Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
any large university anthropology, English, or history department and you will meet faculty and graduate students who feel personally empowered by decades of innovative disciplinary and multidisciplinary work. Yet those same hallways may be peopled by adjunct and part-time faculty who cobble together what is at best an uncertain, nearly impoverished existence on the margins of their disciplines. And those intellectually ambitious graduate students, as they near completing their degrees and start contemplating the disastrous job market, will begin to wonder if they have any future in the field they have come to love. A graduate student who had just completed defending his dissertation in the fall of 1996 turned to me and said, “Now I can see the tunnel at the end of the light.” The tenured faculty rarely think of such matters. Focused on their careers, they assume we all earn our fates. The scholarship of the last half century has not, unfortunately, encouraged many of these people to ask searching questions about academic culture. Meanwhile, if we have any doubts about the difficulties we face in healing ourselves, we might recall that bond-rating services consider it a sign of financial health and good management if universities make heavy use of adjuncts: it shows they have a flexible (disposable) work force. This is a book about these contradictions.
It is also a book that sometimes offers radical solutions to the problems confronting higher education as it approaches the next millennium. My title, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, is, however, both serious and ironic. The book is very much a manifesto for a series of progressive cultural commitments within academia. As the country has moved to the political Right, such commitments have gradually been radicalized, and the notion of the tenured radical, first popularized by Roger Kimball, has now established itself within popular common sense.1 As far as the Right is concerned then, I am a tenured radical, a status I must view somewhat whimsically, but which I am nonetheless willing to claim as a provocation. Notably, no one seems to get equally upset about untenured radicals, since it is the aura of permanence, invulnerability, and cultural warrant around tenure that makes tenured radicals an affront. Of course no contemporary “tenured radical” with a sense of history would put him- or herself in the same company as beleaguered university radicals in the 1950s or those radicals outside academia who risk everything in the causes they serve. My field of operations is not the mountains of Mexico but the groves of academe. But I believe in the importance of higher education as a field of work; Manifesto of a Tenured Radical draws on some decades of left-wing pedagogy and research to make a series of statements about what higher education must do to heal itself.
Manifesto thus examines the dynamic interrelationship between the intellectual and political present and future of the academy. Of course higher education’s controversial commitments to research, its fractured sense of community, its economic peril, its limited capacity to reflect on its disciplinary divisions, and its troubled political and cultural image are already in conflict. What this book seeks to do is to describe these realities clearly and convince readers to take their interrelationships seriously.
I use my own discipline of English simultaneously as a representative case and as an exaggerated instance of forces at work widely in the humanities and throughout higher education. More narrowly, I also use my own period specialization in modern American poetry repeatedly to show how a faculty member’s teaching and historical research can have wider social implications and can be positioned in relation to contemporary debates. More perhaps than any other discipline, literary studies has reformed and opened its intellectual life in such a way as to fulfill a commitment to democratic values. Yet because English departments often hire large numbers of graduate students or part-time faculty to teach lower-division courses, the discipline also harbors some of the most exploitive labor practices in the academy. In English, therefore, democracy is fulfilled in scholarship and betrayed in the workplace. As in other disciplines, some of those who have helped lead the field’s intellectual revolution are among those most indifferent to the fate of their more vulnerable colleagues. When we turn our attention to the workplace, part of the vanguard becomes a rearguard. The discipline as a whole is in almost complete denial about these contradictions. Yet they must be addressed. I have tried not only to say why that is the case but also how the process of reform might begin.
English has also been at the forefront of the culture wars of the last decade. That has puzzled some commentators, but on reflection the prominent position of English seems unsurprising. First, its size makes its scholarship more visible. Its widespread responsibility for freshman rhetoric or composition requirements means that large numbers of students are exposed to English courses. The discipline has also played a large role in formulating the theory revolution of the last twenty-five years and demonstrating its relevance to textual interpretation. And finally, more than any other disciplinary caretaker of high cultural objects, literary studies is articulated to our sense of national identity. Far more members of the general public feel they have access to (and a modest stake in interpreting) novels than symphonies, paintings, or classic works of philosophy. National literatures are often sites of struggle over cultural and political representation, and the disciplinary organization of literature into national groupings frequently serves myths of national exceptionalism and conflict over national identity.
So the debates over symbolic investments in the changes in English studies have been singularly intense. And if some of those outside the university have been willing to use developments in literary studies to delegitimate and defund public education, many inside higher education have simply ignored the material conditions in which they work.
Part of what is startling about faculty passivity and indifference is its blindness to anything except short-term self-interest. Longer-term self-interest—even self-interest focused on, say, a five-year plan—would suggest that some collective action to secure individual options is now critical. Thus many scholars scramble to publish their own books and essays, without troubling to notice that the whole system of university press publishing is dying. If they did notice, they would be ill-prepared to take collective action. Meanwhile, the cost of printing scholarly books keeps increasing while the number of copies sold has declined steadily for nearly two decades, in part because library budgets are falling farther and farther behind acquisition costs. A scholarly book that could easily sell 2,000 copies in 1970 now regularly sells but 500, and some sell even fewer copies than that. All over the country English professors are doing research for books they will not be able to publish. Nevertheless, the enterprise of writing traditional literary criticism continues despite the fact that opportunities to publish it will soon be nearly nonexistent.2
Whether this problem really matters is another issue. Publishing books that virtually no one will read is perhaps not a national priority, but books that could make a difference will likely be threatened as well. This is not, in any case, one of the issues I take up here, but there are other crises that clearly do matter, and, like the one in scholarly publishing, they can only be addressed by collective action. One such crisis is the declining percentage of tenured or tenure-track faculty among college and university teachers. 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.3 Despite media and legislative assaults on tenure, its real crisis is one of gradual diminution, as retiring faculty are increasingly replaced with part-timers, adjuncts, or graduate assistants. The precise pattern varies, with many private institutions relying heavily on adjunct or part-time faculty and many public universities employing graduate assistants, but the trend away from permanent, full-time faculty appointments is nationwide.
Tenure will thus gradually disappear—not with a bang but a whimper. There may never be an event or a critical decision that provokes a national confrontation over the issue, though the 1996 effort by the University of Minnesota Regents to eliminate almost all tenure guarantees will certainly test faculty resolve. The Regents’ rules would make it easy to fire tenured faculty or cut their salaries not only for programmatic but also for political reasons. Meanwhile, some junior colleges 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. Do any faculty members think such a system would serve students well? Hardly. Yet