|
COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cultural Front ser. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. vi + 243 pp. $50.00; $17.95 paper.
While ordinarily book reviewers strive to press against, if not transcend, the limits of the moment in which they write, I strive for topicality and pinpoint the moment of my writing for reasons that will, I trust, become clear in the course of this essay. I write in the days immediately following the 1997 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, where the Executive Council presented-and the Delegate Assembly, unfortunately, approved--the report of the Committee on Professional Employment (CPE), an ad hoc committee charged with the task of analyzing, and offering solutions to, the jobs crisis in the humanities. The Delegate Assembly listserver has been hopping with eager suggestions about letter-writing campaigns and strategies for pressuring legislators; the latest issue of Academe, the AAUP journal, features "Part-Time Appointments and the Future of the Academy." Laborers in the groves of academe, it would seem, are finally confronting the crisis that currently faces the least enfranchised among them and threatens to unseat those occupying the precarious perch called tenure.
But can the academy, through a series of measures either mild or draconian, significantly alter its slide into proletarianization? I shall argue here that it cannot: the academic jobs crisis is embedded in the contradictions of a profit-directed and competitive global economic system that requires such harsh rationalization; and while this trend must be fought, the crisis it signals is essentially not soluble--and here I use a phrase that will surely reveal my political stance--"under capitalism." Two recent books by Cary Nelson--Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, a compilation of his own essays about the "culture wars" and now the "job wars," and Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, an anthology addressing the Yale strike in particular and the jobs crisis more generally--ably document and analyze many features of the current attack on higher education. Even as they purport to take up the cause of working-class students and those who aspire to teach them, however, these books exhibit considerable blindness to the class function that higher education has always served, and continues to serve, in the United States--with or without the presumably enlightening impact of the "new knowledges" of the past couple of decades. Nelson's two volumes thus alert us to the inadequacy of liberal homilies about universities and suggest the necessity for going beyond the limits of reformism--piecemeal or otherwise--as we devise strategies for addressing the current crisis.
The facts are stark. At least 45 percent of all faculty in higher education are part-timers, as compared with 34 percent in 1980 and 22 percent in 1970. In community colleges, 65 percent of all classes are taught by non-tenure-track faculty. While the salaries of tenured faculty have stagnated, the gap between them and the marginalized mass has widened, with tenure-track faculty on average earning close to $12,000 for teaching a course for which a teaching assistant is paid slightly over $2,500 and a part-timer often as little as $1,500. Although Ph.D. candidates in English now often take eight to ten years to complete their degrees and pile up tens of thousands of dollars in debt, the number of tenure-track jobs shrinks steadily. Linda Ray Pratt, past president of the AAUP and chair of an AAUP committee on the status of non-tenure-track faculty, estimates that "if things continue unchecked, about 90 percent of the English Ph.D.'s on the market in the next few years will not find a tenure-track job" (Will Teach 265).
As the essays in the first half of Manifesto remind us, Nelson comes to the jobs wars of the 1990s as a veteran of the culture wars of the 1980s: his proud claim to be a "tenured radical" is a swipe at Roger Kimball's neoconservative diatribe about the presumed ruination of the academy by unreconstructed 1960s leftists. A fine scholar who has done yeoman's work in reconfiguring U.S. modernism to include not only women and people of color but also leftist writers "disappeared" by anticommunism, Nelson perspicaciously notes that "debates over political correctness have made cutting university budgets a great deal easier. A delegitimated university is easier to defund" (Manifesto 108). The devilish wit informing his potshots at conservative cultural warriors like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and Dinesh D'Souza becomes more harshly satirical as, in the second half of Manifesto, Nelson contemplates the ethical bankruptcy of a profession that "eats its young." The Yale faculty who blackball their striking TAs teach only a third of the undergraduate courses, "delivering their wisdom like pigeons roosting high above in the ivy" (200). Job-seekers who persist in thrusting themselves on the job market year after year are viewed as "damaged goods" by prospective purchasers of their labor (159)--or, in a striking metaphor, "lepers in the acropolis--a distraction, a betrayal, a burden, a mirror that offers us an image of ourselves we do not want to see" (174). Nelson unabashedly names names, detailing the strike-breaking activities of a gaggle of Yale professors, from traditional literature scholars such as Annabel Patterson, Margaret Homans, and Peter Brooks to would-be progressives such as postcolonial critic Sara Suleri, women's history scholar Nancy Cott, and slavery historian David Brion Davis. Yale professor David Bromwich, reacting to Nelson's support of the graduate student union (GESO), looks "like a vampire bat suddenly exposed to a shaft of sunlight" (141). Repudiating the ideology of professionalism that would bind him to conspiratorial silence, Nelson narrates specific examples of reprehensible institutional behavior, such as a UC-Santa Cruz English Department job search calling upon hundreds of graduate students to spend thousands of dollars xeroxing and express-mailing writing samples that the hiring committee never even read. Nelson cuts through the self-justifying language of bureaucracy, reminding us that every budgetary act carries moral--or immoral--consequences. He castigates administrators obsessed with the bottom line, but he reserves his most thundering j'accuse for idiot savant tenured academics determined to engage in the narcissistic reproduction of themselves by maintaining Ph.D. programs even when these programs' graduates face disappearing opportunities for tenure-track...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
