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...

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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Revenge Via GoogleEarth

(photo: Wally Herger (R-CA) with a local beauty, as it were.) All blessings upon GoogleEarth's Congressional Districts layer for making sweet the meet assignation of blame...

Here are all the House Republicans whose districts contain MSAs with unemployment higher than 10 percent. Note the multiple nominations for California's Herger and Radanovich, and for New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo:

Connie Mack IV, FL-14, Fort Myers FL, 10% unemployment

Fred Upton, MI-6, Benton Harbor MI, 10.1%

Cliff Stearns, FL-6, Ocala FL, 10.1%

Ken Calvert, CA-44, Riverside-San Bernardino CA, 10.1%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Chico CA, 10.3%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, Vineland NJ, 10.4%

Adam Putnam, FL-12, Bradley FL, 10.5%

Thaddeus McCotter, MI-11, Livonia MI, 10.6%

Patrick T. McHenry, NC-10, Lenoir NC, 10.9%

Nathan Deal, GA-9, Dalton GA, 11.2

Greg Walden, OR-2, Bend OR, 11.3

Peter Hoekstra, MI-2, Muskegon MI, 11.5%

Harry Brown, SC-1, Myrtle Beach SC, 11.5%

Jon Mica, FL-7, Palm Coast FL, 11.7%

Kevin McCarthy, CA-22, Bakersfield CA, 11.8%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Madera CA, 11.9%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Redding CA, 12.2%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, OCean City NJ, 12.4%

Don Manzullo, IL-16, Rockford IL, 12.5%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Fresno CA, 13.2%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Modesto CA, 13.9%

Devin Nunes, CA-21, Visalia CA, 14.3%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Yuba City CA, 14.9%

You may, dear reader, assign asterisks, forgiving those Congressmen whose districts are historically depressed (Bakersfield), or which are beachfront communities during winter (Vineland, Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers), or which are economically OK until they get lumped into the MSA of a big derelict city (Livonia-Detroit-Warren).

I of course choose not to issue exceptions. The MSA is a great indicator of city fabric. To isolate statistically Narberth from Philadelphia would be to ignore the real economic ties between the poor city and its rich suburb. Also, as to beaches and other exceptionally depressed zones, you'd think apathy toward his constituents' employment prospects would get a guy fired, period.

Make the dream real...
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No Title, Just Revenge Via Mathematics

Quick backfill: the other day I wondered how Eric Cantor got House Republicans, some of whom must come from depressed districts, to vote in lockstep against the stimulus. I wondered, specifically, whose would be the heads to roll in 2010.

An Ohio blogger has a list of local 'Pubs who voted nay, along with the December 2008 county figures for each. So the Ohio Up Against the Wall List runs as follows, with a national average unemployment rate of 7.1, the winners are:

Robert Latta, 9.8

Steven LaTourette, 9.4

Jean Schmidt, 9.0

Jim Jordan, 8.5

...with special mention to the most outspoken Ohioan, Minority Leader John Boehner, whose district sports a national-average-beating 7.7 percent unemployment rate. Congratulations, Mr. Leader!

I'm slowly processing names and numbers for the National Up Against the Wall list, using the available numbers from BLS, broken down by MSA instead of county. By and large, it appears safe for Republicans to oppose the stimulus. Think for a second about the states conservative Republicans come from now. Utah, Idaho, Wyoming -- these places all have terrific employment rates, 97 or 98 percent.

But the numbers don't lie. And I don't care what your Cook PVI rating is. Come 2010, we will ice you. That means you:

Wally Herger, California-2, 14.9% unemployment.

Devin Nunes, California-21, 14.2%

George Radanovich, California-19, 13.6%,

et alia. You are Republicans from districts with higher unemployment than Detroit. You have something like 21 percent underemployment. To sit about like the Pasha in grand decline, while your people agitate, this is the peak of foolishness...

Just a warning. Republicans, don't be a statistic...