Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Review corner
Haven't done one of these in a while ...
My current musical obsession is the 1983 recording of Brahms' Violin Concertos featuring Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy. If you're in a bad mood with the State of Israel (and we all are, from time to time), I heartily recommend it as the best kind of evidence that the original Zionist dream of creating a state (and specifically a socialist state, something unaccountably forgotten by non-Israeli Zionists) was at its heart motivated by the best kind of aspiration.
An actual violinist could presumably explain to me how it is that Perlman's tone seems to be so much fuller and more rounded than any other violinist I've heard; it's almost like Jacqueline du Pre's cello at points in the Brahms recording. I suspect that it might have something to do with the painstaking recording done by good old EMI back in the days when people spent money on this sort of thing, or even that there is something to do with the fact that he plays sitting in a wheelchair rather than standing. But lying back with a glass of wine and listening to the confident, lubricious, opening section of the Second Concerto, I couldn't help hearing it as the sound of a Jew at ease with himself. Perlman was born and grew up in Israel; he was three years old when the State was formed; unlike almost any other great Jewish musician you care to mention, he didn't have the diaspora experience. The contrast with his accompanist's approach to Romantic piano playing is extraordinary; Ashkenazy was a Soviet Jew and he approaches the piece with massive nervous energy; he always seems to be pushing the piece frantically forward. Perlman is sitting back and relaxing, letting Ashkenazy wear himself out doing the heavy lifting while savouring the warm, open melody for himself. You can clearly hear that one of these men has got demons and the other one hasn't. Although I have very little time for most of the things that the Israeli government does, particularly when Likud are in charge, the truth has to be recognised that this music could not have been produced if the Jewish people were still living as guests and squatters everywhere in the world. And for this reason it reminds us not to always judge them too harshly when they fight like tigers to protect something that they lacked for a very long time.
On a similar theme, my other current musical obsession is "The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People". It's a reissue of a 1970s anthropological recording originally titled "Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia" and it's fantastic. The mbira is a thumb-piano, made out of strips of metal that vibrate when plucked and placed inside a large gourd which acts as a resonator. It's a sort of deep guttural sound halfway between a stringed instrument and a xylophone or marimba and the music played on it is astonishingly complex in its polyphony. It's a somewhat humbling experience to listen to it if you're white, and particularly British, as the sleeve notes to the reissued edition tell us that several of the players featured were executed in the revolution which brought independence to Zimbabwe. But more than that, it is a racing certainty that some time in the nineteenth century in Africa, the British put a genius of the calibre of Beethoven onto a slave ship and didn't even realise we'd done it.
Finally, I'll briefly point out that if you liked the Norah Jones album, a) you sad cliched thirtysomething bastard and b) you will find that you like Eddi Reader Sings The Songs Of Robert Burns (with the BBC Scottish Orchestra and various Jock musos) much better. Trust me on this one. One of my minor magical powers is "music retail luck", in that I can walk into a record shop and I don't need to look at what I'm buying in order to know that it's going to be both unusual and good. I would normally have recoild in revulsion from this one because a) Scottish (minus a few points) b) Robert Burns (minus a few more, though I must say I'm warming to him) c) Eddi Reader has known form with both "folk" and "jazz" music d) the cover photograph has a rather alarming chin sticking out of it. But I actually picked it up by mistake while reaching for the CD behind it, and when the universe hands you something, it's usually a good idea to buy it. I must say I didn't regret it; it's a great record. As I say, trust me on this one.
Tomorrow, books ....
Update: Askenazy and Perlman play the Brahms Violin Concertos? Sonatas, you bloody idiot.
posted by the management 7/10/2003 11:59:00 AM
Crooked Timber
I'm a terrible academic groupie, as you might guess from the posts below. I really would have loved to have had a career as a prof; the only thing that stopped me was the realisation that it would involve being financially dependent on my parents for another three years. So I'm really quite chuffed to be joining Crooked Timber, the new group blog that's setting the world on fire. I think I'm the only person there who doesn't work for an academic institution. They're all frighteningly highbrow, which is why I decided to come out all guns blazing with a post more or less entirely made up of obscure literary references to Jorge Luis Borges. In all honesty, it might have been a bit more impressive if the references hadn't all been to stories in the same Penguin anthology, but I think I got away with it.
