the minnesota review n.s. 50-51 (1999)

Michael Bennett

The Upside of a Down Market

The title of this essay could only be uttered with tongue firmly planted in cheek. At the level of individual experience, there is nothing positive about the virtual collapse of the job market in higher education. Those of us who are, or recently were, graduate students are all too familiar with the frustration of engaging in graduate study for five to ten years (or more) with no sure job awaiting us, the anxiety of finally launching a job search, and the despair when that search results in either no job offer or the first of a series of part-time and/or non-tenure-track appointments. Even those of us who are lucky enough to land a tenure-track position are all too aware of the tentative status of that position in the face of downsizing and the increasingly rigorous tenure standards that predominate in the current buyer's market in academia.

At the same time, the current job crisis is paradoxically having some positive effects. It is forcing many within the ranks of academia to recognize the internal contradictions in our profession which have been papered over by more prosperous conditions and rosy forecasts of future employment. We are compelled to confront our position as participants in a market economy which is engaged in an assault on labor. The result is an unusual opportunity for labor activism within academia and between academics and other workers. Like all leftists of one stripe or another, radical teachers are in the awkward position of hoping that things will get so bad that our fellow academic workers will be forced to recognize where their interests lie in this conflict.

Even within the stately professional organization of which I am a part, the Modern Language Association, this realization is beginning to dawn, though much more quickly with the rank-and-file than with the powers-that-be. Case in point, at the most recent MLA convention in San Francisco, the Radical Caucus, the Graduate Student Caucus, and a majority (or near-majority) of delegates to the MLA's governing body were pushing for direct confrontation with the market forces dictating the downsizing, part-timing, and outsourcing of academic labor. Meanwhile, MLA President Elaine Showalter was delivering an address which capitulated to these very forces, suggesting that we focus, instead, on finding jobs outside of academia.

This position, which Showalter rehearsed shortly before the conference in the MLA Newsletter's "Presidential Column," dismissed those of us who would rather fight than switch as "outdated and self-destructive" (3). Showalter employed a metaphor suggesting that the market is an immovable iceberg-like force of nature, which it is useless to confront: "We can't afford to waste our collective energies anymore in competition for the dwindling job market, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and fighting about who gets into the lifeboats first" (3). A friend parsed Showalter's elaboration on this conceit during her Presidential Address at the convention as "if you can't beat 'em; join 'em" (work for those corporations and government agencies manufacturing our labor crisis, instead of "self-destructively" struggling against them). Her speech prompted one of the more popular chants from those of us who carried placards in front of the Hilton in support of the UC graduate student strike: "Hey Elaine, you're a pain!; PhDs are teachers!" Not great prose perhaps, but voicing this sentiment at the MLA in the context of support for the grad student strike highlighted the crucial connection between resistance to the assault on academic labor, dismay at the willful blindness of the MLA hierarchy, and the importance of unionization.

In addition to drawing more academic laborers into left organizing and forcing professional organizations to adjust their priorities, the current crisis also has the potential to help heal the split within the academic left between theorists and pedagogues; or, at the very least, reveal that some of our colleagues who spout trendy left theory have no intention of putting their capital where there discourse is. Carl Freedman has argued that this split between theorists and pedagogues "registers the divided class identity" of academics between the theorists' identification as members of a "subsumed class" of unproductive workers and the pedagogues' existence as a "mixed case" of unproductive and productive labor (81). Freedman hopes for the development of a "third term"—a "form of academic radicalism that would respond primarily to our identity as productive workers" involved in the "demystification of the ideology of professionalism," which would begin with unionization efforts in tandem with "those who sweep classroom floors and serve food in university cafeterias" (81). This hope is precisely what is raised by the much-discussed controversy over the efforts of Yale graduate students to unionize under the auspices of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union and the more recent unionization efforts in the University of California system and elsewhere. I focus on the response of the MLA to the Yale strike because it is the most obvious example of the divergence between the MLA hierarchy and its membership with respect to the appropriate response to the job crisis.

In April of 1995, Yale graduate students in the humanities and social sciences elected the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) to represent them as their collective bargaining agent. The Yale administration refused to recognize GESO as such. After a series of protests and forums aimed at gaining recognition, the membership of the GESO voted on 7 December 1995 to conduct a grade strike until the University agreed to negotiate. On 14 January 1996 the membership of GESO voted to discontinue the strike in the face of alleged reprisals by the Yale administration. The surface disagreement between the administration and the strikers concerned whether or not it is proper for teaching assistants to withhold grades as part of a job action and whether it is appropriate to discipline those students who participate in such an action. The more profound disagreement concerned the question of whether or not teaching assistants are, in fact, workers with the right to unionize. I would like to explore how the controversy over this question has helped to spur a left movement within academia which has had a profound impact on the MLA and other professional organizations.

