Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
"All Things Visible and Invisible"
Believing in Higher Education
by Michelle A. Massé | ns 71-72
When Jeff Williams asked me to contribute to this reprise of the Kenyon Review's "My Credo" series, my first association, like that of any other Catholic-trained child, was to the Nicene Creed. The years in which I intoned what's listed in my old Saint Joseph's Missal as "Our Profession of Faith" are long past. The structures of belief, however, remain in ways that can't be disavowed, even while I now parse that phrase as suggesting to the often silent—and sometimes fatuous—faith that characterizes "our" profession, teaching in higher education.
Many years ago, someone asked me in some exasperation what I believed in. My answer was "feminism and psychoanalysis." That's still true. Both demand theory and praxis, faith and good works. Each also demands scrupulous attention to the conscious and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible, sins of commission and omission. Psychoanalysis calls for the movement from insight to action; feminism demands that that movement from the personal to the social be understood as political. And both are systems that require us to understand that the invisible, whether its traces be found in the workings of the mind or of ideological state apparatuses, leaves its mark.
What I did not articulate clearly as a part of my converted system of belief was that I was a worker. A first-generation college graduate on one side of my family, and a first-generation high school graduate on the other, the shift from working class to middle class via vocation seemed a (paradoxical) no-brainer. Although I never doubted that I was indeed a laborer, I also never doubted (and still don't) that I had a better job than a night shift at a local factory would have provided. So certain was I of that, so pleased at the melding of vocation and avocation, that I was slow to see that the "The University" I thought was sempiternal was closing its doors as surely as, even if more slowly than, that factory and the parish church.
That certainty also led to a certain purblindness, a not seeing the forest while I counted the trees. I still count: I automatically note, for example, the traditional all-male, all-white makeup of the Kenyon Review symposium, the pontificating references to "men of taste," "men of feeling," "man's task" that are as plentiful as grass seed throughout. While I smile appreciatively at Leslie Fiedler's brio and insight, I also ruefully see that no women can serve as priests in this church either, that the "our" to which I refer in my first paragraph always has to be in scare quotes, because of its frightening omissions.
A lot of my career has been spent redefining that "our": working to assure that women are present in the professorial workplace as teachers, students, and administrators, that women authors are in the curriculum, that gender inflects policy. In doing this, however, I increasingly wonder whether I am not, to paraphrase the title of Nancy Chodorow's groundbreaking text, The Reproduction of Mothering, reproducing professing in ways that are detrimental to my students and to my own goals. As tenure-track job placement for PhDs in language and literature fields shrinks to 50 percent, as contingent labor swells to almost two-thirds of the faculty nationally, and as doctoral students express reservations about taking jobs at what were once considered plum assignments because of the imbalanced lives they fear will result, I have to ask whether I'm warmly inviting students to an auto-da-fé that will ultimately consume them.
Even while doubting the trinity of research, teaching, and service, I re-draw it, invoking the ultimate salvation of tenured employment. In introductory graduate seminars, courses on pedagogy, and mentoring for national organizations as well as on campus, I talk to students and junior colleagues about what's "professional." Despite prayerful claims to the contrary, things seem not quite fair in the secular or the divine models of the trinity. God, the "Father Almighty," is clearly the ultimate patriarchal avatar of research. Christ, the Word made Flesh, parable-drawer par excellence, the teacher. But isn't there something a bit defensive about the Nicene Creed's assertion that the Holy Spirit "together with the Father and the Son is no less adored and glorified"? And doesn't that mark the place of service in higher education, with its equality more asserted than demonstrated?
As Katie Hogan and I argue in our forthcoming edited collection, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces, service all too often remains a point of blind faith, a ritual in which many of us deeply believe, but which doesn't seem to be institutionally answered in the same way as research and teaching. Service can be an indulgence that we hope will remit the purgatorial sufferings of ourselves and others in community. It can be a penance imposed by others. It can be argued as a self-indulgence, freely undertaken time and again despite its lack of efficacy. Whatever service means at individual institutions, the volume and frequency of its litany marks an escalation of our labor. Exhorted to discipline ourselves for the greater good, we forego pleasure for one more report, one more committee meeting. And, in watching us, our students learn to do the same.
I'd accordingly like to focus upon this least of the tripartite charge of the professoriate, service, in the rest of this essay. Much as I like the David Macaulay-esque implications of Marc Bousquet's admirable book, How the University Works, which suggests that, in taking apart large structures, we learn "how things work," I think that talking about how the university works can potentially be a displacement and deflection from the actual agents of work: us. Schools of higher education—not all of which are universities—do not "work" in this sense of the verb. We do. We are the workers who are potentially so alienated that we no longer recognize our own labor as labor.
The power of service, like that of the Paraclete or Holy Spirit, hovers over everything but is rarely seen. Three decades ago, all too many of us assumed that effective teaching was simply the spontaneous overflow of powerful cerebration. Thanks in part to figures such as Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Ernest Boyer, and bell hooks, that presumption is no longer with us. Service, however, has not undergone the same re-assessment. Texts whose focus is specifically academic "work" nonetheless often omit this crucial field of effort while emphasizing teaching. Yet service with a smile is part of the same quasi-monastic assumption about our unstinting dedication to our orders.
