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Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts

My Campus, Like Your Campus, Is Probably Racist

Monday, November 16, 2015 0 comments
UPDATE: Dominican Star article on the protests. Administration has been speaking out in solidarity with the students and we'll see what happens. Meeting today at 8:30 of Faculty to discuss actions.

Last week African-American students at Dominican University protested racism on campus. Here are two videos. The first is a short protest in the cafeteria. The second is long and outside the office of our President. Both videos are shared with permission of one of the protest organizers.





So what are the issues on our campus? That's a bit complicated. We've had several incidents of racist graffiti in dorms and at least one racist epithet uttered on campus by one student to another in a public space. These have been scattered over the years (and were well publicized on campus in both our student media and official condemnatory statements from administration). Students also speak of micro-aggressions in the classroom, from faculty, although I don't have permission to share these details. I expect in the week to come to have more information, hopefully a statement with demands detailing issues and demanding change. I promise to share them as appropriate, always mindful of the students' right to control their own narrative. I'm not a disinterested journalist here, but a white male tenured faculty member.

The protests came as a shock to some of my colleagues, judging from comments on social media, and even more so to alumni who viewed Dominican as a safe, nurturing, space. We are a relationship-centered university. We form close bonds among students, between students and faculty/staff, and are proud of our community. We are, or will be soon, a majority Hispanic institution, with 65% of this year's first-year class Latina/o. Our ties in the Chicago Latina/o community run deep (as I wrote about in this piece on our president's leadership on immigration reform). We also proud of our commitment to social justice. To be told of a campus climate of racism jars against our sense of self and mission.

It's also certainly true. There's no reason to question the lived experience of others, especially students taking the risk to protest publicly. Moreover, Dominican, like all institutions, partakes of the hierarchies of the society in which it exists. There is no ivory tower. Racism permeates Chicago, Illinois, and America (and beyond). Why should Dominican be exempt? Moreover, to acknowledge its truth does not erase the good things, the real change that our students undergo as a result of their education here, or the intense efforts of faculty and staff to make our campus safe, inclusive, and welcoming. Structural change is hard!

I take these protests as a moment to self-examine, first of all. I know my values and I know how I want to behave. But I, too, partake of the hierarchies in which I live. The pernicious nature of micro-aggressions is that the aggressor can be fully ignorant of his or her actions and be fully of good will, yet still turn a campus into a hostile space.

The inequalities run deep. Here are two recent pieces on structural racism in American universities, both written by African-American women with PhDs. Stacy Patton, for Dame Magazine, writes about the ways that American colleges and universities were never designed with racial equality in mind.
The irony is that many predominantly White colleges and universities appear to have the signs of progressive campus cultures with healthy race relations, especially in comparison to their 1950s predecessors...The problem is that they are signs of an alleged commitment that is rarely realized, and they give the false, and dangerous, impression that race relations on campus are much better than they really are. It is no wonder that so many universities lack even the basic data on faculty diversity or a plan to address systemic racism (much less define it). 
Tressie McMillan Cottom, in The Atlantic, writes:
Given the history of racism, wealth, and institution building on which all U.S. universities are constructed, the debate about Calhoun is specific but not unique. It may also be missing a larger point about the relationship between memory and politics. The legacy of racism is not just carved into the facades of university buildings; it is found in the persistence of inherited privilege that shapes the composition of the curriculum, the student body, and the faculty.
These things are true at Dominican University, for all its lack of fame and money. It's in a fantastically wealthy mostly white suburb of Chicago (River Forest), surrounded by West Chicago (Austin neighborhood), the African-American suburb of Maywood, and the heavily-Latin suburb of Melrose Park. Our buildings are gorgeous and gothic. As the forest preserve to our west adopts the fall colors, the campus glows in the late afternoon with reflected sunlight. We should not be surprised with our African American students articulate ways in which this environment is less than perfect for them.

I am grateful to these students for speaking out and for letting me share these videos. More to come.

Conferences and Cost for the Precariat

Thursday, May 7, 2015 0 comments
Yesterday at the Chronicle of Higher Education, I had a new piece defending academic conferences. I talk about the kinds of benefits I've seen from conferences. I critique a recent New York Times piece that argues the conference is a boondoggle that nevertheless fills the author with ennui. First, let me share Carrie Schroeder's tweet (by permission), then explore the an aspect I left out of my CHE piece (I only had 1000 words) - cost - and talk about it a little more.

Conferences are expensive. If, indeed, they are necessary and important as I argue in my CHE piece, then we have to be concerned about the way those expenses fall most heavily on adjuncts, graduate students, and people at low-paying jobs without adequate conference funding. I have a low-paying job in comparison to other tenure-stream faculty, but we happen to have excellent conference funding, and it's made all the different in my career. I know most people aren't so lucky.

I have written repeatedly about the need to strip the hiring fair components out of academic conferences, and that at least would help remove some mandatory costs from the process of seeking academic work. But if conferences matter for scholarship and growth, as I argue, then that's not enough. We also have to work as hard as possible to keep costs low or even zero for people who have the least money.

Here are three steps:

First - lower fees for adjuncts, independent scholars, and graduate students (EDIT - And low-compensated NTT folks like many post-docs). Many conferences do that already. Here's a petition asking conferences to do lower fees. Consult your particular scholarly organizations and make sure that they have an appropriate fee range, zeroing out costs as much as possible for those who can least afford it.

At Midwest Medieval History Conference, which I ran last fall and of which am now president, we lowered costs for adjuncts, grad students, and independent scholars, and gave a $150 stipend to our graduate student presenters. That, of course, has financial implications for the group and probably bumped everyone else's fees up about 5$. I'm comfortable paying that extra 5$.

Second - Valorize things that replicate the function of conferences (sharing work, getting feedback, networking) but that don't require physical travel. Organizing and hosting a serious ongoing online discussion on Twitter (or wherever) about academic issues is certainly as important a work as organizing a panel in meatspace. Moreover, sharing works in progress and receiving feedback can be done virtually. I am, obviously, a defender of the conference, but let's make sure that if people find other, more affordable, ways to replicate their function, we treat them as "real."

Third - I think it's vital that when people do go to conferences, their experiences are meaningful. The vast majority of responses to my questions spoke positively of conferences, talking about how important it was - whatever stage or status my interlocutors had - to engage with scholarly community. The few dissenting voices, though, spoke of hierarchy. They felt ignored and alienated, isolated from the conversational and scholarly centers in the cliques, and not provided with the kind of connections that I talk about as so important in my Chronicle piece.

That's a real problem, especially if one is spending out of pocket to attend the conference, hoping to gain feedback and network. I think it's vital for conference organizers to be intentional about this sort of thing and for people at the top of the hierarchy to go out of their way to talk to grad students, adjuncts, and the broader precariat.

