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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
About Brainstorm
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Marc Bousquet
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Recent Posts
Higher Ed and the New New Deal? | Comment [12]
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Drill, Baby, Drill | Comment [5]
The University Against Itself | Comment [3]
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What I'm Reading Now
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
This begins an occasional series. Tomorrow’s post will feature The Other USC: Graduate Students on Food Stamps in South Carolina.
Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace (1935). “Hicks’s voice was sharp as he swung around. ‘Except when I was in the army, people have tried to make me feel like that all of my life — that, if things went wrong, it wasn’t that there was something the matter with the system, but that there was something the matter with me. Well, I don’t fall for it any more. And I don’t want you to think that I’m just going to lie down and take it, either, because I’m not.’”
Veteran Hicks returns to a job at a metal lathe, acquiring conciousness of his expendability. Becomes a reporter for the labor newspaper. Disillusioned by opportunistic labor bureaucrats, joins a liberal tabloid and marries. Buys a home on rent-to-own terms. Begins an affair with a woman of the leisure class. Wife becomes an advertising writer, and they hire a nanny. Through his lover’s connections, he writes a lucrative column pimping a radio company. They build a nicer home, keeping the first as an investment. “Everyone” is making money in the stock market. Mortgage crisis and depression ensue. Their wages are cut and their home is repossessed. Hicks repudiates professional-managerial opportunism:
“I’m just not going to kid myself any more. I’m sick of being jerked around like a monkey on a stick, dancin’ around on top of the workers’ shoulders till the shakedown comes and then trying to scramble up again. That’s what your father’s been doing all his life — and look at him! That’s what we’ll be doing, too, till we wake up and realize that the only way we’ll ever get anywhere is with the workers.”
Albert Maltz, The Underground Stream: An Historical Novel of a Moment in the American Winter (1940). A Communist union organizer, an auto plant personnel manager, and a small businessman at the head of a fascist cell meet fatefully over a three-day period in February 1936. Auto is not yet unionized, membership in the Communist Party is not illegal, and fascist terror is on the rise.
“’… We know the power of capitalism in this country. When it comes to a test, the progressive forces in this country are going to be smashed. The trade union movement will be smashed. And the Communist Party will be smashed first of all, to pave way for the others.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Man, be serious! You don’t have to keep up face for me. I’m not someone you need to convert.’
Princey shrugged.
‘Fascism will take power here, and you know it.’
With no idea where this conversation was leading, he asked, ‘Suppose it does?’
Grebb reacted with astonishment. ‘Can a Communist ask that so casually? You know what it will mean: Generations of suffering, increasingly lower standards of living for the mass of people, a bleeding country, a stifled science, an idiotic art — finance and gangsterism in the saddle!’
‘Well?’ Princey managed.
‘I know the way to overthrow Fascism quickly!’
‘How?’
‘By working inside it! Listen to me, Princey. I beg you to listen seriously. This is a tragic time for the world. Those who hold back from new political paths will be judged by history to be as guilty as those who openly opposed the working-class movement. … It would have been so easy for me to leave my job, to denounce finance capital, to give every cent of money I have to the Communist Party. That’s what I should have liked to do. The harder thing is what I’ve decided to do: To remain within the ranks of capital. To gain power in the growing Fascist movement! … Then, when the time is ripe, you and I will be in command. We’ll be able to act for Socialism from within the camp of its enemies.‘”
In the next installment of this series I’ll feature Upton Sinclair, The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence. (1907), including Sinclair on Brooks Adams’s The New Empire. Adams: “Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder.”
Posted at 08:58:32 AM on June 29, 2008 | All postings by Marc BousquetComments
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Maltz’s novel would seem to clearly agree, then, that the tenured faculty are key to the overthrow of the exploitative systems dominating the university today.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 29, 02:05 PM · #
Whoa there, AHA.
Princey, the CP organizer and hero, doesn’t fall for this hackneyed invitation—and we shouldn’t either!
