::Click::

A young American's self portrait in London, 1987.

As Jerusalem is claimed by each of three different religions for their capital, the central yummy-receptor on the psyche's ventral surface is fine-tuned for: mother-love, addictions, and narcissistic supply.

"I was promised an improved infancy..." --Hart Crane
"This is a tragi-comic age: tragic because it is perishing, comic because it continues." --Kierkegaard

One cannot claim that Shakespeare was genius of human affairs while also claiming that America is somehow immune to the depravities explored in his plays.

When I teach Hamlet, which I have done almost every year since 1996, I warn my students of the creepy presence of the unspeakable in the murder of King Hamlet the Elder and the corruption that the cover-up requires. I bring this home to them by invoking the Assassination of President Kennedy as I teach the Elizabethan drama of assassination and cover-up. In fact, for two semesters at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, I taught an entire course based on four texts: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott. Students were stirred by that experience, because it merged areas of the psyche that had been compartmentalized by the ideology of the culture of capital. In other words, the students got excited, seemed to experience the growth of their own moral imagination, and turned in strong academic performances, because the course was electrifying. It was so for many reasons, but the most important is the mutual reflection of past art and present life. From a pedagogical point of view, “deep events” like 9/11 and 11/22 (the First Kennedy Assassination) are ideal for connecting students’ inner lives to the texts at hand. It is not difficult to prove that the very issues that govern Elizabethan drama are also at the heart of current affairs—provided that one knows something about Elizabethan drama, and about current affairs.

One cannot claim that Shakespeare was genius of human affairs while one also claims that America is magically immune to the vices, depravities, and cynical dialectics we find in his plays. In Richard II, Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar, to name a few examples, we see the way the world works, and it is our world. People kill and lie about it, and they always will; those lies are interesting because they are believed by people—including the perpetrators, as well as the public—who know better.

Cookie Monster's Lit-Crit Status Update:

At that point Cookie Monster turned to Grover and said, "Look -- me find poetry of Allen Ginsberg unbearable dreck, but me not going to antagonize jillion people about it. Where cookies?"

Tim Tebow, Get Ready to Throw

The gentleman with the peculiar beard and the cowboy hat is my friend Nandi Johannes. He wrote this song about an extraordinary college football player named Tim Tebow of the Florida Gators. This movie has been viewed on ESPN and YouTube by millions of people.

It's nothing like Nandi's ethereal singing "Haile Selassie gave Prince Charles a wristwatch... but the Queen took it away, almost immediately" on "Once For the Mind." But I like it.

Scary Climate Po*n

Arctic Shantytown.
"By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin." The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock

This "Arctic Shantytown" clip is from the new film, "The Age of Stupid," set a few decades hence. Here's another:

What I Just Posted to Interior about Defoliation In Texas

Dear Responsible Officials,
I respectfully implore you to stop the defoliation program which the US Border Patrol is apparently about to implement. This is a reckless, backward, destructive policy with neglected externalities that make it cost far more than it can possibly be worth. The question of whether to inflict defoliant on American soil should not be up to Texas. This requires national leadership.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6335446.html
See: "Border plants to be killed to reveal smugglers," By DANE SCHILLER, Houston Chronicle, March 24, 2009.

Gratefully,
Jamey Hecht, PhD
Los Angeles, California
http://www.jameyhecht.com

THROWING

THROWING

“Here is the mathematical formalism governing catapult ballistics. It arises in, for instance, the biophysics of an eighteen year old man throwing a baseball in Newark, or a hand grenade in Afghanistan.”

Professor Jane Doe walked straight on past her usual Friday afternoon classroom at The Brand Prestige University. Today she would deliver a 20-minute presentation not only to the 28 students of Bakelite Hall 210, but to the entire Formica Auditorium, if it filled up. Jane’s friend Emily, an adjunct in the Psych department (always in the mood for a vanilla milkshake, that one) said thousands of people had heard about it and wanted to go hear her for themselves. Townies would show up when they liked the topic. Since the start of the One Word Lecture Series, the Widgetville Township had become more and more curious about BPU and what went on within its walls.

