"Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy."

- William Deresiewicz in Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

May 4, 2011, The Nation

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”

The policy may be extreme, but the feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it. (William Pannapacker, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education as Thomas Benton, has been making this argument for years. See “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” among other essays.) My own advice was never that categorical. Go if you feel that your happiness depends on it—it can be a great experience in many ways—but be aware of what you’re in for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.
At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.
But as Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein point out in their comprehensive study The American Faculty (2006), the move to part-time labor is already an old story. Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass—and yet as far back as 1993, such positions already constituted the majority of new appointees. As of 2003, more than a third of full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. By the same year, tenure-track professors—the “normal” kind of academic appointment—represented no more than 35 percent of the American faculty.
The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.
* Read full article here

CUNY in the spotlight - the Tony Kushner controversy

Tony Kushner and the corporatisation of CUNY

My parallel experience of being smeared by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld has convinced me of the very real threat to academic freedom

On Monday evening, 9 May 2011, CUNY reversed its earlier decision to withhold an honorary degree from Tony Kushner after trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld had argued the playwright was too critical of Israel. Despite the controversy, Kushner has reportedly said he will accept the award. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

The taboo surrounding critical discussion of Israel in the United States never ceases to amaze me. But when the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) recently decided not to grant an honorary degree to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner because of his views on Israel, it felt personal.

Three months ago, I found myself at the center of a similar controversy over my appointment to teach a course in Middle East Politics at Brooklyn College, a CUNY school. Lacking any evidence to support the charge, a local politician described me as "pro-suicide bomber" and pressed for my dismissal. Within 48 hours and before I had held a single session of the course, the college administration intervened to cancel my appointment. My case set off a groundswell of support from academics and activists around the world and Brooklyn College eventually reinstated me just in time for classes to begin.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the board member behind the Kushner controversy, characterised Kushner's views on Israel as "extremist" and therefore unworthy of CUNY's recognition. Never mind that Tony Kushner is widely considered one of the greatest living American playwrights, his take on Israel was offensive to our man Wiesenfeld. When asked by the New York Times to elaborate on his objections, Wiesenfeld offered this piece of wisdom: "People who worship death for their children are not human … [The Palestinians] have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history."

This kind of behaviour is nothing new for Jeffrey Wiesenfeld. He was involved with the smear campaign against me earlier this year, charging CUNY professors with running a "cabal that suppresses the very academic freedom they claim to uphold". One can only wonder if his failure to keep me out of the classroom earlier this semester influenced his determination to block Kushner's award. In any case, Wiesenfeld seems to fancy himself an ideological enforcer on Israel.

Though bizarre, Wiesenfeld's antics are only symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Both my and Kushner's cases point to one of the more threatening crises facing CUNY and American universities generally: corporatisation and the adoption of a boardroom mentality in university administrations. As CUNY relies ever more on private funding and student tuition – already the majority of its budget – this once-great public institution gradually concerns itself primarily with cultivating and protecting a brand image. It seems CUNY no longer has much time for those with views likely to upset the largesse of its donors. This is quite simply poisonous for an institution grounded on the free exchange of ideas.

Fortunately, there is still hope. In both instances, a small but diverse and dedicated group of people helped mobilise responses and direct media attention. This is a lingering but powerful residue of academic democracy, for which CUNY was once famous, and it seems to be growing.

I draw one immediate conclusion from the cases in question: the board of trustees is an unnecessary body that should be disbanded. It comprises 17 political appointees who generally lack experience as educators and who – nearly all coming from business backgrounds – have little claim to represent the university's intellectual diversity. At a minimum, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld should submit his resignation, if only to spare CUNY any further embarrassment.

Although the board, on Monday night, cancelled its earlier decision and voted unanimously to grant Tony Kushner his honorary degree, the award itself was never the primary issue. The academic community needs to use this opportunity to launch a debate about the galloping corporatisation of American universities and the undue amount of power given to petty individuals like Wiesenfeld. The whole sordid affair would never have occurred were the university democratically controlled by those who actually use it.

