Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

Ph.D.s and make such “innovations” easier and easier to institute. We are repeatedly told that the job crisis, the focus of the third part of Manifesto, is about to end.

      For some years I have been puzzled by the good cheer of our high-profile faculty in the face of the long-term collapse of the job market. The reality is that the academic job crisis began in 1970 and 1971. We have had intermittent periods of relative improvement since then, but even the best years have left many long-term candidates unemployed. In other words, over a quarter of a century we have never been able to eliminate the backlog of Ph.D.s without full-time tenure-track employment. There are now people who have spent their whole professional lives—twenty or more years—on the margins of the academy, making do with part-time work, cobbling together courses at multiple institutions, going on unemployment, covering their own health insurance when they can. It is astonishing that the more privileged members of the profession can declare “we’re all in this together,” when some of us are clearly so much more equal than others. But most astonishing of all is the decades-long claim that the job crisis is temporary. At the 1994 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, the main disciplinary organization in English, I ran into glad-handers who declared “we’re back” and “the crisis is over” in response to a miserable 2 percent increase in the number of jobs listed that fall. For them the glass was apparently 2 percent full, not 98 percent empty. But the greatest puzzle to me has remained the political and economic blindness of some of our most distinguished scholars. In the spring of 1996 the MLA president again declared the job crisis temporary. These delusions are not unique to English, of course, but it is in English that the numbers are particularly staggering. It is likely that no more than 25 percent of the English Ph.D.s produced in the 1990s will end up becoming tenured faculty members.

      This interplay between English and the rest of academia runs through the entire book. Manifesto opens with a critical review of the way a succession of influential interpretive theories have accommodated themselves to disciplinarity. English is the model, but the pattern is repeated throughout the humanities and social sciences. The same is true of the role anthologies can play in imaging social life, the subject of chapter 2, and the possibilities opened up by a relativistic historiography, the focus of chapter 3. Chapter 4, a polemical account of the Americanization of cultural studies, speaks directly to all the fields where cultural studies has made inroads.

      The book’s second section, “The Academy and the Culture Debates,” also moves outward from English to the academy as a whole. Its opening chapter uses modern American poetry to mount a plea for a historically grounded progressive pedagogy, while the last chapter poses the challenge of left research and teaching at a more abstract and general level. In between, Manifesto addresses the debates over the canon and hate speech regulation. In the latter case, I try to make it clear that a progressive politics need not support restraints on speech.

      If Manifesto is unapologetically on the Left then, it is not programmatically or conventionally so. In a number of areas—from its commitment to maintaining substantial portions of the traditional canon in the curriculum to its rejection of hate speech ordinances—the book negotiates a principled passage through issues the press usually treats as politically given and dichotomous. In its support for teaching assistant unions, for example, Manifesto breaks with more traditional campus liberals who find graduate student unions unacceptable. Indeed, I criticize those who do progressive research but resist applying its lessons to employment practices on their own campus. Far more than the media has encouraged the public to believe, this kind of mix of positions is common among progressive faculty. Perhaps Manifesto can make a small contribution to dispelling public myths about unanimity of opinion on campus.

      Finally, as I suggested above, the last section of the book uses English departments and the Modern Language Association as key examples because they display the problems of other disciplines writ large. “Lessons from the Job Wars” also opens and closes with anecdotes and comments about the efforts to unionize graduate teaching assistants in New Haven. The reactions of Yale faculty and administrators to such efforts highlight the difficulties we face in trying to make campus communities more equitable places to live.

      Here and there the contradictions become rather stark. At Yale, after years of organizing, cafeteria workers won the right to be assigned other duties in the summer rather than be laid off and have to go on welfare. That also gave them year-round benefits and some security for their families. But the Yale Corporation remained restless about its concessions. Other schools were more ruthless; why should Yale waste money and decrease its profits? So in 1995 a Yale spokesperson declared the university to be looking for a “humane” way to reduce salaries and benefits. Step one: break the local union. Some faculty cared deeply; others were indifferent to the nature of the community they worked in or the values of the institution to which they were devoting their labor. After all, their lives proceeded on a higher plane.

      Institutions that mistreat whole classes of employees, we need to realize, have little claim to public respect, let alone an exalted self-image. With higher education under assault and under scrutiny, it is no longer so easy to maintain public acceptance of the academy’s self-idealization, especially when higher education’s labor practices too closely resemble those long associated with California agriculture. “Health care for me but not for you” does not seem a particularly saintly faculty slogan. Nor does “living wages for tenured faculty only.”

      Part of the problem is the increasing spread of the ideology of careerism through the postwar academy. A faculty member who entered the profession in the 1960s remarked to me that the first thing he did when he arrived at his first job was join the American Association of University Professors, a group devoted to defining and promulgating general professional principles, not to individual career advancement. Membership in the AAUP has declined by over half in two decades.

      One is tempted to conclude that some faculty members see the profession as a whole primarily as an audience for their scholarship, an applause track in the background of their lives celebrating their personal accomplishments. When they wonder whether the job market will improve, they look for an answer to the only evidence that signifies: their publications. A good job market would be just one more confirmation of their own value. Given what they themselves have produced, how can the country but reward them yet again? Careerism encourages us to take everything personally; there is no other measure that counts.

      For some time there was no large-scale institutional problem either with faculty doggedly supporting their own rights and privileges while seeing no need to grant anything comparable to anyone else on campus, or with faculty focusing exclusively on their own careers and ignoring the common good. In the 1990s it is another matter. There is a name for this ideology—capitalism—and it is not so compatible with expectations of public largesse, let alone with passivity.

      Meanwhile, the basic categories of university life are in doubt. A shakeout of research universities is under way; many of them will not merit the designation a decade from now. As it is, less than 10 percent of our institutions of higher education devote a significant portion of their resources to research. Yet despite their centrality to the effort to keep higher education current everywhere else, including the majority of institutions whose faculty have neither time nor money to do research, these schools lack public support for their mission. Tenure is increasingly and falsely viewed as a “problem,” a source of excessive costs, indifferent performance, and an undemocratic prestige of intellect. To a considerable degree, views like these are installed as unquestioned common sense in the media and public opinion. At the same time, the political Right wants only cultural indoctrination, respect for authority, and either unfettered greed or technical expertise from college graduates. Even those few academics who glimpse these threats mostly express helplessness before them. “What can we do?” they ask. Manifesto for a Tenured Radical tries to begin answering that question.

      Is there, then, any reason for hope in the picture I paint? First of all, the intellectual life in many disciplines—including English—is at a higher level than it has been in more than half