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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
30 Seconds From Humiliation
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Anonymous details some of the daily humiliations of the majority of higher education faculty, those serving contingently.
Anon. I looked at everyone sitting around me. ‘Slavetrading’? ...Nobody reacted.
MB. But you kept working there.
Anon. I had no choice. We needed the money.
Next I’ll feature Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
After that, a four-parter with members of GSOC-UAW.
Comments
All very unpleasant, but I really fail to understand what any of this has to do with literary studies and literary criticism.
Conditions of production. Has everything to do with it, really.
Literary criticism also exists outside the North American university system.
Is the North American system the only one with labor problems? Or do you mean that criticism exists outside the university?
No, yes.
I suspect that these labor issues impact English departments more than any other. Many universities have extensive freshman composition programs staffed almost entirely by adjuncts/grad students with little say over their work conditions. This staff, even in writing-across-the-university programs, is still majority English major.
So while not all literary criticism or scholarship comes out of the universities, that which does—and let’s not pretend that this is a small percentage of the work—is affected by working conditions. Likewise, the downsizing of newspaper arts sections has had a huge impact on non-academic criticism, just as blogging has. James Wood, who comes up frequently around The Valve, is important mainly because there are so few reviewers out there anymore. There are hundreds of smarter guys and gals sitting around bars in Philadelphia who have more to say about their reading than Wood does; but Wood is like a lone aristocratic survivor of some revolution, a man whose value is precisely in his rarity. In any case, The Valve has included content on all of these issues (there was a period where blogging about blogging was a main Valve concern); I see no reason why The Valve should ignore labor conditions at universities.
Many universities have no freshman composition programs at all, and while James Wood (who belongs to Harvard, I thought) might be the only nonacademic American critic, they do exist in other countries.
Gentlemen, can’t you appreciate how exclusionary bordering on offensive it is to proceed as if the conditions attendant on doing literary studies in North American universities hold good for the entire discipline and practice of literary scholarship and criticism? I know I’m being a bitch here, but you need to understand, it’s just maddening to see “How the University Works”, when really the content presented under that recurring header is so parochial.
Laura, you’ll want to take the nationalism issue up with Bousquet. That header comes from his website, which comes from the title of his book. The full title is *How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation*, and so the assumption is that we’re talking about the American university system here.
I don’t know if we can call this focus “parochial.” We’d have to look at the pie chart of work on English literature coming from North America and work on English literature coming from outside North America. My guess is that more than half of that pie chart will be the former. The focus might not be totalizing, but it’s significant and worthwhile.
I’m under no illusion that these issues are universal or timeless. At the same time, labor issues are, for better worse, largely national issues at this point. Americans can barely organize themselves, let alone create cross-national labor movements.
Finally, I’d love to see figures of international students studying literature in American universities. Laura’s argument—that the effect of American labor issues on literary studies is so limited as to be parochial—might not stand up once we acknowledge that American universities have set the trends in literary studies for at least half a century.
I don’t really have a horse in this race. But Laura, as an official Valve member, why not shift the discourse by posting something that you think is of value for discussions of literature?
Speaking as someone from outside the “North” bit, the “American” bit and even the “literary” bit, I have to say that I find Marc’s pieces on industrial relations among the most engaging contributions to this site.
And seeing as, at this precise point in time, there seem to be no contributions besides Marc’s, the only thing they could be said to be detracting from (or distracting from) is silence.
I’ve not been a contributing author here for a couple of years Luther.
Marc must be either a masochist or an optimist. His frequent posts about contingent faculty rarely get comments, and when they do, they do not address his points. Indeed, here we see snarky comments implying that 1) he shouldn’t post on the topic at all, and 2) his massive work on North American conditions is inadequate because he hasn’t considered conditions in all countries.
Rob, amen to that. I think I just saw some cybertumbleweed blowing across The Valve’s homepage. Could somebody please please please please please get a good discussion going on here? Bill’s Quine post was a noble attempt, but we need more of that. Where’s Sean McCann when we need him? He made me think more in a week than my grad professors did in a semester.
