My name is ——. I am the Lucy Adams Leffingwell Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western University. I am also a lifetime member of the American Anthropological Association and President-elect of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. I am writing to ask that you vote against the boycott of Israeli universities.

My name is Dale Eickelman, the Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College…

I am Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. I write to urge you to watch this important new video where anthropologists who know something about the matter demonstrate how an academic boycott is ultimately personal.

I am Ulf Hannerz, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. I have been a member of the American Anthropological Association since the 1960s, and I am a former member of its Committee on World Anthropologies. I have voted against the boycott resolution.

My name is Myra Bluebond-Langner. I am a medical anthropologist currently at the Institute of Child Health, University College London where I hold the True Colours Chair in Palliative Care for Children and Young People as well as Board of Governors Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Rutgers University. I am a long-term member of the American Anthropological Association and a recipient of the Margaret Mead Award from the AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. I am writing to urge you to vote against boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA’s spring ballot.

I am Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, a member of the AAA for over thirty years. I write to urge you to vote NO on the proposal to boycott Israeli universities in this year’s AAA spring ballot.

I am Michele Rivkin-Fish from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I am writing to urge you to vote NO to boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA’s ballot this month.

These are all the opening lines of the anti-boycott emails. I have to say I’m struck — amazed, really — by the massive recourse to institutional affiliations, titles and credentials. It is as if the most important task for these authors was to establish their own power, as if that in itself conferred authority. None of these people are untenured; none of them are unemployed; none of them are adjuncts; none of them are working-class, all of them are privileged; and we’re meant to know and value that as we imbibe their prose. It’s like a parade of academic capital that you hadn’t planned on watching go by.

One particular slippage that I find interesting is the quite direct equation of the person with their title. I am XYZ, not I work at XYZ. I find that particularly pernicious, as there is nothing more antithetical to the spirit of democratic inquiry than identifying speech with the institutional trappings of its producers. And yet it turns out that the anti-boycott group has an explicit rationalization of this equation. They note in “ten reasons to vote against the boycott” that

Badges we wear at conferences, by-lines at the top of journal articles, resumes and terms we use to introduce each other all consist of names attached to titles and affiliations – institutional idioms that define who and what we are.

But is it really the titles and affiliations that define who and what we are? It’s an idea fit for a feudalism re-enactment camp, but apparently for this group of academics, the thought can somehow be defended non-ironically. Do they not realize that this proposition amounts to saying that unemployed scholars are nothing? And that their recourse to their own titles tends to make their whole discourse nothing but an argument from authority?

JESSICA MARIE FALCONE
Kansas State University
Anthropology Program
204 Waters Hall
Manhattan, KS 66502

Here’s another example, from Bonnie Urciuoli’s paper on neoliberal workplace language:

Bonnie Urciuoli
> Department of Anthropology
> Hamilton College
> Clinton, NY 13323
> [email protected]

To be sure, there are good reasons for this information to be available. If you want to ask the author a question, it helps to know their contact information. If you want to get a sense of which universities are supporting certain research topics, it helps to know where a given scholar is working. Or even, if you are trying to do meta-research on academic prestige and hierarchy, it’s pretty handy to be able to see who gets represented and who doesn’t, or maybe to get a really crude measure of gender and racial representation based on the scholars’ names (which inevitably encode certain social characteristics).

That was the case for listing affiliation. But I think there is a strong case that we should stop listing affiliations in journal articles.

In brief: the naming of affiliation is also the creation of stigma. What kind of stigma, you ask? The stigma of precarious employment. The stigma of being out of work, “unaffiliated.” The stigma of career ambiguity. The stigma of not having an affiliation to put in this box.

You really notice the problems of affiliation if you graduate with a Ph.D., for instance, find a job in some other field, but still want to publish an article. Take my former job working in campus IT. Is a job in campus IT a plausible affiliation? I don’t think so: most employers require that you don’t use your job title for non-job-related purposes. What if your employer doesn’t want to be associated with your findings? Wouldn’t you need to show them what you were publishing beforehand? Whatever you might say about academic freedom, there’s less of it for non-academics.

