[lbo-talk] Academia's indentured servants

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 12 04:27:43 PDT 2013


Joanna; "Why would there be solidarity in a sphere completely based on competition and status?"

[WS:] Yup. Being determines consciousness. This whole institution is organized as a hierarchy of individuals who have little to gain from cooperation within the organization. Even in the corporate world the emphasis is often on team work and collaborative production of the output, but that concept is alien to the academia. It is individually recognized achievement and status, even if the actual knowledge is produced collectively. However, the academic "collective" is still organized as a medieval hierarchy in which the master gets all or most of the credits and the grunts get the subsistence or less.

Emile Durkheim came with the concept of religion as a "pure" representation of the organizational form of a society. Its chief role, according to Durkheim, is to imprint in the human mind apriori forms of reasoning and organizing empirical material (which In my view is a brilliant solution of the old Kantian problem). I would argue that this role is played by the academia. It's role as knowledge producer goes beyond empirical research and verification - it also instills apriori cognitive forms that correspond to social hierarchies. I realized that during my graduation ceremony when the provost announced that undergraduate students will be recognized collectively while graduate student - individually. That corresponds to the Platonic medieval hierarchies in which the collective mass (matter) is the bottom of the hierarchy of beings and a singular idea (deity) is it top. In other words, hierarchy is also the progression of individual distinction, which is also the form of a hierarchical social organization.

This principle may be difficult to implement in its pure form in the real world, where production is a collaborative process of individuals whose competencies and contributions cannot always be organized as linear hierarchies. But it is epitomized in the academia that is what your fellow countryman Mircea Eliade*) called a hierophany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierophany or empirical manifestation and embodiment of hierarchy and individuation.

So since academia is a "sacred manifestation" of a social order in which the degree of individuation corresponds to the place in the hierarchical organization, it is not surprising individual functionaries of that institution merely enact the roles ascribed to them by the organizational form rather that forming bonds of solidarity with people on different rungs of the hierarchy. Being determines consciousness.

*) He might have been a fascist sympathizer, like Heidegger, but he had a few brilliant ideas. For that matter, Marx was an asshole in his private life too.

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 7:22 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> Why would there be solidarity in a sphere completely based on competition
> and status?
>
> On the one hand you'd think the tenured profs would have nothing to lose
> if they stood up for the adjuncts. But if you're not used to thinking in
> terms of supporting others, you might just not see that as a possibility.
> And remember, whole departments have been axed, in which case tenure means
> nothing. So perhaps, they're not as secure as we think.
>
> Finally, still speaking of security, most profs have never left school.
> They might simply not realize that they are employable outside of school.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> Wojtek asks why adjunct profs put up with such terrible conditions. In
> fact, many have tried to organize unions, some successfully. However,
> another question to ask is why tenured profs put up with adjuncts being
> treated so poorly. Why so little solidarity from tenured teachers?
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-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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