Of the same stripe [i.e., belonging to the party of Folly] are those who strive to win eternal fame by publishing books. All of them owe a great deal to me, but especially those who scribble pages of sheer nonsense. As for those who write learnedly for the judgment of a few scholars and would not hesitate to have their books reviewed by such true judges as Persius or Laelius, they seem to me more pitiable than happy because their work is a perpetual torment to them. They add, they alter; they blot something out, they put it back in. They do the work over, they recast it, they show it to friends, they keep it for nine years, and still they are never satisfied. At such a price they buy an empty reward, namely praise, and that only from a handful. They buy it with such an expense of long hours, so much loss of that sweetest of all things, sleep, so much sweat, so much agony. Reckon up also the loss of health, the spoiling of their good looks, weak eyesight (or even blindness), poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, early death, and other things just as bad, if there are any. Such great suffering your wiseman thinks is fully repaid by the approval of one or two blear-eyed readers.

This book was first published in 1511, which means that the 500th anniversary of its publication was last year. It’s safe to say that European universities in 1511 looked quite different from today’s incarnations thereof. The printing press had only recently been invented; everything was taught in Latin; education was not for the masses, and had not been yoked to post-Enlightenment nation and workforce-building projects. One could go on in this vein, if one were a historian. (I’m not.) But what’s so fascinating about this little bit of Erasmus is that, in spite of the enormous institutional, political, cultural, and intellectual gulfs that separate us from these early universities, something about the experience of academic work seems to have remained constant, along with certain of the work’s basic instruments.

For even today, scholarly work in the humanities is deeply text-centered, just as it was for Erasmus. And the psychological follies that Erasmus describes are quite familiar, for me and I suspect for many grad students in the humanities. Do we not all have friends whose scholarly work is a perpetual torment? Whose work—to use language Erasmus would not have used—is an immense locus of neurosis and barely sublimated anxiety? And is it not obvious to everyone that the coin of scholarly approval remains, precisely, praise, and that praise is still and always, existentially speaking, an empty, ephemeral reward? Do we not all know people—though not ourselves, of course!—or so we say in our better moments—who have slaved for weeks—if not months—or indeed years—striving for infinitesimal dribblings of warm feelings for our work—such warmth being of course craved but always inevitably despised for its inability to entirely satisfy our desire…

And then again, one notes Erasmus’s pithy diagnosis of the material circumstances of the scholar, which one would hope (in vain) to have improved in the interim. Said circumstances have improved for some, to be sure, but hardly for all of us. Poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, weak eyesight—who has not encountered colleagues in such states? My eyes, to descend for a moment into the lowlands of biographical detail, were in decidedly better shape before I started my ph.d., and I venture to predict that similar things may have afflicted my peers, what with all the reading…

But I digress. Erasmus has more in store for us:

“Among the learned, the lawyers [but surely the following passage applies to others as well] claim the highest rank, nor could anyone be more self-satisfied than they are as they endlessly roll the stone of Sisyphus… piling gloss on gloss and opinion on opinion to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. For they imagine that whatever is most laborious is automatically also preeminent.

Let us join to them the dialecticians and disputants… fighting to the bitter end over some hair-splitting quibble, and, often enough, missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.

[As for the philosophers:] That they have discovered nothing at all is clear enough from this fact alone: on every single point they disagree violently and irreconcilably among themselves. Though they know nothing at all, they profess to know everything; and though they do not know themselves, and sometimes can’t see a ditch or a stone in their path… nevertheless they claim that they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matter, quiddities, ecceities—things so fine-spun that no one, however ‘eagle-eyed,’ would be able, I think, to perceive them.

Contemporary philosophy has changed terminology in the meantime, now calling them “essences” rather than “quiddities,” but it seems to me that even today we can find philosophers who lay claim to intellectual superiority over what Erasmus termed the “unwashed multitude” while simultaneously having irreconcilable, or anyway irreconciled, disagreements about practically “every single point.” And the tendency to overvalorize “difficulty” in scholarship is, notoriously, still present. Just think of how saying “it’s more complicated” is a debating tactic, or look at the defenses of Judith Butler’s prose style that emerged last decade. That book about Butler is also a good illustration of what Erasmus terms “missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.” As is a well-known book by Marshall Sahlins which, in my view, is quite aggravating reading on account of its extreme passion for attacking its adversary (Ganath Obeyesekere) in painstaking detail.

No doubt there would be more that could be said about Erasmus and the phenomenology of humanistic research, if one were in the mood for a serious study on the topic. But seriousness would hardly be appropriate in this context, for Erasmus himself is not exactly serious; the text is, obviously, irony and hyperbole incarnate. William Clark, in his charming and ironic book about the origins of research universities, comments that scholarly irony is, precisely, not accidental. Irony “expresses and conceals a love-hate relationship,” he says, going on so far as to claim that irony is “an essential academic attitude about academia, that is, the essence of reflexivity” (20). The essence of academic reflexivity, he should have said, since academics are not the only ones who are reflexive. But it is historically interesting to reflect on the fact that, not only are the existential absurdities of humanistic scholarship still in some ways quite similar to what they were in 1511, so too is the ironic attitude that we use to fend off this absurdity. Irony is what allows us to detach from our milieu in order then to better attach to it. What luck for academia that it has writers like Erasmus to help strengthen our collective resolve!

