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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

The End of 'Minnesota Review'?

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’s editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines.

In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’s editorship, mr garnered more mentions in The Chronicle of Higher Education than any other academic journal.

But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”

Upon arriving at CMU, Williams’s two-year deal for support of mr was similar to the arrangements he’d had previously at the University of Missouri and East Carolina University: modest subvention for office space and mailing, and just $9,000 for graduate-student labor, plus a single course release and one month of summer pay. Hardly a fortune in a world of $50,000 vehicle allowances and $6-million mansion renovations for university “leadership.” And a real bargain for a school like CMU with an engineering rep and a confessed need to brush up its humanities cred. As Williams notes wryly, the level of support he negotiated from CMU — and believed would continue, or he would have negotiated a longer arrangement — was provided without question by the “much less wealthy and prestigious institutions” where he’d previously worked.

But at the end of his first year there, Williams found himself without warning (surprise! managerial “innovation” at work!) pressed to “do more with less.” It was suggested — just as a for-instance — that he could get one graduate student to do the work of two, and thereby shave a princely $4,500 off the hefty nine grand they chipped off of CMU’s mighty fiscal block. He quickly assembled a roster of luminaries (Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand) to defend the journal, and limped through for another three years, when, in 2007-8, the demands were renewed, this time more firmly.

This time he was offered the option, instead of shortchanging the graduate-student employees, of giving back his month of summer pay — doing the same work as before, but for a 12-percent cut in pay.

There’s a slim chance that the quality clowns will relent, with the possibility of resistance emerging from Williams’s departmental colleagues and graduate students in the literature and cultural-studies program at a meeting tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meanwhile, though, Williams has taken the line that enough is freaking enough. He’ll give up the journal if another editor can be found and — more likely — if not, he’s made plans for a final issue. Inspired by the 1950s “My Credo” issue of Kenyon Review featuring short, passionate essays by, among others, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and Austin Warren, Williams has invited 16 cultural-studies intellectuals to contribute credos and reflections about the dismal state of the profession for an issue that he feels would fittingly mark his retirement.

You know, there’s a thread over at (union-busting former university president) Trachtenberg’s corner of this blog on “education gurus.” Twenty Chronicle of Higher Ed readers offered their thoughts. Nobody mentioned Aronowitz. Nobody mentioned Slaughter, Leslie, and Rhoades, or Bill Readings. Henry Giroux? Cary Nelson? You gotta be kidding. Nobody mentioned even centrist disappointments like Bok or Kirp.

Quality management? It’s all about taking actual, tangible, meaningful, intellectual quality and turning it into fresh paint for the business school in quest of enhanced revenue.

Responsibility-centered management theorist William Massy (download and play his revolting Virtual U training game — it’s scarier than anything I could tell you about it — once opined, in the midst of an essay praising the work of the HMO, that starving the revenue-poor locations in the university made great sense, saying that if you had six gold mines, you’d want to invest most in the one with the greatest assay. But if you have six runners on your team, are you helping the organization by giving nine lungs to the fastest? If you play football, do you win by giving everyone’s meal to the quarterback?

Posted at 10:00:39 AM on May 8, 2008 | All postings by Marc Bousquet

Comments

  1. It would be a shame if the <i>minnesota review</i> closed shop. Could Williams move to another university and take the <i>minnesota review</i> with him? Many public U’s are hurting financially right now, it’s true, but surely there’s a shrewd dean somewhere who can recognize that hiring Williams and funding the <i>mr</i> would be a great opportunity to increase their English department’s profile – for a reasonable price.

    Part of the problem is that editorial work is not properly valued in academia. Editorial work is absolutely necessary for the publish-or-perish model to survive, but the time-intensive labor (too much of which is effectively outsourced) required to put out a quality publication is invisible, and editing is treated more like service than research, which is a serious mistake. Faculty and grad students need to make it clear that the editorial infrastructure needs to be maintained in order for the system to function.

    Please keep us posted on how this unfolds, Mark.

