Not only does this elide the fact that strong market forces—a glut of PhDs in English and some other fields who can’t find tenure track jobs and are thus desperate to build a CV in hopes of improving their odds—push adjunct salaries down but it’s based on absurdly idealized view of what life is like for most full-time academics.

With few exceptions, colleges and universities have been facing severe budget pressures for the better part of two decades. One presumes that the ongoing global recession has added to that. It’s just absurd to expect them to double or triple the pay for adjunct faculty—especially when there are likely half a dozen highly qualified applicants for every adjunct opening at current prices.

Additionally, having spent all of my brief teaching career in institutions where a 4/4 load (that is, four classes per semester) was standard for tenure track faculty, I have to chuckle at the notion that adjuncts ought to be able to make a decent living teaching a 3/3 load while having zero obligation for institutional service.

Additionally, it’s aimed in exactly the wrong direction. The problem isn’t that adjuncts don’t make enough money but that colleges employ far too many adjuncts rather than hiring full time faculty. While I suppose raising the pay of full-time adjuncts to that of tenure-track faculty would indirectly lead us in that direction, it’s emphasizing the wrong problem.

Is it exploitative that people with some 21 years of education are being paid $2000 for teaching college courses? Perhaps. But, hey, they knew the risks when they went off to grad school. The real crime is that students are paying ever increasing tuition to attend institutions of higher education and then being taught by part-timers with no commitment to the institution and whose prime focus is on landing a job somewhere else.

I’ll start with the last graf. Minor point first: most people didn’t know the risks when they went off to grad school, because most people have no idea what NTT faculty get paid. And yes, as to the major point, if students are paying ever increasing tuition and universities are hiring ever more low-wage faculty, then those low-wage faculty are being “exploited.” According to the standard dictionary definition of the term, at least.

So I’m not getting why anyone would “chuckle at” the MLA standards. Is it really so risible that a scholarly organization would suggest that professionals with advanced degrees should make a decent living by teaching six courses a year? OK, maybe it’s a little too idealistic. Perhaps we can add some demeaning janitorial tasks to their teaching loads to offset their princely $40,000 (proposed) salaries?

As for that “glut of PhDs” driving down NTT wages: I am beginning to get the sense that everyone and her brother believes that NTT faculty are made up of PhDs who didn’t get TT jobs. Yes, of course, some of them are. But most of them are not. Though it comes as a surprise to many people (it certainly surprised me), we are talking about two wholly distinct labor markets. The tenure-track market is national, and is populated mostly by PhDs; the NTT market is local, and is populated chiefly by holders of the MA or MFA.  So, once again with feeling:

according to the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, 65.2% of non-tenure-track faculty members hold the MA as their highest degree—57.3% in four-year institutions, 76.2% in two-year institutions. There are many factors affecting the working conditions of adjuncts, but the production of PhDs isn’t one of the major ones.

Personally, I do think doctoral programs should be smaller overall; time-to-degree should be shortened; and we need to rethink graduate curricula for “alt-ac” career paths outside the academy (perhaps outside the beltway!). The MLA’s Task Force on Graduate Education, chaired by Russell Berman, will be addressing all of these questions. But the “glut of PhDs” is not what’s driving the supply of available NTT labor.***

And as for those “strong market forces”: though it’s true that “colleges and universities have been facing severe budget pressures for the better part of two decades,” somehow this has not slowed the growth of university administration. Quite the contrary. As Benjamin Ginsburg points out in The Fall of the Faculty, administrators and managers at public colleges numbered 60,733 in 1975; 82,396 in 1995; and 101,011 in 2005. At private colleges, those numbers are 40,350 in 1975, 65,049 in 1995, and an astonishing 95,313 in 2005 (almost 47 percent growth in only ten years! amazing what the market can do when it puts its mind to it).

But I agree completely with Joyner that “colleges employ far too many adjuncts rather than hiring full time faculty.” Indeed, the MLA has said so on many occasions. And one way to reduce the overreliance on (and exploitation of) NTT faculty is to make it more expensive to hire NTT faculty. The overall goal, which I am glad to see Joyner endorse, is to convert as many NTT positions to TT as possible, with minimal harm to the people currently working in those NTT positions.

OK, so much for the folk who think the MLA is too utopian. Now to turn to the people who think we’re too timid. I’ll cite two of them: one is a long-term (now retired) NTT faculty member, and the other is someone who commented on my last post. I’ve asked the first person for permission to reproduce her emails to me (and my reply) in full, with or without her name. She said “with,” emphatically.

Dear Michael,

I hope you remember me from your visit to Colorado a few years ago. You visited with AAUP chapters in Boulder and Denver, and you attended a meeting of contingent faculty in Boulder. The meeting was to discuss a resolution that the University of Colorado implement a system whereby instructors could be tenured. You endorsed the resolution, called it “bold,” and got a big laugh when you said that no doubt the administration would embrace it wholeheartedly.

The resolution was approved overwhelmingly by contingent faculty, but ran up against innumerable obstacles set up not so much by the administration as by tenured faculty. Only the elite, they argued, deserve tenure; the rest of us can have academic freedom without it (which of course is ridiculous, as you point out in your recent essay in Inside Higher Ed).

I’ve been hoping that the MLA would take a strong stand on behalf of contingent faculty, since the vast majority of composition teachers are contingent and comprise a large component of MLA’s constituency. I’m disappointed, however, at the continued reluctance of MLA to take the lead in changing the landscape. For example, MLA’s 2011 document “Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members: Recommendations and Evaluative Questions” is wholly inadequate.

I’m attaching the resolution passed by the contingent faculty in Boulder, which you endorsed. I ask you to advance this resolution (or one like it) in the MLA, and use your influence to get it passed.

Essentially, the resolution says that instructors who have passed a probationary period must be eligible for tenure at the instructor rank. This means simply that they become permanent employees, not temporary, contractual employees, and that they can be terminated, as can anyone with tenure, for cause, financial exigency, or program discontinuance. The position continues to be an instructorship, not a professorship, with no change in salary or job description. Those who have already passed the probationary period will be considered tenured.

Yes, it is a bold proposal. But efforts at simply improving treatment of contingent faculty are doomed to failure. The solution is to end contingency altogether. Everyone who teaches at a college or university must be on a tenure track. For some, that track leads to a professorship, with attendant salary and expectations; for others, that track leads to an instructorship. But as long as there are two kinds of faculty—tenure-track and non-tenure-track—unequal treatment is built into the system.

Salaries and benefits are of course important issues. However, the precariousness of their employment is what prevents contingent faculty for agitating for improvements in these areas. End their precariousness, and you’ll quickly see changes in their working conditions.

By the way, you might remember meeting Don Eron while you were in Boulder. Don is co-author of the Resolution for Instructor Tenure and author of many proposals and reports addressing issues of academic freedom and contingency. (See the AAUP Colorado Conference website.) Don is running for second VP of AAUP. Ending contingency, by encouraging all institutions to put all teaching faculty on a tenure track, is a plank in his platform. I hope MLA will support his candidacy.

Sincerely, Suzanne Hudson

Instructor (recently retired), University of Colorado-Boulder

And my reply:

Dear Suzanne,

I remember you well, and I remember my visit to Boulder vividly. I’m sorry to hear that the TT faculty opposed your resolution, but not very surprised. In the past five years I’ve heard many people defend tenure as a special “merit badge” to be worn only by the elite, and I had to hear it a number of times before I realized that these people weren’t kidding. I mean, what is this, the Boy and Girl Scouts of America?

But I have also learned to my surprise, over the past five years, that not all NTT faculty agree that everyone teaching at a college or a university should be on the tenure track. In its 2010 report on conversion of NTT positions, the AAUP Committee on Contingency and the Profession came out strongly in favor of your position:

The best practice for institutions of all types is to convert the status of contingent appointments to appointments eligible for tenure with only minor changes in job description. This means that faculty hired contingently with teaching as the major component of their workload will become tenured or tenure eligible primarily on the basis of successful teaching. (Similarly, faculty serving on contingent appointments with research as the major component of their workload may become tenured or eligible for tenure primarily on the basis of successful research.) In the long run, however, a balance is desirable. Professional development and research activities support strong teaching, and a robust system of shared governance depends upon the participation of all faculty, so even teaching-intensive tenure-eligible positions should include service and appropriate forms of engagement in research or the scholarship of teaching.

It may sound strange, but I have heard time and again—even in a series of emails I have received this week—from many NTT faculty who prefer NTT status precisely because they want nothing to do with “service and appropriate forms of engagement in research.” They would prefer multi-year contracts to annual contracts, of course; they would welcome better pay and benefits; and they want due process and a reliable review procedure. But they don’t want the added responsibilities of TT faculty. I have assured them that the MLA has no intention of dragooning everyone into committee work and ramping up research expectations; we want only to support those NTT faculty who do want a role in governance and opportunities for professional development. Unfortunately, the AAUP language above suggests otherwise, which is why I’ve been getting so much pushback on this. (Interestingly, Mayra Besosa’s recent essay on NTT faculty is more pluralist than the 2010 report of the committee she co-chaired, acknowledging multiple ways of instituting better policies for NTT faculty—including, but not limited to, instructor tenure.)

