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

Annalee Newitz

The Labor of the Cultural Underclass

During the late 70s, California voters passed an anti-tax package called Proposition 13, which meant, in part, severe budget cuts for public K-12 schools and community colleges. At the time, I was in the fourth grade, and my father was an instructor at a local community college. Although I barely understood what was going on, I listened intently as my father mourned the loss of the literature classes he adored teaching. Therefore, I may have been one of the only students at Deerfield Elementary School who knew why it was that the "free" pencils and paper which used to sit in tidy stacks at the front of our classrooms were suddenly no longer available to us.

Our teacher explained—without ever mentioning politics or the economy—that, from then on, we would have to bring our own pencils and paper to class. The school supply cabinets and drawers we were once allowed to open whenever we wished were locked. At school, I could no longer draw as many pictures of horses as I wanted. And at home, my father began to hate the job he had once imagined would help him escape from his blue collar roots in the San Fernando Valley.

As I grew older and started to plan for my own career as an educator (I set my heart on graduate school at the age of sixteen), I watched my father became more and more alienated from his job. The person who had talked happily to my mother and I about the novels he planned to teach while he made us dinner now considered grading an ugly chore and waged bitter battles with his administration about course requirements. He began to hold office hours at 7AM so that he wouldn't have to talk to his students. Like his own father, who worked for years running an auto shop, my father came to consider his labor something he did just for money, an activity which depleted his life rather than enriching it.

Nevertheless, I came to graduate school for my PhD without ever learning the lesson my father's life taught me: there is nothing inherently noble or uplifting about any kind of work if it is done under conditions not of your own choosing. This lesson, it seems to me, must inform any consideration of the two most popular responses to the current "job crisis" in higher education—a crisis which, like Prop 13, has affected me personally. After spending three years looking unsuccessfully for a tenure-track job, I've finally decided to leave academia and become a freelance journalist.

Ironically, my choice—motivated largely by economic necessity—goes against what I've been told is the position I should take as an academic leftist. Prominent members of the Modern Language Association's pro-labor Graduate Student Caucus like Mark Kelley and William Pannapacker (along with faculty allies Cary Nelson and Michael Bérubé) have made a highly successful effort to rally disenfranchised PhDs like myself around a politico-economic platform that calls for more full-time professorships and stricter regulation of graduate programs that seem to produce PhDs solely to maintain a low-wage labor pool (and perhaps to fill graduate classrooms with surplus intellectual capital).

Former MLA president Elaine Showalter has become the reluctant mouthpiece of the GSC's opposition. Showalter's public persona as a para-tabloid journalist writing for Vogue and appearing on talk shows, combined with the fact that she has urged unemployed PhDs to "corporatize" by entering various other professional middle-class industries, has made her an easy target for ridicule and intellectual disdain. She seems not to care about academic integrity, her critics say, and she's a kind of clueless aristocrat to boot, behaving as if it's the easiest thing in the world for impoverished, indebted PhDs to just go out and grab big, bitchy jobs in the corporate marketplace.

Behind all the GSC's justifiable anger and Showalter's image problems there lies a very American debate about how big industries should be treated under capitalism. The GSC and its sympathizers recommend regulation: they urge the MLA and its members to enforce rules about fair employment and just compensation for mental labor. Showalter and her sympathizers celebrate a laissez-faire deregulation of our profession, in which universities should be allowed to structure employment "cost-effectively" because each individual laborer will inevitably find her own place within the vast corporate structures which make up all symbolic-analytic industries (including, but certainly not limited to, the education industry).

It does not seem to me that either position is terribly useful to actual people like myself, unemployed PhDs whose lives are being unhappily transformed by the economic crisis in higher education. While I would welcome industry regulation from the MLA, there's nothing for me to do in the meantime but wait around and suck up those problematic part-time lectureships. More importantly, what the GSC fails to address is the fact that even within a perfect system of full-time professorships, there is still a rigid class structure in academia that has very real material and social consequences. I'm sure you know what I mean—it's in the often unspoken "difference" between working at a state college and a large university, or between taking a job at a two-year college and a four-year one. And there are more subtle differences which involve geographic location. I can't remember how many times I've heard conversations between my UC Berkeley-educated colleagues—their CVs loaded with cultural capital even if their bank accounts are empty—in which someone feels free to say, "Oh, I'd never work at that small state college in [name that rural or economically depressed region]!"

In other words, regulation won't solve the basic class problem that haunts our profession. You may get full-time work, but still be treated as if you are a part of some underclass in the hierarchy of academic mental laborers. Like my father, you may have no choice but to work in the backwaters of higher education, teaching six general ed. courses per semester and still scorned by many of the people whose publications and research are said to typify "academia." In short, you may work full-time and still be laboring under unequal, unjust conditions.

Despite my discomfort with the GSC's position, I'm bewildered and repulsed by Showalter's blissed-out corporate vision. Like many of my colleagues, I entered academia precisely because I wanted to do work I enjoyed, not something that would just pay the bills. I wanted to engage in creative teaching and produce critical writings which would hopefully reach outside the ivory tower and into the population beyond it. I wanted a life, not a job. In this respect, I am no different than idealists in any job or economic class.

As an idealist, however, I've benefited from Showalter's advice, although certainly not in the way she intended. She reminded me that a capitalist system seeks first and foremost to transform everything around it into economic sameness—if one industry begins to profit through downsizing, outsourcing, and distance production, other industries will follow. Academia, despite its lofty goals, is no more untainted by profit and class division than the next industry.

I don't mean to say that PhD-level joblessness is the "natural" result of economic trends and therefore we might as well surrender in our own ways to the inevitability of a global corporate future. Rather, I want to emphasize that academia and academics are simply not so special; we join hundreds of thousands of other people whose lives have been disrupted or destroyed by unregulated economic boom and bust cycles. And therefore it seems short-sighted and possibly even elitist to claim that as pro-labor PhDs our sole task should be to secure full-time employment as academics for ourselves and our colleagues. Instead, we should consider doing something useful with our PhDs, something truly radical that may not have anything to do with full-time professorships and tenure, or all those things that seem to me oriented around the accumulation of cultural capital.

Finally, we should not remain academics under unfair conditions. No form of labor is worth the sacrifices many of us have had to make. Instead, let's say screw the cultural capitalists. We probably won't become classy lawyers and managers if we leave academia. But we can pursue jobs in the "real world" where we still work for the kind of justice we've sought for ourselves as professors in the education industry. Why not organize for more regulation in other corporate industries or service sector jobs? Why not attempt to engage in mental labor that could be socially useful rather than a product we create just to survive the tenure review? Why scorn non-academic jobs as if being an unemployed PhD is somehow "better" than being an employed high school teacher, office manager, technical writer, or retail worker? (I list these generally well-paid jobs because most of us never need to worry about losing our positions in the middle-class, just losing the cultural capital and prestige that academia offers along with our salaries.)

Every industry has its equivalent of the tenure-track dream job, and every industry has what Barbara Ehrenreich has called an internalized underclass. The point is to figure out whose side you're on, and use your knowledge to ameliorate the lives and social conditions of your colleagues. It's clear whose side Showalter is on if we consider the kinds of jobs she recommends that we pursue outside academia: lawyer, Hollywood writer, corporate manager. I'm still waiting to hear people speak out for the other side and act on their convictions. After all, what could be more dangerous than a highly-educated and politicized teacher outside academia, unleashed on the world?