Young Adjunct Friction

Cloning himself a new mathematician, no doubt.

Bousquet in the Chronicle is dead on in his riposte to Mark Taylor in the NYT. Taylor's estimate of adjunct pay at "5000 a class" has to be a typo. He means 5000 a year, right? How did this pass the copy-editor?

The two men seem to be arguing at cross purposes. Both lament the graduate student / young adjunct condition. Taylor's 1990s-esque call for "cross-disciplinarity" is actually something the University has long implemented in order to clear some space for its young professors. More such would actually provide the jobs for young docs that Bousquet so pines for. Clearly everyone can get along.

Apart from that, Taylor sounds like he needs a transfer out of the Religion dept.. If you think a "dissertation on Duns Scotus' use of citations" is inane, I entreat you to see what graduate programs in Fine Art are capable of. Every year we disgorge a new lot of self-absorbed, disengaged careerists bent on deskilling everything they touch, showing on the cheap, or visually fellating their professors, right?

And my argument is that's OK. Graduate school is supposed to be tangent to the world. It is an outburst of free time that we pay for with debt, in order to clear some space for our minds to work. Because Lord knows you can't get that kind of time working on the line. We detach from the world, loose our moorings a little, and plummet back to earth.

How did Duns Scotus cite prior writers, and what does that mean? I have no idea. Maybe someone should spend a couple years looking into that. No one really gives a rat's ass about the specifics of an overly-specific dissertation or journal article because we will use it for our own (larger, philosophical?) ends. Taylor sounds like he's pissed that Foucault got to spend all those years having graduate students write about punishment in early modern Europe, as though advances in one path of research were inherently reflexive, as though research were its own end. As though we didn't cull material from divers sources already, nor speak in tongues...

Parsin Parsons

Updates to the Parsons situation at The Notion and at Runnin Scared. Updates, but no real news. We still don't know, beyond taking New York mag at its word, how many adjuncts were non-tendered, because we don't have names. Or, we have one: Dale Emmart, a 22-year veteran. Who are the other eleven?

If Parsons makes good on its assertion that half of the newly-displaced profs will be tendered offers in other departments, then we're dealing with six fired teachers. If it is true that Parsons' bottom line is OK -- and that seems unlikely, given the New School's run of acquisitions and infrastructure improvements this decade -- then to fire people just because there's a recession going on is not ethically sound. Businesses across the board are taking advantage of the recession to take cost-cutting measures that would otherwise be unpalatable. It's bullshit; it's also happening on a massive scale in government, non-profits, and the private sector.

This makes the logic of protest difficult to grasp. Adjuncts are fired for any number of reasons. This is the nature of adjunct employment, union or no union. Parsons' only mistake seems to be sending out a form letter that implies that the recipient is one of many; that there was a mass firing. Their current PR gambit is exactly this, and it might be a winner: Firings are just another day in the life of adjunct professors, and to protest them is like protesting rain.

So, this is a protest with a material end-point -- unlike the student occupation -- only it's possible that it lacks a prime mover. It is a protest against everyday conditions, not against extraordinary abuses. Violation is here understood to be intrinsic to adjunct employment.

This is difficult for me to parse. Is this a protest built on survivor's guilt? Is this not that big a deal for the people who got canned? I've been non-tendered before. It was okay; I had other plans. Not good plans or anything. No money in those plans...so inform me Parsonsites! I need information...

New New School Brou-Ha-Ha

Never thought I would root for "occupiers," but this New School crew changed all that. A protest at Parsons W. 12th St entrance is scheduled for more or less right now, in solidarity with the dismissed Parsons adjuncts.

You'll remember that I asked more than a week ago "Where are the Parsons adjuncts?" Presumably here. What I meant, in sum, was that it's not enough to agitate for the dismissal of people you simply don't like very much, a la the "occupation" against Bob Kerrey. A protest with a material end, I'm postulating, has a better chance at success.

And the Parsons press release seems to prove it, chalking up the pink slips to failed communication, in the manner of: We didn't fire more than a dozen adjuncts, it was six, and we offered them teaching posts in other areas. Already the institution is running damage control, rather than just calling the NYPD.

It still amazes me how little real information has come out about the Parsons firings. Has anyone been non-tendered for next year? Really and officially? Who and how many? One-third of faculty? One-half? 20? Six? What does teaching another area mean? What saith ye, Parsons Pink Slips?

Also, how come Lawrence Hegarty and Peter Drake are the only two dudes willing to be photographed for the cause? Viz.,this in the NYT and this on the Parsons blog:
Has the university -- to concoct an example, since none exists -- offered printmakers jobs in 3-D digital rendering or suchlike, knowing full-well that the current crop of printmakers lacks that skillset, and that shifting a current instructor's area is tantamount to reopening the position to outside applicants, i.e. firing?

