The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Brisbane-based, News Ltd daily, The Courier-Mail, has an expose on the flagrant misuse of taxpayer’s money by an arrogant, elitist, money-grubbing academic at UQ. His crime? He went to a conference! Shock! Horror!

Link here

In this case, Assoc. Prof. Jacobs was an invited speaker at an international conference…

Viva La Evolution

Via LP

Everyone, but everyone, in and around universities needs to sit up and take notice of the debate around Marc Bousquet’s work on academia and employment. Listservs have been going crazy about it, following a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (‘How the University Works’: Required Reading for Higher Education – try here or here (last link for subscribers only).)

What I find profoundly challenging, and to be honest, shocking, about Bousquet’s work is that he presents a spirited attack on what, for want of a better term, we can call the ‘market discourse’ around jobs for PhDs. He is particularly critical of the (fairly ubiquitous) suggestion that the problems of the academic job market can be solved by restricting or reducing the ‘supply’ of incoming graduate/PhD students.

Sample paragraph: “Ultimately, the notion that the employment system can be controlled by the administration of graduate programs (that is, by reducing PhD ‘production’) has to be seen as profoundly ideological. Even where there is a vigorous effort to diagnose the nature of the labour system, the ideology of the market returns to frame the solution, blocking the transformative potential of analysis that otherwise demonstrates the necessity of nonmarket responses.” (p. 209)

Bousquet’s point is that the ‘market’ for assistant professors / teaching staff shows no sign of vanishing. Students need to be taught; papers and exams need to be marked. There is a pressing and real demand for teaching staff in institutions. His solution is that the wages of all adjuncts and assistant teaching staff should be raised to the level of faculty. Unions may yet have a role to play.

Strong stuff.

Meanwhile, Leslie Madsen Brooks offers a round-up of recent blogging on the concept and reality of academic tenure.

Reference:

‘The Rhetoric of “Job Market” and the Reality of the Academic Labor System’
Author(s): Marc Bousquet
Source: College English, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Nov., 2003), pp. 207-228
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594266

Just lately I’ve been reading Mel Gregg’s Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices. She recounts Richard Hoggart’s description of the working class living room and his points about the obstacles to academic activity faced by the working classes when they are unable even to find a private space to read quietly. Mel associates this with the transitional phase after the Second World War when scholarships and more universal education opened the universities to the working classes for the first time and many students were the first in their family to have the opportunity.

This part of the book came back to me as I was reading an article this evening in preparation for a tutorial tomorrow . . .

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the CSAA conference in Adelaide, particularly so as there were so many senior academics there. I know that time spent at conferences such as CSAA is a big commitment for them, with relatively little payoff, but for those of us who are just starting out they have much to teach. I’m not talking about the content of their keynotes and papers, but about things that are perhaps more important – we can read their work in journals.

The so-called “teaching” panel at last week’s CSAA conference was high-jacked by discussions about the disciplinary position of cultural studies in Australia and New Zealand. It was a pity, because the relation of teaching to research in the academy is important, but obviously people wanted to talk about the related issue of disciplinary relevance.

The discussion started with Angi Buettner demonstrating that as a discipline, cultural studies does not exist in New Zealand: rather, all institutions offer media studies at the undergraduate level. This was followed up by Chris Healy talking about the positioning of cultural studies at Uni Melbourne. I want to engage with this discussion, and hope that others will share their perspectives, because I’m feeling very pessimistic about the future of CS, and I hope I’m wrong. So please leave a comment.

I see the apparent decline…

I’ve been attending the Australian Academy of the Humanities Annual Symposium on “Humanities Futures” and the place of eResearch in the Humanities. It’s really interesting stuff, and many of the papers move beyond the standard call to digitise the archive, and on to considerations of archival formats, meta-tagging, and standardisation. It a timely call, as the digitisation project is gathering pace, and more and more public and private archives are being made available online.

What worries me however…

October MACS
12 October 2007, 2:30pm – 4:00pm

Seminar Room, Level Four, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland

Special Guest: Prof John Quiggin

The final MACS for 2007 will take up the recent debates that have been occurring in various places—notably on the Cult-Stud and Fibreculture lists—about Facebook and other social networking sites, and address what has become almost a mini-moral panic about the values and pressures of maintaining an online presence through SNS, blogs, online publications, and so on, and how this helps or impacts on our ability to research, write, and develop professional contacts…

Sometime colleague Richard Nile has a provocative piece in today’s Oz:

THE PhD is a dinosaur from a previous age of elite education. It has failed at least one generation of research scholars and continues to fail the overwhelming majority of currently enrolled candidates.

A radical rethink would be justified.

I’d like to stir the possum and canvass two options: enrolments could be slashed by at least 50 per cent with a doubling of scholarship and research support funding; alternatively, the degree could head in the opposite direction with an overhaul to take into account the employment prospects of those two thirds of students who will never find full-time employment within the university sector.

Read the full article here.

A discussion is starting to build in the comments: feel free to join in.

I’m not sure if they are trying to tell me something, but two friends have independently emailed me to say that Queen guitarist Brian May has completed the PhD thesis he started in 1971. Read about it here…

OK, I’ve been going for a while, but I’m not that extended!

And anyway, how much do you reckon the physics of interplanetary dust might have changed in 30 years? I mean, how much additional research did he have to do, I wonder…