities, including UTA, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. As such, the Center for Theory will be “virtual,” collecting scholars at four universities in a common project of research and graduate education. The Center will coordinate and facilitate faculty research and graduate study in the area of critical theory and information technology. Extending the work of the Frankfurt School and French cultural theorists such as Derrida and Baudrillard, scholars involved in the Center will bring critical theory into the era of the internet and World Wide Web, addressing the ways in which ‘cybersociety’ is both continuous and discontinuous with earlier forms of industrial society characterized by an urban, factory-based mode of production, the clear distinction between “high” and “low” culture, national identity and territoriality, and “slow” information flows such as pulp publishing, mail and newspapers. It is increasingly clear that social scientists and scholars in the humanities require new categories and methodologies with which to understand globalized post-Fordist “flexible accumulation,” just-in-time production, media culture and electronic communication using the internet.

This sort of virtual consortium is essential at a time when public universities are contracting. An internet-based unit, such as the Center for Theory, concentrates faculty expertise in critical theory without expensive and possibly duplicative tenure-track hiring. In this context, “distance education” emerges as both an extension of earlier “correspondence” courses and a fundamental break with site-based education requiring elaborate overheads of personnel, physical plant and materiale. Scholars in the Center for Theory will not only theorize distance education, asking whether the outsourcing of instruction represents progress or regress for a research-oriented professoriate; the Center will utilize distance education by forging an academic network of nationally visible scholars and high-quality graduate students that is not located in a single university. As such, this could be a model of interinstitutional cooperation in distance education that focuses on research and graduate education.

Institutional Benefits

In addition to facilitating faculty research and graduate education in critical theory and information technology, the Center will focus national attention on an existing group of interacting scholars who work and publish on common issues. As such, by reaching critical mass, scholarship conducted in the Center will bring significant visibility to all four universities. This will greatly enhance the ability of the universities to recruit excellent graduate students who want to pursue study in theory, using pooled intellectual resources that, together, are greater than the sum of their parts.

Organization

Situated in the College of Liberal Arts at UTA, the Center will be Directed by Ben Agger. Mark Poster will coordinate Center activities at UC-Irvine, Douglas Kellner will coordinate Center activities at Texas-Austin and Timothy Luke will coordinate Center activities at Virginia Tech. All four scholars have published widely on issues of cybersociety, information technology and media culture. Center faculty will include faculty working on similar and related issues at the four participating universities. There is already an impressive roster of such faculty at each university who publish and supervise graduate work in theory. At UTA, faculty in English, Foreign Languages Political Science, Sociology/Anthropology, Philosophy and Linguistics do advanced work in theory. The English Department in particular houses a number of senior and junior faculty with established reputations for work on the relationship between critical theory and information technology. Such work is a cornerstone of English’s new PhD program in rhetoric. Lists of related graduate courses at the four sites will be made available to interested graduate students. Where possible, these courses will be offered on-line. Eventually, the Center will offer a core seminar, conducted on-line and F2F. Following the example of the highly-regarded Center for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois-Urbana, students who take a number of Center-recommended courses and the core seminar will be awarded a certificate of specialization in critical theory and information technology. Pending institutional approval, students interested in issues of cybersociety can take on-line courses from Center faculty at the four universities and deploy these faculty on their dissertation and thesis committees. Center faculty can take leaves and give lectures at the participating institutions. They can post work in progress and published work on the existing UTA/UT-Austin Web page, “Illuminations,” which will be cohosted at Virginia Tech.

Budget and Space

As a virtual entity that has very lean overhead needs and involves minimal transaction costs, the Center will require no new resources. UTA will provide a graduate assistant ($10,000 per year) to deal with Web-related issues and matters of outreach. The Director will receive no administrative compensation. Office space at UTA might include University Hall 217 and 218.

Timetable for Implementation

August 1999: organizational meeting of principals in Chicago

September 1999: inauguration of Center

September 2001: core course available