A belated tribute to "The Jobless Juris Doctor"

Alas, the blog of that name is now moribund (he's looking for work fulltime so had to ditch blogging commitments). I never got round to linking to his provocative post, "Students Pay So Professors Can Play". To make up for this blunder, I'm posting two clips in the same embittered spirit as the musings of the Juris Doctor. They too leave no doubt that there are a lot of bright, tragically disadvantaged people out there, so it makes me wonder how we ever let things get to this. Downward mobility and stagnation are the names of this game. I guess it will continue so long as we don't have a meritocracy. Kudos to Derridata for the humanities clip featured here. Be sure to watch "Rich People Things" if you're wondering where the class resistance to a true meritocracy is coming from.

As for me, I have another PhD to finish by next week, so as Lou Reed once said, "I have got obligations to keep/so be very careful when you speak/don't talk to me about work/up to my eyeballs in dirt/with work.

Anyway, these are the best videos I've seen since the Glenn Beck/Donald Duck masterpiece.

The Last Professors

The Last Professors is equally scathing on the hypocrisy of our disavowed competitiveness. But wait: the People’s Republic of the Humanities, competitive? Donoghue puts it a little more gently, discerning “a collective behaviour that ironically duplicates the very corporate values from which we humanists wish to distance ourselves” (26). Exhibit A: graduate school, which picks the best and brightest and then drives them to despair by demanding superlative performance in “a unique kind of competition in which the stakes are extremely high and the rules are never fully explained” (33). Exhibit B is the job market, typically experienced as “an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit” (37). Exhibit C: the still-hallowed monograph, unpurchased, unborrowed, unread, and unassailable. In all of these cases, we define success in impossible terms. And I use the first person here deliberately: there is no “they” doing this to us. Don’t believe me? Try striking up a conversation at the next academic meeting with, “We should forget about writing monographs.” It is hard not to agree with Donoghue that our research models are “clearly broken” (55).

Here and here for further details.

Thanks for the links Derridata. Have you read this yet?:

"Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation".

From the same piece:

"In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future".

How Yale Destroyed New Haven's Economy

I'm not usually inclined to reproduce personal correspondence on this blog, but this is fully deserving of as wide a dissemination as possible. It is scandalous, and confirms everything in Will Teach for Food, as well as a whole lot more. Big thanks to derridata here:

"I discovered this while listening to a talk given by Rick Wolff (Capitalism Hits the Fan). When Rick publicised this, Glenn Beck invited him on his radio show. Yes, Glenn Beck invited a Marxian academic on his show to discuss Yale's historical tax exemption and the destructive results this has had on New Haven, now one of the poorest cities in the US. And Glenn Beck agreed with everything Rick had to say on the matter".

In 2005, Yale enjoyed a tax-free endowment of just over $15 billion after a 22.3% return on its investments in 2004. (Among universities, only Harvard has a larger endowment, at nearly $26 billion.) Yale alumni created the core of the endowment in good part because gifts to universities are a tax write-off. The endowment grows rapidly in large part because the capital gains on its in-and-out stock trades are not taxed (Stein, 2005). (The fact that Yale has the enormous sums to take advantage of company takeovers and private buy-outs arranged by billionaire capital funds also helps). So the university benefits in two ways from its tax-free status, but only in the 1990s did it get around to giving $2-$3 million each year in "voluntary contributions" to the city for fire services, a figure that rose to $4.18 million in 2004. (For a January 2008 update by a New York Times reporter on the growing dominance of Yale in New Haven, click here.)

The argument about New Haven in the 1950s, a city seen at the time as evidence for the great future made possible by urban renewal, is especially poignant in terms of how things turned out there. It is now one of the poorest cities in the United States. Yale and its faculty members are islands of increasing privilege and isolation in a sea of misery. Here's how a reporter for The Observer of Manchester, England, started a story on the city

in 2002:

The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the historic green of New Haven. It blows through the "tent city" where the homeless huddle. And it blows round the spires and quadrangles of Yale University, one of America's richest Ivy League colleges.

The contrast is stark: Charlene Johnson, three months pregnant, emerges from her bivouac, worrying about the winter that lies between her and her due date. And all around are Yale's stone walls, elegant colonial churches and smart people walking past boutiques and coffee shops, carrying their course books.

"You know what's underneath you?" challenges Rod Cleary, who was released from prison in Los Angeles after a conviction for gang fighting, found but lost a job in New Haven, and has now been evicted. "I'll tell ya: bones. This green was a cemetery once; you're sitting on a pauper's grave. And, man, that's what it's going to be again if we ain't careful."

The contrast this reporter draws between Yale and the poor is more than poetic. Although few Yalies can bring themselves to believe it, Yale contributes significantly to the basic problems caused by deindustrialization. It started taking a large amount of prime downtown land off the tax roles in the 1920s and 1930s while refusing to give any compensation, just at the time when New Haven was starting to decline as a manufacturing center. In addition, it always has paid dirt-cheap wages to its thousands of staff employees, leading to strikes and tensions in the last few decades. Peter Dobkin Hall, a historian who taught at Yale for many years, and now teaches at Harvard, wrote a detailed account in 2003 for the Yale Daily News on "How Yale Destroyed New Haven's Economy".

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/new_haven.html

repackaging precarity

“Before the invention of the art of printing, a scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly synonymous. The different governors of the universities before that time appear to have often granted licences to their scholars to beg.”

John Stuart Mill. 1848.
Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, John Robson, ed., Vols. 2 and 3 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965).
From Michael Perelman's Unsettling Economics

"To the university I'll steal, and there I'll steal," to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses
by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Precarity

Precarity - trailer
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A toolbox to investigate about the increasing precarisation of our existence