I endorsed the UC-Boulder proposal in 2007 because it was clearly what the NTT faculty at Boulder wanted, and I still believe the administration and the TT faculty should honor your wishes. But the MLA cannot and will not take the stand that every faculty position in all of higher education should be on the tenure track. Instead, we will work together with the Coalition on the Academic Workforce and the New Faculty Majority to find ways of improving the working conditions and the job security of all NTT faculty, even the ones who want to remain off the tenure track.

As for the resolution and Don’s candidacy—these are matters for the AAUP, and I will support both in my role as member of the AAUP, but the MLA does not dictate employment conditions for individual campuses and does not endorse candidates in other organizations’ elections. I don’t know of any scholarly organization that does—which is one reason why I joined the AAUP in the first place. And I’m sorry to hear that you find the MLA’s 2011 document wholly inadequate, because it builds on guidelines that I helped to write in 2003, and was the work of our Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession—made up largely of NTT faculty.

I’m sorry that we disagree about making instructor tenure universal throughout the profession. But I’m happy to report that not all efforts to improve the working conditions of NTT faculty are doomed to failure. I have now heard a number of reports from various campuses that are converting one-year positions to more stable multi-year positions, and seeking to insure that NTT faculty have a greater role in university governance—for those who want it.

Best wishes,

Michael

And her reply:

Hi, Michael

Thanks for your prompt and thoughtful response. I do appreciate your work on behalf of contingent faculty.

I hope you’ll indulge me one more comment. There is a very large difference between our instructor tenure proposal and the AAUP statement you quote, which unfortunately requires “minor changes” in job description. The AAUP statement has engendered resistance, understandably, from contingent faculty who don’t want to be required to do research or scholarly work, in addition to teaching a full load. Our proposal says that there should be no changes in job descriptions.

To us it makes sense that faculty who have been teaching for upwards of seven years, with their college’s continued endorsement, is already doing all that the college wants or needs them to do. There is no reason to add a layer of responsibility to obtain tenure.

It’s difficult to persuade academics that tenure does not have to be associated with the stress of obtaining a professorship. One can be tenured at any rank, or so says the AAUP before it contradicts itself in the statement you quote. All tenure means is that, after a suitable probationary period, they’ll have to have a good reason to fire you. Everyone who has been teaching at the college level for seven or more years deserves at least that.

If contingent faculty knew they could have tenure without the added burden of research and scholarly work, surely they would prefer it to multi-year contracts, which, speaking as a person who has had such contracts, do nothing to protect academic freedom. One must be cautious during the course of the contract not to express an opinion that will upset the powers-that-be, or face non-renewal.

The AAUP’s central argument remains true: American universities cannot function without academic freedom and shared governance, which in turn cannot thrive without the protections of tenure. And now the majority of faculties throughout the country have no meaningful access to either. The MLA could go a long way toward correcting this problem if it endorsed tenure (without changes in job descriptions) over multi-year contracts.

Anyhow, Michael, thanks again for your efforts and for hearing me out.

All the best,

Suzanne

OK, so I’m tossing this to you all for discussion. I know that instructor tenure would be more secure than multi-year contracts, and I am deeply sympathetic to the argument that those contracts don’t protect academic freedom as effectively as tenure does, but I’m not sure how it would work nationwide. Obviously, it couldn’t rely on external peer review, as tenure does. So how would it work? Or would it just lead universities to fire NTT faculty before they became eligible for it?

Finally, to AOP, who left this long and challenging comment here on February 9:

Professor Bérubé, I am not alone in admiring your attention, as MLA Prez, to the growth of NTT labor, its conditions, and its implications for the future of humanities scholarship and instruction. For my part, however, I find the framing questions of this present discussion too timid to be productive. Yes, it will be helpful to gather more accurate and thorough data on just how exploited NTT teachers are, but the question that MLA and other profession-defining bodies are already late in answering is simple: what are we going to do about it? It’s exasperating that the MLA’s ability to censure is only now being broached—and not, I think, in a serious enough way to sustain the immediate, decisive action necessary to improve NTT working conditions and effectively reassert the expectation of tenure as a standard of academic freedom and excellence.

You clearly recognize that even a strong censure from MLA would amount nothing much: “I censure thee!” Who cares what the MLA thinks, really? Most of MLA’s members see the organization primarily as a clearing-house for academic jobs. Whatever the MLA thinks or says, in other words, it can do quite a lot to shape the search for literature teachers, and that’s precisely where MLA can help solve this problem:

1. Identify departments and institutions whose pay and benefits do not meet the standards of NTT academic employment currently advocated by MLA. Perhaps add a 10% “cushion” if MLA lacks confidence in its own existing standards, about which more below.

2. Divide institutions of higher education into categories, and apply to each category an ideal ratio of NTT to TT instructors, including graduate students in the former category. The division into brackets provides a way of recognizing that community colleges, large state schools, and small liberal arts colleges have different resources and needs and should therefore meet different NTT/TT instructor ratios.

3. If a department fails to meet either standard, MLA should send a letter notifying them of this fact, CC:ing it to the relevant dean and institutional president.

4. The letter should notify the department that MLA will not assist in that department’s job searches. For example, members of the department attending the conference but not giving talks—thus, likely, attending for a job search—will not be given conference rates on hotel rooms, even if they register for the conference.

5. During the job season, email every MLA member a list of departments that do not meet these standards, advising graduate students and others against accepting jobs in these departments.

6. Contact the ADE and other relevant jobs-lists, seeking to strike a deal by which ADE would refuse to list job searches (or NTT job searches) in departments that do not meet MLA’s standards.

7. Contact institutional accreditation authorities and inform them that, in the judgment of MLA, the following departments do not meet minimum requirements—and that their failure to meet these requirements has a negative impact upon the quality of instruction.

8. Mention, in the letters to these departments, that you have taken or intend to take steps 5-7.

The actual reasonableness of these steps—for example, the inevitably arbitrary division into institutional categories—is not directly relevant to their effectiveness. All that matters is that the hiring and exploiting of NTT instructors should become less convenient and less attractive to department chairs, deans, and presidents. The way to do this is to publicly shame offenders, attack their accreditation, and make their search for instructors less convenient. The MLA is especially well positioned to clog up hiring processes.

It is profoundly disheartening to hear this toothless speculation about whether MLA “can” censure departments or institutions—an action that, if it looks anything like a Delegate Assembly resolution, would itself be pretty toothless. I urge you and the other MLA higher-ups to do everything you can think of to make life less easy for those who find it so convenient to replace tenure lines with non-tenured positions and to egregiously underpay NTT instructors. The list of actions above is far from perfect, but I hope it illustrates that there are plenty of options for substantive action. The most important factor is that the MLA should act now and act decisively.

First off, I’m not sure that most MLA members see (or should see) the association “primarily as a clearing-house for academic jobs.” My sense is that this is a graduate-student-eye’s view of the association (or the view of  a relatively new member, or someone currently on the market), and that the members who are long past the hotel-interview stage also see the MLA as an organization that promotes scholarly communication, publishes journals and a bibliography and a handbook and an extensive “approaches to teaching” series, and maintains a wide array of committees on issues important to the profession.

More important, I don’t think these suggestions address the two-labor-market problem I mentioned above. We can restrict access to the Job Information List and punish departments as suggested in items 4 and 6, but this will not stop those departments from conducting searches for TT faculty by bypassing the MLA altogether, and of course the vast majority of NTT hires are local, involving neither advertising nor convention attendance.

However, I’m all for collecting and publishing the data, and putting everyone on notice—universities, departments, current TT faculty, current NTT faculty, and prospective job applicants—about who is and isn’t meeting our recommendations. And I agree completely that we should do everything we can think of “to make life less easy for those who find it so convenient to replace tenure lines with non-tenured positions and to egregiously underpay NTT instructors.”

Finally, and on that note, my thanks to everyone who is helping to bring this issue to the attention of administrators and the higher-ed press.

_______

** I was elected by the membership, not “appointed,” let alone “installed” (I am surprised at how many people have congratulated me on my “appointment”).  OK, sure, it was a dirty election involving hundreds of millions of SuperPAC dollars and unfounded rumors (about which my campaign always maintained plausible deniability) that my opponents were born outside the US.  But it was an election all the same.

*** I am also beginning to get the sense that it will be very hard to dislodge the notion that the working conditions of NTT faculty are attributable primarily to the production of PhDs.  It may be one of those things everybody already knows for certain, like the recent and precipitous enrollment decline in the humanities.

