Cultural Studies; Or, The Perils Of Mislabeling Campus Problems

One of the things I have noticed, probably because I live with an anthropologist, is that academics tend to use the word "culture" to describe a variety of things that, actually, are not cultural at all. It is true that "culture" has a great many meanings, depending on the context in which it is being used, the historical period or thing that is being described, and the intellectual tradition (if any) that is being referenced: here are a few. For social scientists, most centrally anthropologists, "culture" is far more likely to invoke a set of usefully contentious questions and methodological choices than an answer to any given problem.

In a college or university setting, however, when someone starts talking about "culture" it is too frequently the end of the discussion, an explanation for why things must be as they are and/or a way of distancing from something nettlesome. You will most frequently hear the notion of culture being invoked by administrators and faculty when what is being addressed is a problem, or set of problems, that either no one wants to name or can name -- at least, not without opening a can of worms that general consensus dictates ought not to be opened.

For example, my friend Margaret Soltan over at University Diaries, a dedicated muckraker of university athletic scandals and the lavishing of public dollars on stadiums and celebrity coaches, recently reprinted a letter from the New York Times about "the culture of athletics." It was written by a Berkeley alum who is justifiably angry about a budget cutting climate in which academic staffing is dispensable, but the funding of Cal's semi-professional athletic programs continues to "balloon." He writes:

In my experience as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a high school teacher, I have seen how the culture of athletics promotes anti-intellectualism, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and bullying, and competition as opposed to collaboration. The athletic culture, which dismisses and demonizes opponents, most often acts in opposition to our other goals as an academic institution, not in concert with them.

I agree with the larger point about what ought to be the funding priority at universities: education. But I don't think sports are inherently bad for students or for student life, nor are they a waste of time and money when they are prudently budgeted. As a former student-athlete myself, I think athletics, at their best, promote discipline, friendship, a sense of community and self-esteem. Developmentally, they have the potential to help young people learn to accept failure in a nation where failure (particularly in an educational context) is overly stigmatized. Furthermore, while athletic teams with bad-a$$ marquee players get the most ink, such behavior is hardly confined to athletes on any campus, large or small. Young people in groups egg each other on to actions that they would not perpetrate alone. Fearful of being labeled Debbie Downers, individuals fail to intervene when they know the group, or a popular member of the group, is being violent, foolish or destructive. Athletics is only one of many ways that groups of young people cohere and demand conformity on a campus.

Hence, the author's invocation of "culture" to describe a set of malicious or destructive behaviors that vary dramatically in their incidence across gender and athletic specialties, and that are quite similar to behaviors exhibited by non-athletes, strikes me as wrong-headed and unhelpful. It unfairly stigmatizes athletes as bad people, when in fact the vast majority of undergraduate athletes -- like the vast majority of their non-athlete peers -- are good people who are occasionally prone to ill-considered actions. More importantly, the rubric of "culture" blurs questions of agency and responsibility in a way that makes a program of institutional reform, or the sensible re-integration of athletics into a university setting that prioritizes intellectual life, impossible.

If nothing but "culture" is at fault, to whom and to what do you turn for a solution?

Let's not be entirely dim here: while we all know that jock-$niffing faculty, administrators and boosters demand, authorize and pay for the budget excesses in big-time college athletics, the "behaviors" being referenced (with the exception of the occasional high-profile coach being arrested on a DUI or being extorted for an impulsive, public game of hide the salami) are exclusively student behaviors. So when we talk about "culture" on campus we are both talking about students being out of control, and we are being deliberately mysterious as to the role of the adults in promoting and tolerating that. Why the mystery? Because the university is dis-identifying with those activities, whatever it might be doing to facilitate them, and obscuring its own possible moral or legal liability for not dealing with them. That's why. So, to use another example, one great stumbling block to rationalizing tenure procedures across the university is not disciplinary differences, as you might imagine, but the invocation of "departmental cultures" that make each disciplinary entity mysteriously and necessarily unique from the others.

