 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. 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).
3. See Louis Menand, "How to Make a Ph.D Matter," New York Times
Magazine (September 22, 1996), 78-81.
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).
5. Arthur Levine, "How the Academic Profession is Changing,"
Daedalus 126: 4 (Fall 1997), 1-20.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. |