This is also why small conferences matter to me much more than big ones. An all-plenary conference of 50 people provides me with vastly more new connections and exposures to new ideas than a conference with 5000 people and 20 competing concurrent tracks of sessions. When we're all spending a few days working together, sharing coffee breaks, with a finite group of people, it tends to erode social hierarchy. Or at least it can. We can all be more intentional about making sure that conference experiences are meaningful for everyone who attends.

The Academic Conference - A Defense

Tuesday, May 5, 2015 0 comments
Yesterday a professor at Princeton saw fit to ask in the New York Times "What is the purpose of the conference?" She meant is as a setup for a rant about how boring they are all are, writing:
If everyone is content with the conference as a legitimate custom, why do post-conference sentiments typically range from disappointment to total rage, always expressed in hushed tones?
Yes, sometimes papers are boring and people ask bad questions. I loved Mallory Ortberg's piece "Every Question in Every Q&A Session Ever," which makes some of the same points as this NYT piece and is, in my opinion, much funnier (Ortberg is one of my favorite comedy writers online).

I'm going to say more about this NYT piece later, but let me ask you this.

1. Do you leave a conference typically filled with disappointment to total rage? 

I never have. Rage, really? Sometimes the papers are better than other, but I always leave conferences ready to work, to be a scholar.

2. Are most questions, in your experience, self-aggrandizing or distracted mutterings? 

In my experience, I think something like 98% of all questions are good ones. In fact, I am hard pressed right now to remember a bad one (I do remember bad papers, but they are by far the tiny minority).

But that's just my experience. Maybe I've lived a charmed life. What about you? Rage?


Academics Talk About Money

Wednesday, March 25, 2015 0 comments
Recently, I've seen a positive trend - Academics talking bluntly about money.

Talking about money doesn't besmirch intellectual activity; rather, being paid fairly enables more and better intellectual activity.

We exist in a profession in which talking about money is gauche. We're supposed to work because we love it (read this essay on the exploitation built into the concept of "do what you love") and, of course, our institutions' financial structures positions tend to be secretive and haphazard.

I believe that silence about money keeps academics from thinking of their work as work. Wanting to be paid fairly for our work is not betraying a higher intellectual calling; rather, being paid fairly is what enables us to pursue our callings.

Here are some recent pieces on this theme. I don't agree with everything said in all of them, but I'm thrilled the conversation is happening:

The conversation is being driven, appropriately, by people writing about the non-tenure-track and alt-academic careers. They have no choice but to think explicitly about finances, but are still part of a culture that discourages it. That's why we, as a profession, are so fortunate to have such outstanding alt-academic and post-academic writers.

I start with excellent column by Katie Rose Guest Pryal​ (one of my absolutely favorite Chronicle writers) on "the university as a client" for "freelance academics." Pryal writes:
It begins with a shift of mindset—from that of employee to that of freelancer. As a freelancer, your institution is just one of your many clients. That means you need to spend your extra time and energy on projects that earn you money and respect outside of one particular institution. 
I love the "one of many clients" language for the freelance academic. The relationship may be different for the full-time professor, in that we may have fewer clients, but even so, we can think like a savvy freelancer and benefit from it, as discussed in this next piece.

Pryal's call was taken up in another Chronicle piece (not by me) on marketing yourself as a freelancer while a tenured professor. The author, a humanities professor writing under the pseudonym "Sam Johnson," talks about the tenured entrepreneur.
Here’s the line in [Pryal's] essay that really caught my eye: "If you are a tenure-track professor … and you’ve noticed that higher education might not be able to sustain you either, then I’m also talking to you."
I came to that exact realization a few years ago, after receiving my last promotion and struggling through several years without so much as a cost-of-living raise. The resulting epiphany has changed the way I look at my work, revitalized my career, and improved my life immeasurably.
Once Johnson realized that their skills - "teaching, training, speaking, writing, editing" - had monetary value, marketing followed, then significant income. The piece writes about making the leap both conceptually and pragmatically, including how one draws boundaries between oneself and one's main employer.

Meanwhile, "The Tenured Radical" wrote a blog post called "How we make money from books." She seems to be responding to debates about how stringently to fight for a bigger advance/royalties from academic publishers. Her argument is - don't. Academic book publishing is structurally designed not to make money for authors in almost all instances (not textbooks), but she's not saying we should write for love. Rather, books make us money in other ways - i.e. getting jobs, speaking fees, etc. What I like about this piece is that the basic premise - money matters - isn't in dispute. The question is how to maximize one's returns, and that's a fine subject for debate.

One problem in academia is that we valorize certain kinds of money making activities and not others. Clearly, the pseudonymous Chronicle author is concerned that their outside activities might violate a contractual position on secondary employment, even as their wages stagnate and expenses mount. Or maybe, they just don't want to get criticized for "selling out." Here's my advice to artists and intellectuals - sell out. You'll do better art when your bills are paid.

And it's not confined to academia - writers of all types have been posting essays on getting paid. I think it's health. Here's Jim Hines, an SFF novelist, posts his writing income every year. Ann Bauer, at Salon, talked about the way her writing is supported by her husband's salary and why it's essential to be open about that. "Who pays writers" is an anonymous crowd-sourced list of rates from Scratch Magazine. There are others, but that's a good sampling of the kind of non-academic writing on money that's out there.

I am a freelance journalist. It took me ages - dozens of essays - to embrace the word freelance, because freelance suggested that I am writing for the money.

I am not writing for money. If I were writing for money, though, that would be fine, as we could use the money. I could recite long list of unimpeachable expenses relating to child and elder care, but I won't, because frankly if I were writing to make money to make car payments on my HumVee, that would be fine too (seriously people, I do not have a HumVee. I drive a 1997 minivan with 200K miles on it).

I started writing because I thought I had some things to say and I found venues to say them in, almost all unpaid. I finally learned to ask the question, "what is your rate for freelancers." It turns out that almost all publications have them, they are not negotiable at my level, but they're mostly fine. And when people say they can't pay, no matter how interesting, I don't write for them (I do sometimes allow them to re-publish my blogs).

This has all made it easier to do more writing. I am a disciplined writer because it's work. I market myself, increasing my visibility, and thus making it possible to land more visible writing gigs. I work harder for $400 essays than for $100 essays (that's basically the range for me), especially in terms of the research and interviews that lie behind them.

Being paid has helped me invest in my writing - a better phone for interviews and recording conversations. I'm going to buy a better voice recorder soon though. A landline for when I am intereviewed. Cable (I'm reviewing some cable TV shows). Books with relevant information.

Last year I published about 45 essays. I would have had to publish about 350 essays to make anywhere near my current salary (which is very low on the AAUP scale of what professors make).