Let me give you another example which is at least as pressing a policy matter, and perhaps a less controversial one, than tenure. At Zenith, as at many schools, we have a big problem with various forms of extreme inebriation, which no one can pretend is related to our national athletic prominence. Students routinely end up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning after weekend partying, as they do at other schools. Periodically, our very able Student Life professionals address this problem by revising the restrictions and penalties attached, not only to the possession and consumption of alcohol and drugs, but to the breaking of state and local laws that pertain to underage drinking. You can read them for yourself here. Furthermore, in part because of excessive drinking, we have a sex problem, which I would describe as a spectrum of unwanted intercourse along the lines of a Kinsey scale: 6 = unambiguous felony rape; 1 = being really impaired and having some spurious form of consent winkled out of you because you fear being called a c0cktea$e and/or you once "hooked up" with this same person (under our regulations 1 is still sexual assault.)

But in addition to sexual assault, drinking leads to a big, messy, dangerous and budget-sappingly expensive category of behavior on all campuses which is often mistakenly described as "campus culture." I say expensive because, when I was working at Ben Franklin University twenty years ago, BFU was said to have budgeted $500K a year for what was generically called "frat damage." But this too is a spectrum of behaviors dangerous to self and others that I would not call "culture," but The Doing Of Stupid Things. Teenagers are famous for Doing Stupid Things even when sober and living with one or more competent adults: dip into the field of popular psychological writing about parenting adolescents if you don't believe me. But when they get to college, are living with each other, and drinking, these activities can often include one or more of the following: vandalism, hiring strippers, ending up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, throwing up on people, theft, contracting STDs from willing sexual partners, driving into trees, breaking arms and legs, sending nude pictures to each other's cell phones, and insisting that first-year students who have very little acquaintance with alcohol learn to drink like idiots too through drinking games and hazing practices.

A problem no one talks about -- because it is more or less invisible damage except when someone flunks out -- is that many students spend the time they could be studying or sleeping drunk, stoned, or recovering from being drunk or stoned. Five will get you ten that the "stress" we hear so much about nowadays is often intensified by the fact that students have less time to do their work because of the expansion of activities designed to "relieve stress."

Now it sounds like I am blaming students, exactly what I warned against, right? Wrong. I blame us, because by grouping these activities under the rubric of "culture" we obscure their actual causes and effects. We also distance ourselves from any responsibility for helping students grow up. As an aside, this is actually something a number of athletic coaches I know do particularly well, and is a logic for having modest and well-run intercollegiate sports programs. This is also the time to note that although Zenith prohibits underage drinking, it promotes a custom called "senior cocktails" in which undergraduates, in their final year, periodically get drunk at events hosted by the university (events that are sometimes prowled by younger male faculty); and it tolerates a well-known arrangement between the downtown bars and the local police department by which no Zenith student is required to show an I.D. to purchase alcohol on Wednesday nights.

I say this not to expose Zenith as particularly hypocritical in this regard, since most colleges probably have similar arrangements, but to underline my point. By invoking "culture" we are tacitly taking the attitude that the best we can do as professional educators is to contain student behavior by policing it in increasingly draconian ways, turning a blind eye to it when we can, paying for any physical damage. What other choice do we have if students are bringing something to the table -- "their culture" -- that is terribly foreign and inferior to "our culture?"

Never Mix, Never Worry: A Brief (And Incomplete) History Of The Academic Couple

Push your way past the Katie Roiphe essay on page 2 of the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section today (yes, this conservative anti-feminist really does seem to own the column named "Cultural Studies," which is an irony, is it not, given what cultural studies represents on the academic left? Does Roiphe know this? One suspects not.) Make your way to "Modern Love," where Boston College Shakespeare scholar Caroline Bicks, who also blogs at Academic Shakespeare, writes about academic commuting. In "Is The Husband Going To Be A Problem?" she addresses going on the job market as a couple, commonly known in academia as "the two body problem." She also mentions what I think is probably a widespread experience: Bicks' husband was never asked about what would happen to her on his interviews; but whether he would be a "hiring issue" was an anxious subtext of her interviews, a question that was conveyed to her in a way that was highly informal, irregular and effective. No, no, she reassured them, via her advisor; he's not an issue. We are ready to do whatever it takes.

