Learning from Our Students: the GEO Strike as Call for Faculty Solidarity

Monday, November 30, 2009

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GEO members at the University of Illinois march down the quad.

Written by Feisal Mohamed (English)

I am a reluctant veteran of two teaching-assistant strikes: one in 2000 as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and one as a faculty member in 2009 at the University of Illinois. The two are closely parallel in several respects: both took aim at free-spending administrations who cry broke when it comes time to pay graduate employees a living wage, both took place against a backdrop of government divestment from higher education and ballooning tuition costs, and both set themselves against the corporatization of the university.

The Toronto strike went badly by any measure. Buoyed by a relatively quick and favorable settlement with the university’s service workers, by the success of a TA work stoppage at York University across town—which had secured an hourly wage roughly twenty percent greater than ours—and with the inexhaustible strike fund of the Canadian Union of Public Employees behind us, we thought that we had a strong hand to play. In what felt like an especially cold Toronto January we walked our picket lines with strong numbers, anticipating a breakthrough inevitably to come. One morning we were warmed by a letter of support from an alumna excoriating the university administration for inadequately funding graduate studies while financing with alumni dollars one building project after the next, and which closed, ‘Yours in shock, horror, and dismay, Margaret Atwood’ (we were warmed, though we also lamented that we could no longer ridicule the melodramatics of Atwood’s prose with a clear conscience).

After two weeks, the university indicated that it would ‘restructure’ courses in a way that did not include teaching assistants should the strike continue into February, essentially dismissing us for the remainder of the term. As it unveiled that plan, it also made a bargaining offer inferior to the one that prompted the strike and threatened to decertify the union. Exacting revenge for a protest that proved personally embarrassing for President Paul Pritchard, the university threatened the academic expulsion of three prominent union members. In this climate of intimidation and union busting, and on the eve of the university’s restructuring deadline, a divided membership reluctantly and angrily accepted an offer much the same as the one on the table at the beginning of our work stoppage. As a condition of the settlement, the union dropped grievances related to sixty-two teaching assistants whose jobs were eliminated for the term by a preliminary wave of restructuring.

The tense negotiations between the University of Illinois and the GEO thus awoke for me some painful memories and a good deal of anxiety. I feared that a university already claiming financial distress, already freezing wages and threatening furloughs, would engage in all the dirty tactics of my alma mater, and that the experience would be as dispiriting for graduate students here as it was for me. And then—Behold a wonder!—the university actually bargained with the union. It made some concessions on wages. And on parental leave. And on ‘payment-in-kind,’ and furloughs, and benefits. And after a day-long festival that here goes by the name of ‘strike,’ the university agreed that the union should be able to file grievances on any changes to tuition waivers. One would still wish to see wages that truly reflect the cost of living, and to see the university recognize that the human right to health care does not take summers off, but no round of bargaining works miracles. The GEO rightly declared on its website that it had achieved a ‘major victory for labor’ in Illinois, and for graduate employees’ unions nationwide.

But that major victory for labor is also a symptom of a larger problem in significant ways. Toronto’s recalcitrance and bullying are the tactics of a medieval guild disciplining unruly apprentices. Illinois administrators seem more inclined to treat graduate employees like employees, and are conscious of the need to secure the most qualified applicants in a competitive marketplace. These facts produced better administrative behavior and more satisfying results in this particular strike; they also reflect a deeply engrained corporate logic that aims to maximize the teaching hours of those workers with the lowest pay, in what Marc Bousquet has called the ‘radically multitiered workforce’ of the current university. Ossification of those tiers replaces the inequity of apprenticeship with the inequity of terminal low-wage labor, where graduate students cannot expect employment after graduation and non-tenure-track faculty cannot expect promotion or job security.

If, as we all seem to agree, such stratification among the teaching ranks is unjust, those tenure stream faculty who enjoy the greatest share of its security should feel the deepest moral pressure to effect change. That moral pressure has not yet turned into solidarity, despite the solidarity of other campus groups: graduate students have organized, adjunct faculty in the Chicago area have recently organized, and, as Bousquet observes, perhaps the most organized group of all are university administrators, who have become a ‘tightly knit’ ‘managerial caste.’ Tenured and tenurable faculty, by contrast, have by and large become cringing middle managers hiding under their desks and hoping that their modest and precarious perquisites are not taken away—or accepting the demise of the professorate in the way of Frank Donoghue.

