Yoshie,
<<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?>>
This is hard for me. The painful fact is that I have been hired into a department in which those right-wing charges of a certain percentage-at least a third-of tenured professors not holding their weight are all too true. (That's not even to begin to think through the fact that a significant percentage of the active scholars are producing right-wing rubbish; I just have to tolerate that.) This has made me rethink no so much the value of research universities and 2-2 positions, but the question of whether maybe they shouldn't be for life. Let's keep tenure, which is, after all, simply job security (and, to be clear, the janitors should be tenurable too), but make it possible for people who are no longer active scholars to move into 4-4 positions with no loss of salary or prestige. And, lets hire the people we now hire as instructors to teaching faculty 4-4 positions. Saying this is simply acknowledging that UT is not really a first rank research university.
Will the administration try to make all new hires 4-4? Only at the risk of losing its Research I status, which of course might be a wave of the future too. But that's something that could be resisted on other grounds-in fact, our administration will resist any attempt on the part of the state to do this.
I hear you possibly making another response, which is that I'm still accepting the tiering of academia in a way that (among other things) may discriminate against Ohio State grad students who want to do research and in favor of Berkeley grad students who want to do research. I can imagine several possibilities here. Of course, we know that such discrimination already exists, in that OSU students are more frequently hired to 4-4 schools to begin with. So in terms of thinking through what, say, the AAUP could advocate, how about a national policy that all accredited four-year colleges, regardless of "rank", hire at 2-2 with the assumption that all pre-tenure faculty are researchers. After that, the question of whether one becomes primarily a researcher (i.e. teaches at a prestigious school with a small teaching load and regular access to grants) or primarily a teacher, or anything in between, remains competitive, flexible, and subject to change throughout the career.
All this, obviously enough, is not socialism. It's just a position one can advocate in the academy 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?>>
I've actually written Nelson a letter saying this exactly. My particular anger with the left-wing advocates of cutting programs is that, for all its very severe problems and limitations, graduate education in English departments is one of the few places you can get long-term training in left theory in the US today. People I've talked to who have been benificently denied entry to programs are usually angry - they appreciate any and all honesty about their ultimate career prospects, but what they want to be doing now is studying literature and/or theory, rather than brewing cappucino or working at Barnes and Noble (which really are the things the people I know do alternatively), and they're willing to take their chances. I know I'd have been that way ten years ago. Of course you're absolutely correct that the ultimate effect of restricting entry is restricting the training of students from nonelite backgrounds in materials and ideas we may actually, desperately need to survive.
Kenny
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