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.

Today I wanted to write a word about one peculiar difficulty that I came across in the numbers. I was looking for an answer to a pretty basic question: how many university students does the United States have? Curiously, this turns out not to have a straightforward answer. If you look in the figures of the National Center for Education Statistics, there are several ways of measuring enrollments. Do you compare enrollment figures from a single point that you track across the years? There’s a large set of figures for “autumn enrollment” which appear to be useful for this purpose; I’d imagine that for certain kinds of research, like tracking attrition across years or tracking how a given high school class goes through college, it’s helpful to have a fixed point to compare from one year to the next.

But at the same time, there are naturally going to be a certain number of people who won’t enroll in autumn even though they’ll take university classes at some point in a year. As a result, there are also figures on “12-month enrollments” which cumulate everyone who’s signed up for a class in a 12 month period. And to make matters worse, there are some people who are full-time students and others who are something less than full-time; how do we count part-time students? Here we have yet another set of figures that gives “full-time equivalences,” calculated by dividing an institution’s total credit hours dispensed per year by the number of credits taken (arbitrarily) to constitute full-time enrollment (45 per year for undergrads, less for grad students).

If this last sentence makes no sense, you’re welcome to read the official explanation. But perhaps it would be better to skip to some examples: