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Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education

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Once again the prolific, visionary critic of the academic job system, Cary Nelson, and his astute colleague Stephen Watt have the courage to tell it like it is. They expose the false consciousness that permeates higher education: the rhetoric of "apprenticeship," buzzwords like "excellence," the fiction of "academic freedom"--everything that keeps us from recognizing the constructed nature of the academic job crisis. Contrary to what the corporate managers of our universities and their bloated allies among the tenured faculty would have us believe, the job crisis is not about supply and demand; rather, it is about seizing capital from the weakest members of the profession (graduate students, part-timers, and adjuncts), who have become a disposable commodity, enabling universities to provide their student-customers with cheap instruction while an ever-diminishing academic elite promote themselves bewailing the plight of oppressed people with whom they have no contact. Nelson and Watt's "Devils Dictionary" is the perfect resource for a profession that's going to hell. Every exploited worker in higher education should own a copy of this book, along with Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Will Teach for Food, and Christina Boufis' On the Market.

I agree with both the positive and the mixed reviews for this compendium. Having read (and reviewed on Amazon) Nelson & Watt's essay collection "Office Hours," among other critiques of the corporatized, "quality-driven" competitive bean-counting mentality that's overtaken higher education today in America, I found predictable repetition about unionization, the research vs. teaching mentality, and the plight of part-time and non-tenured full-time faculty. I also found wit, insight and verve in their style, familiar since I have read Nelson's and Michael Berube's earlier critiques.

I cannot be entirely objective, however. As a full-time instructor at a for-profit but legitimate university, and as a graduate from one of the nation's top research universities (the department from where I earned my PhD in the 90s is now ranked #10) who had a diss. advisor among the "superstars," there was much of interest in these pages. That interest sparked my resentment, admittedly, as well as my sympathy.

The defense of many of the research university's more arcane pursuits, however laudable in the liberal arts and (when the spirit moves them) the sciences, does appear rather idealized given today's budget pressures. I would like more classics and Sanskrit and art history, too. But students under enormous financial debt, often where I teach (if not at Indiana or Illinois U.) older men and women who are supporting families and working at full-time jobs, do not look so often for enlightenment. The university for them and for those of us who must teach under such constraints is not the place where Nelson & Watt thrive. I wish it was different, sure.

While I lament this attitude and try to counter the nature of undergrads to demand credentialing rather than enriching inspiration from their instructors and peers, I also realize how soaring tuition and debt from student loans can push grads away from the more arcane or rarified fields of scholarship. The degree represents practical knowledge in most B.A. and M.A.-granting programs. Or else, students will not pay exorbitant fees.

Countering this market mentality at the university that does not fit into the old-fashioned charming college town-and-gown vision needs more conviction than the recommendation to agitate. We have no protection, no unions. At many colleges in cities today, an appeal to Joe Hill for faculty not to get angry but to organize seems quaint. My idealism clashes with my need for a regular income as a college instructor. No 2/0 teaching load for me and thousands of my peers, no sabbatical or pension. What do Nelson & Watt counsel? More tenure positions will mean, as they note, fewer opportunities for PhDs as a cohort to teach, given supply oustrips demand. Programs are admitting fewer candidates than when I attended grad school, but still the appeal of the classroom endures for many of us. Alas, I doubt if the Teamsters these days would be welcomed at most campuses to help us line-level workers campaign for tenure, in the thousands of campuses where the bottom-line mentality has already triumphed.

I commend Nelson & Watt for their continued advocacy for the rest of us, especially in the liberal arts, who labor as field hands and migrant workers in the knowledge industry. But being tenured and privileged even as they gaze out of their elevated perch at the newer batch of PhDs toiling below at piecework pay (1500-2000 papers can be graded a year by a composition instructor; college teaching at this level can be "America's lowest paid legal job.") does distance their advocacy for the rest of us. We have little hope of entering their ivory tower. And yes, we knew what we were getting into in the average of 8-10 years it took to earn our doctorates.

Engels was a factory owner even as he agitated for the proles, so I suppose it makes sense that Marxian critics like Nelson take up the cause. This compares favorably with the disdain of the MLA and AHA and vast cadres of their colleagues with tenure, as far as can be judged from their public attitudes. Drawing attention to inequalities on campus and not only on some benighted tropical plantation or crowded favela is an imperative. Nelson & Watt correctly urge this be done by teachers for students.

From my position, on the other hand, pressuring for job security and basic health care seems quixotic for those under "at will employment" and short-term contracts. Benefits have been eroded from non-academic labor in America, so it is hardly likely that Nelson & Watt's prescriptions for organized dissent and sustained protest will succeed on many campuses. Especially when so many under- and unemployed PhDs, not to mention grad students and TAs, wait to fill the ranks of our underfunded, somewhat despised, but still intellectually attractive (if only in our dreams much of the time) careers.

