[On February 08, 2013 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25: Theories for the New Millennium,” a symposium. Cary Nelson, co-editor of the original volume and founding director of the Unit, opened the symposium. His remarks are below.]
Marxism Now
It should hardly be surprising that peoples’ willingness to embrace Marxist terminology and insights is often dependent on their level of comfort with the patterns and consequences of late capitalism. The 21st century has seen both increasing evidence of planet-wide environmental degradation from unchecked industrialization pursued for profit without concern for consequences and worldwide economic collapse based on commodification of the most illusory sort. When the bundled high-risk derivatives lost all their constructed value in 2008 it was clear there really was nothing solid there to melt into air, to adapt the famous phrase from the Communist Manifesto. They merely had their inherent emptiness revealed, but at a huge social cost.
And yet the last half-decade has seen much that we thought solid melt into air, as occupations have disappeared, communities have been financially or environmentally devastated, and industries like ours once thought secure have been utterly transformed—and not to the good. We are in a period—and it seems definitive—of accelerated change and social devastation driven by business interests. If it is true that most people will no longer have lifetime occupations, that certainly suggests more rapid economic change than we have seen for decades. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism propels a “perennial gale of creative destruction,” but except for rapid technological development and the creation of disproportionate centers of wealth, it’s hard to see evidence of the creative innovation part.
When we launched “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture”--a six-week series of summer courses, followed by the conference that was the basis of the book—-we had in mind disseminating the work of those who believed that Marxist economic and political analysis was universally applicable to every cultural domain. The developments of the last decade now seem to have offered belated evidence for that claim, even if some core Marxist insights now circulate in a decontextualized form. Occupy Wall Street is the most obvious example. Marxist for some, merely anti-capitalist out of humanist conviction for others, its opposition to the American class system and its inventive forms of exploitation, commercialization, and proletarianization are not in dispute.
The Marxism conference was conceived in the midst of the poststructuralist revolution in theory and thus was preoccupied with defining what Stuart Hall called a “Marxism without guarantees,” a tension that still haunts efforts to integrate radical irresolution with a discourse with a significant teleological component. We also knew that a viable contemporary Marxism would have to engage directly with new social movements, abandoning the rigid base/superstructure model and crediting cultural work with meaningful political agency. As a result, we were already engaged with a certain decoupling of some of Marxism’s key concepts, though Perry Anderson and Fred Jameson, among others, insisted on Marxism’s teleological truths. Others, certainly including the organizers, had no faith in the capacity for any theory to make confident long-term historical predictions. With poststructuralism long integrated into my DNA, it is only with a mix of incredulity and nostalgia that I can recall this as a positional struggle, but there it is. Some participants I should add, notably Gaijo Petrovic, sought to suture the problem by integrating Marxist humanism with poststructuralist theory.
I had a certain fondness for Gaijo, in part because of his personal history. He was in the Yugoslavian resistance in WW II and was captured and tortured by the Nazis. When a group of feminist participants protested his failure to address their concerns in his course, I called them into my office and asked them to grant him some quarter. Gaijo came to me the next day and said, rather to the point, “I’ll take care of myself. If I told the Nazis nothing under torture, do you think I cannot handle some American students?”
The Modern Language Association’s guide to graduate study called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture “an epoch-creating book,” and within a few years the American edition issued by the University of Illinois Press sold over 30,000 copies. Macmillan published a separate British edition, but without the luminous red dust jacket and paperback cover, based on a special ink that had abalone shell mixed in it. It’s a nightmare to apply, because it’s sticky and the paper tends to lift up and stick to the print roller. But the book’s design also won an award.
The 30,000 plus copy sale was less dramatic than the outcome predicted by one of our speakers, who insisted that none of us would make it through the final conference weekend alive. The CIA, she repeatedly announced, would kill us all with sniper fire. I got her to risk appearing on stage only after that session’s moderator, my partner Paula Treichler, agreed to scan the audience for snipers nonstop. The only real local protest came when the janitors refused to clean the restrooms for a bunch of communists. I was reminded that this was, after all, the Midwest, and that this was not the most self-evident venue for the subject matter. I was reminded again when Henri Lefebvre remarked in what has remained my favorite line of the conference: “I cannot believe what cheap wine these American Marxists drink.”
