One of the pedagogical models to which I gave serious though unwitting attention in my youth was the Star Trek series -- the "real" one, the one about as old as my memory of Mick Jagger singing "Ruby Tuesday." Younger Trekkies who never saw those late sixties shows or know only the spin-offs still wear the phrase "Beam me up!" on T-shirts. But in case you have just come from an extragalactic realm so far beyond the territory of the Cardassians that you have never encountered a Federation ship, "Beam me up! is what you say into your tri-corder when you're exploring a hitherto-unknown planet and danger has threatened, and you'd better get out of there. Or maybe you are tired, your work is done. When you say "Beam me up," you are dematerialized in your bottlelike little portion of time and space. You rematerialize in the starship Enterprise -- which will continue next week its voyage of adventure through the empire of which Earth is but a part, a dim memory in time and space to the voyagers whose mission is the discovery of life on ever-more-distant planets. Culture-to-culture encounters were the subject of the first-series dramas (and are of the spin-offs).

Captain Kirk never radios headquarters to report the presence of, say, large reserves of bauxite and a docile, gullible native population that might be bribed or coerced into working the mines and smelting the ore to manufacture cheap pots and pans for consumers back home. There are no overtly exploitative economic stakes in these voyages, or for that matter religious, only the continuing validation of redemptive goodness in all its avatars. However, the pedagogical model has mutated over the life of the various Treks, with the format becoming more authoritarian even as the cast of characters becomes more complexly multicultural and the ideology more piously democratic. In successive waves of deflation, values central for liberal education are mocked and their value derogated, until education is presented less as a process than as a status-symbol, a logo. Yet from the beginning, Star Trek's overt ethos has fostered learning.

The explorers of the first-series Enterprise are nice guys who clearly differ from the terrestrial voyagers of history such as Columbus, Ulysses, or the Argonauts; there are no trophy women or spoils of war in the hold of the Enterprise, though it bears the name of the freebooting business venture that characterizes capitalism at its most dashing and is often conflated in mainstream political rhetoric with such notions as democracy.

The enterprise of the Enterprise has always seemed to be moral research-without-development -- inquiry freed from any utilitarian purpose -- free enterprise in an ironic yet mythologizing sense that appropriates the ancient proud claims for liberal studies, the proper course of study for "free" individuals.

Yet, however far and boldly they travel, the Enterprise and her multicultural, species-and-a-half crew are oddly conservative, as "readers" of the universe go. Creator Gene Roddenberry, previously best known as a western writer, consciously drew on the eighteenth-century literary model of Swift's Gulliver as well as on the Napoleonic-era Hornblower novels of twentieth-century writer C.S. Forester. The Star-Trekkers' forays into other cultures tend to replicate the narratives central to the history of Earth's western civilization such as the defeat of the Nazis or the search for eternal youth -- a Eurocentric bias strengthened, perhaps, by the accession of Next Generation's Captain Picard -- a Frenchman with an artificial heart who had lost his own as a Starfleet-Academy student fighting three Nausicans. Take that, Sartre!

From the beginning, the Enterprise exuded a pungent whiff of cultural colonialism; an ethnically diverse crew acting out eurodrama embodied a white mainstream notion of progressive. In the first series, the blond Captain Kirk is more-or-less firmly in charge; his engineer is a fellow European, Scotty; "Bones," Dr. McCoy, is also a white male. Nonetheless, there is a black female Lieutenant, Uhura, and there is an Asian officer, Sulu. And then there is Spock, the half-Vulcan incarnation of rational, enlightenment values, always having to prove that he is morally if not genetically "human."

The crew of the old Enterprise, with its "core-periphery" structure, the white males doing most of the talking, doesn't sound all that different from the 1988 Stanford faculty senate meeting which debated the reform of the western culture requirement. According to Mary Louise Pratt, "the senators, overwhelmingly senior white men, sat in the middle while ... around the outside were gathered the [visiting and observing] women faculty, the minority faculty, the students, the black and Chicano administrators, all the 'other Americans' not authorized to speak, but speaking powerfully through their bodily presence."

The question of presence on Star Trek is complicated by the question of absence. The Enterprise seems to be run by officers and non-coms, who constitute a crew, yes, but a "crew" as of a gentleman's racing yacht. No mop-and-pail brigade is visible -- but then we almost never go off the bridge except to the briefing rooms, the curiously un-personned engine room, or the sick bay. In the first-series Trek, the women wore leg-revealing skater-like costumes. By TNG, everyone wears a snappy unisex utility suit which radiates both hierarchized difference and egalitarian sameness. If there are no drones doing scut work, there are also no high-class parasites lounging in deck chairs. Everyone is working, everyone is more-or-less an officer. Star Trek thus finesses the class question.

The show's name "Trek" seems oddly chosen in that it is a Dutch/South-African word with clear implications of migration -- not quite Star Fleet's mission -- if not of the covert apartheid that seeps through the core-periphery structure. Nonetheless "trek" signifies an arduous voyage and echos in that the classically adventurous and revelatory Odyssey. On the face of it, the harmonious, class-suppressed society on board the Enterprise seems to imply that mainstream democratic capitalism has inherited the symposium of classic liberal inquiry without the subtext of serfdom that characterized, say, ancient Athens. (Those slaves -- so embarrassing!)

Typically, discussion on the bridge and in the briefing rooms of the Enterprise is of dramas in which the characters themselves are participants, dramas which exemplify a moral encounter with Aliens or "Others" from which a clear right-and-wrong emerges. The dramas are set in a frame of dialogic exposition in which, as in Plato, different characters are identified with particular arguments. Yet the characters' responses are emblematic -- McCoy the principled specialist, Scotty the dour pragmatist, Kirk a blond Everyman played by an actor whose principal effect is the ability to mime concern, confusion, and vague competence, all at the same time.

Interestingly, the word kirk has made its own little outward-bound voyage from Scandinavia to Scotland. Captain Church is holy or wholly human; he must negotiate not only the moral difficulties generated by encounters with aliens but also the diversity, schematic and partial as it is, of his oddly Celtic crew. Or, if we read this another way, McCoy and Scotty and the other crew members are figures in Kirk's dream, personae representing parts of himself which, Isis-like, Kirk needs to integrate to be wholly human.

However, the dualistic struggle between goodness and evil at the heart of the Star Trek adventures overwhelms and polarizes more complex negotiations. In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin points out that "Star Trek was always introduced with the incantation, 'Space -- the Final Frontier'" and projected "a myth of historical progress similar to that in the progressive Westerns and 'empire' movies of the 30s and 40s. The tale of individual action (typically a captivity/rescue) is presented as the key to a world-historical (or cosmic-historical) struggle between darkness and light, with perpetual happiness and limitless power for the heroes and all humankind (or 'sentient-kind') as the prize of victory."

The bifurcating rhetoric implicit in these dramatic battles echoes not only myths, but hortatory and didactic genres such as sermons, morality plays, fables, and parables which present the right-wrong polarities of manipulated obedience and which thus subvert the smarmy prescriptiveness of the series and the global, open question that characterizes liberal studies: What does it mean to be human? In the episodes of the several series, the global question is repeatedly asked and repeatedly polarized, each time bifurcating in the unraveling of suspense to a "right/wrong" choice. Thus, while the premise of Star Trek is of a working officers' symposium posing a global question that encourages "peace, tolerance, balance," and moral autonomy, the characters tend to be acting out the type of controlled choice that limits such autonomy and makes it manageable.