On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Louis Proyect cross-posted: > Surviving and finishing the Ph.D. > BY ANNALEE NEWITZ > What I want, finally, is for Ph.D.s to be proud of what they've learned, > not because they've been granted the title of professor, but because > they've done something useful with their minds. Likewise, I hope that > professors will come to appreciate that all teaching does not have to end > in the production of more professors. We should not be wringing our hands > over the loss of tenure-track jobs, but trying instead to build an > honorable tradition for thinkers who work outside the university system. I'm afraid I don't feel her pain. There is no "outside" in the postmodern university, we're all run by budgetary hardliners nowadays, even state schools, and the pitch is "market share", "student retention", "customer service" etc. She seems pissed at the University for not recognizing her infallible brilliance as a writer, like this overdue father-figure or something. Adorno said somewhere that rebellions against the family which don't take a political form often lead only to deeper entanglement in the family. Not a word is said about the vicious savaging of the public sector which stomped all those jobs, the privatization of everything under the sun, the naked immiseration of professional-class workers by a rapacious system. I suspect she's someone from a lower middle-class or even working-class upbringing, who was taught to have an inordinate respect for authority and teaching; it's an interesting contradiction in late capitalism, that the ruling ideologies are often most strongly innervated by those who have the least to gain from them. > I'm still infatuated with > research, still solicit the occasional teaching position. I'll even confess > to being on the market again this year, looking for academic jobs. This > time I'm seeking many other types of employment, too: I know my > intellectual dignity does not rest on being called professor. And yet no > matter what happens, I suppose I will always foolishly, perhaps even > self-destructively, adore the university like a first lover, who broke my > heart but taught me the true meaning of seduction. > SALON | Nov. 6, 1998 Academia as the ultimate genderfuck, eh? So this is where post-structuralism ultimately leads us -- don't rebel against Capital, fellow gradgrinds; don't even think about signing that union petition or organizing 3rd parties or solidarizing with the janitors, staff and ordinary folks who do the housekeeping and maintenance for the University. But it's not seduction; it's rape. Capital beats you with a stick and then tries to steal your self-dignity by saying, well, it's not the market, it's that you're unmarketable. -- Dennis
