'Experience'
it's not really what we think it is.
Experience, the raw material of a life course, is assumed to be an uncomplicated ingredient of a good governor and a good administrator. When the board searches for a president, for example, the experience of various candidates are closely examined: what do they bring with them, what particular life experience, management experience, academic experience makes them the right fit for the job? Experience is seen as a key ingredient of competency.
In the day-to-day working of UBC’s Board of Governors many types of ‘experience’ are valued, highlighted, and also fretted about. I focus on two contrasting categories of experience. The first is the experience of ‘diversity’ in life course that undergirds the rationalization for Equity-Diversity-Inclusion policies. These experiences are understood as beneficial and positive for the Board. The second explores a set of life experiences that are seen less favourably and conceived as potential threats to the wellbeing of the Board and University. This life experience is called Conflict of Interest.
Experience of Diversity
Many people argue that diversity and inclusion are important features for contemporary governance bodies interested in enhancing equity. A simple online search brings up a flood of stories explaining how diversity and inclusion enhances corporate operations (including the fiscal bottom line). Civil society activists highlight the historical importance of social justice to remediate past exclusion and marginalization.
The sentiment is that, for example, non-white individuals have a different life experience than do white individuals. To counter the potential problem of having a uniform white perspective, diversity proponents advocate the need to have a diverse body of people on a board, in the workplace, or school [i.e., not just white men]. A study of US undergraduate teacher candidates (TCs) highlights the inherent problem of a lack of diversity:
“TCs from both universities typically held assumptions that underserved communities, rural and urban, were poverty stricken and plagued by crime. In addition, they held a common perception of the children as causing discipline problems, seeming unmotivated, and being difficult to work with. Their preconceived notions caused apprehension about going into these neighborhoods and the children’s responses toward them and their projects. They were concerned about their own safety and about how they would be received by the school personnel and the students.”
The solution, according to the study authors involved creating more diverse practicum experiences and diversifying the undergraduate pool.1
The value of diversifying the pool of people making decisions is that each of these individuals bring their own unique personal life experience to bear in the governance process. This then enhances innovation and creativity. It also is said to creates a more empathetic space welcoming and encouraging of further diversity.
Conflict of Interest
Conflicts of interest also arise out of life experience, but in ways that are typically frowned upon. These life experiences, unlike ‘diversity’ life experiences, are understood as vexatious to effective governance. There is the added possibility that these kinds of life experiences might undermine the competence of a governor’s execution of their responsibilities.
Conflicts of interest typically focuses on whether an individual might personally gain (or a close family member/associate gain) from a decision made by the board. With the increase of the politics of distrust has also come the expansion of the domain of conflict of interests into the potential and even apparent or perceived. At the same time having economic interests in business and law is considered a platform for governor competency (as long as it does not involve a current direct economic interest).
UBC’s Board of Governors have also focussed on other aspects of life experience as vexatious. Whether a governor is a student, staff, or faculty has been considered a potentially conflicting life experience (not that one has been a member of such groups, but only if one currently is). Also of concern are life experiences arising from a history of campus engagement in associations, groups, or clubs. While current economic interests that might intersect with UBC are seen as a source of conflict, a history of economic relations of a type the Board makes decisions on have not been seen as an apparent or potential conflict.
In this space there is an overlap between the life experience deemed positive via diversity and inclusion and those life experience (such as belonging to an organization that advocates for IBPOC concerns) deemed negative under conflict of interest protocols.
Against Experience
What if ‘experience’ isn’t so naïve as to be either a good thing or a potential problem? What if the actual social context out of which experience arises is itself a problematic field of social relations.
Anthropologist Gerald Sider tells us:
“experience is more than the raw material from which an active life is fashioned. It is, to begin, social and relational: a person who stands on an assembly line stamping out a hundred or so small brass fittings an hour does not have a hundred or so experiences of stamping fittings each hour, hour after hour, day after day. What is experienced, rather, is a profusion of changing and repetitive conceptual and social relationships, between hurting knees and back and the smallness of the pay cheque and the pressures from the foreman to keep on working and the hope for and the dread of overtime and the satisfaction of knowing how to do one's job exceedingly well and the need to use the toilet and the need to wait for permission to leave the line - all this and, simultaneously, an inevitably changing, and thus necessarily continually tested, socially rooted sense of what can and cannot be claimed or done with and through these relationships, by oneself and by and with others.”
Sider goes on to argue that rather than acting from experience (either positively or negatively) we should really act against experience. ‘Experience’ helps us accommodate to oppression and exploitation says Sider.
“People hire 'experienced workers' not only for their task skills but also in order to get workers who have learned to go to work day after day, on good days and bad, and each day do more or less what must be done, give more or less of what is taken. 'Experience,' in this perspective, is the active and historically dynamic opposite of agency: it names the changing outcomes of ongoing struggles over teaching and learning 'appropriate' behaviour within a complex field of obligations, in work and in daily life.”
Sider’s research has been with marginalized and racialized communities since his days in the 1960s as a civil rights work in the Carolinas. Rather than seeing ‘experience’ as a basis of strength and resiliency (it is of course partly that) he shows us how experience shapes tactics of accommodation to the inequities of power and makes us ‘competent’ instruments of class rule.
“In Lumberton, North Carolina, the county seat of Robeson County, … in the 1960s, young and middle-aged Indian and African-American women would walk along the sidewalks of the middle class white neighbourhoods quite early in the morning, particularly around the holidays, and call out 'Any cleaning today? Maid? Cleaning?' The women of the house would open their doors and at times call back, 'Are you Indian?' To which the Indian women would respond, 'No, ma'am' - meaning, and sometimes saying, 'No, ma'am, I'm coloured.' …The answer was probably more expected and desired than believed. This is not agency, these ways of coping - on the one hand, to get a job or, on the other, to get a job done cheaply - but experience, and more is at issue than the experience of how and how not to hire or get hired. White people in this part of the south in the 1960’s were more 'afraid' of Indians than of African Americans. They thought that Indians were 'meaner' and less deferential as workers, and they would tell stories of 'experiences' - their own or of people they knew, or just what they had heard - that purportedly demonstrated this view. The fact that both the question and the answer invoked 'experience' - a past - that was fantasy rather than reality made those experiences no less binding.”
With experience, Sider cautions, “the issue … is not simply what we learn from our struggles but also what we must try not to learn, what 'experiences' and what parts of our own histories and our own ways we must not only not take up but must set ourselves against.”
Sider has a more involved discussion that I would recommend to readers. Suffice to say his point is that experience needs to be considered as an aspect of the social forces through which the powerful secure their authority and maintain their control over the majority of us.
The idea of experience lying beneath the benefits of diversity and the problems of conflict of interests draws unproblematically from the same naïve idea: that we just move through life gaining unique individual experiences. Sider’s contribution is to disrupt our unreflective acceptance that experience might be anything more than an ‘experience.’ Sometimes it is in our collective interests to act against the lessons of experience. Sometimes our ‘diverse’ experience leads us to unreflectively act in ways that maintain social inequities of class as we act ‘competently’ in our roles as reasonable institutional decision makers.
One key foundation of diversity that receives very little explicit or direct attention throughout the EDI literature is social class, except as a secondary variable. Social class is considered to be less relevant to diversity and inclusion than race or gender. By social class I do not mean the Weberian notion of layers of prestige, but the more analytically precise idea of social class as a relation to the means of production - those who hold nothing but their own labour in relation to those who own and control the instruments of production.
I’ve missed your blog, and this is such a good one. Definitely a perspective on alienation that’s new to me, and very valuable and broadly applicable.