For me, even though the ink has dried, the book retains a certain stickiness, its cultural arguments remaining entangled with what we used to call “actually existing socialism.” It was often necessary at the time to claim a decisive separation between Soviet communism and Marxist theory, despite the fact that the possibility of real world revolutionary change haunts even the most abstract application of Marxist theory. Jameson and Anderson would have asserted that a Marxism without totalizing historical convictions was not really Marxism at all, but all of us certainly felt the lesser need to imagine alternative futures and plot contemporary alliances that might facilitate fundamental change.
When the conference proposal was being reviewed by academic committees, I steadfastly refused any necessary relationship between Marxist theory and communism, but I was not above exploiting the connection when necessary. The National Endowment for the Humanities gave us a grant to cover tuition and expenses for faculty members from elsewhere attending the whole eight weeks. When a diminutive local administrator refused to sign off on the grant because NEH didn’t provide indirect costs, I lifted him up in the air and somewhat loudly declared: “We’ve invited some of the world’s most remorseless revolutionaries here. Do you realize what’s going to happen when I tell them you won’t let them get reimbursed for their costs?” I set him down, and he signed.
It’s a connection that remains a burden, in some ways a more difficult one now than then. In 1939, party members justified the Nazi-Soviet pact as a necessity to buy time to prepare for German aggression, but that requires largely bracketing the brutal Soviet takeover of half of Poland and Eastern Europe, with its widespread murder of intellectuals and political activists. The later numbers in the Gulag have in turn always been overshadowed by the Holocaust, in part because the Holocaust has for the last few decades been internalized less centrally in terms of numbers than by way a great many stories and human testimonies and in part because Gulag prisoners could survive. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, Stalin’s most ambitious mass murder project, remained largely decathected numbers for many on the left, at least until Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands, which documents the famine in gruesome detail, along with an excruciating account of the Soviet state’s Orwellian contemporary arguments justifying their actions. I had a conversation with Barbara Foley years ago in which she complained that claims Stalin murdered 30 million were horrendously and inexcusably inflated; she was sure he only killed 20 million. I find I can no longer treat comparisons between Hitler and Stalin as bankrupt remnants of McCarthyism.
I remain attracted to the romance of communism, to the artistic outpouring within the Soviet Union during the 1920s, to the utopian ambitions of American communists in the 1920s and 1930s, but I can no longer argue that the distortions and depravities of Stalinism are consequences of capitalist antagonism and aggression alone. That said, the communism in the heads of many American party members in the 1920s and 1930s was not the communism that all too soon took form under Stalin after 1927. Nor is the Marxism in the heads of late 20th century theorists, however haunted by history, fully congruent with the history that played out in Europe from the 1930s to the fall of the Soviet Union.
But both the Marxism conference and the Cultural Studies conference that followed it were not simply about abstract theoretical projects. If objections to mutually interrogating Marxist theory and communist party history are designed to insist that Marxism can be a decontextualized philosophical theory, perfectible in the abstract, then both books stand largely in opposition to that claim. Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak,” certainly the most widely debated essay in the book, comes to a theorized real world conclusion that some found a betrayal of their utopian dreams about class identity. Whatever its teleology, Marxist theory needs not only to be tested against contemporary realities and necessities but also to be reformulated in the light of historical developments.
In the midst of the Great Depression it was altogether possible to believe capitalism was coming to an end, that its economic engine was broken and could not be fixed. It may be possible to believe that again, though capitalism’s death throes could outlive us. The most reliable short-term predictions would include a further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and an increasing exploitation of working peoples. Vast population dislocations from environmental destruction loom in more apocalyptic versions than anything comparable nature has given us in the modern era. Yet the revolution is not at hand. Recognition of capitalism’s capacity to eviscerate daily life, however, may well increase. The legacy of the book thus survives; it’s methodologies remain useful, applicable, viable, timely.
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I’m pleased to join Lauren Goodlad in welcoming you all to today’s symposium. And I am especially grateful to our visiting speakers, whose urgent and stirring work many of us have been reading and discussing in recent weeks during two lively seminar sessions. It’s also a pleasure to be working again with Lauren and the Unit for Criticism. We are lucky to have Lauren as Director of the Unit.
