An Academic Exorcism

Michael Alexander Chaney

Department of English
Indiana University, Bloomington
maxchi@aol.com

 

Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

 

Academic Keywords is that rare sort of polemic that consoles with humor as it enrages us with personal accounts and persuasive analysis of the current crisis in higher education. Provocative and conversational, urbane and intelligent, this is a volume that almost defies traditional categorization. Visually, the book resembles what its redoubtable subtitle announces it to be–a dictionary of keywords essential to expanding our understanding of the unfolding crisis in academia, particularly in the humanities. Entries both long and short cogently define new and often dispiriting trends, such as outsourcing, America’s fast-food discipline, company towns, and Responsibility Centered Management. Other entries trenchantly recontextualize more familiar terms like merit, faculty, and tenure in order to reverse what the authors denounce in their preface as a “vocabulary that reinforces various forms of false consciousness” (vii). As part of this effort to update our taxonomies of academia’s problems, Nelson and Watt include larger, full-length essay entries on sexual harassment, the corporate university, and affirmative action “to redefine familiar terms for each new generation, to rearticulate them to new conditions” (viii). The result is a compelling incrimination of corporatization as the source of our present academic woes.

 

Unfortunately, while the authors eloquently describe corruption and exploitation at all levels of the university, their dictionary is not counterbalanced with a lexicon of improvement or recovery beyond terms that many academics and administrators would read with a twinge of concern if not discomfort–terms such as union, collective bargaining, strike. And yet, Nelson and Watt anticipate this criticism. They explain in their preface that the book is no panacea but a wake-up call meant to “examine present conditions” and to show “that academia is indeed a workplace more than an ivory tower” (x).

 

What most distinguishes this book from others similar to it (Nelson’s Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis; Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English; Michael Bérubé’s The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies) is the way in which the act of naming itself becomes not only a tool for recovering knowledge but also an effective and entertaining means of linking seemingly unrelated symptoms of academia’s hard-to-diagnose illness. Although the book predictably follows an alphabetical order, there is an unrelenting unity that governs each entry. A paragraph from the introduction explains this unity while demonstrating in a final hyperbolic flourish the rhetorical force of these linkages:

 

The multiple crises of higher education now present an interlocking and often interchangeable set of signifiers. (8)

 

Conversation about the lack of full-time jobs for Ph.D.s turns inevitably to the excessive and abusive use of part-time faculty or the exploitation of graduate student employees, which in turn suggests the replacement of tenured with contract faculty, which slides naturally into anxiety about distance learning, which leads to concern about shared governance in a world where administrators have all the power, which in turn invokes the wholesale proletarianization of the professoriate (8). In any other dictionary there is no similarity between one entry and the next except for those phonetically-spelled pronunciation keys in parentheses. Not so in Nelson and Watt’s, though curious parentheticals full of schwas and umlauts abound. Theirs is a primer which, like Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary(1911), defines divergent topics with a yoking interpretive purpose that ranges from the serious to the satiric.

 

Without question, it is on the subject of university corporatization that we find the authors achieving a level of indignation comparable to any radical manifesto. But even the book’s most apocalyptic moments are softened by a sense of humor and an understanding of opposing views. After presenting these issues at the University of Chicago, the authors report that a “distinguished faculty member there rose to say, ‘Well, you’ve heard Mulder’s version of the story; now let me give you Scully’s'” (xii). This comparison to the X-Files conspiracy-obsessed radical is very revealing. Although the book has no conspiracy to uncover, it describes the “multiple, uncoordinated forces working to alter higher education for the worse, not the better” (xii) in essentially Mulder-esque terms, making it easy for the reader to imagine administrators and university business advisors as colluding aliens bent on world domination. Perhaps it is the subtle and comprehensive way that corporatization works that facilitates alien invasion analogies. Throughout the book, the authors refer to the unnamed agents of university denigration as “forces” governed by concomitant material changes in American society prizing corporate efficiency and profit over community and academics.

 

Every entry touching upon problems in the profession hinges upon the impending threat of corporatization. In “Academic Departments,” a definition follows that seems virtually free of corporate attacks. Yet the effects of fractured departments split between theoretical disputes and petty differences cause individual department members to embrace what Nelson describes in Marxist terms as a sense of “entrepreneurial disciplinarity” (20), which in turn shatters any hope of that department being an academic community and leaves it vulnerable to corporate infiltration. In the same entry, Nelson suggests that departmental divisiveness is a consequence of exploitative hiring practices that trickle down a universal acceptance of dishonesty from the administration: “A department that sustains high salaries for tenured and tenure-track faculty by ruthlessly exploiting adjunct faculty with Ph.D.s is hardly well-suited to be honest about any of its other differences” (21).

