How The University Works

Frank Donoghue argues that  professors of the humanities have already “gone too far to rescue themselves.”

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11-13. In attendance will be plenty of Minnesota folks, like Paula Rabinowitz and Lisa Disch as well as a great lineup from GSOC-UAW (who have a new book out regarding the landmark strike of graduate employees at NYU), David Downing, Dick Ohmann, Jeff Williams, and many others.

Also in attendance will be Frank Donoghue from Ohio State, whose new book The Last Professors portrays the swift demise of the tenurable minority in the permatemped disciplines, arguing that with respect to silent acquiescence to casualization, “professors of the humanities have already gone too far to rescue themselves.”

This is a vigorous, approachable, and often angry book that seeks to hold the tenurable minority responsible for the steady flowering of multiple tiers of labor—the “new majority” serving contingently as well as graduate employees. To that end, he offers a trenchant critique of the communications of disciplinary associations and graduate program advisors that tend to paint the graduate-employee-as-disposable-worker as the victims of their own bad choices, bad preparation, or bad timing “on the market.” As a result, the relentless “job-market” propaganda and pseudo-knowledge produces a graduate-student subjectivity that willingly self-fashions as a commodity:

This take-charge, self-help approach is perfectly pitched to an audience of job-seekers who have survived graduate school and earned the Ph.D., and who cannot bring themselves to admit that the academic labor system is rigged against them. Instead, they deny it, or, more accurately, they don’t believe that the system will personally victimize them. If they fail, it is because they were “underprepared.” Ideally, they believe that their personal merit and thorough preparation will override the workings of the ‘market.’ … If you believe that success or failure is largely up to you, the job search itself becomes an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit. (40)

Donoghue goes on to note that the intensified world of competition hardly ends with the job search but continues throughout the life cycle of the tenured minority, noting the sheer unsustainability of speed-up at this level (and, one might add, at wages often much lower than those of nurses, bartenders, and police officers).

The one caveat I’ll raise with Frank this weekend regards the general probem of using “vanishing” tropes. As many have observed, the “vanishing Indian” didn’t actually disappear, but moved to degraded circumstances with a limited purchase on the public sphere. We might say the same for the faculty.

Since future higher education won’t be “professorless,” but filled with faculty—research professors of retail marketing, distinguished chairs in business ethics, but $1000-per-course lecturers in Homer—there will remain opportunities for resistance, for political action, especially by way of activist unions of the faculty serving contingently, including those faculty who serve contingently as graduate employees.

This is the argument of The University Against Itself, the GSOC-NYU collection just released by Temple University Press: corporatization is neither inevitable nor impersonal. It is a matter of human, political, reality that we can make or unmake as we choose–if we choose.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the importance of Jeff Williams’ mantra to “Teach the University,” and perhaps the day after, I’ll say something about my presentation, Extreme Work-Study.

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