After a BLT and a big Pellegrino, Professor Doe tick-tocked through the rotunda on her modest high heels looking at the murals. Brand Prestige had great murals. Here a line of Doughboys were roughing it “Over There,” and there a team of Soccer Women held a wall. The logos of the six major defense contractors in the United States were present as highly reflective hanging sculptures that seemed to conjure and control the light throughout the room. Each was a great shimmering 3D balloon of what was normally a flat device on a letterhead, thousands of pages of defense contractor letterhead moving through the shredders at Brand Prestige University. That was the beauty of the inflatable logo sculptures in the lobby – they made you want to use darts at them. In your private opposition to the weapon-makers and weapon-merchants, you caught yourself holding an imaginary dart that looked for all the world like a missile, lusting to throw it straight at each of the bloated emblems, and suddenly you’re no better than they are.

Jane had a head full of things to say about the topic; she was delighted with the prospect of an extemporaneous lecture on “throwing.” It was supposed to be an interdisciplinary lecture, its one-word title chosen from a hat with a hundred other lexical monads, each one written on a slug of paper folded into an amorphous wad that waited like an eager gamete to fertilize some lucky faculty member’s brain with a lecture’s worth of neural activity. This little tadpole said “THROWING.” She was a professor of English, and the institution of the campus-wide, lottery-driven lecture had been her idea. She formed a phalanx of allies in the Faculty Senate – people susceptible to her charisma – who successfully passed it. This would be around Thanksgiving, when old Michelson from the Math Department brought a fresh (still hot) dozen of his own clove honey sweet-potato pumpkin pies to the vote.

Once it passed, there began the tradition. Every Tuesday, lots would be cast; one ballot for who would give the next lecture; another for what the topic (it had to be one word) would be. Then came the delivery of the much anticipated lecture from the previous week’s winner, in a wicker gazebo seating eighty, with many a great chrome cylinder full of fair trade beans a-brewing, and real half-and-half. There was generally pie.

Jane walked up to the podium in a suit of burgundy corduroy. Her jet black hair was tied up in a bun. She began:

“My topic is “THROWING”; that’s what it said on the ballot that the Big Hat threw out. In biophysics I confess myself a barbarian, unversed in the barest rudiments of physiology, thusfar untouched by any knowledge of the calculus. Yet I can tell you a thing or two about the essence of this primal human gesture. Begin with me, then, in the Pliocene Epoch., 5.3 to 1.8 million years ago (M.Y.A.). Naked to their enemies, our ancestors had feeble teeth and a slow gait, no horns or venom, no whipping tails. We know that a moment came when hominid hands first took up external objects and used strength of arm to cast them at the dangerous animals before them. Stones first, then spears. Remarkably effective. Add a spear-launcher – one of those socketed sticks that holds the butt-end of the spear, so you can push on the launcher instead of the spear itself – and the force rises exponentially.”

Professor Doe explained the principles of torque and momentum, adding anecdotes about their origins in Archimedes and Descartes. She taught the simple lever; then the catapult; then she came to the part about the baseball and the hand-grenade, and how the arm movement isn’t so much different:

“Here is the mathematical formalism governing catapult ballistics. It arises in, for instance, the biophysics of an eighteen year old man throwing a baseball in Newark, or a hand grenade in Afghanistan. Nor are we the first generation to notice this strangely compelling versatility of the maneouver we call throwing."

With the aid of a beige 1977 overhead projector she cast on the great white south wall of the classroom these two lines of Homer:

σφαῖραν ἔπειτ᾽ ἔρριψε μετ᾽ ἀμφίπολον βασίλεια:
ἀμφιπόλου μὲν ἅμαρτε, βαθείῃ δ᾽ ἔμβαλε δίνῃ:

“This is Odyssey Book Six, lines 115-6, and it describes the ball thrown by Nausicaa, the teenage princess of the Phaiakians: Then the princess threw the sphere to one of her handmaids / But she missed the handmaid, and cast it into a deep whirlpool. It’s the same rhetorical arrangement we hear over and over in the Iliad, where the thrower is a man and not a princess; the thrown object is a spear and not a ball; the missed object is a soldier and not a girl; the hit object is some other soldier, not a deep eddy in a brook. Here’s a passage from near the end of Iliad IV:

τοῖον ἄρ᾽ Ἀνθεμίδην Σιμοείσιον ἐξενάριξεν
Αἴας διογενής: τοῦ δ᾽ Ἄντιφος αἰολοθώρηξ
Πριαμίδης καθ᾽ ὅμιλον ἀκόντισεν ὀξέϊ δουρί. 490
τοῦ μὲν ἅμαρθ᾽, ὃ δὲ Λεῦκον Ὀδυσσέος ἐσθλὸν ἑταῖρον
βεβλήκει βουβῶνα, νέκυν ἑτέρως᾽ ἐρύοντα:
ἤριπε δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτῷ, νεκρὸς δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε χειρός.

