academe

Dennis Robert Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Fri Jun 1 18:14:24 PDT 2001


On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


> The superstar surrounded by the cognitariat (intellectual proletariat i.e.
> graduate workers and research assistants) who toil for subsistence wages to
> produce the value (i.e. do the actual research and write about it), which
> the superstar then appropriates by adding his/her name to it

That's not quite how it works in the humanities, where grads don't cook up vats of research results and then deliver these in a box to the superstars; the superstars write their own books, and the profits made from publishing a humanities book are pretty feeble compared to any managerial textbook. What you get is a class struggle over the distribution of teaching-time, as it were: the serfs do the entry-level teaching and go crazy correcting papers, while the superstars get a limited amount of time to work on Great Theory, and hone their skills teaching to a limited audience of grad students, and both face off against the university system as a whole, which as we know is just another business.

-- Dennis



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