An und für sich

If anybody has gone through or participated on any level with a university interview, this scene from Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial will look very familiar.

Due to some travel-related problems I have been asked to fill in for a speaker who is unable to attend the upcoming Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier hosted at King’s College London. It looks like a very good conference and I like the laboratory aspect of the event (check out the conference program for “specimen texts”). This, though, seems like a Renaissance idea, no? Though, of course, history is in many ways a nominalist discipline. Anyway, I’ll be presenting on angelology, building off of work I’m doing for an article and the theorist of darkness Ben Woodard will be responding. I’m looking forward to doing this with Ben since our work is generally on the same material, but we work from very different axioms and frames and come to very different conclusions. Since disagreement is often more illuminating and more interesting than agreement that should make for a vibrant encounter.

Tactically speaking, I fully support the effort to push for regularizing the vast population of permatemps in the academy and turning back toward tenure as the normal condition of employment for academics. At the same time, I think that the desire to return essentially to the way the academy was structured during its American heyday under Fordism is inadequate, because arguably we are still working within the very same structure today.

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By formal disciplinary classification, I’m a political scientist, so I was at this year’s American Political Science Association meeting. As well as attending a number of panels on political theory, and giggling at what the “science” side of the discipline is studying, I went to a number of panels about the political challenges facing universities. This included Cary Nelson, President of the AAUP, talking about the association’s call for tenure for all “long term” teaching staff. This is good as far as it goes, but that doesn’t seem to be very far; everyone (and not just academics) should be protected from being arbitrarily fired, but simply expanding tenure to all academics employed for more than six years would largely leave intact the casualization of academic work and the managerial relationship to students that are characteristic of the neoliberalization of universities (though Nelson does say that tenure for adjuncts must include the right to participate in faculty governance, an aspect of tenure which, to the extent it still exists, is a site of resistance against the administrative take over of universities). More generally, it seems to me that when valuable institutions are under attack, it’s rarely sufficient to simply defend the status quo, especially when, as with universities, that “status quo” has existed more as some kind of perverse regulative ideal than as a reality for, what, thirty years?

This defensive stance was also in evidence in a paper by Wendy Brown on the importance of the liberal arts. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, I received an e-mail from The International Journal of English and Literature, asking me to review an article entitled “Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of L2 Learners’ Performance in Essay Writing and Two Correction Tasks.” I declined the invitation, as I have not the foggiest idea of what that article could possibly be about — which of course brings up the question of where they would have gotten my name in the first place.

Could this be peer review spam? The website for the journal doesn’t immediately jump out to me as spam, though it may be. The “editorial assistant” has a Gmail address and sent the request to my Gmail address rather than my academic address (which I do admittedly tend to use for most purposes other than things immediately relevant to my classes and department for the time being, given that it’s permanent and some academic processes can take years and years). Has anyone else received anything similar?