We should see such a situation for what it is: when we who enjoy the (relatively) ambrosial air of the tenure stream urge those with insecure futures to fight, we are contributing to a climate of exploitation, not remedying it. The Toronto lesson is that a graduate employee union can be extremely vulnerable when exposed to an unethical administration. If faculty respond aright to the inspiring efforts of the GEO, it will be by strengthening their own organizations so that they can play a leading role in making higher education affordable once more, in assuring that neoliberal principles do not govern curricular decision-making, and in reversing the downsizing of the highest paid group of teaching professionals—who, at the end of the day, are not paid so very much. Indeed, the coming years will likely make such organization a necessity for faculty, for everywhere can be heard the grinding of budgetary axes.

Organizing may bring its own discomforts. Reviewing Bousquet’s How the University Works, Jeffrey J. Williams observes that faculty organization requires more forthright recognition of faculty as laborers, which recognition may place greater emphasis on teaching. This country’s Research 1 professorate might not enjoy as much time to churn out publications as it has done in the past fifty years, coming to resemble its counterparts in Canada and the UK. So much the better, if such an eventuality reduces the amount of slapdash scholarship that now finds its way into print. If there is truth in our teaching philosophy statements—a protasis about which I am profoundly uncertain—we should be willing to learn from the smart and successful efforts of our students. Solidarity in the tenure stream, and only solidarity in the tenure stream, can make real gains in improving quality of life in the profession as a whole.
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Author's Roundtable 3: Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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On Monday, November 16, the Unit for Criticism held the last of its Fall 2009 Author’s Roundtables on the first day of a historic strike for the University of Illinois and beyond. When we asked various student and faculty affiliates if they thought we should cancel the event, one student, John Claborn, replied that he thought that “the project of critical theory should continue unabated in the face of a work-action against the corporatized University” since such actions “are indebted to the spaces of critique opened up by groups” like the Unit. We wish to reply that the debt is, to say the least, a mutual one. We congratulate and thank the Graduate Employee Organization for their stirring example of courage, fortitude, principle, and pertinacity. In the months and years ahead, as the University of Illinois rebuilds its leadership, we hope that the GEO’s exemplary commitment to the core needs of teaching and research will serve as a model and inspiration.

In the focus of Monday’s roundtable, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke, 2009), Ritu Birla, associate professor of history at the University of Toronto in Canada, charts a new history of market society and the modern subject in India through the study of colonial governmentalities. The book describes how the standardization of the Indian economy—a transition from vernacular capitalisms to “the ideal of Indian Economic Man”—took the form of a “translation across hegemonies,” indigenous as well as colonial. Central to this process, was the growing distinction between a privatized and Orientalized realm of culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, the supposedly neutral and impersonal public realm of the modern market. Neither a celebration of “native” capitalist voices, nor a description merely of capitalist-imperial structures, Birla’s study shows us a different way of thinking through the history of globalization—an account in which the institution of the market actually creates the Indian capitalist through a process that sees colonial subjects negotiating, contesting and appropriating the new technologies of rule.

The Unit for Criticism invited three responses to the book (from Matt Hart in English, Zsuzsa Gille in Sociology, and James Warren in History) all of which we are pleased to published below. We are also pleased to feature a post from Guest Writer,Okla Elliott, a graduate student in Comparative Literature. And here is the rest of it. Read more

Author's Roundtable 3: Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital
Guest Writer: Okla Elliott

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Written by Okla Elliott (Comparative and World Literature)

The Graduate Employee Organization strike so filled the air Monday night that the event began with an update from a representative, Michael Verderame, from the English department. Two of the panelists addressed the issue—Zsuzsa Gille dedicating her comments to the GEO’s efforts and Matt Hart beginning with an inspiring description of graduate students’ labor and intellectual value. Proof that their words were more than mere lip service, one of the panelists, Jamie Warren, was a graduate student in History.

Lauren Goodlad, who also mentioned the strike in her introductory comments, acknowledged the challenges we face here at UIUC (and elsewhere in the country), as she pointed out that intellectual exchanges like Monday’s author’s roundtable continue to bring joy to academic life. I will go one step further and say that it is evenings like this for which we are ultimately fighting, and they’re the reason graduate students are already willing to live at near-poverty levels just to be here. As we celebrate the apparent success of the GEO strike, I find myself hoping that the University of Illinois and others like it continue to be the locus of a kind of wealth which exceeds mere material comfort.

