I hear this turn of phrase so often. It’s what academics often say when they mean “the way that x.” There is often, as far as I can tell, not much difference in meaning between saying “the way that x” and “the way in which x,” except that the latter is a much more academic usage. The way that(in which) academics use this expression bothers me. It seems gratuitous. It seems wordy. It creates barriers to communication with non-academics that don’t have to be there.

In case anyone’s not sure that “the way in which” is a specifically academic usage, I’ve compiled some handy evidence from Google that clearly shows “the way in which” to be more scholarly than popular. On regular Google, “the way in which” returns 180 million results, versus 839 million for “the way that.” In other words, in the general Google corpus, “the way that” is about 4.66 times more frequent than “the way in which.” On Google Scholar, on the other hand, there are about 2,420,000 hits for “the way in which,” versus 1,080,000 for “the way that.” So among scholars, on the contrary, “the way in which” is 2.24 times more frequent than “the way that.” Or put otherwise, scholars use “the way in which” about 69% of the time, versus only about 17% of the time for the general population.*

Let’s take some examples of this usage, drawing at random from the academic articles on my computer.

From Merle Curti’s 1955 “Intellectuals and Other People,” an interesting analysis of American anti-intellectualism: “Some intellectuals, however, have continued to invite resentment by the way in which they hold their learning.” Curti could have said the same thing, as far as I can tell, by writing “… continued to invite resentment by the way that they hold their learning,” or even “continued to invite resentment by the way they hold their learning.” Admittedly, it’s less formal if we omit the relative pronoun, but then, questioning formal language is precisely what we’re here to do.

From Gregory Price’s interesting-looking “The Idea of a Black University,” on my list of stuff to read: “The reduced likelihood of a typical HBCU [historically black college or university] producing a cultivated intellect that Martin Luther King, Jr. represented underscores the way in which the typical HBCU, with its nonliberal emphasis, catalyzes the decline of black America.” Here he really could have written “the way that” without any change in meaning.

From Jeffrey Williams’ 2008 “Teach the University“: “While Graff prescribed a plan for education overall, he was responding to the particular development of literary studies and the way in which the literary curriculum had morphed over the past thirty years, split into the fiefdoms of theory, such as structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and so on.” Williams is a known advocate of plain, clear scholarly writing, and one can only conclude from his use of this deeply scholarly phrasing that it has seeped into our collective unconscious, becoming something we scholars can say without thinking about. Here too, I think Williams could just as well have omitted the “in which” altogether, writing “the way the literary curriculum had morphed,” without doing much harm to the sense of his sentence.

It’s striking that even scholars like Williams or Curti, who are trying to write against spurious divides between scholars and everyone else, use this phrasing. So we have to ask: what are we doing, we scholars, when we say “the way in which”? A number of hypotheses come to my mind. We may be:

• Creating a spurious sense of precision. In some ironically vague way, “the way in which x” just sounds a lot more precise than “the way that x,” at least according to my scholarly intuition. (My scholarly intuition is itself a social product.)
• Establishing that we scholars are different and better than ordinary people.
• Establishing that we speakers (or writers) are members of the in-group. By implication, by using this phrasing, we are also blessing our audiences as group insiders, people worthy enough to dignify with good prose. (Would you say “the way in which” if you were talking to your bartender?)
• Taking longer to say, thus showing that we scholars possess leisure time to waste on communicative niceties. (See Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of scholarly language as a form of conspicuous waste.)
• Showing that we value decorum and formality for their own sake.
• Inserting a normally written register into the realm of spoken language (at least, when we are speaking and not writing). This kind of transposition of the most formal written register into less formal or oral discourse is, I think, characteristic of many scholarly circles.

Needless to say, every professional milieu has its own professional jargon, its own professional vocabulary, its own professional lexicon. I’m wondering, though, if all professions have their own syntax? Or is that the special province of academics? Maybe other professions use specialized vocabulary without trying to distinguish themselves in terms of gratuitously elaborate grammar…

It’s hard not to be struck by the way (that/in which) academics inflate their language into something more than language, into a realm of self-congratulation that ultimately obscures, that ultimately divides them from any non-academic group that might have been their public. Is “in which” an expression that, by itself, does anything so terrible? No; it merely contributes to a larger linguistic world that academics inhabit and which separates them from others. Williams writes at one point: “we should have a better ear for the freight of the words we wield and estrange them from their commonplace usage.” To which one can only add: it’s not only the words we use, but also the way we connect them to each other, that estranges us from the laity.

* A few additional points of data: Interestingly, if we strike the definite article “the” from my search queries on Google Scholar, we find 3.25 million results for “way in which,” as opposed to 3.68 million for “way that.” So while “the way that” is much less common than “the way in which” in the scholarship searched by Google, “way that” is actually slightly more common than “way in which.” When we add the definite object, in other words, we get much more differentiated results. I surmise that “the way in which” is the full form of the specifically scholarly expression.

As a second point of data, I find that in my personal cache of academic articles (about 2800 PDFs), “way in which” produces 589 results, vs “way that,” which produces 755. “The way in which” produces 454, vs. 255 for “the way that.” This roughly corroborates the findings from Google Scholar.

Anyway, I’ve been working on an essay about precarious work in French universities, and I came across a passage that I think is a great starting point for any analysis of academics’ class status. It’s in an essay, “Smart,” by Jeffrey Williams, a literary critic; it’s one of the best essays about academic culture that I know. In this passage, Williams is trying to teach us that academics’ class status is ambiguous: definitely not working class in the traditional sense, but distanced, often, from the conventional markers of professional success.