I am now learning to quote a speaking rate comparable to other journalists, though between you and me, I'm always ready to undercut myself and come talk to anyone who wants to listen. If you have the money, though, you should pay your speakers well.

Again, here's the principle - Fair pay for work makes it possible to do more and better work, and there's lots of work that needs doing. Academics need more blunt talk about pay.

Academics: Say Nothing if you Want a Job.

Thursday, January 22, 2015 0 comments
A new survey of chief academic officers is out from Inside Higher Education. Among the findings: Provosts really care about civility and think it should be part of the framework for hiring and tenure.

I see this as potentially troubling. When the Steven Salaita controversy broke, I wrote a piece for the Chronicle called "Don't Speak Out," in which I read the Salaita affair through the lens of my interest in public engagement for academics. I said that the lesson for academics was that if you ever wanted a job, or might want to move from one job to another, don't have strong opinions about things.
We need more public writing, not less. We need to open pathways for more academics to speak out in public, not punish Salaita for doing so in ways that have provoked such strong feelings. But we can’t ask scholars to embrace the risks of engagement in a system in which partisan bloggers and local papers can push timid administrators to fire, or in this case unhire, academics who leap into public debates.
In theory, Provosts agree with this and support public scholarship. At the same time, from IHE:
Generally, provosts expressed concern (with little difference by sector) about civility. Asked if they were worried about "declining civility among higher education faculty," 27 percent said that they were very concerned and 44 percent were somewhat concerned. Only 5 percent were not concerned at all.
But in more detailed questions, provosts had varying perspectives on where faculty civility is lacking.
Generally, they feel more confident of faculty civility with regard to students than to fellow professors or (in particular) administrators. And provosts typically believe that their institutions display more civility than higher education as a whole. (A pattern in Inside Higher Ed surveys of administrators is that they think their institutions are doing better in many respects than the rest of higher education.)
So they think their institution is fine, but others aren't so much. They think faculty are civil to students (which is as it must be, due to the power dynamic at work there). But about 80% of all provosts, across all sectors, (download the whole survey here), believe that civility is appropriate to consider for hiring and tenure/promotion.

So that's it. It's a massive majority. And so we're stuck back where I started this post.

If you ever want to get a job in higher education or be considered for another job in higher education, don't speak out on important controversies. Stay cautious. Stay silent. Stay detached.

This is not what the academy needs. It runs counter to the message we share with our students. It runs counter to the NEH call for more public humanities. It runs counter to everything I've been writing about for the last year.

But the data is clear. So be careful out there.

Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege

Friday, January 9, 2015 0 comments
For the next few days, Community Colleges will be in the news, thanks to the president's proposal. #FreeCommunityCollege was the top trending hashtag in the U.S. yesterday. There are lots of news reports and surely hundreds of think pieces to come.

My basic assessment is that it's a good plan that if enacted, because it's not a "last dollar" plan (i.e. the money only comes after other means have been exhausted) will make 2 years of college more affordable for many Americans. It will undermine the for-profit market as well as the Frankenstein ASU-style for-profit wing of non-profits. The devil is in the details, but I'm pleased.

And now, dear fellow academics, here's the thing for which we must lobby.

These new students need to be taught by full-time, salaried, faculty.

If we're going to claim that Community College is a pathway towards a better life, better wages, better education. If we're going to claim that public education is a public good. If we're going to invest federal money in making higher education accessible. Shouldn't we then demand that the people doing the actual teaching are fully supported? They must make a living wage. They need health care. They need access to faculty development. They need offices.

We do this for the students. And we're going to hear a lot about the students in the next few days and weeks.

We do this for basic economic justice.

We do this for the profession.

We have to demand that this new investment in community colleges arrives with an appropriate investment in instruction.

My baseline, at the moment - Any school receiving funding for the America's College Promise must have 80% full-time faculty.

This is one of those moments in which a unified voice can have an impact, so let's start speaking up.

Update: Thanks to New Faculty Majority, I got a link to this report on the state of community colleges as of 2012. A shocking 70% of all faculty are part-timers. Yes, some of those will be people who only want to teach a course or two while working at some other profession, but most are adjunct profs trying to scrape together a living.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, public intellectual

Thursday, December 18, 2014 0 comments
Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education I have a profile of Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. I'm interested in his work as a public intellectual and defender of the traditions of liberal learning. There are lots of other people who make similar arguments (which is not a criticism. They are GOOD arguments!). But few have the kind of influence over one of the elite institutions of American higher education.

Since I wrote my profile, Roth wrote this for The New Republic (before it imploded):
In the nineteenth century, Emerson urged students to “resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.” He emphasized that a true education would help one find one’s own way by expanding one’s world, not narrowing it: notice everything but imitate nothing, he urged. The goal of this cultivated attentiveness is not to discover some ultimate Truth, but neither is it just to prepare for the worst job one is likely to ever have, one’s first job after graduation.
Instead, the goal of liberal education is, in John Dewey’s words, “to free experience from routine and caprice.” This goal will make one more effective in the world, and it will help one continue to grow as a whole person beyond the university. This project, like learning itself, should never end.
The criticism of Roth will be that this is all easy for him to say, but that first-generation college students need jobs! College is too expensive! Also jobs! All of which is absolutely true, and Roth acknowledges these issues in his other work. But he does seem to want to get us to agree on what the ideal should look like, and then we can work on cost issues.

Roth is also working at Wesleyan to encourage his faculty to do more public work. When I interviewed him, I asked about how this worked (in the context of my piece, But Does it Count?) I believe that if we want academics to engage, and I think we do, we have to make it count. In a followup email, Roth wrote:
We established a faculty task force to examine how to evaluate “non-traditional scholarship.” The impetus came from wanting to acknowledge public and engaged scholarly work. There was genuine buy-in by the tenured faculty, though we still have not determined genuine formulae for quality. There probably aren’t such formulae, in my view, and we will have to proceed with evaluators and metrics on a case-by-case basis.
This seems right to me. That you establish the principle to valorize public work, you deal with it case by case, and then those cases provide precedents for going forward. I think, as I've said elsewhere, that senior faculty members have to go first. They apply for promotions, sabbaticals, and grants based on public work, then those can serve as precedents for junior faculty to do the same.

Finally, Roth is still very much a faculty member in some ways, especially intellectually. I think this runs generally against the grain of university presidencies. For example, Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester, wrote for Inside Higher Education that, "The days of faculty participating as a matter of course in admissions decisions or of presidents being drawn regularly from the ranks of the faculty at their own institutions are over." That's a pretty bold statement from Rosenberg, and I believe Roth serves as a counter-example.

So I asked Roth about what he thinks about faculty becoming presidents. He said:
It is probably important to have had some time in administration, just so one is informed about budgets, fundraising.. and the other systems of governance. Most faculty never have to deal with these things.