Ritu Birla’s Stages of Capital is as much a legal history as a theoretical analysis, a project in post-colonial studies as well as an investigation into economics. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of this wide-ranging book is Birla’s conceptualization of history and jurisprudence as translation. This is an especially apt tactic when one remembers that translators can do more than get the particular words wrong; one can also misunderstand underlying facts.

Birla’s insights into the economics of kinship as recoded by colonial law are among the strongest aspects of the book. The notion of kinship as it played out in pre-colonial Indian economic practice allowed for an extended family that also served as a business network crossing city, state, and (at times) national borders. The colonial translation of this “family business,” however, limited the family economic unit to the more western notion of an estate or residence, shrinking the business network to a single household. And so, getting the cultural facts on the ground wrong, the British translated the Indian family business network into a law that was then applied to the conduct of Indian society, thus changing the facts on the ground (though Birla also explains the back and forth reverberation between the two).

As she recapitulated the main arguments from her book, Birla reinterpreted Ferdinand Tönnies’ well known thesis about the nineteenth-century shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. She pointed to the specific laws that translated the Western distinction between public and private into a distinction between British-style market capitalism and the “culture” of Indian economic practices. On her view the imposition of the market governmentality and the consequent impact on and response from India’s vernancular capitalists created what we now think of as Gemeinschaft.

One of the joys of the book, for me anyway, is the wealth of specific examples from legal and economic history. Birla offers a nearly perfect balance of archival data, explanations of said data (for readers who aren’t specialists in Indian legal history), and theorizing about how these data came to cause the historical and cultural events they have.

And, finally, I’d like to call attention to a term Birla coins that I hope will find its way into Latin American Studies, African Studies, and other area studies related to post-colonialism: “vernacular capitalist.” The term nicely evokes a palimpsest of the language, culture, and commercial practices of a region. It names, and therefore brings into being, a variation on several pre-existing concepts in a way that I find immensely productive.
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Author's Roundtable 3: Response from Matt Hart

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Vernacular Capitalists: A Response to Ritu Birla

Written by Matt Hart (English)

Author’s Note: The day after I delivered these remarks, the Graduate Employees Organization, IFT/AFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO (GEO), suspended strike action pending ratification of a new contract with the University of Illinois. In a major victory for academic labor, the GEO won concessions on all four of its key issues: salary increases for the poorest paid, maternity/paternity benefits, restoration of the union’s right to bargain in the event of material changes to working conditions, and protection of tuition waivers. Although this victory makes my introductory comments less newsworthy, it only magnifies the sentiments behind them.

Ritu Birla is the author of a remarkably absorbing book. But before I begin responding to it, I can’t resist the chance to comment upon the GEO strike. In my time at Illinois, I’ve worked with some pretty terrific graduate students and, as I’ve moved from teaching small seminars to large lectures with TA support, I’ve learned that our students’ intellectual gifts are matched by the professionalism, dedication, and love that they bring to their teaching. It seems to me that the GEO has done a terrific job at the bargaining table, fighting back several of the University’s most regressive proposals and winning meaningful salary raises in very difficult budgetary circumstances. As you’ve heard, their remaining battle is over graduate tuition waivers or, as I like to call it, advanced humanistic study as we know it. Most of us in the Unit don’t work in grant-rich disciplines. Without guaranteed tuition waivers, we not only give up on the goal of educational equality: we will find it impossible to build sustained excellence in our graduate programs. It seems that the administration is determined to create an à la carte policy on graduate tuition, where certain departments can access new revenue streams that boost their bottom line even as they further restrict educational access to the privileged. This policy will put new pressures on department heads and on our beleaguered systems of faculty governance, which often lack the power to resist the Board of Trustees, even when they have the will. So when I say that the GEO’s struggle for guaranteed tuition is the faculty’s struggle, too, I don’t only mean that we share a common set of principles; I mean that the GEO represents the most determined, the most effective, and the most democratic means of resisting the next step in the corporatization of our University. I spent this morning chanting, “Who are we? GEO!” This is no empty slogan: as faculty, we have no better advocate than our students.

OK. Time to get back on topic.