Class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

I start with this… to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics, especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our own hours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you’ve ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell’s Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials, we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class.

On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projecting a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we’re not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in the higher realm of the mind); and sometimes by proclaiming our political resistance (as intellectuals, we stand outside capitalist society to criticize and resist it). Thus we are the class that somehow stands outside class.

In some ways this plays out a characteristic attitude toward class in America, that, because we are all in the great middle class, we do not experience the class distinctions of the old world. This affects what the German sociologist Hans Speier calls the “masked class membership” of the middle classes. But it also has specific permutations in academe, and we experience and enact class in distinctive ways. This holds true especially in the humanities, that have a traditional bearing set apart from business and little commercial crossover. In the post-welfare state university, some of the sciences, technological programs, and practical disciplines, like business, are oriented toward paying their own way, through grants, business “partnerships,” and patentable results, so do not oppose the world of commerce. Rather, they embrace it. (If you look at the cars in the parking lots around the quad, you’re more likely to see Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses near their buildings, instead of the Hondas near ours.) Members of those disciplines might give up some of the humanistic aura of the university, but they express less ambivalence about their class position.

Many of our codes and practices play out our peculiar relation to class. Most academic measures purport a structural neutrality, beyond class, but they also carry with them, and inculcate, a distinctive range of affects designating our class. While we are not marked with the striations of class in the visible ways that a stooped factory worker might be after twenty years at a drill press, we are nonetheless marked by the ways that we feel, experience, and act out professional life. Some of the difficulty of talking about this realm of feeling or affect is that it is more amorphous than visible marks, but it is not any the less tangible—tangible when the ticket agent acts deferentially to us when it says “Dr.” on our itinerary, or when at the faculty meeting the full professor frowns at the tentative assistant professor and adjuncts aren’t even allowed, or when the persistent student expects us to be in our office 9-5, by his or her lights seeing us as the clerk behind the counter of the educational department store, by our lights misrecognizing our true position. Or tangible, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, when we drive sensible cars. Affect is how we embody our class position, and in a sense generates our class position.

It’s a splendid piece of social observation: it remarks on frowns, on hands, on academics’ titles and their choices of automobile. The observational detail is, perhaps, more sparse than in an ethnographic text; Williams uses his details to illustrate his analysis, rather than using the analysis to try to make sense of the details. But I think he is right to call attention to the fact that American academics participate in larger fantasies about American classlessness. And he’s right to raise the spectre of the Bohemian heritage (a real study of academic bohemianism is long overdue).

One does wonder two things about this analysis. First, of course it’s true that academics’ class status is going to be shaped by the larger class structures of the society where they live. But don’t academics have a peculiar mixed-class status elsewhere as well? In France, for instance? And, relatedly, aren’t academics more socially heterogeneous than Williams makes out? There are plenty of underemployed adjuncts out there — they clearly don’t have the same class position as the Ivy League tenured superstars, even if they share a professional identity. Class and professional identity are not always synonymous.

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 the masses converged upon Le Palais, I was anticipating a strong show of support. Yet, when the activists began shouting “Occupy….Montréal….Occupy…Wall Street,” they were met with disdain and not open arms. Are we just armchair anthropologists, all about observation and indignant toward participation? I was told activist anthropology was gaining steam, but that did not seem to be the case in Montréal. Where were the impromptu meetings or discussions dedicated to the most important movement of our day?

It is said that those who do not think something can be done should get out of the way of those people doing it. I guess that is what the majority of anthropologists chose in Montréal— simply get out of the way. When the activists stormed the meetings, I heard several anthropologists uttering “This is not the time or place,” “Someone should alert security,” or “They’ll let anybody in here.” Others ignored their chance to join the movement…

…It is because of corporate greed and profits over people that there are not enough jobs in anthropology and in education in general. Margaret Mead once said: “It only takes a few like-minded individuals to change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Unfortunately, it seems many anthropologists have no interest in changing the world. They seem content doing anthropology from their armchair, waiting on the younger generation to fix the problems that they helped create. For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to say that I was an anthropologist.

But it may help our sense of historical consciousness to discover that even a hundred years ago, some people already had a fairly clear discourse on precarious intellectual work. I’m not a historian and I can’t pretend to give the whole picture, but if we search on JSTOR for “intellectual proletariat” the first use of the term is as early as 1884, and the term has been used occasionally ever since, being used on average a few times per year in the scholarly literature since the 1930s.

In 1904, one Frances J. Davenport wrote a review in the Journal of Political Economy of a book by Carlo Marin. Marin apparently set out to demonstrate that “the inferiority of the Italian is by no means innate, but is the result of his extreme poverty.” Davenport went on to summarize as follows:

The fundamental cause of the poverty of Italy, according to Dr. Marin, is the faulty system of education. Numerous but poorly equipped universities train great numbers of lawyers and of doctors, who cannot find employment and form an intellectual proletariat. On the other hand, the few schools of agriculture, industry and commerce are scantily attended, and the instruction lacks a practical character. Reduce the number of universities, improve their scientific equipment, and introduce into every university thoroughly practical instruction in agriculture, industry, and commerce; work directly for economic development and social improvement will follow.

