The generally staid newsletter of my disciplinary association (the AAA) suddenly had a leading letter by Eric J Montgomery in this month’s issue: What happened to activist anthropology? To solidarity and support for those fighting injustice and inequality? At the AAA meeting in Montréal support for the Occupy Wall Street movement was conspicuously absent. As [...]
Contemporary commentators often give us the sense that the increasing precarity of academic work is a recent and novel phenomenon. As I’ve noted before, in the American case this sometimes seems to rest on the historically inaccurate fantasy of a previous Golden Era of tenure, even though tenure, on further investigation, was apparently a rather [...]
I was just skimming a long interview with Richard Rorty (downloadable here) and I came across a really surprising description of politics at the University of Chicago sixty years ago. RR: I was at Chicago until ‘52, and then I was at Yale from ‘52 to ‘56. I remember watching the Army-McCarthy hearings at Yale. [...]
One of the things that always bothers me about universities is how cagey they are when it comes to talking about their place in class reproduction. (For those of you who are uneasy about “class,” try asking yourself about the possible place of universities in hierarchical, even antagonistic social systems of status, prestige, exploitation, wealth, [...]
I’ve been reading some literature on the “Idea” of the university lately. If you’re curious to get a sense of this arcane set of texts, which go back to Kant and Cardinal Newman, the best recent introductions are Gerard Delanty’s 1998 The idea of the university in the global era and Jeffrey J. Williams’ 2007 [...]
Via John K. Wilson, I came across a fascinating 1994 article by historian Stephen Norwood, “The Student as Strikebreaker: College Youth and the Crisis of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century.” It’s published at JSTOR but the full text is also available at findarticles. (Norwood was in the news last year for more controversial research [...]
John Curtis of the AAUP Research Office was kind enough to provide me with their current compilation of government figures on instructional staff in the U.S. 1975 1995 2007 % Change 1975-2007 Full-time Tenured 29%227,381 24.8% 284,870 17.2% 290,581 27.8% Full-Time Tenure Track 16.1%126,300 9.6%110,311 8.0%134,826 6.8% Full-Time Non-Tenure 10.3%80,883 13.6%155,641 14.9%251,361 210.8% Part-Time Faculty [...]
Befitting the title and the subject of this post, I’ll try to be brief. Stanley Aronowitz, in his 1998 essay on faculty working conditions called “The last good job in America,” tells us the following: “Organizations such as the American Association of University Professors originally fought for tenure because, contrary to popular, even academic, belief, [...]
A few weeks ago I put together a quick presentation on the U.S. university system for a meeting of European university activists. It’s a strange experience, suddenly being the only American in a room and feeling some sort of obligation to describe a massive institutional system with at least some minimal level of accuracy. I [...]
College students who turn more or less consciously and hopefully to philosophy for enlightenment are, at bottom, in search of a satisfying life. They may have a pretty clear idea of what this includes. “It means,” said a football man whom I asked what he meant by a satisfying life, “employment, a fair income, the [...]