As you heard from Lauren, I’m neither a legal historian nor a scholar of late colonial India. When it comes to Stages of Capital, then, whatever expertise I possess lies in the work I’ve done on the vernacular. As a critic of modern and contemporary literature, I’m most interested in the vernacular as a linguistic phenomenon—that is, as dialect, nation-language, or some other written or verbal sign of indigeneity, ethno-national identity, or deviance from a presumed norm. But as any student of vernacular literatures soon learns, it’s impossible to treat the vernacular as a narrowly linguistic phenomenon. In the first place, as I’ve explored through my concept of the “synthetic vernacular,” the very fact of translating the vernacular into print opens it up to all sorts of transformations and adulterations. More importantly, the vernacular is not simply a mode of writing or speech; it is a discourse in the broadest sense, not just a language but, as Grant Farred argues in his work on black vernacular intellectuals, a language of power.1 Moreover, as such a language of power, the vernacular is not easily assimilated to a simple discourse of subalterneity; rather, because it represents the way in which the indigenous becomes expressible as such, it is an ideologically over-determined discourse that can be co-opted by sovereign power even as it can be mobilized in resistance to it. Thus, when Farred insists that the vernacular has a basically populist caste, we ought to remind ourselves, using Ernesto Laclau as a guide and Sarah Palin as an example, that populism is the emptiest of signifiers.2 And when we narrow the topic to the politics of language, we ought to remember the work done by the Africanist Moreadewun Adejunmobi, whose studies of English education in the context of the Nigerian anti-colonial struggle describe the phenomenon she calls “major discourses of the vernacular”—as when the colonial government in Lagos made indigenous language education a priority, at the same time as anti-colonial activists opted for what they saw as the universality and modernity of English.3

The social polyvalence of the vernacular is palpable in Professor Birla’s book. As you have heard, she focuses on how Indian vernacular capitalists—whom she calls “insiders in the colonial economy but outsiders to modern market ethics”—worked to “legitimize themselves as modern subjects” (3). In a fascinating series of chapters about the uneven development of Indian market governance, Professor Birla shows how institutions such as the Hindu Undivided Family or HUF, which confound Eurocentric distinctions between “kinship as a symbolic logic and commerce as a material one” (16), became the object of profound disagreement, between Indians and the British, to be sure, but also between reformers and traditionalists within Marwari society. In her chapter on gender and the making of capitalist subjects, for instance, she describes how the HUF was not only a problem for the British, who shed real tears about corporate partnerships, liability, and loss and, one suspects, crocodile tears about the morality of child marriage. Rather, as “a private system for the regulation of females, sanctioned by ancient authority,” the HUF was seen by Marwari reformers as a signal contribution “to public welfare,” while for the orthodox it “constituted the foundation of an alternative Hindu public” (222). In debates like these, Professor Birla writes, “idioms of gemeinschaft” ought to be seen as “effects of a politics of gesellschaft” (201). If there’s one thing, then, that this non-specialist reader takes away from Stages of Capital, it’s Ritu Birla’s explanation of the way “colonial authorities regulated vernacular capitalism […] by coding it as a rarefied cultural formation,” while vernacular capitalists themselves first challenged and then redeployed the very categories of culture through which they were subjectivized as Indian Economic Man (5).

Now I’ve written enough reviews to know that the easiest way to criticize someone’s scholarship is to look for sins of omission, with the corollary that the subject most often left out is (who would’ve thunk it?) the one you’ve just published upon, with the implication that the author would never have sinned had she only consulted you first. But if this reflects poorly upon the academic propensity for narcissism, it’s nevertheless defensible as a function of scholarly expertise: for we all see through a glass, narrowly. I’ve already noted my deep appreciation for the way Professor Birla adds to our understanding of the vernacular as a cultural, legal, social, and economic discourse. I hope it’s not churlish, then, to wish that she’d made her theorization of the nature and limits of this discourse somewhat more explicit. As I read Stages of Capital, I started an ad hoc list of rough synonyms for vernacular. In no particular order, I came up with the following: indigenous, gemeinschaft, pre-modern gemeinschaft, customary, convention, long-held convention, community, kinship, tradition, social customs based on religious laws, personal law, and the nexus: family, clan, caste, and ethnic/communal identity (218). Now my complaint isn’t that Professor Birla conflates these terms; on the contrary, concepts like kinship and personal law are handled with great particularity. But when such social and historical precision combines with great cultural and semantic diversity, it becomes hard to define the modifier in vernacular capitalist without reducing it to a lowest-common-denominator label like indigenous—and that, as we’ve already seen, is only the beginning of the discussion.

In the end, this seems like a fair price to pay. My objection only stands because Professor Birla has assembled such a rich historical archive, replete with examples and ambiguities, as when she writes about her focus on the unstable distinction “between law as a logic, and law as a nomos or the conventions of localized practice” (236). Stages of Capital is a compelling work of history centered on Indian market governance. If this literary critic leaves it wanting more, then that only points towards the interdisciplinary work still waiting to be done on the discourse of the vernacular. I only hope that Professor Birla is already writing her next contribution to the field.

1Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota P., 2003).
2Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
3Moradewun Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (Clevedon UK, Tonawanda NY, and North York, Ontario: Multilingual Matters, 2004).

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Author's Roundtable 3: Response from Zsuzsa Gille

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Written by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology)

Stages of Capital is an excellent book that I read from cover to cover. I learned so much from it and will no doubt refer to it a lot in my work on postsocialism. I am dedicating this response to my graduate students in two ways: a) I will make most of my comments about capitalism which so pervades our workplace and b) I will make an effort to help them understand this excellent book in the context of what we usually teach them about capitalism. I think it is really relevant for us to understand where capitalism is in this history. Or to put it in another way, what familiar theories of capitalism is this book most informed by or contributing to?

Is capitalism in private ownership of the means of production? Is it in the double freedom of labor? (from feudal shackles and of property sufficient for subsistence) or primitive accumulation of capital? Is it in rational accounting, asceticism, or some kind of “spirit” of capitalism? Is it in the division of labor? The emergence of restitutive law? (You will of course recognize Marx, Weber and Durkheim respectively.)

While there is a lot in this book about rationality and law, these topics are primarily raised for an understanding of subjectivity, and not even subjectivity in general but that of a particular class of native Indian merchants, primarily the Marwaris. I think it is worth discussing how we arrived at the current stage of theorization, wherein if we want to talk about capitalism we do not talk about class, not even the working class or the existence private property. Instead we go immediately to discussion of subjectivity. In that sense, this book does not so much refute classical theories of capitalist modernity as much as complement them with insights from postcolonial theory and poststructuralism.

Well, Ritu Birla’s implicit answer is that this is not you grandfather’s capitalism, i.e. none of these old theories work. I presume they don’t work, first, because classical theorists all tended to assume that capitalist modernity as they describe it only existed in Western/European societies. They don’t work because Indian native capitalism developed under colonial rule, leaving other modes of production in place in the colonies, on which modes of production capitalism was parasitic. Or they don’t work because though there is plenty of debt bondage, I presume, this is not that legally free labor Marx talked about as the condition of capitalism. In fact, for a book on capitalism, there is almost no mention of the working class--with the exception of its participation in speculation, gambling, futures trading, stock buying, which is not exactly the image of the working class we have from Engels’ representation of the working class in Manchester!

But Marwaris are also not your Marxian capitalist class: it seems they would fit more Marx’s concept of the capitalist prototype, the merchant, i.e. holding and profiting from private property but not quite having transformed that property into capital in the Marxist sense. (For Marx, capital is “self-valorizing value,” “a self-moving substance,” “value in process,” or “money in process.”)

Perhaps it is true that classical Marxism—and maybe even contemporary accounts of neoliberal globalization—focus too much on ownership, and less on other forms of control (that is certainly one of the lessons of poststructuralism, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory.) So Stages is not a history of privatization, at least not in the classic sense of the turning of collective into private property through enclosure and so forth. Though in a way the repeated efforts at reforming contract law, charitable giving, pension funds, and speculation all aim at a certain notion of privatization. As important as the actual privatization or enclosure of the means of production, there is another notion of privatization, the legal disciplining of kinship capital or the family firm so that its activities could be unmistakably classified as either private/personal or public. This disciplining has two objectives: a) to make that property alienable, in the interest of free circulation of capital, and b) to make it more easily readable (it is about transparency) in the interest of contract enforcement and taxation. It is privatization in the sense of lumping certain activities of the Hindu Undivided Family—a legal concept—irrevocably and categorically into a private, personal realm—a realm that, unlike the public, should not be subject to regulation. It is privatization also in the sense that activities or contracts that were now newly deemed public were those that took place out there in the market—which in Nancy Fraser’s concept is another realm of the private (besides the family).

Hence the book’s emphasis on law. But this too is law with a twist. It is not just that law facilitates capitalism (the old lesson from the scholarship on the embeddedness of the economy) but—in a deeper sense it creates our very cognitive structures. In my mind this is taking Durkheim’s argument that norms and, thus, laws are boundary-maintaining devices not just seriously but even further than he had intended. So here law is presented as creating the categories, classes of phenomena, that make legal intervention and economic/fiscal policies logical and legitimate. The most important boundary to be drawn is that between public and private but another one, perhaps with a greater relevance for today, is the distinction of profit from chance (gambling, horse racing) vs. profit from knowledge of the market (futures trading) or vs. profit from labor. This distinction, of course, has great implication for what is considered ethical and not just for what is legal. (The ethical component of this subject creation is a very important part of the history—that I was happy to see.) We can see today conceptual acrobatics and legal maneuvers similar to such delineations of ethical vs. unethical conduct in the market in the debates about regulating creative accounting, derivates, debt swaps-- all the trappings of what the the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff call casino capitalism.

