Disciplinary Pedagogy

-- By WillDamarjian - 20 Feb 2025

“A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching" Foucault Discipline and Punish

Campus Crisis?

Cops on campus are not a crisis nor an aberration to an otherwise ‘educational’ environment: Discipline is a pedagogical tool at Columbia University. The University's physical layout, grading, and hierarchical structure instructs students and disciplines them through individualized observation and correction.

Disciplinary Instruction

Columbia University utilizes education as a disciplinary mechanism instructing students in proper values. The Center for Student Success Intervention (CSSI) described its mission for the Spectator, “Instead of ending with the completion of sanctions, student conduct will proceed with the center’s educational approach and guide students to learn from their experiences.” [[https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2022/10/25/new-center-for-student-success-and-intervention-aims-to-reimagine-student-conduct/]] Another discipline apparatus, the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) repeatedly references educational goals in its guidelines “A Report concerning allegations of Prohibited Conduct that would typically result in Sanctions no more severe than a warning or reprimand may proceed through Educational Resolution.” https://institutionalequity.columbia.edu/content/policies This ‘resolution’ is granted on the basis of mere allegations; a supposed alternative to ‘discipline.’ The disciplinary structures diagnose ‘failing’ students and offer them corrective work.

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Learning Rules

The University assigns modules on its values and disciplinary policies, covering everything from sexual ethics to plagiarism. These modules both instruct students on University policy and call attention to surveillance. A recent email to students assigned a new course on the updated OIE policies, “...providing a learning, living, and working environment free from unlawful discrimination and harassment…The training you have been assigned was created to provide you with an understanding of your obligation to uphold that commitment by complying with the Anti-Discrimination & Discriminatory Harassment Policy and Procedures for Students.” This reminds students they are being watched, on email and through cctv, and must internalize this surveillance. It models correct behavior while normalizing judgment. Not only threatening future discipline, these modules collectively punish students for ongoing protests by assigning them homework, collapsing any distinction between the disciplinary and educational goals of the university. Education becomes a corrective measure for students who think improperly.

Criticism of these disciplinary procedures emphasize their punitive nature as though in opposition to an educational response. Without minimizing the real differences between forms of punishment, it is important to recognize that discipline is instructive by nature and Columbia’s apparatus explicitly models an educational structure seen throughout campus. The University not only contains disciplinary elements but the education disciplines.

Examination as a Disciplinary Power

The disciplinary procedure mimics many of the unpleasant aspects of education, arbitrary ranking and punishment. Duncan Kennedy's "Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy" describes law school’s function to behaviorally condition students for law firms, “Grading as practiced teaches the inevitability and also the justice of hierarchy, a hierarchy that is at once false and unnecessary.” Duncan 63. Likewise, disciplinary determinations are almost as random as the alleged misconduct violations. Forced appearance at hearings, while not explicitly physical, instructs the student in the University’s power over their body through the divisions of time and the withholding of resources (insurance, housing, education, work). These apparatuses refuse to follow their own rules, denying resolution to students who received disciplinary charges almost a year ago. These are not accidental features of grading or missteps in the adjudication of student disciplinary charges, their mirrored function reveals a mirrored purpose, discipline. Foucault described the technology of exams “observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement,”184 as an essential disciplinary mechanism of individually singling out students and normalizing them through ‘corrective’ discipline. The procedures of the disciplinary offices similarly normalize judgements on students and correct non-normative behavior through the labeling of individual transgressions. The individualizing hierarchy of the exams and the disciplinary process both punishes deviance and teaches appropriate behavior.

Learning Through Discipline

Disciplinary hearings, like exams, provide the University essential knowledge. Exams create individualized student metrics, allowing them to be sorted and known personally to the University. Likewise, the disciplinary process, “...transform[s] his pupils into a whole field of knowledge.” Foucault 186. In hearings, students are instructed to name co-conspirators, identify themselves in photographs, reveal past transgressions providing the University the knowledge it needs for its own burden of proof. Forcing students to reveal personal information demonstrates “...the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.” 192 These hearings range from informal chats to mandatory adjudications of formal charges; they all provide the University opportunity to exercise power over individual students through observation. Not only does the University gain literal knowledge, the exercise of interrogation and observation act upon the student as a demonstration of the University’s internal power.

Conclusion

The absence of cops' formal presence on campus and the relative calm does not demonstrate a return to the ‘true’ mission of the University, to educate not punish. Surveillance allows the University to know and discipline individual students, eliminating the needs for brute force. This is not at odds with education, rather it betrays a sinister pedagogy central to the University. The advance of surveillance technology coupled with the internalization of being watched, normalized judgment, and control over essential resources allows the University to exercise power over everything from walking across a closed lawn to inappropriate speech.

Notes:

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish 1-92 (Alan Sheridan trans., Vintage Books 2d ed. 1995) (1975). Accessed: https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_The_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf

Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy, in D. Kairys, ed. The Politics of Law (1982, 2nd ed. 1990, 3d ed. 1998) Accessed: https://duncankennedy.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/legal-education-as-training-for-hierarchy_politics-of-law.pdf

Isabella Ramirez, New Center for Student Success and Intervention aims to reimagine student conduct, Columbia Daily Spectator Accessed: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2022/10/25/new-center-for-student-success-and-intervention-aims-to-reimagine-student-conduct/

One disadvantage of the Foucaulldian a-historical perspective is that the institutions its describes as apparently timeless are in fact recent. The required trainings, the controls of movement, the intensive surveillance, the ridiculous formalities of discipline supposedly embodied in "educational" activity, have all arrived in this deteriorating university within the last fraction of my decades-long life here. Once they are correctly observed as innovations, there is indeed a crisis, and the only issue is the cadence of its occurrence.

Exams, to be sure, have a longer history, and your analysis retains its value in discrediting them. But I haven't given exams in decades, which plainly indicates that whatever the power structure is that embeds them, it is itself rather puny, (You might wonder, indeed, why Duncan Kennedy didn't stop doing so himself in the course of a long and distinguished teaching career at that other law school....)

Perhaps it would not be an improvement to interfere with the purity of this analysis, therefore, by intruding the problem of historical development, or the reality of practical academic freedom resulting from the privileges and immunities of tenure. But if freedom begins in knowing that another future is possible, it might be worth at least a couple of sentences to point out that even the present is contingent, and that sometimes waving a wand is enough to change it, if you know even a little wizardry, which we do.

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