I wish that Nelson & Watt had delved deeper into conditions at non-research institutions. At Indiana's and Illinois' massive main campuses, they seem to forget about community colleges, proprietary colleges, distance learning, and hybrid college programs now competing with the old ivy-walled Gothic-spired quads that the authors surely stroll with pleasure. Many tenured faculty dismiss the plaints of the rest of the academic laborers as sour grapes from the unworthy.

Nelson & Watt document how much competition exists for so few positions, how retiring faculty are not being replaced by tenure-line hires, and how rationalization, commodification, and assembly-line production turn our campuses today into Taylorized models of efficiency. This tendency to regard teaching as only a commodity to be measured for "outcomes" in standards in the 00s has only increased. Platforms bought by universities require instructors to place course content on-line. Benefits accrue for faculty and students--these by the way are overlooked in Nelson & Watt. But, dangers await. Course content when uploaded opens to administrative scrutiny of the instructor's levels of "production" to meet student demand. Academic freedom vs. fulfillment of what a student expects for their tuition appear on a collision course, given the supervision that electronics allows for those higher placed to observe faculty 24/7.

My hope is that Nelson & Watt and their younger followers attend to the situation outside the ivory tower more, in these electronic classrooms turned sweatshops. These colleges characterize "non-traditional" models that provide a student with many more options than strolling to a pleasant seminar room in Bloomington or Champaign-Urbana. I type this from a site that's freeway close, in a corporate park, but it's an accredited university granted status under the same licensing agencies that monitor Indiana's and Illinois' campuses.

The condition of college teaching a generation or so after Nelson & Watt earned tenure speaks volumes. This volume's a start, but much more damage to the integrity of the scholarly world of publishing, tenure, merit, and intellectual wisdom has been made since this book came out in 1999. It needs updating. Unfortunately, a sequel may reveal little progress has been made, if any. After reading Academic Keywords, the momentum for the bottom-line university that accelerated over the 90s-- I realize in 2007--has gained speed, force, and heft.

Anyone who has ever experienced the uniquely sado-masochistic experience of graduate school--especially in the humanities--who has ever dreamed of becoming a (tenured) professor only have those hopes dashed...this book is for you! It sheds light and helps you at least understand the nature of the beast (no pun intended). While you're reading this, try see if you can an EXCELLENT pair of student documentary films that make nice companion pieces..._University, Inc._ and _Subtext of a Yale Education_. They were part of the so-called McCollege Tour this past year and the brilliant student filmmakers (one of whom I met in person) were very well aquainted with Cary Nelson & Michael Berube and their sharply critical books about the state of modern academia.

Basically, a typical grad student's chances of landing a secure assistant professor's job at a major university is about the same as your typical college baseball player joining the major leagues after school...more than likely this person is going to stay in the minor leagues forever...translated to the academic analogy that means endless, untenured/temporary lecturer/instructor positions, jostling between several teaching gigs at different junior colleges, etc, living at near poverty level in the process. The light Nelson sheds on this reveals injustices that are truly scandalous...and you thought public school teachers aren't paid enough! (They aren't--but compared to the peons of Higher Ed...)

I laughed very hard (and often bitterly) reading this book and got my monthly fix of moral indignation. As someone who attended grad school at Rice University, I can definitely relate. The president of Rice recently issued a manifesto that essentially argued for running the university like a business. Funny, I thought a university was an institution of higher learning, not a business... Cary Nelson elucidates very effectively the coming prominence of the "University, Inc." mentality among university administrators...

In this volume, Nelson and Watt present the reader with a series of alphabetically-arranged essays on the problems confronting higher education. It is a work that bears the stamp of long, evenhanded research and personal involvement, full of surprising statistics and shocking anecdotes.

The authors display great skill at discerning the subtle ways many disparate forces interact to effect an almost unseen crisis in university life. When the big picture comes together, it is overwhelming; for me, the moment came when reading the essay on scholarly books. In the late eighties a single British entrepreneur hired a star-studded staff of editors and reviewers to create the world's most prestigious science journal. Shortly thereafter, he was able to charge subscription fees in the thousands. He repeated the model for many of the other sciences, and a number of other journals followed suit. This meant that science and engineering departments began demanding these essential journals, which forced libraries to cut back on their humanities book budget. These cutbacks were felt by the academic publishing industry, who once could have published any book that made a significant contribution to a field but now found itself rejecting scholar's books on the basis of limited marketability. This in turn made it harder for scholars (especially in English departments) to publish their material, which led to their failing to get tenure for reasons entirely out of control. Meanwhile, English departments around the country are ruthlessly exploiting part-time English faculty, paying them less than minimum wage to work impossible hours. This means that individual scholars have less money to buy scholarly books, further exacerbating the book industry's problems, which in turn further exacerbate the part-timers' struggle to get published and build their CVs to prove their worth. This book is full of depressing analyses like the one above; the authors really do not exaggerate the abysmal state of higher education at all.

