I
I detect in one teaching statement the key words INTEGRITY, DIGNITY, CONVICTION, and COMMITMENT. This is in response to the all too many compromises one makes, in the interest of bringing together different disciplines, “learning styles,” sub-disciplines, points of view, and so on – compromises which can lead to the creation not of an interesting eclecticism, but an ambivalent mishmash. The writer is dreaming of unalienated labor and telling us to return to our roots. I am interested.
II
Academics are not proletarians, but the dominated fraction of the dominating class. We should not organize as a union but along the lines, or in the spirit of the guilds from which we originated, it is said. What I say to this is yes, one knew at the outset that one was joining the dominated fraction of the dominating class, and one believed one was also joining an ancient guild. But one then began to realize how much proletarianized labor supported each professorship, and to notice how alienated one’s own labor was actually expected to be. That is how one realized one had not joined an ancient guild but the academic industrial complex.
III
One is supposed to believe one is what one is not, or be other than who one is. I recommend being who one is, but also knowing where one is. I may be in my soul a member of an ancient guild, but I see the signs of the times all around me. Very few people are willing to be elected to Academic Senate or join the AAUP. This is just one of the elements in the AIC panorama.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 