Been having a bit of back and forth with Carl on this post over at his, about academic labor and unionization and so on. Not quite sure how it relates but I get the sense there’s a tie to academic work being really stressful and all that, but it also being a good job as jobs go. I keep having the feeling I’m talking past a point he’s making, or maybe I’m just not getting something - very likely, I’m really tired. I’m taking a deep breath and backing off on that one for now, over there. Instead, this post.
I just read over this earlier post of Carl’s and there’s much I agree with. I should have read that sooner.
Carl speaks of a “consensus (…) that academic work is hard, poorly paid, and underappreciated.” He agrees with some of this - the work is hard sometimes, for instance - but says that this misses an important point or points. For one thing, most work is hard. Most work is a lot harder than academic work. All of that speaks to me.
It particularly speaks to me when Carl says that “praise or recognition (…) is really beside the point.”
I agree with this completely. There’s an element to some academic complaints which seem to me to be about wounded pride and anxiety about status. Like, “I should be more important than I am!” or something.
Carl is also right that “there are kinds of work that seem more privileged or desirable than others, where the ordinariness of work is (occasionally) enhanced by an inherent feeling of fulfillment and accomplishment and value.”
I don’t agree with Carl when he calls this “unalienated labor,” I don’t think that’s what Marx meant by alienation but I do think Carl is right on two important points. One, “this work is a pretty sweet deal” when compared with a lot of other work. He’s right that “it’s always a bad argument to try to claim sympathy for privileged work. It’s bad because it’s a quick way to get people who understand work to be an ordinary feature of human life, like university administrators, to stop taking you seriously.”
I will say, I work really hard and it’s stressful and puts a burden on my marriage and I make a low enough wage that I qualify for food stamps, and I definitely have many a day when I wish I hadn’t taken the career path I did that led me back to graduate school. Admission of that all of that is really important to me and I think my employer and the industry I work in are unjust for doing this to so many people. The thing is, this too is an ordinary injustice. I mean, I feel it more strongly because it effects me. But it’s not *more unjust* because it effects me. I don’t have a “people like me shouldn’t be treated this way” kind of argument, I have a “people shouldn’t be treated this way” kind of argument (and in trying to talk union with other people I know I don’t go that route either, I go more of a “tell me, what’s it like living like that?” kind of route, in the hope to get people agitated about their issues); changing this won’t be a matter of moral right but collective power. But I digress.
Second important point Carl makes - or that I got out of what he said, I think he may disagree with me on some of this - is that there are aspects to academic labor that are in themselves rewarding to the people involved in them. Or, put differently, a lot of academic claims to importance are really about demands for the right to do things that the people making those demands want to do. Research? That’s about people who like to read and write getting to read and write. Academic freedom? That’s about people who like to teach on certain subjects getting teach on those subjects. To put this yet another way, I think a lot of demands - or gripes that are not yet formulated into grievances - that academics have are along the lines of demands by other workers for longer paid vacations. It’s a legitimate demand but one that doesn’t help other people and isn’t a social good. I think there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors done by academic workers sometimes to talk as if all of our demands are good for society. That’s just not true. A lot of our demands are things that would be good for us. I still think that more power for the people who do the bulk of teaching might be better for society than otherwise (assuming two things, that the people doing teaching care about the people they teach and that teaching is good for society - the first is I think empirically demonstrable, the second I think is actually pretty questionable); I’ve made a parallel elsewhere to this re: how nurses can advocate better for patients if the nurses have more power in hospitals (this too I think is empirically demonstrable). This does not mean, however that every effect of that power or every goal toward which that power would be exercised would be good for society. Again, like vacation time.
Final thing, I think clarity and honest on this is tremendously important. One of my gripes regarding edu-factory was a slippage I felt was there, from academic workers to “the university,” as if the university was only composed of academics. That is pernicious, as is academic workers’ occasional tendency to complain about their own condition in such a way that acts like academics have more right to good things and fails to notice that many others’ have it much, much worse. (For instance, if I rubbed a lamp in the library and a genie appeared and said “I’m not very powerful so you can only make limited types of wishes and they have to apply to the university where you work” I’d probably wish first for higher pay for graduate students in the humanities and social sciences without cuts anywhere else [selfish, I know], then higher pay for the many non-academic workers particularly those on the lower end [my university can be a pretty vicious union buster and is worse yet when it comes to non-unionized employees other than faculty], followed by dramatic tuition cuts.)