In case you wondered, this is how women are disciplined not even to ask for the things men just get (like being treated with respect); and how we are trained not even to think about what we might need or want to do a job and have a life at the same time, since we should feel so damned lucky to be there in the first place.

If you are about to go on the job market, or are already a young commuting couple, read this: it is a story that has its hitches, but it ends happily: they live together, in the same city, with a daughter who didn't sleep through the night until she was almost five.

Academic commuting is an historically recent phenomenon, but not so recent that universities have not had time to address the problem -- and drop the ball instead. Once women decided to stop baking cookies for their husband's seminars and type manuscripts for love and pin money, it occurred to them get their own advanced degrees (it was around the mid 1960s, when women's liberation really took off, Katie Roiphe) and have their own careers. Prior to the mid-1970s, in other words, there was no two-body problem: the wife, awarded to the husband some time after his BA but prior to his hooding as a Ph.D., came along in the moving van along with the furniture and books.

Legend has it that at Zenith, when women began to be appointed as tenure-track faculty, it was such a seismic shock to the system that no one knew what to do with them socially. The first few of these pioneer women were, legend also has it, put in the odd position of having to navigate well-meant invitations to a faculty wives' lunch club. Indeed, when Zenith alumni of my age and older recall the happy days of intimate seminars held in professors' homes, they may have only a very vague memory of the unobtrusive (little) woman who kept the children out of the way, cleaned and dusted the house, baked the cookies, and washed the sherry glasses at the end of the day.

It wasn't a pretty life for everyone. Growing up in the nexus of three well-regarded liberal arts colleges and one Ivy League University, take it from me that a lot of these women resented the hell out of their second-class status. More than a few were closet drinkers and maintained a low-level buzz all day (you know, the ones that "went to the bathroom" just a few too many times a day, and kept a bottle of vodka in a locked glove compartment in the car.) In the Mad Men era (which is exactly when I grew up) men were capable of spacing out a great deal, particularly when it was in their own self interest, but let me just say that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is worth a little look-see for you couples out there who are considering ditching wify's career in order to live and raise your children in the same city.

There are a variety of reasons that colleges and universities have never come to some comprehensive solution to the two-person academic career, a problem that is now acknowledged to include queer people. None of them are good, and none address the stress induced by commuting academic careers that invariably falls hardest on women. A partner hire is most frequently thought of as an exceptional event akin to a prize: in order to get "him," you shoehorn another department or program into taking "her;" in order to keep "her" in the face of an outside offer, a department is cajoled into interviewing "her." The best possible scenario is the one least available to most of us: to be thought of as a "power couple" in the field, a kind of academic Ferdinand and Isabella scenario where 1 + 1 = more than 2.

Why can't we solve this problem? Well, two reasons.

Adding tenure-track faculty lines is far down, and in many cases not even on, the list of institutional priorities for most universities. There are very few exceptions to this rule, and the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Franklin & Marshall, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, which often agrees to create an extra half line for partner hires. Each member of the partnership is tenure-track and each occupies 3/4 of a line. Who is the big winner here? Franklin & Marshall, of course: they get two faculty for the price of 1.5 -- and who knows what it means to work 3/4 time at a liberal arts college? My guess is that both members of the couple are working full-time for 3/4 pay. Franklin & Marshall also gets to keep faculty who might otherwise want to escape Lancaster, PA, because what other schools have any partner hire policy at all?

Add to this the following fact: the bad job market is not a natural phenomenon. It is not going to magically correct itself when the economy improves. The bad job market has been entirely manufactured by colleges, universities and state legislatures who are unwilling to create the number of full-time positions that they need to teach the students they have. Until there is some kind of effective social movement of students and faculty to correct this, Boards of Trustees and administrations will continue to shrink faculties, particularly in the liberal arts. In this atmosphere of scarcity, the idea that faculty lines would be created for two-career couples is unthinkable.

