EGO LECTOR

At the beginning of his Vocation Lectures (issued by NYRB as Charisma and Disenchantment, Max Weber explains that under the German university system of the late 19th century, only the rich could realistically pursue academic careers. At the time, junior scholars with only one published book to their name rented out their services in a transparent way by receiving fees directly from students who attended their lectures. (This may be usefully compared to the current situation of the precariat under the gig economy.) This went on until the young lecturer received his Habilitation from an elder academic following the completion of a second book. Weber contrasts this with the American university system’s tendency to hire junior faculty members as assistant professors who are expected to work through a relatively predictable system on their way to become full professors.

Of course, anyone even moderately familiar with American academia today knows that this no longer holds. Not only has the work of junior academics been rendered more precarious through the extension of visiting assistant professorships (perhaps better described as ‘transient academic peonage’), post-doctoral fellowships, and other cost-saving labor arrangements, but many tenure lines have been excised entirely from the university’s books. Not only must the young scholar work far harder at teaching in an increasingly anti-intellectual environment, but all of that hard precarious labor also has no larger goal than the perpetuation of itself. Realistically, most hopeful professors will have to settle for the vassalage of adjuncting forever in exchange either for the intellectual satisfactions of the scholar’s life or for emolument in the form of enhanced social prestige. [This latter point can be contested: really, how much presitge does our society accord even to a full professor today? Though, on the other hand, I as a high school teacher am often asked why I don’t ‘just go teach college instead,’ a linguistic formulation only possible for someone who has no idea what the project entails. Nevertheless, it’s clear that they mean to suggest that it’s a better job than teaching high school, presumably because they reckon it to be more lucrative or more prestigious.] But almost all of them are smart enough to see the truth: at the end of all of those years of grunt work at the ivory tower’s foundations, they will never secure that full professorship, if for no other reason than because it simply doesn’t exist anymore.

The system under which junior scholars labor is, in effect, just as exclusive as the old German system which Weber criticized. Academic careers, along with other associated lines that might be considered intellectual vocations, such as journalism, curatorship, professional criticism, etc. are now potentially ruinous career choices for those who have no financial safety net to depend on. Though by temperament extremely inclined toward the ivory tower myself, I never pursued the dream of a university career for the same reason that I don’t continue to live my various vivid sleep-borne fantasies when I awake because I see that they were naught but dreams without substance or reality. Though that personal note may suggest that this is written purely out of negative animus toward a system which I was, ultimately, too scared to join, it strikes me as an objectively undesirable state of affairs. Should both scholarship and higher education become pursuits only for those with a trust fund or the kind of soul comfortable with living life on the economic margins, then academia will be nothing more than another one of our institutions entirely captured by the elite and their mode of thinking.