“Thereon Antiphos of the gleaming corselet, son of Priam, hurled a spear at Ajax from amid the crowd and missed him, but he hit Leukos, the brave comrade of Odysseus, in the groin, as he was dragging the body of Simoeisios over to the other side; so he fell upon the body and loosed his hold upon it.’ (tr. Samuel Butler). Both the play-passage and the war-passage use the same verb for the foul shot: hamartanein, ‘to miss the mark.’ and then more broadly hamartia [ἁμαρτία], a mistake. The term originates in spear warfare, not ethics. Sophocles seems to have brought the term into the ethical arena by having Oedipus say, ‘I hit the mark, by my own mind!’ when he boasts of having answered the Riddle of the Sphinx. In the Antigone (lines 1024-5), Teiresias the Prophet uses the word twice in two lines, each in a clearly ethical sense:

τοῖς πᾶσι κοινόν ἐστι τοὐξαμαρτάνειν:
ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἁμάρτῃ, κεῖνος οὐκέτ᾽ ἔστ᾽ ἀνὴρ

“For every human being does make deep mistakes, / but when a man has missed his mark, he is still not unmanned….” Aristotle extended the metaphorical use of military lingo to describe ethical phenomena when he put hamartia at the center of his Poetics, describing the cause of the tragic hero’s downfall as a kind of ‘missing the mark.’ Four centuries later, in the early Christian period, the Greek word hamartia had come to refer not so much to missed shots in archery, nor to career-breaking errors in statecraft, but to a vast new personal and cosmic and rather magical category called ‘Sin’.

“Now, quick: back to Iliad IV: Thereon Antiphos of the gleaming corselet, son of Priam, hurled a spear at Ajax from amid the crowd and missed him, but he hit Leukos, the brave comrade of Odysseus, in the groin, as he was dragging the body of Simoeisios over to the other side; so he fell upon the body and loosed his hold upon it. What was the biomechanics of that, dear students? Let’s work out the kinematics here. Note that it happens as he was dragging the body of Simoeisios over to the other side, meaning the Greek side rather than the Trojan side of the line of no-man’s land. Leukos was bringing the body of Simoesios over the battle-line, but the body of Simoesios brought Leukos over the line between life and death.”

Heidegger’s most tasty descriptor for the human condition was Geworfenheit, “having-been-thrown-ness.” It designates our lack of a role in the determination of the facticities we inherit on our arrival in the world: gender, body-type, native language, historical moment, and so on. We have nothing to do with determining those boundary conditions, within whose constraints we find ourselves tossed (this is one of the reasons bigotry is so absurd). Our freedom arises in the work we do within these “givens,” so our knowledge of ourselves requires them as vines require a trellis. I needed this little white slip of paper that bounced out of the hat I was shaking—it gave me my topic: “THROWING.”

(“I’m going to close with a shout-out to the fellows at Boeing.”)

Kubrick Throws Bone/Rocket At Sky, Hits Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish’s magic charm (“do your job; don't do somebody else's job; don't let someone else do your job”) defines as someone else’s job the business of deliberating the urgent moral questions of the day. At first this seems sensible:

"I am urging professors to remain silent on important political issues only when they are engaged in teaching. After hours, on their own time, when they write letters to the editor or speak at campus rallies, they can be as vocal as they like about anything and everything. That distinction is not likely to satisfy a critic like Ben Wallace, who complained on huflingtonpost.com (in response to a New York Times op-ed) that 'under Fish’s rule, a faculty member in the South in the 1950’s could not embrace and urge the idea that segregation is wrong and that students should act to remedy the situation.' That’s right. In the 1950’s the legal and moral status of segregation was a live political question working its way through legislatures and courts, which were (and are) the proper venues for adjudicating the issue. Faculty members were free to air their views in public forums and many did, but those who used the classroom as a soapbox were co-opting a space intended for other purposes. Today the situation is quite different. Segregation, at least the non-voluntary kind, is no longer a live issue; it has been settled and there is no possibility at all of reviving it. Consequently it would now be entirely appropriate to discuss it in a classroom and even appropriate for a professor to declare (as some have declared of slavery) that it really wasn't so bad. (29)"

