I just when through the Mike Yates memo. What is there to say?
I had a long series of exchanges with several people on other lists over these issues about three years ago. I have struggled with them in various contexts as staff and then part-time temporary work under grants (OE and NSF) and decided that academia is gone, disappeared, not there, as in no longer present. Something else, possibly an alien mutation, a pod-people thing has taken its place. You try to talk to these people and their eyes don't respond with human reactions--it's the plant talking. I am convinced if you shot them in the head, some kind of sticky goo would come out that looked a lot like oatmeal. (Thanks to Laura for this image.)
So, I tried to move my focus of what to do, and what to think into a differently constructed arena, to theorize a way around whatever it was the academia promised at one time and has since abandon as its reason for being.
At the Univ of Cal in Berkeley (UCB) this transformation (living entity to pod-creature look alike) has been underway since about the mid-seventies when the last of the old school of Deans quietly retired after doing battle with the students and faculty for twenty years. We on the other side of the fence should have realized that was a lost era of academia life that had just walked out the door. Former enemy or not, those old hard heads at least considered the primary job of the institution was education, research, and holding a place in the grand scheme of western history. Too bad. What replace the generation who paved the way with their post war transition plan into a mass higher education system (a la Clark Kerr) was the new generation of system managers without a clue of what it means to do research, to teach, to take lectures, write blue books, and sweat through orals--not a fucking clue. And of course worse yet, they could care less--they have much taller orders to fill. These jerks arrived in the late Seventies here at UCB and it has been straight down the toilet ever since. Their first impact hit all the student services that had evolved under the various battles of the decades before, starting with overhauling financial aid, work study, and numerous other limp reforms and measures that helped keep lower middle class students alive in a university--those students have mostly disappeared into the State College system, basically in direct proportion to the rise in student fees (UCB is supposed to be free--remember). It should be noted that the State College system has preceded apace with these transitions into a full blown commercialization--to a certain extent the State College system makes the University system look like the very tallow of humanism itself.
By the late Eighties the mop-up campaigns were completed. Under state government budget freezes for almost ten years, virtually every tiny humanizing facility or student benefit was stripped out or converted into a pay-for-view farce. This reached a peak here in the about '89-91 when the Regents offered a large number of tenured faculty golden parachutes to get out--many took them. Whole departments disappeared overnight and what was left was reorganized and consolidated into newer sounding stupid managerial titles. The use of grad students as TA's and part-time temp faculty has proportionally risen--blah, blah, blah.
While I was working with my science buddy under his grant, we used to talk about all these developments, their scope, their implications, what it would be like to be a freshman or a new grad student these days. Our conclusion was we had been lucky despite or maybe because of the war, the draft, and the constant battles with faculty and administration--all of it was the right intellectual stuff. These latter battles seem a pale imitation, fighting a kind of grade school principal mentality under a repressive local school board. Utterly despicable enemies. Whatever victories could be declared seem like tiny little battles over minutiae--a war of attrition fought under increasingly defensive retreats.
When I first saw the issues covered in Mike Yates' memo brought up in cyberspace, it was on the Classics List! These are academics who have taken a tremendous beating over decades as their fields, students, and faculty have been systematically marginalized by the developing academic managerial class. So, if anyone is looking for solidarity on these issues, check out your local Classics department--you might find comrades in arms there. My own field or what I once upon a time considered mine, (Art, practice and history) evaporated into thin air long ago--it was one of the first targets of the pod-creatures. Art, for some mysterious reason contains a kind of essential antidote to this oatmeal stuff that the pod-creatures live on--same stuff that comes out of their head when you shoot them. So, Art was a first priority target and was easily neutralized. I date that neutralization, in a personal chronology sometime in the early to mid-Seventies--even though an Art zombie lived on to finally be completely turned in the Eighties.
So, all and all, what to do? I think you have to see that this apparently closeted issue of the managerial transformation of academia is not isolated, but rather part of a larger transformation. I am not sure how to characterize this larger scale--you could just call it Capitalism, or late Capitalism or even Postmodernism and be done with it. But a more refined view might also see it as the commodification of knowledge and its related skills--the transformation of knowledge, its traditional sources, its means, its various forms of existence--the transformation of all of that into a cultural product line--a product line to be bought, sold, capitalized, and restricted, managed through forms of capitalist exchange. Remember that knowledge with a big K is supposed to be free. But, if there is one thing that Capital hates, it is any thing for free, ergo, the pod-creature wars.
If you take this broader view about all of these developments, then it forces you into a dilemma. Join something and fight as a group. Or what? I am afraid I've been living out in the cold too long to join academic groups. So, instead I tried to put together a personal ethic about it. I had the advantage of having learned how of learn, and decided that was the best use I could put those skills to--try tolearn my out of it. Re-learn to read, write, study, and develop the necessary knowledge and skill to at least halt that whatever it is, on a personal level. But there are other branches and perhaps better fights. The key point is to re-appropriate the required skills to extract at least some part from the Capitalist exchange system. If money is commodified labor, and labor can be seen as the transfer of skill into the means of production, then the most immediate short circuit of this process is to take back the skills themselves. Well, that's my crude reasoning anyway. Of course groups and concerted efforts are more effective and a better route. But for those out there without that option, there is this other road--just call it, the old fashion, do-it-yourself trip.
So, to take a recent project example, my change over to a Unix based operating system was part of that ethic. I don't want to over use this tiny saga, but it worked well as a model of how to go about these things. It also seems to have provided a miniature view of the entire process of commodification itself. It yielded insight into the question of how to turn nothing into something that can be brought and sold as a product when there is nothing there to sell, and no reason to buy, since it is available for free. Well, that is the beauty of it, see, says the snake oil Bill.
The deeper issue about academia hasn't been lost, at least in my mind. That's what is going on. The same thing--how to turn nothing, or learning and education, which is freely available, into a product that can be bought and sold, just like any other product--like software for example. Academia, software, mass communication, and the whole electronic wizardland are subsumed or become manifested as the same process, and perhaps identical in concrete terms with the mechanisms of mass culture. One thing they share is that they are a relationship in which you pay in advance to be isolated, belittled, abused, lectured, brainwashed and defrauded all at the same time. In other words, a capitalist dream come true.
As Humphrey Bogart said, "You'll pay all right, and like it, see!" (To Have and To Have Not)
Chuck Grimes