I cite

Neoliberal arts: 23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million

The economic situation at private colleges is not quite the same as that in the California system. It's bad and worsening in a rather different way. For some, the crisis was the depletion of endowments. Aggressive investment practices, the same practices of hedge fund managers and currency traders--accessorized with swagger, arrogance, and the elitism of those who think that their ability to take risks with other people's money proves their superiority--has meant multi-million dollar declines in endowments and hence in operating budgets. For colleges and universities that depend on tuition for their operating expenses, the collapse in housing values combined with the rise in unemployment has led to a steep decline in the numbers of students willing or able to pay the high price of private tuition.

The new demand--from boards and administrations: cut, cut, cut.

But not everything:

...23 private college presidents made over $1 million in total compensation, and 110 made more than $500,000. Such large pay packages are still relatively new in higher education: as recently as 2002, there were no million-dollar presidents, only four earning more than $800,000, and 27 earning more than $500,000.

Over all, the Chronicle survey found, the median pay for presidents of the 419 private colleges and universities surveyed was $358,746, a 6.5 percent increase over the previous year. Over the last five years, the median presidential pay, adjusted for inflation, grew by 14 percent.

Why is university presidents’ pay going up so much?

“I think the answer you’d get from the governing boards that set these salaries is that it’s a market and it’s increasingly hard to find these people,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published its compensation survey annually since 1993. “That said, almost every year, presidential salaries have gone up faster than inflation, and faster than tuition, which rankles some people on campus.”

via www.nytimes.com

These numbers were from before last fall's market collapse. What they indicate, however, is the extent to which the boards at private colleges and universities treat and understand higher education in corporate, market, terms. Presidents are CEOs. They are paid and treated like CEOs. The language of markets--how difficult it is to find good people--is telling: what about faculty members, people who have usually dedicated themselves to research, teaching, the production of knowledge for its own sake, what about hiring from within these ranks of those who don't think of their careers in terms of paychecks?

The response would have to do with fund-raising, no doubt. This is a skill that most faculty have not developed and really don't care to. Yet, this is misleading because private colleges and universities have fund-raising departments and professionals--paid far less than our presidents--who do this work. The president isn't the primary fundraiser; he or she is the face of fund-raising; the groundwork is generally done by others, who keep files and accounts and collect information and develop plans and all the rest.

Additionally, as with other CEOs over the last decade, college presidents' salaries don't seem to have anything to do with actual achievements--increase in ranking, increase in retention, significant increase in fund-raising. Rather, it is just the neoliberal culture, the one that tells boards that they need to pay more to get the right person--just like they do in business and finance.

And, don't forget the perks--golden parachutes protecting the highly paid even as someone who is denied tenure faces destitution. To be clear: a college or university president generally receives a large severance package when leaving. So, if he or she has been at a college for 5 years, living in a house provided by the college and collecting, say, half a million a year, he or she will still pocket a million or so when leaving. A faculty member who is denied tenured, someone who has worked at a school for 5-7 years, teaching a heavy load, trying to publish, often with lingering debt from graduate school, and paid probably around 60K a year, will leave with nothing.

The neoliberalization of colleges and universities separates top administrators from faculty. Faculty produce knowledge and graduates. We are knowledge workers. Top administrators, paid in some institutions more than 20 times what entry-level faculty are paid and 40 times what secretaries are paid, are allied with the CEO class and take on their values.

What do their values reflect? A change from liberal arts education to neoliberal arts education. Here's a list. Feel free to pick and choose--like from a menu of new forms of degradation of intellectual labor:

--research only counts if it leads to profit, security, or control; it is nearly always carried out only at Ivy League and research 1 universities, and then only valuable if connected to or part of large grants; everything else is a waste of time and hence should be squeezed out;

--bookstores are profit-generators; they should be stocked with clothes and gifts;

--libraries are computer-centers; collections and print journals are too expensive, no one needs to visit an archive, research skills are trivial after google; reading takes too long, anyway;

--lectures are boring; only bring in lecturers who are big stars; the rest of the time, forgo lectures and encourage students to talk about how they feel about what they haven't read; 

--teaching is about being well-liked and entertaining; learning should be fun, fun, fun; if it's not fun, why bother?