 

The term “accountability” is similarly disentangled from any “timeless Platonic form” and redefined as a “strategic term deployed in specific social and political contexts” (37). The authors argue that the current popularity of the word has less to do with keeping the outside world informed of the duties and important pursuits of researchers and teachers than with keeping bureaucratized accounts of faculty output and cost effectiveness. Justifying the authors’ insistence on interpreting fashionable university lingo in economic terms is the academic habit of invoking “apprenticeship,” which retains historical economic connotations, as a paradigm for the role that graduate-student teachers play in academia. The relevant entry in Academic Keywords calls this usage sharply into question, showing that student teachers are not adequately instructed on how to better perform their teaching duties as are other apprentices, nor are they adequately compensated as inchoate professionals should be. In a useful chart comparing the rate of pay increases among Bloomington plumber, carpenter and graduate apprentices, Stephen Watt (in several entries initials indicate single authorship) uses the predictably bleak increase in graduate pay to underscore the “inherent inadequacy of the metaphor of apprenticeship” (70).

 

The book makes frequent and compelling use of such charts to bolster its rhetorical campaign. There are charts tracing the median level of debt for a range of graduate students, the change in faculty appointments nationwide (showing the decrease in tenured positions), and even a list of the top twelve ways in which academic freedom for faculty is undermined and curtailed. Facts, statistics, citations, and charts abound. Nelson and Watt have done their homework and are not afraid to spell out just how disastrous things are.

 

How disastrous? In “Faculty,” the authors aver that “over 40 percent of the nation’s faculty of higher education in 1997 were part-timers” (138). In the same entry, part-timers are referred to as university cash cows and compared to Mexican factory workers and migrant fruit pickers. Elsewhere, in “Part-Time Faculty,” statements from underpaid and devalued Ph.D.s forced to travel the highways to different schools paying meager wages and offering no benefits provide sobering evidence of the job crisis. Many of these part-timers have children. Many are published researchers and talented teachers, which refutes the self-deluding myth many tenured professors embrace that “underpaid teachers are underpaid because they are inferior” (204).

 

Indeed, much of the book has been generated by the authors’ principled opposition to the profession’s mistreatment of part-timers. Moreover, the authors, both renowned English professors, excoriate English departments in particular, as it was this field that proved to administrators throughout the country that almost all introductory courses could be taught by instructors without Ph.D.s: “Indeed, many courses are taught at a profit” (57). Nor is Nelson reluctant to implicate his own institution, which “earns a profit for [the University of Illinois] of about $8,000 for each freshman composition course taught [….] So the yearly profit on freshman rhetoric is about $1,200,000, and the profit on introductory courses is about $1,500,000” (93). According to the authors (in a clever entry on “Cafeterias”), this urge to sacrifice quality education for better revenues is linked to the corporate tactic of outsourcing. The practice of replacing tenured faculty with part-time instructors is shown to be a direct outgrowth of the profitable replacement of salaried dietitians, cooks, and cafeterias with fast-food counters, food courts, and minimum-wage workers, a development that transpired gradually in most American colleges and universities starting in the late 1970s. Neither the quality of the food nor that of the instruction has weighed heavily on university administrators as they have carried out these changes. And though the administrative determination to build profit centers within the non-profit entity of the university by outsourcing, downsizing, and reducing costs seems at this stage irreversible, Nelson and Watt offer several direct and concrete mandates for resistance.

 

The most sensible solution Nelson posits is that “disciplinary organizations need to set minimum wages for part-timers” (203). Additionally, he calls for an “annual ‘Harvest of Shame’ listing all departments and institutions paying less than $3,000 or $4,000 per semester course to instructors with Ph.D.s” (203). A more militant suggestion is that “faculty members and administrators from those schools should be barred from privileges like discounted convention room rates and barred from advertising in professional publications” (203). Nelson goes on to consider even more serious sanctions that would disqualify those associated with the Harvest of Shame from publishing in journals and receiving health care benefits.

