Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
What Is Criticism on Academic Labor For?
by Katie Hogan | ns 71-72
There is a new criticism of academic labor, advocating both respect for intellectual work and equitable material conditions for students and faculty. This latest strand of criticism has the potential to bring into productive dialogue critics and activists who variously emphasize economic exploitation, prioritize labor organizing, focus on intellectual and creative aspirations, and direct attention to research. With its unabashed commitment to social justice for faculty and students, who are increasingly working and studying in compromised workplaces and learning environments, criticism on academic labor holds the potential to merge a commitment to intellectual achievement with economic justice while it conveys an enlivened, ethical, and thoughtful sense of what criticism can do for people and ideas. The urgent need to theorize and organize in response to the impoverishment of higher education stems from this awareness that thoughtful education and intellectual practices are threatened and worth fighting for.
Decline, Exploitation, and Struggle
Books, articles, reports, blogs, websites, and discussion boards focusing on the dismal state of higher education have been appearing in rapid succession over the past fifteen to twenty years, with each statement attributing the current situation to decades of reduced support for solid, analytic education. Eighteen years ago Mary G. Edwards published "The Decline of the American Professoriate, 1970-1990," in which she outlined the all-too-familiar signposts: stagnant wages; the rise in contingent labor and deterioration of tenure-track positions; the feminization of the professoriate; and the subtle, yet profound, disappearance of support for intellectual work and research. Today faculty are "free" to do research; but with seven out of ten US college and university faculty in non-tenure track and part-time positions, fewer and fewer faculty have the material support to write and publish. We are witnessing a dramatic whittling away of provisions for academic energy, cultures, and workplaces. Except for a handful of superstars, very few faculty are exempt from this systemic, structural assault.
Given these vivid grievances, it is understandable that criticism on academic labor would primarily focus on unfair labor practices and economic justice. But this new criticism could also include a more explicit statement of its commitment to social justice for intellectual practices that create complex academic insights and innovative ideas. Too often, this aspect of the criticism is muted or left implied. Criticism on academic labor has the capacity to argue more directly for the value of unhurried intellectual work and resistant critical thinking in addition to issues of worker and student rights and justice. The shrinking minority of overworked tenured professors underscores the need to argue for professors', and not only students', right to learn. Faculty at research institutions increasingly experience their right to grow intellectually as hijacked by the institution's fixation with prestige and image. Faculty at teaching and service-intensive colleges and universities are experiencing extraordinary demands to keep institutions afloat while doing what needs to be done to earn tenure and promotion as well as keep abreast in their disciplines. Yet these diminishing opportunities to practice serious intellectual work are sometimes ignored or framed as less urgent than pressing economic realities.
Characterizations abound in the discourse on academic labor of tenured professors as selfish and useless individuals who could care less about students or their contingent colleagues; instead of entering the fray of labor activism, luxuriating in a world of books and articles supposedly fills the days, weeks, and years of most tenured faculty. Even if such a group portrait is accurate in some instances, I find this kind of blaming language distracting at best and anti-intellectual at worst. I also think it contributes to the increasing expectation that professors prove their worth by being superserviceable, contributing to a service speed-up that is sweeping many US campuses. My professional experience at non-elite institutions suggests that many tenured faculty face enormous pressures to "do more with less"—a phenomenon that the majority of US workers have been experiencing for years—and that many faculty are not aware of the connection between the adjunctification of the university and their deteriorating working conditions or the relationship between the misuse of contingent faculty and the decimation of genuine support for intellectual and academic culture and practices.