It’s worth noting, in passing, that the word “proletariat” itself only came into the English language in the 1840s (according to the OED), so we can infer that it only took a few decades for it to be extended metaphorically to refer to intellectuals as well. At any rate, Davenport’s language sounds eerily similar to contemporary discourses on the impracticality of university education, and it certainly echoes the contemporary desire to make universities more economically useful. I notice that there is nothing directly political about this discourse; while “overeducation” and unemployed elites are sometimes perceived as a political threat, here they are merely characterized as a lost economic opportunity for the nation.

It is, nonetheless, unsurprising that the term “intellectual proletariat” was also used early on by overtly left-wing writers. As early as 1909, the politically complicated American socialist leader Morris Hillquit argued that “intellectual proletarians” formed part of the working class. From his book ‘Socialism in theory and practice‘:

The word Proletarian signifies a workingman who does not own his tools of labor, a wage worker; but in its wider application it embraces the entire propertyless class of workers. Thus we speak not only of the “industrial” proletarian, but also of the “agricultural” proletarian, the farmer who does not own his land, or the hired farm hand; and even of the “intellectual” proletarian, the professional who depends upon an unsteady and uncertain hiring out of his talents for a living.

That sounds like a pretty contemporary description of precarious faculty to me: “the professional who depends on an unsteady and uncertain hiring out of his [or her] talents for a living.” At the time, though, it appears that American faculty at this point weren’t particularly conscious of their status as “intellectual proletarians.” A couple of years earlier, around 1905 (but only published in 1918), Thorstein Veblen had described the labor situation in American universities thus:

There is no trades-union among university teachers, and no collective bargaining. There appears to be a feeling prevalent among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages, and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in overtly so dealing with the matter. And in the individual bargaining by which the rate of pay is determined the directorate may easily be tempted to seek an economical way out, by offering a low rate of pay coupled with a higher academic rank. The plea is always ready to hand that the university is in want of the necessary funds and is constrained to economize where it can. So an advance in nominal rank is made to serve in place of an advance in salary, the former being the less costly commodity for the time being. Indeed, so frequent are such departures from the normal scale as to have given rise to the (no doubt ill-advised) suggestion that this may be one of the chief uses of the adopted schedule of normal salaries. So an employee of the university may not infrequently find himself constrained to accept, as part payment, an expensive increment of dignity attaching to a higher rank than his salary account would indicate. Such an outcome of individual bargaining is all the more likely in the academic community, since there is no settled code of professional ethics governing the conduct of business enterprise in academic management, as contrasted with the traffic of ordinary competitive business.

It seems that this moral norm of being “above” collective bargaining broke down slightly over the next few decades. As Zach has discovered in a great bit of archival research, by the 1930s faculty were thinking about unionization. From a 1931 article in a Minneapolis labor journal:

Forces beyond their control are driving university professors to the status of employees and are forcing them to the point where they must form “a guild or a union,” declared Professor Randall Henderson, president Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, in his annual report.

Professor Henderson is shocked at the prospect, but he can see no alternate to cope with the industrialization of universities that are now being ruled from above. He warns the controlling factors of American universities that a guild or a union is inevitable unless there is a reform in methods of administration.

The universities, he said, have become industrialized and are now being operated on the factory system. The old New England type of college government is impossible, he said.

In spite of this early discussion of academic “industrialization,” I am obliged to remark that there is an ongoing conflict, even to this day, about whether American university faculty are “workers” and, if so, what kind of workers they are. I can testify from experience that many elite faculty in the humanities don’t see themselves as “workers,” having instead an artisanal, connoisseurial, artistic or even amateur relationship to their labor. And thanks to the 1980 Yeshiva vs. NLRB decision, private university faculty are classified legally as having managerial status and hence not being eligible for collective bargaining rights. At the same time, of course, academic labor activists continue to claim that “we are workers.” One is tempted to remark that current American debates over academic labor haven’t much evolved, in terms of their framing, over the last 80 years.

But one has to observe, at the same time, that these debates on the intellectual proletariat weren’t limited to the United States. As it turns out, they were also happening in Germany in the 30s. The other day I was reading some (very harsh) comments by Theodor Adorno on Karl Mannheim’s “sociology of knowledge”; Adorno summarizes a book that Mannheim had published in German in 1935, translated into English in 1940, called Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. I haven’t read that, but I gather that Mannheim was commenting on the intellectual situation in inter-war Germany (1920s or early 1930s), and Adorno’s gloss on Mannheim’s analysis makes it sound like a very familiar situation.

Mannheim speaks of a “proletarianization of the intelligentsia.” He is correct in calling attention to the fact that the cultural market is flooded; there are, he observes, more culturally qualified (from the standpoint of formal education, that is) people available than there are suitable positions for them. This situation, however, is supposed to lead to a drop in the social value of culture, since it is ”a sociological law that the social value of cultural goods is a function of the social status of those who produce them.”

At the same time, he continues, the “social value” of culture necessarily declines because the recruiting of new members of the intelligentsia extends increasingly to lower social strata, especially that of the petty officialdom. Thus, the notion of the proletarian is formalized; it appears as a mere structure of consciousness, as with the upper bourgeoisie, which condemns anyone not familiar with the rules as a “prole.” The genesis of this process is not considered and as a result is falsified. By calling attention to a “structural” assimilation of consciousness to that of the lowest strata of society, he implicitly shifts the blame to the members of those strata and their alleged emancipation in mass democracy. Yet stultification is caused not by the oppressed but by oppression, and it affects not only the oppressed but, in their essentials, the oppressors as well, a fact to which Mannheim paid little attention. The flooding of intellectual vocations is due to the flooding of economic occupations as such, basically, to technological unemployment. It has nothing to do with Mannheim’s democratization of the elites, and the reserve army of intellectuals is the last to influence them.

