The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Viva La Evolution

Via LP

Public transport ticket inspectors with police powers. What could possibly go wrong? (more)

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

I have nothing substantive to say at this point, but thought I should keep the old thing ticking over.

I was going to post something about the lack of women at Kevin’s 2020 love-in, but the entire blogosphere beat me to it. For what it’s worth, “Women on Boards”, a “national program to improve the gender balance on Australian company boards” has distributed a press-release with some interesting points. My favourite was a quotation from Albert Einstein insisting that “you can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it.” See the presser here.

On another note, Paul Keating, with nothing left to prove and rapidly approaching the elder-statesman phase of life (and with his own musical to boot!), apparently just doesn’t care what he says anymore. Of fellow Oz opinion writer, Janet Albrechtsen, he says: “Albrechtsen is a no-talent proselytiser for causes overtaken by history and events”. Link here.

It’s fun when you find yourself back in the cool kids team.

Further evidence that when you change the government, you change the country.

According to Crikey yesterday (behind the pay-wall, unfortunately), Immigration Minister Chris Evans in a Senate Estimates Committee confessed that he was uncomfortable with the amount of power that he could exercise over individual immigration cases:

“I have formed the view that I have too much power … in terms of the power given to the minister to make decisions about individual cases,” Evans said. “I’m uncomfortable with that, not just because of concern about playing God, but also because of the lack of transparency and accountability for those decisions.”

Evans has apparently ordered a review of his own position. Crikey mentioned the cases of Robert Jovicic, and of course, Dr Mohamed Haneef, two examples of ministerial intervention into specific cases.

Of course, it remains to be seen what Evans’ review of the role of the Minister will bring, and whether, when it comes to crunch-time, he will be able to bring himself to limit his own powers.

But it is a refreshing change from the days of centralisation and big government.

A list of shame: the MPs who avoided Parliament yesterday when the Prime Minister formally apologised to the Stolen Generation. May their names ever be blighted.

Lib MP denies Stolen Generations exist | The Australian

(Via Larvatus Prodeo.)

I was recently talking with Toby Miller, who is an Honorary Professor in the Centre in which I am based, and it came out that in California, and presumably in the US as a whole—the most hyper-capitalist nation on the planet—the issue of the privatisation of water is a taboo topic. As Toby said, “You can’t even think it.”

This seemed incredible until Toby explained that water in the US is seen in terms of a natural right, rather than a resource. When Americans are told that in Britain and other countries the water is owned by private companies, they shake their heads in bewilderment. As they should.

I wonder what it would take for water in Australia to be embedded within a discourse of rights, rather than a discourse of resources? Quite a bit, I assume, given the private investment in infrastructure, and the profitable market for trading in irrigation licences.

Still, it’s nice to dream.

First a disclaimer: I absolutely adore BBC motoring show Top Gear. I’m not a petrol head, but the repartee between the three presenters is classic, and Jeremy Clarkson’s staunchly non-PC delivery is one of life’s guilty pleasures. Even the actual reviews—always of cars that cost more than I will earn in my lifetime (“Now we get quite a few complaints that we don’t feature enough affordable cars on the show, so we’re kicking off tonight with the cheapest Ferrari of them all”)—are beautifully, cinematically filmed: car-porn, even for the terminally disinterested.

The head of the Queensland Police Union tells the citizenry to suck it.

Mr Fitzpatrick said the Government’s decision was “bad luck” for critics of the stun guns.

“I am sick of visiting police in hospital, I’m sick of daily ringing police who’ve been spat on, who’ve suffered serious bodily injuries,” he said.

The 150 deaths from Tasering over the last 7 years in the US alone? Not something Fitzpatrick is sick of, apparently.

Sometime in the last week, while I was eating far too much fantastic Italian cuisine in Melbourne, the Meme’s second anniversary passed unnoticed. It seems a little arrogant to attempt a retrospective on our first two years, when it has been the better part of two months since the last substantive posting, but I should take the opportunity to thank our regular readers (if there are any left) and as always, to encourage you to engage with the debate.

I was prompted to write by the confluence of three things that happened today that all hit a chord…