Letters from Yale faculty and administrators mailed to all members of the Modern Language Association revealed the pervasive ideology of professionalism which insists that academics—from graduate students to chaired professors—are part of a community which exists in a separate realm from regular workers. Thus Annabel Patterson wrote condescendingly of the alliance between GESO and the "dining workers in the colleges and other support staff" on the grounds that "Yale is not prepared to negotiate academic policy [. . .] with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union" (MLA 6). The letter from Margaret Homans was the most blunt in stating the underlying rationale for the Yale administration's opposition to the? unionization efforts of its graduate students: "it is not possible for Yale students-in training, after all, to occupy professional positions-to constitute the proletarianized body they claim to be. Therefore [. . .] I concur with Yale's position that its students cannot and should not be unionized" (MLA 11). This position is built on at least two dubious premises: 1) that teaching assistants are primarily "apprentices" and 2) that all academics are members of a domain which is qualitatively removed from other workers.

The state of the academic job market gives the lie to the first premise. Since the number of positions advertised in the MLA's Job Information List (JIL) peaked in 1988, the yearly reports of the Director of Research for the MLA had, until recently, provided one unbroken narrative: a "sharp decline in the number of positions advertised in the JIL has been accompanied by an increase in the number of modern language PhDs granted" (Huber 89). Despite a recent leveling off and even slight improvement in this decline, only a third of those receiving English PhDs found "tenure-track positions within the year they received their degrees" (Laurence and Welles 6). The rapid shift to part-time positions in English departments reflects an "industry-wide" trend, such that temporary employees now account for almost two-fifths of all faculty positions (Horwitz A6). Based on these facts, Cary Nelson and Michael Bérubé conclude that "the collapse of the job market makes the logic of graduate apprenticeship morally corrupt" (B1).

And I would argue that even were the market to turn around tomorrow this small miracle would not change the fact that academics—whether teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, junior faculty, or tenured professors—are workers in the knowledge industry. I do not mean to suggest that there are no differences between, say, graduate students, senior professors, clerical workers, and dining hall staff in colleges and universities; however, I insist that these are differences in degree and not in kind (as opposed to, for example, the difference between workers and management). We are obviously part of the same economic system as other workers. In the words of then-MLA President Patricia Meyer Spacks, in her introduction to Profession 95, "academics, like carpenters and accountants, must operate within the perplexing economic and social context of our historical moment" (3). And the shared misfortunes of this historical moment also provide a shared hope.

Rather than merely accommodating to the market, the current crisis offers an impetus to join with others in challenging the market relations of which academia is a part. We need to confront the assumption that the market "dictates" cutbacks, downsizing, layoffs, etc. To this end, professional organizations should refocus more of their resources on assessing and responding to the needs of their unemployed (and underemployed) members or potential members. We should be attempting to make mutual connections with other workers in academia trying to enhance and transform their work environment. Cary Nelson has suggested ways in which effective union organizing could also include building alliances with "potential allies" outside the academic community ("What is to be Done" 22).

But before we can worry about trying to influence the market relations which pertain outside the academy, we must first own up to our position within a market economy. The ideology of professionalism championed by the letters from Yale and promulgated by Elaine Showalter impede this process. As Mary Burgan, General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors, notes "we must understand ourselves not only as a professional community, but also as an economic one" (38). In every sense, what is happening in the academic market is tied to what is happening in the larger market: colleges and universities, like other businesses, are downsizing; they are hiring part-time and replacement workers; they are engaging in speedup and productivity pressure through increasing teaching loads and class sizes; and they are failing to replace retiring workers—all while providing special benefits and extravagant retirement packages for executive officers (Nelson, "Late Capitalism" 132). Only by acting on this "realization" can we hope to have any impact on the forces which are undermining academia. For those who find the pronouncement that we must resist these forces too radical, Mary Burgan points out that tenure is itself a resistance to laissez-faire economics which makes us all potentially "resistors to the implacable dictates of the market" (38). On this basis, she makes a call for solidarity.