This business about an imaginary professor saying Segregation “really wasn’t so bad” is a dead giveaway that here Fish is playing a game of bait the hippies, which might be fun but is not terribly interesting. This is the crux: “In the 1950’s the legal and moral status of segregation was a live political question working its way through legislatures and courts, which were (and are) the proper venues for adjudicating the issue.” The trouble is that these real institutions are not adequate to their ideal function. Fanny Lou Hamer marched to Washington DC with her Mississippi Delegates, but they were not seated. Legislatures and courts were indeed among the “proper venues” for settling Segregation, but had debate occurred only inside those institutions, there would have been no change, as I am sure Professor Fish would agree. He also accepts various “on your own time” avenues of political expression for teachers and students, and those would contribute to legislative and judicial progress in aggregate.

Like Fish, I believe paying customers have every right to expect a course on calculus to remain silent on the question of the Vietnam War. Within that right I insist that academic freedom must protect the professor who tells a classroom of thirty students, “Here is the mathematical formalism governing catapult ballistics. It arises in, for instance, the biophysics of an eighteen year old man throwing a baseball in Newark, or a hand grenade in Afghanistan.” To do so is to enter the students’ mental library and deactivate the Hollywood imago of the “geek”: the notion that because math itself is cold, people who pursue it tend to be cold, detached figures. A vibrant professor who included this sentence in her introductory calculus lesson would be removing obstacles to student motivation, drawing students in toward the subject, and modeling the figure of the lifelong learner who pursues unity of knowledge.

Academic freedom takes on form and contour when a teacher’s classroom utterance both (1) remains within the boundaries of the advertised academic discipline and (2) sheds light on urgent public questions of the day, but (3) without taking a position on them. Would Stanley Fish object to that? I wonder.

When I teach Hamlet, I bring home to my students the creepy presence of the unspeakable in the murder of King Hamlet the Elder by showing them the story of the Assassination of President Kennedy. In fact, for two semesters at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, I taught an entire course based on four texts: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott. Students were stirred by the that experience, because it merged areas of the psyche that had been compartmentalized by the ideology of the culture of capital. In other words, the students got excited, grew morally, and turned in strong academic performances because the course was electrifying. It was so for many reasons, but the most important is the mutual reflection of past art and present life. From a pedagogical point of view, “deep events” like 9/11 and 11/22 (the First Kennedy Assassination) are ideal for connecting students’ inner lives to the texts at hand. It is not difficult to prove that the very issues that govern Elizabethan drama are also at the heart of current affairs—provided that one knows something about Elizabethan drama, and about current affairs.

Around 2000 I started writing a book based on that course. I keep meaning to get back to it...

Three More Anti-important Lists

Remarks Rarely Uttered
I was, up until fairly recently, a rabbit.
Your Honor, I insist upon having one of the months named after me.
That was a fun swim in the lava.
Does anybody want this medical waste?
This grapefruit should be our king.
Coffee, tea, or three troubled astronauts taking liberties with a dead alligator on a bus?
I toured the hottest nightclubs of Tibet.
I'm still angry about the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.


Ineffectual Superheroes
The Walker
She-Loaf
Captain Hesitation
Reluctantman
Whateverboy
Mr. Maybe
Queen What’s-On-T-V
Dr. Mopwater
Quaalude Bob Again
Forgetterman

eBay Items of Dubious Value
Penny On Which Lincoln Somewhat Resembles the Virgin Mary
Fingernail of the Buddha in Pez Reliquary
72 Minute CD of the Buzzing Sound from the Game “Operation”
Paper Bag Containing 13 VHS Copies of “Rocky III” and a Lint Roller
Two Pictures of Meat, Torn Out of a Magazine and Glued Onto a Broken Clock
Plastic Dagger Allegedly Owned By Elvis' Cousin's Boss
Small Heap of Rice on a Glue Trap (no reserve)
RARE: Unopened Bag of Chips-A-Hoy, Circa 1989
Captain and Tennille 8-Track, Some Fire Damage, Otherwise Perfect
Film rights to the New Hampshire Tax Code

Bestsellers in the Making...