The fiction that academic hiring is, and should be, a meritocracy in which those awarded jobs and tenure are understood to be the "best." Hiring, particularly in an expanded market, could be a mix of competitive searches and opportunity appointments -- which, in fact, is now the case at the most senior levels and at the lowest adjunct levels. But right now there is no constituency advocating for this, except the people who are running to the airport on Thursday at 3:30.

The worst offenders, in my view, are departments, who think the world is going to come to an end if they hires a 19th century economic historian rather than a 19th century political historian; or if the political historian spouse turns out to be an African Americanist ("Shriek!!! We've already got one of those!!!!") Departments are usually utterly unwelcoming to candidates -- no matter how promising -- who do not fit an exact niche that has been decided upon in endless department meetings, received the dean's stamp of approval, been searched for, and been vetted as part of a vast pool of candidates -- by them. Being a spouse of someone already on the faculty can hurt you as a candidate, because it launches grumbling about whether the department will be "forced" to take you. The hiring mentality often includes a form of magical thinking that goes like this: if, out of 100 candidates, we picked Assistant Professor X -- then we can be assured that s/he is the best!

You are getting my point here? "We picked hir = s/he is the best." If you don't go through "the hiring process," no one can be certain that you are the best.

But graduate students have drunk the Kool-Aid too, and are just as invested in the idea of meritocracy as faculty are, if not more so. Take a look at the job wikis, if you don't believe me, and the number of people who seem to honestly believe that they were objectively more deserving of a given job than the person who actually got it. How is it that people think they know they were the best candidate? Gave the best talk? Wrote the best dissertation? Wore the prettiest shoes? I dunno. I suppose this kind of hubris is a good way of maintaining your self-esteem in a brutal job market, but it is also insane. Thus, one of the constituencies that is most harmed by the "two-body problem" is also not likely to accept a solution in which people are awarded jobs without clawing their way to the top of the application pile and being brutally hazed by search committees first.

So good luck to all of you on the market this year. And by the way, if you are on a search committee, you might want to know that what happened to Caroline Bicks during her interview process is not just sexist, it's against federal law: asking about, or considering, a candidate's marital status part of the selection process is a major-league no-no, regardless of the candidate's gender and sexual orientation. Here's a complete list of things you can't be asked at an interview.

Like Sands Through The Hourglass, So Are The Days Of Our Lives: Having The Courage Not To Go To Graduate School

You would think that May would signal the winding down of things at Zenith. In fact, as we all know, the liberal arts college has a tendency to crank things up toward the end of the year. Didn't spend enough of your budget? There will be a memo asking for suggestions on how to do that. Last year, when I was chair and everyone was in ex post crash-o mentality, we saved a lot of time via a memo telling us that departments and programs were prohibited from spending down at the end of the year, although how they would be able to sift legitimate from illegitimate expenses was not clear. ("Six skateboards? Why did sociology purchase skateboards?") Prizes and various awards must be given, and we will be solicited for the names of ever-more students to receive them. Committees that have been ruminating on this or that will be rushing legislation to the floor of the last faculty meeting. These motions will be greeted with suspicion by a great many people who haven't bothered to attend a meeting all year, and who will table them: "We can't hurry an important decision like this!" they will snarl.

Subsequently, many of these ideas will die on the Island of Tabled Motions.

In the middle of all this chaos, there are the former students who write to ask for recommendations. They've been cooling their heels in Teach for America and prison re-entry programs, toiling in obscurity as paralegals at Dewey, Cheatham & Howe and Doing Good Deeds in far-flung places. Spring has come and -- guess what? There's no summer vacation! You don't get to advance to the next level of work in the fall! Furthermore, since liberal arts colleges now specialize in ginning up nostalgia (and saving money, I presume) by holding alumni reunions and commencement on the same weekend in May, the recent B.A.'s thoughts turn lovingly to:

Graduate school. As Monty Python would say, "Run away! Run away!"