There are a number of problems with the book, however. As Nelson and Watt aim to show, the issues threatening the quality of higher education (and thus American intellectual life) are varied, complex, and tightly interconnected, which is perhaps the rationale for arranging the work into short, discrete essays focused on single issues rather than a sequential narrative. Unfortunately, the fact that the issues are so interconnected means there is a substantial amount of repeated information. The casual reader thumbing through this volume in a public or university library and perusing only those entries that interest them might need to have the point about the gradual replacement of full-time faculty by part-timers to be stated in the entries on 'Superstars' and 'Tenure'; those of us who have been reading straight from Academic Departments to Yuppies, however, had seen that issue addressed numerous times before.

Furthermore, the book is marred by a number of unentertaining polemics (which I suppose are what the other reviewers have been praising as "wit") that lessen the author's credibility. I, too, have little sympathy for the unrealistic and misinformed attacks on higher education by the far right, but the I found venemous entry on the National Association of Scholars a little too mean-spirited. Picking on an easy target rarely makes for an entertaining fight. And even when the authors' intent is not overtly polemical, there is still a clear political slant in favor of faculty unionization as a solution for the university's ills. It is, of course, a well-informed slant supported by hard statistics and honest, reasoned reflection, but the format of the book made it impossible to give this solution the full, nuanced treatment it deserves and evaluate it in contrast to other possible solutions.

The bottom line: This book is a good purchase (especially at the bargain used prices current at the time of this review), but one is left feeling that it could have been better. It (or something like it) is essential for anyone considering graduate study (particularly the humanities), full of sobering statistics to remind you of the reality you might face when you get there. Otherwise, it might be an inspiring call to action for graduate students, and a valuable wealth of information for anybody who wants to discover the real issues facing higher education today are. But it is only a place to start, and it would be a good idea to supplement it with other views. If anything, Nelson and Watt's greatest strength is showing that the problems of the contemporary university have no straightforward solutions. Lovers of rhetorical showdowns beware--but then again, if spectacle and easy answers are what you are after, you probably aren't much concerned for the state of American intellectual life, anyways.

I picked up _Academic Keywords_ during the 2000 meeting of the American Historical Association. It looked intriguing (when's the last time a book with "dictionary" in the subtitle had a glossy depiction of Satan on the cover?). Not one to judge a book entirely by its cover, I flipped through _Academic Keywords_ and was overcome by the feeling that I had better buy it. I am so glad I did. Remember Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"? I feel as if I have seen the sun, and now I want to shout in the "cave" of higher education, "Read this! React! Refuse to be assimilated into the corporate university!"

For the past two years, I have heard fellow graduate students in the humanities and the social sciences moaning about the job market, university administration(s), health insurance, and what a raw deal teaching assistants get. I hoped they were overstating things, but Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt backed up the litanies with not only further anecdotal evidence but with facts and figures. I challenge all undergrads going on to graduate school, all graduate students, all adjuncts, all untenured and tenured full-time faculty, and all university administrators to read _Academic Keywords_.

Grad students, it's time to organize, unionize, and refuse to allow ourselves to be exploited. Full-time faculty, it's time to refuse to profit from the exploitation of your students and colleagues. It's time to break the codes of silence and complicity with university administrations. Sure, scholars stay in academia because we love our disciplines; we're not in this for the money. However, as Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt argue, one cannot eat prestige and drink respect.

For two authors who promise to shake things up a bit, cary Nelson and Stephen Watt really don't do much here except snipe at people with different politics then their own in a disappointingly unfunny heavy-handed style. They identify the stakes as being high, and promise to say much for the benefit of underemployed Ph. Ds, but in the end they seem mostly intent on settling old scores.

The book only becomes amusing (unintentionally) when Nelson and Watt go through all kinds of backbending to justify the secure positions of themselves and their close friends in the institutions--why should Stanley Fish be faulted for making so much money, they argue, when academics in the sciences or law, or prfoessional athletes for that matter, make so much more money than *he* does? It seems as if its other people's privilege Nelson and comapny want to put an end to--not their own.

After having read the positive reviews, I was rather disappointed that this book fell flat of my expectations. While the concept is an appealing way to relate the changes in higher education, the book lacked the wit it promised to deliver. Often, the anecdotes seemed too simplistic and one-sided; the writing often seemed to lack subtlety and craftsmanship need to enhance the content. My one consolation: I did not buy this in hardback.