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Berkeley, California 12 September 2004 Jeff: I too lost
my job for taking a public stand, at the University of California, Davis,
though frankly I would have lost it anyway in a year or two, so I didn't have
much to lose. I'm better off now as
union staff, I think. The perks of
working at UC as non-tenure faculty (teaching in an advanced composition
program) were more illusory than real. In any
case, as a UC lecturer and then as union staff, I've been caught up in many
battles that illustrate your thesis dramatically. The timorousness and tunnel vision of so many tenured faculty
in the humanities in the face of the imminent apocalyptic destruction of
their profession (does that seem too melodramatic?) is profoundly disturbing
to me. It's amazing how people with
such highly trained analytical minds can lose their analytical faculties
entirely when certain topics come up.
Unlike faculty with tenure, lecturers at least have an excuse, as they
can actually lose their jobs. Your
book gives a nuanced account of the indoctrination process that really
explains why academic freedom, by the time it comes, if it ever comes, is
meaningless. I've witnessed the way
the selection and indoctrination works. Of course,
not all academics are cowards or stooges.
A few have considerable courage and vision. But those qualities are far too rare. It took some time for me to realize that's no accident. I'm
constantly thinking there's a book in the stories I witness and live through
daily -- but how to find the time and the courage to write it? I mean the courage to take on a project of
that scale. I'm not afraid of taking
controversial positions, but I'm very torn about how to write a book and
continue doing my job -- the very conflict that you lost your job for
acknowledging, of course. And yet
writing a dissertation was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life,
and I did it while doing a completely different (non-academic) job nearly
full-time. I stopped teaching and
after a year and a half doing office work, got a job as a private
investigator -- not an exciting or academic job but somehow what I needed to
free me to finish that dissertation on sonnets. I'm one of
those who went into graduate school without much of a sense of the career
(other than a conviction that I wouldn't fit in) -- just an attraction to the
subject. I never had any idea how to
work the system or do what it takes to get ahead -- didn't get that kind of
advice and only realized that I probably needed such advice at a very late
stage. Don't know if I would have
taken it if I got it. Your account of
what happens to such people is extremely comforting to me -- this kind of
experience is so isolating that it's wonderful to read a structural analysis
and think about that experience as one I've really shared with others. I had
terrible writing blocks for a lot of the time I was in grad school -- your
book sheds light on that too. A
writing block is a kind of ambivalence and resistance, though at a level that
isn't understood. The confusion is
part of the syndrome. One is horribly
ashamed of that struggle, but perhaps it's not really something to be ashamed
of. The last
time I went to the annual Modern Language Association convention (a huge meat
market for language and literature faculty hiring committees and applicants),
I attended a workshop for grad students newly on the academic job
market. Four or five faculty members
gave talks about how to sell yourself, etc.
It was pathetic. In what is
really a job lottery rather than a job market, these speakers gave the most
absurdly individualistic, commonplace, and largely useless advice to people
about how to present themselves professionally to hiring committees. Their talks usually started off with some
wryly humorous acknowledgement of the near hopelessness of the rapidly rising
odds against finding a tenure-track job in the field, and then proceeded as
if that had not been said, as if most of these people could actually hope to
land a decent job if they just presented themselves in the right way. I stood
up, introduced myself as a former University of California lecturer with three
degrees in English from UC Berkeley who now works for a UC lecturers'
union. I said I had come to hear what
they were telling these new graduates, and I found it depressing though not
surprising that they were so entirely focused on telling people how to get
ahead individually in a race that most of them couldn't win. I said it would be refreshing if, just
once, one of these speakers would actually address the entirely dismal
prospects most of these new grads -- the younger generation of academics --
now face, and would invite them to think about their situation collectively
-- as a shared problem, a structural problem. I suggested that as tenured faculty, they might actually want
to make some effort to analyze and work on this crisis in the profession. I think I suggested that they might have a
responsibility to do so (and implied that they might be shirking it). I'm not sure I was quite that coherent (if
this is coherent), but I made my point well enough that I think there was a
brief, painful silence. It was
gratifying to say these things publicly in a place where such things are
never said. Three or four of the
people in the audience thanked me later. Your book
gives the kind of help I was trying to suggest we all need -- an honest
effort to recognize that there's a systemic problem, and to imagine -- or at
least imagine the possibility of -- solutions. I'm
temporarily doing some grievance work, mostly by phone, at your alma mater,
UC Irvine, since the staff person who formerly covered that campus is
leaving. Normally, my work is at the
Berkeley campus -- which is where I'm located. That's
probably more sharing than you have time for. But it was good for me to write it, so thanks for writing a
book that inspired it. Again, best
wishes. I hope you get reinstated or
find something better soon. Let me
know if there's any other support I can offer. Michelle
Squitieri Field
Representative University
of California - American Federation of Teachers Local 1474 Berkeley,
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