Intellectual Aspirations
Engaging in research and intellectual creative practices is often embroiled in the power of human ego and the lure of reward and visibility, and pretentiousness and self-interest are familiar traits among higher education workers. Hollywood films are replete with images of burned out, self-absorbed, privileged professors who clearly don't contribute much to education or scholarship. But there is also an aspect of research and creative endeavor found in higher education that, while hard to detangle from the self-interested achievement and advancement paradigm, is part of a larger project of intellectual dialogue, community, human rights, and freedom of thought and expression. Stanley Aronowitz captured this quality of the field when he proposed the idea that critics and scholars might present thinking as a useful and necessary full-time activity worthy of admiration and basic material support. Admittedly, thinking as a full-time activity is a vague concept; it's more a process than a product, often elusive and only seemingly tangible when the long endeavor of research and revision results in a new course, article, book, or other cultural/creative work. Despite the challenges of pinning down thinking as a full-time activity, given that it is often not tied to money or a product, it is nevertheless one of the central reasons that criticism on academic labor is potentially so meaningful and valuable. The right to practice intellectual work brings to mind what Robert Boice calls the process of "slowly emerging insights." Thinking as a full-time activity also hinges on actively seeking out serious critical feedback, a process that is sometimes painful, but one that is crucial for creating ideas rather than shutting them down. Only through honest critique can ideas, people, institutions, and cultures be transformed and expanded. While I agree with Cary Nelson that faculty need to "rethink our relation to ambition, achievement, competition and careerism," I suggest we might also want to consider cherishing—without embarrassment, sarcasm, or contempt—the energy and purpose of engaging in challenging intellectual and creative work. Pitting a focus on economic and political worker rights against this tradition of knowledge production is a losing strategy.
Remembering and restoring respect for intellectual traditions and practices can easily devolve into nostalgia based in an elitist idyllic past. As Andrew Ross shows in "The Mental Labor Problem," artists and academics are uniquely susceptible to allowing themselves to participate in their own exploitation, and they are routinely encouraged to see their labor in terms of an exalted, transcendent, sacrificial love. Ross' essay resonates profoundly with the vexed issue of gender, academic labor, and sacrifice. Sacrificing one's own intellectual and personal growth for the benefit of others, including the welfare of one's students, colleagues, and institutions, is particularly expected of women, and the demand is often intensified when racial, ethnic, class, and sexuality dynamics are at play. However, in the downsized service economy of higher education, the self-sacrificing professor is increasingly an expectation for the majority of faculty workers in higher education, regardless of group identity. David W. Leslie and Ronald B. Head's article on part-time faculty rights illustrates this sacrificial ideology with a telling quote from a part-time faculty member who, in an ethnographic interview session, said that teaching was so meaningful that the instructor "would work for free, but don't tell the dean!" Although Leslie and Head's article was published in 1979, the notion of mental labor as morally superior and as beyond money, power, and tough negotiating, has played a central role in the cheapening of faculty labor. Pleasure in doing intellectual academic work shouldn't mean accepting low pay, downsized contracts, or substandard working conditions. As Sharon Bird, Jacquelyn Litt, and Yong Wang assert: "[That faculty] enjoy the work [they do] is not why they are being paid for doing it" (203).
Prior to the emergence of the new strand of criticism on academic labor, critics such as Edmund Wilson and Adrienne Rich visited the issues of material conditions and intellectual culture in their work. Edmund Wilson's 1938 essay, "Marxism and Literature," is an intriguing framework for thinking about the purpose of criticism that addresses the economic and social struggles of academe. Rich's central preoccupation in all of her work, including in her poetry, is "conversations about justice, power, and what it means to be a [worker and] citizen," the very themes fueling contemporary theory and criticism on academic labor. Both critics direct an intense focus on issues of social justice and the creation of intellectual culture.
Known for his supple and complex vision of the relationship between literature and the social, Wilson rejects any fixed or simple paradigm for analyzing politics and literature. Writers produce their best work not in times of social revolution or economic crisis, but under social and economic conditions that nourish patient practice and support from what Wilson refers to as "long-enduring institutions." Wilson's essay also makes a distinction between short-range writing and long-range writing. Short-range writing is immediate, urgent, forged in the heat of the moment. He characterizes it as a form of pamphleteering and contrasts it with long-range writing, which builds from careful, thoughtful engagement with ideas, craft, and creativity in an unhurried world. Neither type of writing is set against the other; sometimes, as is the case now, the short-range immediacy of much of the discourse on academic labor is needed in the service of long-range writing projects supported by stable institutions. Literary and critical innovation can co-exist with unflinching critical analysis of labor practices and literature and criticism are not weapons but opportunities for continued exploration, clarification, and change.