Moreover, the sociological law which makes the so-called status of culture dependent on that of those who produce it is a textbook example of a false generalization. One need only recall the music of the eighteenth century, the cultural relevance of which in the Germany of the time stands beyond all doubt. Musicians, except for the maestri, primadonnas and castrati attached to the courts, were held in low esteem; Bach lived as a subordinate church official and the young Hayden as a servant. Musicians attained social status only when their products were no longer suitable for immediate consumption, when the composer set himself against society as his own master — with Beethoven.

Beyond the important comparative interest of an early 20th-century German debate on this question, Adorno raises some important theoretical questions. How do we explain the existence of an intellectual proletariat? For Mannheim, this was supposedly an effect of elites becoming increasingly influenced by proletarian culture; Adorno, on the other hand, argues that it was just one example of a general underemployment caused by mechanization. And what is the cultural significance of underemployed intellectuals? Adorno makes what would seem – to 21st century postmodernist intellectuals – the obvious claim that there is no necessary correlation between the social status of cultural producers and the cultural status of their products. But I’m not entirely convinced by his example of 18th-century German musicians; he seems to reduce social status to institutional role (“a subordinate church official”). It comes to mind that in fact there have been any number of intellectuals whose relatively minor institutional roles didn’t seem to constitute low social standing per se. (Jacques Derrida comes to mind.) Adorno is no doubt right that there is some looseness in the relation between cultural producer and cultural product; but a more adequate theory of the relationship between class structure and intellectual production remains for another day. Or another post.

At any rate, the bottom line is this: the intellectual proletariat or precariat is older than people think. As is the critical discourse that goes with it.

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. Chicago was perhaps the left-most American university except maybe CCNY and Columbia. When the communists took Czechoslovakia in ‘48, I was a member of the Chicago student senate (or whatever they called it). I introduced a resolution of sympathy with the students of Charles University who’d been killed by the Communists. It was killed 40-2, because it was seen as lending aid and comfort to the capitalists. It was viewed as red-baiting. In those days, Chicago students genuinely believed that saying anything nasty about Stalin counted as red-baiting. The student newspaper was communist, and eventually it turned out that the editor had been registering for one credit a quarter. He was getting paid, believe it or not, by Moscow gold. He was being paid by the party to run the student newspaper. When McCarthy came along and said the Communists had infiltrated everywhere, he could produce lots of similar examples. But, of course, Chicago was not typical of the American academy at that time. I spent my time at Chicago making red-baiting remarks, as I had been brought up to do. I became unpopular with my fellow students for making them.

Admittedly, I have pretty much no evidence one way or the other, not being a historian of the university at midcentury, but given the current state of campus politics, one is hard pressed to believe that this university was ever the “left-most American university,” or that only 2.5% of elected students would have voted to condemn a Communist action. The university I know today seems more apolitical than anything else, and is certainly at least as marked by the pro-market Milton Friedman heritage as by any kind of leftist politics. To be sure, there’s a vague memory that SDS was big in the ’60s and that there was a building occupation in 1969, but even if you read the 2008 newspaper article commemorating that event, the sense is that the student body was quite diverse and far from monolithically radical. The time Rorty describes, of course, was twenty years before that, just as the Cold War was getting started — at a point when I suppose American views of the USSR may have been temporarily relatively positive, in the aftermath of the US-Soviet war-time alliance.

My guess is that Rorty is exaggerating in his description of late-40s communist sympathies at the University of Chicago; I doubt it was ever as widespread as he makes it out to be. In his description, you get the impression that pretty much 100% of students other than Rorty himself were communists, which strains credibility. Indeed, it seems exemplary of the hyperbolic mindset of someone who feels so politically outnumbered that they begin to imagine that they are the only one on their side surrounded by nothing but their opponents. “OMG, we’re surrounded by Communists!” — wasn’t that a popular trope of American political hysteria in the 50s?

Nonetheless, even if Rorty’s report is only half true, it’s enough to suggest that the politics of the university’s student body have shifted dramatically over the years. It would be interesting to know more about the historical and sociological reasons why that has happened.

I find it interesting, therefore, to notice those rare occasions when some sort of class analysis manages to emerge from official academic discourse. If we look at the University of Chicago’s very odd Idea of the University colloquium from 2000-2001, we see that Don Randel, then the university’s president, expressed a very definite faith in his university’s collective attachment to wealth:

“We must hope that values and commitment are the principal reasons for which both faculty and graduate students want to be at The University of Chicago. But we cannot idly expect them to express their values and commitment through any very significant financial sacrifice. One of our greatest challenges for the future, then, will be to find the resources with which to ensure that neither talented faculty nor talented graduate students go to other institutions for the wrong reasons (though it is hard to imagine what a “right” reason could be).”

In other words, Randel argues that the faculty (and graduate students) must be well paid, lest they go elsewhere for the “wrong reasons” (i.e., for crassly economic reasons). The university has continued this argument in the meantime, incidentally; it was one of their main motivations for increasing graduate stipends in humanities and social sciences a few years ago. But Randel doesn’t only observe that many people are motivated by money; he also argues that we can’t expect any very significant financial sacrifice for any apparent higher purpose. Which is a way of saying not only that money matters, but also that it outweighs any foreseeable moral or political motivation. In other words, economic status — indeed, class status — is the bottom line.

