Employment of English. Michael Berube

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       NOTES

      1. As Peter Brooks has said in his important essay, “Aesthetics and Ideology—What Happened to Poetics?”

      Students are only too willing to short-circuit the aesthetic, and to perform any kind of reading, including the ideological, that you indicate to them. What is more difficult for them—and hence more necessary—is to slow up the work of interpretation, the attempt to turn the text into some other discourse or system, and to consider it as a manifestation of the conventions, constraints and possibilities of literature. . . . Students need in the work on literature to encounter a moment of poetics—a moment in which they are forced to ask not only what the text means, but as well how it means, what its grounds as a meaning-making sign system are, and how we as readers, through the competence we have gained by reading other texts, activate and deploy systems that allow us to detect or create meaning. (In Levine 160–61)

2. One of the reasons it is useful to contest the narrative of decline is that the Right has jerry-rigged and publicized that narrative for its own purposes, and in so doing has distorted or suppressed everything that doesn’t fit the narrative. For instance, the well-publicized National Association of Scholars’ study of “core courses,” released in 1996, claimed that American universities had precipitously “declined” since 1964 in that fewer colleges required Western Civilization courses of their undergraduates. What the NAS study deliberately hides, however, is that although the number of universities offering core courses has declined since 1964, that number has increased in the past decade and a half; the reason the NAS chose 1964 as the basis of comparison, of course, is that it allows the NAS to blame the “decline” of higher education on their all-purpose scapegoat, the sixties. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, in weaving their narrative of decline about primary public schools, like to focus on 1962, the year the Supreme Court banned prayer from the classroom; the NAS chooses 1964 presumably because once the Free Speech Movement had taken hold at Berkeley, the chant of “hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go” was merely inevitable.

3. For discussion of the rise in graduate enrollments, by contrast, see Bérubé and Nelson 18–20.

4. For a more detailed version of my analysis of Readings, Guillory, and cultural capital, see my review essay, “The Abuses of the University,” forthcoming in American Literary History.

5. For a discussion of “critical cosmopolitanism,” see Robbins, Secular Vocations; for the relation between nationalism and canons, see Connor, Postmodernist Culture; Eagleton, Literary Theory; Graff, Professing Literature; and Shumway, Creating American Civilization; for “nationalist” literatures and their relation to postcolonialism, see Ahmad, In Theory.

2 THE BLESSED OF THE EARTH

      In the fall of 1995, not long after graduate students at the University of Kansas voted to unionize, affiliating themselves with the American Federation of Teachers, I was invited to speak at Kansas on the future of graduate study in the humanities. In the course of my talk, I not only endorsed the unionization of graduate students at KU and elsewhere, but also referred, in passing, to what I called the “bad faith” attempt of administrators and faculty at Yale University to claim that their graduate students were simply students and not also “employees.” As long as people are working as instructors or as teaching assistants and being paid for their work, I thought, it makes sense to consider them “employed,” to consider their work “employment,” and to admit, therefore, that they are in some sense “employees.” And if administrators and faculty at Yale or elsewhere want to claim that their graduate students’ wages are not “wages” because their teaching (which is not strictly “teaching”) is merely part of their professional training as apprentice professors, then it makes sense to call the bluff: take graduate students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and instructors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them professional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision of undergraduates. Then we’ll see how long Yale University can survive without the labor (which is not strictly “labor”) of its graduate student teaching assistants.

      At the time, I thought my support for graduate student unions—in a speech delivered to, among other people, unionized graduate students—amounted to endorsing candidates after they’d won their elections. To my surprise, however, I learned later that the graduate students were very pleased with my speech, and that some even considered it “courageous.” It seems that I had denounced as ridiculous Yale administrators’ claims that graduate students were not employees in front of a number of Kansas administrators who had claimed that graduate students were not employees. (I told the students I had had no idea that my audience included actual bad faith negotiators, and that my “courage” in denouncing them was therefore attributable to simple ignorance.) I asked them what other kinds of opposition the union had met; they told me of faculty in department after department who had insisted that the unionization of graduate students would disrupt “morale” and destroy the delicate, collegial relationship so characteristic of, and necessary to, healthy interactions between graduate students and faculty. When I asked these students whether their faculty had entertained the possibility that delicate, collegial relationships don’t normally involve one party dictating the other party’s interests and threatening punishment if party number two failed to act in what party number one had determined those interests to be, I was met with bitter laughter. It would be one thing, I was told, if the faculty’s relation to graduate students were simply paternal rather than collegial; that would be undesirable but understandable. “But Michael,” said one union leader, “half the faculty who spoke to us about the importance of faculty-student collegiality didn’t even know our names.”

      Nothing, СКАЧАТЬ