In Part I of this essay (here), I argued that the evils associated with capitalism can emerge even when capitalism is absent. They emerge, for example, in academia, which is not part of capitalism and which is currently under the control of liberals and leftists. When confronted with this sort of evidence, liberals and leftists are likely to respond that in fact capitalism is still responsible for these evils because corporations have in recent years begun intruding into academia, so therefore the influence of these corporations is the real cause of these evils.
But I have to say no, and the reason for my saying no is one I have partly given already, that leftists themselves have not behaved anywhere near as well as they could have. Let me lay out my expectations here in connection with the current jobs crisis. Ever since the early 1970s, the academic job market hasn’t been very good, but things were slowly getting better during the 1980s. Moreover, at that time there was talk of a looming professor shortage for the 1990s. This encouraged young people to consider academia as a viable career. Instead of a professor shortage, however, there was a job shortage, and lots of people who had counted on jobs didn’t get them. What should tenured liberals and leftists do about this? I expected a great deal of activity on their part. I expected many papers at conferences to be delivered on this topic, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of whatever solutions could be envisioned. I expected entire sessions to be devoted to dealing with this jobs crisis. In fact, I expected that some enterprising people would organize an entire conference dealing with nothing but this subject. Likewise, I expected that journals (such as Radical Philosophy or Philosophy and Public Affairs) would occasionally publish articles examining and judging the various solutions to the problem, and that maybe even an entire issue of a journal would be devoted to it. And of course I expected that many books would appear on the subject.
However, I saw almost no activity of this sort whatsoever. Liberals and leftists in academia seemed to take no notice whatsoever of what was happening right under their noses.
It has been suggested that people devoting their lives to the study of Jane Austen or anorexia or African-American artists were too focused on their own subjects to notice the jobs crisis and in any case had no time to deal with it. Yet these people could always be counted on to be well-informed about national and international affairs and to bash any conservatives, especially George Bush, whose policies they found annoying. Surely they had the time to become informed about an issue closer to home, one in their own profession.
Another excuse is that tenured liberals and leftists had no power to do anything, so there wasn’t any point in discussing any of this. However, such an assertion is nonsense. Academia has been controlled by liberals and leftists for quite some time now, so it is nonsense to say that they had no power and that nothing could be done. They could have greatly restricted admissions to grad schools, or they could have reduced salaries so that the extra money would go to adjuncts and the unemployed, and so on. But they did nothing. Occasionally, outsiders did things. Here in Ohio, the Ohio State Legislature decided to do something: it closed down some lesser grad schools which it thought weren’t doing very well at placing candidates in jobs. (I know a woman who was the very last person to get a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University.) Anyway, even if nothing could be done, talking about the situation was important, if only to suggest to those who were suffering that those who had tenure cared about them. But they didn’t even do that much.
It is true that a very small number of tenured academics did talk about the jobs crisis and did seem to care, most notably Cary Nelson. But his book from 1997, entitled Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, also told a tale of utter betrayal to the leftist cause, by of all people some leftists. The tale involved a union of teaching assistants that was formed at Yale in the 1990s to deal with the terrible job prospects that even those at elite schools were facing. In 1995, they went on strike. And how did their leftist professors react?
“Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own courses, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the union’s] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades until Yale agreed to negotiate. Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given....” (page 143).
The simple, disturbing fact is that tenured liberals and leftists acted like capitalists in the early industrial revolution, in that they exhibited no particular interest in those who were unemployed or exploited and in that they stomped on a union when their own power was threatened. Moreover, by doing nothing about the jobs crisis, they in effect chose a free-market solution, even though they profess to hate such solutions.
So far I’ve been discussing a temporary problem in academia, the jobs crisis. A more permanent problem concerns its hierarchy. But here too liberals and leftists were uninterested in pushing for reforms or even acknowledging the problem. For them, the system by which the best are chosen for elite schools works, and peer review is a system without any problems, even though everyone I talked to could mention an instance when peer review went awry.
To conclude this part of my essay, not only did the evils of capitalism emerge when capitalism was not present, it emerged in a domain that liberals and leftists dominate. In addition, instead of discussing how to deal with these evils and to implement some sort of plan, these liberals and leftists did nothing. They obviously found it much more enjoyable to bash George Bush or Sarah Palin than to actually deal with the jobs crisis or the vicious hierarchy. I have to conclude, then, that blaming the various evils of academia on capitalism just isn’t very credible.