Only tangentially related - along similar lines I’ve never liked academic claims to political importance, or invocations thereof along the lines of public intellectuals or invocations of Gramsci to make claims that academics’ failures are this big thing that’s hampering the movement or whatever. I mean, I love to read Marx, I love to teach Marx. I don’t think those things are political. They *can* be. A reading group with comrades dedicated to social change? Political (maybe). A college course on Marx? Not so much. Put another way, I think academic critical and radical theory and so on is more an effect of social struggle than an actor or facilitator thereof. I think this parallels other forms of cultural production. I don’t know that legal theory makes for better lawyers. I don’t know that cultural studies theorizing of popular music improves pop music. Likewise I don’t know that academic theorizing of radical social movements improves those movements. Maybe. But it’s contextual. (I have different views on stuff that’s internal to movements, like theoretical work produced by the Sojourner Truth Organization. I recognized that I’m making too neat a distinction between academic and movement knowledge production; I think that’s better than failing to make a distinction at all.)
EDIT: Another thought I had on this while walking my dog (and why is it that the only time I have semi-interesting thoughts seems to be when I’m doing something else?) is that I think there’s a tension that academic workers negotiate in talking about their jobs. That is, we often work for institutions that make larger sorts of claims than some other workplaces. Our work isn’t just a job, it’s supposed to be good for the world or at least for the people we work with in some way (work on?) - students, perhaps the people who read academic writing - and in a way that’s not reducible to the tastes of those people. Leaving aside whether or not this is true (I’m really conflicted about that), I think a lot of people have an impulse to appeal to the statements of values made by our academic employers, to say something like “you claim to believe these high minded values and yet you do these other things that aren’t in keeping with those values.” I think that’s understandable and can even be useful, but it can also easily turn into a claim about academics having a greater right to good things, in a way that fails to notice that a great many people other than academics are important for making universities do the things they do (for instance, where I work the university has been aggressive in busting the unions of the non-academic workers [the academic workers aren’t organized], and keeping wages down across the board including paying student workers - many of whom are contributing a lot to their own support and tuition costs - around minimum wage for jobs that are necessary functions - oftentimes jobs that used to be unionized jobs that paid somewhat closer to a livable wage).
Hey Nate, I want to agree with you in detail but it’s finals time and I’m deathmarching through essays and journals. I mean, er, um, I’m enjoying a lively human relationship with my students to the benefit of the whole species. So for now I’ll just agree with you in general and bookmark a thought about Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals. Cheers!
Comment by Carl — December 11, 2008 @ 11:16 pm
“I’m enjoying a lively human relationship with my students to the benefit of the whole species.”
Dude this made me laugh at a moment when I could really use one. Thanks a ton.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 11, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
Oh, thanks for the links and noting that earlier post. It’s much closer to what I actually think than the second one, which is more of a think-piece, enhanced fortunately by the quality of the commentary.
Comment by Carl — December 11, 2008 @ 11:21 pm
I know, walking the dog really gets me down too. Take care. C
Comment by Carl — December 11, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
I can’t comment too much on your discussion about labor, alienation and academia, but I will add a few conclusions that I’ve come to around this…
As we know, college and higher education is largely training for skilled and white collar labor. I always refer back to these great readings I had for a sociology of education class with Bolwes/Gintis (sp?) and Bordieu (sp?). These helped explain a lot of things for me that I grappled with. What they said was that largely college is a process of enculturalization/socialization that prepared participants to join certain status groups in society (ie professionals) and that much of the particular knowledge they ‘learned’ was largely tangential or useless to the skills and knowledge they wound up using in the job world. Related to this, what I’ve seen on my own is that college is largely about preparing you for jobs/social status’ where you ‘care’ or ‘believe in’ whatever it is you are doing and that part of this is getting you to believe in certain values. These require you to work in a very much self-directed manner, where you understand the mission/goals/tasks of an institution and are expected to execute them largely independent of oversight, instead you report back and are evaluated in a very individualized way. (I think connections could be drawn to the concept of a coordinator class here, though I know Nate might throw a very heavy ‘Das Kapital’ hardcover at me for saying it). This is in contrast to most working class manual/blue collar jobs where they don’t expect you to believe in anything, just to do your work and largely shut up. Does this make sense?
So being a radical academic seems like such a hard proposition because you are expected to first follow the rigorous hoops getting degrees and learning this kind of individualized discipline via professors and then you are expected to replicate the whole process. At the whole time you are critical of what the real goals and actual practices of the whole institution. You are stuck in this predicament of doing the work to ‘believe in it’ but not really ‘believing it’ and being conscious of the larger social processes at work. I think these ideas could be developed more, but in short- being in the academy and being a radical and an academic seems like quagmire of sorts. And I think this has a lot to do with the crux of what sucks about academic work.
