Category Archives: Writing

There’s quite a lot of discussion about crisis in my book, both in terms of the two historical crises (the Great Depression and World War II) that had such a profound effect on the teaching of English, and in terms of the contemporary crisis, which I argue is less about pedagogy than it is about institutional power. Academics have allowed others to control our professional lives.

There’s not a fundamental crisis in funding, or in the market for English majors, or the use of part time labor, or the rising costs of tuition. (See this “Redesigning Today’s Graduate Classroom” for a recent example of these misconceptions.) The crisis is symptomatic of working people in academia who no longer believe in the power of organizing together towards collective goals.

The attacks on unions in Wisconsin should be instructive to academics. The budget crisis wasn’t caused by the unions, and it won’t be solved by breaking their power. The attacks on the unions is about trying to shift power away from democratic control so that money and capital can be moved out of the public sphere and into private hands. It’s simply a redistribution of wealth.

Markets are not natural phenomena; they are shaped by more or less explicit policy decisions. We can’t reshape the market for liberal arts graduate students simply by teaching them differently. We have to seize control of the mechanisms of policy and create a market that suits our goals. The only way to do that is to organized ourselves into unions. Right now, the rest is fiddling.

Rahm Emanuel, mayor elect of Chicago, famously said ““You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Conservatives made a lot of silly hay out of this (this one claimed that the economy would probably “recover on its own”) but Emanuel was, as usual, simply being ironic and blunt about political reality. In particular, he meant that the financial crisis allowed the administration to introduce regulations– and stimulus money– that it could not do otherwise.

I don’t think the Obama administration has gone far enough with financial regulations, or stimulus, but the point remains: we hate regulations until the economy collapses, and then we bemoan their absence like a long lost lover. The politically unfeasible is now politically necessary. That’s what the Republicans believe justify their ongoing attacks on workplace democracy, including legislation in Ohio that specifically targets faculty unions. It’s Big Lie rhetoric.

In fact, polls show that the public disagrees with the attacks on collective bargaining. Perhaps as a result, the governor of Wisconsin seems poised to negotiate the very compromise that he said he would never accept. The real crisis, I think, which I hope the unions in particular will take advantage of, is the sense of powerlessness that a majority of Americans feel, as their standard– and quality– of living continues to erode. It’s not just jobs.

It’s a long term structural problem created by more than three decades of income redistribution from the poor, working and middle classes, to the rich. The attempt to destroy the public sector unions– the last bastion of real power for working people– has been the final straw for many people. We cannot fix the budget problems unless we begin to revitalize democracy via card check reform and address the taxation inequities that have created the mess.