(This is not the promised issues-only post on contingency, which I’ll deliver early next week.) Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Some of the issues I’ve been raising have been batted about in The Chronicle’s discussion forums. One member of the business faculty initiated an exchange by complaining that some of my writing is an example of the way, he believes, humanities faculty too easily assume the utility of their work and project a corresponding harmfulness to the work of business. He raises a fair question, and my answer may well be too soft on capitalism, or too tough on administrators, or both.

I might even be too hard on Stephen Trachtenberg. I don’t know. But I’m flummoxed at the ruling silence on the question of contingency and a situation where five faculty members teaching full-time earn less than a decent nurse or state trooper. That’s messed up.

So correspondent John Marshall begins by quoting some of my remarks in the forum on the topic of “shifting rewards away from socially-directed activity (teaching, social work, child care) toward activities in direct service of capital accumulation. Chances seem good that thirty years of movement in that direction are about to be balanced a bit by some movement toward increasing reward for pro-social activities,” and then continues:

This post is endemic of the blindness in the perception of some academics. I teach in a business-related field in a business academic milieu. Too many in the humanities and similar fields are under the misapprehension that what they do benefits society (“pro-social”), while what we in the business arena do is teach greed (“capital accumulation”). I think that accounting, marketing, finance, business law, economics, strategy and general management professors teach “pro-social” activities writ large. We don’t teach mere capital accumulation—but even if we did, what about job creation isn’t “pro-social”?

Without the development of business and industry, without the perpetual movement to the right of the production possibilities curve—without the work we on the dark side are doing to enable that—you could forget social work and public education, most of us would be serfs struggling to eek out a living, the vast majority wouldn’t have time for the luxuries of social work, psychology, social studies, the arts, women’s studies—you name it.

Marc, it’s not that I think you were trying to flamebait us in the business disciplines or had any ill intent; it’s just that your post demonstrates the blinders that so many in academia wear vis-a-vis the pro-social nature of business disciplines. —John Marshall

Here’s what I wrote in reply:

Thanks, John, for your thoughtful remarks. You have a fair point, and I appreciate that you made it with civility. I certainly don’t make a point of being fair to business in most of my writing on academic labor issues, and I agree that there are many, many ways in which enterprise activities are abundantly pro-social. Marx agreed, of course: he often wrote of capitalist enterprise with a tone of wonder and appreciation, as having brought about realities and possibilities infinitely preferable to many preceding forms of distribution. As is well known, he did go on to dwell on the disappointments of the new order, and wonder what would come next.

My own project is not about attacking enterprise per se, though there are innumerable anti-social travesties committed in the name of enterprise on campus and off. It may well turn out to be the case that, as Marx argues, enterprise is not susceptible to reform, but that’s a horizon broader than I usually dare to take on as an individual scholar!

My main point is that directly pro-social activity has been starved. With the movement toward “quality,” productivity improvement has relied less on technological innovation and more on aggressively reducing the workers’ share of their labor… and nowhere more so than in the academy.

My recent exchange, if you can call it that, with ex-GWU prez Stephen Trachtenberg is a good example of enterprise ideology run amok.

While prez, Trachtenberg jacked tuition through the roof and whacked away millions in personal compensation, but permatemped the faculty: when he retired, about 60% of the faculty (not counting grad students) were contingent, teaching 6 courses a year for $18,000.

He refuses even to discuss contingency, preferring to natter on about false problems and false solutions (he knows someone on the tenure track who is “burnt out,” so he suggests giving tenure track faculty internships just like student internships). He is concerned about job security for administrators, but evidently it’s just fine if his faculty have to wait tables to pay the bills.

I don’t presume to know whether capitalism can be reformed or not. But I do know an excess of greed and a profoundly exploitative arrangement when I see it.