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.

I went through a grim suburban railroad station in Dublin on my way there. But in the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, there was a pair of grills that produced one of the most intense moiré patterns I’ve seen.

When you got to the campus, though, there was an sense of almost physical relief compared to the tightly enclosed urban campuses where I work in France. This was the enormous lawn just beside the old part of campus.

It even had wildlife.

The old campus itself was stone. Everything there was very quiet. (I think this part of the campus is the seminary, matter of fact.)

Admittedly, the cars and parking lots have risen up between the old buildings like a bituminous tide.

And the rows of dumpsters were somewhat aesthetically out of place, to say the least.

I was surprised to find out that the library was named after Pope John Paul II. Across from its front door was a very… pastoral sculpture.

If we crossed a bridge we came to the new side of campus (it’s the National University of Ireland-Maynooth).

The reflections ran off to a vanishing point.

There was even a creche with a playhouse.

This low building was locally considered the ugliest on campus. It didn’t look that bad to me.

A whole complex of new dormitories had been built in the last couple of years (all those buildings in the far background).

Out in the town, on the other hand, houses were low, tightly packed, a bit glum, barely colored, very similar to architecture I’ve seen elsewhere in the British Isles. One of these had all its windows broken and the rain pouring in, and seemed to have been left that way for some time.

One notices that in the university’s advertisements, they don’t show images of that part of town.

By contrast, you could rent a room in Paris for an entire month (my rent is €400) for less than the sum cost of these three days. Yes, a month’s rent: which, from a student perspective, is a rather amazing sum of money. It’s enough to make one think that major academic conferences like this are structured around a sort of tacit class exclusion. They do, of course, have some participant funding available, but it apparently comes to €20,000 for a conference that’s supposed to attract more than a thousand people.

This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority for him, since the numbers in the ‘nation’ which comprised the Aberdeen constituency were greater than those in the ‘nations’ which came from outside Aberdeen. Reckoned by ‘nations’ and not by numbers, there was a tie between Hay and Maitland, the solicitor-general. The principal gave a casting vote in favor of Maitland. This was taken as a deliberate move to back the professors against the students. In March 1861 Maitland came to deliver his rectorial address. The academic profession, along with the magistrates and the town council, entered the hall. Cheering, hooting and yelling greeted their appearance; this was to be expected: it was the traditional accompaniment to every rectorial address. But then the scene became ugly. Chunks of splintered wood hurtled across the hall. The audience were, of course, expected to come unarmed, but some of them had brought in hammers and other instruments with which they uprooted the seats and smashed them into pieces suitable for projectiles.

The principal took his place at the rostrum and called on the meeting to join him in prayer. Out of respect for the kirk there was a temporary lull. But the uproar resumed as soon as the oath was administered to Maitland, and he stood at the lectern to give his address. At this point some of the professors left the platform ‘to remonstrate personally with those taking a leading part in the row’.The rector kept smiling and endeavoured to proceed with his address, but at this stage blood was trickling down his face. The more respectable students were ashamed, and added to the pandemonium by hissing. There were cries of ‘Call in the police’. After ineffectual intervention by the principal, several police were ‘brought up to the hall door, but no force was used by them. . . ‘. The rector calmly and impressively completed his oration, the principal pronounced a benediction, and the proceedings, ‘which had lasted upwards of two hours’, were brought to a close. (20-21)

I’d like to imagine that these days outright violence is no longer a part of university politics, but there are just too many counterexamples to take that claim seriously.

Greenberg starts with a general history of Serbian universities, saying that they were “decentralized,” with each faculty an autonomous legal entity. (Universities in Serbia date from this century, several having been started in the 1960s and 70s.) Apparently they were an instrument by which the state could consolidate its power — although the threat of subversion from within the universities remained a real concern to state power, and the university thus became “a highly politicized site of critique and protest.” Greenberg adds that “student protest was often exacerbated because expectations created by ideals of higher education were constantly foiled by social and material practices within the everyday workings of the university” (7). (Of course, this is true in America as well, and in France – although I wonder whether it also works in reverse. Is it possible that our social practices are constantly being foiled and disrupted by our dysfunctional educational ideals?)

Serbia is an interesting case of student activism, anyway, since it seems that students had a major role in the defeat of Milosevic in 2000. But after this victory, the student movement lost its unity, refocusing itself on reform of universities. In the context of traditional pedagogy and limited institutional resources, “many student leaders saw the forms of standardization, credit systems, quality assurance and transparency of testing and educational requirements as the solution” (14). Moreover, it was evidently viewed as “a way to make Serbia more properly European” (15). Indeed, Greenberg’s work centers on how Serbian students work through the difficulties of citizenship and democratic organization in their universities. Unfortunately, from the introduction, I get the impression that she doesn’t investigate the university as such, as an institution, as a complex social structure – it seems to be very much cultural anthropology. But for the time being, I just want to emphasize this fascinating case of a neoliberal, regional reform – the Bologna process – being reused and reappropriated in local politics.