I'll be keeping D2D going at roughly its current rate of (in)frequency of posting, however. For one thing, it can only be a matter of time before I get found out and chucked out of the Crooked Timber gang. For another, there are a fair few things I like doing that wouldn't really fit in there because they're too long, contain obscene language or excessive facetiousness, or are only concerned with personal hobby-horses of mine. And also because I'm incredibly vain.
Everyone who likes this weblog will like Crooked Timber much more. If you're worried about the number of weblogs you find yourself having to keep up with, might I suggest that Matthew Yglesias' site has begun to suck a bit recently and is probably the best candidate for pruning from your bookmarks.
posted by the management 7/10/2003 10:52:00 AM
Friday, July 04, 2003
A Solution To The Adjunct Problem
OK people, it's Friday evening, and I'm having problems with "Big Post Error", so I'm going to keep this short and sweet and say what I think. Our problem, outlined below, was that the adjuncts are trapped in a situation in which their existing jobs are crap, but they can't bear to leave the academy because they consistently have an unrealistic hope (possibly one inculcated in them by ruthless professors, possibly one to which they are temperamentally inclined anyway) of getting a fantastic job as a proper professor. My solution to it is simple and rather than build up to it, I'm just going to say it.
If tenured professorships are such great things and recently graduated PhDs want them so much, they are presumably willing to pay for them. Universities should sell their professorships, at whatever price the market will bear.
Hear me out. This isn't a piece of hypothetical neoliberal Panglossian market-boosterism, despite appearances, it's a very well thought-out proposal to return to a system that has already been thoroughly tested and worked very well. Commissions to be an officer in the British Army used to be bought and sold in the nineteenth century, and so did "livings" for parish priests. There was even considerable price discrimination; smarter regiments and more agreeable parishes sold for higher prices. Commissions had to be bought from the regiment, but livings for priests were advertised in the classified columns of the Times. Trollope wrote about little else but the buying and selling of these positions in society. I presume that the defence of the realm and the cure of souls are no less important than the "sacred guild of scholars", so I will not be taking any objections on the grounds that there is something fundamentally immoral about taking money for an academic post rather than awarding it to the man or woman who has most enthusastically brown-nosed prominent co-authors on journal papers.
Note that I'm not proposing a free market free-for-all here. Just as one had to actually be an ordained priest to purchase a living, and had to actually commit to taking the risk of being shot to be an officer, colleges should only be allowed to sell tenured jobs to people who can actually put "Professor of Humanities" on their business cards without raising a laugh. But if you think about it, as well as providing a natty source of funds which could be used to better the condition of adjuncts1, the introduction of a market in tenureships would have a number of highly desirable side-effects.
First, it would massively lessen the psychic pain of PhDs who don't get tenure. As Michael Young wrote in "Triumph of the Meritocracy", the burden of failure is particularly painful in situations where the social arrangements puport to be judging people on their intrinsic worth as human beings. I don't believe for one minute that the current tenure-track system actually does this, of course, but it certainly acts like it does, and it is powerfully difficult to remind yourself that it doesn't. If, on the other hand, not getting a professorship was simply a matter of not having been able to afford one, then presumably people would feel about as bad about it as they do about not being able to afford other expensive luxuries ie not very much at all.
Second, it would most likely encourage PhDs into the non-academic workplace. If the career structure for a humanities scholar went graduate school - job - save money- buy professorship, rather than graduate school -- adjunct -- horrible worrying and brownnosing -- maybe get awarded professorship, then we'd most likely get more well-rounded, experienced and worldly-wise professors of poetry, which would probably compensate for the dreadful rich kids who would also benefit from a market in tenured jobs. Equally importantly, because not everyone would bother to get back into the academy, we'd have more accountants, shopkeepers and management consultants with PhDs in poetry, which surely to Christ has got to be good for society. An embarrassing amount of the best work in most fields has been done by people not attached to a university.
