Customer Reviews

Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy

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Another effort, mostly essays by activist prof "tenured radical" Cary Nelson from Illinois U. with contributions from Indiana U's Stephen Watt. These literary scholars are unfortunately rare in their field of English. They combine research and teaching with energetic efforts to organize and to lobby for the rights and dignity of the profession to be extended towards those they call expendable or "contingent" faculty, those of us without the benefits and protection of tenure who comprise now the majority of college instructors. This is a collection from around the early 00s, reflecting the shifts that Nelson, Watt, Michael Berube, and a few union organizers have documented: the corporatization of the university, the downsizing of the humanities and liberal arts, and the stress upon production for the business world in terms of how students are trained (not educated) and teachers are monitored (not supported).

Nelson sums up his crí de coeur: "I make no apologies for focusing my current efforts on what I know best-- academia. For decades people have viewed activism on behalf of higher education as somehow illegitimate, declassé. Exploited workers in other industries are noble figures, but university employees deserve no defense. The barons of the academy are free to grind their bones into dust. Real activism takes place outside the academy, in that place too many of us idiotically still refer to as the real world." (109)

This excerpt represents Nelson (and Watt in his articles); he writes efficiently, clearly, and without cant. Blessedly (at least for my tastes), with the exception of a nod to Foucault or Lyotard when earned, theory bows to praxis. Nelson reminds us that too many of the pampered tenured elite thrive (and often posture in their au courant leftist attitudes) upon the labor of the overworked, underpaid, expendable, and belittled majority: the PhDs who have, since the early 70s, emerged from the classrooms of the celebrity profs into considerably narrowed prospects that they will ever attain even a fraction of the status afforded their advisors who've at their most grossly inflated become (as David Lodge's Morris Zapp only slightly caricatures) the leaders who assure the workers that as their superiors they deserve the perks and privileges that the unworthy proles don't. Nelson, as a Marxist critic, is ideally placed, then, to examine the hypocrisy that keeps this supposedly "liberating" regime in power (another Potemkin village now ivy-draped soviet?).

The contents range from a meditation on the "cohorts" of those who failed to earn tenure among those with whom Nelson, as a newly hired tenure-track faculty member in the early 70s, first entered the professorial ranks. He then looks at the celebrity culture that has infiltrated academia; he shares the difficulty of setting up a viable post-doc program in the English dept.; he documents the mounting debt incurred by penurious grad students in the humanities; he reminds us (see also David Noble's "Digital Diploma Mills") how on-line and distance education allow greater surveillance of course content and delivery in the false expectation that teaching can be reduced to Power Point and calculated evaluations; and he notes how the World Bank in the third world presages the trend of a globalized capitalism that desires practical rather than philosophical preparation for university graduates.

The second section delves into campus issues. These study the self-satisfied MLA; the fight at Indiana to save wetlands from being bulldozed for a golf course to court deep-pocketed alumni; the collective bargaining campaigns by part-timers and grad students that gained momentum in the past decade; the struggle of Nelson for his American poetry anthology to be published given the reprint costs, the royalty battles with poets and their estates, and protracted PC debates over selection inclusion with multicult defenders and trad detractors; the MAPS project that allowed some of that anthology to expand and be studied worldwide on the Net; and how an "ethical" grad program might be instituted.

I agree with most of the authors' arguments. I disagree with the conclusions that Nelson (not so much Watt) raises. (I have also addressed similar issues in my Amazon review of the related anthology "Steal This University.") From my perspective as a full-time "token professor" who lacks the chance for collective bargaining (the union was crushed), I do not have the confidence that labor reps can organize for the long haul most "freeway flyers" and marginalized instructors. Given the increasing lack of contracts and job security for not only part-timers even full-time faculty who work in non-tenured posts, Nelson does not seem to recognize that vulnerable activists will be fired (or not rehired) to keep teaching at schools that have mandated corporatized mass-production and privatized downsizing models.

I also, being trained as a scholar, do not agree with what Nelson seems to imply what might be better-- to support the reduction in qualifying exams and language requirements for PhD candidates in English. The job situation that many PhDs face does offer few if any daily opportunities for overworked instructors to conduct in-depth research, but I do not believe that the PhD programs in English and literature should lower their standards. This would only diminish further the worth of the degree-- in scholarly accomplishment if not actual application, alas! -- and devalue the PhD's worth on an already debased academic (and basically corporate whether in or out of the academy) employment market.

Still, any book on serious topics that manages to make me smile has more worth than most products from a tenured prof published by an academic press these days. The comparison of huffing poetry doyenne Marjorie Perloff to a Poseidon Adventure-era Shelley Winters expresses Nelson's wit and his sharp eye in combining pop culture with literary criticism. The encouragement that Nelson and Watt share may be the last rallying cry that many of us in the academic trenches hear, and a moment of foxhole humor at this losing stage in the battle for dignity and security's welcome.