But I have to say no, and the reason for my saying no is one I have partly given already, that leftists themselves have not behaved anywhere near as well as they could have. Let me lay out my expectations here in connection with the current jobs crisis. Ever since the early 1970s, the academic job market hasn’t been very good, but things were slowly getting better during the 1980s. Moreover, at that time there was talk of a looming professor shortage for the 1990s. This encouraged young people to consider academia as a viable career. Instead of a professor shortage, however, there was a job shortage, and lots of people who had counted on jobs didn’t get them. What should tenured liberals and leftists do about this? I expected a great deal of activity on their part. I expected many papers at conferences to be delivered on this topic, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of whatever solutions could be envisioned. I expected entire sessions to be devoted to dealing with this jobs crisis. In fact, I expected that some enterprising people would organize an entire conference dealing with nothing but this subject. Likewise, I expected that journals (such as Radical Philosophy or Philosophy and Public Affairs) would occasionally publish articles examining and judging the various solutions to the problem, and that maybe even an entire issue of a journal would be devoted to it. And of course I expected that many books would appear on the subject.
However, I saw almost no activity of this sort whatsoever. Liberals and leftists in academia seemed to take no notice whatsoever of what was happening right under their noses.
It has been suggested that people devoting their lives to the study of Jane Austen or anorexia or African-American artists were too focused on their own subjects to notice the jobs crisis and in any case had no time to deal with it. Yet these people could always be counted on to be well-informed about national and international affairs and to bash any conservatives, especially George Bush, whose policies they found annoying. Surely they had the time to become informed about an issue closer to home, one in their own profession.
Another excuse is that tenured liberals and leftists had no power to do anything, so there wasn’t any point in discussing any of this. However, such an assertion is nonsense. Academia has been controlled by liberals and leftists for quite some time now, so it is nonsense to say that they had no power and that nothing could be done. They could have greatly restricted admissions to grad schools, or they could have reduced salaries so that the extra money would go to adjuncts and the unemployed, and so on. But they did nothing. Occasionally, outsiders did things. Here in Ohio, the Ohio State Legislature decided to do something: it closed down some lesser grad schools which it thought weren’t doing very well at placing candidates in jobs. (I know a woman who was the very last person to get a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University.) Anyway, even if nothing could be done, talking about the situation was important, if only to suggest to those who were suffering that those who had tenure cared about them. But they didn’t even do that much.
It is true that a very small number of tenured academics did talk about the jobs crisis and did seem to care, most notably Cary Nelson. But his book from 1997, entitled Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, also told a tale of utter betrayal to the leftist cause, by of all people some leftists. The tale involved a union of teaching assistants that was formed at Yale in the 1990s to deal with the terrible job prospects that even those at elite schools were facing. In 1995, they went on strike. And how did their leftist professors react?
“Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own courses, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the union’s] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades until Yale agreed to negotiate. Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given....” (page 143).
The simple, disturbing fact is that tenured liberals and leftists acted like capitalists in the early industrial revolution, in that they exhibited no particular interest in those who were unemployed or exploited and in that they stomped on a union when their own power was threatened. Moreover, by doing nothing about the jobs crisis, they in effect chose a free-market solution, even though they profess to hate such solutions.
So far I’ve been discussing a temporary problem in academia, the jobs crisis. A more permanent problem concerns its hierarchy. But here too liberals and leftists were uninterested in pushing for reforms or even acknowledging the problem. For them, the system by which the best are chosen for elite schools works, and peer review is a system without any problems, even though everyone I talked to could mention an instance when peer review went awry.
To conclude this part of my essay, not only did the evils of capitalism emerge when capitalism was not present, it emerged in a domain that liberals and leftists dominate. In addition, instead of discussing how to deal with these evils and to implement some sort of plan, these liberals and leftists did nothing. They obviously found it much more enjoyable to bash George Bush or Sarah Palin than to actually deal with the jobs crisis or the vicious hierarchy. I have to conclude, then, that blaming the various evils of academia on capitalism just isn’t very credible.
I enjoy your blog very much, John.
Posted by: Keith Burgess-Jackson | 06/28/2010 at 02:12 PM
And I enjoy yours, Keith.
Posted by: John Pepple | 06/29/2010 at 08:33 PM