C Bush has written here already about the contradictory assumptions that fuel the twinned attitudes of hostility and contempt toward the Liberal Elites of the American University (particularly Humanities, and especially English professors). It’s one thing when the misconceptions are coming from the outside, as it were. But when someone who should know better says dumb things to perpetuate the overplayed clichés about academic labor, it pisses me off.
The latest irritant appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “First Person” column from last Tuesday, written by one “Eugene Thompson” (a pseudonym). He’s an “assistant vice president of academic affairs” who is invited to an international conference in the UK, but the university would only cover about $1000 of what he estimated to be a $5000 trip. He writes that “the $1000 would barely cover the registration fee” and “with only a few months to come up with the money, [he] decide[s] to seek a second job.” Because his timing is off, and all the adjunct teaching jobs are filled, he turns to the newspaper and answers an ad for “package handlers” at a “major shipping company.”
Already I’m thinking, what conference charges $1000 for registration? And has the guy heard of credit cards? Does he not have savings to dip into? No discretionary income at all? He doesn’t mention a family except when he’s lying to the shift manager about why an “educator” with an MA (he leaves out the PhD on the form) would need this job lifting boxes. So where’s all his money going to? Thinking about it now, I’m wondering if he made the whole thing up just to make his point.
And what is his point? The bulk of the column is about how he starts out thinking he can do the job, working the twilight shift from 3 to 7 am, lifting an endless stream of boxes off a conveyor belt, but then is humbled by the experience. Although we’re meant to chuckle at the writer’s naiveté about what he’s gotten himself into, the narrative of his life lesson is pretty tedious, especially his descriptions of the exchanges with his mentor, José:
I reminded myself that I was only there to earn money to go overseas; I had options with my education. I found comfort in that, but was very unsettled witnessing firsthand how hard many people must toil to make ends meet.
But wait, the revelations keep coming. He quits after three weeks, cancels his trip, but realizes that he could still manage a second job, gets an adjunct teaching position, and writes, “I figured out I earned as much by teaching for three hours in an evening as I did in a 20-hour week of backbreaking work at the shipping company. Education truly gives you options.”
Not only does he have options with his education, but education truly gives him options. If this were the take-away message, it would have been utterly forgettable, and I wouldn’t be blogging about it now. No, his three-week stint in the trenches not only makes him appreciate his many options, but he offers us this final nugget of wisdom:
The easy moralism is annoying enough, but the way he arrives at it, with the suggestion that the academic labor of administrators and professors isn't real work, is what I find so dumb. Yes, there's no doubt that "sheer physical work for little pay" is both more physically demanding and more exploitive than any academic job. But must mental labor always be devalued in relation to manual labor? Does teaching a three-hour class in exchange for a "20-hour week of backbreaking work" have to be cast as getting away with something, as escaping a more difficult situation that is nevertheless valorized and therefore more real?
The abnegation of his own labor that Thompson offers as a punchline is no more insightful about the nature of academic work than the shift manager's commonplace about it being a "shame that we don't pay our teachers enough money to live on" which he quotes earlier in his piece. The contrast Thompson invokes isn't just between low skilled, poorly compensated and high skilled, well-compensated labor, but between a conception of work as such, which is felt in the body ("aches and pains," "backbreaking") and some other "option" that isn't quite work, that is a kind of opting out.
It's this recurring notion of "options" that seems to name a discomfort about the comfort Thompson finds in his education, a discomfort he displaces onto "how hard many people must toil," the witnessing of which "unsettle[s]" him. Maybe if there were some visible signs of his own toil that he could lay claim to (like social approbation in the form of a bigger paycheck, heroism, celebrity, and so on), he would feel the worth of his work. Maybe if he enjoyed his job less, it would seem more like toil. Maybe he simply doesn't work as hard at his day job as other administrators and professors. Even his conference is cast not as a necessary part of his professional development or promotion, but as an excuse for a vacation that he in the end can't afford. It seems the MA can still be explained as a practical necessity for certain kinds of work; the PhD is somehow a perverse expenditure that can't be economically justified. To admit to a PhD is to disqualify yourself for real work.
Ultimately, it's not the "working-class persona" he tried to create that makes him feel "like a fraud." What's disturbing is that Thompson expresses his own class anxieties in the form of a hard won truth. He tries to turn his own sense of guilt into a matter of collective shame. In reading this fellow academic's piece, I felt ashamed (as well as pissed off), but not because I work at a university.
Galbraith's always-pragmatic answer is, of course, that the goal should be an eventual elimination of the back-breaking variety, and a gradual shift of all laborers into the New Class, where work can indeed be enjoyable, mentally stimulating, and honorable. The point should not be that both types of labor are noble, or that one should not be ashamed of the less-back-breaking kind. Rather, it should be the goal of every member of our incredibly affluent society that the hardship of labor be eased across the board.
My point, if it didn't come across clearly above, isn't really about physical vs non-physical labor and their relative values, but about how academic labor in particular occupies a kind of nether zone in which it isn't really considered work. I think the element of pleasure has something to do with it, but while non-academics seem to recognize the pleasures and privileges that academia can offer (and seem to resent it because of these pleasures), they have a harder time understanding the nature of academic work, such that it comes to seem like no work at all, so academics seem to be getting away with being paid to take their summers off (which only deepens the resentment). Somehow, this kind of misperception doesn't apply to I-bankers or doctors, perhaps because their output (profit, health) seems so palpably practical. What's disappointing to me is when academics themselves don't seem to understand what constitutes academic work and why it matters.
It seems to me that the profession of higher education instruction shows a Derridean "brisure" or hinge -- if a students learns something useful or meaningful, he or she learned it on their own, erasing the labor of the instructor. And if they don't learn, the stereotypical prof is to blame -- lazy folks w/ summer's off, can you believe those jerks!?
American culture seems ill-equipped to deal with the epistemology of learning. Look at all the education fads that come and go: "learner-centered education," "learning communities," etc. -- all euphemisms to erase the fact that an instructor has authority over students and teaches them something they don't already know.
Re: S L Kim's reponse; absolutely, i actually didn't mean to disagree with your reading, only to add something tangential. I think it is a general and unfortunate problem that the critics of academia are so constant, and, as Felonious points out, so double-binded, that academe's time must be spent defending itself against such ill-intended and illogical attacks.
And such defending is absolutely necessary. The attacks only signal that there is still something potent and vital in teaching that, however marginalized, threatens certain power structures.
Nevertheless, and if one could do it with one's left hand, as Benjamin would say, while the right hand was parrying the blows, I would like to invest some time and thought in an imaginary space where the necessity of the academy could indeed be questioned -- or the possibility of a future academy be plotted.
I concur with Felonious about the euphemisms. But as Illich in "Deschooling Society" pointed out, the problem may be, in the end, and with many caveats, that there are instructors with authority over their students at all. All the euphemisms do is actually enforce this same structure.
I think that a full and nearly utopian reflection on the role of teachers in society would have to both affirm the importace of teachers in the current moment, given what is dialectically opposed to them, but at the same time question their radical purpose.
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