Third, a lot of the problem of adjunctry as far as I can tell is the dearth of decent information for someone when they enter graduate school about what kind of job prospects they actually have. You can bet your life that if these things changed hands for money, there would be a whole cottage industry in telling you about them. One of my neighbours is the publisher of "What MBA" magazine and he drives a better car than I do. I daresay he'd be happy to start publishing "What Humanities Professorship" if the market was there. People would also take the academic career decision a lot less lightly if they knew about this major hurdle, rather than just assuming that getting to the top in academia is just a matter of continuing to come top of the class.
If anyone really thinks that there would be a terrible problem of impoverished geniuses being excluded, then I daresay that people like the MacArthur Foundation could buy up a few professorships every year to distribute among the needy. I'm frankly not in the mood to bugger about with the details. The only downside I can see to my plan is that it would mean that most likely the academic world would be dominated by fiftysomething white males. To which I can only reply "and that differs in which way from what we have now?" It's perfect.
1I said could.
posted by the management 7/04/2003 09:58:00 AM
Monday, June 30, 2003
Adjunct pay
And finally ... on to the "adjunct pay issue". I've read up voluminously on this topic on the internet and jolly boring it was too, I have to say, so after a while I gave up and thus may have missed significant factual information. If I've got anything wrong, please tell me and I will first attempt to explain it away by pretending it's a difference between the UK and US systems, and failing that, become nasty.
The adjunct pay issue is one of a perceived oversupply of humanities PhDs relative to the number of jobs for them in academia. Because of this oversupply, lots of well-educated people with qualifications in English, History and similar are scraping by from hand to mouth on what they call "adjunct" jobs, which are poorly paid short term contract teaching posts, which are created in order to allow the existing club of "full professors" to avoid the onerous duty of teaching undergraduates and free up their time for writing long papers for academic journals. I shall follow general usage by euphemistically calling this latter activity of writing papers for academic journals "research", without wanting to commit myself on the question of whether it is actually research or not.
As a way of organising part of the labour market, it's got more or less nothing to recommend it. The adjuncts are doing a crap job for crap wages, with the result that they never have time to carry out the "research" that they need to do in order to publish things in journals to get a "tenure track"1 job within the charmed circle. Meanwhile, the poor buggers on the tenure track have to spend their time managing the adjuncts and writing completely dull and pointless papers, not for any scholarly reasons but in order to get them published in order to maintain an impressive enough list of publications to keep up their own status and keep their jobs. The only people who the system seems to benefit are a small crew of academic stars (most of whom appear to be stars on the basis of having published popular works anyway, and thus don't even need academic jobs), plus the university administrators who manage to run something that looks to the outsider to be pretty similar to a univesity, except that the teaching is worse and it's a fuck sight easier to administer because you are dealing with casualised labour rather than unionised academics.
A side issue to the debate is that the adjuncts don't want to form a union, partly because they appear to be a bit snobby about the concept of themselves as working class, and partly because they (probably correctly) think that getting a reputation as trouble-making union organisers will mean that they have once and for always pissed on their chips with respect to getting a "proper" academic job as opposed to the burger-flipping, undergraduate teaching one they have now. And partly, of course, because they are arts graduates and therefore are temperamentally prone to think of things in incredibly impractical terms and waffle on about "higher values" and "the sacred guild of scholars" whenever the suggestion is raised that they might want to complain about their wages. Or at least, their employers tend to feed them this line of bullshit and they don't laugh it off anything like as often or as hard as they ought to.
So anyway, that's the adjunct crisis, my version of, and on to the analysis.
First up, I think it's very unhelpful indeed to analyse this as a question of an "oversupply of PhDs". Too many PhDs for what? I am reminded of the old libertarian line when faced with the suggestion that London (or New York, or Monte Carlo or wherever) "has no affordable housing" - what are all those people doing living there then? In general, the complaints about the "oversupply of PhDs" come from people who actually have a job in academia, performing the functions of a university professor. So in other words, there appears to me to be a prima facie case that there is, in fact, a decent balance between the number of people we are training to be competent to teach humanities subjects to undergraduates, versus the number of undergraduates who want to be taught humanities subjects. I've had a fair old look around, and have turned up surprisingly few stories of people with humanities PhDs actually flipping burgers. I've seen lots of stories about people with humanities degrees doing middle-class jobs (like being accountants and such like) that they could probably have got with just an undergraduate degree, but this hardly seems to be a problem to me. There are any number of reasons someone might be entering the non-university labour market at age 26 rather than 21, and I don't see any particular reason to believe that people who make this choice do so for any other reason that they've decided that they want to.
