Invisible Adjunct

"Lynne Cheney of all people"

I've just finished reading Marc Bousquet's "The Rhetoric of 'Job Market' and the Reality of the Academic Labor System" (College English 66 no. 2 [November 2003]). The main argument is a restatement of the thesis put forth in his "Waste Product" article: namely, that the fiction of a job "market" obscures rather than uncovers the reality of a system organized around the ongoing and increasing casualization of academic labor (for discussion of this and related themes, see Oh Sh*t: Marc Bousquet's Excremental Theory of Graduate Education, along with What is a Labor Market? and What is a Guild?).

As in "Waste Product," in "The Rhetoric of the 'Job Market" Bousquet once again takes aim at the Bowen report of 1989, which projected a substantial shortage of PhDs across the humanities and social sciences by the mid-1990s.* Bousquet reads this very wrongheaded assessment as an attempt "to vigorously impose the ideology of 'market' on data that virtually trumpet the structural reality of casualization." In particular, he points to Bowen's decision "'to define 'faculty' quite carefully'" -- which, as it turned out, was not very carefully at all. By including only full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty in his analysis of employment trends, Bowen sought, in Bousquet's words, "to understand the employment system as system while ignoring the largest categories of its working parts."

And as in "Waste Product," Bousquet here seeks to account for the (in hindsight) amazingly uncritical reception of what was clearly a deeply flawed document:

Given the dramatic and startling nature of the conclusions of Bowen and Sosa's 1989 'job market' study, Prospects for Faculty (that faculty jobs would soon appear like manna in the desert), and its origin in an unusual collaboration between a sitting university presdient (William G. Bowen, Princeton president) and an undergraduate student (Julie Ann Sosa, then the editor of the Princeton student newspaper), it's more than a little surprising that almost no one seems to have questioned the Bowen study before a 1994 blurb in the Chronicle of Higher Education -- with the interesting exception of Lynne Cheney, who wrote a scathing New York Times editorial regarding the assumptions guiding it.

For Bousquet, the fact that "Lynne Cheney -- of all people -- was essentially alone in attempting to debunk the Bowen projections shows the staying power of the positivist market fantasy even in the most well-meaning and politically committed quarters of the academy."

Well, I do think Cheney an interesting exception. And I mean to look up the article (an op-ed entitled "The Phantom Ph.D. Gap," from September 28, 1989), as soon as I get a chance.

*From the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation website, a description of the infamous report:

This thought-provoking study of academic job markets over the next quarter century uses rigorous analysis to project substantial excess demand for faculty starting in the 1997-2002 period. Particularly severe imbalances are projected in the humanities and social sciences. Contrary to popular impressions, however, these projected shortages are not caused by any unusual "bunching" of retirements. The authors' discussion of factors affecting the outlook for academic employment includes information on changes in the age distributions of faculties, trends in enrollment, shifts in the popularity of fields of study, changes in the faculty-student ratio, and the continuing increase in the time spent by the typical graduate student in obtaining a doctorate.

This work will appeal to a broad audience. It will be essential reading for those who are responsible for determining the size and character of graduate programs in universities, for aspiring academics who are looking for a sense of their job prospects, for college and university faculty members and administrators who must recruit new colleagues, and for those interested in the federal role in higher education.

Ouch.

Posted by Invisible Adjunct at January 5, 2004 10:15 PM