Trent, that’s not what I said - surely you can see the difference between saying literary studies, quite good some of it I believe, goes on independently of American universities and saying MB’s work is inadequate at what it does? Though of course I’ll cop to the snark. I was unaware that snark was frowned upon in this circle.
"I think I just saw some cybertumbleweed blowing across The Valve’s homepage.”
As a frequent Valve reader, I’ve noticed that things have been pretty quiet ‘round these parts lately. I’ve resorted re-reading bits of the Theory’s Empire book event.
I’ve also noticed that Long Sunday went silent recently. Does that indicate some kind of symbiotic psychic link between the two blogs?
Whatever else is going on, it’s also late summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), deep downtime in academia.
People almost never comment substantively on Bousquet’s posts; if one agrees, and doesn’t want to be despairing, there can seem little to say.
Laura, why not turn this around--in what country (England? Australia? New Zealand? or...) do you practice literary studies; under what institutional conditions; what can American scholars learn from your situation?
Thanks for these thoughtful comments (and challenges). I do sometimes finish editing a video and say, what can I possibly add to this? So I very much sympathize with thinking people not having a lot to say after screening one.
Over at the Chronicle “Brainstorm” (sometimes appropriately abbreviated “BS"), this video generated 61 comments. Sometimes, though, I’d guess that many comments can be related to the churlishness of a handful of readers: “Why doncha go where the Market will pay ya?”
The thinking people, many of them more patient than I know how to be on these issues, then seize the moment for teaching, or try....
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/30-seconds-from-humiliation
"People almost never comment substantively on Bousquet’s posts [...]”
If we’re getting into meta-commentary here, why guess? This is one of those rare questions here that is susceptible to being actually answered.
From a quick scan of the post-by-author list, Bousquet has posted here 30 times. Of those posts, nine have zero comments, seven have two comments, seven have three, and six have between three and seven comments. One, this one, currently has eighteen. Looking at a sampling of them, I would class many as substantive, but of course you’re free to disagree, in which case, hey, go read something else.
Why does this one have 18? Because it has flames from an ex-Valve-poster who didn’t like what the Valve was doing, and left, and came back to criticize the U.S.-centrism of an activist involved in U.S. academic politics. Three out of four ex-Valve-posters left because as far as I could tell they they had long-standing beliefs that the people who actually posted here regularly should be posting about something else, so that isn’t really a surprise.
That should be “seven have one comment, seven have two, and six have between three and seven” above.
the point of my post, Rich, was twofold
1) to suggest that Bousquet’s posts, unfortunately, seem to generate little discussion here. comparing #s of comments here to #s on other posts, or length of comments, would support my point. I don’t know why you feel compelled to disagree--I’m not trying to shut things down.
2) to draw Laura into saying something useful, as opposed to merely expressing her frustration about the very existence of a topic that doesn’t interest her.
I don’t really have much interest in the history of factionalism at this site…
As nick says, I often can think of nothing to say after Marc’s posts, but I’m very grateful he posts ‘em. I’m tenure track now, thank god, but I spent years as contingent faculty in a state that has outlawed collective bargaining by state employees.
I would be very interested to hear first-hand accounts about contingent faculty experiences in other countries.
Well, I saw the video and was terribly interested. I’m new to the site, but can pretty well identify with the problems described, etc. I even went to Marc’s site to view some more. I’m an adjunct at a 2 year college, several years away from attempting to get the phD, and it actually (perhaps sadly?) made me reconsider my field of choice. Although I do love literary studies and teaching English, I would like to get a good job someday…
I had been considering the phD sooner, but it looks like at this point in the field it is a luxury, i.e. the opportunity to pay loads of money simply for the joy of expanding my mind without any hope for compensation at the end of the day. While I do think a phD in lit. would be worth the $$, I also feel the need not to pay college loans until I’m 80 years old
I’m not sure if that was the intended effect of the films, but to be honest, I’ve now decided to get certified to teach high school, save up and do the phD when I am able to take off for full-time study. And then I can teach and write for the pure pleasure of it, without job security. (and yes, that last bit was sarcastic, and I know I didn’t really address the actual problem, i.e. how do we change a system problem in the hiring practices of higher ed in which humanities depts. especially are not sufficiently funded, because I honestly don’t know).