This event has particular significance for me, so allow me to reminisce for a moment. I still remember vividly the first time I saw Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. It was the fall of 1988, I was in my first and, as it turned out, last year in the Duke Literature Program, and I was in the house where Carolyn Lesjak was living on Clarendon St. in Durham. One of the older and more intimidating grad students—the one who always knew the answers to Jameson’s leading questions about, say, the three defining characteristics of Western Marxism—came down into the living room carrying a copy of a big red book. What’s that?, I remember wanting to know about the massive and strikingly designed volume. It was only a year later, in 1989, having left grad school and moved to New York City, that I finally started to read Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, on my own, in a soup kitchen on E. 3rd St., down the block from the Hell’s Angels. The building-shaking noise of their motorcycles accompanied my energetic underlining of Spivak, Jameson, Lefebvre, Fields, Mouffe, and company.
Little could I have imagined that fall—the fall of the fall of the Berlin Wall—that two and a half decades later I would be involved in organizing a conference marking the publication of the book. Even less could I have imagined that I would have the honor of working with and, right now, introducing to you, one of the organizers of the original Marxism conference and a coeditor of what must be one of the two or three most influential edited volumes of critical theory in the last half century: Cary Nelson.
Besides being Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Cary Nelson is one of the founders, indeed the founding Director, of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Our being here today is a direct consequence of his belief in the necessity of progressive institution building—and his savvy ability to actually get it done. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of creating these kinds of spaces of intellectual community that foster the imagination of alternative cultural and political futures. We’re all in Cary’s debt. Cary’s scholarly work, which is at the same time political work, falls roughly into three categories. He has been a path-breaking scholar of twentieth-century US poetry, especially the poetry of the left. Books such as Repression and Recovery and Revolutionary Memory, as well as the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, have fundamentally changed how we think about this field of cultural production. He has also been a critic of the academy and tireless advocate of its most marginalized members in books such as Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and the coauthored Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy as well as in collections such as Higher Education Under Fire and Will Teach for Food. Of course, Cary’s interest in the politics of the academy goes well beyond books—he recently completed six years as President of the American Association of University Professors and is regularly involved in consulting with and providing support for graduate student and faculty unions. Most recently, Cary helped draft a major AAUP report, Recommended Principles and Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships. Finally, bringing us back to our reason for being here, Cary has played a crucial role in the shape that cultural studies and critical theory have taken in North America. Along with the Marxism conference and volume, he also co-organized and coedited the epochal Cultural Studies conference and collection along with such titles as Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies.
Lauren and I were thrilled that Cary agreed to open our conference with some reflections on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and its legacies. Please join me in welcoming Cary Nelson.
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[Cary Nelson's contribution to the "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series on the condition of higher education is excerpted from the lecture he gave for the Unit for Criticism's January 25 colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?"]
Written by Cary Nelson (English/President, AAUP)
The requirement to choose between a 2% salary cut and self-selected furlough days is not simply a matter of convenience. It represents a series of fundamental political choices. We can lie about our likely activities and pledge to do no work for four days.
I would urge faculty members instead to pick furlough days and use one such day to self-report violations, then join the collective activities organized by the Campus Faculty Association, including their February 9 meeting and February 15 common action day/teach-in. Contrary to the Senate Executive Committee's call to "contain the damage," I do not believe we should make seamless cooperation our goal.
The list of prohibitions on furlough days is itself an unacceptable embarrassment to institutions like the University of Wisconsin which has distributed them. No visits to your office or your lab, no professional phone calls to students or colleagues, no research oriented reading or writing, no university work of any kind. Not only do these protocols offend academic freedom, they violate your human rights. Thus I regard self-reporting violations as a form of nonviolent professional disobedience, conscientious objection to the war against the faculty.
So, alternatively, you can admit the furloughs were really a salary cut and just take a 2% reduction. But then the two choices—pretending not to work, or admitting you will work without pay-- put the lie to each other. Apparently our senior administrators were not prepared for the news that some faculty members prefer not to lie. At the moment, we can either accept the administration’s paternalism on good faith, or we can resist. We can also let a thousand flowers bloom, resisting on one day, cooperating on another, hold a mass teach-in, volunteering in the community, and so forth. A public display of faculty/staff solidarity is an important component of an activist strategy. But do not delude yourselves into believing you can win public support for teaching and research if you limit yourself to volunteering in an old folks home or adopting a highway for a faculty cleanup project. You cannot build public admiration for our core activities indirectly. Moreover, unless deliberate noncompliance is part of our collective response, it will not have sufficient impact.
