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Engage in the ongoing discussion of American studies by reading and sharing commentary on a current American Quarterly article. Contact the editors if you want to submit a response to an article which appeared in AQ.
The first article up for discussion will be “Hire Ed! Deconstructing the Crises in Academe” by Gregory Jay from the March 2011 issue. Penn State's Michael Berube has submitted this response.
Michael Bérubé
Penn State University
I hate to take issue with Gregory Jay’s essay, because (like all of Greg’s work) it’s so rigorous, judicious, and smart. I especially like the suggestion that the real “postmodern turn” in American higher education was not a matter of philosophical rupture but rather of a piece with the postmodern neoliberalization of the advanced economies of the developed world– and I like it because it seems to be exactly right. David Harvey to the white courtesy phone....
But I confess that I was surprised to see Greg propose, in his final paragraph, that faculty “may have to decide to increase our teaching loads if the proportion of tenurable positions relative to all academic employment is going to rise.” Since this proposal is framed as a matter of economic justice, as a way of mitigating the exploitation of adjunct labor, it may seem particularly attractive to people advocating greater workplace equity in academe. Indeed, I’ve heard many versions of it in recent years, from many quarters. So I’ll try to explain briefly why I don’t find it particularly attractive, and why you shouldn’t either.
When Greg says that the postwar reduction in teaching assignments among humanities faculty at research institutions “seems to have been largely paid for by shifting this labor to temps and teaching assistants,” he implies that if (say) French professors at Indiana University were to move from 2/2 to 3/3 next year, the working conditions of temps and teaching assistants would improve. But how? The full professor of French teaching four courses per year for $80,000 is now teaching six courses. Does Indiana now have any incentive to increase the pay, the status, and the working conditions of its non-tenure-track labor force? Or will Indiana simply offer two more sections of French, or fire the adjuncts who were teaching introductory French for $4000 per course? And if all humanities faculty increase their teaching loads at research institutions, how precisely is this arrangement supposed to benefit all the adjuncts and NTT faculty teaching elsewhere?
Still, even if increased teaching loads will not do much to combat the rampant adjunctification of academic labor, the optics of the situation, as they say in the PR department, are not good. Thousands upon thousands of worthy Ph.D.s are working for subsistence wages, and a handful of “research” faculty are enjoying historically low teaching schedules. Clearly there is a good reason to suggest that humanities faculty at research institutions teach more often. In fact, there are two: one, our work as teachers has always been more intelligible and defensible to the general public than our work as researchers; two, increased teaching loads would break down the elitist academic hierarchy in which everyone in the humanities except tenured and tenure-track professors at research institutions teaches six to ten courses per year.
A version of the second argument also motivates many critiques of tenure: tenure has been so eroded in academe that it is now the province of an elite, elitism is bad, so no one should have tenure. (See here for a spectacularly addled example of this argument.) But the first argument is more subtle and more pernicious, insofar as it accepts (and intensifies) the general undervaluation of research in the humanities. Sadly, even many advocates and supporters of the humanities participate in the undervaluation of research: when they speak of the importance of the humanities, it’s usually in terms of “appreciating” or “celebrating” great works of art and literature. Very few philanthropists and alumni are likely to say that it’s crucial to support humanities research on the grounds that Epistemology of the Closet helped destabilize oppressive gender norms. And make no mistake, this increase in teaching loads would not be campus-wide: there will be no comparable move in the sciences to improve the working conditions of adjuncts and postdocs. That’s because everyone knows that research in the sciences produces new (and patentable!) knowledge. Humanists, however, are rarely seen as producers of new knowledge, no doubt partly because the humanities (when they are appreciated or celebrated) are seen as repositories of wisdom, and obviously, there is no such thing as producing “new wisdom.”
Sigh. It is about time humanists stopped denigrating the research they do– and I’m looking at you, Mark Taylor, for your snide op-ed crack about dissertations on Duns Scotus, and you too, Frank Donoghue, for your Chronicle essay on how the humanities will do just fine if they disappear from the university. Yes, I suppose they will. But no one, save perhaps for a few independently wealthy enthusiasts, will be doing research in them.
About the rest of Greg’s conclusion– faculty taking control of “assessment,” strengthening shared governance of university budgets, and staging a long ground game– I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t think that increasing teaching loads for the subset of professors who work at research universities has any productive part to play in that long ground game.
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