your employer hates you
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 5th, 2008 • Category: Identity Politics, Politicsi’ve been following the case of Andrea Smith being denied tenure over at brownfemipower.com. apparently, an off blog conversation revealed that someone objected to the idea of calling academia the “academic industrial complex.”
when i got a position working for someone who does research in a field i won’t name to protect the guilty, a friend of mine at the parson’s school of design pointed out that 1. we all have to eat so i shouldn’t feel guilty and 2. the things my employer did — how he made money — was to get speaking fees and the like from the military-academic-industrial complex.
whoever complained about calling it the academic industrial complex is, i guess, in the humanities or maybe social sciences? because, if you head on over to the sciences, the the professional schools, the engineering schools, communications and journalism, and so forth, the impact of industrial (pharma, agribusiness, etc.) and military organizations on colleges and universities is tremendous. and, since they underwrite so much that goes on in the university, they are also making it possible for the humanities and social sciences to exist.
the humanities and social sciences are hardly exempt. when the onus is on faculty to publish, publish, publish — that is, do research — a research institution (as opposed to one primarily geared toward teaching) expects faculty to bring the grants in since the university gets a percentage off the top of any grant a researcher obtains. as government monies dwindled, university researchers in the humanities and social sciences now look for money anywhere they can get it — and that includes the military and big business.
it’s not just bombs and guns the military wants, and it’s not just research on synthetics and drugs and industrial processes that industry wants. they want knowledge about how to control people — at work, in the public sphere, in the polity, in front of the telly, and while tapping out message in a blog comment form. ;-o therefore, all that wonderful research produces by people who study poverty or racism or white collar crime or sexism is all useful to a company that wants to control workers. it’s useful to a military that wants to recruit more personnel, that needs more persuasive commercials and advertisements, that wants to know how to subdue local peoples during and after a war, how to manipulate the citizenry during outbreaks of urban warfare, and so forth.
you live in a dirty world and your employer — private, public, mixed, or academic — hates you and your freedom. in comments, the person who seemed to be patting her/himself on the back for being off the grid does nothing for people who otherwise have to make a living, find something to do that they love if at all possible, and figure out how to fight that hatred the best way they know how. it is a ridiculous game of holier-than-thou purist politics where politics is ridiculous mockery of what “the personal is political” is supposed to mean. hint: it doesn’t mean that your politics can be enacted by not shopping Walmart or only working for a mom and pop hardware store or not working for the government or some other boneheaded purist identity politics. feh.
can you tell? LBO also seems to be gearing up to another perenniel debate over anarchism - which always brings out the fundamentalists. double feh.
shag carpet bomb is
Email this author | All posts by shag carpet bomb
I love the way blogs induce these almost amazing coincidences. Yesterday while I was whiling away the hours in the emergency room while they figured the dangerous spike in my mother’s blood pressure, I was reading a hypertheoretical book on media, class structure and perception. it would have been so much better if the poor prof who wrote it had had time to read more than three books on each of the ways of producing and media networks before the 19th century. So this morning I was thinking how Marx could never have written Capital if he had been writing for tenure. It’s not just the knowledge the complex generates, it the knowledge it precludes. Prior to overt censorship.
As an undergrad I got some internships to participate in research at some of the Big Ten schools. When I started the first one, I remember thinking how awesome it was that these professors were willing to allow undergrads the opportunity to come in and learn what it was like to work in a prestigious biological sciences laboratory. Then, a few days after I arrived, the very mean prof that I got assigned to brought me some papers to sign so that he could apply for grants that provided extra money for researchers who had women and racial minorities working on their projects. It did kind of take the wind out of my sails a bit because it sort of ruined the whole altruistic streak that I thought was his sole motivation for hosting students like me.
So, yeah, I think the academic industrial complex is VERY real. It controls which research questions even get asked in the first place. It’s quite problematic, to me, for so many industries and government agencies to have a hand in academic funding at all.