On 8 June 2018, Paul T. Corrigan’s “Jobs Will Save the Humanities” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. The article opens with discussion of one contribution to a survey Corrigan offered, one that rehearses from experience many of the woes traditionally associated with the English major, before offering context from a Gallup and Strada survey and noting that the implications for humanistic studies are dire. Corrigan goes on to note that humanities departments typically do poorly at addressing issues of employability and calls for giving students better understandings of the working world in which they will likely be enmeshed. He then notes data from several sources that argue in favor of humanities students’ employability before asserting that matters still need to be improved for them. Several methods for improvement are outlined before Corrigan addresses a likely counterargument and concluding on an evidently hopeful note.

I admit there are days when I feel much the same as the pseudonymous respondent Corrigan describes. His “Casey” bemoans the yoking of her debt-load, seemingly dead-end job, and inability to get re-trained; I cannot help but look at the tens of thousands of dollars I owe after years of paying, as well as the fact that, despite a terminal degree, I am working as an administrative assistant, and feel some chagrin, as I have noted. At the same time, though, I know that a bad job is better than no job (and my job is not a bad one, let me reiterate)–and I know that, in the world I inhabit as an academic expatriate, there is actually the chance of promotion from a bad job to a less bad one, or even to a decent one. Part-time work in a coffee shop can become full-time, perhaps, or advancement from the floor into management. Secretarial work for a small non-profit can become administration of that non-profit, leveraging the skills developed in a humanistic curriculum into “practical” applications. And even if the job is stressful, it is hardly the case that the jobs for which humanistic study is typically regarded as offering training–teaching and academic research–are not.

I value the work I did to earn my degrees. But I also value the work I do now–certainly because it helps people, but in no small part because it allows me to meet my bills (usually), and I do sometimes chafe at the idea that I am not able to do so from my training, but as the result of luck. (Unlike many, I do not set aside the role of random chance in my circumstances. I know I got a break and had the good sense to take it–and not all people get the break.) Whoever “Casey” is, I hope she (and the article uses the pronoun, so I have to take it) is able to find something similar–as are the many who share her situation. For my part, when I am in position to do some hiring, I will be sure to keep those like her–like I was–in mind.

I also majored in English, and while I’m not making coffee, I could still use your support.

My wife and I take vitamin supplements that are calculated to provide us with more energy; we are the parents of a precocious four-year-old, so we need all the help we can get in terms of energy to keep up with her. There are differences in the supplements we take, of course, some of which inhere in their compositions. In theory, at least, our bodies have different needs in generating the energy we both need, so supplements to help us in that regard will necessarily respond to those differences. But those are not the only ones evident; the differences extend to the packaging, not so much in coloring (although the colors do differ) or in printed imagery as in the lids on the bottles themselves. And those differences bespeak ongoing reinforcement of gender stereotyping.

The cap on my supplement bottle–a product marketed explicitly towards men–has a flip-open lid; that on my wife’s–a product explicitly marketed toward women–is a child-resistant one. That is, our daughter could easily get at my supplements, all else being equal, and not my wife’s, despite my wife’s physiology being more similar to hers and supplements targeted toward that physiology being more likely to be appropriate for her than mine. And despite several issues that make me more able to open child-resistant bottles than my wife is, not least of which is the conceit that men are physically stronger, she is expected to open such a bottle more than I am.

Of course, this is not targeted at us, as such. We are buyers who could not have been predicted individually; we are members of groups whose purchases can be forecast in the aggregate, however. And it seems that members of the relevant group to which my wife belongs are expected to need energy because of their children, as members of the relevant group to which I belong are not. Or it is expected that her group will need to care for and protect children, while mine will not. Or it is expected that my group’s tasks away from children are what tax its members, rather than those that are done with and for the kids. And any of these have unpleasant implications for how matters are likely to continue.

I do not say in this that vitamin bottle lids are forcing people into patterns of behavior, into gender roles that 1) may well not reflect individuals’ lived reality and 2) are problematic even if they do thus reflect. That would be inaccurate in scope and in thrust. What they do, however, is reflect, in ways that are not often examined (How many will pay so close attention to their supplement bottles? And how many might read what I write here and think I do poorly to attend so closely to them?), environmental influences on people. I do not think the vitamin bottles are deliberately constructed to reinforce particular norms–although they are deliberately made as they are made, as any design choice is a choice–but things can happen without or despite intent. But they do seem to make some things easier than others, and when things are easy, they invite people, however subtly, to act in particular ways that may not be the best ways to act.