Then in mid-January, Executive Director Rosemary Feal and I decided I should attend the January 28 summit meeting of the New Faculty Majority, whose tweets I had been following on the Twitter machine. (I finally activated my account. Yes, I have a Twitter account. But I’m still not joining Facebook, now more than ever.) Washington, DC is one of the few places I can visit on short notice from my remote mountain lair, and the NFM is a group Rosemary and I want to work with during my presidential year and beyond—trying to get the US higher education apparatus (starting with the American Association of Colleges and Universities) to take seriously, and to ameliorate, the working conditions of non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. So attending the summit, together with MLA Director of Research David Laurence, made all kinds of sense.

I reported on the summit for Inside Higher Ed, and then posted a longer (though not Holbonian—merely 2500 words) director’s cut on the MLA site. Rosemary and I then Tweeted these things to the Twitterati.

And here’s where things get interesting.

In the longer version of my essay, I had noted that the MLA publishes recommendations for per-course compensation for NTT faculty. This comes as no surprise to me; I remember very well when the Delegate Assembly authorized those recommendations over ten years ago, and when I was a member (and then chair) of the MLA’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities, I helped to update them, as we do each year. Indeed, one year we had a spirited discussion over whether our recommendations were realistic. You’re about to see why.

Apparently, few people—even among the MLA membership—know about these recommendations. So here they are, in relevant part:

Following a review of best practices in various institutions, the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011–12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. These recommendations are based on a full-time load of 3 courses per semester (6 per year) or 3 courses per quarter or trimester (9 per year); annual full-time equivalent thus falls in a range of $40,770 to $40,800.

University of Georgia writing instructor Josh Boldt, who also attended the NFM summit, responded on his blog “Copy and Paste,” from which I will proceed to copy and paste:

Almost $7K per course! Most adjuncts have never seen anything close to that figure. I personally have taught at schools that pay right at or below $2000 maximum per course. Feel free to do the math on that one (Hint: a 5/5 pays $20,000 annually). You can be a terrible human being and still recognize that a full-time teacher should earn much more than that. Just in case you’re not familiar with the usual procedure, full-time professors generally teach much less than 10 courses per year. Some teach as few as three. The MLA’s recommendation is based on the assumption of a 3/3 teaching load, which sounds about perfect. I would venture to say most adjuncts would agree. Three courses per semester is ideal because it allows teaching to be the primary focus (as it should be), and it also permits some time for research and professional development. So, about $40,000 a year. That isn’t too much to ask I don’t think. Especially considering all adjuncts have advanced degrees in their fields.

It is not too much to ask. We think it’s the bare minimum: it certainly doesn’t constitute making a comfortable living. It merely allows NTT faculty a standard of living a bit higher than the one Boldt references later on in this post, in which college professors “eat Ramen noodles for dinner, and worry about whether or not they have enough gas in the tank to coast to work the rest of the week.”

The problem, of course, is that most NTT positions don’t offer this bare minimum. As I pointed out in the longer version of my NFM report, only 7% of the departments surveyed by the MLA offered per-course wages of $6,800 or more. I didn’t add—but I will now—that the vast majority of surveyed departments offered per-course wages somewhere between $2,500 and $6,800. And a good number of institutions paid less than $2,500.

“Wait a second,” you say. “What do you mean, ‘somewhere between $2,500 and $6,800’? That’s quite a range, isn’t it?” Yes it is. On the high end, up around $5,000 – $6,500, it’s almost like making a decent living. On the low end, it’s basically Ramenland. So we’re working on refining and updating and disaggregating the data, which is one of the many things David Laurence does as Director of Research.

But while we’re doing that, as Tedra has noted below, Boldt went ahead and did something pretty brilliant: he has begun crowdsourcing the data on NTT faculty in a Google doc. He writes:

Let’s combine forces and establish which schools are doing good work, and which are doing bad. Fill in as much information as you feel comfortable doing, and be sure to tweet this document and share it via Facebook, email, listserv, or anywhere else you can think of.

At the summit, we discussed the idea of creating a “Hall of Fame” of the best universities to work for. I would like to see hundreds of schools get added to this list. Eventually, faculty treatment might even become a standard in the accreditation process. This is a good start. If you have current information on the compensation practices for a school, check out the document and add it to the list.

So, what Josh and Tedra said: let’s combine forces. Please spread the word far and wide among the academic blogs, if you haven’t already.

For our part, the MLA will be following Josh’s survey with great interest; we have been working on our own data-gathering model for thousands of institutions, which connects to our work on the Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey project. As I type, we’re gathering current, institution-level data about per-course salaries and selected benefits—which is one of the several data-collection projects carried out by the MLA’s Office of Research and the IT department. (Just for those of you who think the MLA is basically an annual convention, or perhaps a citation style.) I’ll be sure to let everyone know when ours is ready to roll out. In the meantime, thanks to Josh Boldt for taking the initiative on this.

______

** Only one of these improbable things is true.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

And they pronounced his name correctly!

At least since 1994 I have promised Jamie I would cry at this event.  At least since 2003 he has responded to this promise with great exasperation and annoyance (“Michael! You will not cry”).  And in the end, he was right—I did not cry, largely because it was all I could do to operate the zoom at maximum zoom-power and keep my focus on the right kid.

The year is almost behind us.  Jamie has completed his first semester at LifeLink PSU, in which he took courses in meteorology, dinosaurs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  He also declared himself the Assistant Director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that he does in fact assist me.  Everyone in the immediate household is well, and my father is improving.  As of six weeks ago we have a new dog, a rescued six-year-old Jack Russell/beagle mix.  So, dear readers, here’s hoping your 2012 is much better than your 2011, wherever and whoever you may be.

Every semester for 15 years, I had been asking students to identify and/or comment on passages from our readings, and then to write a couple of longer essays on various aspects of those readings, and for some reason the essays were (with notably rare exceptions) pretty bad.  Why was that?  Perhaps, I thought, asking sleep-deprived students to scribble madly in bluebooks for two or three hours wasn’t a good way to get them to say something interesting and coherent about literature.

Now, there is a rule forbidding professors from giving exams during the final week of classes (this year, December 5-9) rather than during finals week (December 12-16), because we don’t want people running off a week early.  So in response to my student with CP, I decided to distribute a take-home exam on the final day of class, and then give students 72 or 96 hours to write two essays.  That way, the exam itself would be turned in (and graded) during finals week, and students could devote as much (or as little) time to the exam as they desired.  I’ve done this ever since.

Fun surprising fact: even when you give some people three or four days to complete an essay exam, they still respond by scribbling madly—or, more accurately, typing madly—for two or three hours.  Who could have known?  But the even more fun fact is that those students’ exams are readily identifiable as half-assed efforts, whereas the people who put serious thought into their essays stand out all the more clearly.  (For example, they dig diligently for textual evidence—something they can’t readily do in the in-class format.)  And for extra added upside, I no longer have to decipher students’ crazed, finals-week handwriting.  Lastly, for even more extra extra upside, the students who need accommodations—the one with cerebral palsy; the more recent one with carpal tunnel syndrome; and the two with mild dyslexia—get to work at their own pace, like everybody else.  It’s like universal design … for final exams.

The only thing I’ve missed, over the past five years, is the “identifications” part of the exam.  I know, it’s silly—a test of one’s memory rather than a test of one’s ability to read carefully and think critically.  And it was never worth more than one-quarter of the final exam grade.  But still, even though it took more time to come up with IDs than to write three or four provocative essay prompts, I liked doing it—and it really did a decent job of revealing which of my students had done the reading, and which were gliding by on half-assed efforts and an ability to bullshit.

So this year, I decided to offer an ID exam on the final day of class (Dec 9), and I asked my students to spend no more than 25 of our 50 minutes on it.  Then I finished up Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake by explaining the purpose of art (whew! glad we solved that one at last, and just in time for the holidays), and gave them their take-home essay questions.

The class was a senior seminar.  It’s supposed to be a “capstone” experience for our English majors, and the last two I’ve taught (fall 2007, fall 2009) have been pretty wonderful; the best students make the most of the opportunity to lead discussion and burrow intensely into the grainy details of texts, and the more mediocre students, well, they go along for the ride amiably enough.  The slackers are exposed.  After each of the previous two seminars, about half of my 15 students told me they wished that all their courses at Penn State could be like this one, and that the whole “capstone” thing worked.  So I was looking forward to this semester.

With one caveat: thanks to recent austerity measures, enrollment in English senior seminars was bumped from 15 to 20.  Not a big deal as austerity measures go, and certainly nothing like the cuts enacted at many other universities.  But when you have a class size of 20, it’s a challenge to run the thing as a real seminar, and there are too many opportunities for some students to disappear into the woodwork.  So I mentioned all this to my students back in August, not only to caution them not to disappear but also to enlist their help in making a relatively large seminar work like a seminar.

I’m happy to say that the course turned out to be one of my most rewarding experiences as a teacher.  Almost every single student did well; many spoke warmly of the course as they left for the break; a few even stayed after the last class to tell me how much they had enjoyed it. (That almost never happens!)  This was deeply gratifying partly because it made me feel like I had done a creditable job, but even more because so many students testified to the all-around awesomeness of the readings (in themselves, and for the ways the readings spoke to each other).  And the reason that’s important is that I had decided last summer, with some trepidation, to teach a good chunk of the course by working out some of the ideas for my next book.

