Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Against Heroism
On Politically-Committed Academic Labor
by John Conley | ns 71-72
Graduate workers have enough professional organizations—what we need are unions that win gains and exert collective worker power on the job.1 Organizing graduate workers' unions that can do these things also necessitates reorganizing our relationships to our jobs, as well as the feelings, sentiments, and ideas about our work that probably seem more or less natural to many of us. Put frankly, although many grad workers may support having a union in the abstract, we should not underestimate some of the real and accumulated barriers that block the processes of unionization—not only the ones in the state legislature or in the specifics of a bargaining unit, but the ones that are reproduced daily in our common notions, feelings, and sentiments and that are increasingly woven into the very fabric of our labor as such. One such barrier is the notion of politically-committed academic labor. I contend that graduate workers can't afford—both literally and otherwise—to be radical pedagogues or politically-committed academics. I believe that graduate workers need to intentionally and collectively develop a critique of politically-committed academic labor, and that this critique is internal to unionizing and in its interest. Hardly a detour from the "real work" of organizing, the critique of politically-committed academic labor is in fact necessary for and at the same time an essential part of that very work.
It turns out that in his famous essay on ideology, Louis Althusser has something to say about all of this:
I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they 'teach' against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the 'work' the system...forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and the nourishment of this ideological representation of the School. (157)
Written in January 1969, it's not so far-fetched to imagine that Althusser has the "events of May" in mind in composing this passage, which offers a nice starting point for coming to terms with some fairly common sentiments that often are felt by graduate workers—with one important caveat, of course: today, any graduate worker knows that their teaching work maintains and nourishes the ideology of the university and reproduces existing class relations. In my experience, it usually doesn't take too much time for this kind of alienation to coalesce. It doesn't always take the same forms, but I think that very few of us think that teaching "in itself" is a radical practice. However, it does seem to me that as a result, a so-common-so-as-to-be-structural response is to work all the harder, to put all the more "heart and soul" into our teaching, to squarely recommit ourselves to researching and practicing forms of radical pedagogy, to invest ourselves in the project of teaching our students to "think outside the box" and to "read against the grain." In other words, it is precisely because we understand so well how the university reproduces all kinds of hierarchies—class or otherwise—that we so strongly commit ourselves to teaching against it.
Whether about Darfur or Dos Passos, such teaching is indeed commendable and meaningful work. But isn't it interesting that Althusser says that this is, in fact, a worse position—in other words, a more exploitative and less empowered position—to be in than those that "know not what they do"? I think that this describes a lot of us who know very well the system that we work within but believe that, if we work really, really hard, maybe we can subvert it, if only in small ways and to meager effects. It's the old "if I can even get through to one student" argument. It is precisely this notion and precisely this desire—that is, to work within the "belly of the beast," to try to effect change in the world, etc.—that compels us to work so hard, to care and invest so much in our interactions with students, and to do so much of the extra work that is increasingly compulsory for graduate student workers. In this way, politically-committed academic labor acts as a sort of ethical supplement to the pay we don't have in our wallets and the respect we don't get in our workplaces.
At issue here is the objective side of the critique of politically-committed academic labor. By misrecognizing our labor as political work, our desires to participate in the construction of a better world are captured and effectively neutralized. What is more, by inducing us to work harder—whether it be quantitatively (grading more papers more quickly, holding extra offices hours, providing more in-depth comments, etc.) or qualitatively (spending more time and energy building and maintaining affective and interpersonal relationships with students)—our power to act collectively to build a union is decreased. By this time, not only are we overworked, but our teaching has become overvalued and the highest political priority for us. It is this relationship to our work that, somewhat perversely, in fact ends up becoming a strong barrier to grad unionization rather than a conduit for it. In this way, politically-committed academic labor is thoroughly depoliticized—or, at the very least, is robbed of political efficacy in relation to our own working conditions.