Frequent readers might recall that I was critiqued roundly in the comments section of this post for suggesting that people contemplating the PH.D. might want to evaluate their chances of getting an academic job more thoroughly prior to choosing a program that suits them only for being a college professor. "I'm gobsmacked that someone who calls herself radical could publish something so reactionary," wrote one of my kinder critics. My suggestion that any person contemplating the PH.D work for a minimum of three years post-B.A. to imagine the numerous other life choices available was also rejected by many. "Why would you hold back a talented person who knows exactly what s/he wants to do at the age of twenty or twenty-two?" is a collective version of what I was asked. "If I wait, I will be almost thirty when I get my degree! Too late to start a life!" others whimpered. The most heartfelt responses were some version of: "On what grounds can you -- and people like you -- deny me the opportunity to have something precious that you already have?"

I do not yet control the fate of the historical profession, much less the academy at large, and regulating the supply of jobs to meet the demand is the committee I keep requesting, but to no avail. Give me time, why don't you?

Seriously, let me say two things: I don't think there is anything particularly radical about encouraging people to get a PH.D. in say, history or English literature. It's not like you will be educated to join the IWW, after all (although if you go into sociology you might have a crack at it), or to redistribute wealth. In addition, as I will be 52 in a couple weeks, color me silly, but I don't think 30 is too late to change direction in life, voluntarily or involuntarily. One valued family member of mine is, in her thirties, embarking on her fourth career, and I would say that each one of them has made her a more interesting and productive person.

I also don't think any education, PH.D.'s in the Humanities included, is a waste, even if it doesn't lead you to the career you thought it would. Could be a waste of money, but not time.

However: the idea that life will pass you by if you actually take time to live it (as opposed to studying it, or acquire more education to enter life at a higher level than ordinary folk) is worrisome to some of us who watch talented people graduate from our universities only to return a year later to say that they want back in. I worry that it is a symptom of being part of a generation of over-scheduled overachievers raised to believe that the sands of time run quicker if you aren't writing a memoir about your alcoholic mother, starting your own film production company or scoring big time with your new band in those crucial twelve months after graduation. The concern seems to be that living life is an uncertain proposition at best, a huge waste of time at worst. Those of us who advise contemplation and acquiring experience outside the classroom are perceived by Generation Adderall as hopelessly out of touch.

Rather than seeing me and my colleagues as gatekeepers, however, I would like these hopeful young people to do the research themselves before embarking on this journey. In particular, in the comments section of my earlier post I was initially appalled, then angered, and then moved, by the numerous bitter remarks by commenters who claimed they had been lied to by their own college professors about their future prospects as scholars. Many claimed that they were told that they should go to graduate school, and that the cream always rises to the top in the job market. Such people said they were not told, prior to enrolling in the PH.D. program, that only 4 out of 10 of them would get a tenure track job, much less at a college or university similar to the one they had attended.

One can't help but believe -- even if you think, as I do, that you shouldn't take all your advice about going into the priesthood from a priest -- that there isn't some truth to the experiences they are reporting, so I did a little of my own research. And you know what? I think a lot of them were lied to, albeit by well-meaning people. I was further convinced of this by a conversation with a lovely young person who was given exactly the wrong advice by a university mentor: the best young intellects go straight from college to graduate school; prestigious schools in your field don't care about you taking time to think it over; there will be plenty of jobs in (x) field by the time you get out in seven years. Not one of these things is true, and (x) field is literally crammed with the un- and underemployed. Looking back at the records of the professional association in which (x) field is located, I count 16 jobs in that field advertised in the last 5 years, and 182 if you count the larger fields which might accept an application from someone trained in (x). There were, in the same period 537 PH.D.s produced in the larger fields for which a person trained in (x) might have applied. If you count the other people, in other fields, who might have enlarged the pool for the more general job descriptions, that is less than a 1 in 3 chance of obtaining a tenure-track job over 5 years on the market.

I am estimating, given the job market that existed prior to the crash, and given that state legislatures will continue to slash away at education budgets for several years to come (remember: the commercial real estate market is slumping like a warm ice cream cone as 5-year balloon mortgages start to come due) that out of the dozen or so students who have talked to me about the PH.D. this spring alone, there will be academic jobs for 4 or 5 at best.

