| Notes
1. On that score, let me add that the final report also includes
a passage I have some warrant to take personally: "we believe
finger-pointing, name-calling, political posturing and intellectual
profiteering are inadequate as well as inappropriate responses."
When I debated Sandra Gilbert in November 1997 at the annual
meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, she read from
the report and made it clear she had me in mind. Indeed these are
much the same accusations she made against me in the January 1996
issue of Academe. Committee member Sander Gilman confirmed that I
was the object of that passage in the report when I debated him at
a University of Chicago conference the same month. So all the
committee members have apparently felt pleased to sign on to an
attack that lacks sufficient courage or honor to address me by
name. Again, all this is obviously less important than the vision
of the profession the report puts forward. Gilman remarked as well
that the MLA committee spent considerable time analyzing job market
writings by myself and others and comparing and contrasting their
recommendations and ours'. It is thus even more remarkable -- indeed
shabby and unprofessional -- that they obliterated all citation of
our work. In my case it is partly Gilbert's personal anger and
partly her determination to prove that none of us who have
criticized the MLA have made any contribution to the debate or the
report's recommendations.
Since both my own previous work on higher education -- and the
work of my collaborators -- includes a large number of practical
suggestions not repeated here, I should provide citations. See
Michael B‚rub‚ and Cary Nelson, eds. Higher Education Under Fire:
Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York:
Routledge, 1994); Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New
York: New York University Press, 1997); Cary Nelson, ed. Will Teach
for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); and several of my uncollected essays:
"Superstars," Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of
University Professors (January / February 1997), 38-43, 54, "The
Real Problem With Tenure is Incompetant Faculty Hiring," The
Chronicle of Higher Education (November 14, 1997), B4-B5, and
"Between Meltdown and Community in Higher Education," forthcoming
in the minnesota review in Spring 1998. back
2. At the 1996 annual MLA, held in Washington DC, at a forum
devoted to the job crisis, John Guillory challenged us to confront
the crisis in its proper historical perspective. "Ask yourselves,"
he implicitly urged the audience, "how the ancient Greeks would
have responded to such a crisis." Not believing that history is
much help in solving anachronistic riddles, I can only say now that
perhaps the ancient Greeks would have gotten on their cell phones
to talk it through. Guillory himself had a stern warning to extract
from his parable: "The worst thing that could happen," he
announced, pausing for appropriate drama while we trembled in the
plastic amphitheater of ancient Washington, "would be to let this
passing crisis deflect us from our proper focus on transcendent
verities toward a concern with the contingent and the political."
In "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" in the Spring
1996 ADE Bulletin he had suggested that the politicization of
graduate students was a kind of manifestation of psychological
pathology. Now he went further. The job crisis, he offered in a
dark prophecy, just might politicize the profession as a whole.
Well, so far he has little to worry about. Business as usual
continues apace.
Yet the job crisis may have produced a new critical theory.
Call it Addled Eco-Feminism. I refer to the talk by Adalaide
Morris, currently chair of the University of Iowa's English
department, which was presented on the same program. Morris spent
twenty minutes offering a series of biological tropes for a
profession in crisis. "The roots and branches are severed, cut off
from each other and torn out of the ground. The webs are broken,
the connections lost. The liquids that once flowed peacefully from
branch to branch now drip on the ground and decompose." Morris
never got beyond these images or offered any proposals, though it
seemed plausible to suggest that a dehumidifier might solve our
problems.
For more serious and productive accounts of the job crisis,
readers might consult Christina Boufis and Victoria C. Olsen, eds.
