Convergence

After a year and a half of navigating the torturous academic job market, I accepted a tenure track position at the University of Pittsburgh, as a media scholar in their English department.  I look forward to continuing my work at this institution, which seems to be very supportive of the many strange things that I do.  I want to take this moment to reflect, however, on the nature of this academic job market that is far less kind to most.

Academia serves a number of social functions, from education (disseminating the world’s storehouse of knowledge, teaching students how to think critically and produce new knowledge) to basic research (investigating the world) to applied research (figuring out new ways to do things: innovation) to community outreach, etc.   In our neoliberal economy, the value of academia is often framed in terms of employment.  From the student’s perspective, the academy makes her employable (or more desirable as an employee); from industry’s perspective, the academy ensures an unending supply of fresh workers.

In the humanities we frequently debate the degree to which the university should be framed in neoliberal terms.  After all, shouldn’t we (as a society) value knowledge for knowledge’s sake?  Shouldn’t we be promoting activities that will make society better, even if that means researching and teaching in fields and subfields that are of little interest to capitalists?  Shouldn’t we be producing citizens that can think and act beyond the confines of neoliberal capitalism?  Rather than serving the interests of power, shouldn’t knowledge be revolutionary?

There are a lot of things universities, students, and the general public can do to de-neoliberalize the university, but I won’t go into those here.  I simply want to acknowledge a white elephant that haunts such efforts more generally (and particularly in the humanities): the university is, as one of it’s most significant functions, an employer.  This is particularly significant for those who are determined to speak truth to power instead of enrolling themselves in power’s commodity factory.  The university employs researchers and teachers who are working for a greater good (even if a nebulous, future-tense good) instead of feeding  some company’s bottom line.  This is an absolutely vital function, not only for the academy, and for future students, but also for society as a whole.  Just as seed banks preserve the world’s biodiversity against the potential calamities of monoculture, academia (at its best) preserves and builds on ideas and knowledge that, while not useful to the rich and powerful of today, must nevertheless (in fact for that reason) be nurtured until their time is ripe.  This is reason enough to de-neoliberalize the university, but I digress.

Just about everyone in the humanities knows that the academic job market is broken.  For one thing, the university is structured as a pyramid, with relatively few professors (along with many adjunct faculty members) overseeing many more graduate students than can ever join their ranks, who in turn do a great deal of the teaching of many more undergraduates than can ever join their ranks.  None of this is a problem if you consider the university’s role to be an employment feeder for capitalistic enterprise.  But when research and teaching revolve around those areas of less interest to capitalists (such as basic research in science, philosophy, or cultural analysis), the system needs somewhere for its best and brightest to go.  Many of the best and brightest currently have nowhere to go.

Most universities are making this problem worse rather than better, by making the following mistakes:

• Placing too much emphasis on partnering with business and subordinating their functions to the needs of those businesses.
• Placing too much emphasis, in student recruitment and other forms of official discourse, on employability rather than radical innovation and thinking–in other words, the production of new ways of life outside of corporate employment.
• Formulating job calls according to the categories of the past rather than the open-ended categories of the future (in the humanities, this takes the form of asking for rickety categories tied to specific time periods and regions).
• Maintaining, in the formation of new jobs, rigid disciplinary boundaries.

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Faced with hesitant, conservative job ads, the great thinkers and researchers of tomorrow, facing terrible odds, are forced to become neoliberal themselves.  They stop taking risks, endlessly prep themselves as salespeople, learning how to narrativize their own interests and research into the narrow categories of official job vacancies.  At best, this diverts attention on all sides away from innovative potential scholarship.  At worst, it irreparably impairs scholarly creativity, innovation, and boldness. The process of neoliberalization does not begin when a promising scholar enters the academic job market, but much earlier, when considering what to study and how.  The job market is like a narrow sluice whose primary effect is not the dividing of the river, but the dividing of the headwaters.

What kind of academic jobs should we be creating, promoting, and supporting?  Innovative jobs that break down disciplinary boundaries, mix time periods, cross borders and are open to new methods and ideas.  It is not a question of “modernizing” these jobs to fit the needs of today’s business or today’s cultural trends (for the oldest ideas, objects, and cultural forms are often the most radical), but promiscuously mixing categories both old and new, with an eye on the future.  Rather than endlessly rehearsing the same categories of knowledge, we need to take seriously the academy’s role as idea bank for a future society.  We need a little more alchemy in the academic job market.  And we need to make alchemists a little more welcome.