Thread by @shengokai

I was going to sit on this, but fuck it:

"You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of the academy that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you run departments and that in them precarious faculty are exploited in your name."

This is a modification of one of Sartre's quotes from his preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which you can find below:

marxists.org/reference/arch…

To be clear, this isn't a subtweet of tenured faculty, though it can be read as such: this is a subtweet of the broad structures of the academy that have become reliant upon contingent and precarious faculty, so much so that I don't think the academy can imagine itself otherwise.

That is, our institutions, all of them, run on precarious labor. If every member of the precariat (a fucked term if I ever heard one) from VAPs to adjucts just stopped taking the scraps we're tossed by administrators and their collaborators, institutions would crumble.

Whole departments would be lost as the labor, the exploited labor, that enables them to provide their "world class education" suddenly vanished. However, the unfortunate reality is that the need to fucking survive means that there will always be someone to take the job.

Further, for all of its protestations, the academy knows this. Administration knows this. Their collaborators know this and they weaponize it in contract negotiations, shared governance (or what's left of it), and hiring priorities. They wield precarity like a scythe.

And they do so while lamenting the state of their budgets, the availability of FT lines, and their commiseration over the faculty they "lose." That is, they pretend to forget that their institutions operate on precarity, and their "world class education" requires exploitation.

I say "pretend to forget," because they pretend that they don't know that the majority of instruction on their campuses is done by precarious faculty. I say "pretend to forget" because they use the VAP to perpetuate the lie that their instruction is done by "full time" faculty.

I say "pretend to forget" because they know their institution runs on exploitation; they simply don't care to do something about it. Rather, they, like the Left in Sartre's preface will scold the precariat for wanting things like raises, job security, a tenure path, healthcare.

The academy says "you ask too much, any more and we won't support you..." And again, Sartre's understanding here is clear: the precariat don't give a damn about conditional support for basic needs: "for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides."

Now, there's a crucial difference here: Sartre is writing at a time when "the natives" as he calls them, were in open rebellion: they were waging war in the colonies, spilling the blood of the colonizers in an attempt to reclaim their humanity.

But I say Sartre is prescient in application to the precariat:

"they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the academy will pay for sooner or later."

That is, sooner or later, the academy will be made to pay for the way it has created and maintained a permanent underclass, dangling in front of them the promise of happiness in the form of "tenure," while simultaneously denying them basic necessities.

Sooner or later, the academy will have to reckon with how it's claims of freedom through education, of a better life through scholarship, are made out to be a lie of staggering proportions by the maintenance of the precariat.

To conclude, I haven't even BEGUN to talk about what the fuck would happen if students were made aware, TRULY made aware of how their institutions exploit their faculty. Not just when it is convenient for contract negotiations, but as an ongoing practice.

Especially as an ongoing practice that is connected to the very world that institutions are supposed to be "preparing" them for.