Thursday, July 31, 2008
Choice Quote: Bousquet #6
This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works.
From “The Rhetoric of the ‘Job Market’” (204-5):
Under the current system of academic work, the university clearly does not prefer the best of most experienced teachers; it prefers the cheapest teachers. Increasingly, that means the creation of nontenurable full-time instructorships and other casual appointments, a casualization that has unfolded unevenly by discipline and is especially pronounced in English and writing instruction. In this instance, Bowen has again simply applied the dominant logic and assumed that, even within the context of a general assault on the tenure system, “of course” managers would hire the best “doctoral product” available. From the posture of common sense, it seems reasonable to assume—as many people have—that the replacement of tenured positions with “full-time” term contract positions means that person holding doctorates will be awarded those jobs. The fashionable notion that we have an “oversupply” of degree holders sustains this assumption: many graduate faculty imagine that their students who don’t get tenurable work will be leading contenders for contract positions, in which, it is further assumed, they will pursue the scholarship, teaching, and service that they would have done in a tenurable position, albeit on a more sped-up basis, less well paid, and without the protections of tenure. While it is true that numerous degree holders seek and would gladly accept these positions, the facts are quite clear: holders of doctorates have not enjoyed a preferential status for those jobs. Non-tenure track positions have been awarded to persons with the doctorate in numbers large enough to substantially reduce the overall percentage of Ph.D. holders in the full-time workforce.