Now, I can tell you that most of the responses to this colloquium’s speeches were terribly serious and profound. But the very last response was Andrew Abbott’s, and he seemed to have been appointed court jester for the afternoon. Abbott is one of those senior faculty who has dedicated himself partly to analyzing his own institution; his book Chaos of Disciplines has some genuinely unprecedented ideas about patterns of academic social relations, and he’s written an interesting history of the Chicago sociology department. In his comments on Randel’s speech he argued, half-seriously, half-ironically, that there was nothing special about the University of Chicago, that serious arguments were generally avoided in favor of “non-encounters,” that there was nothing at risk in the faculty’s parlor game of ideas, that “there is little on the line,” and that “we had better wake up and discover a commitment to something besides the nostalgic pleasantries we live with today.” But I was most struck by the moment where Abbott comments on Randel’s comments on class:

It is this kind of non-commitment [to serious intellectual disagreement] that forces Don to his most depressing conclusion, that “we cannot idly expect [faculty] to express their values and commitment through any very significant financial sacrifice.” Excuse me? The median salary of full professors in the Divisions is around the 93rd percentile of the American income distribution. Their children’s college tuitions are paid for. They have health insurance, disability insurance, university-paid trips to conferences, half-price at the lab school, office phones to use for personal long distance, all the usual privileges of the upper class. Do you think the taxi driver who brought me in from O’Hare last Sunday night thinks people who have all this but are in only the 93rd, not the 95th, percentile of income are making a sacrifice? Showing a special commitment? And that we can’t expect people to “express their values and commitment” at the price of that extra trip to London for spring break?

Needless to say, Abbott makes no concrete proposals for financial sacrifice; he goes on to complain about the “endless litany of self-gratulation and narcissistic blackmail” one hears from the faculty.

But if we stop and look beyond the shine of farce that enfolds this text, I’m struck by the fact that never before have I heard a faculty member at my university describe the (senior) faculty as “upper class.” Abbott, to his credit, doesn’t even present this as a revelation; he presents it as obvious. He only manages to muster a bit of indignation for those who imagine that these upper class faculty really can justifiably cling to every last penny of their wealth, to their “extra trips to London” and their easy taxi rides home afterwards. Abbott’s indignation, or is it mock indignation?, seems to be above all for those who believe that their privilege and their claims of moral virtue and “special commitment” are entirely coherent.

Given the serious threat that this argument ought to pose for faculty fantasies of their own virtue, I find it unsurprising that it only appears publicly in the context of a series of half-jokes. In the register of an “Excuse me?” with no practical implications. In the imaginary thoughts of an imaginary taxi driver, conjured up as a member of a lower social class, conjured up as an example of Abbott himself coming in contact with someone less well off.

You could call it a fantasy of class envy.

Maybe even a symptom of a fleeting moment of guilty class consciousness on the part of the professoriate.

But what I wanted to write about, briefly, was a little exchange I discovered in Critical Inquiry from 1999 between Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian, and Nicholas Royle, an English literature professor. The year before, LaCapra had written a fairly critical response to Bill Readings’ well-known 1996 book, The University in Ruins. In his earlier 1998 essay, LaCapra notes that Readings’ claims of “ruin” are hyperbole, and he goes on to make some very sensible points about Readings’ tacit theory of institutions and his forms of evidence. Here’s a typical passage:

Readings’s very understanding of institutions is largely conceptual rather than oriented to institutions as historically variable sets of practices relating groups of people. His perspective on the institution and what he considers institutionally relevant thus seems very high-altitude in nature. In this approach… Readings relies not on studies of the institutional functioning of universities but on a decontextualized reading of such figures as Kant, Humboldt, Arnold, and Newman. These figures did elaborate paradigms or normative models, at times embodying critical and self-critical elements, and these models may have had a problematic relation to institutional practice that varied over space and time. But what that relation was, including the differences between model and practice, is not immediately obvious. (1998:38)

This strikes me as wise methodological advice for anyone who wants to understand what a university is and how “the university” relates to the various ideas that actors have about it. LaCapra argues, in short, that one has to look at the relations, gaps, tensions, between discourse and practice. But what strikes me as hilarious, and what drives me to write this blog post, is how Royle writes in his response to LaCapra the year after. In short, Royle gives a flawless performance of what I recognize, from essays I read in college, as stock deconstructive rhetoric. Here’s the start of Royle’s essay:

In his extremely measured and seemingly even-handed essay, Dominick LaCapra recalls Jacques Derrida’s well-known (though still perhaps inconceivable) proposition that “one must begin where one is” (p. 50).[1] He does not recall the more difficult and disconcerting supplement that accompanies it, that is to say “Wherever we are: in a text already where we believe ourselves to be” (“Quelque part où nous sommes: en un texte déjà où nous croyons être”).[2] To be already in a text, that is to say, in a context, is to be in ruins.[3] It is to have to reckon with a thinking and an affirmation of ruination at the origin. As Derrida has observed: “In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.”[4] An affirmation of this experience of ruination is, as Derrida says, “experience itself”: the ruin “is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.”[5]

How do you feel about this passage? Yes, I’m serious. I want to hear your reactions. But since, alas, I can’t find out without finishing this post first, I’ll start by telling you some things that strike me about this passage.