Most administrators never have to deal with teaching, and this can be a big problem in the presidential role. Presidents should see themselves as educators as well as administrators. Faculty members can surely do this. I suppose most wouldn’t want to, and many faculty leaders see themselves as antagonists vis a vis the administration. I certainly did. Perhaps this is why some boards of trustees are skeptical about faculty members as presidents.

But university leadership is educational leadership — and I wish that more professors would be interested in it. A friend said to me when I took my first job as president: "you’ve written books, how about trying to build a bookcase?" You don’t build a bookcase if you don’t love books.
And Roth, I am sure, loves books.

Social Media in the Workplace, especially Academia

Tuesday, December 9, 2014 0 comments
I have a meta-thesis about academic culture: It's no worse than anywhere else, but we tend to think we're better, and that's where the problems come in.

Usually I'm talking about race, class, or gender. We think we're immune to the dominant trends of American society, so generally resist being told to change our ways. In today's essay for Vitae, I talk about power and social media. I think academics, particularly senior folk, are loathe to think of themselves as managers, as bosses, as supervisors, so end up treating their junior colleagues as ... colleagues. Except they are also simultaneously judging their senior colleagues and exercising all sorts of power over them. Our practices on social media need to reflect this reality.

The essay tells the story of Jane Smith, a young professor with kids, who received a Facebook friend request from a Dean. I explore what it meant for her, interspersed with commentary about social media and the workplace in this age of never-ending work-life integration. I wrote:

We live in a world in which our social and professional identities entangle so easily. The rise of the Internet and email, followed by the ability to access both from our phones, has stretched the hours of expected contact throughout the day. Many of us choose to habitually broadcast our lives on social media, placing our quotidian activities into a strange public-private record. We can, of course, avoid social media. We can choose not to allow our colleagues into our private online space. Such choices come with social costs and perhaps even missed professional opportunities.

What we need, instead, are clear guidelines for how to handle such interactions in the best possible way. Here are my rules, rephrased to try to be clearer:

1. DO NOT EVER SEND FRIEND REQUESTS TO YOUR SUBORDINATES.

Is that clear? Don't do it. Don't ask them. They will find you and send to you if you want to do it. When you send a friend request, you are pretending that they can accept or reject if they want to. They can't.

I think we know this with our students, or most of us do anyway. We need to be mindful of these power dynamics with our colleagues as well.

2. Accept 100% or 0% of friend requests from subordinates.

Make a rule. Stick to it. Don't make it personal.

3. Be mindful of power.

In an amusing addendum, my Dean sent me an email asking, "What about Twitter?" I responded:


I think Twitter has a different public/private dynamic (unless you have a private Twitter account, then the same applies). When you say something on Twitter, it's intentionally a public utterance. Not everyone realizes that, of course and people tweet out private thoughts that later get them in trouble. Still, reading someone's tweets, even hitting follow, is different than friending. The Facebook "Friend" suggests a kind of intimacy and a private space. It's also transactional in that when you send a friend request, the other person has to respond. Not so on Twitter. You tweet, the world decides whether they want to listen.

The Follow does have a kind of status to it. It says - I think you're worth listening to, but the intimacy of Facebook isn't there.
 What do you think?

The Empty Room - Indifference to Disability is Ordinary

Tuesday, September 30, 2014 0 comments
One of my absolutely favorite writers on disability, Lydia Brown, is at Georgetown. She's an increasingly well-known voice on disability issues and, not surprisingly, was asked to provide a training to student organizations about accessibility. She agreed.

No one showed up.

In a powerful post, Brown explains what the empty room means.
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the utter disregard that disabled people face every day at Georgetown than this. That of literally hundreds of student organizations with hundreds (possibly even creeping into the low thousands) of students involved on their boards or other leadership positions, not even one person deemed it worth their while to learn about access and inclusion.
She then acknowledges that yes, people at Georgetown are busy (aside - also jaded if they turn down free pizza), but it was a huge pool, and not one person decided that disability issues might possibly matter to their groups.

There is hate and scorn for people with disabilities out there, yes, but that's not the problem. It's the casual, structural, ableism, in which disability issues vanish, in which when we talk about diversity on campus, we mean race, gender, and class, not ability. Even when we throw ability into the list, we don't actually act on it. When we act on it, unless it's mandatory, no one comes. When we make it mandatory, we build resentment, hate, and scorn.

Here's how Brown finishes:
The empty room means that our fight is less against willful hate and more against the easy ignorance cloaked in the privilege of never having to live a disabled experience -- the privilege of never being guilted and shamed into going to an event that you lost the spoons for but had requested an interpreter for beforehand -- the privilege of never having to decide days in advance whether you will go to an event or not -- the privilege of never having to wonder whether you'll be able to access the handouts, presentation slides, or speech of the presenter -- the privilege of not worrying whether other attendees' perfumed products will induce an allergic reaction, meltdown, or physical illness -- the privilege of not sitting on edge in case something triggers a seizure -- the privilege of not thinking about whether something will surprise you by triggering a panic, anxiety, or PTSD attack -- the privilege of not having to think about whether you can even get into the fucking building -- the privilege of being able to go to any event you like, anywhere, with little difficulty or inconvenience except perhaps finding parking --

The empty room means that this state of affairs, a state of affairs in which our completely avoidable and unnecessary yet routine exclusion from programming on campus is simply ordinary.
I don't have an answer except to share Brown's writing and to share her frustration. Right now, I am editing our ADA documents to try and make them more robust. We will end up with stronger rules, clearer guidelines, and more resentment for the "special perks."

Today, I have no solutions for this.

The Academic Job Market - Fundamental Premises

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 0 comments
Yesterday I had a piece at Vitae on ending the conference interview and last week I had a blog post on the same topic, as a sort of prequel.

Today, I offer a few fundamental premises.

1. The job market today is about adjuncts, not graduate students.
A lot of my friends and colleagues and random internet commentators suggested graduate-training programs offer to fund sending their students to conferences if they get interviews; in fact, many programs do just that, if they are wealthy enough. But not only does it encourage another level of have/have-not, unless the programs are offering to fund grad student trips to conferences for 4-5 years, often long after they've finished their PhD, such a proposal doesn't solve the problem.
In modern academia, fewer and fewer people go straight from graduate school into a tenure-track job. Most adjunct for awhile or, if they are lucky, get post-docs or fixed-term positions. Any system has to protect them from financial exploitation.
Departments should send their graduate students to the annual disciplinary conference, though, in order to take advantage of all the professionalization and networking opportunities (and learning how to pitch books) that one can find there.
2. The conference interview is already dead.
We have a reliable technological fix that is only getting more reliable. My cellphone is better at video conferencing that the highest-tech suites of 10 years ago. Academic interviews will all turn into a round of video (or phone) followed by on-campus. This is not neoliberal. This is not corporatization. It's just efficient and smart. We don't need to be in the same meatspace to do a set of screener conversations.
It also has the benefit of being cheaper for the adjuncts and grad students. See point 1 (and pretty much every essay on this topic).
So the choice is this - take command of the funds used to send interviewers to conferences or see them lost to the general budget.  
3.  The video interview protects from certain forms of bias.
I didn't say this in my essay, but I've heard from a number of people - women who were pregnant in particular - that they are more comfortable concealing potentially bias-worthy features about themselves over video interviews (or phones). Pregnancy, in particular, is notorious red flag for departments, raising the specter of the "mommy track." It's true that on-campus such things may be visible (or there may be a baby or pumping breaks), but by that point the seachers are more invested in the candidate as a whole person. 
More to come on this topic. I am going to work very hard to get information from people doing conference interviews. I want to hear why. I want to hear what they think I'm missing.
 
