The motivations for academic work are similarly supposed to be other than pecuniary. One is supposed to work for existential reasons, or out of commitments to higher values that go beyond the purely economic — the “pursuit of knowledge” in some quarters, the dedication to making citizens or producing social justice in others. Yet it’s no criticism of these values to observe, as many have already observed, that these higher values can become alibis for an amplified self-exploitation. “You’re doing it out of personal commitment,” they tell you as you donate your weekend to the institution.

A strange moment in this process, though, is the moment where colleges and universities beg their own employees for charitable donations.

Thus I’ve been surprised to receive email and paper mail requests numerous times per year from my current employer, Whittier College, originating in their Office of Advancement. As the illustration for this post shows, they even emailed me before the end of 2016 to suggest that “Charitable giving might help reduce your income tax bill.” But the only reason I have a tax bill is because they themselves are paying me a salary. So if I gave them a donation, that would … essentially be returning a portion of my salary to my employer.

Which amounts to asking me to work for free, or anyway for less, as if, again, academic work wasn’t actually something you do for a living. (I say “for a living” and not “for the money” to signal that what motivates me is the practical survival of our household, rather than money for its own sake. For people motivated by the latter goal, academia is obviously an inefficient route.) In any event, this seems a strange message to send to one’s employees. The same thing used to happen when I worked at the University of Chicago, so it isn’t just Whittier College in question; but in that case at least I was actually an alumnus.

I would recommend to academic employers that they at least ask their employees to opt in to the list of prospective donors, rather than giving their names to Institutional Advancement purely because of the mere fact of their employment.

First she comments on the poverty wages and immense structural sexism that characterizes the post-PhD situation:

… a whole generation of junior academics is exposed to an ever growing casualization of labor. In Ireland alone, as a study of the collective Third Level Workplace Watch shows, a growing number of casual academics win on average 10 000 € annual income for an average of eight and a half years after finishing their PhD. In 63% of the cases this income is generated by hourly paid work, done in 62% of the cases by women. In Ireland again, a recent study by the Higher Academic Authority has shown that men still get 70% of all permanent academic positions in all seven universities in the country. The situation is similar in other countries where despite the fact that women make for the majority of completed PhD dissertations, the ratio of employment is still at their detriment. Women are particularly exposed to vulnerability with less access to permanent positions, and more emotional labor and care-giving functions both in and out of the academy. While those who have children feel losing the academic game because of the domestic burden of care in ever decreasing welfare conditions, those who do not have children feel deprived of private life due to growing imperative to do replacement teaching and administrative work.

Ivancheva subsequently remarks on the increasingly cruel norm of labor mobility that precarity and underemployment impose:

Beyond national trends, a growing “internationalization” (i.e. transnational flexibilization) of academic work makes it a difficult subject of both research and organized resistance. To stay in the academic game after finishing a PhD, in an English language research institution, one is usually required to put up with flexibility and recurrent migration. Those who get to do a post-doc or get a full-time fixed-contract teaching position are usually pressed to find time out of work in order to turn their PhD into publications. The shorter the time of the contract the higher the probability is that they return unprepared to the ever more competitive job-market.

Finally, she succinctly notes the costs of this mobility norm:

On the road of celebrated “internationalization” many are pressed to curtail their previous social and professional networks, and change countries every few months or years, if lucky. Many suffer loneliness and depression while others have to take on the responsibility of moving their whole families along or commuting across regional or national borders to make ends meet. The others, who – out of choice, or often out of necessity – opt out of the game of transnational mobility, fall easily in the trap of zero-hour teaching and precarious research arrangements in order to stay afloat. Both groups are dependent on local or international clan-like arrangements of loyalty and hierarchy. While university administrations outnumber academic faculty, academics do ever-growing amount of administrative work of (self-) evaluation to fit the demands of the ‘global knowledge economy’. Individualized contractual arrangements and access to benefits and resources encourages cruel competition among colleagues and friends, and breaks all solidarity.

In particular, her emphasis on “cruel competition among friends” fits my own disciplinary milieu (U.S.  cultural anthropology) all too exactly. The question of how to reinvent professional solidarity among people forced to compete with each other for scarce jobs remains, in my opinion, one of the major challenges facing academic labor organizers.

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…