1. It starts out with utter sarcasm about LaCapra’s text; seemingly even-handed is basically academese for ridiculously unfair.
2. Derrida is cast in a very strange way: as at once a sort of nearby interlocutor, someone who needs no introduction and whose propositions are “well-known,” but also as an absolute authority whose (in fact controversial) claims can be cited as if they were self-evident truths.
3. It’s unclear why it would be an inconceivable proposition to “begin where one is,” and Royle makes no effort to explain what he means.
4. Moving on to the second sentence… I note that being “more difficult and disconcerting” is cast as an obviously good thing.
5. In passing, this is an incredibly scholastic bit of prose: every sentence ends in a footnote.
6. Royle cites Derrida to the effect that we are (presumably always and everywhere) “in a text already.” (He also quotes the French original to no apparent purpose.)
7. He needs to assert that we’re already in a text so that he can then claim, in the third sentence, that texts are themselves contexts. If there is nothing outside the text (are we far enough into the Derridean ritual incantations yet?) then, presumably, LaCapra’s “differences between model and practice” don’t exist, or at best can only be rephrased as mere differences between one text and the next.
8. Having claimed that contexts are themselves texts, Royle can then present us with the fantastic metaphor, presented however as a seemingly literal claim, that being in a text is already being in ruins. My point here isn’t that we ought to strive for non-metaphorical thought — anyone who believes that should try reading George Lakoff — but rather that Royle fails to acknowledge the metaphorical status of his own claim.
9. (Incidentally, I observe that Royle has casually slipped from Derrida’s voice to his own, blending one with the next.)
10. In sum, Royle’s initial retort to LaCapra’s paper appears to be something like this: If all being involves being in a text, which involves being in a context, which is itself a text, and all being in a text involves being in ruins, then Readings can’t be accused of hyperbole in claiming that the university is in ruins. For we’re all always already in ruins.
11. I’m tempted to point out that Royle himself is appallingly hyperbolic here, but as it turns out later in the essay, Royle is already well aware of his own hyperbole. I won’t quote the whole passage, but he tries to avoid the patent hypocrisy of his hyperbolic reaction to (what he views as) LaCapra’s hyperbolic reaction to Readings’ hyperbole by asserting, feebly, that “there is hyperbole… we could say, as soon as there is text” (fn. 11). Royle, of course, makes no effort to substantiate this sweeping statement.
12. If we go on to read the last few sentences of the passage I quoted, we get a sense of the way that this Derridean language seems to constitute a limited, abstract literary cosmos, one which seems to have a strong aesthetic appeal for writers like Royle. A Derridean utterance like “At the origin comes ruin” certainly sounds mysterious; it has the patter of poetry; but it becomes a blunt form of thought, an intellectual anaesthetic that blocks us from distinguishing different origins and different ruins. There’s something Pavlovian about it, come to think of it: it’s as if, every time anyone uttered the word “ruins,” Royle were obliged to respond by citing Derrida to the effect that we’re already ruined. As if Derridean language makes its intellectual world less by persuasion or dialogue with its critics than through sheer force of repetition. A sad fate for a intellectual project that often wanted to be more discriminating, to read more carefully, than any other.
13. Just to pick out one last quality of this Derridean style, I’m struck by the casual reference to something like “experience itself,” which apparently can be entirely defined (by Royle) as “an affirmation of this experience of ruination.” Really, all experience is an experience of ruination? This is a kind of writing that talks freely about extremely abstract entities and takes pleasure in giving lots of paradoxical definitions, but it’s simultaneously theoretically committed to the impossibility of ever defining anything. It’s a theoretical language that revels in its own paradoxes.

Now, LaCapra obviously was seriously annoyed by Royle’s critique (which went on for several pages). His 1999 response to Royle is one of the more witheringly comic bits of academic prose I’ve read in a while; it has moments like these:

I would begin by noting the seeming condescension in his tone of the initiate. This tone has become familiar in a certain discourse that seems to situate itself both textually and contextually somewhere between meta-metaphysical hyperspace and Planet Earth (conceived of course in appropriately global terms). This labile (non)position of the Luftmensch allows for rapid gliding between quasi-transcendental critique and historical (or pseudohistorical) commentary.

[In response to an argument that LaCapra is US-centric:] If Royle really has something to say about other university systems that would contradict or qualify my argument, it would have been enlightening for him to have said it.

[In response to Readings's and Royle's advocacy of short-term, non-institutionalized structures:] A university made up only of self-styled anti-institutional institutions of short duration could be the realization of the superbureaucratic, transnational manager’s wildest dream—the ideal place for the blissful rendez-vous of such an apparatchik with the Deleuzian nomad following a ligne de fuite.

[In response to a claim that LaCapra ignores students:] Royle asserts that “in a sense, students do not exist” (p. 152). I shall resist the invitation to sustained irony this formulation holds out and simply observe that in another sense they do indeed exist.

[In conclusion:] Readings’s book was striving for something while Royle at times seems to equate thought (or is it Thought?) with rather predictable, in any case “undisconcerting” and histrionic, verbal gestures.

