This is a quote from “Sightings” which is an e-mailing that comes twice a week from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I earned an MA in Religious Studies.
There are “varying classes of college-level teachers: tenured and tenure-track; full-time but non-tenure track (such as visiting professors, lecturers, and instructors); adjunct faculty, who are generally paid on a per-course basis; and graduate student teachers and teaching assistants whose teaching is often bound up with financial aid or other program requirements.
“Yet contingent faculty—all those off the tenure track—make up approximately 70% of instructors in American higher education. Of those who hold terminal degrees, adjuncts are often worst off: pay generally hovers around $2,000-$3,000 per course, although some large, wealthy institutions may pay as much as $7,000, and some smaller or public schools pay even less.
“In order to make ends meet, most adjuncts teach at multiple institutions. They earn no benefits, have no job security, and often lack access to other perks that full-time academic employment can bring: eligibility for promotion; an institutional home (avoiding the dreaded “independent scholar” label); budgets for books, conference fees and travel, and professional organization memberships; the ability to sponsor events and conferences; uninterrupted library privileges; a voice in university and departmental affairs; and even office space and supplies. All of this affects their ability to teach, mentor, and research.
“Adjunct positions are disposable, not temp-to-hire; but precisely for that reason, their numbers are increasing: some foresee the day when tenured faculty are primarily administrators for departments consisting entirely of adjuncts.
“. . . the myth of academic meritocracy—including the promise of decently-paid, full-time jobs to all deserving Ph.D.’s—continues to thrive, despite extensive documentation to the contrary. This means, in turn, that after devoting five, ten, even fifteen years or longer to the study of religion, a pursuit they both believe and are told is critical to understanding the contemporary world, even graduates of top schools realize too late how little chance they have of earning a decent livelihood and making a contribution to their chosen field. They are powerless and stuck, exploited by the ones who hold the keys to their professional future.”
So it has happened: the death of the university. This is not a place corrupted by athletics, booze and carelessness. This is a vital part of a major respected institution, hollowed out and collapsing -- just like publishing, journalism, financial institutions, political parties, the military, all the arrangements of Western-style humanities -- including third world clients. Professionals were supposed to be the jobs that stayed, after all the plumbers and welders and other physical jobs had collapsed. White collar institutions were supposed to be refuges. High status intellectuals thought they had it made.
Institutions want renewal but without change. Humanities, as they have been understood, have been linked in an Anglo-Victorian way to the middle class, to prosperity, to status, to decency and respectability. But that’s suffocating, conformist, zombiliferating. No wonder we thinking about the Fifties. This is why so much innovation -- whether exploration of sexuality, of black or indigenous culture, of profane or ghetto rhetoric, from substance abuse culture or from disease or rebellion -- has been excluded from the mainstream. Yet these same forces are the source of new energy. They sneak back through the music, the same way that religion sneaks back through “spirituality.” But this time they sneak back with no money -- only the love. And the kids go to tech school.
Official humanities have become an exercise in maintaining the status quo, even if that means gradually de-oxygenating the whole culture. Middle-class bias is always to replicate what has gone before: the canon, the hierarchy. If there is innovation at all, it often comes from looking at high-status people and trying to do what they do, whether it’s relevant or not. Lately the variation has been “crowd-sourcing” everything: what are your friends reading, what movies are they watching, what are they eating? Here in ag country, everyone is keeping an eye on the next farmer over. Salesmen who pitch “everyone is . . .” will be successful. It’s a high school sort of way to be. Of course, the freshman in college goes out of his way to do the opposite and sometimes generates ideas that last a lifetime. More often he finds out why the opposite doesn’t work and ends the search for alternatives right there. And soon he may discover the social safety nets of Medicare and Social Security have been removed, because they were in the way. Labor unions, employer paid health care, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation -- they're bad for business.
Nassim Taleb has been telling us and telling us. Untested complex assumptions lead to fragility. If you can’t produce proof, if you have no safeguards, if you have done no testing and considered no consequences, much less alternatives, it's "fragile." Too much is context-dependent and when that context (maybe the weather) is changing radically, whatever is contingent on it is ended. Right now in many ways the industrial revolution is withdrawing, partly because raw resources are either running out or being managed by wised-up wogs who want full value or so out-sourced that we’re doing what every army learns not to do: stretching our supply column too far.
The move to understanding and high culture that the internet was supposed to give us has turned out to be kids sexting. I guess we have to get it out of our systems. But I was surprised by the reaction to yesterday’s blog about the international high tension lines, which seemed to echo the determination of the oil industry people to truck loads so excessively large that they have to travel at night on back roads. People seemed to feel that juggernauts crushing through our small roadside lives, in spite of every legal obstacle, or sucking the very wind out of the sails of our small boats, were not just metaphorical. Aad, the Rotterdam poet, sent me illustrations from Chicken Little storybooks.
The sky IS falling. No, the sky already fell on Japan, in the Gulf of Mexico, in coal mines -- impossibly. The sky is always falling -- it lies around us in translucent jagged chunks like azure Jello rubble. We have to step over it to get anywhere. You know what was behind the sky up there all along? The stars. What did you think? And pretty soon the sun will come up again and melt all these sky shards. Expect floods. Then renewal.
No comments:
Post a Comment