Effective immediately, my university is freezing salaries, canceling all searches, and cutting budgets 10%. I’ve talked about this before, thinking that perhaps Obama needed to include the type of cultural creative work in his stimulus package that FDR included in the New Deal. But at least two others have taken up the call.
This is an excellent moment to begin to think about what we’re preparing PhDs for. And what universities need to be.
But first, calm.
I’ve already listed some of the things I think Obama should pursue.
What are some things we can do here?
For those of us currently training graduate students we should begin to have either formal or informal conversations with them about what the future holds, and we need to be realistic here. Even the top tier schools aren’t going to be able to place every single student who wants a job. Students need to understand this without simultaneously approaching their studies and their fellow students in a cutthroat manner.
We should also take this opportunity to figure out how we can serve much more of a public role than what we currently play. The idea of being a “public intellectual” has fallen into disfavor largely because of the paychecks individuals like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson routinely get speaking to “the public.” It’s become a marketing thing, used by some professors to augment their income and their presence/brand (in some cases significantly). Although I do believe that professors are going to have to do more work like this, I’m not talking about Dyson style public intellectual work but rather something different. Roland Fryer’s politics are not my own but he offers a potential model here.
Those are just two ideas. More?
More non-for-profit work. Making an impact on the community from within universities. Not necessarily the usual grant sources or corporate charities but new ones, designed for specific purposes in specific communities to address specific problems. My discipline, Geography, has mapping and statistical capabilities that many communities need in order to plan effectively.
I've been looking for ways to implement that in the cause. Work like this must begin now.
Rahkyt! holler at craig nulan…and we should talk too. I didn't know (or forgot) that Geography was your thing.
Definition -a recession is when your neighbor is facing unemployment a depression is when you face unemployment ,America is in a depression
I appreciated the emphasis on public intellectual work done by some faculty members. There are reasons tax money gets rerouted into public/private Universities, and one ofthose reasons is because the work done in those institutions should make the world a better, more thoughtful place.
The problem is the prominence of social, empirical scientists weighing in on the issues. These particular academics aren't morally equipped to handle the less material vagaries of their work. This is why people like Fryer are getting kudos for introducing paying elementary school students for grades. This is also why the charter school movement has taken off, unbound. The harder conversation, and dare I say it, the more musical one that redounds to the quality of our national character isn't likely to happen well among the number crunchers. If the new face of black public intellectuals is Charles Blow, we are in a bad way.
The answer, I believe, is more, better black humanities programs. African-American studies should include Kant ,Plato, Hegel. Not because those thinkers are black, but because of their inestimable influence on democratic theory and civic duty. Danielle Allen is doing the kind and quality of work we should trumpet.
I said “influence on,” but I think better words would be “insight into.”
http://hnicwatch.blogspot.com/
Irami, I'm going to bump this up…..
I wasn't aware there was a time when public intellectuals were actually in favor.
Doesn't Fryer's experiment amount to a fellowship? I mean… he is working for a think tank, no? There's nothing particularly novel about fellowships or think tanks. Still, you have the resources of JHU (presently) as the basis for a fine incubator. As your professed area of focus is politics, I'd tend to believe that you've got an excellent opportunity right there in Baltimore to go beyond the typical stuff of poli sci — opinion research and policy development — into creating models for organized political expression and/or actual political parties. Remember the discussion we had here once about 'open source'?
“I wasn't aware there was a time when public intellectuals were actually in favor.”
In the academy? I think we can point to a period where they were MORE in favor than they are now. Even someone like Paul Krugman allegedly caught a great deal of flack for his NYT columns. Krugman's got his already so although his graduate students may suffer (“what does Krugman know about how good an economist X is….he spends all of his time at the nyt!”) he's good to go. People on the lower end of the totem pole may end up paying real costs in job security and salary even before we take tenure into account.
A fellowship? The purpose of fellowships is usually to give the fellow time off to pursue academic projects. There are fellowships that focus on non-academic work but they are few. What Fryer is doing is more akin to consultant work. If he weren't getting paid I'd consider it the academic equivalent of pro bono.
And while I'm very aware of what Hopkins and Baltimore have to offer, I'm not talking about me as an individual but academics (black ones particularly) in general.
To me it seems as if the academy has always maintained a healthy level of contempt for what you're calling public intellectualism. Perhaps this is because higher education likes to maintain an image that conflicts at points with modernism and postmodernism. Authoring critiques on economics, history, politics, etc., for public consumption at Border's is considered gauche, y'know.
My point is that academics in the arts and humanities would do well to consider non-traditional concepts of research in order to avail themselves to a larger pool of financial support. I would think this holds especially true for Black academics, and again those situated at HBCUs.
I’m wondering about the background of a lot of the people in academia. In my experience graduate schools programs (especially Phds) tend to care more exclusively about your preparation and exposure to a given field, and don’t take into account diversity of life experiences. This at least somewhat means that you may have cohorts that are diverse geographically or in terms of their research experiences, but can still be homogenous in other ways.
I know plenty of future social scientists who are down right scary because although they understand theory they don’t necessarily get the facts on the ground sympathize but not empathize.
e.g. In Anthro class one year after discussing and watching two films about 1. government sponsored forcible sterilization on poor white children in Virginia and 2. Heavy marketing of Norplant to the poor (especially blacks ) despite the ridiculously horrible side effects of the drug. One classmates reaction directly after all this: “I think poor people should be temporarily sterilized until they can get themselves off of welfare.” This is a woman who on paper is brilliant and will undoubtedly achieve her goal of Phd and then combat AIDS in Africa and other economically depressed communities. Maybe this is an extreme example, but there are more people like this.
All this is to say, academia needs more flava. Dr. Spence and Co. is not enough.
Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.
Very interesting post indeed. I also made a twitter post about this.