[lbo-talk] seems 99% sure

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 2 10:16:31 PDT 2011


Alan: " It not professor's salaries or benefits either that's at issue, it is the way the attack on higher education is an attack on public space, public discourse, the ever-so-slight democratization of the state, and the mere idea that the reification of markets, militarism, and individualism might could just be fetishized horseshit."

[WS:] Exactly. You are absolutely correct that the attack on higher education is a part of the war that neo-liberal forces wage on the public sector. It is interesting to note that these attacks started in the time when access to universities became fairly universal in the US.

As to the ideological stance of universities - it is a really mixed bag. You will find a variety of stances. But even relatively conservative universities like JHU tend to be more liberal than the population at large. Not long ago, we had a visiting postodoc fellow from Germany who was quite surprised that Marxist ideas were still being taught in US universities - this was not the case of German universities (at least according to her.) It is one thing to have philosophical disagreements with some of these Marxist ideas (as I sometimes do) - but it is a good thing that they are there, still being cultivated rather than being totally forgotten.

Your comments about deskilling are also worth further consideration. I recall discussing the issue of deskilling in a sociology class that I taught a while ago. Most students considered it mainly a "manual labor" issue, something that would not happen to white collar jobs to which they were aspiring. They were skeptical about my arguments that they were next in line. Now fast forward 20 years, and most white collar and professional jobs have either been deskilled or are in the process of deskilling. In the academia, deskilling takes the form of bifurcation into cognitariat - basically workers performing mental labor for someone else, and owners/managers of the products of mental labor performed by the cognitariat. The skills required to produce intellectual commodity have been pretty much standardized to manning software and writing standard prose appropriate for the genre.

The skills required to manage have also been standardized to parroting buzzwords currently in vogue in the managerial/business circles, schmoozing with other managers, and using pop-psychology to manipulate subordinates.

This division of academic labor into owners/managers and the cognitariat struck me very clearlynot long ago when I was asked to review a book proposal submitted to an academic publisher. This was an edited volume to which various experts were to contribute chapters.

However, the contract awarded all intellectual property rights and royalties to the editors, whose only contribution was to review the submitted work and put their own names on the cover. The workers who actually produced the content of the volume would receive a complimentary copy and a discount on purchasing additional copies. This is basically no different from, say, a Walmart worker receiving 10% discount for the merchandise her employer sells.

It struck me that this is standard practice in academic publishing. I contributed a number of chapters to edited volumes basically for nothing (a complimentary copy.) The issue of royalties never occurred to me, because I always thought that they were meager if any to begin with, but the main reason I - and presume most other academics - did this was to receive " credit" which would count toward my future academic career. This is, btw, the reason why I use the word "cognitariat" rather than "proletariat" in this context. Proletariat gets their wage for their work and has no illusion that it will receive any rights or credits for the product. Cognitariat gets bupkes for their work, but has a big illusion that the product they created will somehow be credited to them. Fat chance. Given the way the academia is going, they will be nothing but proles producing intellectual community for increasingly lower wages, unless they cross into the dark side and become managers/entrepreneurs themselves.

Wojtek

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Chris Brooke <cb632 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 02/09/2011 02:22, "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>>
>> > We know that from statements that Smith had made concerning his own
>> > university experiences, that he claimed that he got far more out of his
>> > undergraduate studies at Glasgow University than he did from his graduate
>> studies
>> > at Oxford...
>>
>> Yes, indeed. In a letter from Oxford, Smith wrote that, "It will be his own
>> fault if anyone should endanger his health at Oxford by excessive study,
>> our
>> only business here being to go to prayers twice a day and to lecture twice
>> a
>> week". And when preparing one of the later editions of the Wealth of
>> Nations
>> for publication, Smith added this entry to the index: "Oxford, the
>> professorships there, sinecures".
>>
>> C.
>>
>
>
> Without picking out anyone in particular, I think the same-as-it-ever-was
> tone of a lot of the discussion here verges on ridiculous… particularly in
> the context of contemporary struggles over education.
>
> Yes, since long before Smith there's been great ambivalence about
> institutions of higher education… or whatever you want to call them.  The
> material conditions associated with such institutions and the class status
> of the intended enrollees, much less the social meaning of a degree, has
> changed just a tad since 1750.  On the one hand, a great deal of the
> difference between English and Scottish universities lies in the clearly
> subordinate status of the latter to the former due in no small part to the
> effective colonization of the latter by the former… along these lines, I
> wonder what Smith and so many others thought of William and Mary or Harvard?
>
> Despite all this, however, it was much more the German model of education
> that informed the development of public/land grant universities in the US.
>  Of course, the relationship between various strata of the citizenry,
> business, science, technology and the canon was deeply contested, but to
> treat Edinburgh, Oxford, Harvard, UVA, UofM, MSU and the many many Normal
> colleges, much less Swarthmore, Skidmore, Earlham, Knox, Grinnell, Mills,
> Pomona, or Howard, Tuskegee and the 1890s public universities as having more
> in common in 1900 w/r/t their entrepreneurial and/or disembedded and
> disembodied character is materially unsustainable.
>
> You don't have to have an uncritical stance on the ideological role of
> colleges and universities to be less than blase about the deskilling and
> deprofessionalization of education workers, much less the
> intended-yet-always-implicit denigration of students and the meaning of
> education.   Sure, much about the Cold War explosion of  the
> university-science-industrial complex sucked.  Sure, a great deal of
> disabling crap was, has been and is taught to the last three or four
> generations of first-persons-in-family-to-attend-college.  Sure, there are
> intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan and political people who got that way
> without college - public or private.  But the glib dismissal ("Yeah, well,
> whatever, higher ed's always sucked… just look what Adam Smith said.") of
> the real consequences for real people of the neoliberal and neoconservative
> attack on education - primary, secondary or higher - is pretty irritating.
>  It not professor's salaries or benefits either that's at issue, it is the
> way the attack on higher education is an attack on public space, public
> discourse, the ever-so-slight democratization of the state, and the mere
> idea that the reification of markets, militarism, and individualism might
> could just be fetishized horseshit.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list