There are people who frown upon such things at the undergraduate level (cough, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreyfus, cough).  It can sound like (and be made to sound like) professorial self-indulgence; indeed, for Hacker and Dreyfus it is damning evidence of How Research Ruins Everything.  But I tried to make it clear to my students that I have some rudimentary ideas about this stuff twirling around in my head, and that I genuinely wanted some feedback on them.  When I came upon material that I haven’t really worked out well enough to commit to pixels or paper, I said so.  Last but not least, from August onward I replied to students’ comments about the boundaries of the human in these novels by saying, “great!  now hold that thought for Oryx and Crake in December.”  And they did!  Margaret Atwood has some new fans, and people are planning to read The Year of the Flood over the break, so overall, senior seminar win.

Oh, right, the ID questions.  They’re below, just for fun.  The syllabus consisted of eight novels: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip; Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (why this old high-school/ young-adult chestnut?  because this, that’s why—and yes, I assigned that essay as well); Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (sad to say, this one didn’t work as well as I’d hoped); Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Atwood, Oryx and Crake (credit where credit is due: many thanks to the students at Cornell College who suggested it for this lineup after seeing Gattaca last May).  Ordinarily, a class will average 16-17 / 20 on the ID section.  This class averaged 19 (!), and even that impressive result was skewed by the one student who apparently experienced a brain freeze and answered 15 of 16 instead of 20 of 25.

One final thing before the final.  I remarked at the outset of the class that I would not waste any time rehearsing the tired debate about whether speculative fiction is “quality” fiction.  You know, where the “quality” fiction writers say “your stupid novels are all about the n-dimensional beings of Effexor 6 and their travels in the anniq” (a real fictional word! from this engaging example of the marriage of cyberpunk and autism narratives) and the speculative fiction writers say “your stupid novels are all about somebody’s divorce in Westchester and how they have a sad.”  (That is almost precisely what I said when I told them I wouldn’t waste any time on the tired debate.  I don’t think I had the presence of mind to say “Effexor 6,” though.)  But when I got to Sven Birkerts’ review of Oryx and Crake I found that I had to vent a little after all, not only because of this…

I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘’L,’’ and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character

(oh well, so much for Paradise Lost) but because of this:

What Atwood’s inventive treatment of first and last things lacks is a plausible psychological basis. The man who would play God, who would rewrite creation, needs to be something more than a knowingly enigmatic figure conjured onto the page.

Folks, if you’ve read Oryx and Crake, would you be so kind as to tell the rest of the class why Crake does what he does?  Because there’s an entirely plausible psychological basis for the actions of this knowingly enigmatic figure.  You just have to stop yelling at the kids to get off your lawn long enough to pay attention to it.

Without further ado, then, identify 20 of the following 25 excerpts by author and title.  Warning!  Excerpts 3, 7, 10, 14 and 21 are misdirections.  You think it could be one thing, but it’s another thing.  Almost every student figured this out, which is good.

1.

I see everything.  That is why I don’t like new places.

2. 

I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!

3. 

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was.

4. 

“Fonebone!” I shouted.

5. 

I’ve got to try to hold onto some of the things I’ve learned.  Please, God, don’t take it all away.

6. 

It was the hallmark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate.

7. 

How come I’m alone?  Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?

8. 

Rains are falling from me onto your valuable persons.

9. 

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

10. 

And in the dream nearly everyone on the earth is dead, because they have caught a virus.

11. 

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

12. 

It was bad enough when your father insisted on calling you by that silly nickname, and I will not have him called by one.  Nicknames are vulgar.  Only common people use them.  Benjamin.

13. 

He was a soldier of France, and he would teach these beasts how an officer and a gentleman died.

14. 

Papaya Czar’s walls are so layered with language that I find myself immediately calmed inside their doors, as though I’ve stepped into a model interior of my own skull.

15. 

But the body had its own cultural forms.  It had its own art.  Executions were its tragedies, pornography its romance.

16. 

He saw the psychiatrist under the aspect of absolute reality: a thing composed of cold wires and switches, not a human at all, not made of flesh.

17. 

When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness.

18. 

Clayton was the type of Englishman that one likes best to associate with the noblest monuments of historic achievement upon a thousand victorious battlefields– a strong, virile man– mentally, morally, and physically.

19. 

As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble.

20. 

Wheels within wheels.

21. 

Perhaps, he had once conjectured, it was because there really was such a condition as autism.  It was a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family.

22. 

And Grandmother has pictures in her head, too, but her pictures are all confused, like someone has muddled the film up and she can’t tell what happened in what order, so she thinks that dead people are still alive and she doesn’t know whether something happened in real life or whether it happened on television.

23. 

No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves.  No more rape.

24. 

What makes it so awkward is that I’ve never experienced anything like this before.  How does a person go about learning how to act toward another person?  How does a man learn how to behave toward a woman?

25. 

Because no battle is ever won he said.  They are not even fought.  The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

I’ll be back next week with one final post for the year.

A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called Journolist, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. Here’s a list of the members.

No, that was not the purpose of Journolist.  It was an ordinary liberal listserv that included pundits and professors.  Once in 2008, one of its members, angered by the American media’s harping on the Jeremiah Wright nonsense, suggested an aggressive pushback against conservative pundits.  No one took him up on the suggestion.  People complained for a while (on list and off, in public even) that Sean Hannity had fed a stupid debate question to George Stephanopoulos, and then they went back to arguing about social policy and the Red Sox.  The end.

Reynolds’ second update to his disingenuous/delusional post acknowledges that there might in fact be something to the Herman Cain sexual harassment story after all.  Do tell!  Now all Professor Reynolds needs to do is to take down and apologize for his little piece of slander about a liberal listserv that (a) did not actually do anything wrong in the first place and (b) clearly had nothing to do with the Cain story, having disbanded in 2010 when the right-wing press proved by geometric logic that it was unseemly for liberals to use the Internet to converse with each other.

Full disclosure: yes, I myself was a member of Journolist for about two years.  I was invited to join because I signed the open letter about that ABC News debate of April 2008—indeed, the very letter that is repeatedly cited in the wingnutosphere as proof that Journolist was colluding on an open letter!!  How did the writers of the open letter get in touch with me if I was not already a member of Journolist, you ask?  The amazing but true answer is below the fold:

They used the new “electronical” mail … and I replied!  Indeed, one of the drafters of that unethically-composed and stealthily-published open letter reportedly writes for this very blog.*  Wheels within wheels, people.

________________

• That blogger, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons (though his initials are similar to those of this guy), adds that as one of the actual drafters of that letter, he was highly annoyed that he was too obscure to be singled out in the Daily Caller, and then denounced in a Sarah Palin tweet as a symbol of the fundamental corruption of America.**

** Private correspondence, searchable through the seekrit Journolist 2.0 archives for November 2011.***

*** In still more private correspondence, yet another CT blogger adds the following.

Notice to Open Pajamas readers:  We do not recognize you as falling within the norms of intelligible discourse, and request that you do not bother to comment. Any comments you submit here may be deleted, disemvowelled or published with whatever changes we think more clearly brings out your true inner meaning. If you wish your comments to be published without such changes, please direct them to the Open Pajamas Instapundit site.  Thank you!

I can see from the comments on John’s post below that there is some confusion out there about the way the American political system works.  Specifically, there seems to be some serious misunderstanding of the dynamics of national elections in the US.  So let me try to clear this up once and for all.

You are welcome.

Basically, post-Watergate America works like this.  It’s what you might call a “twelve-step” program.

1.  Democratic president is elected after disastrous Republican administration messes things up bad.  Liberals rejoice, hoping that their long national nightmare is now over.

2.  Democratic president turns out to be liberal–centrist fellow with some degree of cultural conservatism and willingness to echo Republican talking points on a handful of issues.

3.  Democratic president meets with solid Republican opposition in Congress as well as various forms of obstructionism from members of his own party.

4.  Democratic president gives in to Republicans repeatedly on a handful of symbolic (and therefore important to politically active voters) issues, appointments, regulations, etc.

5.  Left wing of Democratic party erupts in outrage at sellout Judas stealth-Republican president.

6.  Portion of left wing of Democratic party leaves party, goes home, fantasizes about awesome third party that will destroy the system and rebuild it from scratch.[1]

7.  Democratic president faces (a) stunning losses for his party in midterm Congressional elections or (b) primary challenger who divides the party and weakens the incumbent in the general election.

[Update: Goodness gracious!  Now I see what all the fuss is about in comments.  People are assuming that I think (7) is caused exclusively by (6).  But that is so silly!  As some of you have been kind enough to point out, there are many other factors at work behind (7), ranging from the state of the economy to the fired-upedness of Republican voters determined to punish the potsmoking/ philandering/  socialist/ Kenyan/ Muslim Democratic president for being president.  Really, the whole point of the post was simply that Obama is hardly the first Democratic president to alienate the left wing of his base.  On the contrary, it is required by the secret twenty-second-and-a-halfth amendment to the Constitution, ratified on November 1, 1960!

