Actually, a personal "solution" is not difficult to find. I can do what I used to do, go to law school like Justin, hang onto academy & hope for the best, whatever, after finishing my diss (which I promise to Justin, Jordan, Carrol, Doug, Michael P., Michael H., & other concerned individuals to finish _this year_!). What is not easy is to put *political solutions* to the *structural problems* into *practice* -- the solutions that I have been advocating for the last several years on campus (the latest of my efforts is to be part of the Student Tuition Alliance that I mentioned here a while ago -- *fight against tuition hikes & for more public funding of higher education*).
The problem is that finding personal "solutions" & seeking political solutions often come into conflict.
To find a personal "solution," you should focus on your study single-mindedly, build up your resume, try to network a lot so you'll have connections, finish your dissertation ASAP, etc. and/or acquire various skills & credentials that may lead to a better-paying job outside academia -- doing all of them doesn't guarantee anything, but your chance of escaping poverty rises somewhat. To create a political solution, in contrast, you have to spend time organizing, inside & outside academia, trying to reverse the tide of neoliberalism. Since the latter has no immediate personal payoff and in fact diminishes time & energy for the former (as well as creating your reputation as "a trouble-maker to be avoided"), it doesn't strike enough academic workers as a worthwhile thing to do.
This conflict of the personal and the political is *not at all* unique to academia; it appears to me to be the *single most difficult obstacle to overcome* in any sort of political organizing (from the most mundane to the most revolutionary).
At 2:36 PM +0000 3/12/01, Daniel Davies wrote:
>I also think that three problems are being conflated
>here:
>
>1) akin to the Prisoner's Dilemma, possibly white
>workers are adopting racism as the best strategy
>available to them given the assumed behaviour of other
>white workers. If they could somehow be persuaded to
>develop class consciousness, they could win
>concessions from capital, and would be better off.
>
>2) white (male) workers have got such a
>disproportionate share of what is available that any
>realistic division in which white workers do not get
>much more than their fair share will leave white
>workers worse off. Therefore, white workers will
>always be a reactionary force unless they can be
>persuaded in the interests of justice to accept a
>decline in their living standards.
>
>3) some groups of workers (plants, industries),
>delineated either by possession of specialist skills,
>or by their own exclusive behaviour, are in the
>position described above; their rewards are completely
>disproportionate, and any equitable distribution would
>leave them worse off. White males are
>disproportionately represented in these groups, and
>among the means they use to delineate and restrict
>access to those groups are practices which are racist
>and/or sexist in intention or effect.
I haven't had a chance to reply to some of Daniel's posts, but here's an occasion to come back to the question of race & class, which is related to (though not reducible to) the question of credentialism, "meritocracy," individualism, etc. that we have been discussing.
While seeking an individual survival through various personal strategies may appear to "make sense," every worker doing so makes political solutions "unrealistic," thus bringing down the living standards of most (if not all) workers.
Yoshie