 
 

End the Conference Interview, Take 47

Wednesday, September 17, 2014 0 comments
On Chronicle Vitae, today, I will have a new essay about ending the conference interview. In it, I offer ways to make the shift into a positive rather than a surrender to austerity.

Listen. The conference interview is, in fact, already dead. Video interview technology is getting better and better, funds are limited, and like all traditions this one is going to fade away. It might take 20 years. But it's not going to last forever. The question is whether we, as faculty, manage this transition or whether it is eventually simply done to us by cost-cutting administrations.

Some background.

  • I wrote these two blogs on the topic last November. They were by far not the first pieces pointing out the flaws in the system.
 For example.
Not long after I wrote my blogs, though entirely unconnected to them, the issue thoroughly exploded as a result UC-Riverside's job offer which promised to offer all-of three days of warning to candidates they wanted to interview. Rebecca Schuman's wrote an anti-interview piece, there was a backlash to her tone, then a backlash to the backlash, and so forth.
 Ok, caught up?

After all this was over, last February, I thought to myself. Next fall, early in the semester, I will write another piece on the conference interview. I will really think about how I might persuade skeptics and holdouts, people who believe the interview does more good than harm, people who are not bad or callous, who understand the financial issues, but who just are resistant to change.

Today's piece in Vitae, exploring how we might take control of funds once used to send people to the conferences for interviews, and re-purpose them, is my attempt at that.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about and listening to reasons that the conference interview is good. To my mind, they boil down to the following:

1. Skype sucks.

I deal with this in my piece. Low-rent skype using lousy hotel-room wi-fi does, indeed, suck. Professional video conferencing is pretty reliable. And as I describe at the end of this piece, face-to-face interviews, whether in the cattle call room, the hotel-suite sitting area or (NO NO NO!) on the hotel-room beds, have their problems too.
I try to think of it like math. Video interviews - free vs Conference interviews - thousands of dollars. There's no way that equation doesn't work out for video conferencing.
2. Going to the conference shows that we, the hiring department, are serious.

In this age of precarity, no department needs to prove they are serious. There is no school that will not have plenty of qualified candidates for any position. There are other ways to indicate your seriousness.

3. Conference interviews provide networking etc. to young PhDs.
I believe this can be true. Graduate training programs should budget in sending a senior grad student to their disciplinary conference, and then conferences should build programming designed to serve this population. In fact, they already do, but imagine of they were just there for the conference, not amid the interview madness. The experience will be so much better.
4. We've always done it that way

Well, not really, it was in the 60s and was a good thing too, as it helped break the "old boy's network." Before that, people just called up friends and asked them to send over a graduate student.
That time has passed. Moreover, video conferencing will do just as good a job and keeping the process "honest."
My next step is this - I am going to start calling search chairs that state they are going to hold interviews at conferences. I will ask them why. I will offer them anonymity in exchange for honesty.

I will publish the results, both here and, if interesting enough, at Vitae.

As I said almost a year ago - we can't fix most of the problems in higher ed very easily. They run deep, they tie into big issues in our society, and they involve millions of dollars.

But this one just takes an act of will. We can solve it tomorrow. Let's solve it tomorrow.


Crowdsourcing: Hiring Timelines with Boards of Trustees/Regents/Visitors Approval

Saturday, September 13, 2014 0 comments
As surely all of you know by now, the hiring then unhiring of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois has highlighted many important issues for higher education. Much of the discussion has, correctly, focused on how we may and may not discuss Israel and fundamental questions about academic freedom and faculty governance.

As the case heads to the courts, I am shifting my attention to an issue on which I think we can all agree: Final approval for a job cannot take place weeks after a professor has started his or her classes.

Whatever you think of Steven Salaita, there is no way that an acceptable system can involve having to quit your job, prepare to travel across the country, start teaching, and then find out a few weeks later whether you're actually hired. Ian Bogost has thought through some of the consequences in his piece on "Academic Paydom," (a play on academic freedom).

Meanwhile, boards are getting more active, as discussed in these two pieces.

SO - I NEED YOUR HELP

I will be spending the next week doing some research on the timing of final reviews of hires at universities. I am going to be calling Midwestern state schools (just to keep the project doable), but I need help with the broader context. Crowdsourcing is notoriously unscientific, but it does provide with a way to get a sense of the scope of these practices.

Can you please, in a comment, in an email, on my public facebook thread, or even on twitter tell me the timing of your final reviews for new hires at your school? I need to get a sense of how common this kind of delayed rubber stamp is.

Thank you.

Steven Salaita's Press Conference - My reactions.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014 0 comments
Today Steven Salaita gave a press conference. I was there. Full video here.

Salaita spoke, along with with his constitutional lawyer Maria LaHood, one of his employment lawyers, Robert Warrior (chair of American Indian Studies), and Michael Rothberg from English (who read a statement from the MLA).

You can read Salaita's statement here.

I'd like to offer a few key thoughts as an initial summary, in chronological order.