Vitamins cost money; help me buy them?

On 8 June 2018, Andrew Seal’s “How the University Became Neoliberal” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. Seal opens with a summary of historical critiques of corporatist education, emphasizing Mario Savio’s 1964 speech and its successors. It pivots thence into a treatment of the term “neoliberal” and its derivatives, spending a section on its appropriateness and the development of its concept from such notions as “corporate universities” and “late capitalism.” The emergence of the term in the work of David Harvey and its proliferation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and its ongoing aftereffects also receive attention, with the specific connections to adjunctification and institutional austerity being emphasized before an agreement with Harvey’s assertion that financial crises are inherent, system-desired features of capitalism. Efforts to unify among academics are detailed, demonstrating the idea that the ivory tower is now what the factory floor was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries–an inherently political locus of power that can be seized, control of which exerts outsize influence on current society. The article ends with an affirmation of the university’s pivotal role in struggles to come.

Some points of interest present themselves in the piece. One emerges near the end of the article; Seal writes that “Neoliberal politics aren’t coming from outside the ivory tower: The caller is in the house.” In a short phrase, Seal ties his article–and the phenomenon it describes–to horror film, which is entirely appropriate. While the current state of affairs in academe might well be described as dystopian (and not just from my academic expatriate perspective), any dystopia has at least elements of horror to it; if nothing else, the situations that give rise to dystopias are themselves horrific, not least because they seem to be so easily accomplished and so willingly entered into by the people who let and make them happen. (To follow the implication, though, I have to wonder who or what will be Clover’s final girl; there aren’t any innocents in all this, it seems. And the implied gendering has resonance that I’m not sure I’m qualified to untangle; it could just be my own iteration of internalized patriarchal-hegemonic institutional structures at work.)

Another is the discussion of the Edu-Factory Collective, something with which I had been wholly unfamiliar prior to reading the article (and with which I am still largely unfamiliar-but some understanding is a thing that can be built upon at need or at desire, so there is some improvement). The quote from that group that “We vindicate the university’s destruction…[we are] not merely immune to tears for the past but enemies of such a nostalgic disposition [sic]” rings strangely in my inward ear; that I remain as I do despite my experience suggests that I still see value in institutionalized higher education, that I recognize there are things that universities can do well, if allowed to do so–but I will admit that that may well be my own inherent biases at work, my own internalization of social mores and norms that serve only to restrict me in ways that benefit those in positions of power–not least by ensuring that my own access to power is limited.

It may also be from those biases that I find myself nodding along with Seal’s reminder that the educational enterprise has never not been political. The choice of curriculum is a political act; whether it is to work in a “Great Books” tradition of liberal arts instruction or to work to make every assignment in every course more or less explicit job training, a course of study emerges from and reinscribes an ideology. Even in such “real” and “unbiased” things as math and physics, such is the case–that things are taught as they are taught, whether in terms of  assignment sequence or course division, is always a result of and contributor to such decisions. To assert otherwise is ignorant at best, inaccurate in all cases, bullshit in most, and an outright lie in far too many–and of each, we ought to be wary, though we do less well in that than should be done.

Help support an #academicexpatriate?

On 20 May 2018, Thomas Cogswell’s “True Confessions of a Reluctant Administrator” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, Cogswell glosses over his early-career experience shirking institutional service in favor of teaching–until he was confronted by an incoming dean who effectively forced him into committee work and assigned him administrative duties afterward. He afterwards comments about faculty governance and its joys before concluding with the note that his own experience has led him to make committee selections.

Cogswell’s piece reads as an attempt at humor, invoking long-known and well-worn tropes of 12-step programs (explicitly: the piece opens with an injunction to “Imagine this is a 12-step program and that I am standing before you, tearfully confessing my transgressions”). And there is some sense to framing a joke in such a way; life in academe, generally, has properties that are not unlike addiction. It starts out innocently enough, with people lured in through often-false promises of esoteric pleasures, and it quickly becomes compulsive, with people scrambling to put together larger sums of money than they can afford to continue to indulge it. Exit is difficult, occasioning no few psychological changes, as any amount of quit lit can attest. Too, as has been mentioned in connection with certain scholarly gatherings, there is a strong correlation of scholarly gatherings and heavy drinking–which has occasioned events designed to give those in recovery, who probably ought to be in recovery, and who simply want to spare their livers so much trauma places to gather.

