That was a sentence the younger professors in my graduate program reiterated quite often, as a pedagogical remark. They had apparently thought they were “the next Foucault” and discovered this was not the case, and had had a difficult adjustment to a more modest reality. Their point was that we should not imagine we were “the next Foucault,” but set our sights lower.
I thought it strange they had imagined they would be “the next Foucault,” and had apparently based their self-images upon this, but I still learned the lesson: set your sights low, as your work is surely not destined to be nearly as good as you imagine.
My question now is, but what about people whose work is good? I see people all around me who, while perhaps not being “the next Foucault,” have clearly always acted as though their work could have value. What is the point of the finger-shaking, I learned I would not be the next Foucault, and so should you?
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This is interesting. I think most musicians know they are not Mozart, but framing it in that way is quite skewed. It should be more like “Who do you think you are, the next Cathy Jrade, the next Vera Kutzinsky” And then you could answer, well, they are good, and it is in fact realistic to emulate their achievement, but I want to be myself. Or if someone said, you aren’t Foucault, you could say, yes, but I could grow up to be Dru Doughtery.
I would rather write my own books than Foucault’s. I say this with all modesty. I am simply more interested in my own ideas, and that is logical even for a person of very modest achievements.
I have comments from the same crowd about how “brave” it is to publish now in Academe, and to be an AAUP member. I think that if they are that afraid to use just a small percentage of their academic freedom, they should give up tenure.
Academic freedom is more like an empty shell in those cases. It is the freedom not to be fired, but nobody wants to even put it to any significant test.
How low do you set your sights?
“As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this with the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits.
Meanwhile, in the past year, her teaching load had been reduced by the university to one class a semester, which meant she was making well below $10,000 a year. With huge out-of-pocket bills from UPMC Mercy for her cancer treatment, Margaret Mary was left in abject penury. She could no longer keep her electricity on in her home, which became uninhabitable during the winter. She therefore took to working at an Eat’n Park at night and then trying to catch some sleep during the day at her office at Duquesne. When this was discovered by the university, the police were called in to eject her from her office. Still, despite her cancer and her poverty, she never missed a day of class.”
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/death-of-an-adjunct-703773/#ixzz2fN9rbMyW
What a disgusting indictment on our culture.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, I saw that, we massively discussed it on Facebook. How low *I* was trained to set sights: any tenure track, low-level survival but in tenure track, so as to avoid that fate; the supposition being that one could not aspire to more and must be very careful not to, because one could easily get pushed to that fate. But really these are two topics: that’s one of the truly exploited, whereas I am talking about being one of the privileged and lucky but being trained not to take advantage of it.
@Jonathan, I figured out today that what they are after is making sure they are Liked by administration and everything like that. You apparently are to keep quiet until tenure to get tenure, and then afterwards so as to move further up. Nobody is willing to allow their work to just stand for them, which means those who do, aren’t recognized/don’t have enough company in said strategy to have it become a viable strategy. What events made me see this are too long to describe.
Related: it seems that many of the 76%, that is to say, the current contingent faculty, really do not see why it is better to have tenure than to have long-term contracts; this frightens me, that so many are so totally do not even see what it would be to be a full-on professor, to have all the powers of this; they see it as being part of management or something, it is really weird.
Wow. Did not know this change happened. Not to want tenure? Strange. Actually I call the academics now careerists. They are very fearful people. In debt to the company store and no where to go if they don’t behave.To spend all that time getting the degrees, putting up with the crap that goes with it, and then to have that student debt to service, just means that the intellectual class in academia is now compromised. Foucault never expected to have security. He was never going to get in the Sorbonne. His appointment at the College de France was contested and politically helped. So we are not going to have the old farts there either and that will be nice. Leo Steinberg got his appointments at Penn after he got the MacArthur Grant. He did not have super security before that. Sontag said only when she got the MacArthur Grant could she buy an apartment in New York City. I think the fact that none of them have protected Snowden publicly nor questioned the ghastly manipulation of photos and narrative for the “Boston Bombers” is indicative of this insecurity. Kind of like coal miners and union organizing at one time. Zizek moves from place to place. The European Graduate School does not have tenure but does have the most prominent people in their fields teaching there. Maybe that’s the way we should go. US universities are so controlled now by govt money they have to watch themselves. I remember in the 70’s Julian Hochberg saying that research was going to be defunded and if you wanted to do it you would have to figure out how to fund it. This has been coming along for a long time.
It’s been in the works since late 70s, yes.
So they would rather have a long term contract now than maybe tenure later. No wonder no one is helping on the framing of the narrative for the “Boston Bombers.”
I notice a difference between faculty senate people and aaup. The latter are very vocal and somewhat hostile to the administration. The former just want to smooth things over. The AAUP guy, a Distinguised professor, and his wife can be obnoxious, but I admire that they don’t care if administration doesn’t like what they say.
My problem with AAUP is that they are on the one hand automatically hostile to admin, but on the other hand extremely cautious. I’d like to see them get braver but also lose this us-and-them mode. (And, I want a union.)