Taking the 2% salary cut is easier, but it includes no element of resistance. Combining a teach-in with nonviolent professional resistance establishes a full protocol for the faculty to assert its rights and its point of view. If at least 100 faculty members agree to identify furlough days and then publicly declare that they “read a book,” “talked with a student,” “worked in their lab,” etc., on one of the furlough days, then we can gain national publicity for a faculty collective voice.
I know some of you will say “We do not see the benefit of being confrontational,” and I also know what that really means. “My dignity is fragile,” “I am afraid of retaliation.” “If I keep my head down maybe the world will stay the same.” A research university is a roiling mix of fear, arrogance, and idealism. But the first of these, fear, is never far from the surface. I understand that. I’m no less subject to it than any of you. I have just learned to control it and move on. That is what you must do if you wish some control over your fate. That said, if the administration is foolish enough to punish you for reading a book, then let them reap what they will have sown. They would be the laughing stock of higher education. I do not believe they will go there.
Be assured, the furloughs are in place not because the university lacks the money to pay faculty/staff salaries but because there is a cash flow problem and the university prefers to spend the available funds in other ways, to protect other priorities.
Not, of course, that we really know what all those other priorities actually are. The faculty needs independent sources of information. We could fund an annual audit through the AAUP for about $4,000. The AAUP has already donated a general audit of the system and can now move on to detailed campus-by-campus reports. Short of that, there is every reason to distrust a university budget. We have never seen one that is adequate, never seen one that lists all resources available to an institution. Over the last year we have analyzed budgets for a dozen large institutions that claimed severe financial difficulty and found all the claims false. On the other hand we have found several small schools to be literally in jeopardy of financial collapse, but that is not the U of I’s situation.
Despite some loss from investments, total UI revenues grew from 3.573 billion in 2005 to 4.046 billion in 2008. Tuition and fees in the same period grew from 507 million to 662 million. Bonds payable are at $1 billion, but our total assets are over $5 billion. Interest payments on our debts come to only 2% of our budget. Our cash flow projections have to be modified by removing depreciation costs from the budget, since depreciation is not a cash expense. Overall, the UI is in excellent financial health.
The one alarming piece of financial data is that while expenditures on instruction increased only 12% from 2005 to 2008, and expenditures on research increased only 2%, three of the four administrative categories increased more than 20% in the same period. In the financial report on the UI system that the national AAUP just released, we conclude that the fact that UI administrative costs have increased at a substantially higher rate than expenditures on teaching and research suggests “the UI system has not be true to the core academic mission” (13).
Now ask yourselves this: if you look at senior administrator’s salaries three to five years from now, will they have been handsomely overcompensated for their 2010 furlough days? Will faculty and staff?
The assurance that the university will honor its core mission is thus the least reassuring thing one hears. For we are not in agreement about what our core mission is. We now have an honorable interim president, but some of the mid-level administrators who transferred funds to cover the losses from Global Campus or facilitated clouted admissions are still in place. The ideology that endorsed the Academy on Capitalism has not been rooted out. This remains an entrepreneurial campus looking toward defunding the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. Unless you are perceived as bringing in money, a perception that is often misleading, you have no reason to trust the administration.
For, short of outright gifts, dollars often come packed in a Trojan horse. The administration is well aware that the grants supporting big budget science or engineering research often do not cover all costs. So tuition income is siphoned off from other units. Global Campus is the model for every major initiative. And this system of robbing Peter to pay Paul operates without informed faculty consent. A ruling ideology and set of priorities have increasingly been imposed on the campus without adequate consultation or buy-in.
Our current system of shared governance is not adequate to address either the ideological differences or the compensation gap between faculty and administrators. That does not, however, mean that I am opposed to cooperating with good administrators. For nearly twenty years, a succession of deans and provosts and chancellors routinely posed the same question: “How are humanities, science, and social science disciplines evolving and how can Illinois be a leader in those changes?” They were eager to invest in the whole range of disciplines so as to make that happen.
But the world has changed. The administration is no longer genuinely interested in what the humanities have to offer the country. The sciences in many ways have it worse. Tenured humanities faculty members at least have intellectual control over their diminished patrimony. Scientists forced to turn to corporations to fund their work are frequently compelled to focus on producing marketable products, rather than on fundamental research. And now the university itself touts research that translates into products. If all this were just a local phenomenon, it could be reversed. But these are national and international trends.
