“I Wanna Be a SHIT-Head!” Accepted and Radical Pedagogy

Abstract

Ostensibly a college-comedy, mobilizing familiar tropes of slacking, drinking, and destruction, Accepted (2006) actually constitutes a more or less coherent critique of Higher Education and a utopian proposition for curriculum reform. Perhaps with a nod to Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Justin Long’s Bartleby Gaines embodies implacable resistance to conventional college education and through his fake institution, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, creates a diverse, pedagogically innovative community. In this community the curriculum is created by the students and, as Bartleby later claims to the accreditation board, “the students are the faculty.” This chapter explores the degree to which the exigencies of the narrative permit this radical critique to obtain, and suggests that despite the romantically triumphant finale, the film inevitably leaves tensions unresolved regarding the meaning of learning, the marketization of Higher Education, and the conditions of possibility for a truly radical pedagogy.