Two items from academia. First, a serious one. Following up on my post about “academic freedom”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001487.html a couple of days ago, Michael Bérubé “argues”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php?id=P84 that the Nona Gerard case at PSU and the suspensions at USM are quite different, because there was a formal review process at PSU whereas the USM President just acted like an autocrat. I agree with Michael that the USM case seems wholly indefensible on its face, so maybe it shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as the Gerard case, which just looks highly suspicious. As I said “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001447.html, there just isn’t enough information available to make a judgment. But I think the bar for revoking tenure is pretty damn high. It took Yale a couple of years to fire “Antonio Lasaga”:http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=18233, and he’d pleaded guilty to specimen charges of sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. Of course I don’t mean that this is the _minimum_ required to get fired, and Yale didn’t handle that case very well. But it reinforces Michael’s argument that “The Penn State decision should be pursued, and the grounds for Gerard’s dismissal made available for broader review,” so we could make up our minds about what kind of case it is.
Meanwhile, via “Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000487.html, the Chronicle “carries a piece”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/03/2004030901c.htm by David Lester, who wants people who complain about the stress of academic life to shut up. It’s a marvelous essay. He starts out sounding like just the kind of straight-talking no-bullshit kind of guy you could have a beer with, but then — just after he tells you about his 300 articles and his third wife — he says “I have made some decisions over the course of my career that have allowed me to be productive, yet not feel overwhelmed,” and suddenly all the wheels come off. Read it yourself and see. He ends up sounding a bit like Dr Johnson in “Blackadder III”:http://blackadder.powertie.org/transcripts/3/2/:
bq. Dr. Johnson: Where is my dictionary?
bq. Edmund: And what dictionary would this be?
bq. Dr. Johnson: The one that has taken eighteen hours of every day for the last ten years. My mother died; I hardly noticed. My father cut off his head and fried it in garlic in the hope of attracting my attention; I scarcely looked up from my work. My wife brought armies of lovers to the house, who worked in droves so that she might bring up a huge family of bastards. I cannot–
{ 14 comments }
derPlau 03.10.04 at 3:17 pm
Actually, from the very first paragraph the guy seemed more like someone over whose head I’d like to pour a beer.
God, what a prick. I’ll bet his colleagues (and his ex wives) love him.
Rich Puchalsky 03.10.04 at 3:46 pm
Invisible Adjunct really goes off on David Lester’s article, criticizing his “capacities for sympathetic imagination” and calling it “a remarkable instance of self-absorption and self-promotion”. I think that Lester’s prose style could certainly use some work, but I don’t see that much odd about liking one’s work and trying to get out of faculty politics as much as possible.
Is it really wise to just blow off the coal mining comparison that Lester repeatedly makes? I agree that some people might find any particular job stressful, because people vary, and in that sense Lester is being self absorbed in generalizing from himself. But it doesn’t seem wrong to say that objectively there is more stress involved in coal mining, and in many other blue collar occupations, than in academia, and to advise people to consider this in their own complaints and behavior.
I’d like to connect this with a recent thread here on the hoary old subject of bias against conservatives in academia. Annoyed, I suggested that maybe liberals really should discriminate against conservatives in academia, in part as a gesture of social solidarity toward the unionized workers that conservatives discriminate against, and advocate discriminating against, everywhere else. Needless to say, if people replied to the point at all, they replied with bromides about academic freedom, the unbiased pursuit of pure knowledge, etc etc. (No academic can afford to go on record as favoring discrimination against conservatives, as this would immediately be used by the conservative attack machine, so I’m not sure whether this was really the general opinion or reflected a wise concealment of agreement).
Well, all of these repeated claims about bias against conservatives in academia aren’t just accidentally coming up over and over, they are part of a push to get liberals out of academia and conservatives in. That goes hand in hand with general attacks on tenure, which always include the “Marxist professors” meme, and individual cases of attacks on tenured professors, of which the large majority are against liberals or leftists.
So is there any reason for coal workers to be concerned? Social solidarity goes both ways, of course; is there any reason why unionized workers elsewhere should be concerned about attacks on liberal academia, or should they just shrug and tend to their own interests? Something in the attitude of blowoff towards the idea that maybe coal workers really do have it worse suggests to me that perhaps non-academics shouldn’t invest any effort in this.
Timothy Burke 03.10.04 at 4:04 pm
Rich:
Nobody’s blowing off the coal miner point, though it’s a histrionic overreading by Lester of much more specific complaints by academics about aspects of their institutional lives. Nobody’s nailing themselves to the cross at the level that Lester implies, though yes, there has been and will probably continue to be a level of self-pity in academia that is totally out of synch with the pleasant actuality of work conditions in the profession–though we also ought not to forget that at the worst end of the scale, where people carry 5/5 loads and get paid $20,000/year for it, often after having invested six years in obtaining professional credentials, the conditions of work are pretty well about as bad as white collar labor can be.