The faculty needs an independent voice willing to speak truth to power. It needs an organization with sufficient membership and sufficient independent financial resources to be a decisive force on campus. The faculty senate, only intermittently reliable, is not a sufficiently independent or courageous voice. Like many senates nationwide, it can be corrupted by members hoping to use the body as a route to a well-paid administrative position. It can be compromised by a tendency to withhold critical information from the faculty as a whole.
The standard form of financially and legally empowered faculty organization is called a union, but there are examples of nonunion but dues paying faculty organizations—including nonunion AAUP chapters with majority membership--that also negotiate salary, benefits, shared governance, and academic freedom issues with the administration.
As it stands now, candidates for senior administrative positions come for an interview, assure us they love children, puppy dogs, and arts and humanities faculty, then do as they please as soon as they are on the job. Humanists lose their infrastructural support, and scientists lose their academic freedom.
Why on earth should two thousand PhDs cede their collective fates to a provost, a chancellor, or a president? Do they know more than we do? Are they more enlightened? Do they better understand what a university is or should be? Do they have research and teaching experience? Did you have that confidence in Joe White? Do you have that confidence in the board of trustees? Do you think the next administrator will be a philosopher king or queen?
The second chapter of my new book No University is an Island (NYU) is devoted to enumerating and analyzing the threats to academic freedom posed by higher education’s transformed administrative and cultural climate. I list sixteen, pointing out that the U of I regularly violates merely 15 of those. The key threats to academic freedom include:
1. INSTRUMENTALIZATION (the notion that higher education is first and foremost job training);
2. CONTINGENCY (the shift to faculty without job security and full academic freedom;
3.AUTHORITARIAN ADMINISTRATION;
4. ABUSES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE;
5. ADMINISTRATION RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY;
6. UNWARRANTED RESEARCH OVERSIGHT (as with institutional review boards);
7. NEOLIBERAL ASSAULTS ON ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES;
8. MANAGERIAL IDEOLOGY
9. CIRCUMVENTION OF SHARED GOVERNANCE;
10. GLOBALIZATION;
11. OPPOSITION TO HUMAN RIGHTS;
12. INADEQUATE GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES;
13. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE;
14. POLITICAL INTOLERANCE;
15. LEGAL THREATS;
and finally
16. CLAIMS OF FINANCIAL CRISIS.
About the last threat, I say in part: The recession gives administrators the opportunity to claim financial crisis whether or not it is true. Their plans often demonstrate they do not share the same values, priorities, loyalties, goals, and sense of mission as the faculty.
Deciding how to deal with either real or imagined financial constraints entails fundamental moral and ethical issues. How well schools deal with them—whether they are even willing to address them—may depend on how staffing and compensation have evolved over the last two generations.
An institution that pays its president and its football coach half a million dollars a year or more, an institution that has bought into huge disparities between salaries for humanities and business faculty, an institution that already pays contingent faculty subminimum wages, may be ill-prepared to address the ethics of employment in a “crisis.” Nothing is more disingenuous in the context of an amoral salary schedule than an administrative declaration that “we all have to share the pain equally.”
If the worldwide recession continues, many institutions will face a fundamental choice—whether to exacerbate or ameliorate pay schedules and working conditions that are wholly unfair. Should campuses now reap the fruits of gradually enhanced exploitation or take this as an opportunity to address them? In any case, the central issue is always how you spend the money you have. That requires broad campus-wide consultation. Otherwise both shared governance and academic freedom will suffer.
The university has a cash flow problem, but the reason the faculty is being subjected to taxation without representation is that the administration has other priorities for spending the money is does have. The main problem is with Swanlund, not Springfield. There is one and only one solution to these problems—collective action. Reconceive faculty identity to embrace both careerism and community responsibility. Then act. The jury is still out on whether this faculty can rise to the occasion.
Long term, we will need to see the operational fruits of faculty solidarity. That will require:
- A sustained conversation about the mission of the university and a search for faculty consensus about what that mission is. Until then, special pleading for disciplinary utility or funding is likely to be unsuccessful.
- A broad campaign to create a coalition of students, faculty, parents, administrators, citizens, and legislators to revive the commitment to public higher education. It has begun in California, with the realization it is not a short-term goal.