I would issue that same call. One of the perennial problems of the left in America is that it is difficult for the workers of the world to unite when no one is willing to self-identify as anything other than the middle class (or, in the case of academia, the so-called professional managerial class). Current conditions may at last force academics to recognize that we are workers in the knowledge industry. As long as workers at places like Yale had the luxury of assuming that they were not like everyone else, it was easy to maintain that graduate apprenticeship existed outside of the market economy. Now that even such elite institutions see their full-time job placement rate falling precipitously, it becomes clear that we are all subject to market forces as long as we exist in a capitalist economy. To the extent that this realization dawns in even the most unlikely places, we have an unusual opportunity to organize and unite academic workers—this is the upside of the down market.

Based on these "provocations," allow me to conclude with a few concrete suggestions:

1) Resist the traditional academic genres in order to turn professional organizations and academic conferences into venues for activist organizing. Conventional conceptions of the conference paper (one person reading to a passive audience), academic politics, the profession, and professional meetings—all need to be rethought. (See, for example, Cary Nelson's suggestions to turn one whole MLA conference into a discussion of the collapse of the job market and how to deal with it ["Late Capitalism" 132-3].)

2) Articulate the political responsibility of the critic, to borrow Jim Merod's phrase. Take those who engage in left theory at their word and hold them accountable for the "real world" implications of their theories—that is, challenge scholars to turn literary theory into literary praxis. When the membership of the MLA voted overwhelmingly to sanction Yale despite the propaganda spewed forth by well-respected literary theorists on behalf of Yale, we were in part rejecting the theoretical bad faith of those scholars. The language of Annabel Patterson's letter, for example, shows a scholar at odds with her own theoretical commitments. She begins her letter by promising to reveal "the facts that lie behind the graduate students' inflammatory rhetoric" (MLA 5). It seems odd that a critic whose hermeneutical strategy of "reading between the lines" is "implied in deconstruction as an exegetical practice" (Reading 7) could fail to recognize that meaning does not and cannot exist behind discursive practices. Patterson then reports that "the Yale administration responded to this situation by making it absolutely clear that withholding grades was an infringement of teaching responsibility and not an expression of free speech" (MLA 5), as though the imprimatur of Yale is the arbiter of Reason as opposed to the confused and "inflammatory" claims of the students. Given Patterson's concern for recovering the encoded messages which have evaded the censorship of official power in her important work Censorship and Interpretation, it seems odd that official pronouncements are taken as the measure of Truth. And it is especially disturbing that someone who has argued against the elitism of Leo Strauss and Jacques Lacan (Reading 6, 325), could write with such condescension for the alliance between graduate students and dining hall workers.

Not surprisingly, those scholars who practice a more materially grounded form of cultural criticism provided a more trenchant analysis of, and helpful intervention in, the Yale strike. Scholars like Hazel Carby, Alan Wald, Andrew Ross, Wahneema Lubiano, Robin Kelley, and Michael Denning were more consistent in applying their analysis of hegemonic structures and the socio-political co-determinants of cultural formations to the domains which they study and to the terrain which they inhabit. We should challenge ourselves and others to do likewise.

3) Put the MLA to work on these issues. Three years ago, the MLA voted to sanction Yale. Two years ago, the Delegate Assembly voted down a Radical Caucus-sponsored resolution on part-time labor and unionization because several delegates objected to the "inflammatory language" of the resolution, as when we blamed "global movements of capital" for a role in the job crisis. Last year, a more demurely phrased version of the same resolution was defeated by only seven votes. Next year, with your help, it should pass. If you are a member of the MLA, contact your Delegate Assembly representatives. Go to the conference in December and attend the hearings on this and other resolutions sponsored by the Radical Caucus, Graduate Student Caucus, and members of the Marxist Literary Group. Come to the sessions sponsored by these organizations. Speak your mind at the Delegate Assembly meeting.

4) Organize, organize, organize. Having recently been elected to my local union's executive committee, I have seen firsthand how academic unions can make a difference. But I have also seen how the rights of adjunct and part-time faculty will repeatedly be bargained away in exchange for benefits for full-time faculty unless there is an organized and active adjunct presence throughout the process. If you don't have a union, get one. If you do have a union, get on the executive committee. If you are on the executive committee, make sure that it is doing everything possible to protect and expand the rights of adjunct and part-time faculty, build bridges with other unions on campus (secretarial, food service, etc.), and work to make your collective union a force which can resist the insidious corporatization of the university.