Comment by Adam W. — December 11, 2008 @ 11:28 pm
Hey Nate, I liked your post a lot. It reminded me of your writing on militant research. What do you think about academics who try to work with movements, i.e., activist/participatory research? (e.g., Richa Nagar who works with a movement in India, and wrote a book collectively with some of the movement members). I agree with you that we need to make a distinction between academic work and movement work, but I think we need to take our normative evaluation of that distinction more seriously. If most academic work is useless to movements and tends to perpetuate the unjust education system, then don’t we have an ethical responsibility to either: a) get out of the academy and devote our work fully to a revolutionary movement, or b) remain in the academy and ONLY do work that is written for such movements? And along with (b), if we wanted to sustain such projects, we would need to create the conditions for such work to be valued in the academy (e.g., in order to make such work count for hiring and tenure requirements, working to increase the prestige of journals that publish such militant movement work, and creating practices of valuing such political participation as equally or more important than teaching and research). This project might be something like what Nathan C. called ‘the insurgent university.’ I totally agree with your complaints about academics complaining about their jobs, and so this is my constructive response for how we could work on creating some alternative type of university (or destroying ‘the university’ as such and integrating processes of ‘higher education’ throughout all of life).
Comment by Eli — December 12, 2008 @ 1:30 am
hi friends,
Adam, we’re on the same page here. If you find the reading list for that class I’d love to see it.
Carl, I love walking my dog actually. That seems to be one of the only times anymore that I think anything worth thinking. Sadly.
Eli, Thanks for the kind words. I guess it depends on what “getting out” means. I’d say that we should get out of the academy, in terms of where we do our movement work. Or we do our movement in the academy as a workplace, rather than as the academy. I don’t know that getting out of the academy in terms of where we work is all that feasible, at least not for some people.
To put it another way, I’m very skeptical about academic work as having useful political contributions to make. I’m sure there are examples here and there, but over all I’m pessimistic. I think academics who have radical political views are in a situation a lot like anyone else with radical political views - the practice following from those views very rarely involves doing the work that one gets paid to do. I think it’s also really hard to tell the difference between academics who make a living by doing work which is beneficial for movements and academics who make a living off of movements - and I think examples of the former likely involve a higher quantity of the latter than a lot of us might be comfortable to admit.
I’d love to be wrong on this though!
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 12, 2008 @ 1:58 am
Note to self: roundup of some prior posts on this. Really must get my tags updated but I can’t be bothered. Might help me repeat myself less though. I’m like Mr. Reinvent The Wheel sometimes. Bit disconcerting. I’m often like “ooh I just thought of this” then later like “oh, I had already thought of it.”
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/05/16/does-my-academic-work-connect-to-my-political-work/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/04/12/do-people-think-theyre-accomplishing/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/05/09/do-you-mean-irrelevance/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/04/23/is-the-difference-between-teachers-and-janitors/
Comment by Nate — December 12, 2008 @ 2:05 am
Additional thoughts…
1. I cleaned my apartment today for the first time since thanksgiving, I can’t remember the date. I didn’t clean everything - like mopping and stuff - but I gave it a really thorough tidying. Something struck me. I have yet to do anything meaningful on the research front, so I couldn’t argue that I make a meaningful contribution (bracketing any questions about the degree that academics do so) by research and writing, even if I wanted to. I do teach a fair bit. Presumably the classes I take are supposed to contribute in some way to my teaching. I do have a desk at work but it’s not a sufficient workspace. Part of the clutter in my apartment is routinely related to classes I’m taking, stuff I’m teaching, and research stuff. To the degree that any of this matters for how I act in my capacity as an employee of the university, and to the degree that anything I do matters in a larger social sense (such that it’s a useful activity; I don’t know that it is but presumably the assumption that it is makes up part of why faculty get offices and access to research materials and so on), I effectively subsidize a portion of the activities of the university. Put another way, the use of graduate employees and adjuncts in such a way that we get minimal resource involves a privatization of costs for things which are regarded (when it comes to faculty) as public/collective. Man that sucks.
2. One of the things that I think muddies the waters in conversations like these is lack of sufficient detail particularly regarding differences between institutions and differences among the conditions in different workplaces in the industry (across institutions and in any given institution, like comparing different departments). There are definitely trends and common elements but there’s also tremendous variation. The variation makes it harder to say “we” and to appeal to common experience
Comment by Nate — December 14, 2008 @ 11:44 pm