I have to say that I have great sympathy for Michael's commentary on left
academia. I never really intended to be an academic, although there were
short periods when I considered it while working on my Ph.D., but the
biggest deterrent was that I didn't want "to be" any of the folks I saw in
the professoriat-- talking the talk but doing almost nothing to engage with
those for whom their nice words might matter. And I was pretty disgusted
at how little teaching was respected and where even leftwing profs were more
impressed by an inch-thick vita than the ability to make a classroom hum
with intellectual curiosity.
I had three markers in my Ph.D. experience that pretty completely knocked me
off any desire to be an academic. The first was during the budget cuts in
higher education during the early 90s. As tuition doubled and services and
funding was cut, the tenured faculty at the University of California sat
back and did almost nothing, since their perks were not on the line. Their
apathy and indifference to the narrowing of opportunity to pay for education
and the devastation of funding literally made me sick to my stomach. I
remember a faculty meeting to discuss how to deal with the proposed cuts and
the Sociology faculty did the most repugnant cost-benefit analysis possible,
discussing throwing non-majors out of classes and so on and, with only a bit
of irony but real dead-seriousness, noting they should probably keep
business majors in order to maintain respectability for the discipline among
those funding the University.
The second marker was a fight over a hire for a race and sociology position.
The hard fight was over the faculty's violation of the law in handing the
job to a white guy who didn't even apply by the posted deadline, a clear
violation of the law, against an asian prof who had won awards as one of the
best teachers at UC-Berkeley in another department. But the other basic
issue was that the graduate students who interviewed him hated the guy and
recognized that he would be a bad teacher, yet the faculty made it clear
that this prof, a good lefty by many measures, was the candidate because of
his prestigious resume and faculty sponsors. The graduate students staged a
two-week walkout, a pretty unprecedented move by graduate students against
their departments (as opposed to normal union fights against the
administration), and the University blocked the hire for the year, but the
guy was brought in the next year.
The third marker was from work I did with a fellow grad student on
supporting local community groups on research and Internet support. We were
eventually kicked off campus for being too activist, literally having
conflicts for using words like "racism" on our web site, where we were told
by obstensibly left-leaning profs that this was not a proper academic term.
It was a complicated set of events, but what struck me was how passive even
the most left-leaning profs were in promoting any real activism from their
privileged positions.
In the end, it was appalling to me that most progressive and left-leaning
faculty were commited to neither teaching nor activism that reached broader
communities, but overwhelmingly to the narrow intellectual debates that they
engaged in with their writing and conference-going. That these debates had
little meaning to the broader world and, even if they did, were almost never
translated in ways that would be useful, seemed not to matter at all.
Truly depressing, so I understand Michael's sense of freedom in getting the
hell out.
-- Nathan Newman