For a year after I got my doctorate, I just kept listing my graduate department instead of my actual job whenever someone asked me for a scholarly affiliation. It beat writing “independent scholar.”

Underneath the current system of declaring one’s affiliations, there’s an assumption that one’s scholarly identity is equatable with one’s job, with one’s institutional belonging, and with one’s paycheck. I think that as global academia gets increasingly precarious, these things are all getting unbundled. You might not get your paycheck from being a scholar. You might have an institutional affiliation that’s partial, that’s barely declarable. You might be broke and unemployed but need to publish in hopes of getting a job so as to get less broke. All of these conditions are ill-served by the affiliation metadata that journals are requiring.

I think they should abolish it. These days, you don’t need to publish your academic department and campus address to be contactable; we have Google and academia.edu if we want to find someone’s CV. Publishing an email address is a sufficient form of contact information.

I think it may make sense to still collect metadata about the employment status of scholars who publish in journals, so that it will still be available for meta-analysis. But it doesn’t need to be published with the article. In my modest opinion.

The massification of higher education has not only had demographic implications. It has led to a certain trivialization of university faculty’s social position in developed countries — it is no longer rare to be an academic. At the same time, it is no longer rare to be a university graduate. This trend should increase in the years to come, in spite of the stagnation of demographic growth in developed countries as enrollments among 18- to 25-year-olds, by cohort [classe d’âge], tend to plateau or even decline. But official policies in most developed countries, as we enter the third millennium, nonetheless aim to increase access to higher education. In France, the objective of the post-2007 government, like that of its predecessor, is to bring 50% of each age class to bachelor’s [license] level. The idea is to facilitate underprivileged or underrepresented populations’ access to education, to encourage the pursuit of studies through graduation, to encourage further studies and teaching all throughout the life course. One should not thus expect a decrease in the population of university teachers in the years to come; one should expect growth, aimed at accommodating students with more and more diversified profiles in terms of age, sociological composition, motivation, etc.

These developments are often described as one of the signs of contemporary societies’ transition towards “knowledge societies” [sociétés de connaissance] one of whose notable characteristics is a break with the concentration of knowledges [savoirs] within a handful of heads. University faculty, as they become more numerous and come to play a central role in this process, will be less and less able to maintain the quasi-monopoly of knowledge [connaissance] expertise that they have held in the past.

The progressive loss of social prestige should thus continue — at least for the larger part of the professoriate, who won’t be in the avant-garde of scientific production, but will rather primarily contribute to the transmission of knowledge and the training of highly qualified personnel. This evolution has already been in progress for a long time and can be measured in particular by looking at salaries. University faculty salaries have evolved less favorably than those of professionals with the same level of education working outside academia (for France, see Bouzidi, Jaaidane and Gary-Bobo [2007]). This trend goes for most of the university models concerned [here in this study], whether quasi-completely public as in Europe or partly private as in North America, whether the academics are state functionaries or have private-sector contracts.

(Musselin, Les universitaires, 2006, pp. 25-26, my translation.)

My sense is that academics’ “status loss” is somewhat more complex than this, since, if you believe what you read on academic blogs, most American college students can’t tell the difference between an adjunct with really low institutional status and salary and a tenured professor. So on the level of everyday phenomenology of professional life, Musselin’s description seems a little hasty. But there is certainly a sort of myth, at the very least, that (American) faculty used to get more respect than they do now; and it may well be the case that students, on the whole, demonstrate less exaggerated obsequiousness than they once did. And it’s hard not to agree with Musselin that this shift likely is deeply related to  the massification of higher education: as if the more people go to college, the less prestige they gain from it – and the less prestige their teachers garner from teaching them. As if there was a kind of prestige mimesis, such that the lower status of today’s less elite student populations was contagious. Some longer meditations on the relation between prestige and scarcity may be in order here: Graeber’s, for example…