Sometimes I wonder about my writing life thus far. I've written three books, but I've never started from the right end and asked, what might sell well? I've never asked in advance, at the outset, "What can I write that will answer to what other people need to read right now?" Maybe I should. In the meantime, here are a few book ideas that I consider non-starters:

Gertrude Stein Celebrates the Integers
Most of My Fans Get Smallpox
Getting the Love You Want and Then Ruining It
Dick Van Patten’s Headcheese Cookbook
Raising Hemophiliac Bunnies the Easy Way
The DaVinci Code: Vowels-Only Edition
Prince Charming’s Prolapse Teaches Chess
Tonight, Accountancy: Tomorrow, Accountancy
Casper the Friendly Ghost Just Ate My Fingers
Aimless Celibacy For Everyone!
Kicking the Air Habit
The Gentle Art of Cockroach Massage
Let’s Circumcise the Grizzly Bears
90 Degree Angles Galore
Persistent Vegetative State for Dummies
Why You Should Do Coke All the Time
How to Swallow the Leprous Toad that is Your Fate
Your Mere Knowledge of This Title Constitutes My Mastery Over You
For the Love of Socks

Awesome University Jobs Fall from Heaven Like Rain pt. 2

As Marc Bousquet has shown in How the University Works, a 1989 document called the “Bowen Report” predicted that the mid-1990’s would see a “a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences,” with five jobs open for every four applicants. Instead, there proved to be one job for every three applicants. Let me repeat that, because it’s stunning, and because it’s one of the best summaries we have of exactly what went on: the Bowen Report predicted that the mid-1990’s would see “substantial excess demand,” with five jobs open for every four applicants. Instead, there proved to be one job for every three applicants. We were taught that the old abundance of academic jobs that had blessed our mentors in their youth (the putative ancestor of the 1990’s fictitious “excess demand”) had been based on the expansion of the American economy, and both would simply continue to the end of days.

In reality, by the end of the 1970’s growth had already shifted from the real economy of manufacturing production goods for export, to the fairytale economy (remember “Goldilocks”?) of finance and consumption. The vast deficits of the Reagan era signaled a normalization of unsound money backed by endless debt. Combined with twin oil bonanzas in Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea, this easy credit (that is, ballooning debt) created a false sense of economic security among the owning classes of the US and UK. That false sense of security was cultivated and maintained by a speculative investment market that required their “confidence” in order to function. The American dependence on debt forces all its participants–including the foreign Central banks that buy U.S. Treasury Bills–to maintain the fiction that one day, the ever-growing debt will be paid. That, however, would require that the dollar be backed by something other than the printing press and the Federal Reserve banks that loaned it into existence. The only choice for the participants is to insist (on those very rare occasions when the question is brought to bear) that one is simply betting on “future economic growth” to generate the vast wealth required to pay down all the interest and the principal. The need for this pretense (and others) led the national narrative–the journalism that drives “groupthink”–dangerously far from the solid ground of real economic and ecological events.

Just as neurotic symptoms arise as defenses against a problem that the patient has repressed down into the unconscious, the Reagan-Thatcher pathology of borrow-and-consume was a defense against the quickly repressed “malaise” of the 1970’s. Largely unremarked at the time, 1971 saw two events whose significance for American the future can’t be overstated: domestic oil production peaked in the Lower 48 states and went into irreversible decline, and the greenback was taken off the gold standard as Richard Nixon “temporarily” ended the Breton Woods accord. Those are, of course, the two sides of a single coin. Without cheap and abundant hydrocarbon energy, it became harder and harder to convert raw materials into finished goods for export, and the finance economy ballooned to fill the gap left by a hollowed-out manufacturing sector. After the international oil shocks of 1973 (associated with the Yom Kippur War in Israel) and 1979 (the Iranian Revolution), American influence brought the price of Saudi crude very low. This was perhaps the main driver of the USSR’s collapse, since oil was and remains Russia’s chief export. In managing that Saudi relationship, President Reagan was building on the work of his Republican predecessor: after all, why hadn’t the dollar collapsed in 1971 when Nixon unmoored the greenback from gold and forced it to “float”? Because around the same moment, his administration also ensured that Saudi crude would only be sold in American dollars, no matter who the customer might be. That meant the rest of the world had to produce real goods and services, trade them for American dollars, and use those dollars to buy the petroleum they needed–whereas Washington could simply turn on the presses at the Fed and print the dollars up from nothing, getting America its Saudi oil essentially for free. This is a generalization, but the gist is right.