Finally, as an example to us all, Columbia faculty are meeting to support academic freedom in Palestine; this is a protest without fashionable accessories, built to redress tangible grievances, namely, Israel will not let Palestinian academics attend conferences in their fields. A simple thing like the right to a comp'ed lunch calls into question borders, sovereignty, rights of movement and return, usw, all the giant problems in miniature...
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Watch Out: I Can Always Bring This Back to Stanley Fish

[Photo: Jay Bybee and family / Meridian]

NYT editorializes for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, torture memo author, current federal appeals court judge, on the grounds of a warped understanding of the President's constitutional powers. All this re: his writing torture into the law.

NYT linked to the new documents, which cover warrantless wiretapping, use of the US military to pursue terrorists domestically, pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, detention of American citizens charged with terrorism, and extraordinary rendition. They skip the torture memo because it's long been released, Bybee has long been on the bench, and John Yoo is the only person out there vociferously defending his crimes.

We'll leave aside the contradiction inherent NYT's romantic prose and pragmatic posture, suing for Bybee's dismissal six years after his nomination and at a time of Democratic ascendancy. In 2004, he was a footnote to an opinion denouncing Thomas Griffith; NYT hasn't always demanded his impeachment/resignation. They just got on the boat today.

Again, leaving all that aside, the real problem is in the perceived boundary between academic behavior and political behavior. Bybee is a judge and can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. John Yoo is a professor and is, apparently, exempt from such calumny. Both men issued legal opinions that rationalized all manner of weirdo executive branch usurpations of power. One is in the Academy, so he's clear. It's as if Stanley Fish were on the editorial board, and you can say and do whatever wack shit you feel (Ward Churchill) so long as you don't try to problematize the Academy itself (Denis Rancourt).

Conspiracy theorists, people who want Iran bombed yesterday, people who want Israel pushed into the sea, war criminals and ordinary street freaks -- all their actions are OK so long as they 1) stay in the Academy 2) keep the Academy away from "ordinary life". This is how we get into Bybee-not-Yoo, Rancourt-not-Churchill hair-splitting.

Just come out and tell us which sorts of academic freedom are legitimate and which are not, and stop pussyfooting...by which I mean Fish's position on Columbia's bringing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak: the University administrator is beyond politics.

This is a total fallacy. Academic positions are already constructed as political, whether you like it or not. Teach engineering? To what end? To build more and better highway off-ramps? OK, or statistics -- you know how much blood has been shed over sampling methods and the census? What about the relationship of calculus to ballistic missiles? Or the complicity of art in legitimating a culture of plunder consumption? See how quickly we hit the "minefield" of ethical decision-making -- which is, in a democracy, politics itself?

See also, and I'm speaking to you Stanley, how deferring the ethical point of contact onto the decision to act ethically in opposition to academic standards negates the difference between good and bad acts? If the standard for a person's actions is not "Does this promote the good life?" but "Is this covered in the provost's integrity manual?" one can act inethically and legally at the same time.

Impeach Bybee, but fire John Yoo too.
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Leaders of the New School Count the Receipts

Reading about the occupation of a disused building at the New School by a group demanding the resignation of the president and some trustees, some questions about politics and representation:

After the protest, why is the most interesting dispute about the authenticity and meaning of the video of NYPD "spraying" inside the building? Nearly everyone in the building was dressed to get maced. Say the protest ended without any pepper spray or tear gas fired in anger; scarves, keffiyehs etc. become fashion accessories rather than real-world precautions. With spray, we can continue discussions about the relationship of free speech to security, civil liberties and civil rights within the University usw. Without spray, there's less to talk about.

Doesn't this defer the meaning of the protest onto its means? Clearly, this is not a direct form of communication, as in "Meet our demands, or we will not leave." The occupation didn't last long enough to have been conducted on those terms. It appears, rather, to be an attempt to bait the University and the police into committing violence, thereby delegitimizing their power, and broadening the base for future protests.

Even the original meaning of the protests (the first in December) is hazily concocted. Kerrey and James Murtha are, respectively, a proponent of the Iraq War and a man related to a war profiteer. This is the least charitable view. Probably, by temperament, they should not be running the New School. Is this like Paul Wolfowitz running Oberlin? No, not really. But I understand and share the desire to punish absolutely everyone who thought it might be a good idea to chase down Saddam Hussein. Fair or not. The University is a place where the unsettled debts of history come to roost. If you don't like it, you can walk right back into the corporate world.

So pushing these men out for one political choice I see as legitimate. Why then combine the issue with some vague allegations of academic malfeasance? Is Kerrey failing to "safeguard the values" of the New School just by being square? Hasn't the New School been on a corporate tear in the past decade, expanding into business and fashion, veering from its foundation in pure soft sciences? Isn't Kerrey the culmination of a long-running corporatization of the school? So where was senior faculty outrage ten or fifteen years ago? Too busy getting tenure to get arrested?

