Posts in category: Work

I’m on sabbatical, but this post goes out with an affirmation of solidarity with everyone getting down to fall teaching in this low dishonest decade. It’s a bad time for teaching. On top of social and political crisis, there’s AI. Or rather, as part of said crisis, there’s AI. It is exhaustingly present everywhere you turn, even when you have retreated to your sabbatical bunker—perhaps especially there, if you are in your sabbatical bunker, as I am, to study the institutions of genre fiction. I am studying how, for a century, Anglophone culture and society developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, many people have turned to for its seeming copiousness and its openness even to those with few literary and economic resources. Meanwhile, in the past decade, Anglophone culture and society have developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, people are turning to in order to fill the internet with garbage text while filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and filling the pockets of some astonishingly awful people with more money than you can imagine. So here’s my idea: like the development of genre fiction, “AI” is the product and beneficiary of a significant transformation of literacy—that is, the production and use of writing—and its role in the distribution of social rewards.

Following the example of Chris Newfield, who has returned to the unversity-finances-blogging fray after a hiatus, I went and looked at Rutgers’s potential losses from the initial onslaught from the current federal government.

It’s been a while since I checked in on the statistics for what is laughingly called “the job market” in English for PhDs. But after a few demoralizing conversations with people looking at the thing from various angles (I was the one doing the demoralizing), I realized I wanted an updated version of a chart I last made in 2017, comparing new English PhDs and new faculty job openings. There was a pandemic in the interim.

…Well, on YouTube: with my comrades on our union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, I was on a panel about following the money at Rutgers, which you can see a recording of here. I talked a bit about the erosion of tenure and the rise of full-time non-tenure-track faculty positions. It’s a subject I have blogged on more than once before; those earlier posts give more detail about the data and analysis I used. Then I indulged in a little speculation and imagined—in the mode of Chris Newfield—two futures, one dismal and the other not, for the public university.

The whole program was pretty fun (despite a brief technological stumble near the end), with good questions from the audience too. Here’s a link to the slides I showed (slightly edited, with links to sources).

FOLLOW R MONEY
How the Rutgers Budget Shapes Our University
Thursday, October 13, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Michelle Gittelman (Management and Global Business, RBS-Newark)
on the central administration’s money vacuum

Andrew Goldstone (English, SAS-New Brunswick)
on new ways of undermining tenure

Juan González (Communcations, SCI-New Brunswick; co-host, Democracy Now!) on where the COVID relief money went

Mark Killingsworth (Economics, SAS-New Brunswick)
on athletics’ financial future or lack thereof

I watched some of my own performance, which probably wasn’t a good idea. Let’s just say I’m not about to be the next TikTok sensation.

In my last post on casualization at Rutgers, written November 2021, I discussed statistics on the rise of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty, arguing that this was an increasingly significant yet under-discussed aspect of the broader erosion of the tenure track. I promised then that I’d follow up on some of the details about different categories of faculty and of institutions. Would my dire picture of “twilight for tenure” change if I separated non-medical from medical faculty, or if I paid attention to faculty with non-instructional roles? Well, I’m pleased to report the picture is dire no matter how you paint it. I’ve been looking at the more granular information on higher-education staffing found in the Human Resources data from the Department of Education (specifically, the “Employees by Assigned Position” or EAP data files from IPEDS). Here are some tentative explorations, vacillating between being tediously technical and speculatively broad-brush. Skip to the end for my regular “workers of the world” conclusion followed by faculty-casualization league tables for research universities.

The basic question is, what are the terms of employment for people doing academic work in higher education? The EAP data answer that question by classifying workers at each institution as tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, or “without faculty status,” dividing each category into full-time and part-time categories and according to whether they are in medical schools or not. The EAP survey also subdivides academic workers’ duties into instruction, research, and public service—as well as further categories like librarianship, archiving, and “Student and Academic Affairs.” Graduate workers (“graduate assistants”) are treated as another employee category, assigned either to teaching or research (and medical or non-). That leaves us with many possible ways of cross-cutting or subsetting the data about tenured and contingent academic work. (Obviously such categories do not exhaust the interesting variables; for example, the EAP data does not include any demographic information about each category. These are found in other IPEDS components, which however do not subdivide job categories with the same granularity.) What I want to do here is explore—without being exhaustive about it—whether the divisions matter to our understanding of contingency in the academy. I’m hoping that even if my analysis is wanting, the annotated R code on github, as “tidy” as I can make it, might help others get a leg up on working with this data.