Sorry for the confusion, folks!]

8.  Democratic president is up for re-election, or his vice-president seeks the office after president completes two terms.  Disappointed liberal and left intellectuals convince themselves that Republican challenger can’t be all that much worse than Democratic candidate, since Democrat is sellout Judas stealth-Republican to begin with, Republican candidate will surely be more moderate than he appears when he is pandering to his base, and both candidates are working within the very narrow parameters of the corporate duopoly anyway.[2]

9.  Republican president takes office and makes things far worse than disappointed liberal and left intellectuals could possibly have imagined, lurching far to the right, empowering elements of his own party that were once considered “fringe,” and sweeping along one-third to one-half of the Democratic party as well.  It turns out he wasn’t just pandering to the base after all!  Who could have known?

10.  Republican president wipes out previous Democratic president’s modest gains and accomplishments, which are belatedly acknowledged and viewed in nostalgic retrospect by Democratic voters appalled by Republican president, and seeds every tier of the judiciary with radicals whose decisions will hobble next Democratic president’s sporadic attempts to strengthen the social welfare state.

11.  Democratic president is elected after disastrous Republican administration messes things up bad.  Liberals rejoice, hoping that their long national nightmare is now over.

12.  See step 2.  Move three steps to the right and lather, rinse, repeat.

_____
[1]  Just for the record, this would be me in 1979 and again in 1995.  RIP, Citizens Party and New Party.  We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.

[2]  This would be me in 1980 but not in 2000.  Fool me once, can’t get fooled again.

“Corporations are people too,” Romney said to a dwindling group of supporters who seemed to be distracted by a picture of Texas governor Rick Perry in a flight suit, “and they should be denied the same basic reproductive rights that I once supported and now oppose for people.”  Romney went on to say that people-corporations should enjoy the same tax and regulatory relief as corporation-corporations, “giving job seekers and job creators alike the freedom to innovate and to invest their money as they see fit.”

Romney did not respond to a question as to whether his administration would permit corporations to merge with other corporations of the same sex.

Romney’s announcement comes at a pivotal time for his campaign.  Confronted with polls that show him losing Iowa and much of the South to Perry, Romney’s advisors have suggested that the candidate needs to “take it to the next level” to avoid being “outflanked” among the Republican base.  “Just look at what Perry’s done in the course of a few days,” said one staffer who requested anonymity because he is thinking of leaving Romney’s campaign for Perry’s.  “He called Ben Bernanke a traitor, he suggested that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists involved in an international profiteering scam, and he promoted the illegal teaching of creationism in public schools.  That’s a trifecta plus a home run and a total game changer right there.  No question, Rick is on a roll.”

Even in the moderate wing of the GOP, all three remaining observers agreed that Romney will need to do much more to court socially conservative voters.  “The bar is much higher now,” said one of the three remaining moderates, who held out the utterly delusional hope that former Illinois governor Jim Edgar could still get into the race.  “Rick Perry has written a book in which he claims that Social Security is unconstitutional and that it spread like a ‘bad disease.’  Now [Florida senator and possible vice presidential candidate] Marco Rubio is going around talking about how Social Security has ‘weakened’ the US because in the good old days people used to rely on voluntary community support when they were old, sick, and broke.  How is Romney going to respond to that?  I don’t see that he has many options, unless he’s going to up the ante by telling the rubes that Social Security promotes the teaching of evolution, or that it’s responsible for the Supreme Court decision that took prayer out of the public schools, or that it subsidizes abortion and leads to gay marriage.  Where else is there to go?”

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Romney campaign suggested that Social Security promotes the teaching of evolution, that it’s responsible for the Supreme Court decision that took prayer out of the public schools, and that it subsidizes abortion and leads to gay marriage.

Just wait ‘til Breitbart finds out that Mark Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League!  He’s gonna send James O’Keefe out to sting the guy but good.

Ellen Willis took freedom seriously: “I believe that the struggle for freedom, pleasure, transcendence, is not just an individual matter.  The social system that organizes our lives, and as far as possible channels our desire, is antagonistic to that struggle; to change this requires collective effort” (No  More Nice Girls 266).  And she was deadly serious about pleasure, too: “does it sound like a dirty word to you?  No wonder, given how relentlessly it’s been attacked not only by puritanical conservatives but by liberals who uncritically accept the Reaganite equation of pleasure with greed and callousness….  Yet life without pleasure—without spontaneity and playfulness, sexuality and sensuality, esthetic experience, surprise, excitement, ecstasy—is a kind of death” (NMNG 272). It’s probably too much (or too cliché?) to say that her life was saved by rock and roll, but I do think she found in the music the rhythm of a social revolution she could dance to—and I think her willingness to think about freedom and pleasure rigorously served her well throughout her intellectual career.

That’s easy enough to see when you look at her writings on the drug wars of the 1980s, which Willis was right to see not just as an extension of state power and the carceral society in which we are all required to piss on demand, not only as a war on some classes of people who use drugs, but also as a frontal assault on the very idea that an illegal drug could have a beneficial effect on one’s being in the world.  (By the mid-80s it was damn near impossible to say such a thing in public, so, of course, she went ahead and said it, more than once.)  And it’s easy to see in Willis’s scathing critiques of antiporn feminism and so-called pro-life leftism, as well.  But I see it suffusing every aspect of her work at every stage of her career, even in her writings on race, on The Satanic Verses, on “class first” leftism, and on the world after 9/11.  It wasn’t just that she had one of the most accurate bullshit detectors known to modern science, as her essay on Woodstock demonstrates:

You have to give the producers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair this much credit: they are pulling off a great public-relations coup.  They have apparently succeeded in creating the impression that the crisis in Bethel was a capricious natural disaster rather than a product of human incompetence, that the huge turnout was completely unexpected (and, in fact, could not have been foreseen by reasonable men), and that they have lost more than a million dollars in the process of being good guys who did everything possible to transform an incipient fiasco into a groovy weekend.  Incredibly, instead of hiding from the wrath of disappointed ticket-buyers and creditors they are bragging that the festival was a landmark in the development of youth culture and have announced that they plan to hold it again next year.  But before history is completely re-written, a few facts, semi-facts, and strong inferences are in order….

It was a bit creepy that there was such a total lack of resentment at the Fair’s mismanagement, especially among those who had paid from seven to eighteen dollars.  People either made excuses for Woodstock Ventures (“They couldn’t help it, man; it was just too big for them”) or thought of the festival as a noble social experiment to which crass concepts like responsible planning were irrelevant.  For the most part, they took for granted not only the discomforts but the tremendous efforts made by the state, the local communities, and unpaid volunteers to distribute cheap or free food and establish minimum standards of health and safety.  No one seemed to comprehend what the tasks of mobilizing and transporting emergency food, water, and medical personnel, clearing the roads, and removing garbage meant in terms of labor and money.  Ecstatic heads even proclaimed that the festival proved the viability of a new culture in which no one worked and everything was free.  And in the aftermath anyone who has dared to complain has been put down as a crank.

Publication date: September 6, 1969.  Buy Out of the Vinyl Deeps and read the whole damn thing.

And it wasn’t just that Willis had an addiction, as she once wrote, to being right (so that explains why she was right so often!).  It’s also that she always knew that freedom is not a matter of not paying taxes, not a bourgeois illusion, not an optional side dish on the political menu, and certainly not just another word for nothing left to lose.

Sometimes I like to wonder what kind of alternate universe we would be living in if Ellen Willis’s arguments had carried the day in cultural politics.  They certainly didn’t prevent the re-writing of history with Woodstock, and I see that pattern repeating itself over the ensuing three decades of her work.  I don’t mean to say that her ideas had no influence; but I do think that her battles against antiporn feminism and varieties of left cultural conservatism were Sisyphusian.  Here’s the opening of Don’t Think, Smile!, responding to the Gitlin-Tomasky-Rorty left of the 1990s:

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, a wide assortment of liberals and leftists called for unity around a campaign for economic justice.  Since then, as the country has moved steadily rightward, I have heard this call repeated countless times, along with many hopeful announcements of projects designed to put it into practice.  Each time the right wins an egregious victory (as in the congressional elections of 1994), dozens of lefty commentators rush into print with some version of this proposal as if it were a daring new idea….  You would think that if economic majoritarianism were really a winning strategy, sometime in the past eighteen years it would have caught on, at least a little.  Why has it had no effect whatsoever?  Are people stupid, or what? (ix)

Sure enough, the same damn argument got trotted out again in 2004, in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and though Willis’s response to Frank was brilliant, I have to imagine she wrote it with a sense of profound exasperation.  But in “Escape from Freedom,” she not only repeated her critique of economic majoritarianism; she restated her conviction that for some figures on the left—the most egregious offender is Christopher Lasch, but I find similar motifs cropping up in the work of George Scialabba and Robert McChesney—the critique of capitalism comes wrapped in a nostalgia for an old order:

another left rationale for rejecting cultural politics is rooted in the historical connection of cultural movements to the marketplace.  The rise of capitalism, which undermined the authority of the patriarchal family and church, put widespread cultural revolt in the realm of possibility.  Wage labor allowed women and young people to find a means of support outside the home.  Urbanization allowed people the freedom of social anonymity.  The shift from production- to consumption-oriented capitalism and the spread of mass media encouraged cultural permissiveness, since the primary technique of marketing as well as the most salient attraction of mass art is their appeal to the desire for individual autonomy and specifically to erotic fantasy.