Similarly, in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Why Today's Publishing World Is Reprising the Past," Jeffrey J. Williams echoes Wilson's idea when, in response to the oft-heard lament about the alleged paucity of creativity in current literary criticism and theory, he hammers home the point that intellectual and critical innovation require patronage, sustenance, and material support. Also echoing Virginia Woolf's classic essay, "A Room of One's Own," Williams speculates that the spotty support of the profession in the form of good, full-time, tenure-track jobs and money for publications, meetings, and conferences greatly affects the advancement of knowledge in literary criticism and theory. Even those who aspire to live the "life of the mind" must eat, and a starvation diet typically produces death or mere survival. A key factor in the rise of criticism that focuses on the various conditions facing faculty and students today has emerged because of what Williams calls the "pinched diet" of the humanities professoriate and the whittling away of support of long-enduring institutions.
The gradual disappearance of support for long-range academic writing projects affects the majority of those in the profession, but such changes in support structures are especially poignant for women, queers, people of color, and academics from working-class backgrounds—the very groups whose participation in higher education has been relatively short when compared to dominant groups. There are more women in the academy today than ever before, but the work many female professors do is administration-imposed service or institutional housekeeping. Law professor Marnina Angel sees this pattern in the legal field, in which academic women are funneled into nurturing work that resonates with traditional ideas of women and femininity; "legal writing and clinical jobs that are intense, one-on-one handholding students through basic courses" are largely taught by women. Similarly, in English departments, writing and introductory subjects in colleges and universities are courses overwhelmingly taught by women.
In several of Adrienne Rich's essays on education, she identifies these cultural customs and traditions that have resulted in women's uneven contributions to intellectual and creative knowledge. The expectation that women are involved in helping, assisting, serving, and guiding—meaningful and noble activities—interferes with their intellectual growth and exploration. Rich sounds a clear warning about the university's exploitation of women's socialization to perform altruism, a cultural dynamic that she says has been shrouded in silence, at the expense of women's own intellectual growth: "[T]he extent to which [higher education] has been built on the bodies and services of women—unacknowledged, unpaid, and unprotected in the main—is a subject apparently unfit for scholarly decency."
While altruism is one of the most formidable impediments to women's intellectual work, the other barrier Rich cites is the lack of affordable high-quality childcare on American campuses. Rich's insistence that women treat their intellectual work as a priority, and resist being pressed into altruistic service, is matched by her argument that campus administrators should make childcare a top priority; these issues remain relevant today.
Rich's commitments to long-range writing and to the material conditions that make it possible resonate with assertions in Wilson's essay. Like Wilson, Rich makes a direct statement supporting the significance of intellectual growth. In "Claiming an Education," she opens with an analysis of the necessity for women's studies as a discipline, but the power of this piece is not its focus on women's studies; instead, it's the essay's delineation of the specific practices one needs to adopt in order to accomplish intellectual work: the willingness to consider difficult texts and ideas and, most important, the courage to seek out criticism. All of these elements are presented as the cornerstone of intellectual work, and all of them take time and patience.
Revisiting the work of Wilson and Rich is a humble acknowledgement that we can learn from those critics who came before us. They are resources for those of us who are thinking about, and tracking, changes in academic labor. Valuing solidarity, unhurried intellectual work, and resistant critical thinking, and demonstrating an active faith and commitment to changing the institutions in which we find ourselves, Wilson and Rich have much to offer us as we resist the egregious policies and injustices that are changing, and even corroding, the profession and higher education more generally.
While criticism on academic labor is rightfully suspicious of idealizations, nostalgia, and exalted abstract language, professors don't do their jobs for economic reasons alone or solely for opportunities to rebel, protest, and organize. Reasonable compensation and worker resistance are absolutely essential, but there is a current of desire for creative and intellectual exploration and community that motivates many of us in our teaching and research and that should be cherished, not belittled or forgotten. Those faculty who are new to academe are in a precarious situation that is only aggravated by characterizations of professors as selfish and uncaring, as people more focused on their next book, article, or tenure than on the stewardship of the institution. For most professors today, finding time for practices that involve intellectual risk-taking and creativity is a daily struggle. What's needed is a clear statement that restoring economic justice also means supporting academic intellectual culture for students and faculty alike. One solution is to value intellectual and creative work openly as the right of all faculty and students, regardless of the classification of their institution or their identity status.
|