Obviously, such a barrier takes slightly different forms with regard to research, writing, service work, and other forms of labor that graduate students perform with little or no formalized wage compensation—in other words, teaching is not the only way that graduate workers work, even though I focus mostly on teaching here. Let me try to explain what I mean by way of an example from the University of Minnesota. Over the last few years graduate workers there have not only tried multiple times to organize themselves formally, but have repeatedly been put in the position of having to decide whether or not to cross AFSCME picket lines in order to teach. The AFSCME strikes generated a lot of discussions among us—productive ones, I think—about how to act ethically and politically in those situations. A number of positions were taken up by our fellow workers: some refused to cross picket lines and stopped going to work; some refused to cross picket lines and moved their classes off campus; many dedicated themselves to "teaching the strike" as content in their courses, whether off campus or on; and still many others crossed the picket lines expressly in order to continue teaching and mentoring students, considering that work to be politicized in itself to the degree that it was most important not to deprive the students of the opportunity to learn. I bring all of this up not to pass judgment on which response was best or most appropriate—there were a lot of extenuating factors (like threats of getting fired)—but rather because I think that any attempt at graduate unionization may be faced with similar kinds of conundrums if they are seeking formal recognition.
At the University of Minnesota, the administration maintains that unions are set out to deprive the students of education. If and when graduate workers start acting like a union, it's reasonable to expect such discourse to be an early response from management. This is connected to the fact that, at the end of the day, management doesn't really care whether we take our classes off campus or not—and considering that they can use that opportunity to experiment with forms of "distance learning," maybe they would even be happy for us to do so! More immediately, however, is the fact that taking classes off campus traps us within a very limiting dialectic, and there's no point of escalation: if we go on to cancel classes, then we are depriving the students of what they deserve, and management says, "See? We told you—those damn unionists don't care about the university or the students, just themselves."
What is more, as the accumulating history of grad student organization tells us, gaining recognition for a graduate worker union may not be possible without organized work stoppages—and even then, winning is certainly not a slam-dunk. But graduate workers will need to be ready not to simply move classes off campus but to withhold grades, cancel classes, and otherwise collectively withhold labor. That sounds scary, but it may be true—and it's going to be a hard thing to do if we ourselves feel like we're depriving the students of their education.
Wouldn't the most radical pedagogy be to show our students that we, the workers, can exert power in the workplace? That we have better lives and work better collectively than we do as atomized individuals? That we need not be quite so enamored of power and so subjected by our jobs? This is how we need to reconfigure the concepts of radical pedagogy and politically-committed academic labor if they are to have any positive content in our struggle. To realize such lofty rhetoric demands a developed and rich level of organization. In the meantime, grad workers may need more earthly, everyday tools. I think that a strong practical component of the critique of politically-committed academic labor could be auto-reduction. Clearly our employers are not going to give us less work to do, so we're going to have to do it ourselves. In other words, we need to collectively develop ways that we can work less for the same pay—or, in what amounts to the same thing, develop ways that we can extricate ourselves from things like "student service" fees, inflated transportation costs, and other ways that our employers withhold our wages systematically. Measures such as these should be done not in place of a union but as a function of the union itself.
I say this not because I advocate doing a sloppy job, and even less in defense of some kind of slacker utopia. Though I think there are a lot of good things that come out of "going on the slack," a union probably won't be one of them. Rather, I'm thinking of ways that we can at once accelerate and take control of the collectivization of our labor. This is hard work, too—as we know all too well, one of the prime forces against us is the kind of hyper-individualization of our work, the intense competition, and all of the bad feelings that go with it. We need to be better at sharing syllabi and resources, yes, but such things need to happen as an intentional and internal effort of the process of unionization so that we can put more time into that work. Building a union is a tough, long process and we need to be clear about that—and unfortunately it isn't some kind of magically non-alienating labor, either. But I contend that we're so overworked—not only in terms of hours of the day, but emotionally and affectively as well—that it's really hard to find the time and energy for many of us to prioritize building a union, especially when we consider our work in the classroom to be so politicized. We need to help each other work less. Through auto-reduction, the critique of politically-committed academic labor depoliticizes the notion of politically-committed academic labor that is imposed on us by our jobs. This is the subjective side of the critique, and the one that we should work on developing together. Let me be clear—this critique is not identical with the process of unionization, but in my estimation it is essential to it.
Note
1. This essay is a slightly modified version of a talk given at the conference "Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value" held at the University of Minnesota on April 13, 2008. Although some of what follows may apply to other cases, I am primarily concerned with the topic of graduate worker organizing, and therefore this is addressed to graduate workers.
[return to sentence]
Work Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. 121-76.
|
