Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Mythology of dwyl in the Neoliberal Marketplace of Academic Labour

Abstract

I thought i was lucky when I landed my first contract academic faculty (CAF) position right after I finished my comprehensive exams for my doctorate. That was twelve years ago. Like many others, I thought this was beginning of a long line of employment that would eventually land me in a tenure-track job. I loved my job as a teacher and a researcher. I was doing what I loved, and I figured that this love would carry me through to a full-time career. This was not necessarily a naive point of view, as many of my CAF colleagues were doing that. But in past twelve years there has been a radical shift in academic labour market. Not only are there a small number of tenure stream, or regular academic faculty (RAF), positions, there are so many contract academic faculty that even securing enough courses every semester to pay rent is becoming a precarious situation. There are too many CAF fighting over too few crumbs, and for some only recourse to ensure a livelihood is to formally grieve when crumbs don't come one's way, a situation that further alienates RAF from CAF. But love was not enough. Doing what I loved would still leave me in a precarious position every year and constantly under threat of being bounced from my courses with every new hire, curriculum review, or teaching overload of an RAF that department undertook. My feelings resonated with Miya Tokumitsu's article Name of Love originally published in Jacobin, 13 January 2014, and reprinted in Slate two days later. In article, Tokumitsu shreds DWYL (doing what you love) mantra, arguing that it actually works to reinforce exploitation and functions as the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. The mythology of DWYL is deeply entrenched in academia. Choosing to continue in school instead of entering labour market immediately after high school, then choosing to take valuable asset of an undergraduate education and go back into academia instead of entering open labour market where one could (in theory) make much more money, is underpinned by romantic notions of academic labour as being fulfilling beyond its monetary compensation. But, as Tokumitsu points out, DWYL rhetoric has a dark side; it works to legitimate divide of academic labour between RAF and CAF by individualizing realities of academic labour as loving This mythology is embedded through academic system and functions to hide structural conditions that value PhD labour for graduate student but not for graduated student on job market. First, DWYL is a tool to justify exploitation and devalue labour. Only certain jobs are ascribed a DWYL; there is little DWYL rhetoric to justify labour of accountants or ceos who are allowed to be motivated by compensation packages and not passion. Instead DWYL functions as a means to extract cheap or free labour by making certain types of work feel like non (Tokumitsu). DWYL is middle-class version of it's better than nothing rhetoric that is used to justify meager wages of working poor. These are stories told by capitalism to justify existence of precarious, poorly paid jobs that are structurally designed to lock workers in. DWYL locks workers into academic piecework of CAF by deflecting attention away from real problem. Implied in DWYL rhetoric is that one gets stuck in a CAF position, never winning an RAF job, because one didn't love profession enough to get prestigious grant or right venue for publication that would have made difference in job market. What is erased from this debate is a dialogue on how structures of universities have shifted to rely on precarious, just in time academic piecework as their main labour force. In neoliberal marketplace, DWYL shifts conversation away from structural realities to individual deficits. Secondly, with DWYL we can ask, What is to love? …