LaHood
  1. LaHood said that in just the last few years, there were over 200 cases of people at universities being reprimanded, fired, or even litigated against for making anti-Israel statements. She argued that this is sign of a persistent attempt to silence critics of Israel in American higher education. Palestine Solidarity Legal Support will be publishing a study on this in the next month. 
  2. Salaita's lawyers also call this a termination. Their legal strategy is that Salaita was, in fact, already hired, so this is unjust firing.
Salaita
  1. Salaita himself said many things in his statement worth noting, but you can just read it. His comments on twitter, the real-time nature of it, his teaching record, his concern about academic freedom as a principle, and more. Seriously, it's not long, go read it.
  2. I am struck by how committed he remains to UIUC and his lifetime of scholarship spent challenging orthodoxies. So, here he is now, challenging orthodoxies.
  3. He also revealed that his offer letter specifically references UofI adherence to the 1940 AAUP principles of academic freedom. I've confirmed this is standard. Everyone associated with the AAUP today agrees the UofI violated those principles. Are they going to keep sending that out in the offer letters when they are under AAUP censure (if it comes to that)?
Robert Warrior

In a few ways, his comments were more informative about the process than Salaita's statement
  1. Chancellor Wise didn't engage with Salaita's whole twitter stream, but accepted the cherrypicked inflammatory statements as proof positive that Salaita was not acceptable for UIUC.
  2. Wise initially said that Salaita's social media use "would be monitored" so as to make sure he wasn't using university property to tweet about Israel. Chilling.
  3. Most disturbing, Wise said that Warrior needed to tell Salaita (video here), "We live in a town, we have to shop together, at Target, at Sam's Club, we have to follow a different set of rules." Collegiality is, I think, barely an acceptable norm on which to judge colleagues - i.e. can we function together as a body. Whether we're nice at Target is no way to run a major university hiring decision. In fact, it's not an acceptable way to decide about who to include in anything, not even your country club (though in fact it's just how such things work and perpetuate bias).  
Question and Answer Time
  1. Salaita and his lawyers are not considering any option other than reinstatement, including the possibility of a court injunction mandating reinstatement. He absolutely wants to work at Illinois, even after all this.
  2. His employment lawyer looked eager to do some document discovery and deposing of people. Given the lack of care with some of the statements already made public, I'd be worried if I were in the Chancellor's office. After all (this is me, not the lawyer), they can just settle and avoid discovery, but it takes two to settle. Salaita might choose not to do so anytime soon.
  3. "Do you support the boycott?" - A long long pause, followed by the answer, "I do." After, Salaita explained that he just didn't want to say anything that made it sound like it was his action. He supports all free speech, the freedom to dissent in any number of cases, not just his.
  4. If this case is really not about the donors, but about civility, then the chancellor and trustees should sit down with Salaita and have a dialogue, rather than reading angry tweets and angry letters from donors and letting them decide the situation.
Let me add a few thoughts. As of August 1, I hadn't really heard of Steven Salaita, although I knew something vaguely was going on at Urbana-Champaign.  Like many others, I read his tweets and thought they were harsh, but defended his hiring on the grounds of academic freedom and public engagement. I still believe in those grounds.

But it is increasingly clear that Salaita is an open and engaging teacher who welcomes all evidence-based arguments regardless of viewpoint. UIUC would be lucky to have him in the classroom. As a taxpayer of Illinois, I certainly don't want the state paying hundreds of thousands (or whatever number emerges) in order to have him NOT teach.

More on this to come. 

Resources: The Firing of Steven Salaita

Monday, August 11, 2014 0 comments
For my non-academic readers, over the last week there's been a big story about academic freedom in the age of Twitter. An arab-American professor lost a job, it seems, because he was rude about Israel on Twitter. There's lots to say here and I am working on several essays. Here are some resources.

 First, on the firing, then some reactions (there are lots and lots more), and then the ways that conservative media write about conservative professors who encounter, they say, prejudice for their political beliefs.

As always with these resource posts, please let me know what I missed either in comments (which work better now), facebook, twitter, or email. Thanks.

Prequel


News on Salaita Firing
Some Reactions
  • Electronic Intifada roundup.
  • Mondoweiss compares to Seeger and Robeson.
  • Change.org petition calling for reversal.
  • David Palumbo-Liu in Salon with his reaction.
  • Daily Caller hangs up its trophy.
  • Corey Robin. I don't even know where to start as he's been deeply involved in the story. Maybe here.
  • AAUP reactions from Illinois and Nationally (and former AAUP president Cary Nelson applauding Salaita's firing)
  • FIRE points out the timing between a 7/22  defense of Salaita and the pocket veto of the hiring.
Conservative Complaints about Conservative Profs being fired/discriminated against or calls for liberal profs to be fired.

Meta-article on the position of conservatives in the American university. Most important piece I've read on the topic It is written by a serious conservative. It accesses lots and lots of data. It acknowledges the divide in numbers between liberal and conservative profs, but says:
Looking at survey data from all of higher education’s primary constituencies, I began to realize that Republicans and conservatives, while vastly outnumbered in academia, were, for the most part, successful, happy, and prosperous. Fewer than 2 percent of faculty (Republican or Democratic) reported being the victims of unfair treatment based on their politics. Only 7 percent of Republican faculty believed that discrimination against those with “right-wing” views was a serious problem on their campus, compared with 8 percent of Democratic faculty who expressed concerns about discrimination against those with “left-wing” views. Asked to consider what they would do if given the opportunity to “begin your career again,” 91 percent of Democratic faculty and 93 percent of Republican faculty answered that they would “definitely” or “probably” want to be a college professor. Similarly, few rightleaning students or administrators claimed to have been the victims of political mistreatment. Like their Democratic counterparts, most were satisfied with their experience in higher education.

Sustained Public Engagement

Monday, June 23, 2014 0 comments
I have a new piece up at the Chronicle on public engagement in higher education. I've written about public engagement both here and on various sites before, but now I am starting a series of columns for the advice/careers section of the Chronicle. I will be writing about how both individuals and institutions could be engaging and are engaging, and some of the lessons we might draw from this. Next month, for example, I will discuss Catholic universities and undocumented students.

This piece, however, has been in the making for months, especially with my response to Nicholas Kristof.

Here are the points I make today:
  1. First, academics of all sorts are already deeply engaged with the public in many different ways.
  2. Second, many universities explicitly recognize public engagement as a category that may count toward hiring, tenure, or promotion.
  3. Third, in the United States and in academe itself, the widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.
If you read this blog, you knew point 1 already. Many of you are, in fact, the very evidence of point 1. Academics are already in public, not just as writers, but as organizers, activists, outreach coordinators, and so much more. 

Point two surprised me. I set out to write this column as a screed, to shout, "count this!" In fact, many universities have ways of counting it, though standards and types vary. 

Point three, then, is the conundrum. If one and two are true, shouldn't we all know it? What's going on? 

I think we have a problem of discourse. We somehow perpetuate the idea both that academics don't do public engagement and that specialized scholarship is useless to the broader world, neither of which is true, though they function very differently. 