CUNY in the spotlight - the Tony Kushner controversy

Transcript of Jeffrey Weisenfeld's statement:

BOARD OF TRUSTEES
OF
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING

JEFFREY S. WIESENFELD SPEECH

Monday
May 2, 2011

BENNO SCHMIDT, Chairman

MR. WIESENFELD: Again, Mr. Chairman, forgive the indulgence. I want to raise an issue that’s larger the candidate about which I want to speak, but I want to explain why. There is a lot of disingenuous and non intellectual activity directed against the State of Israel on campuses throughout the country, the west generally and often times the United States as well. And the reason I choose to address this is there have been a couple of instances and I don’t in any way God forbid denigrate this university because we are far and away better in this regard than most others and certainly not the college in question, but I want to address in context the question of the granting of the degree to Tony Kushner.

Now, about a year or so ago, if I am not mistaken John Jay College also issued a John Jay Justice Award to Mary Robinson and there was an article in The Wall Street Journal, and I will just give a brief quote to set the stage, “Criticism of Mr. Obama’s award to Mary Robinson to be official bestowed has centered on Mrs. Robinson’s central organizing role as secretary general of the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durbin, South Africa. Instead of concentrating on its purported objectives, Durbin was vehemently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and at least implicitly anti-American. So vile was the conference’s draft declaration that Secretary of State Colin Powell correctly called it a throwback to the days of Zionism equals racism, referring to the infamous 1975 U.N. General Assembly Resolution to that effect. President George Bush, whose father led the 1991 campaign that repealed the U.N. Zionism as a form of racism resolution, unhesitatingly agreed when Mr. Powell recommended the U.S. delegation leave the Durbin conference rather than legitimize the outcome.

Mrs. Robinson did not see it that way then and she has shown no remorse since. In late 2002 she described Durbin’s outcome as “remarkably good including on issues of the Middle East.”

Now to Mr. Kushner. I chose with Mr. Kushner not to look at pro Israel Web sites that would give insight into his feelings of Israel, rather I went to the Web site of one Norman Finkelstein, another discredited individual that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this university, and he pridefully displays key quotes of Mr. Kushner on his Web site which are accurately reflected elsewhere and by Mr. Kushner’s record itself and I quote Mr. Kushner.

First, why Mr. Finkelstein praises the candidate. Kushner also deplores the brutal and illegal tactics of the I.D.F., which I might add is the only force of its kind in the world that has the high code of ethics that the Israel Defense Forces has and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture in a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people. He is also on the board of an organization which opposes the security fence, a unified Jerusalem or military aid to Israel recommends Norman Finkelstein’s notorious books and supports boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel.

Now to Mr. Kushner’s quotes, “Israel was founded in a program that if you really wasn’t to be blunt about it was ethnic cleansing and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people. I have never been a Zionist, I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state, it would be better if it never had happened.”

Kushner said establishing a state means [expletive] people over. However, I think that people in the late 20th and 21st century, having seen the Holocaust, having seen the 20th century and all of its horrors cannot be complacent in the face of that. The Israeli reporter questioning Mr. Kushner says, but you are saying then that the very creation of the State of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea. And Mr. Kushner answered it was a mistake.

I think you get the idea. I don’t wasn’t to bore you all with the details. Let me just say that when people identify themselves politically in principle or principally by these types of viewpoints, yes it could be said by other trustees or by members of faculty that it has a chilling effect when a trustee brings up these types of matters, but I think it is up to all of us to look at fairness and to consider these things, especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are misogynist, anti-gay, anti-Christian and societies that are doing today to the Christians what they did to the 500,000 Jews who lived in the Arab world in 1948 at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, dispossessing them, murdering them, deporting them.

And so I have to say that even if I am the lone dissenter, that it is time that it would be much worse for the reputation of the university not to mention this, especially after the appointment of an individual at Brooklyn College, Mr. Oberton, who has some equally specious scholarship.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Barthes on Provocative Language

"...the paradox here is that “provocative” language is readily accommodated by the literary institution: the scandals of language, from Rimbaud to Ionesco, are rapidly and perfectly integrated; whereas “provocative” thought, insofar as it is to be immediate (without mediation), can only exhaust itself in the no man’s land of form: the scandal is never total ”.
Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, (Canada: HerperCollins, 1996) 185

Aphasia

It is absolutely crucial to try to question and analyze the movement/passage that took place in the university in which the academia changed from the place where you ask the questions to the place where students (especially undergraduates) come already with the answers and a prepackaged vision of the self and how within this passage a new language is formed and spoken both by the professors and the students. A language that is related to the corporate world and a language that seems to be locked in an aphasia that creates an incapacity to invent new metaphors and real linguistic movements that could eventually bring to awareness and that could generate new questions and that could be open and deal directly with the idea of a changing self.

