> >From Yoshie's fwd, Chronicle of Higher Education (12/1/2000):
>
>``After relying for years on anecdotal evidence and outdated
>statistics, the debate over the use of part-time faculty members took
>on new urgency last week with the release of a report filled with hard
>data. It suggested an even darker view of the situation than
>conventional wisdom supposed, showing that nontenure-track instructors
>make up almost half of the teaching staff in many humanities and
>social-science disciplines...'' (Ana Marix Cox)
>----------------
>
>Saturn Eating His Children.
>
>What of the longer historical view, for this continual erosion of the
>intellectual elite as they are transformed into an itinerate class of
>migratory artists, scholars, and scientists? Obviously their social
>role in a neoliberal state as the critical voice of bourgeois order is
>essentially in its institutionalized endgame.
>
>There is a certain amount of promise in that demise, if and only if as
>class they can reproduce themselves outside their eventually
>foreclosed institutional protections.
>
>Thoughts?
Yes, I think that proletarianization is a promising trend, politically speaking (though it means an economic hardship for an increasing number of academic workers considered as individuals). Earlier in history, intellectuals were mostly clericals & "men of letters with independent means"; later, with the proliferation of colleges & universities, many intellectuals became "professionals" with more job security than other workers; today, the majority of intellectuals -- inside or outside of academy -- are proletarians with no job security (unless unionized), just like other workers.
Minus the tenure system & pay differentials, more academic workers than before may come to recognize themselves as part of the working class. Grad union organizing suggests that an increasing number of us already do.
Yoshie