--students are to be evaluated according to strictly measurable standards; each assessment should provide predictors of the student's potential value at generating profit, security, or control; any student activities or pursuits that detract from these are endeavors must be eliminated (creative writing, alcohol, political protests, MMORPGs);

--insecurity and self-doubt should be encouraged, especially if it can be amplified into paranoia; such insecurity and self-doubt will prevent students and faculty from working together against the neoliberal arts institution;

--begin with bribes so as to generate good will and compliance: generous tuition aid packages that insure constant policing and no-risk course choices (the repercussions of losing financial aid are too great); start-up packages for new faculty that require constant grant-writing for matching funds and discourage long-term, creative, or impractical projects (as well as installing suspicion and competitiveness towards other academics);

--spin new revenue generating ventures: leadership programs (who needs followers, cooperation, or actual skills?), abroad programs (tourism for credit); internship programs (paying someone to work for them);

--faculty and support staff are a dime a dozen; make sure they know this; after all, those who can't do teach and if the egg-heads knew anything they'd be in finance.

An old school approach to liberal arts education (see Michael Berube on this), would emphasize the development of capacities to appreciate different ways of knowing, of asking questions, of thinking about where we are and how we got here. It would tend to view the liberal arts college as a community, a sort of knowledge commons. Neoliberal arts values division, entertainment, and surveillance. It also relies on competition without competition: ranking and evaluating and eliminating even as the propaganda promises that everyone is a winner, a leader, a success-story (it's rough paying 50K a year to end up just a follower or unemployed with a lot of debt and no skills). It wants education without education, that is, people creative enough to think of new ways to extract money and attention but not so creative that they reject the values forced upon them.

And, the thing is, rejecting neoliberal arts, attacking what college and universities have devolved into over the last 30 years, doesn't really matter: neoliberalism doesn't need a large, educated, middle class. It pays the few to exploit the many.

Comments on the necrosocial

I was re-reading The Necrosocial, an essay or polemic written in connection with the UC strike and occupation last week. I want to think about two aspects of the essay, not quite as a critique but more in an effort to push my own thinking. These two aspects involve shifting the terms from social death to death of the social and drive as a domain between the two deaths. I'll talk about the first aspect here and, I hope, discuss the second in a follow up post.

First, the essay describes the university as

a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated.

On the one hand, the discussion of social death incorporates Marxist ideas of dead, accumulated labor as well as from New Left critiques of the university's role in support the military-industrial-bureaucratic state machine. On the other, it includes a contemporary critique of identity categories (understood very broadly) as divisions enabling the division and domination of the people:

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.

This passage suggests a social life folded in on itself and intensified, amplified to the extent that the ever fragmented social dissolves in a multitude of singularities. These singularities are related through the slashes that separate them, as well as through the common acceptance of a dynamic of singularity, a becoming singular, becoming unique, to the point that absorbs and destroys in possibility of social relation, that is, relations that are not already contained in economies of profit and loss, domination and submission. The passage evokes the shift from disciplinary to control societies, suggesting thereby the ways that singularization itself functions as a mechanism of control as well as the ways that the university contributes to the maintenance and extension of control mechanisms as it repeats injunctions to identify and specify.

The death of the social in societies of control thus follows directly from the 'intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices; (Empire 23). Normalizing, though, should be understood in terms of norms of idenfitication and separation, injunctions to become unique.

Under in terms of the normalization of uniqueness in the society of control (a commodified, reified uniqueness that condemns newly formed and fragile individuals to isolation in a multitude of singularities, a kind of isolation radically different from the alienation criticized in the 50s and 60s), the university as a factory of meaning separate from reality makes a kind of sense. But I don't think that the primary problem at stake in the death of social is the production of the illusion that meaning and reality are separated. In fact, this is where the analysis in "The Necrosocial" begins to miss its target (and, in fact, in the later paragraphs of the essay, make this point: "Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning."). The meaning of the university is reality; the values of the machine constitute reality. Reality is the problem--and our failure to remake it into what it could or should mean.