That said, the joke falls flat for me. As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, I work for a substance abuse treatment facility, one that makes use of 12-step methodologies and which treats clients who are engaged in 12-step programs. They are not among the most privileged people; of those who have entered the facility’s outpatient treatment this calendar year, only nine percent have not been economically disadvantaged, and all are struggling to achieve and maintain sobriety, whether from marijuana (which remains illegal where I am), alcohol, methamphetamine, or some other substance. They are in pain, in trouble with the law, and, in many cases, struggling to keep their families intact. The joke Cogswell seems to be trying to make seems to be made at the expense of my facility’s clients and people like them–and that seems to me to be punching more than a bit down. And I would expect better from someone who would present himself as a fellow-sufferer.

Any help for my facility will be greatly appreciated. Please give.

On 14 June 2018, Tove Danovich’s “Despite a Revamped Focus on real-Life Skills, ‘Home Ec’ Classes Fade Away” appeared on NPR.org. The article opens with a quotation regarding the current state of instruction in what was once taught as home economics and is not taught as family and consumer sciences (FCS) in the United States. It moves on to note that FCS classes are not swelling as might be expected in a period of increased attention to food, but that they are instead dwindling–by more than a third from 2002 to 2012–likely in response to the prevailing testing culture at work in public schooling. Danovich moves on to gloss the history of FCS classes and their socially problematic nature before moving into description of current FCS course content. Schools’ requirements for such coursework receive some attention before the article cites a dearth of FCS teachers as a major obstacle. The article concludes with an assertion of FCS courses’ relevance in students’ lives; their utility is usually swiftly evident.

A couple points emerge as of peculiar interest for me. One of them is in the quoted comments by Montana’s Megan Vincent: “In the good old days you got that at home[sic]” and “But now you have two working parents…these courses fill the gaps for what parents can no longer do.” The former rankles a bit, since the “good old days” were hardly good for a great many people–and the litanies of ways in which and the people for whom they were not needs more rehearsal than can be given it here. Related is the latter; the comments assume that parents could ever do what the class does. While in some, perhaps many, cases such a thing was true, it was never so universally the case as the comment–indeed, the kind of comment–comes off as assuming was. How many jokes, after all, center on parental ineptitude? And how can a joke enjoy currency if it does not speak to something easily seen in people’s lives? A look at the tables and pantries and lives of a great many people, across generations, suggests that they were not and are not the best informed about how to cook and eat well–and a thing not known cannot be taught, not reliably.

Another point of interest, although one that does not irk, is the later-reported comment from Carol Werhan that “FCS classes make for ‘a well-rounded, world-literate human being, which makes a great workforce and a great community.'” It reads as much the same kind of thing that is typically deployed to justify humanities coursework and programs to increasingly corporatized higher education and its “consumers.” I do not think it will be as ineffective for FCS as it has been for, say, French, because I do agree with the comment about the field’s obvious utility–but I have not seen such rhetoric work well often or at all.

Still, looking back–as I do too often, and seldom to my benefit–I 1) do not recall that an FCS class was on offer at my high school (and I attended high school before No Child Left Behind), 2) wish there had been such a class or that I had seen it, and 3) wish I had taken it. While I’ve learned to cook more in the years since (I cook dinner for my family more nights than I don’t, and I make breakfast through the work week), and I do a fair bit of the laundry around my family’s house, it’s taken me those years to learn how to do so with even the modicum of skill I have. (I had various house-cleaning chores as a youth, and I still keep a pretty clean house much of the time.) It would have been a good use of a fourth year of high school to take such classes as FCS, which would have helped prepare me for some parts of my life since with which I’ve had to struggle. Even then, I needed and should have had the sense to take a break not only from the scholastic demands of “regular” classrooms, but also from my life’s overwhelming focus on meeting those demands. Had I done so, I think my being exiled from academe might have been a bit easier to handle than it was–and that would have been decidedly welcome.

Help balance the economics of my home?

