#academic labor

A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever

In fact, much of the professor’s labor resembles what others do in their leisure time: staring at a blinking cursor in their pajamas, reading and scribbling, chatting with students. Labor that cannot be assessed or monetized cannot be a form of grace. (...) The difficulty of visualizing “the life of the mind,” of translating it into the American language of labor and productivity, may explain why the professor is so frequently accused of being unproductive by other concrete material individuals.

From 1993 to 2013, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in non-tenure-track part-time faculty positions in higher education grew by 230 percent. By contrast, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in full-time tenure-track positions grew by just 30 percent. Nearly 80 percent of faculty members were tenured or tenure-track in 1969. Now roughly three-quarters of faculty are nontenured.

Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the 'embarrassing' kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for 'elites' from 'elite' institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class. But the egalitarian view of education and the luxury view are mutually exclusive. Pulling up the drawbridge around your ivory tower only cuts it off from the global commons, which alone can provide the intellectual atmosphere in which a free society, and its academy, can breathe and thrive. Power wants its 'meritocracy': thus the eternal cake-having rhetoric around higher education, the queasy mingling of 'exclusivity' and 'diversity.'

Who's More Valuable, Einstein or a Staff Instructor?

Elections are a narrow form of political participation. While they may produce a changing same, they seldom produce transformative change. Political education, however, can at least change people’s perspectives, as I’ve seen powerfully in my own life. It’s why I’m invested in research, analysis, study, and teaching, despite the innumerable problems of the academic-industrial complex. [Para.] In fact, I had to leave the slate to post this analysis, because to do so without the approval of the principal decision-makers would’ve been tantamount, in their view, to anti-solidarity—or the same hollow rhetoric the New Caucus slate was using against the CUNY Struggle slate at that very moment. I will likely be accused of such betrayal now, but I take transparency seriously as a foundational element of political education. [Para.] There’s enough power in the world—I don’t need to remind anyone of that. What we need more of—a lot more of—are different ways of being in the world and with each other. I’m always trying to think about what that means, and how it can be achieved, across scales—and how to practice it on my own scale.