    — erasmus · May 8, 12:23 PM · #

  2. Readers sympathetic to Marc’s criticism of educational managerialism might also enjoy this recent essay that similarly rejects the notion of higher education as an industrial process: The Global War on Taylorism.

    — R.J. O'Hara · May 8, 01:17 PM · #

  3. Look, it is the world’s (US’) top ten schools of business that CREATE clowns like the CMU management team. Then higher ed institutions having created generations of cohorts of monsters get angry when the monsters turn their monstrosity on the universities that produced them. You reap what you sow—when universities, especially top ten ones, stop producing monsters as the average graduate content of their MBA programs, then we can expect something better than monster-isms as manager dictates to underling faculty. I dislike whiny victims hiding their own responsibility for the problems they whine about. The solution is you—get your own university to stop producing monsters as MBA graduates.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · May 9, 04:51 AM · #

  4. Along the lines of Mr. Greene’s response here: And stop going, as Mr. Williams did, to what you take to be more prestigious universities after what you take to be less prestigious universities have materially contributed to your success. And who, but managerial types, thinks Carnegie Mellon “University” is prestigious? The solution is you — stop doing anything other than denouncing monstrous managerial types of people and places in academe. Certainly, don’t willingly go to them and then complain that they act like the people and places they are.

    — Jesse · May 9, 07:10 AM · #

  5. Whatever the reasons behind the demands, it would be a shame if Minnesota Review went under.

    — Mark Bauerlein · May 9, 07:46 AM · #

  6. Wouldn’t it be fun if students could “check-off” which “tub on its own bottom” they wished their tuition to fund?

    Would some of them choose mr over, say, the office redecoration budget of the top administration? Yup.

    The students are the ones whose monies get “drowned” in the “pools” chosen and determined by administrators — with no “earmarking” of funds possible. Unlike private donations and public subsidies, of course.

    The sheer hypocrisy of university administrations in professing to treat each “tub” as if it were truly “on its own bottom” would be laughable — were it not for the very real consequences on the quality of education itself.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 9, 10:39 AM · #

  7. Dear Jeffrey Williams & Marc Bousquet —

    How very sad to see the bean counters do in as interesting and prestiguous a journal as Minnesota Review. My advice as the Editor of Style: MOVE. There must be other universities who would love to bring mr to their campuses. We have been fortunate at NIU to have the support of both Dept and college, but at the heart of many universities is a bean counter interested only in the bottom line. However, there ARE many universities in the USA and not all are as short-sighted at CMU.

    JVK

    — John V. Knapp · May 9, 10:54 AM · #

  8. What a sham(e), and what telling irony as another liberal academic institution attempts to erradicate everything that sustains it (and its reputation). As a graduate student at MU, I was lucky enough to do some proofreading and preparatory work at mr for a year. Nine years later as an assistant professor at a regional institution, I still find myself influenced by the critical vocabulary I worked with at the journal. Academics need mr to keep critical inquiry at the forefront of the profession. We’re doomed if we stop looking at what we do and why we do it!

    — Charles C. Bradshaw · May 9, 01:23 PM · #

  9. #6, while some students would be upset to see their fees supporting expensive and often divisive campus ‘speakers’ or fringe student ‘organizations’ the vast majority of them would not now be interested in funding MR. They would fund student workout facilities, increased bandwidth and more luxurious dormitories.

    — Observer · May 10, 07:43 AM · #

  10. While the generalizations in comment 9 are well-taken (well-“observed” ;-)), the amounts used for the mr (as indicated in the post) would only take a small fraction of the tuition of a single of the editor’s courses to subsidize.

    After all, there appear to be students who devour the mr regularly as Paul Buhle attests. Surely, a large number of them are at Carnegie Mellon, as well.

    One wonders whether the heirs of the late Carnegie (who was also the founder of TIAA-CREF) would be pleased to learn that his university is asking a faculty member to actually give up salary. And whether the Mellon family finds this whole situation congruent with their famed support of the arts and humanities as well.