So in the end it doesn’t appear that Royle managed to persuade his opponent of anything of substance. Instead, he managed to call attention to his own textual performance. But for me, this whole exchange elicits above all a feeling of the rapid passage of time in academia. It strikes me that I very seldom see anything from the last ten years written in the Roylean style — that style where Derrida is a vast authority yet close at hand, where certain kinds of universal claims (for instance about “experience itself”) combine so readily with a fixation on the irreducibility and undecidability of texts, where a certain form of in-group irony passed for the height of intellectual sophistication. I don’t even know if most grad students my age have encountered this Derridean style — it was a staple of undergrad literary theory education when I was in college, but that was a while ago and may have been particular to my undergrad institution. At any rate, it’s not a style I’ve really encountered in the humanities at Chicago where I am now (though admittedly I’m not in a humanities department). Does anyone else get the sense that this sort of deconstructive writing is now slipping away into the archives?

Basically, the article tells a disturbing story about the labor politics of early 20th-century American college students. In essence, college students from such places as Columbia, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Univ. of Minnesota, Univ. of Chicago, Tufts, Brown, Univ. of Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Univ. of Southern California, and various engineering schools volunteered to serve as strikebreakers in a large number of labor disputes. It’s not news that college students of that era were elite and conservative, but their extreme hostility towards organized labor is nonetheless striking. Some 9 of 10 of Yale students, we’re told, “subscribed ‘to anti-labor attitudes with fervor’” as of 1910 (334); but the heart of their anti-labor sentiment was expressed less in political statements — as they were apparently too frivolous on the whole to articulate any clear political philosophy — than in the sheer violence of their physical confrontation with striking workers.

Norwood explains that not only did elite college students (a redundant expression, by the way, given the times) replace striking workers at their posts, they also relished the brawls that often broke out as they crossed picket lines. In New York in 1905, “Stories circulated around Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute that ‘Poly’ students working on subways had ‘bested roughs [ie, workers] a dozen times’ ” (331). Two years earlier, “hundreds [of students] answered the Minneapolis flour millers’ call for strikebreakers. Among the first to volunteer were varsity athletes from the University of Minnesota, who with a ‘lusty Shi-U-Mah’ (the Minnesota cheer) formed a wedge, and blasted through the picket line” (338). In 1912, students “joined the militia companies sent in to quell the Lawrence [Mass.] textile strike… students enjoyed the opportunity to precipitate violence, as they enthusiastically disrupted picketing and strike parades” (339). A few years later, in 1919, students were themselves victims of retributive violence. “In riots in the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and Malden, which were sparked by the strikebreaking of students from Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Brown, the working class took its revenge on the collegians, badly mauling several. In Boston, for example, some student strikebreakers were beaten unconscious and one had his teeth knocked out” (339).

Norwood proposes a joint explanation for this strikingly physical form of class warfare. First of all, he argues that the antipathy of the rich towards the working classes made the students particularly suited for strikebreaking. While students themselves alternated between familial conservatism and sheer festive indifference to anything serious, their administrators, athletic coaches and trustees held clear anti-labor doctrines. “Columbia’s president Nicholas Murray Butler,” for instance, “denounced the strike in general as an ‘act of war’ ” (334). Students’ involvement in strikebreaking, apparently, was catalyzed by the active encouragement of these campus leaders. Moreover, because students were wealthy elites, they afforded businessmen the chance to hire a more publicly “presentable” group of scabs — the alternative being to hire lower-class, less seemly “riff-raff” and “slum dwellers” as substitute workers (332).

Now for the second piece of Norwood’s explanation: he suggests that involvement in strikebreaking was in large part a response to what he calls a turn-of-the-century “crisis of masculinity.” He argues that, as upper- and middle-class men were increasingly decoupled from physical work, they found themselves having more trouble performing the “muscularity,” violence, “daring deeds,” and “strenuous life” that were stereotypical characteristics of manhood. Violent sports, according to Norwood, were hence increasingly valorized as a sort of substitute site of masculinity pageants. However, the increasingly bloody and ridiculous rites of passage that emerged at elite colleges themselves became too unseemly, and administrators eventually banned them as “relic[s] of barbarism.” “Strikebreaking,” Norwood goes on to argue, “was the perfect replacement for the banned violent rituals. It provided students with the opportunity for mass participation, denied in organized college athletics, and satisfied their pressing need for a ‘test of masculinity’ ” (338).

As one would expect from this somewhat heterogeneous cluster of motivations, students’ experiences of strikebreaking were complex: they seemed to live it as a gigantic “lark” (333); as a test of physical prowess; as a sort of break from campus (some even got course credit!); but also as something that satisfied a certain craving for heroism. While this craving for heroism was no doubt essential to the masculinity complex of the day, it strikes me that these idly rich students may also have harbored fantasies of doing something less useless than drinking and making fools of themselves on a daily basis.

In the end, the period of strike-breaking (from 1901-1923) came to a close, Norwood argues, above all because campuses became more co-educational in the 1920s, and the frivolous pursuits of college boys were redirected towards “heterosexual activities.” It’s a ridiculous ending to a ridiculous bit of history.

(This data comes from the IPEDS Fall Staff Survey. The AAUP notes as follows: “Figures for 2005 and 2007 may not be exactly comparable with previous years, due to a change in the type of institutions included in totals. Grad student figure in 1975 column is for 1976. Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.”)

There are three important things to learn here. (1) The current fraction of contingent instructional labor in U.S. higher education is just about 75% by these figures. (2) Contingents (i.e. everyone who’s not tenured or tenure-track) have grown enormously since 1975, but it’s important to note that even in 1975 they were already more than half the academic teaching workforce. As I wrote in my earlier post, even the golden age wasn’t that golden. (3) Interestingly enough, while the tenured faculty has grown noticeably over the last 35 years, the tenure-track faculty (assistant professors) have barely grown at all, even in absolute terms. In other words, as people on the existing tenure track have gotten tenure (or alternatively failed to get tenure and hence gotten fired), they haven’t been replaced by new tenure track slots.