I am not positing sites of higher education as dark Satanic mills. But I am saying they are mills: "knowledge factories," to use Michelle Tokarczyk's and Elizabeth Faye's phrase, in which we produce some very good things, mills in which many other things—including, sometimes, people—are ground exceeding fine, but also workplaces in which we work. And much of that work, in particular service, isn't on the clock.
In our coedited collection, Hogan and I have built upon our experience and interest to bring together a collection of voices in which professorial workers struggle to articulate what "service" has meant in their lives. I say "struggle" because, despite the extraordinary collective acumen, experience, and achievements represented by these women and men, the majority display what Katie and I diagnose in ourselves and others as the "service unconscious." On a conscious level, our astute selves know that our behaviors sometimes damage ourselves and support organizational structures we don't want to reinforce. And yet we nonetheless persevere in these behaviors and articulate their value for the best of all possible reasons: the ways in which they please us, fulfill our deepest-held beliefs about the importance of existence in community, and support our colleagues and students. Through splitting, we deny that contradiction.
For example, we all know that there is something wrong about our collegial definition of "work" as research, implicit in the question we routinely ask one another, "How is your work going?" According to the logic of this formula, teaching and service, which take up the brunt of our weeks, are time-absorbing distractions, and not our "real" work at all. We all nod ruefully at the troubling inconsistency, but continue to ask the question.
Service has increased for all professorial faculty: there are fewer of us at the same time as there is more work to be done. At the same time as institutional service obligations have mushroomed because of changing accreditation criteria, outcome assessment, post-tenure review, and an increasing reliance upon corporate management models, the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty who can do these jobs has shrunk by one quarter to one half at many schools. In addition, the exhilarating expansion of interdisciplinary programs and centers is often followed by the draining reality of no staff support. The challenging work of re-theorizing the boundaries of knowledge and curriculum all too often also means finding not only one's inner secretary, but one's inner accountant, one's inner fundraiser, one's inner IT specialist, and one's inner travel agent.
Doctors have "unbundled" their services in order to increase billable items. We, as faculty, have often been unbundled. At my own school, for instance, we have "Professors of Research"—scientists who do not teach. We had serious discussions about using "Professors of Teaching" for our full-time instructors, and I wondered if "Professors of Service" might not be next—or if, indeed, I wasn't perhaps already one. Service for most of us is surplus labor that we generate ceaselessly and unquestioningly.
Dismayingly like the clerks at Wal-Mart who "volunteer" to spend off-clock hours restocking, cleaning, or taking inventory, we all too often accept the right of our employers to demand our time and to impose penance. More dismaying still, in most instances the "associates" at Wal-Mart know they're being had: we, well-trained to see ourselves as disembodied rolling cerebrums, acolytes of the academy, often don't. Instead, clasping the ideologies of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency or purified merit to ourselves, we vigorously deny what that sage of our generation, Bob Dylan, noted, "You've got to serve some one." For undergraduate students that someone may nominally be UPS, as Bousquet so insightfully outlines, or Sallie Mae, as Jeff Williams cogently notes, but many PhDs usually refuse to believe there are any liens on them.
Even those who embrace service often do so semi-defiantly and semi-apologetically but, they believe, freely, knowing that they've violated the implicit hierarchy that descends from research and teaching to service. Although service has its own hierarchy, an exquisite sequencing of postulancy, it is, in general, a feminized mode of effort, as Hogan argued so well in "Superserviceable Feminism."
We of course understand that female professors are not the only group who serve. We know that:
- particular fields are service-intensive, such as composition, language instruction and service learning.
- other ranks also serve: there are assistants, lecturers, instructors, and graduate students dedicated to institutional service. And they also serve who wait, and wait, and wait for tenure-track jobs.
- there are individual men who are paragons of good citizenship; individual women who are shamelessly self-serving.
Not surprisingly, however, institutional caregiving, like domestic, is heavily gendered. Women thus sometimes find themselves primarily responsible for doing the university's housework as well as the family's. This "housework," as Dale Bauer and others have called it, constitutes a silent economy that oils the gears of institutional functioning. Like other kinds of work associated with caregiving, such as nursing and teaching, service work, particularly in its most necessary and standard forms, is often "feminized" and denied official recognition and compensation. Furthermore, the refusal to perform it, as evidenced in strike actions, means that one doesn't "really care": a criterion rarely applied to other forms of labor.
Such labor isn't sanctified by tradition, isn't performed by "stewards of the profession," that resounding Carnegie phrase. It's the work of caregivers. We hypothesize that, just as women fill the less-prestigious ranks of language and literature units, so too women and minorities are proportionately over-represented when we start to tally who's doing the department's housework, who's making sure that the liturgy can take place. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Piper Fogg notes that "women have a harder time than men in turning away colleagues who ask them to contribute time and energy to a cause. Barbara Keating, a sociology professor ... thinks that is because women have been socialized to be caretakers" (A16). We see that connection manifested strongly in many departmental cultures.