Left cultural conservatives have argued that feminism and cultural radicalism, in weakening traditional institutions like the family, have merely contributed to the market’s hegemony over all spheres of life…. [T]his mindset puts a progressive political gloss on what is really a form of puritanism, offended by the fleshpots of the market, not just the profits.  What it ignores, or denies—as Marx never did—is the paradoxical nature of capitalism.  In destroying the old patriarchal order, in making all that was solid melt into air, in fomenting constant dynamism and change, capital made space for the revolutionary ideas that would challenge its own authority.  In letting loose the genie of desire in the service of profit, consumer culture unleashes forces that can’t reliably be controlled.  (17-18)

As I noted in The Left At War, this lines up rather nicely with Stuart Hall’s work:

Consumer capitalism works by working the markets; but it cannot entirely determine what alternative uses people are able to make of the diversity of choices and the real advances in mass production which it also always brings.  If “people’s capitalism” did not liberate the people, it nevertheless “loosed” many individuals into a life somewhat less constrained, less puritanically regulated, less strictly imposed than it had been three or four decades before.  Of course the market has not remained buoyant and expansive in this manner.  But the contradictory capacity, for a time, of the system to pioneer expansion, to drive and develop new products and maximize new choices, while at the same time creaming off its profit margins, was seriously underestimated.  Thus the left has never understood the capacity of the market to become identified in the minds of the mass of ordinary people, not as fair and decent and socially responsible (that it never was), but as an expansive popular system.  (Hard Road to Renewal 215)

As Willis put it a bit more viscerally in the introduction to Beginning to See the Light (1981),

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products; it had a way of spilling over into rebellion against the constricting conditions of our lives.  The history of the sixties strongly suggests that the impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock-and-roll is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.

Had these arguments won the degree of assent they deserved on the left, we would conceivably have been spared three decades of progressives pitting cultural politics against “real” politics—just as if Willis’s arguments about sexuality had determined the course of feminism in the 70s and 80s, the movement would have been spared a disastrous detour from the defense of reproductive freedom to the campaign against smut, and the English-speaking world would have been spared one decade of anti-antiporn backlash in which “liberal” thinkers and publications actually took Camille Paglia seriously.

But Ellen Willis’s work was never a simple matter of taking sides.  Even in her critique of the antiporn wing, she did not flinch from turning a critical eye to the sex-positive wing, as when she asked of Pat Califia, “does the need to act out fantasies of debasing oneself or someone else really require no further elaboration?  Does it have nothing to do with buried emotions of rage or self-hatred?  Nothing to do with living in a hierarchical society where one is ‘superior’ to some people and ‘inferior’ to others, where men rule and women serve?”  (NMNG 11) Likewise, in her fearless 1982 essay, “Sisters Under the Skin?  Confronting Race and Sex,” she did not hesitate to temper her admiration for bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman with an insistence that hooks had gotten a great deal wrong about the feminist trajectories of the previous 15 years; and she concluded by more or less predicting what the worst forms of “identity politics” would look like over the next 15 years.  Taking her distance from the notion that it is somehow useful to enumerate a hierarchy of oppressions, Willis wrote,

this kind of ranking does not lead to a politics of genuine liberation, based on mutual respect and cooperation among oppressed groups, but instead provokes a politics of ressentiment, competition, and guilt.  Black men tend to react not by recognizing the sexual oppression of black women but by rationalizing their antifeminism as a legitimate response to white women’s privilege.  White women who are sensitive to the imputation of racism tend to become hesitant and apologetic about asserting feminist grievances.  As for white women who can’t see beyond their own immediate interests, attempts to demote them from the ranks of the oppressed do nothing but make them feel unjustly attacked and confirmed in their belief that racial and sexual equality are separate, competing causes.  The ultimate results are to reinforce left antifeminism, weaken feminist militance, widen the split between the black and feminist movements, and play into the divide and conquer tactics of white men….  Insistence on a hierarchy of oppression never radicalizes people, because the impulse behind it is moralistic.  Its object is to get the “lesser victims” to stop being selfish, to agree that their own pain (however deeply they may feel it) is less serious and less deserving of attention (including their own) than someone else’s.  Its appeal is that it allows people at the bottom of social hierarchies to turn the tables and rule over a moral hierarchy of suffering  and powerlessness.  But whatever the emotional comfort of righteousness, it’s a poor substitute for real change.  (NMNG 115-16).

I have the very strong feeling that Willis would take a similarly dim view of people who think they are advancing the cause of justice and equality by festooning the comment sections of feminist blogs with demands that everyone own their privilege.

And in the matter of Salman Rushdie, Willis took pains to point out that “the argument that people have a right to have their religious beliefs ‘respected,’ i.e., not challenged in any way … is claimed only for the absolutists, who are presumed to be incapable of tolerating, let alone respecting, heretical views.  The champions of authoritarian, patriarchal religions offend my most cherished beliefs every time they open their mouths, yet I don’t hear anyone agonizing about my hurt feelings” (NMNG 231).  At the same time, though, she did not summarily dismiss Rushdie’s critics on the left: “there’s some substance to the claim that the fervor in support of Rushdie contains an element of Western chauvinism, raising the specter of a monolithic mass of Oriental barbarians beleaguering us enlightened folks.  But the remedy is not to apologize for Rushdie’s book, or qualify the protests.  It’s to keep emphasizing that the struggle against our own brand of fundamentalism is far from won—ask any American librarian, science teacher, or abortion clinic head—and that the virulence of Khomeini’s atttack on Rushdie reflects, among other things, conflict between fundamentalists and modernists within the Moslem world” (NMNG 233).  The resonance of this argument for the world after 9/11 should be obvious—for the events of that day did not convince Ellen to moderate her critique of religious fundamentalism abroad or at home, just as she was not persuaded to stop caring about the status of women living in fundamentalist societies simply because Laura Bush spoke of it.

I want to close, though, with another passage from the 80s that continues to make claims on our attention today.  It’s from the essay “Exile on Main Street: What the Pollard Case Means to Jews,” and in it Willis pursues a difficult argument all down the line:

[F]ear has induced most Israelis to support a government that equates survival with military power and no territorial concessions; and this government’s policies, along with the right-wing chauvinist ideology that rationalizes them, are undermining Israel’s reason for being—to alleviate the oppression of Jews.

Zionism as a philosophy, even in its leftist versions, doesn’t appeal to me.  I’ve never envisioned sovereignty over a piece of land as a solution to anti-Semitism, a negation of the Diaspora, a necessary focus of Jewish identity and culture, or the basis for building a socialist utopia.  I see nationalism of all sorts, including national liberation movements, as problematic—an understatement when applied to the Middle East.  Yet I support the existence of Israel because Zionism is, among other things, a strategy forced on Jews by a particular historical situation.  What it comes down to is that Israel has given Jews something whose lack cost millions of lives: a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

These days, however, the Israeli government seems to believe that, far from the state’s existing to insure the survival of Jews, Jews exist to insure the survival of the state.  Its resentment of Jews who choose to live elsewhere took a grotesque form when, around the time the Pollard case was approaching its denouement, Yitzhak Shamir demanded that the U.S. deny Soviet Jews special refugee status, thereby forcing them to go to Israel.  Though Soviet Jews can get exit visas only by claiming they want to join relatives in Israel, most emigrants have chosen to come here.  In the interests of a “strong Israel,” Shamir wants to change that, and freedom for Jews be damned.  Apparently, unsatisfied with maintaining Israeli rule over unwilling Palestinians, he’s after a captive population of Jews as well.  Let my people go, indeed!  (NMNG 215-16)

It is stunning, I think, that the woman who wrote those words 24 years ago could have been dismissed, on one wing of the left, as having “an unfortunate Zionist streak.”  But so it goes.  Ellen Willis was simply so much smarter and so much braver than most of her critics.  What would the world be like today if her work were central to it?  I know it would be a better, more pleasurable place—and I think the left would have a richer and more challenging rhetoric of freedom.

You may thank me in comments.

Me:

Caps in 5
Flyers in 6
Bruins in 7
Lightning in 6

Reality:

Caps in 5
Flyers in 7
Bruins in 7
Lightning in 7

I think this pretty much proves that Dreyfus was guilty.