What everyone is teeing off about in Lester’s article is his frank admission that he doesn’t actually *do* a significant part of his job, and uses this to explain how it’s possible to live what he regards as a good life while being an academic. Sure. But it’s because people like him misuse tenure as a way to shirk collective obligations that others end up bearing more than their fair share of the stress-load. It’s rather like a coal miner who has managed to fake a disability so as to get some kind of minor managerial job on the surface talking about how coal mining really isn’t so hard.
Keith M Ellis 03.10.04 at 4:13 pm
It seemed to me from the article that Lester is still teaching and writing. Isn’t he doing his job?
My impression was that Lester’s point is that faculty politics makes up the majority of what often makes academic life unpleasant and stressful and his solution is to disengage from it. That squares with my observations and his solution strikes me as quite practical.
Stentor 03.10.04 at 5:34 pm
A professor’s job has three components — research, teaching, and service (things like being on committees that help to run the institution). Lester admits to shirking the service component. A faculty member at my department recently got denied tenure for doing that.
psetzer 03.10.04 at 5:43 pm
I have seen some damn good professors not gain tenure because of not having the proper scholarship. Oh, sure, maybe Dr. Wright started the Southern Women Writers Confrence, but do we really count that as scholarship? Hell, I’d like to know the date of this guy’s last paper and how much he actually wrote of it.
Invisible Adjunct 03.10.04 at 6:05 pm
“Isn’t he doing his job?”
He readily admits (but *admits* is the wrong term: I should rather say he *brags*) that he hasn’t attended a faculty meeting since 1972. He doesn’t answer the phone, rarely reads his email, and avoids as much service work as he can.
What’s bizarre is that he actually acknowledges any number of demands which might make faculty feel overwhelmed, only to boast of how he has managed to avoid and evade just such demands. If everyone in his department behaved this way, what would be the result? But everyone wouldn’t, because some people will feel a sense of responsibility — and these people will have to pick up the slack for the David Lesters of the academy.
Michael 03.10.04 at 6:36 pm
No, this guy’s quite a role model. His philosophy of enjoying the privledges that everyone else but him fights for is terrific. Why safeguard your own rights if others are willing to do it for you? Brilliant idea. And I’m sure he appreciates it. If others weren’t doing all that work, he might actually have to attend some of those pesky meetings. But right now he’s got it made. It’s so much better when you can pretend to float above everyone else.
Jason 03.10.04 at 6:42 pm
I can’t help but read Lester’s post and think to myself “good on him.”
In fact, the best run departments I’ve been in have had a number of faculty like him, a few that are slightly more engaged, along with a couple that like handling admin stuff more than doing research. A sort of division of responsibilities thing – it doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you do it well. The worst run ones have overworked their professors with everybody being forced to be on various committees, along with solid teaching loads, and high expectations of research as well. That’s the sort of thing that puts people off academic jobs in the first place (overworked, and underpaid).
There’re a couple of famous professors at my current university that don’t have email, or don’t attend meetings, or don’t teach. Of course, being famous has it’s perks.
Jason 03.10.04 at 6:44 pm
PS. I didn’t mean “good on him” for the 3 wives thing. That alone suggests to me he’s probably not a great person to live with (and as such why would you want him on a committee anyway).
LTH 03.10.04 at 6:57 pm
3 wives in 32 years isn’t so bad, is it?
tim 03.10.04 at 7:56 pm
Lester’s compromises with academia seem pretty reasonable to me. At a university with a 4-4 load where I have friends and colleagues, most of the faculty make their compromises in the opposite way. They abandon research for do-nothing committee naps (service!). They “eye-ball” grades, and cancel weeks of classes for “voluntary” student conferences (which I had always imagined was what office hours are for). They provide only the most cursory of comments (if any) on papers. They try for that rarest of all pleasures, the once-a-week three hour seminars scheduled for Mondays (since that’s the day with the most holiday cancellations). And they fill the time they are no longer spending on students in the pursuit of grudges over grievances real and imagined, individing the campus into factions, and in scheming to put sand or grease the gears of the promotion process for their fellow faculty members.
Oh, and let’s just make clear, for the record, that being on a committee or attending a committee meeting is not at all the same thing as doing any of the work the committee was convened to do (if, even, the committe had real goals to accomplish).
Anarch 03.10.04 at 8:37 pm
Huh. Was I the only one who read that piece as satire?
Mud Blood & Beer 03.12.04 at 3:42 am
I’m not sure how to add a trackback, but I have a new post on this issue that disagrees with most of these comments …
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