Professorial rank, as well as tenure/non-tenure-track designations, further modify the supply and demand for good institutional help. The demand for publication by junior colleagues, as well as their inappropriateness as committee members for many major committees, for instance, often leads to a lessened service load. And, as the number of associate professors listed as chairs, directors, and even deans suggests, it is increasingly difficult to recruit senior colleagues for positions of responsibility, such as chair, director of graduate studies, or director of writing, that were once assumed to be part of the rank's responsibility.
The Association of Departments of English (ADE) Ad Hoc Committee on Governance reports with a note of surprise that, in a discussion group made up of recently tenured faculty, "The self-descriptions of recently tenured participants revealed an extraordinary degree of administrative responsibility among faculty members who had held tenure only for a year or two. The group included a department chair, a director of undergraduate studies, and an associate dean, as well as many with heavy participation in important committees" (5). The same schools that draw upon their newly tenured often will not promote them for performing the very tasks they're called upon to perform in order to maintain the institution: job description and actual tasks are bizarrely awry.
In addition, as the report notes, faculty members who are effective committee members and administrators are turned to repeatedly, which results in an "often uneven distribution of the load of departmental responsibility" (6). Female—or feminized—professors' acceptance of above-average service loads can be forced by external pressure. It can also be embraced, or even sought after, because of the faculty member's own definition of professional commitments, internalization of institutional expectations, or naiveté about evaluation criteria.
Some of our authors, and some respondents to questions about service, rightfully praise the pleasure of service done well and rewarded appropriately. Others wonder, however, whether the rigors of their training have saved them and whether the orders they receive are holy. In discussing a recently completed study about graduate students' increasing reluctance to embrace the austerity academic orders demand, for instance, Mary Ann Mason quotes one apostate who exclaims: "Don't get a PhD! Just don't do it: There are so many other things in life that you could do for a living." Such heretical misgivings don't go away with the beatification of tenure, as one of the comments Hogan and I got testifies: "How do I get a life??!! By this, I don't mean having children or a relationship. I mean a return to some semblance of the person I was before I got a tenure?track job, someone with interests, hobbies, leisure time, and the ability to think of something other than work and child?rearing."
The ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Governance claims: "Service is governance, governance is service" and, in a good workplace, that would be all we know and all we need to know. That dictum can be a handmaid's tale, however, at a school in which female faculty members serve those who govern. If, then, rather than "changing the center of gravity in the institution," as Adrienne Rich charges us (128), I (and we) are assuring that our best and brightest are becoming the base upon which a crushing pyramid of privilege is constructed, then we must confess it. What, though, can penance and reparation be? After such knowledge, what forgiveness? If the consolation of philosophy won't assuage the pangs of unemployment, will being a terrific close reader of texts and life? The very fact that this essay doesn't address The Book as central to all we do suggests a sobering loss of faith—or the need to put it aside for a while, not as one of the things of childhood, but as something that needs to be shelved temporarily, perhaps to preserve it.
I hear other communicant's voices talking about how we've sinned in the books I read. Some help to persuade me that there may be an end to a kingdom based upon exploitation. And so I meditate upon the insights of authors such as Marc Bousquet, Mary Burgan, Cary Nelson, Gary Rhoades, and Jeffrey Williams to help my growing disbelief in higher education. I ponder in my heart the possibilities of unionization, collective action, and social justice. And I look forward to the life of that world to come.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David, et al. Education in the Balance: A Report on the Academic Workforce in English. Report of the 2007 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Staffing. Modern Language Association. 10 Dec. 2008.
Bauer, Dale. "Academic Housework: Women's Studies and Second Shifting." Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change. Ed. Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 245?257.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: NYU P, 2008.
---. howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/.
Breznau, Anne, Charles Harris, David Laurence, James Papp, and Patricia Meyer Spacks. "Report of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Governance." ADE Bulletin 129 (Fall 2001): 1-13. Rpt. Profession 2002. New York: MLA, 2002. 211-28.
Burgan, Mary. What Ever Happened to the Faculty?: Drift and Decision in Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
Fogg, Piper. "So Many Committees, So Little Time." The Chronicle of Higher Education 19 Dec. 2003: A14. See also this website for discussion of the article.
Hogan, Katie. "Superviceable Feminism." the minnesota review ns 63/64 (Spring/Summer 2005).
Mason, Mary Ann. "A Bad Reputation: Why are more and more graduate students turning away from careers at research universities?" The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 Jan. 2009.
Massé, Michelle A. "Higher Ed: A Pyramid Scheme."
---. "Ten Million Served!"
---, and Katie Hogan, eds. Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces. Albany: SUNY P, forthcoming.
Nelson, Cary. Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Rhoades, Gary. Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor. Albany: SUNY P, 1998.
Rich, Adrienne. "Toward a Woman-Centered University." 1975. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979. 125-55.
Tokarczyk, Michelle M., and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds. Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.
Walker, George E., et al. The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.
Williams, Jeffrey. "Renegotiating the Pedagogical Contract." Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: NYU P, 1997. 298-312.
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