Return-Path: list-relay@UCSD.EDU Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 20:46:46 -0400 (EDT) From: thomas conroy Subject: capitalism, academia and the PhD job market To: SOCGRAD@UCSD.EDU I've just come across an interesting article written by Cary Nelson, a cultural studies scholar, called "Lessons from the job wars: Late capitalism arrives on campus." It's similar, in a lot of ways, to TR Young's recent post, on the "golden age" of sociology. Nelson's piece is from Social Text 44, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall/Winter 1995 Nelson's argument, like Young's, is, essentially, that higher education - and in particular, the humanities and social sciences - is subject to a complex of economic, social, and political forces. Nelson is not optimistic that "the brutal job market in academia" - subject as it is to a transformation of the American economy - will get better anytime soon. Indeed, he paints a completely gloomy scenario; he writes Over the next decade we are likely to see a gradual increase in the percentage of part-time and fixed-term college teachers, a decrease in the percentage of tenured and tenure track employees, increased teaching loads, and a notable drop in salaries for beginning faculty in some markets. With many college teachers looking more and more like migrant factory labor - lacking health benefits, job security, retirement funds, and any influence over either their employment conditions or the goals of the institutions they work for - the ideology of professionalism seems increasingly ludicrous. While Nelson sees the overproduction of Ph.D.s as partly to blame, he also looks at cultural, economic and political factors and the conservative climate of the past 15 - 20 years, - including the attacks on public education, the cultural right's attacks on "tenured radicals," Thatcherism, racism, attacks on labor, and a lost public mandate for the liberal arts, among other things. Thus, a combination of diminished public support and an overproduction of Ph.D.s help to explain what's going on. Nelson suggests, for those of us soon to enter to job market (and he is sincerely sympathetic toward our plight), the need to get published; (specifically, he says "you need a book to get a job" but this may be a bit discipline, or institution-specific; I take his advice to be a bit more general, and figure publishing can take the form of articles in addition to/instead of a book) however, he also points to the constraints - such as being hired as a low wage lecturer - which make publishing difficult. Ultimately, he is suggesting that we need more leadership and advocacy - by senior faculty, and professional organizations (as an English professor, he singles out the MLA, but one could probably point to the ASA, and other such professional organizations, and call for the same sorts of things; what's needed is a bit more equity and fairness, given the structurally diminished opportunities faced by current apprentice scholars and the potential - which Nelson documents - for overly exploited teaching labor and abusive hiring practices (he cites an instance in which a candidate from his institution was sent a dinner bill, after she had gone to dinner with a Dean during a job search; the Dean wanted her to foot the bill for herself and for him) . Well, there's a bit more in this article, but these are some of the main points. However, let me end with one more quote Thus, real change, if it is to come, may also require mass action from below. Given the low priority most tenured faculty give to addressing our economic problems or confronting graduate student exploitation, it would be a mistake to rely on them. It is one thing to educate tenured faculty and put pressure on them, quite another to depend on them for either solutions or action. Thus I believe it is imperative for the unemployed to rise up and either transform the existing structures of professional disciplanary organizations or pull them down. Building strong organizations for job seekers and planning street theater and perhaps civil disobediance at annual meetings might be places to start. Even if the more disruptive of these actions are not taken - since few people on the market, understandibly enough, wish to risk their chance for a job by disrupting an annual convention - there is real educational value in debating the advisability of these sorts of direct actions. The threat to intervene in talks and cocktail parties could win concessions and help to awaken faculty to conditions they now choose to ignore. (Similarly, serious efforts to unionize graduate students on a campus can win improved working conditions long before the unions themselves are fromally recognized.) In any case, a sympathetic MLA or AHA or APA president might well, for example, be happy to grant time for a brief but effective symbolic intervention at a public event. Such a project might more easily gain faculty support. If we do not begin discussing such options, we will never know what they are. Meanwhile, those who no longer have anything to lose might ask how they can work together to awaken the organizations that have abandoned them. At the very least it is time for job seekers to work together to explore what collective power they may have; choosing whether to exercise it is a separate issue. At present, disciplanary organizations apparently consider job seekers a powerless, temporary, and generally irrelevant constituency. they will either win jobs and acquire different interests or they will give up and disappear. National officers consider it counterproductive to risk alienating permanent members who pay full dues. Moral suasion along apparently will not drive these organizations to do anything to inconvenience or discomfort permanent members. These seem to be the only explanations for the extraordinary and consistent resistance disciplanary organizations display toward even the most modest changes in their practices - such as refusing to permit member departments to require writing samples and dossiers with initial applications. The perceived power relations have to be altered. Job seekers have to become a constituency to be reckoned with, a constituency dangerous to ignore. There is no other option.