You will recognize in this history the performative turn in theory, though we sociologists primarily tend to focus on the performative role not of the law but of economics and statistics. This leads me to ask Ritu Birla, what the role of the suspicious social sciences was in creating these dichotomies of public/private, economy/culture, ethics vs. ethnics, etc. Do they constitute the network or assemblage we call capitalism, of which law is arguably an important part? which of these did law or legal scholarship most rely on?

I also found it refreshing to focus on domestic/indigenous debates, even though, obviously the British play a major role in the discursive transformations. I appreciated the study’s careful avoidance of superimposing the binaries of British vs. Hindu, capitalist vs. non-capitalist, or rational vs. non-rational. But I wonder if there was more transnational circulation of ideas, science, and law, than simply the influence or the imposition of British legal models?

So this was all mostly focusing on staging capital--staging in the sense of performing it. Focusing on the concept of stage as a temporal concept, with the conceptual contrasts you create between British and Indian/Hindu, I had the sense that many of these legal questions and concepts were already operating or at least elaborated by the British, sustaining the familiar chronology that India was lagging behind. I am wondering if Professor Birla knows of cases where the colonies served as laboratories of regulating capital, as such not lagging behind but running ahead the British (taking our cues from the Comaroffs or other anthropologists)

What does the book say about power? I was very happy to see a critique of Foucault especially the demonstration that law plays more complex roles in colonial contexts than it does in Foucault’s concept of sovereign power. And I really see the point you are making about the shift from a layered, negotiated sovereignty to a non-negotiable one---as the boundaries between public and private, economy and culture became less porous. But to what extent can you say that there were multiple regimes operating, perhaps on the analogy of what Fraser calls segmented governmentality? (For her that primarily refers to the contemporary bifurcation of or the mutual dependence between two regimes of control, flexible neoliberal governmentality with sovereign power/brute force).
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Author's Roundtable 3: Response from James H. Warren

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Respondent James H. Warren (History, Illinois) talks with Ritu Birla (History, Toronto).

Written by James H. Warren (History)

Several years ago in a social theory seminar, my colleagues and I were assigned Douglass C. North’s 1990 book Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge UP, 1990). Economic history, we were told, was about to undergo a resurgence and North was to serve as our entry point into economic history and theory. The book was concerned with delineating an analytic framework to study “the role of institutions in economic performance” (3). It offered a sort of diagnostic toolset for evaluating the “differential performance of economies over time” (3). I was skeptical, to say the least, of this sort of narrow modeling, especially given my attraction to the interdisciplinarity of cultural, gender, and postcolonial studies.

Looking back on Douglass North now, there are some useful ideas, ideas that run through Ritu Birla’s Stages of Capital, in fact. The notion that institutions effect economic change is echoed in Birla’s attention to shifts in case and codified law and the effect of the “rule of law” on the market as an object of governance—indeed the temporal stages of capital: status and contract. The observation that the birth and evolution of organizations is influenced by institutional frameworks and that they, in turn, influence how institutional frameworks evolve (5) is evident, for instance, in chapter five, where Birla examines the rise of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and other similar commercial organizations within the framework of market governance as well as their participation in debates about the scope of sovereignty.

But, as Birla says, these aren’t necessarily ideas new to the study of South Asian economy, governance, and society. And in fact a pure temporal narration of institutional change and economic performance in late colonial South Asia, a narration Birla resists, presupposes, she writes, culture and economy as distinct temporal realms that posed no conflict or tension in the production of the Indian Economic Man. That presupposition reproduces the master narrative of the production of the modern subject as a universal rational agent of Capital. Only by putting economic (and legal history) in conversation with postcolonial and gender studies, rather than relying on economic models of change and performance, is Birla able offer something new: her genealogy of capital and contract as a governmental practice that managed both economy and culture, of how market governance produced “the market” as a model for social relations. Only very optimistically could we retrospectively see the kernel of Birla’s intervention in North’s contention that “institutions shape human interaction,” which he explored only in the most narrowly economic terms. And given the tenor of our introduction to work on gender and postcolonialism in that seminar all those years ago, I doubt that Stages of Capital is precisely the resurgence that the seminar leader had in mind.

