X-Authentication-Warning: tigger.cc.uic.edu: jdaniel owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 11:12:05 -0600 (CST) From: Jamie Owen Daniel <jdaniel at uic.edu> X-Sender: jdaniel at tigger.cc.uic.edu To: lbo-talk-digest <owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com> Subject: Re: lingua franca on "stars" in academia MIME-Version: 1.0
Dear folks:
I am perplexed by Michael Yates' response to Wahneema Lubiano, who offers a much-needed dose of reality vis-a-vis the sensationalizing of Duke in Lingua Franca (the _People_ magazine of academia) and the (incorrect) assumption that the people doing "pomo" (which on this list seems to be short for post-structuralist or Althusserian or Marxist theory and/or "identity politics" and/or any other contemporary discursive mode, rather than for "postmodernist") in academia are all trendy theory-heads making big salaries.
As Wahneema points out, the few "stars" in English Departments making "big" money (which is anything over $50,000 for most of us) are at places like Yale and Harvard and the U of Chicago, and they aren't remotely "pomo." In fact, they are much more likely to be very conservative (politically and methodologically) and disdainful of any work that talks about anything "extra-textual" (race, class, gender, economics, politics, in short, life in the world). I teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Stanley Fish, our new dean, makes more than five times what I do (I teach literature, cultural theory, Marxism) but about 1/3 what a number of the professors in the medical college at the other end of campus make. He's a "star," if by that you mean well known, much discussed, and somewhat controversial, but he hardly fits the stereotype of "pomo" in use here or in the media.
So, my question would be, why do people seem to want so much for there to be a connection between "pomo" academics and "stardom," when all evidence is to the contrary and when a "star" salary for an English professor is chicken feed compared to average salaries for lawyers, doctors, and stock traders?
Jamie
University of Illinois at Chicago, English Dept.