I am of course sorry for the Penguins, whose horrendous 8-2 mauling Jamie and I witnessed in person last Saturday.*  But it really is difficult to get far in the playoffs when your two best players are in street clothes and your “power” play puts up the Rangersesque stat of 1-for-35.  In the postseason you simply have to make the most of whatever man-advantage chances you get, because you’re dealing with evenly matched teams playing at very high levels of intensity.  Winning the Cup with an abysmal power play is sort of like winning the Masters without playing the 5s under par.  It can be done, theoretically, but it still ain’t gonna happen.  So as JP Stormcrow said to me earlier today, it’s totally fitting that the Penguins’ season ended on … a failed power play.

Are anemic power plays the cause of playoff collapses (see, e.g., the case of Washington v. Montreal [2010]), or a mere symptom?  Discuss amongst yourselves.

But you can hardly fault the poor flightless birds.  It’s amazing they got here without two of the best players on the planet.  The only question for next year is whether the NHL is going to ban all hits to the head and institute year-long suspensions for people who deliver them.  It can continue its current policy, sure—namely, solemnly insisting that blows to the head are Very Bad Indeed and fining/suspending every third or fourth guy who renders someone unable to stand up without seeing double, getting dizzy, and vomiting.  That course of inaction would be stupid, and it will help to destroy the game.  Which is why it’s probably what the league will do.

As for Bruins-Habs, a series haunted by Zdeno Chara’s totally conscious (imho) decision to behead Max Pacioretty earlier in the year (even if he didn’t necessarily foresee the consequences): obviously, that contest could have gone either way, right down to the final seconds.  My pick was determined by a coin toss, and a sense that the Bruins’ goaltending would hold up.  Alas, the Bruins now have to face the team against which they coughed up a hairball of world-historical proportions just one year ago, losing in seven not only after being up 3-0 in the series but also after taking a 3-0 lead in game seven itself.  My guess is that the Bruins are going to take one look at those hideously ugly Flyers jerseys, complete with their beer-league-quality nametags on the back, and have a series of severely debilitating nightmares and flashbacks.  Fortunately, this series of flashbacks will not last very long, because the series will not last very long.  The Bruins will be done in five.  Their only hope is that the Flyers’ goaltending turns as ugly as those jerseys.

But the Flyers-Bruins matchup will not make my eyeballs bleed the way Caps-Flyers will in the conference final.  I’m sorry.  I know I should be thinking strictly of the quality of play on the ice, and the question of whether the better team will advance (for the Caps and Flyers surely are the better teams in these tilts).  But the Hawks-Flyers red/orange finals were aesthetically painful to watch last year, and I’m not looking forward to a similar experience this year.  Because when the Caps dispatch the Bolts in six, it’s gonna be bright red/dull orange all over again, and that will suck.

Speaking of ugly jerseys, I have to say I like these Lightnings (and their new sweaters and stylish sox) more than the crew that won the Cup in 2004.  That club won games mostly by giving Martin St. Louis and Vincent Lecavalier 40 minutes of ice time every night and hoping that Nikolai Khabibulin could stop 40 shots; this club has ten players who scored ten goals or more this season.  Stamkos and Gagne are great snipers, and Moore, Malone, and Purcell are a solid supporting crew.  This series is going to be a delight, with lots of brilliant skating, crisp passing and stunning stickhandling.  I’ve always thought St. Louis has the best hands in the game (here’s hoping he wins the Hart Trophy this year for MVP), and I hear that this Ovechkin kid isn’t bad either.  (This would be a good time to remark on how profoundly appalling and enthralling the Internet can be.**)  So there will be finesse, and the Bolts will almost be good enough.  Whereas Bruins-Flyers will be muck and mire.  But thankfully brief.

I want to make it clear, as if it isn’t clear already, that I am rooting for the Bruins.  I just don’t think they’ve recovered from last year’s trauma.

Speaking of trauma, it was nice to see the Canucks pull themselves together long enough to kill off a colossally stupid penalty in the opening seconds of OT in game 7, and then win it a few minutes later.  It was also nice that the guy who got that penalty, Alexandre Burrows, scored that goal to redeem himself.  (He also scored the Canucks’ first goal.  And missed a penalty shot.  Basically, the entire night was All About Him.)  But then, it was extra extra nice to see the Blackhawks scare the living bejeezus out of Vancouver by coming back from 3-0 and then somehow scoring shorthanded by sheer force of will with two minutes left.  As for the other matchups in the West: it would have been nice if both the Sharks and the Kings could have advanced.  The Sharks deserve a break this year—last year’s conference-final loss wasn’t their usual spineless collapse; it was simply the bad luck of running into a tremendous team playing at its very highest level—and I think the Kings are a likely bunch of young men.  I was glad to be able to catch a game at the Staples Center during this year’s MLA convention, and glad to know that I saw the Kings as they really are—that is, as a very talented group who can stun a team (that night, the Columbus Blue Jackets) with four incandescent goals and then forget how to play for 10-15 minutes at a stretch.  Of course, like the plucky young Rangers, they need to be reminded (perhaps by, I dunno, maybe a coach) that there is no mercy rule in hockey, and that the game is not shortened to 40 minutes when you go up 3-0 or 4-0.  (About game 4 of the Rangers-Caps series, the Versus announcers were praising Rangers coach John Tortorella for calling a time out when the Caps closed it to 3-2.  No.  That is wrong.  By the time it’s 3-2, the flames are already engulfing the house, and sure enough, the next Caps power play tied it up.  You call time out after the Rangers score two in seven seconds to go up 3-0, because you’re dealing with 23-year-olds who are ecstatic to have suddenly pwned the Caps so thoroughly and need to be reminded, calmly, that there’s still 26 long minutes to play against a very dangerous team.  But everyone thinks you call time out only when the team is on the ropes.)  The Red Wings-Coyotes series would have been more exciting if the Coyotes had shown up.  And here’s a friendly tip of the hat to the Predators for chasing down the Ducks and eating them.  Welcome to the second round, Predators!  Enjoy your time here, because you only have another two weeks of hockey this spring.

I will leave the Western predictions to Lemieux, adding only that I fear he is wrong about the Sharks, even though I do hope they advance (see “needing a break,” above).  Oh, no, wait—I could also add that while I went 4-for-4 in the first round, Scott went only 2-for-4 (and 2-for-4 in the East, though of course that’s not his domain), thereby rendering him unable to criticize Roger Kimball’s prediction that McCain would win 40 states, according to the standard geometric logic employed by Althouse fanboys.

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*  Because the game started at noon, which is a human rights violation in and of itself, I looked around for things we could do later that evening, since we were planning to spend the entire weekend in Pittsburgh.  It just so happened that the touring company of Mamma Mia were playing at Heinz Hall that week, and since Mamma Mia is one of Jamie’s Favorite Things Ever, I got two tickets to the 8 pm show.  Sigh.  It was fine.  Much clean fun was had by all, and I survived.  But later, I began to wonder whether it is really fair, in this universe or any other, that the masterminds responsible for ABBA have managed to contrive to earn more than one trillion dollars twice in the course of their lives.

** Too bad for you if you clicked on that link.  But I hope you availed yourself of all 64 options!

OK, those of you who clicked the first link have now learned that my first-round picks last year were a jumbo package of epic fail.  But don’t forget, I’ve had my moments.  And I did say that last year’s finals would be Penguins-Hawks, and I still think that’s what should have happened in the end, so I was kind of right about that too, except for the Penguins part.  So, without further ado:

Washington Capitals (1) v. New York Rangers (8).  Is this finally the Caps’ year?  I find it impossible to root against them, given their recent playoff history, and yet I ran into Rod Gilbert last month as he was emerging from a restaurant on East 62nd Street and told him that I’d been in his hockey camp in 1970 and 1971 and still have my autographed copy of his autobiography, so I can’t root against the Rangers either.  If I lie open to the pressure of society I often succeed with the dexterity of my tongue in putting something difficult into the currency.  See my little toys, twisted out of nothing in a second, how they entertain.  I am no hoarder—I shall leave only a cupboard of old clothes when I die—and I am almost indifferent to the minor vanities of life which cause Louis so much torture.  But I have sacrificed much.  Veined as I am with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud, I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend upon stimulus.   Capitals in five.

Philadelphia Flyers (2) v. Buffalo Sabres (7).  Philly comes in badly banged up, but still dangerous, and the Sabres, as ever, are talented but inconsistent.  At least they’ve gotten rid of that hideous Slug!  They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.  Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood.  And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo.  Flyers in six.

Boston Bruins (3) v. Montreal Canadiens (6). The seventy-ninth matchup between these Original Six rivals promises to be explosive.  Outside it’s getting cold and if you don’t have someplace you really want to be you wish you did because it’s cold, suggesting the beginning of winter in New England, suggesting that this winter, when you have to go anywhere, the streets will trap you in a mouse-maze of painful cold, suggesting that you will need to buy a sweater or two that you don’t have the money for.  You hope at least that you’ll get a phone call from a friend who wants to talk for a long time, so that you can bring the phone near the bed and get under the comforter and talk.  Outside it’s getting cold, colder than you would expect after such a warm afternoon, when people were lying on the grass reading in the sun.  Bruins in seven.