Enough looking back. I read Stages of Capital, as one does, through my own particular research interests, which right now involve conceptions of authority within certain arenas of public debate about, for instance, nineteenth-century British science, governance, and party politics against the backdrop of colonial rebellions. I take up genealogies of authority—which I define loosely as the cultural practices and performances aimed at the production of consent—on three simultaneous levels. First, at a sort of meta-level, there are broad debates about imperial and colonial authority—or sovereignty, as it emerges in Stages of Capital—in the context of both particular moments of colonial resistance and generally in the cumulative undermining of imperial authority in the mid-nineteenth century. Second, at a sort of middle level, there are debates about the national market share of authority about certain subjects for particular communities vis-à-vis other communities (for example, scientists’ claims to knowledge about the natural world as against those of natural philosophers, or those defending monarchial governance against republican and democratic governance). And lastly, I’m interested in the personal and professional authority that an individual attempts to accrue to himself (since in my research I’m dealing with male subjects and masculinity) within a community—i.e., looking at competing visions of what constitutes authoritative science, or Tory politics etc.

Birla’s genealogy of market governance offers a rich and even expanded conception of my middle layer. I don’t want to rehearse here all the ways in which I read Stages of Capital as a study in the conceptualization of authority. But, for instance, if we read chapters three and five together, we can read, as Birla does: first, market governance and the notion of trusteeship as a juridical-economic version of the civilizing mission and thus one sort of meta-level model for colonial authority (104). Below that, we can read localized disputes about public trusts and the claims of beneficiaries vs. those of joint families as regional and national debates about whether the authority of the trust contract (protecting the abstracted public community) could be asserted over the claims of joint families (the interests of the private); i.e., over what form of law and what community of legal opinion was authorized to settle claims. Then below that, we have the voices of native experts: indigenous merchant capitalists, who in claiming national public economic authority on the basis of their expertise in managing the joint family and controlling women, also opened up debates about who had the authority to speak for, for instance, Indian nationalism, the Hindu community, and even the Marwari community itself.

Through all this, Birla provides a complex picture of hegemony, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation that is the history of Capital and late colonial Indian society. Given my own interests, I’m curious about how a genealogy of competing imperial visions for India might appear alongside the history Birla has written. Certainly the development of Capital was never a given as the model for British national, never mind imperial, social formations and I wonder about the history of contestation surrounding the stages of Capital at the imperial level. Without it there’s the danger of confirming a narrative about the inevitability of global Capital. Also, while in the context of social reform debates we get glimpses of some dissonant voices from within the Marawari community, I wondered more about the strategies for claiming to speak for that community, or even for a community within that community. What were the internal politics and conflicts informing conflicting contributions to national debates about Indian social reform? What strategies did individuals within the community perform in order to claim to speak on behalf of it? How do these debates look from within the Marwari community? Thus, how is the history of these contingent translators of culture also part of a local, rather than just, colonial history? Obviously we could telescope and microscope these genealogies forever, so these queries are not meant as criticisms of the book, but as the sorts of questions that Stages of Capital reminds me to ask of my own work.
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Michael Verderame Address to the Board of Trustees

Thursday, November 12, 2009

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism
(These comments, slightly edited, were delivered in the public comment section of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees meeting, November 12, 2009, in Springfield).

My name is Michael Verderame. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Urbana-Champaign campus. I’m also a graduate employee, working as assistant director of the professional writing program and a research assistant, and I’ve also taught eleven classes in the past 3 years. I’d like to speak to you about the University’s fiscal priorities and the state of the University in the wake of the admissions controversy.

As a land-grant institution, the University’s core mission is to provide an affordable and accessible education to the citizens of Illinois, and to serve as a center for world-class teaching, research, and public service. The admissions crisis this past summer has forced all of us to reflect on whether we are fulfilling our core values. We learned over the summer that some administrators played fast and loose with the rules to ensure that politically well-connected applicants received preferential treatment, including diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in discretionary funds for scholarships. This was a particularly egregious violation of the university’s core principles, and appropriately it attracted national attention and resulted in new leadership. But in a number of other ways, the current administration is still acting in ways contrary to the university’s fundamental mission.
Tuition is skyrocketing, at the same time that financial aid resources are drying up. As you just heard in the University Treasurer’s presentation, tuition revenue has increased approximately 30% in the past four years. As a result, access to a U of I education is increasingly being phased out for students from poor and working-class families. This disproportionately affects students of color. As you heard today in the diversity report, African American enrollment at both the Chicago and Urbana campuses has dropped over the past couple of years.