In sum, nothing too surprising here, but it’s useful to have the figures handy.

“Organizations such as the American Association of University Professors originally fought for tenure because, contrary to popular, even academic, belief, there was no tradition of academic freedom in the American university until the twentieth century, and then only for the most conventional and apolitical scholars. On the whole, postsecondary administrations were not sympathetic to intellectual, let alone political, dissenters, the Scopeses of the day. Through the 1950s most faculty were hired on year-to-year contracts by presidents and other institutional officers who simply failed to renew the contracts of teachers they found politically, intellectually, or personally objectionable.

For example, until well into the 1960s the number of public Marxists, open gays, blacks, and women with secure mainstream academic jobs could be counted on ten fingers. And contrary to myth it wasn’t all due to McCarthyism, although the handful of Marxists in American academia were drummed out of academia by congressional investigations and administrative inquisitions. The liberal Lionel Trilling was a year-to-year lecturer at Columbia for a decade not only because he had been a radical but because he was Jew. The not-so-hidden secret of English departments in the first half of the twentieth century was their genteel anti-Semitism. For example, Irving Howe didn’t land a college teaching job until the early 1950s, and then it was at Brandeis. Women fared even worse. There’s the notorious case of Margaret Mead, one of America’s outstanding anthropologist and its most distinguished permanent adjunct at Columbia University. Her regular job was at the Museum of Natural History. She was a best-selling author, celebrated in some intellectual circles, but there was no question of a permanent academic appointment. Her colleagues Gene Weltfish and Ruth Benedict, no small figures in anthropology, were accorded similar treatment.”

(pp. 207-208)

What strikes me as interesting about this is the fact that tenure, according to Aronowitz, only became generalized in the postwar period (50s or 60s), as higher education expanded more generally and as America saw the emergence of a tacit social contract between workers and employers that offered stability and decent material conditions. Since the 1970s (according to the usual way of telling this story, which I’m not really competent to evaluate, not being a labor historian), this contract fell apart, for various reasons involving deindustrialization, a shift to the service sector, rising right-wing political opposition to welfare and social services, economic downturns, and so on. As Andrew Ross put it a couple of years ago:

On the landscape of work, there is less and less terra firma. No one, not even in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of his or her lifetime. The rise in the percentage of contingent workers, both in low-end service sectors and in high-wage occupations, has been steady and shows no sign of leveling off. For youth who are entering the labor market today, stories about the postwar decades of stable Fordist employment are tall tales indulged by the elderly, not unlike the lore of Great Depression hardship that baby boomers endured when they were young. In retrospect, the Keynesian era of state-backed securities for core workers in the primary employment sector, including higher education, was a brief interregnum or, more likely, an armed truce.

This description is, as Ross goes on to emphasize, true of academia as well. As practically every reader here probably knows, today in the United States, tenure-stream faculty amount to less than a third of all instructional staff in higher ed, and the growth of temporary, adjunct, part-time, poorly-paid, insecure teachers has been very rapid (the AFT has details). Ross goes so far as saying that “in no other profession has casualization proceeded more rapidly than in academe.”

That’s not news. But what’s news to me, and what seems worth emphasizing, is that the history of academic labor actually seems not that different, on the whole, from the broader trajectory of American labor relations. Not only have academic jobs gotten more precarious around the same time that precarious employment has generally increased, but academics only started to generally have tenure — this is what’s so important about Aronowitz’s comments, if correct — more or less around the same time that other American workers also started getting stable jobs in the post-war period. Sure, there are some important things that are specific to academia: the tenure movement had been in the works for decades earlier (according to the AAUP’s history), and it may have taken a few of decades longer in academia to cut pay and working conditions than it would have in some factory that moved abroad in the 70s. According to the only historical statistics I’ve come across, 51% of faculty were tenured in 1969 and 64.4% in 1979, which was still far from unanimous (though many of the remainder may have been on tenure-track appointments). At any rate, there was no golden age when everyone was tenured, although in 1982 the fraction of tenured faculty was still thought to be increasing by “a point or two every year.” These days, of course, the fraction of tenure-stream faculty declines every year instead by the same amount. I can’t tell you the moment when it began to fall instead of rise, although sometime between 1985 and 1995 seems like a reasonable guess. I’ll look for statistics.

The general point, however, would seem to be that an exceptionalist fantasy where universities are radically special – in terms of their social organization – is pretty clearly false. American faculty didn’t have tenure in an earlier age; they only had it for a few decades mid-century which, basically, seem to correspond to the age of big post-war economic growth and prosperity, though apparently lagging behind it by a decade or two. The conclusion here, it seems to me, is that it makes no sense for academics to defend tenure in itself, without looking at its historical conditions of possibility in the American economy. There’s nothing wrong with demanding a stable job, but it’s irksome when certain academics seem to think that only a professor deserves one in this day and age. Sometimes (as in that interview by Stimpson I’ve linked to) the argument is that tenure facilitates academic work in the public interest, but I’m skeptical that most contemporary academic work is in the public interest, and a general argument for stable employment strikes me as far less prone to fantasies of academia’s exceptionality and unique value.