What’s flawed about Grebb’s invitation, who rises from the working class to professional-managerial complicity with the capitalists he despises, is its essential misunderstanding of administrative power: to be an administrator is to have less freedom to oppose domination, not more. Administrators are not “free” to rule as their conscience dictates; quite the opposite. I talk about this at length in Chapter 5 of HTUW (Composition as Management Science), on the figure of the Writing Program Administrator, but you can also just review how this fantasy worked for Annette Kolodny, in her fantastic memoir of her term as dean: what she discovers is the necessity of mass action, social movements and redistributive justice.
Thanks for your last comment on the home blog, btw. Solidarity, M
— Marc Bousquet · Jun 29, 02:29 PM · #
Whoa there, MB.
First of all, I am not familiar with the novel and your summary does not indicate by name which of the trio of characters mentioned is “management” – and my comment is definitely not about administrators, either.
The tenured faculty are employees (pace Yeshiva). In their role as tenured faculty (and not in their role as tenured faculty who become administrators), they do indeed find themselves in the position of “being on the inside” and able to work for change in ways that administrators may not, precisely because being an administrator is not simply being “on the inside” – it’s being “on top” with all the implications and connotations thereof.
Indeed, just imagine what “mass action, social movements and redistributive justice” led by tenured faculty might look like in the university. They alone among the faculty have job security (pace Ceballos) – which is granted to them precisely to safeguard their disciplines and the heritage of the university itself. That tenure has instead been an “excuse” for solipsistic self-aggrandisement and “ivory tower” isolation is the shameful self-destructive legacy of the professoriate.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 29, 03:04 PM · #
BTW I have not read Kolodny’s memoir and am therefore unfamiliar with the specifics of her struggles as a dean. However, I do recall her heroic legal battle over her first bid for tenure – a case which she settled because the stress was affecting her health and eyesight.
But to further pursue the “faculty administrator” theme: Tenure is supposed to protect the faculty member become administrator from fearing to be a “defender of the faith”, as it were, in universities. They, unlike most managers, have job security and can always “return to the faculty”.
Once the tenured “faculty administrator” is more interested in retaining the position and the salary than in effecting change, the game is lost. Yes, “go-along-to-get-along” rules in administrations, so why don’t tenured faculty who become administrators resign publicly when they disagree with what management is doing or how it is done? Why do they actually think that “staying the course” is worth it when the threat to resign the administrative post with full exposure to the press is perhaps the single most important tool in their arsenal?
Indeed, many tenured “faculty administrators” instead simply take the Liberace route: They cry all the way to the bank.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 29, 03:21 PM · #
AHA, I think we agree both on what tenured faculty ought to do and what, instead, the vast majority actually do.
As for being inside, being “on top,” etc: I haven’t made any significant study of the actual scope of individual administrators’ agency. But my experience, and the qualitative evidence I’ve seen, is that most administrators may accomplish a pet project or two in exchange for their complicity—a green building, a center for a cause, a few new hires in a field of interest, etc.
But this isn’t systematic agency. I do wonder if it’s different at the presidential level—what would happen if a president, instead of thuggishly spending millions on trying to break faculty unions and raising money for bricks & mortar, actually raised money to hire and stabilize the faculty?
But you don’t get appointed president for promising to do that. Solidarity, M
— Marc Bousquet · Jun 29, 05:46 PM · #
MB: I am not referring to the “faculty administrator” in my statement that being “on the inside” may be of use. I am referring to the tenured faculty who remain “on the outside” of administration but who, nevertheless, are “inside” the university in a manner which should make them the leaders/organizers
of “mass action, social movements and redistributive justice”.
As for a “faculty administrator” who was different at the presidential level, Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago and John C. Sawhill of NYU (later President of The Nature Conservancy) come to mind. They each had a positive and empowering vision for their universities and they kept themselves distant from the corrupting influences which would compromise it.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 29, 08:35 PM · #
Marc, you might enjoy the recent book about Sinclair: Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair’s California, edited by Lauren Coodley (Heyday Books) for a rethinking of his life and bio.
— lauren · Jul 1, 05:50 PM · #