So in other words, I don't believe that there is an oversupply of PhDs relative to the vacancies. The problem appears to be in the quality of the jobs on offer; they're crap. The problem (and I do not wish in any way to dismiss the very real human suffering I've read over the last week or two; most of the people who have written on the subject appear to me intelligent enough to take a bit of good-natured mockery. When I say that there is no adjunct crisis, I mean it in the same way as one talks about an "acceptable rate of unemployment" ie acceptable to those who have jobs) appears to be that there are people who hate their current lifestyles, but don't want to make the choice to find a different one. Because I'm not a neoclassical economist, I take this problem seriously.
[continued below ...]
posted by the management 6/30/2003 10:40:00 AM
[continued ....]
But the first problem has to be to treat this as what it is; a labour dispute. It's not a "crisis of scholarship", nor is it a "scandal of the denigration of teaching as against research". It's not even a "closed shop of existing faculty". It's a dispute between employees and their employers over terms and conditions of employment.
Consider this. Are the newly minted PhD/adjunct's really bemoaning their fate because they can't all be the Goerge Washington Plunkitt Professor of Practical Politics at New York University or some similiarly well-endowed post? I don't think so. Whatever Brad and others think about the systematic tendency of PhDs to overestimate their own prospects for academic success, I seem to get a feeling of genuine grievance in the complaints from the adjunct proleteriat. It's not just a matter of them not having turned out to be as successful as they hoped; they actually think that their current fate is an injustice.
And I think that the reason they really feel aggrieved is that what they wanted was tenure and they haven't got it. And when you clear away the thickets and fog of "community of scholars", "guild system of values", "sacred trust of learning" etc, the reason that people want to have tenure is that once you've got it, they can't sack you. It's a Job For Life. Which is a very, very pleasant thing to have, or so I am told in travellers' tales or the senile ravings of old men who claim to have been alive when such mythical beasts walked the earth.
That's the good thing about being a "tenured professor" or being on the "tenure track". It allows you to look forward to a day when you don't have to worry about the possibility of losing your income2. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the academic career path is profoundly attractive to people whose personalities tend toward insecurity and low tolerance for being exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. These are after all people who have got where they are by passing exams, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that lots of these people will have passed exams a lot because they have studied a lot, and have studied a lot because studying has been a way of controlling their anxiety about their general vulnerability to things and events outside their control. The PhD track are also people who have elected to keep away from the big bad world on completion of their undergraduate degrees, and their role models and mentors are all people who live in the easy world of tenured income certainty. To then expose them to considerably more income uncertainty than, say, an average second-year graduate trainee at a consultancy firm seems pretty cruel.
So at the end of the day, the "adjunct crisis" is just the problem of the labour market overall; it's one of insufficiently long-dated labour contracts, which have been imposed by people who want to shift their operating risks onto their workers, and who enjoy a side-benefit of forcing more unrewarded labour and effort out of those workers as they attempt to get back to the level of income security they want. It's part of the same shift of the burden of risk onto the shoulders of those least well-equipped to bear it and away from those whose natural social function is to bear it. The adjunct crisis is just felt particularly badly by a particularly articulate group.
Tune in toward the end of the week for my shocking proposal for a solution ...
1I have never seen so much incomprehensible fucking jargon in my life. I'm not at all sure of the meaning of any of these terms. Etymology gives no clues at all and they're not even descriptive. If at all possible, just use them as empty signifiers.
2I also suspect, but can't yet prove, that a very significant motivating factor for all those would be writers who "have an urge to express" is that writers are paid in royalties, which is a little bit like owning capital. Certainly, this would fit in with the almost mystic reverence that people of my acquaintance seem to have for royalty statements; hacks like me tend to view them as bitter reminders of past failure to ask for a big enough advance.
posted by the management 6/30/2003 10:40:00 AM
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Education stew. Parody of true expression; no more poetry
The adjunct pay bit is coming along nicely, but I found myself engaged quite ferociously in a digression which I felt was best posted separately, as it made the tone of the whole thing more bitter and incoherent than it needed to be, and it lacks the analytical depth which I was aiming for. Fundamentally, the subtext of intellectually snobbish rage in the following piece sums up my dissatisfaction with the modern teaching of humanities; while I have picked on a particular point of irritation because it looms disproportionately large in the world of things which drive me to anger, consider it to stand as metonym for much of what passes for a liberal arts education these days. Anyway, with my theme:
*Ahem*
Does anyone out there know what a haiku is?