Hence, paying some attention to those who claim they were lied to about their prospects, I have responded to this by advising talented undergraduates, right up front, not to go to graduate school. Not yet, at least. And when you are making this decision, take into account the following:

Regardless of whether you like this or not, or whether it seems fair, it is simply a fact that actual graduate school admissions committees at select schools will regard your application more favorably if you take a significant amount of time off. Two to five years, I would say. Want to do labor history? Be an organizer; spend one of those years as a day laborer or a factory worker. An anthropologist? Leave the country and learn a language. Learn two. Cultural studies? Try an advertising agency or tending bar on the Lower East Side of New York. Whatever you do, engage the world of paid labor head on, and try to marry your genuine interests with a determination to get out of your comfort zone. Use this time to read, far more deeply than you have had the opportunity to do as an undergraduate, to discover what field compels you in a deep enough way to make a profoundly scary, uncertain commitment to it.

Your choice to attend graduate school, and their choice to admit you, is not a mutual contract that is designed to benefit all parties equally. Too often young people who have succeeded in school believe that schools actually care about them. They don't. Then why do graduate schools pay people to attend? In part, because it is traditional to do so. But in the overwhelming number of cases graduate students constitute an indispensable pool of cheap labor. You earn your tuition and stipend by doing hours of work for what seems like a good sum of money at the age of 22; by the time you are 29, it doesn't look so good.

If your beloved undergraduate mentor is over age 65, you run the risk of getting really bad advice about graduate school. In fact, I would say that few of us over 35 are reliably in touch, with some exceptions. The first thing you should do is join the professional association in your field of choice. If your income is under 25K, it costs $45 to join the American Historical Association, $35 to join the MLA, $55 to join the American Studies Association. A one year digital subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education is $72.50, and Inside Higher Education is free! Hence, for under $125, a small investment compared to the loans you will be forced to take out in graduate school to eat and keep a roof over your head, you have within your grasp the best possible advice about the current state of the academic profession, the recent history of the job market, and the degree of risk you are running if you have your heart set on being an academic.

Read blogs: start with New Faculty Majority, the mother ship of up-to-date commentary about the high rate of underemployment among academics.

As for asking live people, your most important advice in this matter, particularly at a liberal arts college, is from the youngest members of the faculty, those who have been on the job market quite recently, and whose bright and capable friends are strategizing their lack of tenure-track employment. I pick out the SLAC as a particular font of poor advice in this matter, because it is here that the romance of teaching and scholarship tends to cloud the uglier realities of academic life, and it is here that there are no graduate students to set you straight as Professor Graybeard waxes eloquent about the beauties of a cultivated scholarly intellect. Your second most important advice is from all women, GLBT people and anyone in an interdisciplinary or ethnic studies field: there never has been a "good" market for us, and we tend not to think that our special experience of success characterizes the general condition.

And finally, when you are taking advice, do what sensible people do: consider the source. Check to see how many search committees Professor Graybeard has run, and whether s/he gives papers at professional meetings regularly. Does s/he contribute to the life of the profession by serving on committees of professional associations? Does s/he mentor graduate students of hir own, or sit on committees at nearby research universities? Is s/he on the editorial board of a journal? Does s/he publish? Thanks to Google, all of this information is available to you. If the answers to all, or most, of the above questions are "No" then this person may be well-intentioned, but is not a good source of advice.

Whatever you decide: take responsibility for your own decisions in this matter so that you don't waste a lot of emotional energy trying to figure out who to blame when the breaks, and the tenure-track searches, don't go your way. The damage done is not an education that isn't worth anything -- all education is worth something, particularly to creative and engaged people. It's the damage of low self-esteem and disillusion when you have drunk the academic Kool-Aid and -- through no fault of your own -- it doesn't work out.

Monday update: here's a post on the joint J.D./PH.D. from Karen Tani at Legal History Blog. While I wouldn't advise trying to jive the job market by simply attaining multiple degrees (and Tani notes that pursuing such a program is "not for the faint of heart") it is one direction for those of you with an incurable love for learning who are also sane enough to want flexible career options.