Here are two steps I think we might take.
  1. Be smarter than me. What does your institution count?
  2. Start disciplinary conversations. I think this might be a great function for the MLA, AHA, AAR, CAA, etc. They have no power over institutions, but that's not the step here. The step is to persuade other faculty that we could do more to count and measure public engagement.
I finish with the following:
The myth of the ivory tower dismisses the public academic as an aberration and the specialized scholar as detached. Neither is true. But we do have a problem with how we define, count, and value many types of public engagement. If we can improve this and tear down the mythic tower, we can make sure that all of our varied but important types of work get the credit they deserve.
And now, the sources I cite in the piece.
  • Patricia Limerick, president of the Organization of American Historians, recently put out a call to locate scholars who do public work.
  • In response, Matthew G. Schoenbachler, professor of History at the University of North Alabama, wrote that all such efforts are just “pro bono - the entire academic system of incentives and rewards militates against such activities.”
  • My university includes “scholarship of engagement” as one of the types of scholarship that count for tenure or promotion, a phrase that emerged from the expansive taxonomy of scholarship pioneered by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation. 
  • Syracuse employs the phrase “publicly engaged scholarship” in their tenure and promotion documents.
  • The University of Illinois uses “public engagement” and “public service,” recognizing the problem of categorizing diverse acts of engagement in our standard tenure and promotion framework.
  • Other universities categorize such activity solely as service. Portland State, for example, uses the phrase “community outreach.” 
  • Community colleges routinely link service to tenure and promotion, with the potential for that service to be outside the university. At the Central Oregon Community Colleges, for example, full professors will “regularly serve the community as an expert resource.”
  • Also, I link to this (now slightly outdated) study on shifting workloads.

Resources: Against the monograph dissertation

Saturday, June 7, 2014 0 comments

Here is a collection of resources for my latest piece. People who are arguing to move to dissertation away from the monograph model.

The recent MLA report is the catalyst. It reads:
Reimagine the dissertation. An extended research project should remain the defining feature of doctoral education. Departments should expand the spectrum of forms the dissertation may take and ensure that students receive mentoring from professionals beyond the department as appropriate.
  • This report is building off of former MLA president Sidonie Smith's writing against the monograph dissertation as the sole way of thinking about a culminating project.
It reminded me of Mark Taylor, chair of Religion at Columbia, mocking his own department's students in the NYTimes in 2009, singling out someone working on Dun Scotus' footnotes. He wrote:
Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

  • That piece engendered lots of commentary and criticism (I'm focusing on ones that talked about Duns Scotus and the dissertation, rather than Taylor's other ideas. Here's a big Chronicle overview. Here's a piece on "What's the matter with footnotes?" Natalia Cecire weighed in here. 
  • Here's Terry McGarty applauding, "All too often having doctoral students is a means to an end for faculty who just want free help." Also, he notes, Einstein didn't need a thesis adviser, so why should anyone else?
  • Taylor turned his op-ed into a book, Crisis on Campus. I haven't read it. Reviews say it's provocative but thin in terms of data. Taylor's an interesting guy, but mocking a grad student in the NYTimes is the very definition of punching down.

Ted Steinberg followed up Taylor by advocating "Death to the Footnoters:"
The idea of graduate students running around writing doctoral dissertations as if they were living in the Middle Ages would be funny were it not for the fact that thousands of such students are today squandering their very best years, squirreled away in the archives writing treatises about as likely to be read as documents with titles such as Erring: A Postmodern A/theology3 or Altarity4 or “nO nOt nO” (admittedly works written by Professor Taylor himself in an earlier, perhaps more medieval time in his life).5 Almost inevitably, Taylor concludes, the monograph is a “financial failure” and the dissertation process itself a “rite of initiation [that] produces little of lasting value.”
I got a lot of responses to my blog post asking how people view their scholarship, but this is its own thoughtful piece from Geoff Schullenberger. He's interested in seeing the dissertation re-framed, but cautions:
Count me skeptical that the monograph dissertation is the only way to achieve intellectual rigor and commitment. It seems to me that the main reason it has come to be seen as such is the “job market”: when a search committee is reviewing ten zillion applications for a position, they need to have a discrete “product” to evaluate. For the same reason, it seems unimaginable that the dissertation can be reformed without a broader reform of hiring practices and, along with it, a systematic effort to address the exploitative regime of academic labor. Otherwise, the result will be essentially what Schuman alludes to with her “Executive Literary MBA” quip: a two-tier system in which people who want to go on the tenure track still write dissertations in the current mode, while those destined to “alt-ac” trajectories write a “reformed” dissertation, which is viewed condescendingly by the tenured but tolerated because it’s the price they have to pay to keep their TAs, RAs, and graduate seminars intact.
Odds and ends:

  • A 2012 IHE piece on the MLA thinking about the dissertation. 
  • More to come here as I find things.


I enjoy being a man! - Thoughts on criticism

Friday, June 6, 2014 0 comments
What do we, as writers, owe other writers?

I've been thinking about this in the context of my "talking while privileged" argument. In general, when making arguments about privilege and power, I try to be gracious when people with less privilege don't like what I say. I thank them for reading. I listen to their critique. I think about what I might learn from it.

What might I learn from this, other than to be angry that another writer decided to reduce my prose to this little la-la-la insult and send it out to her thousands of twitter followers?
1.Sometimes, it's ok to be angry. I don't know where Kelsky and I lie on the spectra of power and privilege. She has a much bigger profile and a big business weighing in on academic matters. On the other hand, when writing about gender, I try to accept criticism from women with grace (much as when writing about academic labor, I try to accept criticism from adjuncts with grace). But this is a mean little dig, it's not seeking me out with a mention, but I know my article and it's from a fellow writer for the Chronicle. I get to be angry. 
2. I am a man writing about feminism and fatherhood. It's going to raise hackles, people from both the left and the right are going to have visceral, quick, reactions and it's important that I don't get angry. 
I actually think Kelsky might like my essay about using my privilege as a father to help dismantle my privilege as a father and yet create a better working environment for both men and women. You cannot make someone read you closely, so I am going to have work on my early sign-posting to derail this gut reaction. When you've been dealing with sexism, as I'm sure Kelsky has, when you dwell on the internet with its misogyny and mansplaining, it's little wonder that readers like her have a gut, negative, reaction to my writing. I believe, though, because I'm an optimist, that I can win some people over by just writing better.

I also know this. This little barb stung. It stung much more than the endless parade of homophobic comments from right-wing trolls, the cries of gender betrayal from MRAs, or the clueless, "everything's fine for me!" from other straight white dads. It stung because I think we're on the same side here, but I am coming across as the enemy.

But then you pluck the barb out, put on a bandaid, and get back to writing. It's going to be a busy day of essay writing, working in the yard, and playing with my son. Enjoy Friday.


Crowdsourcing: How do you feel about the new MLA Dissertation Proposal?

Thursday, June 5, 2014 0 comments
Dear Adjuncts, Grad Students, Post-Ac, Alt-Ac, and other academics who are getting or have PhDs but who do NOT have a FT faculty position. UPDATE: Or people in TT jobs not doing much research due to teaching load!