The process is called “petrodollar recycling”: America sells dollar-denominated debt to China in the form of Treasury Bills, bank bonds, corporate bonds, and stock. In exchange for these and other American IOU’s, China sends money to the US Treasury and to US banks and US firms. These then pay their American workers (for jobs that may or may not generate real wealth, the way manufacturing and agriculture do, but finance does not), who in turn spend their dollars on cheap imported Chinese goods at Wal-Mart and Target. The Chinese who receive these American consumer dollars can then spend them on Saudi crude oil to fuel Chinese manufacturing, and the process continues. Of course, every step of this sketch is a reductive distortion, but the general pattern is accurate, and it is the pattern that is just beginning to break down. Like many cycles, it looks sustainable if you only pay attention to the moving parts, not where they originate or end up. China accumulates endless mountains of increasingly risky American paper investment instruments (over a trillion as of this writing); America accumulates staggering debts; U.S. consumers spend money they don’t have and wind up indentured to banks and other creditors; and the biosphere on which we all depend is depleted to the brink of ecological disaster. Without those four inconvenient externalities, the system is just fine.

The year 1970 was a pivotal one for American power for the two linked reasons explained above, domestic oil scarcity and the fiat dollar. This helps explain the shifting sands on which American undergraduate and (especially) graduate education has been built. “The last year in which the notion of apprenticeship had any validity for the [academic] profession,” writes Cary Nelson (in “Resistance Is Not Futile”), “was 1970.” In the apprenticeship model, a graduate student earns her doctorate by taking courses, writing a dissertation, and learning to teach undergraduates by doing so throughout her graduate education (or at least after the first or second year of study is complete). The term “apprenticeship” applies because after the PhD is complete, the fully trained PhD steps into an academic job similar to the job of the mentor who trained her. That presupposes a flow of interested undergraduates on one side, proportionally matched by new full-time teachings posts on the other side. What has changed is not a decline in the number of college students in need of instruction – there is no shortage of undergraduates. What has changed is the way universities get their teaching done: they no longer higher PhDs and pay an adequate lower middle class salary with medical benefits and a retirement provision, along with some basic guarantee of academic freedom. The faster way to say that is “tenure-track,” but the most controversial part of tenure – the alleged lifelong immunity to being fired – is not the salient point. This is: “Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or non-tenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed.” Marc Bousquet continues:

"If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could “work her way into” a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now. In almost all courses in most disciplines using nontenurable or adjunct faculty, a person with a recently earned Ph.D. was available, and would gladly have taught your other three courses, but could not afford to pay their loans and house themselves on the wage being offered… Most undergraduate education is conducted by a super-exploited corps of disposable workers…often collecting wages and benefits inferior to those of fast-food clerks and bell-hops. According to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey of 2000, for instance, fewer than one-third of the responding programs paid first-year writing instructors more than $2,500 a class; nearly half (47.6%) paid these instructors less than $2,000 per class. At that rate, a full-time load of eight classes nets less than $16,000 annually and includes no benefits… Like Wal-Mart employees, the majority-female contingent academic workforce relies on a patchwork of other sources of income, including such forms of public assistance as food stamps…” (Bousquet, 2-3).