Said on Professionalism

“By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with an eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior –not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and apolitical and “objective”.”
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 23

About "the profession"

What exactly is professionalism and does it apply to the academic institution? Is it a certain prescribed protocol? Or is it a qualification given by a group, an institution, an authority? How can one become professional? Does professionalism require a certain skill a certain mannerism?
A definition of professionalism of course would entail a division of professions and should we call ours the “intellectual profession”? Is professionalism driven by personal interest, by convenience? Is it a responsibility or a liability? Is it an imitative activity, a molding magma? What falls under the professionalism of the academic intellectual are certain requirements such as writing papers, publishing them and going to conferences, but for some the demanded production of papers can be a burden. Too often there seems to be a split between what one reads and discusses in a classroom and the requirements and expectations of the “profession” This type of separation between theory and praxis is exactly what turns the early passionate and engaged interest of students into an alluring and dispassionate theoretical horizon of time.
In this sense professionalism remains the burden of a bureaucratic load that provides a certain position, label, name, and a “home”. Students are introduced to the routine from the start but are not engaged in a discussion of the routine’s premises and processes.
Professionalism has become an assessing parameter for success. We as a group are proposing undisciplinarity as an unfixed position from which to reconsider the role of academia and our own work as academics.

Hazy Knowledge and Potential Seeds

It is crucial to investigate the development of “specialized languages,” particularly within academic institutions, and explore the ways in which these “specialized languages,” vocabularies, or terminologies serve to cordon off experience and create “exclusive” zones or zones of exclusion. Aside from the fascinating linguistic debate, we should try to understand what role the intellectual can have today in engaging a discourse that is both outspoken and comprehensible and how this debate is framed in the Academy. Crucial is also to examine the relationship between the imposition of technocratic/corporative languages, specialized vocabularies, and the loss of identity, particularly through imposed boundaries that level out intellectual differences in representative forms of expression... boundaries that are almost impalpable (a deep and extensive analysis of the nature of these boundaries is also a pivotal point).

Moreover within this context: which is the role of “the unperceived”? The idea of the unknown that sparks “mythical” experience, that intersects with and transforms the pragmatic space of a tangible experience, moving beyond the idea of a common ground of shared rules and specialized languages towards a dynamic in which the particular and the subjective are at the center and where this hazy knowledge becomes a crucial seed for further imagining that may eventually lead to open up cracks in the new (functional) intelligibility of the Academia.

Noam Chomsky on the Finkelstein Fiasco

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.
From The Fate of an Honest Intellectual by Noam Chomsky

Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248

From Adorno

From Adorno's "Minima Moralia" - "On Marcel Proust" (To me, seems to be a comment on professionalism though filtered from a totally different context)

"The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become 'practical,' a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry...The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the moe reliably since anyone who repudiates the division of labour - if only by taking pleasure in this work - makes himself vulnerable by its standars in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus, is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independant intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge."

the poetics of common knowledge

"The common is given, but the common knowledge is not. It should not be confused with "common sense"–that is to say, the lore of compromise a culture builds up with its own ignorance. The common knowledge might be properly contrasted to disciplined knowledge. The domain of the common knowledge has no preexistence. It comes into being only when contingent beings come into contingent relationship. The common knowledge leads not to certainty, but to confidence of action." (Byrd, The Poetics of Common Knowledge, 23)

politics and academia

Stanley Fish raises some really interesting issues in relation to the separation between literary criticism and political influence, perhaps extending that to the whole academic institution. There seems to be a consensus that the political independence of academia preserves it's progressive ideology by allowing it to be freely leftist without concern for larger political influence. The more problematic aspect of his argument is that he calls for an acceptance of the lack of political influence, and a depoliticized practice of literary criticism. But just because literary criticism is insignificant politically doesn't mean that we should give up the politics of criticism and the underlying ideology of the institution. Again, Fish seems to point to a certain academic neutrality, or isolation from the larger social arena, and even seems to find that a positive attribute that should be embraced. In other words, if I understand this correctly, one should embrace political irrelevance of the discipline because that is the context we are in, and not try to make it into a political discipline.

