<<Here are my problems with the Nelson piece: first, he makes no attempt to ascertain what the hiring, workload, or salary practices are in History, or Philosophy, or Classics, let alone theoretical Physics. Since I have recently known people in grad school in all the above both at Berkeley (my Ph.D.: 1995) and here at Tennessee, I have anecdotal, by no means considerable, evidence that nothing special is going on in English.>>
I agree with you. At the Ohio State University where I teach, the Math Dept. regularly puts in an ad in our student newspaper, encouraging non-math majors, grads as well as _undergrads_, to apply for jobs teaching certain low-level math classes. At least this has yet to happen in English here.
<<(And given that multidisciplinary grad student unions exist in ten or so places, such information is in fact available to Nelson if he wants to find it. I should add, the union at Berkeley was not my special area of political activity, but it was for many of my friends, and my anecdotes are largely from them.)>>
Yes, and Nelson must know many grad union organizers personally.
<<Second, he doesn't give any argument that would suggest why English departments have the agency to accomplish destruction as no other departments can (which is to say, he makes it appear that English departments rather than administrations have been the main forces behind the current structure). I am not claiming that English Department administrations are blameless, but the picture of English Department administrations as having special moral impurity seems wrong factually and silly politically.>>
I think Nelson is trying to seize a moral high ground and shake up the lack of consciousness of many tenured professors who still don't think that what's happening to grad students and adjuncts has _economic_ implications _for them_ as well. But I agree that his moral rhetoric singling out English for special condemnation doesn't serve a purpose of giving us a truer picture of the political economy of academic labor.
<<Now, Nelson gives a couple of statistics that show English using more part-timers than other departments. This is easily explained on bases other than our special immorality. First, composition is a course servicing every undergraduate in the US. There is simply no comparable service course in any other discipline, no other situations where a particular department organization services 100% of an introductory requirement for students in every sector of a university. Second, English courses are, on the whole, small (although this is decreasingly true). When statistics show that a higher percentage of History courses are taught by full-time faculty, this fact is produced by the existence of 500 person lecture courses in which essentially all the work is done by TAs, but the "teaching" is supposedly done by the faculty member.>>
Both good points.
<<Please understand that I am not then defending the structure of English departments as good. The basic charge - that teaching labor is being proletarianized in a way that has never been true before, and that English departments are part of this, is entirely true. Here at UT, and to the shock of people who have never heard a junior faculty member open his mouth before, I loudly advocate 1-1 teaching loads for grad students at the pay they currently receive for 2-2, and the elimination of the position of Instructor: I actually don't have major problems with faculty teaching loads being flexible and dependent on active research, especially since its not like every piece of research produced by someone at Tennessee is an unambiguous social good. But all 4-4 teachers, whatever the reason they were hired, should be paid as faculty and tenurable as faculty. (The main thing opening my mouth has accomplished, of course, is the sense that there's no way I'll ever have an administrative position. Which may be just as well . . .)>>
I agree with most of the points above, but what do you think of the current argument that 'professors only love research, neglect teaching, etc.'? Don't you think that saying it may be OK for faculty teaching loads to become more 'flexible' might give 'them' an opening?
<<Finally, as most English departments are not run by radicals (whatever our image at the NY Times), few department administrators understand or care about the scope and significance of the problem. My goal is not their defense.
On the other hand, I worry that Nelson's position is Matthew Arnold redux: we, as humanists, are the conscience of the nation and the world, and our bad example is the one that leads to the downfall of the world. And that's just stupid. It is not a useful account of how power is wielded in or out of the university. It doesn't help English department composition teachers now.>>
You are right, but let me add another problem I have with Nelson's thinking on how to solve the 'job crisis.' Though not in that article (parts of which Carrol and I posted), Nelson argued elsewhere that since we have a problem of overproduction of Ph.D.s, we ought to close down some 'marginal' graduate programs. I think this line of argument doesn't serve us well, because (1) It ends up reserving research to an even smaller number of elite students, academics, and universities, making intellectual labor ever more hierarchical; (2) It reinforces the idea and practice of studying and teaching English as 'profession,' and the 'professional' organization serving as a gatekeeper to shore up the value of our labor by reducing the number of 'professionals'; and (3) I'm not sure if we really have an 'overproduction' problem, in that the main problem seems to me to be _not_ that we have no jobs _but_ that we have lots of lousy jobs. What do you think?
Yoshie