Why yes, yes, we learned it in school. It's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen syllables, divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables.
Wrong, fool, it's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen Japanese syllables, etc, etc, etc. What you learned about in school was a completely pointless exercise in attempting to transfer a verse form which makes sense in its native language into a language in which it doesn't make sense. Japanese doesn't have word stresses in the way in which English does, and all the words in in vowels, so the concepts of rhythmic metre and rhyme are pretty alien. Conversely, Japanese syllables are well-defined and unalterable, while English ones are often ambiguous and elided. Furthermore, I read on the internet that classical Japanese haiku actually have (rather like the Welsh englyn) many other restrictions on their form, so it is actually quite difficult to compose one which sticks rigidly to the rules. In English, the answer to the question "can you compose a haiku?" is basically the answer to the question "can you count?". ( Proof.)
And yet there are still people in the world who believe themselves to be showing off their intelligence and even, ye Gods, sensitivity, by attempting to "compose" haiku extempore. I've seen it happen in real life as well as on the internet (obviously)and in Simpsons episodes about precocious kids. It's horrendous. The fact is that, unless you have decided to adopt some restriction of English metre or rhyme, the haiku is free verse, end of story. The intellectual effort needed to fit the seventeen syllables is equivalent to solving crossword puzzles in one dimension. It's much less intellectually challenging a form than the limerick, for example; damn few people can write a good one of those.
How the hell did the haiku get so popular? I can only blame English teachers. Nobody, apart from a few freaks, Orientalists and other statistical anomalies, would have bothered with trying to import this form into English otherwise. Obviously, as with so many abstruse and foreign forms, Ezra Pound has to cop some of the blame for introducing the English speaking world to the bloody thing in the first place, but I find it rather difficult to believe that a single one of these 456 people has ever heard of him (yup).
The point is that the haiku has the considerable advantage as a form of verse that it can be written badly with next to no mental effort. It is therefore an ideal verse form to teach to people who are too thick to be worth teaching and who don't want to learn; for example, computer science students on compulsory liberal arts courses. Furthermore, it's easier to mark than free verse; it's just a matter of counting to seventeen and checking that the line breaks are in roughly the right place, optional caesura, optional seasonal image, ten out of ten for you little Clyde and no messy embarrassment at having to tell someone that their precious piece of self-expression is no bloody good. The haiku cult allows you to sit down and perform a quick, straightforward quantitative check to see whether what you are reading is poetry or not, and how many of us could do with one of those? And so, a hundred thousand kids every year get an embossed certificate notarised by the government to tell the world that they're not devoid of an inner life. Talk about grade inflation.
If you're thinking of writing a haiku, don't do it. Or at the very least, don't share it with anyone. If you can't avoid that, at least try to keep it secret from me. This isn't pure intellectual elitism. I'm in general rather in favour of people trying to write poetry and one day if I get drunk, I might inflict some of my own on you lot. Bu what I'm against is people kidding themselves that they're writing poetry when they're just solving not very difficult puzzle-games. As noted above, I blame modern society for being set up in such a way as to systematically reward the business of distracting people from what they might be capable of into formulaic and uninteresting, but socially acceptable commodified forms. I note with a degree of sardonic humour that if I am right about the reasons why haiku are popular with English teachers, the root cause of the haiku epidemic in the English speaking world is exactly the dulling of artistic sensibility identified in Uncle Ezra's own "With Usura" ...
Update: It appears that not everybody agrees with me. Very well then, I fight dirty. Try reading through your slim volumes of Basho after I inform you that if a haiku has the right number of syllables, it can be sung to the tune of the first three lines of "Agadoo" by Black Lace.
Agadoo, doo doo
Push pineapple shake the tree
Agadoo, doo doo.
posted by the management 6/17/2003 12:42:00 PM
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