I‘ve commented before (here, for example) that I had initially thought to become a band director when I grew up. That I did so emerged in large part from my time in bands from sixth grade through the end of high school. Band was one of the few places where I found any sense of camaraderie at school, although I did not value fellowship then as it deserved, and one of the few places of happiness I could find outside of my broken-in rocking chair and the pages of books already many times read. As might be expected, then, I went into my undergraduate career full of love of the thing and hope that I would be able to do as had been done for me–but, by the end of my sophomore year, I was told that I would not be allowed to proceed in my program, and I gave up on that particular dream, soon taking up another that would ultimately fail to come true.

Since that time, since my sophomore year of college, since 2002, I did not play more than a few idle notes at odd intervals, only occasionally picking up a horn, and then not for long. I entertained no serious thought of playing again, no real notion that I would do anything other than look from time to time at an instrument I had never been worthy to play and barely to touch, and I rebuked myself for ever being so much a fool as to think I could ever really have done so. And seeing my brother do so well as he did–and is still doing!–musically served to remind me that my talents lie elsewhere than in winding a horn, and that I was better served by turning my attentions to other ends. But, again, doing even that and applying myself to the exercise of those talents I flatter myself that I have did not work out as I had hoped, and I drifted from failure to failure to failure, winding up where I am now. And if it is the case that I enjoy some success–because I do–it is still far, far from what I had ever thought I’d have. (Too, as many times as I have faltered, there is a part of me–a large part–that is waiting for me to fail again.)

Recently, though, a non-profit in Kerrville and the head band director at the public high school got together and set up a community jazz band. News of it reached me through the usual channels (thanks, Mom!), and, after consulting with my wife, I decided I’d join if they’d have me. After a couple of phone calls and emails, I found myself retrieving instruments from my parents’ house: a late-1930s King Zephyr alto sax that’s been in my family for generations and a Buescher bari sax my grandfather had owned and which I had inherited.

The alto was long familiar–and it is the instrument of which I am far from worthy. I have heard others wind it as it deserves, and I know I cannot match them; I tend to it, but I dare do no more. But the bari is another matter. It has not the ancientry of the alto, nor has it the mystique; the alto is known in the family as “the Magic Horn,” and in the hands of those who actually know what they are doing, it lives up to the name. The bari is not of the same quality; Buescher has not the cachet that King does, and for cause. Nor, if I am being honest, was my grandfather the finest saxophonist–though he was better far than me, as is clear from his having succeeded in his musical goals, while I definitely did not. But when I did play, and when I was commended for playing such that I thought I might reasonably expect to make a life around it, it was a bari sax I played–and I do not devalue the horn that I have now, when I might otherwise have had none.

And it felt good to wind it again! Oh, I am aware of how much I have lost of what little I had; I dare not deny it (and I am working to reclaim at least some of it, although I know that the intervening years will have taken more from me than I can ever recover). But when I wrapped my hands around the hollow brass, put my fingers on the keys and the reeded rubber into my mouth again, it felt right. I babbled through the horn, true, my faltering utterances showing long disuse, but as I played, my fingers and lips and tongue began to remember what they had known. It was as if rust fell from me in the very act of playing again, and as I moved more, I was able to move more. And sitting in communion with others doing much the same…it was decidedly welcome.

So I shall be going back again, I think. Even if I will never be the sort of person who can make a living at it, I can be the sort who does a bit and enjoys what all is done–and I think that’ll actually be good enough.

Reeds are expensive! Help me buy some more!

On 29 May 2018, Brian Rosenberg’s “Are You in a ‘BS Job’? Thank You for Your Work. No, Really” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. The article opens with a summary of common complaints about administration and the remark that the Chronicle hosts no few such–including David Graeber’s “Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone” (about which my comments appear here and here)–before rehearsing Rosenberg’s own experience on both sides of such complaints. The author then asserts a position contrary to the tendency to badmouth administration and staff, grounding the assertion in staff:student ratios and anecdotal commentary from Rosenberg’s own situation and background. After, the article turns to a reflection on administrative burdens, usefully citing Adm. William H. McRaven and the Vietnam War era before offering a Swiftian passage and concluding on a variation of the oft-rehearsed teacher’s protestation that those who actually come and try to do the work will have a markedly different view afterward.

The note must be made that Rosenberg is president at Macalester College. As such, he is in the kind of position against which Graeber rails, so it is understandable that he would rail against Graeber and those like him, in turn. And that position might well make readers somewhat suspicious of claims Rosenberg makes; he has a vested interest in the opinions of others about the validity of his job, so arguing against those who would question that validity is to be expected–and it is easy to overreach in such an argument.