- A readjustment of the power relations between faculty and administration. That will mean broader faculty involvement in campus governance.
There really is no other choice. The only other option is to work at a university whose overall goals and practices many of us do not believe in. Meanwhile, idealism harnessed to progressive self-interest can overcome fear and arrogance. But only if we remake our lives.
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The Brooklyn Bridge photographed in the 1950s[On January 25, 2010 the Unit hosted a lecture by Cary Nelson, “Higher Education’s Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?,” with responses by Douglas Beck (Physics) and Harriet Murav (Slavic/Comparative & World Lit). Below is an abridged version of Professor Murav’s response]Written by Harriet Murav (Slavic/Comparative & World Lit)I am grateful to Lauren Goodlad and the Unit for Criticism for organizing this important forum and asking me to participate. The GEO has been a source of inspiration; however, I would like to look back a little farther to acknowledge other people who brought me here.
My mother’s father Peysekh was an elevator operator in Brooklyn; my father’s father was a carpenter. My mother, who is 87, went to Brooklyn College. My late father, who came to this country in the 1920s, received a master’s degree in seventeenth-century English literature in the early 1950s thanks to the GI Bill.
If my parents had not had access to higher education, I doubt that I would have pursued a Ph.D. in comparative literature. This would not have been a loss for the profession, but would have been a loss to me, because I love my work. I love talking to students about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; I love bouncing Yiddish writers against critical theory; I love writing for the opportunity it gives me to see an alternative vision to the world I already know. That new vision would be a lot poorer if I didn’t have graduate students to tell me the new things they discover in their work.
Access to excellence in higher education, which means everything to me personally, is what is at stake today at Illinois. On January 18, 2010 a reporter from the Daily Illini asked our Interim President, “With budget cuts and furloughs, how can the University of Illinois stay a top university in the nation?” Ikenberry answered, “That’s a tough one. I think the answer is, that may not be doable when you look at it.”
In contrast to President Ikenberry, I think excellence at Illinois is doable, even in the midst of a financial crisis. But no one asks me.
Excellence depends on small classes, what I call the gezundheit factor. A student sneezes and you say “Gezundheit, Mark.” Then Mark, who has been arguing with his classmate Luke about the meaning of a scene in War and Peace, approaches you after class and tells you he can’t decide whether to become a Russian major or do premed. And you start talking to him and keep talking to him all the way through his premed major, because all his science professors know him only by his user name. You and his other professors write him letters of recommendation and Northwestern medical school accepts him. Gezundheit, Mark!
Mark’s story is one dimension of excellence at Illinois which we can sustain even now. We can preserve small classes in Russian literature, physics, and physiology, and also teach big classes in these subjects. We can preserve our research mission: we can read Milton in a new way, invent new nanotechnology, and track black holes. All of it is economically feasible. We can take care of the bottom line and preserve our core values, but only if we articulate them and only if we critically examine the bookkeeping at this university. But no one asks me.
That no one asks me is my fault, my failure as a faculty member to take action, and it is also the failure of our administrators. It is the failure of our failed shared governance. Shared governance, along with academic freedom and tenure is one of the legs of the three-legged stool that Cary Nelson talks about in his new book, No University Is An Island.
Cary’s book could not have come at a more opportune time. We face an economic crisis at the state and university level, a crisis of ethics at the state and university level, and a crisis of vision at the state and university level. Cary’s book compellingly shows how excellence in education and research, academic freedom, governance, leadership, and budget are all intertwined. Cary also shows that the key to resolving the hydra-headed problem is up to us.
You may object. You may say, “I don’t teach controversial subjects, therefore my academic freedom is not at stake. I’m financially okay: I can handle a furlough/pay cut. I’ll let my colleagues worry about the Academic Senate; I do enough service. Besides, I just want time to finish my project.” No University is An Island shows that this response is no longer viable. No individual is an island either.
Excellence in undergraduate and graduate education, our research mission, and our academic freedom are all threatened at Illinois. The problem stems not so much from the financial crisis as from the longstanding erosion of our core values and their replacement with market values.
I will take just one thread, or, better, threat, and show how it runs across the entire fabric of our campus. No University is An Island explains the danger posed by the shift to contingent labor, an alleged cost-saving measure. Adjunct faculty are not permitted to contribute to the research mission or to shared governance; they have no job security and are therefore more vulnerable to self-censorship and pressure from administrators.