I understand that we are not going to change the course or the war in Iraq through literary critique and that the White House policies are not influenced by Stanley Fish's latest essay, but that doesn't mean that as literary critics we should not be political and politically active, even within the discipline. One of the purposes of our undisciplinarity is to address the political from within the academic as a way to reconnect it to the larger context, by saying that there is a link, no matter what people might think. There is a link between departmental censorship and intimidation practices and the current regime in the White House. To ignore the political climate we are in would be naive. So gatekeeping shouldn't be to keep politics outside, as though it were some kind of purity that the rest of society lacked. The discipline itself should learn to be messy again, utopian again, and seek influence, even if it is unattainable. To be political is not just to influence the government, it is to become participant in the production of a culture that is politically relevant, even to those in power.

politics and academia

While there is much debate from within the academic institution on global American politics, and support for political intellectuals such as Cornell West, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Harvey, there seems to be little attention paid to the changing politics of the academic institution itself, as though it were immune to the growing attacks on the democratic process. Being students today is a radically different experience, one that in many ways replicates the deeply troubling mechanisms of censorship we see all over America. Many of these students, from undergraduate to the graduate level, have internalized the political climate into their academic thinking, becoming self-censoring in order to advance their careers. This unquestioning acceptance of career advancement has turned the university into an business-oriented institution, seriously undermining the university as a place for critical thought. Of course there are still the great critical and progressive thinkers, but given the course of the past few years, we might be tempted to think that they are the last of a kind of political intellectual that resists and thinks the givens of political mandates. It is time to reclaim their resistance and the university as a space of intellectual protest, especially in a time of unprecedented erosion of democratic values.

Undisciplinarity is a provocation and a resistance, a way to rethink the categories we live by and propose a new space of free critical thought, one that need not take into account disciplinary boundaries. Undisciplinarity is a way to think and to act, to disobey the pervasive mandates of fear and suspicion in the university in order to make it a place of freedom in a global world of terror.

Context:

All of this has emerged from the way in which our Comparative Literature department at the City University of New York evolved over the past few years and how it affected our course of study, our choice of fields and approaches to research. Much like other universities, CUNY has been making changes within its sprawling educational system to accommodate the trends towards an unfortunate professionalization and corporatization of the academic world. Being in New York City, overt manifestations of these transitions came to the fore after the 9/11 tragedy as censorious organizations such as a Campuswatch and other more virulent forms ofconservatism in the media pushed the Humanities departments in different directions. Of course, some departments reacted and debated these changes, our Comparative Lit dept further embraced the atmosphere of censorship generated by the 9/11 tragedy. There is a distinct feeling that there is a renewed attack upon the university as a liberal institution and thus the intellectual and political discourse it generates is getting monitored in various ways. The academic world has become a mirror of political trends in this country and that there is an inextricable link between the two.

On the university front, we have tried to engage and confront these issues by questioning certain policy decisions and asking for changes within the extremely traditional Eurocentric reading lists, course listings, colloquium choices and so on. Since then, our department has become a place of ideological battle regarding the future of Comp Lit itself. Not only has it led to some polemical debates but it has led to the exclusions of many of us interested in more politicized fields of study. This departmental politics is merely a point of entry in what seems to be a greater malaise within academia in the United States. It seem that, on the one hand, departments and disciplines within the United States are transitioning into interdisciplinarity, studies of transnational literatures an intermingling of fields and methodologies while on the other hand, there is a renewed vigor to conservatism and the resistance to the breaking down of monolithic canonical structures, disciplinary models and more traditional ways of thinking through the field of the Humanities.

There are subtle and unsubtle processes of gatekeeping and constructions of boundaries within the institutions that transform the fields in which students undertake research, the theory that gets taught in the classrooms, the reading lists that get drawn up and the professional market that one tends to cater to. As much as all of this seems to be exceptional to our department, we have realized that many of these practices are also present at other departments and that in our case, they are merely hyper-realized. We have begun to detect, in fact, a sort of phenomena within the academic universe which all of us realized that it needed to be addressed, analyzed, and shared with other academics.