Violating my resolution to never click through to NYT higher education coverage, I went and read a report on the scandal over Columbia’s US News rankings. That rankings are “reactive” is not exactly breaking news (see Espeland and Sauder and Fourcade), but the article is worth it for two reasons. The first is the line in my title, which describes Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia math professor whose analysis is the basis for the story. The second reason is the link to the analysis itself, a highly entertaining exercise in checking Columbia management’s dodgy data. I recommend the analysis as an education in the value of looking things up in IPEDS, the Common Data Set, audited financial statements, and other public data sources. And as a reminder that there are many paths to radicalism, including those that go via algebraic geometry.

Eight years ago, I taught an undergraduate literary theory course with a section on the history and theory of the English curriculum itself. I spent some time looking at the University Archives’ collection of Rutgers course catalogues in order to make a selection for students. One of the pleasurable discoveries was the English listings of Livingston College in its early years (here 1971):

My colleague Jeff Lawrence has just published an essay in the Chronicle Review: Who Owns Your Academic Community? There are so many good points that I was having trouble choosing which to quote-tweet. But then I realized: I’m not tweeting. So instead of locating the most RT-able, like-able, fire-emoji-able sound-bite, I can just tell you to read the whole thing. Jeff shows that social media is a hopeless pis aller for intellectuals and the scholarly community. Two years of pandemic isolation has made it possible for the fetid outrage factories on Facebook and Twitter to appear in the guise of a righteously populist substitute for exclusionary “academe”—even to academics who should know better. But there is no salvation for intellectuals to be found in the ruins of the public sphere, least of all in the extremely limited possibilities of so-called “public scholarship.” Without scholarly institutions, there can be but few scholars.

I add as a footnote that the dynamic Jeff describes is recognized by Pierre Bourdieu as an established tendency in the cultural field. One of the characteristic positions in this field is that of “internal anti-intellectualism,” the practice of denouncing the values of intellectuals themselves as a mere disguise for self-aggrandizement. Some of the force of these denunciations comes from the fact that, of course, some intellectuals of high stature are indeed terrible people. And people who are marginalized within the intellectual field are, says Bourdieu, “well-placed to discover the contradictions, weaknesses or pettinesses which go unnoticed by a more distanced reverence….But the objectifications of the intellectual game inspired by these intellectual passions remain necessarily partial and blind to themselves: the resentment of disappointed love leads to a reversal of the dominant vision, demonizing what it once made divine.”¹ Social media has proven even more effective at disseminating this distorting and demoralizing vision than the cultural journalism of print and broadcast mass-media (or as we now call them, “legacy media”) that Bourdieu had in mind. Jeff’s point is that social media has proven far less effective as a substitute for the kinds of interaction that allow intellectuals to organize collectively in defense of their own institutions and the integrity of their own values.

Far be it from me to abstain from joining academics the world over conducting their sortes Joyceanae in search of an appropriate line for the day. Combing through my old notes got me the title of this post (“Eumaeus,” 16.1153), but what follows falls at about the level of late-night Bloomian rambling.

Or, the committee to review the committee to review has reviewed the review and issued its review review.

My union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, which I am part of, just put out a new report on Rutgers’s Responsibility Center Management budgeting system: Reviewing the RCM Review: What Five Years Taught Rutgers About a Broken Budget System. Some time last year I imagined that committee doing a full-scale independent investigation of this baleful budgetary scheme, which has abetted privatization and austerity at countless universities. But the work was slow getting going, and in the meantime something weird happened: management did it for us, sort of. A high-level committee of deans and vice presidents produced an RCM Review Report, issued in June, whose findings are as damning as the most radical university budget-critic could desire. It baldly concludes that the budget model is bad for “Ph.D. education, arts and humanities, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and those [initiatives] that support students or further the university’s public mission.” In other words, almost every worthwhile goal of the university; elsewhere the report notes that the sciences are ill-served too.

Of course, that was not how management treated the results of its own proceedings: the report has been left to sit quietly, with no apparent change in the RCM machinery. So our union committee has produced a Review of the Review to highlight for the wider university public just how dire the effects of this machinery have been.