|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy
Reviewed by Michelle Fine
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt. New York: Routledge, 2004
If you're worried about the future of democracy, intellectual freedom, or the academy, read Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt provide a comprehensive, hysterically funny, devastating critique of the state of higher education. They ask us to consider the ways in which we are being colonized, censored, and proletarianized, and how we remain in collective denial. In particular, they challenge senior faculty to rethink our comfort and collusion as health benefits and opportunities for political dissent evaporate. A montage of systematic evidence, mixed skillfully with chilling stories of careers gone bad, longitudinal analyses of tenure cohorts, and meticulous estimates of post-graduate debt, paints a terrifying picture of the fraying state of higher education and tosses into our laps challenging questions about the responsibility of survivors.
With an impeccable analysis of the class politics of higher education and raw one-liners ("The university [as] Citadel of Reason has gradually evolved into the Campus Sweat Shop"), Nelson and Watt argue that we are both witnesses to and implicated in the economic and intellectual gentrification of the academy. Public colleges and universities (and private ones that serve poor and working-class youth) are meeting the fate of public and low-income housing. The landlord lets the building rot; occupants are coerced into fleeing, in despair and in debt; and early glimmering signs of refurbishment can be spotted. As the government neglects higher education, doctoral-program graduates and dropouts carry growing debt as they enter a hostile job market with betrayed dreams of tenure-track jobs. At the same time, administrative offices are redecorated. Hence my favorite chapter title, "Is It a University or Is It a Country Club?"
There have long been indications that public higher education for the nation's poor was under siege. Those of us working on prison education took notice in 1994 when then-president Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, denying Pell Grants to prisoners and effectively removing higher education from their reach. In 1994, there were 350 college-in-prison programs in the nation; in 1995, there were eight. AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen, then the president of the State University of New York at New Paltz, joined other progressive educators in fighting this assault on prison education. These educators understood that the early warning signs of the dismantling of public higher education would be followed by an attack on its base. That the assault on higher education, especially for poor and working-class people, has swelled over time is evident in budget cuts and tuition hikes; attacks on remediation, access programs, affirmative action, and racialized opportunity programs; spikes in censorship and surveillance; and the introduction of entrance and exit exams. As the state retreated from higher education, the prison-industrial complex engorged. "Whereas New York spent more than twice as much on universities than on prisons in 1988, the state now spends $275 million more on prisons than on state and city colleges," observed a 1998 report issued jointly by the Correctional Association of New York and the Justice Policy Institute.
So, too, as money has been withdrawn, intellectual surveillance has been fortified. Recall how the 1997 women's studies conference at SUNY New Paltz was assailed by conservatives, who objected to the content of some of the workshops. Today, we see similar attacks by the right on intellectual life. In 2004, Susan Rosenberg, who had spent sixteen years in prison, felt pressured to resign as artist in residence at Hamilton College and was not reappointed as an adjunct faculty member at John Jay College. As Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, director of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture at Hamilton concluded in a January 2005 letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The skirmish over Rosenberg's appointment reflects the dangers to freedom in the wider society, reminding us that we work not in an ivory tower but in the real world." Looking through the prism of prisons and former prisoners—who may just be the canaries in the mine—we see that democracy and academic freedom in higher education have long been under siege.
Office Hours poses hard questions to those of us who have committed our professional lives to social criticism but have failed to analyze the conditions of our own workplaces, and to those of us who engage with struggles for justice globally and blithely recruit the next generation of doctoral candidates. In twinned chapters, "Disciplining Debt" and "What Would an Ethical Graduate Program Be?" Nelson and Watt insist that prospective students be told, to the extent possible, about post-graduation employment rates, levels of anticipated debt, and the likelihood of receiving insurance benefits while in graduate school. They ask faculty to confront the creeping corporatization of the academy collectively and across multiple sites, not simply within our own schools; to take seriously the reports that minority-serving programs such as Upward Bound and Talent Search may be on the budgetary chopping block; to recognize the relentless search for the superstar faculty member whose work is funded by federal grants as an incremental slide toward intellectual shrinkage; and to expose how shifts in publishing, academic hiring, virtual universities, and Christian law clubs that explicitly ban non-evangelicals and gays bear serious consequence for the future of the academy and the future of democracy.
Office Hours accomplishes what few books have: it issues both an invitation to analyze and a slap in the face to organize. As much as I have quoted, copied, and cited this book, there are three analytic moves I wish that Nelson and Watt had taken, or that the next generation of critical higher education scholars would take up. First, we need to document the elaborate circulations of money, power, networks, access, censorship, and surveillance that have metastasized between the academy and prisons, the military, government, and corporate interests. Some of this investigation has begun with exposés of how Department of Defense and pharmaceutical contracts distort and conceal research findings, constricting public access to data. But we need more. Without waxing romantic about a purely autonomous and democratic university long gone, we need to ask who stole the public university and where sites of resistance are.
Second, while Office Hours delineates the intergenerational and the discipline-specific implications of the corporate academy, we need more fine-grained analyses of its fallout for faculty of color, lesbian and gay faculty, Muslim faculty, and activist faculty. All of these groups are newer to the academy and better represented among the nontenured ranks. While the assault on higher education affects us all, a movement for academic justice must interrogate how the wreckage of proletarianization distributes along the interior fault lines built into the academy.
Third, the struggles of higher education need to be linked to those of our colleagues in K-12 public education. Deep in the devastation wrought in elementary and secondary education by some of the same forces of the political economy lie educators with knowledge about oppressive consequences and about organizing. Many educators in public schools suffer from, and resist, financial inequities; absorb a fundamental lack of power and respect; and live with radical curtailments of their academic freedom. Classroom "chatter" is monitored by boards of education and right-wing watchdog groups for mention of abortion, condoms, or evolution. Textbooks blessed by the state of Texas are shaped around "intelligent design," creationism, marriage as a union between a man and a woman, high-stakes testing, and English-only and abstinence education. In drag as "standards," the No Child Left Behind Act ravages possibilities for rich, inquiry-based teaching and learning, as public librarians protest the Patriot Act's assault on intellectual freedom. Multi-million-dollar solitary housing units and Super-Max prisons are built, while prison educators, teaching in small underfunded corners of jails and prisons, actively subvert the dehumanization of prisoners. These beleaguered K-12 and prison educators are, of course, our political kin.
Nelson and Watt have laid a powerful foundation for a movement for academic justice, with substantial inspiration drawn from graduate student and adjunct organizing campaigns. Today, progressive faculty confront challenges from students, faculty, alumni, and boards of trustees. Affirmative action and race-based policies are being shaven very close to the skin. Faculty with radical biographies or histories of serving time in prison are placed in twenty-first century stockades for public consumption. The Federal Communications Commission is threatening to investigate universities where documentary filmmaker Michael Moore spoke during the presidential campaign. And the U.S. government has denied visas to sixty-five Cuban scholars en route to an international conference in Las Vegas. With much appreciation to Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, it's time to read, discuss, organize, and then extend Office Hours.
Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Pyschology and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
|