Viz:

• In August’s American Ethnologist, I had a paper on French academic labor and the ways that French mobilizations against “precarity” ended up masking certain other social phenomena (race, class, status, political delegation).
• In this month’s Cultural Anthropology, I have a paper on the “infinite stubbornness” of a French faculty protest against the former Sarkozy administration’s university reforms.
• In the Autumn issue of Critical Inquiry, I have a little book review of “Why there is no poststructuralism in France.”

I have to say, not having done much mainstream disciplinary publishing before, I found myself agreeing with the received wisdom that scholarly publishing is a tremendously long process. The first paper went through at least eleven drafts and two journals. For the second paper, which has some nifty animated diagrams, I had something like sixty email exchanges over the past six months with the journal staff who organized and realized the animations.  Not all these steps were time-intensive, but cumulatively they added up to quite a bit of work.

One of the inevitable results of the slow publishing process is that some of the work is born dated. For example, one of my claims in the paper on precarity is that a lot of anti-precarity organizing isn’t actually by precarious academic staff themselves, but is rather handled by a set of union delegates who themselves are not precarious. I also suggested that precarious academics tend to avoid identifying personally as precarious. If I were writing the paper this year, I might have changed those claims a bit, because a new “Collective of precarious workers of Higher Education and Research” emerged in France last spring. It seems to be getting a lot of the attention that the traditional union apparatus used to get, and it does speak more in the first person (albeit plural, not singular).

As far as the other paper, it turns out that I slipped in an unwarranted assumption that Sarkozy was only the past President of France:

The Ronde had initially been launched by French activist academics in March 2009, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year term as president of the French Republic…

A broad spectrum of feelings is apparent in the comments on the article. One says:

au fond ceux qui manifestent ne sont-ils pas en plein desarroi? on leur a fait croire que l ‘université était accessible à tous, tout le monde pouvait être docteur, chercheur ……. et non même à la fac il y a un filtre( à la sortie) il vaut mieux faire des etudes modestes et respectables, que de “longues études” qui ne menent à rien! je suis d ‘accord dès que le privé sera dans l ‘université alors celles-ci brilleront davantage comme à l ‘etranger c ‘est vrai mais attention la fac n ‘est pas faite pour tout le monde! il faut l ‘accepter et accepter ses limites. (on voit même des bac pro s’inscrire en medecine sic!, en science!) l echec est programmé non?

Which means roughly:

at heart, aren’t those who protest in total confusion? they were led to believe that the university was accessible to all, everyone could be doctor, researcher…. and that even at the fac there wasn’t a filter (at the exit). it’s better to do modest and respectable studies, than “long studies” leading to nothing! i agree since the private [sector] will be in the university, they’ll shine like they do abroad, it’s true. but pay attention, the fac isn’t made for everybody! you have to accept it and accept its limits. (one even sees vocational high school students enrolling in medicine, in science!) failure is planned, no?

It’s a very conservative pragmatism to argue that “the fac isn’t made for everybody,” but I think it’s an interesting claim that failure is planned. There’s more to look into when it comes to planned failure and disappointment in academic institutions.