But we don’t use adjunct faculty at Illinois, right? Think again. We’re in the second year of a hiring freeze that shows every sign of continuing for a third year and beyond. How is our campus responding to the freeze?
A December 2009 memo from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences went to all executive officers. It provided an analysis of the cost of delivering an “Instructional Unit” (IU). The budget memo suggests that the use of a $40K instructor (contingent laborer) allegedly delivers an IU more cheaply than a 50% graduate student teaching assistant with a non-resident tuition waiver. I quote from the LAS memo, which asks units to estimate the cost of generating an instructional unit:
For example, if a 50% FTE [full-time enrollment] TA who is paid 15k/year plus a non-resident tuition waiver of 22.5k/year (total compensation of 37.5 K/year) generates 150 instructional units per year, the cost would be $250/IU <…> For example, if a 100%FTE instructor paid 40K/year generates an average of 1200 instructional units per year, the cost would be $33/IU
Calling a non-resident tuition waiver "compensation" is wrong. It’s smoke and mirrors. (After all, subsidization of graduate study through tuition waivers is what makes graduate study in the humanities and interpretive social sciences economically possible for those who choose it. And tuition waivers for such study is no more a source of lost revenue to the University than the non-reporting of income you never earned is a lost revenue to the IRS.)
But the writing on the wall could not be clearer: especially now that our unionized grad students have negotiated slightly more livable working conditions, we are going to cut back on their employment, because, according to this false accounting, it is too expensive.
Units that depend on LAS for funding for graduate students should have looked for alternative sources a long time ago. The presumptive model of the memo is that a graduate student should be understood, first and foremost, as a source of revenue. My father’s education was not understood that way; mine wasn’t; and the education of my graduate students from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Iowa, California, and Illinois should not be either. We like to talk about our global campus, but don’t we really mean our market-driven campus?
Let’s continue our close reading of the budget memo and trace its threats to excellence in education. The threat to graduate programs in the humanities and the interpretative social sciences is obvious. The threat to undergraduate education, including key courses that teach writing and critical thinking, is also real: no more discussion sections in the large lecture classes we teach. This threat poses a danger to the research mission. How can we preserve the gezundheit factor in undergraduate education if the classes we teach grow ever larger? If the sheer mass of our student load leaves us less time for thinking, let alone research?
The same December memo talks about the need to curtail leave time. If your research does not “translate” into a marketable product, as Cary points out, whether you are in the humanities or the sciences, you may find it impossible to get funding for it.
Strangely enough, the budget memo, focused on the bottom line, threatens the bottom line. If we falsely call a tuition waiver a cost, and we save that “cost” by hiring more contingent faculty who teach 6 or more classes a year, we are going to lose revenue from undergraduate tuition, because the value of an education at Illinois will decline. Why should parents pay upwards of $10,000 for U of I tuition when their student is one of 700 in a classroom taught by instructors who have long ago stopped knowing who their students are and who have long ago stopped doing research (though through no fault of their own)?
“What is to be done?” asked Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. In 2010 at Illinois the answer is: Come to the February 9 meeting organized by the CFA and concerned faculty. Come to the February 15 teach-in. Let’s work together to preserve excellence and academic freedom and to achieve shared governance.
Let’s articulate our core values as a public university and let’s be sure those values are realized, not undermined, in concrete budgetary and policy decisions. Discussions with your colleagues, emails to deans and other administrators, and articles and letters in the press only go so far, however.
As Cary argues, collective bargaining is the most effective way to resolve the vision crisis and to secure a faculty voice in the deliberations that determine every aspect of our professional lives and on which the future of our public university depends. Let’s join my grandfather Peysekh the elevator operator. Let’s unionize.
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[On January 25 the Unit for Criticism hosted a colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?," featuring Cary Nelson, professor of English, president of the national AAUP, and author of the forthcoming book No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. We invited responses from Douglas Beck (Physics) and Harriet Murav (Slavic/Comparative & World Lit). Kritik will soon be publishing an abridged version of Professor Murav's response as well as a contribution by Cary Nelson to our ongoing series, "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut."] Written by Martha Althea Webber (English) The small snow flurries and sudden drop in temperature that announced Monday's early morning hours progressed to accumulated snow by the evening when I drove across town with two fellow students to attend Cary Nelson's talk and hear respondents Douglas Beck (Physics) and Harriet Murav (Slavic/Comp Lit). Somewhere along Green Street my car fishtailed to the right and – after a brief moment that felt experience draws out interminably – my car crunched abruptly to a stop against the sidewalk curb.