On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search (New York:
Riverhead Books, 1997). back
3. See Louis Menand, "How to Make a Ph.D Matter," New York Times
Magazine (September 22, 1996), 78-81. back
4. For a devastating account of the University of Phoenix see
James Traub's "The Next University: Drive-Thru U" in the October
20-27, 1997, issue of The New Yorker (pp. 114-123). back
5. Arthur Levine, "How the Academic Profession is Changing,"
Daedalus 126: 4 (Fall 1997), 1-20. back
6. My colleague Stephen Watt at Indiana University remembers
that he was paid $1,150 per course as a visiting lecturer at the
University of Wyoming for the 1976-77 academic year, twenty years
ago. back
7. This suggestion would need to be worked out tactically, since
the national list would be very large. The list might be assembled
and distributed state by state to reduce the numbers and focus the
disapproval on local conditions. One would also need to decide how
much pressure to place on schools at the upper end of the part time
pay scale. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, pays $3,000
per course. Obviously a "Harvest of Shame" that shows all
institutions as noncompliant would serve no purpose or even be
counterproductive. At the same time one wants all part-time
salaries raised. So one might need to set the figure so as to
exempt schools at the upper end from criticism but warn that the
minimum ethical salary would be raised each year. back
8. Among the pertinent motions passed by the MLA's Delegate
Assembly at its annual meeting in December 1997 -- over the
objections of its astonishingly conservative Organizing
Committee -- are two (Nos. 7-2 and 7-3) submitted in 1996 by Marc
Bousquet: "Whereas the proportion of part-time teachers in the
academy has accelerated to unacceptable levels over the past two
decades, and / Whereas language and literature departments have
been particularly vulnerable in this regard, and / Whereas this
trend threatens academic freedom, faculty self-governance,
democratic access to the profession, reduces opportunity for
student-faculty interaction, and disables the production of new
knowledge in the discipline, / We move that the MLA determine
minimum standards of acceptable full-time/part-time ratios by
various institutional circumstances, and report those standards by
the next convention" and "We move that the MLA direct substantial
efforts to convincing accrediting agencies that educationally sound
full-time/part-time faculty ratios (measured on a department-by-
department basis) should be a determining factor in the
accreditation process." Although the MLA's CPE had these motions in
hand, it chose not to recommend these more forceful actions in its
final report.
A new motion by Michael Bennett (No. 8-7) would have
strengthened the MLA's role still more, but it was tabled after the
meeting lost its quorum: "Whereas the trend toward corporate
downsizing and the resulting unprecedented levels of unemployment
and underemployment have had an impact on U.S. higher education in
terms of budget cuts; work speed-up; the elimination of jobs and,
in some cases, of entire departments; and / Whereas increasing use
of part-time and adjunct faculty, when combined with reliance on
under-compensated graduate student labor perpetuates exploitive
practices which undermine our profession; and / Whereas there is an
urgent need for an activist movement on campuses that unites
tenured and untenured professors, adjunct and part-time faculty,
graduate and undergraduate students, and other campus workers to
resist this trend; / We move that the MLA advocate that non-
graduate student teaching positions should whenever possible be
full-time, with full benefits, at a living wage, and carrying
reasonable expectations of job security, while teaching assistants
should receive a living wage and full benefits; and / We further
move that the MLA support unionization among campus workers at all
levels and oppose reprisals against union activists; and / We
further move that the MLA censure any department which relies on
part-time or adjunct faculty for more than 50% of its credit hours
taught and/or provides no benefits to non-full-time faculty. This
censure will exclude these departments from all MLA services,
including the MLA Job Information List."
Meanwhile, an effort to eliminate reference to graduate
student employees from the CPE report was handily overridden. back
9. See Richard Chait, "Rethinking Tenure: Towards New Templates
for Academic Employment," Harvard Magazine (July-August 1997), 30-
31, 90, and "New Pathways: Faculty Careers and Employment in the
21st Century," American Association for Higher Education," March
1997. The latter document, issued as a background paper for
attenders of a 1997 AAHE conference, is the source of my quotations
from Chait. Also see Richard Chait and Cathy Trower, "Where Tenure
Does Not Reign: Colleges With Contract Systems," (1997) AAHE New
Pathway Working Paper Series. AAHE papers can be ordered from their
office at One Dupont Circle, Washington DC 20036. back
10. See J. Peter Byrne, "Academic Freedom Without Tenure?,"
(1997) AAHE New Pathways Working Paper Series. For a detailed
critique of Byrne and contractual guarantees of academic freedom
see Erwin Chemerinsky, "Is Tenure Necessary to Protect Academic
Freedom?," (1997-98), Occasional Papers from the Center for Higher
Education Policy Analysis. The Center's occasional papers may be
ordered from their office at the University of Southern California,
Wait Phillips Hall Room 701, Los Angeles, CA 90089. back
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