 

Like his rallying cries for collective action and unionization, these recriminations force us to ponder the feasibility of such responses. For instance, how effective is the existing list of censured institutions published by Academe? Who are the disciplinary organizations that would implement these sanctions? And after all, isn’t the real problem, according to the facts set down by Nelson and Watt, that part-timers and many adjuncts are not socially part of the more permanent teaching staff, and thereby fail to garner the financial and professional sympathy of other instructors necessary before any collective action may take place? How can we make tenured faculty and administrators care about part-timers? Simply to call for collectivization before outlining the motives for doing so on the part of higher paid faculty seems, to me, to skip several steps in the solution. And any kind of national representation would naturally involve regulating what schools pay all of their employees from the highest paid athletic coaches and administrators to physical plant workers and TAs. As with all collective bargainings, the initial phase of wage balancing will prove to be the most slow-moving and painful, as Nelson himself attests in a personal chapter-entry on his dealings with the Teamsters and his predictably unwilling faculty peers (during the strike that is the subject of his Manifesto of a Tenured Radical). Nelson and Watt seem content to allude to some imaginary middle wage for all faculty, without inquiring too closely into the problem of wage scales in a capitalist economy.

 

Ultimately, and not improperly, Academic Keywords leaves the task of working out a plan of action to its readers. The book’s objective is not to dictate a fully formed agenda, but to inform and to raise consciousness: to shock us out of our apathy. And this it does to superb effect; it is a book that can raise hairs on the back of your neck. If academia were a summer camp, then Academic Keywords could be its campfire tale, horrifying us with the brutal facts of the recent past and the plausible approach of an even more brutal future.

 

But there is another side to this book. It would be a mistake to conclude here without mentioning the incredible humor that enriches Academic Keywords. Indeed, I find myself resisting an urge to simply quote entire sections which read like slice-of-life stand-up comedy… Like, did you hear the one about the moonlighting professor? After repeated sightings of him working in a men’s clothing store at the mall, the concerned department head set up a sting operation to catch the aberrant scholar “patting down a suit on someone else’s shoulders” (179). The mall-lighting professor was found to be working his second job forty hours a week. Or, did you hear the one about the distinguished English professor at a formal department dinner who celebrated too early? With his colleagues seated around him, “he made a series of profound pronouncements and then passed out face forward into the first course” (19). Afterwards the others “lifted him up, wiped him off, and propped him up as best they could” (19). What is so hilariously disturbing about these jokes is that they are true, and each anonymous professor mentioned is probably someone we have heard of, whose works we have read, whom we may even know. More abundant than their narrative tales are the one-liners that the authors interweave into their prose with an admirable acumen. Some of these jibes work to offset the depressing subject matter. When describing the ultra-conservative constituents of the National Association of Scholars, Nelson refers to them as “specimens of that vanishing but still aggressive species, the confrontational white male wearing a bow tie” (182). In the section on graduate employees and cafeterias, the last few lines of the entry imagines a university with a certain corporate booth in the food court: “By the way, the Disney booth is manned by an English Ph.D. who earns $5.15 an hour” (78). The introduction includes a strange advertisement listing the corporate university’s principles of governance with the heading “MOBILE OIL BRINGS YOU MASTERPIECE CLASSROOM THEATRE” (6). The first nine so-called principles farcically delimit all faculty rights and freedoms in favor of student consumers and university supervisors; the tenth generously promises faculty the “full academic freedom to accept these principles or to resign” (6). It is a truism of comedians that making light of serious troubles is not only a powerful coping device but also a way of creating agreement through humor that these serious troubles exist–which not so coincidentally is the self-declared purpose for the book set down in its preface.

 

In closing, I find it difficult not to propose a few items to consider (which is not inappropriate in a review of a book that steadfastly demands reader response). While reading, I found myself recalling a very unpopular economic answer to the current muddle, one that is the oldest and perhaps the most pacifistic answer to any economically motivated turmoil. That answer is the same one offered by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations that counters any kind of intervention on the grounds that the market will always organically correct itself. Is it only blind faith that impels me to think that universities passing off an inferior education will experience an eventual decline in revenues which will in turn force them to employ a better paid supply of instructors? Many prospective students and parents are deluged with brochures touting impressive faculty-student ratios. May we not collectively force these resources to include accurate listings of part-timer-student ratios? No matter how unpopular this laissez-faire view, I refuse to believe that there is no longer a need in this country for a quality education. After all, McDonald’s did not erase the existence of family restaurants or neighborhood diners as critics expected, just as malls never obliterated privately owned specialty shops and clothing stores.

 

Regardless of how centrist my position may seem, I feel empowered in whatever stance I take after reading this book, since as the authors so justly emphasize, informed discontent naturally breeds hopeful action. I recommend this book highly, but also hope that we in the academy do not make the same mistake with this issue as we do in so many others–by speaking only to each other–and so, instead of encouraging professors and administrators to read Academic Keywords, I strongly recommend the book to parents and students.