Pittsburgh Penguins (4) v. Tampa Bay Lightning (5). It’s insane that the Penguins are still legitimate Cup contenders without their two best players.  Think of the mid-90s Bulls without Jordan and Pippen, or the early-00s Lakers without Shaq and Kobe.  And yet here they are, facing a team that didn’t show up on anyone’s preseason radar and that features Methuselah in goal.  The woman who I’m sending knows all about you.  We have spent many nights reminiscing about you and laughing about your ingenuous kindnesses and social clumsiness.  She is impressed by your poems and surmises that, as a child, you must have been force fed like farm poultry.  Of course she is drifting very peaceably now right towards you.  It’s a fine sunny day.  She and the raft look marvelous, rocking in the tide.  She is doing her impersonation of an automobile showroom.  You would enjoy it very much. Lightning in six.

Scott, I think I’ve said everything I needed to say.  Over to you.

“We didn’t know, when we made these governors available to the public, how truly dangerous they were,” said an NGA representative who requested anonymity because he feared swift and remorseless retaliation from one of the defective governors.  “In most cases, they seemed like fully functioning human beings.  But now it appears that many of them avoided routine safety checks or managed to buy off safety regulators.”

In Pennsylvania, defective governor Tom Corbett has recently barred safety inspectors from issuing citations of his office for safety violations, following on his Department of Environmental Protection’s unprecedented demand that environmental inspectors in Pennsylvania stop issuing violations against natural gas drillers without prior approval from the DEP.  In Wisconsin, defective governor Scott Walker has issued demands for the email records of everyone who has typed the words Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, Mary Bell, Rachel Maddow, or fruit bats since January 1 of this year.  And in Florida, defective governor Rick Scott has eliminated an anti-fraud database that would track the fraudulent dealings of defective governor Rick Scott, following on his attempt to kill an anti-fraud database that would track the fraudulent distribution of addictive prescription drugs in Florida.

“These guys are clearly a menace to society,” said consumer watchdogs Albert and Allen Hughes.

But according to the National Governors Association, the problem has spread beyond the initial “bad batch” of gubernatorial products recently purchased by unwary consumers.  “It’s not just the new crop, almost all of whom contain toxic and potentially lethal levels of wingnuttery,” said an industry spokesman.  “It’s a public hazard of almost epic proportions.  You’ve got governors like Bobby Jindal making fun of early-detection systems for natural disasters.  You’ve got Jan Brewer’s crew looking for anyone who speaks with a funny accent.  You’ve got Haley Barbour reminiscing fondly about the white-supremacist Citizens Councils.  So it’s not just a question of a few bad eggs like Alabama’s Robert Bentley refusing to acknowledge non-Christians as his ‘brothers and sisters.’  It’s grounds for a total recall.”

Even some conservative voters have begun to express “buyer’s remorse.”  “I liked this brand of governor because they yell at teachers, so I bought a whole case of ‘em,” said Roger Waters, an unemployed man from upstate.  “I hated the way teachers were always telling me to read and think and stop hitting people and stuff.  But then I find out that they’re killing train lines and cutting off my unemployment checks.  I asked one of them about creating jobs, and he said something about seceding from the federal government.  I asked another one about all the crumbling bridges and tunnels in the state and he said ‘abortion abortion abortion abortion.’  I don’t get it.”

The recalled governors are Haley Barbour (Mississippi), Robert Bentley (Alabama), Jan Brewer (Arizona), Sam Brownback (Kansas), Chris Christie (New Jersey), Tom Corbett (Pennsylvania), Mitch Daniels (Indiana), Nathan Deal (Georgia), Dennis Daugaard (South Dakota), Nikki Haley (South Carolina), Bobby Jindal (Lousiana), John Kasich (Ohio), Rick Perry (Texas), Rick Scott (Florida), Rick Snyder (Michigan), and Scott Walker (Wisconsin).  Jerry Brown (California) and Andrew Cuomo (New York) are also being monitored for public safety violations, though consumer advocates warn that their potential replacement governors may give off deadly noxious fumes.  “Don’t forget what happened last time we issued a recall in one of those places,” said Anthony Kiedis of the Institute for Advanced Californication.  “They wound up with some guy who went through nightclubs and malls shooting people.  Even when they tried to blow up his oil truck and crush him in a drill press, they couldn’t get rid of him.  So you take your chances.”

The National Governors Association has issued a warning that continued prolonged exposure to defective governors may cause severe corrosion of public works and irreparable damage to the social fabric.  If your body politic comes into contact with any of the recalled governors, wash thoroughly with soap and water to prevent toxic effects such as rashes, burns, abrasions, lacerations, boils, and excessive bleeding.  Reported side effects include loss of workplace protections, civil liberties, reproductive rights, drinkable water, health coverage, pensions, hair, memory, and eyesight.

And now that I’ve spent the weekend putting together new shelving and storage devices and tidying up in general, it’s time to pick a fight!  This time I’m over at the National Humanities Center blog, On the Human, complaining about bioethicists.  For example (from a discussion of Jonathan Glover’s book Choosing Children:  Genes, Disability, and Design):

This then is yet another version of the classic “trolley problem,” in which we are asked to decide whether it is better that people with X disability not be born at all (because the prospective mothers wait two months and have different children altogether) while some people with X disability go “uncured” in utero, or better that people with X disability be “cured” in utero while others are born with the disability because their mothers went untreated.I suppose this is the stuff of which bioethical debates are made, but may I be so rude as to point out that there is no such trolley? This thought experiment may be all well and good if the object is to ask people about the moral difference between foregoing a pregnancy that will result in a fetus with disabilities and treating a disabled fetus in utero (and miraculously “curing” it!). But it does not correspond to any imaginable scenario in the world we inhabit. (And there’s more: because, perhaps, “a disability is harder to bear if you know that people could have prevented it but chose not to do so,” [Derek] Parfit adds that “we assume that those born with the disability do not know they could have been spared it” [48]. Why not assume instead that those born with the disability are given a pony on their fifth birthday?) There simply are no known genetic conditions that present prospective parents with this kind of decision….

There is no scenario — I repeat, no scenario, none whatsoever — in which any woman knows that, if she foregoes conception now, she will have a normal child later on. Earlier in the chapter, in the course of demonstrating that some children’s disabilities truly do place crushing emotional burdens on parents, Glover had adduced the case of Julia Hollander, mother of a child with significant brain damage: “the cause of her problem was not genetic,” Glover notes. “When she was born, the placenta peeled away early, and this destroyed her cerebral cortex” (40). Yes, well: this is quite terrible, but it should at least give pause to bioethicists who concoct scenarios in which women decline to initiate a pregnancy now in the assurance that they will have a normal child if they only wait. The world in which bioethicists propose such things, the world in which [Frances] Kamm can chastise a woman who produces a “defective” child “when she could have easily (!) avoided it,” is a world without birth trauma, without conditions undiagnosable before birth (autism, pervasive developmental delay), without any sense of contingency — let alone an openness to the unbidden. Such trolley problems and what-if hypotheticals profoundly distort what it is like to contemplate having a child who may have a disability; indeed, they distort what it is like to have a child.

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In other news, I’m not really picking a fight in this comment thread on the recently-concluded convention of the Modern Language Association.  I’m just noting that someone is wrong on the Internet.

Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Postdoctoral/ MFA Fellowships:  Being Humans
2011-12

For artists and humanists, these are extraordinary times: our sense of “the human” is undergoing remarkable transformations, with implications for the future of all life on the planet.  How should we understand our relation to animal cognition, to artificial intelligence, to the biosphere, to disability, to genetics?  Can we imagine a form of humanism in which the boundaries of the human are unstable?

Applicants should have received their terminal degrees (PhDs in the humanities, MFAs in the fine and performing arts, Masters or beyond in design fields such as architecture) within the past three years.  Applications should include a cv, two letters of recommendation, a project description of 1000 words, and (for applicants in the arts or design) a sample of work on a single DVD.  Fellowship stipends are $42,000 plus benefits and a $2,000 research fund; fellows will be required to teach one course each semester in their discipline.  Fellows will be given office space at the Institute.  It is expected that fellows will take part in the intellectual life of campus, working with faculty and students, attending symposia and events, and contributing to meetings and discussions presented by IAH.

All application materials must be received at this address by January 15, 2011:

The Institute for Arts and Humanities
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Penn State University
Ihlseng Cottage
University Park, PA 16802

For more information, call (814) 865-0495 or write to arts-humanities@psu.edu.

And yes, the position is open to scholars outside the US.

Also, in unrelated and not-nearly-as good news, I have an essay out in the new issue of Democracy.  I figure it has now been well over a year since I last wrote about Alan Sokal, so I decided the time was ripe for marking the milestone 14-and-a-half-year anniversary of the Original Sokal Hoax.