Crossposted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Maybe it's time we learned our lesson about shared governance. Four decades of earnest collaboration with management have done little for the tenure stream partners in governance--except to see their steady replacement by instructors, moonlighters, staff specialists and student workers, including undergraduates.

This summer's events on many campuses suggest that "sharing" governance has been just a figleaf for managerial control. 

These past few months even the most Pollyanna of profs might have to admit that the fundamental powerlessness of faculty under systems of "sharing" governance is on spectacular display across the country--with opportunistic administrations using the economic crisis to achieve their hearts' desire: wage cuts, furloughs, layoffs, program closures... but no reduction in administration, staff, services, or landscaping!

The...

crossposted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Last week President Obama (He Who Must Not Be Criticized From the Left) proposed throwing some chump change at higher education -- $12-billion or so to community colleges, much of it intended for such great ideas as more spending on facilities, online education, assessment tools, and a standardized national curriculum -- excepting where potential employers want to dictate course content.

Woo-hoo. Over a decade from now, more than 1,000 institutions, educating half of all the students in the country -- tens of millions of people! -- will eventually divvy up a third as much cash as The One slings to a bank or automaker in a single day. As long as they spend it the way ROTC cheerleader and Margaret Spellings clone Arne Duncan tells them.

Not to go all Paul Krugman on the prez, but it's hard to know which is more irritating -- the galling cheapskatery...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In my last column, I pointed out that the nationalist and “cultural capital” function of literature classes are in decline. With their tenure lines evaporating, many literature faculty are grasping at the claim that they teach “reading” and “thinking.”

By this they generally mean the training of managers and professionals in a degraded version of New Critical reading practices—spotting (or producing) ambiguity, complexity, and irony. For those who care about this sort of thing, this is really a version of a much older claim, that they teach rhetoric.

Combined with the right higher-ed brand names, the capacity to produce ambiguity and complexity in the tax code or the National Labor-Relations Act can get sold to a corporate law firm for a million dollars a year.

Of course that requires further training in the ability to live with oneself...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is part 1 of a short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).

For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.

Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards — time, salary, prestige, power — rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the 20th century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is part 2 of a short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).

Secession, Fusion and Compromise

There is a substantial tradition of thinking about this problem from below—especially from the most subordinated position, of writing. Most of the more prescient and convincing accounts come from scholars attempting to re-imagine English studies from the disciplinary location of rhetoric and composition.

The most circulated analysis in this vein is Stephen North’s account of a mid-nineties reform of the doctoral program at SUNY Albany, which presents a taxonomy of prescriptions for disciplinary change (principally by way of reorganizing graduate study) going back to a 1984 summit meeting at Wayzata, Minnesota.

As the accounts by North and others have it, discussants representing the major disciplinary associations in...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

A funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The one-time supporter of the only kind of national health insurance proven to work (single payer) rolled over for the insurance industry and adopted the single most ridiculous health-care plan offered during the 2007-2008 Democratic primaries. Against all the evidence, candidate Obama asserted that “lowering costs” would lead to universal health coverage.

All the evidence has it the other way around: universal coverage causes the lowering of costs. Most educators will understand this clearly, because it’s parallel to our situation. Most of the actual expense to be saved is in administrator bloat, the armies of staff to collect the bills and whole country clubs full of vice presidents to “manage the care,” i.e., invent the hoops that separate physicians from patients.

When yours...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In this week’s lead story at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson has a spread of four pieces scoffing at the notion of a national problem with undergraduate debt: A Lifetime of Debt? Not Likely.

Splashed above the fold on the front page — during Congressional hearings regarding major reforms in student lending — this story flies in the face of massive public and legislator concern about the funding of higher education, including a longrunning series of scandals in student lending: corruption among state and federal education officials, predatory lending, abusive collections, lax oversight, outrageous executive pay, perks, and bonuses.

While acknowledging that what she dubs a vocal minority of undergraduate borrowers have “very real” problems with the system of college financing, Wilson asserts that students in loan...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This essay is drawn from the final issue of minnesota review to be edited by Jeffrey Williams, featuring a series of statements of professional commitment or belief -- credos -- by representative scholars. It's a very special series of essays, and a worthy capstone to Williams's extraordinary run as editor.

I'll follow up with more about Williams' accomplishments, and the future of the journal, which received several bids from institutions willing to step in where Carnegie Mellon stumbled. A letter of intent has been signed, and an orderly transfer to a great new editorial board is underway.

The issue also brings nearly to a close Williams’s spectacular series of in-depth interviews. Often twenty pages in print, these leisurely portrait-of-an-era conversations have been typically longer than the articles in the same issue. Despite...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 2 of my contribution to the "my credo" issue of minnesota review. Return to Part 1

Now you may well say that all of this tawdry consideration may not make for much of a credo.

But we can take this line of thought in a number of interesting ways, many of which are fairly important for anyone thinking about the situation of culture and critique today.

One way to take this line of thought is toward straightforward observations regarding the social logic and policy environment of the United States: the low regard in which education is held, the possible virtues of greater rationalization of faculty careers, and so forth. I've already suggested that public institutions in the United States should treat faculty salaries like the civil service or military pay grades — winning some startled coverage in the mainstream press, though there are...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

EVERY DAY MAY DAY!

Thursday, April 30 is May Day for faculty serving contingently, according to the fledgling New Faculty Majority coalition. Major support provided by Bob Samuels, president of the California Federation of Teachers, representing nontenurable faculty at five UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Riverside, San Diego and Santa Cruz. Support ‘em by wearing red to work tomorrow.

On the same day, the University of Colorado AAUP chapter will push my kind of radicalism, putting Suzanne Hudson’s Instructor Tenure Proposal to a vote in the Faculty Assembly.

Image: Lenin Pointing the Way Forward! pose struck by Emile Bousquet, 13 mos. Sweater fashion by Jamie Owen Daniel, former Marxist Literary Group president, denied tenure by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish during his theatrical run as a “campus leader” at the...