While I may have found relative warmth and stability after taking my seat for his talk, Nelson began to outline the treacherously icy conditions public higher education has faced from the early '90s (in particular for the humanities and interpretive social sciences) which have sharply worsened since the 2008 worldwide economic downturn. Acerbic humor punctuated his talk and the frequent laughter and occasional applause that erupted from the audience following the description of an administrator's expensive misstep or the English building's slum-like condition seemed to suggest that the active portion of the audience has accepted the basic premises of his talk: the quality of public higher education in the United States is going down just as its access is becoming more limited because of higher tuition.
Douglas Beck and Harriet Murav's responses both accepted these premises, so I want to proceed to the most important part of each speakers' contributions to the evening: "What can we do now?" In doing so, I'm glossing over critical information about the University of Illinois' budget that all three speakers addressed and a particularly chilling, post-GEO strike, December 2009 memo sent to departments which highlights how much cheaper adjunct laborers are (or are perceived to be) for the university than graduate student teaching assistants (a fact both obvious and cruel, but disguised in polite terms and abstracted from human value or educational quality through the device of the “instructional unit”). I encourage discussion of these budgetary considerations in your comments, even if brevity and focus preclude me from dwelling on them here.
Cary Nelson argues that "the only issue” during a financial crisis “is how you spend the money you already have" and he offers three solutions on how to re-prioritize and democratize these spending decisions for public higher education. The first step is for faculty to engage in collective action, which could mean unionizing. The second is for a broad campaign of all the stakeholders involved – students, potential students, campus workers, parents of students, tenured faculty, adjuncts, academic professionals, and so on – to revive quality public education. Finally, the last solution demands a fundamental readjustment in campus governance so that a shared governance model replaces the top-down administration that has left departments fishtailing with little to no control over decisions like spending and hiring. Nelson insists that returning to consolations of our scholarly lives is simply no longer a choice we have.
Douglas Beck also acknowledges our need for improved governance: he argues for leadership that comes from the reluctant ranks of the University of Illinois faculty and administration, and shuns the short-term, careerist hires that professional search firms encourage. He believes that we have reached a moment at Illinois during which we have two choices: we can do the same amount poorly or we can do fewer things. Unfortunately there wasn't time at the talk to elaborate what those "fewer things" should be, but he responded to an email query I sent with the following: "there are quite a lot of small programs of various kinds on campus: about 60 Centers, Institutes, Programs and Units, all of whom derive some funding from the university…. Each has some administrative structure – some inconsequentially small, but some significant. Although I believe I can appreciate the value of the distinct and distinctive identities that derive from independence, I nevertheless think it is a luxury we can no longer afford."
Of the three, Harriet Murav's response was the most outwardly impassioned: despite Interim President Ikenberry's claim a few days previously that high standards might be impossible to maintain, we can preserve excellence at the University and it can be economically feasible. While agreeing with Nelson's demand for shared governance, she offers an achievable and clear next step for faculty action: come to the February 9th Campus Faculty Association meeting and help determine your future because collective action may be the only way to stop the erosion of public higher education.
The discussion period that followed was heated. Comments erupted that demanded we must recognize this issue isn't only about four furlough days but also about the plight of all campus workers. Other remarks from the floor questioned the merits of unionizing, the efficacy of the Faculty Senate, and asked what solidarity and action look like and whether it can be brought to the steps of Swanlund or Springfield.
Compared to my drive to the Levis Center, my car ride home with my friends was uneventful, except for my gentle coaxing of the brake pedal and a few lively afterthoughts (respectfully, Professor Nelson, I have seen actual slums and they look nowhere near as sturdy as the aging English Building we share–and I learned about them, not from a book, but through the volunteering that scholars in the interpretive social sciences often refer to as "participant observation").
Returning home to my computer, as the snow flurried outside, I reread the closing lines of Bob Meister's Fall 2009 open letter to University of California students and wondered if the evening's discussion and the actions that may result from it “are building a movement that can produce new knowledge on which other movements could build.”
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