At the same time that tuition is increasing, the administration is freezing wages for faculty and staff, curtailing benefits, increasing class sizes, and threatening furloughs and layoffs. For the majority of graduate students, who teach nearly a quarter of the classes at the University, our salaries pay well below what the administration itself estimates to be the minimum amount to survive in Champaign-Urbana over a nine month period. Both undergraduate and graduate education at U of I are becoming unaffordable to many students, and as a result our graduates increasingly enter the worst job market in decades burdened by unprecedented levels of debt.

These problems are all interconnected, and all have roots that go much deeper than the current economic recession. For years administrative units have received dramatic budget increases while instructional units are forced to make do with anemic budgets. For instance, in the current budget, while appropriations for instructional units went up less than 1%, appropriations for institutional advancement, public relations, and other administrative units rose between 10% and 12%. The already exorbitant salaries of upper-level administrators rise every year, several percentage points over inflation, while tuition goes up and wages and benefits are frozen.

It’s true that part of this is due to the state’s refusal to fund higher education in Illinois at appropriate levels. It is an absolute scandal that the state provides less than a fifth of the revenue of what is ostensibly a public university. A public university should be primarily financed by public dollars. And I urge you to continue to work with other stakeholders—students, faculty, staff—to lobby the legislature to provide adequate funding.

However, even at current funding levels, the resources that the university does have are often misused, as in the case of money thrown away on the ill-considered Global Campus initiative, or the $300,000 misused by Chancellor Herman to assist clouted applicants, or the half a million dollars the University has had to spend in legal fees because of the admissions scandal. While future state funding is still up in the air and a matter of concern, you just heard a presentation from the University of Illinois Foundation that showed that the University had one of the most successful private donation years on record, and that the endowment has outperformed our peer institutions.

The real problem is not a lack of money. The real problem is that the short-term exigencies of the current financial situation are being used as a pretext to accelerate fundamental changes in the structure of the university that have been gradually occurring over the last forty years: changes such as the defunding of public education and the resulting skyrocketing cost of attendance, the increasing corporatization and privatization of the university, and the trend towards reliance on disposable, contingent labor in place of tenure-track faculty. All of these changes have had severely deleterious effects on the quality of research and undergraduate and graduate instruction at the university, and will continue to do so unless these trends are checked.

At the University now, the upper levels of the administration, enriched by stratospheric salaries and abundant perks, have grown out of touch and unaccountable to students and other stakeholders. It is that lack of accountability that allows a major department at the Urbana campus, Chemistry, to withdraw tuition waivers for a hundred undergraduate teaching assistants, leaving them scrambling for funding in the middle of the year. It is that lack of accountability that enables interim Provost Easter, who makes over a quarter of a million dollars a year, to shrug off the notion of paying workers a living wage as an “extraordinary demand.”

This new Board of Trustees has the opportunity to redress the mistaken priorities of previous administrations. It must ensure that an affordable education is provided to the tens of thousands of students who come to this university to learn and better themselves. It must provide fair compensation to the people who perform the vital functions of the university. I urge you to return to honoring the university’s core commitments of learning and labor.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I’d be happy to take questions.
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Statement from the GEO

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

posted under by Unit for Criticism

The GEO’s last two rallies before the strike will be this Thursday at locations in Springfield and the Urbana campus. The first rally will be the Board of Trustees meeting in Springfield. The Board of Trustees ultimately signs off on the GEO contract, and they have new members (since the clout scandal resignations) who may be swayed to put pressure on the University’s administration. The GEO will be joined by union members from the Springfield campus and other allied groups. The GEO encourages supporters to attend and has arranged transportation for the event. Email botrally@gmail.com if you’re interested. More details will be forwarded to you.

Coincident with the Board of Trustees meeting, there will be a UIUC campus rally at 12pm on the quad near the Illini Union. If you can’t make it to Springfield, this is a perfect opportunity for you to show your support for the GEO.

Contrary to misleading statements made in the email sent out by the Office of the Provost, the University of Illinois administration wants graduate employees to accept furloughs, payment-in-kind, and un-secured tuition waivers in their contract. Those issues are what the impending GEO strike is about.

Please become a Facebook fan of the GEO by going to www.uigeo.org. Read more

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