The number of incoming undergraduates in need of professorial instruction at American universities has continued to grow; so has the number of PhD’s “produced” by graduate programs at the same universities. What has radically shrunk is the number of full-time tenurable faculty jobs where those PhD’s can be employed to do that undergraduate teaching, since the jobs have been replaced with super-exploitive “adjunct” professorships. “In the reality of structural casualization,” Bousquet continues, “the jobs of professors taking early retirement are often eliminated, not filled with new degree holders.” (80) During the same period, the number of administrators and the size of their salaries grew at alarming rates. Descriptions of the would-be new-faculty predicament were proffered by deans, department chairs, and disciplinary professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), which ministers to English departments. Those descriptions were articulated in a management discourse in whose primary allegiance is not the university’s tuition-paying clientele, the faculty, nor civil society altogether, but capital. So its terms were exclusively those of supply and demand, production and capacity. Since this presupposes an equivalence between higher education and any other product—such as the cars Henry Ford manufactured while formulating the kernel of modern corporate management doctrine—“Fordism” is the name given to the supply-side approach. The problem, from the Fordist perspective, is not that the good teaching jobs have been essentially stolen and alchemized into new stadiums, dorms, and Assistant Provost salaries; no, the problem is that too many PhD’s have been “produced” by graduate programs whose size must therefore be curtailed:

The Fordism of the discourse surrounding graduate education is a nearly unchanged survival of the dominant interpretive frame established between 1968 and 1970, when a freight train of scholarship decrying a Cold War ‘shortage’ of degree holders suddenly reversed itself in attempting to account for a Vietnam-era ‘surplus.’ (Bousquet, 190)

The now-venerable Full Professors who had arrived in the 1960’s were imprinted with (and misled by) an experience of opportunity abundance. Those hired in the 1970’s and 1980’s, by contrast, had the false impression that the conditions of their own scary-but-successful scramble for academic employment represented the worst the profession would ever throw at any fresh crop of candidates. Since they had achieved tenure anyway, surely their students, too, could sing “We Shall Overcome” and prove it true. These mentors and thesis advisors believed the Bowen Report’s fish story of an imminent 1990’s job-glut for a tangle of reasons: it appealed to their conscience (without the Report’s promise of a new golden age, they would be guilty of training new PhD’s for jobs that would never materialize: a cruel hoax); it appealed to their vanity (we strained uphill and made it to the heights, but you kids will sail downhill toward even greener pastures); and it concealed both the real situation and the reasons for it. Though the Fordist solution—curtail production of new PhD’s by shrinking or eliminating some doctoral programs and raising graduate admissions standards—was often discussed in meetings and in print, nobody ever took it seriously as an action program. Why not? After all, that program certainly sounds like it would produce the desired parity between new job candidates and the full time faculty posts they had spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of strenuous effort to earn. Because such parity was never the real goal. Instead, hordes of earnest, wide-eyed, talented graduate students are annually accepted, educated, mentored, and released into the airless chamber of permatemp poverty in order to create and maintain a just-in-time supply of casualized low-wage teaching labor, large enough to serve the ever-growing classes of incoming undergraduates.

Why does graduate student Jane Doe willingly enter what often turns out to be a lifetime of teaching for sub-poverty wages, with no benefits, no office, no telephone, no photocopy privileges, and no respect? Because at each stage, it appears to be in her rational interest to do so. At first, she accepts it as a matter of course, because she’s still a mere graduate student with no rank, who needs to teach in order to become experienced. This is the apprenticeship model she carries in her head; it is the basis of her dignity and is not easily discarded. Then, some of her classmates quit, often for lack of money to complete their studies; these continue to teach as adjuncts because they lack the PhD which the good jobs require. Ms. Doe completes the PhD. She continues to teach as an adjunct because in order to reach the eventual holy grail of a tenurable job, she must continuously keep a hand in the profession by teaching one course or more at all times. After a few years of relentless rejection from those scarce-or-fictitious tenurable jobs, she will continue to teach as an adjunct because (as even the most obtuse idealist will have realized by then) it is the only remaining way to practice the teaching vocation in such conditions. Search committees for the few real jobs that appear to open up (sometimes the funding falls through and the job proves illusory) tend to prefer the relative naïveté and boundless energy of the 28 year old gente nuova. At that point the 40 year old job candidate has fifteen years of adjunct teaching experience, three scholarly books, and a sheaf of peer evaluations: but her PhD is fifteen years old. So the credentials Dr. Jane Doe worked so hard to achieve have become not only useless, but disqualifying. Yesterday’s groomed wunderkind is tomorrow’s overqualified cynic.

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