The sign-of-the-times word in the title of this readers' forum is negotiating. In the 1980s, 1990s, and even earlier in the millennium, I suspect we'd have used the term resisting, and I am reluctant to jettison it, especially when--writing in late November 2011--we are witnessing a reinvigorated protest movement occupying key symbolic spaces and the interstices of virtual culture. Occupying carries the time-honoured connotation of working from within, and I hope that negotiating retains that meaning too. The term negotiating also may reflect a recognition that the changing conditions of the academic workplace are impossible to resist in the sense of turning them back altogether. What once appeared a specific, albeit long-running, crisis in the academic job market, we now know, was only a seismic shimmer signaling the earthquake to come, triggered by the shifting tectonic plates of global capital. We stand on an altered terrain of short-cycle economic climbs and crashes, dislocated and migrant labour pools, and mass unemployment that is structural rather than periodic. Work--academic work is no exception--is increasingly downsized, outsourced, un-unionized, de-professionalized, proletarianized, and largely part-time in status and pay if not in hours. In the last few years, I have been trying, if only in a limited way, to understand the impact of this new situation on stipendiary/sessional employment, a topic to which I'll return, somewhat parabolically, in a moment. And here is a parable, in keeping with the pre-holiday season in which I write. Our department has a lounge for staff and faculty, with a fair traffic in graduate students although they have their own lively space as well. People sometimes leave treats near the coffee machine, and this week someone contributed a tray of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies, topped with one large festive cookie with red frosting and coloured sprinkles. During the course of the week, I observed this tray with increasing fascination. No one would take the frosted cookie--indeed, people had to shift it to get to the plainer biscuits beneath--and when we locked up for the weekend, there it remained in its sprinkly splendour. That no one ate it--surely someone wanted to?--seems oddly symbolic of the values of the community we call English: responsibility and community-mindedness, with a dash of self-abnegation. In the seasonal tally of the naughties and the nices, people in English departments must get very few lumps of coal. As a fairly new administrator, I've been pleasantly surprised how easily people agree to requests (although a from a colleague who is operating on automatic pilot, eyes glazed from end-of-term marking, may not count as informed consent). But I also am aware that the ethos of yes that characterizes our discipline--the meeting and mentoring, reviewing and networking--is increasingly difficult to maintain. We spend our days in a workplace with frozen resources and chopped services, new mandates for accountability and measurability, pressure to inaugurate and expand graduate programs, and the inflated demands of short-stay administrators (mission creep? Surely it should be mission sprint.) We all know the toll this takes, in the forms of chronic fatigue syndrome and repetitive strain injuries, missed writing deadlines, free-floating guilt, and a flattened or foreshortened intellectual life. I wonder if we all imagine ourselves, in our secret heart of hearts, as an academic Aeneas, battling improbable odds. The Angel in the House might be more like When there were cookies, she took the plain one: when there was a committee, she sat on it. The late November context that forms these reflections finds new PhDs competing for twenty-three tenure-track positions available in Canada. While more may be added, the fact that there are fewer postings now than at the low-point in 2009-10 following the economic downturn (and endowment death spirals) is a quick indicator that underhiring to the tenure track is becoming normalized. …
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Jan 1, 2014
Casey G Swinkels + 1
Open Access