That it is easy, however, does not mean that it happens. Rosenberg admits to his own culpability in propagating the myths he decries in the article. He also admits to the limitations of his data sets, acknowledging likely causes for the observations made from them (although they are themselves problematic, the more in that he is in a position to vitiate against them at his own institution), as well as the anecdotal nature of much of his discussion. While the Swiftian passage in the penultimate paragraph might come off as somewhat excessive, it is both brief and rooted in a long polemical tradition, and it is done in service to what is an essentially sound central point: if there are more administrators, it is because 1) more administration is demanded by even the compassionate, student-centered university towards which institutions ostensibly strive (let alone the technological and regulatory realities of higher education) and 2) more people are classified as administration than their job duties would normally prescribe. It is a point worth making.

And I have to add my own comments to Rosenberg’s here. I have seen no few poor administrators and staff, to be sure, just as I have seen no few poor instructors–and any other set of professionals that could be named. But I have also seen college deans teaching introductory classes at eminently undesirable times (5 to 9 or 10pm on Fridays. for example), and I’ve had others who’ve back me wholly when the inevitable complaints from students have arisen. At the same time, I have complained about “the management” as “the enemy,” and I have railed against administrators who have not taught the classes they oversee in years, if ever. The truth, I think, lies somewhere between Graeber (in this regard, although not in others, as I’ve noted) and Rosenberg–and finding it, finding any truth, is something worth doing.

Care to support these endeavors? Send a little help my way!

On 25 May 2018, Adam Kirk Edgerton’s “What’s Wrong with Being from the South? Just Ask an Academic in the North” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. The article opens with an anecdote from Edgerton’s undergraduate life in which the idea of escaping his upbringing is voiced, leading to an explication of prevailing academic presumptions against the rural South. Edgerton moves on to treat the mutually reinforcing effects of those presumptions on both academic populations and those who inhabit the rural South before decrying the reactionary impulses on both sides–including their historical grounding. The author also notes that the historical grounding that is typically presented serves to oversimplify matters, and that academics tend not to question that particular oversimplification, which situates geographical identity in much the same way that racial/ethnic and gender identities are by those populations academics would decry. Edgerton offers a gentle rebuke of the mental laziness involved in accepting the oversimplification and returns, at last, to the idea of the contradictory identities of displaced Southerners in (Northern) academe.

I cannot claim to come from the same circumstances as Edgerton, to be sure. I am from the South, true, but the Southernness of Texas is not the same as the Southernness of the Carolinas (and that of San Antonio, in the shadow of which I grew up, is more different still)–and my family is Midwestern, so that I never was as immersed in the South as were those around whom I grew up. Too, I am a cisgendered heterosexual white man of British descent, raised ostensibly Protestant by two veterans of the US military, so that I occupy quite a few positions of privilege. I am I cannot speak on the matter with Edgerton’s force. But I can speak to it, because I am also a Southern man who has been involved in academe elsewhere than the South (in New York City and in Oklahoma–and the latter is not the South, despite its strange desire to be so), and the…disdain in which the overwhelming majority of the South is held (Austin and New Orleans seem to be the exceptions), of which Edgerton writes, is not unknown to me.

This is not to say the South does not have its share of problems, of course, and even Texas. There is too damned much of each of racism, homophobia, sexism, and religious discrimination, there is too damned much jingoism, and there is too damned little regard for reflection and thought. But that is also true of other parts of the country. I have had to have pointed conversations with Midwesterners who made comments about “knowing how those Mexicans are” more often than with Texans, and to rebuke locker-room talk of certain epithets in New York City more than even in Lafayette, Louisiana. I have heard comments about “you people” from passengers on New Jersey Transit trains more than on VIA buses–all while being told that “racism is a Southern problem; we don’t have that up here [in the Mid-Atlantic].” And I’ve heard no few times the disbelief that I do not (normally) carry the accent/s around which I grew up from people alongside whom I’ve taught, or who hear me talk at Kalamazoo or elsewhere, when they learn that I’m from where I’m from.

I’m glad, therefore, to see Edgerton’s piece and to see the issues it raises get some attention. I’m less so that the issues are there to get the attention, but if they have to be, then, as Edgerton puts it, they ought to push all of us “to ask how academe might better speak to all regions of the country.”

Help me keep these responses coming! Send a little bit my way!