Why occupy an unused building? In what way does that disrupt the functioning of the School? What happened to shutting down classes? Where are the Parsons adjuncts? (Forget Bob Kerrey's job, let's compromise: Kerrey gets to keep his job as long as Parsons adjuncts get to keep theirs.) Why does the iconic photo in the Times show a banner that says "Occupy," in a classy font, with a demure black star? Why do photos of the actors look like an Urban Outfitters spread? The more we look at the images of the April protest, the more purely performative it appears.

Back to fashion: More frequently mentioned than his Iraq stance or his assumption of the Provost position is Kerrey's pure "incompatibility" with the New School's "radical character". As if to prove this character, students wave the red-and-black flag and demand the president's ouster. Of course, it's the radicalism of the School that drives enrollment. Showy, cop-baiting demonstrations serve to ratify the thing they profess to vilify: counting the day's receipts.
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More Quad Panic

The only thing college professors and professor-wanna-bes (is professors-in-waiting the preferred nomenclature?) have to fear is one another. It wasn't the cruel vicissitudes of market funding for education that sacked Denis Rancourt for instance. I suspect it is the stultifying effect of tenure that increases unemployment in the Academy. Same way the UAW kills Detroit.

Anyway, prompted by a recent NYT piece on the impending doom of the humanities, I've grown more interested in market effects on academic employment. For one thing, I suspect (I keep saying this because I want to stress that I have no statistics for these theories) that the target of a manufactured panic about the future of the humanities is not the Provost, but the Department Chair.

I ignored this last time, but the Times' headline said it all. Disciplines must make themselves useful, say the disciples. The point is not to concoct a panic in order to force the Provost to pay attention to humanities when the budget ax falls; the point is to cram a utilitarian model onto disciplines that are ethical, in the sense that they help us determine what the good life is. Whether this is wise or pernicious depends I suppose on the degree to which a department is removed from the currents of History, and you'll pardon the archae-Marxist flavor there.

I suspect this, in part, because the crisis in academic hiring and promotion seems to have been ever thus. This is a 1977 American Philosophical Society statement on how to get young Philosophy grads into the Academy on a provisional, unpaid basis. The salient line, I think, is the first one: "The academic community has a responsibility to do what it can to help scholars who are suffering a period of academic unemployment because of the continuing academic job crisis."

Or, we could take for example the panic that created the Mellon Fellows program, without which, declining humanities enrollment would make, "entire academic departments an endangered species in 10 years." That was 1982. Clearly, there are complex threads here, and I don't know a lot about the 1977-1982 academic jobs panic. But I think I see a pattern.

It is possible to construct a story; in this story, humanities people expand their empire by threatening its demise, repeat, its utter nonexistence. As a good-faith gesture, Deans and Provosts give departments permission for new concentrations, then majors, then whole new departments. The exchange, I think, for this expansion/dilution of talent is a diminution of the importance of so-called pure study.

New departments -- like Cultural Studies, begat of English; or American Studies, begat of History -- then face a pressure to demonstrate the dollar-value of wealth created by their degrees; since there is no apparent academic justification for their existence, Why not major in English?, there must be a market-based one.

Tieing the existence of a department to the market is a mistake. When enrollments in your major decline, the budget declines and jobs disappear. Saying you need therefore to make your major more attractive is supply-side; it merely reinforces the justification-by-demand that doomed your major in the first place.

That's a thought anyway. Much much more to discover here, though. Peace
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Panic on the quad?

What panic? The NYT has just revealed that people who teach in the humanities are concerned that no one wants to major in the humanities. And this is more than one more round of paranoid academic turf-war: it is an existential crisis. The fields are "irrelevant," fears Delbanco of Columbia. The NYT itself says, "the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents."

I would love more insight into the threats facing the humanities, but I'm not going to get it from one paranoid academic and one reporter making things up. Is it possible that the humanities appear so easy to ax because the fruits of our labor are impossible to describe to our audience? What is it that you get from the Creative Writing MFA? Isn't cultural studies just an alloy of low-grade lit crit, art theory and 20th c. French philosophy? Seriously, these dudes look like Early Christianity.

It's not time for the humanities to rethink their relationship to the job sphere: that's my task. Employers clearly want excellent written and oral communication skills, which every English major had better have. Employers want an ability to reason, a capacity for drudgery, the ability to summarize discoveries, powers of analysis, etc. The humanities is where you get that.

What the disciplines have to reassess is whether what they're doing actually qualifies as humanities-work. Students in the humanities are leaving with no frame of reference beyond their own lifespans, no history of Europe, horrific, genuinely hilarious "communication skills." I've sat in on art classes that boiled down to nothing more than "I think that idea, it's interesting." We're at the dead end of interest; no accountant cares what you're interested in, unless you make it important to him that he be interested.

Or, you know, in other words, if you play the shit that they like, then the people would come, simple as that.
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