The MLA, via this report, has recommended reducing time to degree for people in MLA fields.
Reduce time to degree. Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years from entry into a doctoral program with a bachelor's degree as the highest degree attained. (p.15)
Individual trajectories vary, and some students' programs may take longer, especially those that require specialized linguistic, archival, or technological knowledge. (p. 2)
Given this, I have some questions for you. Surely someone else has asked.
  1. Would you be happier if your time to degree was shorter? 
  2. Would you be happier if you didn't have to produce a monograph dissertation? (links from former MLA president Sidonie Smith) 
  3. If you didn't get a job and produced a traditional monograph dissertation, how do you feel about that work now?
Here are some media followups to the report and some criticism.

I have lots and lots of thoughts about this recommendation. Do I have thoughts! But I am a tenured professor, so my thoughts may not be relevant, and my rule #1 of talking with privilege is to listen. So please, speak to me, O Adjuncts, Post/Alt-Ac, and Graduate Students of the Internet.

What I want to know is for those of you who have or are getting PhDs who do not have a full-time academic job, whether because you are a graduate student, an adjunct, or someone not in academia, how do you feel about this? If you haven't gotten an academic job, how do you feel about your scholarship now? Was it time wasted? Would you do it again? Would you rather have had options? If we are going to radically transform the nature of the humanities dissertation in order to better serve graduate students and save opportunity-cost for those who don't land full-time faculty employment of some sort, do you think that's a good idea?

Please respond in comments below, via twitter, via my public facebook page, or emailing me lollardfish AT gmail DOT com. Feel free to comment anonymously or confidentially via email. I will only quote you with explicit permission.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice is ________.

Friday, May 23, 2014 0 comments



I think those four tweets say it pretty clearly. I link to two higher ed pieces. Both pick an issue - rural and religion - that imply the following. Higher Education may still contain prejudiced people about all kinds of things (race, gender, sexuality, for example), but those "mainstream" prejudices are at least not broadly acceptable. MY CAUSE, whatever it is, remains under the radar - it's the last acceptable prejudice we hav to deal with.

People, there are lots of prejudices. Some of them are more called out than others. Some of them in fact need to be rendered more visible. None of them are "last." I wish it were otherwise.

I am by far NOT the first person to notice this. s.e. smith wrote a great post in 2013 that said (focused on the widespread use of "last acceptable" in regards to obesity):
The phrase keeps popping up, over and over and over again, in a wide variety of media, and it often remains unchallenged; I see it coming up in quotes, in titles, in lengthy essays, with minimal pushback. When Tasha Fierce confronted it at Bitch magazine a few years ago, people seemed genuinely surprised and offended when she said she didn’t agree that fat was bigotry’s last stand.
Later, smith adds [my emphasis]:
There’s a bigger issue at play here, which is the genuine belief that something is the ‘last acceptable prejudice’ in a world full of prejudicial attitudes. People use this phrasing because they think it’s true, and because they think it furthers their activism, and in the process, they do a lot of damage, in addition to making themselves look absolutely ridiculous...
More than just being wrong, it’s also a classic example of setting marginalised groups against each other, rather than helping them work in solidarity, and it explains why intersectionality and an understanding of intersocial prejudices is so important. Because when people hear that ‘x is the last acceptable prejudice’ and they’re members of group y, what they’re hearing is that they don’t experience prejudice—which is in direct opposition to their personal lived experience of the world, and to what members of their social group know to be true.
I am focused on issues related to disability and gender, where they intersect and where they don't. I recognize all other kinds of intersocial prejudices exist. I am a little more concerned about the visibility of disability issues. I do think people in higher ed, and elsewhere, are more aware of sexism than ableism. So I try to raise the profile there.

But it's not the last anything.

When you are an activist and you see your issue being ignored, it's frustrating. Fat jokes, class jokes, rural jokes, religious jokes (just to take a few) permeate our culture, even our leftist intellectual academic culture, giving the sense that they might be "acceptable." That's a good conversation to have, the ways in which our ignorance of difference might lead us to perpetuate discrimination and prejudice.

When we privilege one category over the other, though, we say that it is only our issue that needs attention. That we are the most oppressed. That you (collectively) are the most ignorant in regards to our cause. It's not true. It is easy rhetoric to use, but it's actually not all that savvy for building alliances and trying to shift language, perception, or policy.

As s.e. smith says - the pathway out of these "last acceptable" woods remains: intersectionality.

Work is Work!

Thursday, May 22, 2014 0 comments
On International May Day I wrote a little hymn. I wrote:
Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work.
Today Chronicle Vitae published a column on academic work as labor, as work.

It's a linked column to this first piece on the language of adjunct labor. In that piece, I worked through a number of different ways in which adjunct advocates speak about their work, using the language of slave, sharecropper, or migrant laborer. I think this language is mistaken. But here's how I finished the piece.
The issue here is not that writers are loosely deploying hyperbolic metaphors. The real problem is that adjuncts and their advocates believe the rest of us aren’t on their side.
We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.
So let’s not be too quick to blame adjunct advocates for invoking historical inequities when trying to change the system. Instead, let’s question why such metaphors seem necessary. I propose that the plight of the adjunct lies squarely alongside that of a long-recognized historically oppressed group: the working class. Why are faculty so resistant to seeing themselves as labor who need to act in solidarity with the exploited adjuncts?
In my next column, I’ll look at what happens when we put all these metaphors aside and just look at adjunctification as a basic labor issue, one in which we all have a stake.
In today's piece, I really just want to make a simple argument.

Work is work.

As academics, we know a lot about the nature of labor, the ebb and flow of power mostly up to management, but not always. We read about the changing nature of the workforce across the country, but for those enough of us lucky - and let's be clear that luck is a huge part of it, there is no meritocracy - to be on the tenure-stream side of things, it's hard to apply such lenses to ourselves.

I find it hard. Maybe you don't. But plenty of other people see little connection between the plight of the adjunct and their own labor situation.

Work is work.

You are paid for your work. You should be paid for your work. Let's apply the lens of "labor" to what we do in academia, to think of administration as management - maybe nice management, maybe trusted management, but management none the less.

I am very lucky in my job and my bosses. I trust them. But they are still my bosses (some of them read my blog! Hi there!). There's nothing wrong with having a boss, but we need to remember that there is a power dynamic here. And once you bring power into the equation, well, we're back to the labor movement.

I finish today's piece with the following:
We need to recognize that what’s happening to our universities is happening across the North American labor market (and beyond), and that we’re not special. Other highly-trained, specialized industries have turned to contingency work. Higher ed is no different. In fact, we could learn from the industries that increasingly argue that one must treat contingent workers as full members of the community.
Why not embrace the pressures that are falling on the university? Be proud of being laborers, identify with your fellow workers, and organize across the tenure-adjunct divide. Ultimately, it’s the only thing that’s going to improve the situation.
Best of all, it’s the right thing to do.
It really is the right thing to do.

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