    Has anyone bothered to ask them?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 10, 08:56 AM · #

  11. The minnesota review is a gem. Carnegie-Mellon is so lucky to have both Jeffrey Williams and the journal associated with their name. Williams is one of the most generous and thoughtful academic editors in the field. He helped me begin my own professional career as an editor and academic when he allowed me to guest edit part of an issue of mr. It was the most valuable learning experience I could have had at that time—it was a deep learning experience in that it was a real stretch for me, and Jeffrey Williams’ guidance ensured it was a true learning experience remember some of the things he worked with me about as he helped me edit and assemble the issue. I have not forgotten these lessons; I hope to be as good a teacher, mentor, and editor some day. That sort of professional generosity and true gift for teaching editing as a craft has led me to love this too-invisible aspect of the field.

    Nine thousand dollars to run the whole journal, including grad student assistants? Carnegie Mellon should be embracing such an important opportunity.

    — Noreen O'Connor · May 13, 04:32 PM · #

  12. MB – Why not organize a signature campaign (among the notable/quotables who came to the rescue the last time) to be submitted to the Mellon and Carnegie families?

    You wouldn’t be asking them to “interfere” with management or governance (heaven forfend!) – you could simply point out the incongruencies and ask them to fund the mr.

    Of course, if the “open letter” just happened to be published in a major newspaper, or the CHE or IHE, for example, covering the issues, that wouldn’t hurt either.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 13, 07:00 PM · #

  13. There is no question that CMU is being stupid given the amounts of money we are talking about. They would, without question, pump in this kind of money if it were computer science — and a lot more to boot. That said, for all CMU’s talk of prestige, it has mismanaged its endowment, it has been an utter failure at fundraising until recently (except for military contracts) and so prestigious or not, it is not a wealthy university. So the beancounting shouldn’t come as a surprise even though it is shamefully short sited and demonstrates CMU’s utter inability to understand or support work in the humanities — which is a problem they’ve had for a long time.

    But I also take to heart the point that a reader about made about prestigious universities. You can’t eat prestige, the cliche goes, and perhaps Williams ought to look at the reality of the situation. It seems somewhat selfish to close down the journal because he can’t edit it at CMU if the journal is that important. He could go on the market if it were a big enough issue for him (since he went on the market to get to CMU not that long ago), OR he could, with regret, allow someone else to take over the journal and move it to another campus. A change of editorship is something not unheard of in the history of journal publishing and if the journal is as essential as everyone says it is, this would be a greater contribution than what sounds like a somewhat self-indulgent final issue where tenured professors decry the state of the profession (make no mistake, I’m tenured too, but surely there is something more substantial that could go in a last issue of a major journal than reflections on its own demise and the various unfulfilled hopes of its contributors). An angry issue about the forced transition of editorship would be at least as valuable and is a small contribution to make to keep a journal for which there is much interest alive.

    — Velvet Elvis · May 14, 07:28 AM · #

  14. I guess there’s a reason that, among themselves, many top-level college/university administrators refer to the faculty as “sheep”….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 14, 08:47 AM · #

  15. CMU’s decision to shut down the journal is blatantly political. The administrators responsible know perfectly well what they are doing and why.

    — Michael Keefer · May 14, 11:04 PM · #

  16. I suspected from the start that the decision by the administration was political. However, given the relatively low cost of the enterprise, and the prestige of some of its past supporters, it should be possible to “save” it from the wolves – but not if the faculty surrounding/supporting the enterprise are “sheep”.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 14, 11:55 PM · #

  17. So then, how about some sort of petition/open letter showing support for the journal? Mark? Jeff? Someone? Surely a statement signed by a hundred-plus committed readers of the journal (including students , past contributors, junior faculty, and academic “stars” to boot), —combined with as many pledges to renew or lobby for fresh mr subscriptions— would go a long way to convincing CMU of the financial viability of the journal. And it might shame/pressure CMU admin out of a politically motivated shut-down as well, if that’s what’s afoot after all

    — Joe Ramsey · May 29, 09:21 PM · #

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