On Sunday, August 4, 2002, at 02:29 PM, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> <snip>
> What causes it? I'm in a southern town with a big public university, the
> profs and grad assistants that speak up don't get contracts, don't get
> tenure, or if tenured are driven out. If you support activist
> students, you
> get attacked for unprofessionalism (meaning, have you thought about
> changing
> your profession?). If you use a Marxist critique, it better be about
> literature or culture. This means that (employed) professors sound
> pretty
> damn obscure. We had an "anti-war" panel here a few months after 9-11
> with
> various profs, and no one could say a clear sentence, not because they
> can't
> communicate, but out of fear. Activists listen to this and it's not
> clarifying, and their reaction is, 'study, bah, what we need is action.'
well, that's where you need tenured professors with the chutzpah to say it and say it loud. when i was at yale, david montgomery, who used to be a shop floor organizer for the CP until he was blacklisted and is now the author famous tomes of labor history, was one of those guys who could--and DID--do it all. many other tenured professors would ask "how high?" when told to jump, moreso even than some junior/untenured faculty. part of that, of course, is that the rate of tenure for yale faculty is so low, so a lot of those people never thought they would get tenured at yale in the first place. but the point is really how cowardly--and even downright vicious--tenured faculty were.
incidentally, the main anarchist in the history dept, jim scott, refused to get involved with grad student union organizing because weren't sufficiently anarchist. we were, of course, all about organizing. feh. that was his excuse, anyway.
>
> Don't even get me started on the corporate foundation-funded liberal
> thinktanks. Talk about giving analysis a bad name. And these same
> foundations give grants only for action action action when they fund
> 'grassroots' groups, completing the break. Union-funded thinktanking is
> better, it being dues money and all. Contrast the Green Party program
> criticized earlier with the Labor Party program
> (http://www.thelaborparty.org) and you'll see what I mean.
i'd be interested in hearing more analysis of this.
>
> Yeah, yeah, I'm all for all of us being 'intellectuals' or better yet,
> theorists. And in feminism, at least, we do analyze our experiences and
> build our theory based on that. But I'd define intellectual for the
> moment
> as someone who gets paid to study, since in my experience, when you're
> leading in a movement--day to day operations and organizing--the
> requirements
> and deadlines of that work shove study to the back burner and sometimes
> right
> off the stove.
>
this again is where i think of david montgomery, who used to take his sabbaticals to go off around the world and help people organize. he did some of the best speechifying in support of unions i've ever seen. in a lot of ways, i wish i could be david montgomery.
of course, i never will, and then i--and you and the rest of us--have to figure out what we can do and are satisfied doing.
j