Bill Janus
History
Western Montana College-UM
Cary Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical issues a political wake-up call to all tenured university Liberals in the United States. Nelson's book does not speak to academic Conservatives. Nor does he conduct a dialogue with students, unemployed Ph.D.s, untenured faculty, campus administrators, the general public, or political leaders. He exclusively addresses tenured Leftists, many of whom he sees as selfish, lazy, and naive careerists. He attempts to reform these Liberals however, and he tries to mobilize them to become an aggressive Realpolitik-practicing advocacy group that will fight for Left-wing economic, political, social, and academic agendas. Nelson is unabashed in his political partisanship and he makes no apologies for his obvious bias. Nelson decries the fact that today universities are abandoning their primary goal, which is to foster and promote intellectualism, to become profit-making institutions where administrators "downsize," often by eliminating tenure.
[C]olleges now argue over whether every department needs to include at least one full-time, tenure-track faculty member. The alternative is a faculty of part-timers who are given their marching orders by bureaucrats with no disciplinary expertise and no intellectual commitments beyond cost accounting. When tenure is gone, then anyone who questions corporate authority can be summarily fired. (4)
Why is this occurring? It is because there is a glut of unemployed and underemployed Ph.D.s competing to fill any and all job openings, no matter how exploitive and unrewarding they may be. "There are now people who have spent their whole professional lives--twenty or more years--on the margins of the academy, making do with part-time work, cobbling together courses at multiple institutions, going on unemployment, covering their own health insurance when they can" (5). Yet according to Nelson, most tenured Leftists fail or do not want to recognize this fact, and refuse to actively oppose such an outcome, an outcome only they can prevent. "These are the people with the greatest protection for their free speech and, moreover, the people with the greatest potential for commitment to the institutions in which they teach" (4).
Nelson has identified a very critical problem facing higher education, the over-production of Ph.D.s, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The problem is that Nelson himself offers no real solution to this quandary other than a few insignificant job-producing proposals (i.e. offer more postdocs, encourage retirement); the one workable resolution he does suggest goes against his politics--the closing of marginal doctorate programs and the prevention of new doctorate programs from being created (185). Throughout his text, Nelson eloquently argues that higher education is the only proven means for the under classes to rise above poverty and become the equals of those better off (8), yet he proposes to circumscribe graduate school access. He never resolves this major contradiction and it leaves the reader frustrated.
But why do tenured Leftists ignore today's economic trends (which should be the antithesis of their entire political and philosophical world view) in their workplace? Nelson has a devastating answer. "[S]ome faculty members see the profession as a whole primarily as an audience for their scholarship, an applause track in the background of their lives celebrating their personal accomplishments. When they wonder whether the job market will improve, they look for an answer to the only evidence that signifies: their publications [they get published, hence the job market must be healthy]" (7). Nelson's chief example of such callousness for those less privileged in academe is the recent fight by Yale graduate students to unionize, a goal that was vigorously opposed by such noted tenured Leftists as Sara Suleri, Nancy Cott, and David Brion Davis (143). Graduate students teach the bulk of courses offered at Yale, they are in relative terms grossly underpaid, and most will never work within their profession. Despite this, their Leftist professors/mentors saw unionization as a personal affront, and they complained that a graduate student strike would force them to assign and turn in grades themselves. "Many are unable to recognize, let alone analyze, the contradiction between holding a progressive position in one area of their professional life and a repressive one in another" (144).
Another more benign reason for such insensitivity is simple naïveté, a faculty view that graduate education is an "initiation into transcendent mysteries..., [a] means by which our most sacred secular knowledge passes from one generation to the next" (172). So, TA's, and adjunct faculty are not workers, they are holy acolytes doing divine work. Under those circumstances it is easier to say "[h]ealth care for me but not for you" and "living wages for tenured faculty only"(6). I must agree, Nelson's characterization of tenured faculty's ignorance of today's job market seems to hit the mark. Unfortunately, recent Ph.D.s universally have too many similar anecdotal illustrations. Perhaps tenured faculty cannot halt economic trends, but they certainly can acknowledge that they have colleagues on the economic margins. Ultimately, Nelson's main thesis is a challenge to tenured Leftists to practice what they preach, but to do so by employing practical means. For example, he takes "radical" cultural studies leaders to task. How can they fight, he asks, the destruction of the traditional university mission, and advance their politics when they view the traditional conference structure (divided by speakers and audience) as "intolerably oppressive and hierarchical" hence abandoning this empowering structure "at the very moment that disenfranchised populations were finally gaining access to the stage" (71.) Or, how can they legitimatize themselves when Gayatri Spivak opened a cultural studies lecture "by disingenuously declaring how relieved she was to be presenting a lecture that was not destined to be immortalized in a book" (60). These examples apoliticize cultural studies (robbing it of spokesperson leaders), and they make cultural studies appear unprofessional, something Nelson believes they are not. In Nelson's opinion cultural studies have finally tackled the study of the history and culture of the under-represented majority of the American people (women, immigrants, African Americans). For this reason alone, cultural studies are important to him, but additionally, he believes cultural studies have the singular ability to make students become aware of the underprivileged experience, something Conservatives would choose to ignore for political reasons. For Nelson, this is a major cultural/political war that Leftist faculty must not lose to their Right wing opponents.
Without doubt, "radical" cultural studies have helped revolutionize the traditional discipline of history when it comes to examining and giving value to under-represented Americans. However, I think Nelson is guilty of making two arguments here that are flawed. First, traditional historians for the past forty years have already been writing a critical history of under-represented Americans, a fact that he ignores. Second, if cultural studies adopts a traditional academic role as he advocates, its entire raison d' être will cease to exist. Cultural studies will become a mere duplicate of what then will be its well established "betters," the disciplines of history, modern languages, and sociology. Such co-option within the "system" may rob cultural studies of the wonderfully distinguishing feature it possesses--the ability to freely experiment with new academic methods. It is the freedom cultural studies enjoys which helped cause traditional historians to examine the lives of the under-represented Americans in the first place, and if cultural studies loses this freedom, who knows when we may get innovation again?
Obviously, Nelson also offers his views on the state of English curricula throughout the nation. On the question of theory, he does not make the mistake he made when writing about cultural studies. He encourages the study of theory, but he criticizes those who canonize specific theories. For instance, he accuses feminist theorists as installing their own brand of "literary reverence," and of being already semi-"co-opted" by the early 1990s because they were "securely institutionalized in many places, from departments to publishers' lists" (22). Nelson sees such persons as contradicting their own philosophy, and he sees them as putting themselves in a position where they will resist new ideas and be in league with Conservatives when it comes to protecting their academic and economic positions vis-à-vis their less fortunate colleagues.
Nelson's text is an excellent read. Its title is very apt. Karl Marx's manifesto was aimed at revolutionizing the working classes of the world. Nelson attempts to revolutionize apathetic tenured Leftists. He wants them to finally be all that the Right accuses them of being--academic partisans who promote their socio-political philosophy to students, within academe, and throughout society. He wants truth in advertising.