I can put this differently, drawing--to no one's surprise, from Zizek's recent injunctions to think: part of the contemporary challenge is breaking the absorption of meaning into neoliberal capitalist reality, waking up from the dream that low taxes and beanie babies are the road to happiness, disconnecting from the illusion that efficiency measures and competition access the world we want rather than providing the language of our capture. The challenge is separating meaning from this reality in order to make a new one. Some separations are better than others.

Police v. students at UC Berkeley

Theory and Event 12.3

Introduction 12.3
Jodi Dean and Michael J. Shapiro

The articles in 12.3 suggest a political-theoretical topography marked by the prominence of Freud and Deleuze and traces of Benjamin and Derrida. Screened of proper names, the features contouring the political are swamps and fissures, shifting edges, unstable sprawls and impossible spaces without centers. There are subterranean forces threatening to rupture or exceed the unstable structures unsuccessfully attempting their containment. How one or how we—itself the name of a problem and an aspiration—might make it through or even reside in such a terrain thus becomes the question (dis)orienting this issue of Theory & Event.

In "Freud and the Political," Mladen Dolar opens with an anecdote about Freud in a cave, a hidden encounter with political resonance. Rather than coinciding with the social surface, the political takes the form of a more fundamental fissure. Psychoanalysis describes and dissects this crack of the political, a point Dolar explores in relation to the psychoanalytic institution, drive, and the opposition between the artificial and the primary masses. Too often, Dolar explains, psychoanalysis's relation to the political is misread as the Oedipal familial drama (as in the critique presented in Anti-Oedipus). He offers an alternative reading that addresses the subversion of roles and positions, the untying and undoing of relationships, central to psychoanalysis's circumscription of the political.

James Martel ("The Messiah who Comes and Goes: Franz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community") argues that we only clumsily make our way through the political. Most of the time we misrecognize what's going on, who's here and who's there. Most of the time we fail to do what we intend. But, by reading Kafka with Benjamin, Martel demonstrates that not realizing our intentions is not so bad after all. Failure and misrecognition disrupt the narratives of authority to which we subscribe. Martel writes, "Such disruptions produce less a sense of our own 'agency' than a sense of participation in an ongoing conspiracy, one that formally excludes us even as it serves as the means for our (potential and only partial) redemption.

Laura Penny's "Parables and Politics: How Benjamin and Deleuze & Guattari Read Kafka" is also concerned with Benjamin's reading of Kafka, which she compares with that of Deleuze and Guattari. For Penny, at stake in this comparison is judgment and its refusal. Thus, she endorses the Deleuzian rejection of judgment insofar as judgment can neither sense nor summon new possibilities for life.

If the Kafkan messiah who only comes the day after his arrival features largely in the articles by Martel and Penny, then the specter of a future to come animates Antonis Balasopoulos, "Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia." Balasopoulos introduces the term "apparitional unconscious" as a way to open up utopian discourse to theoretical appraisal. He focuses on Jameson and Derrida, staging a disagreement and disjunction at the site of the (non) site/future of utopia. Moreover, he emphasizes an affirmation that is also necessarily a critical selection, that is, a decision.

The final two articles return to the psychoanalytic themes with which 12.3 begins. Joanne Faulkner considers the place of disavowal in Hobbes, particularly with regard to its exclusion of those positioned as other. Exploring the fantastic position of the other as repository for the citizens' jouissance, Faulkner gestures toward a Lacanian response to a politics of fear and security—traversing the fantasy. In contrast, Michael Williams ("A Traversal Beyond the Pleasure Principle: From Pervert to Schizophrenic") suggests an even further traversal, from Lacanian perversion to Deleuzian schizophrenia.

Issue 12.3 also includes an interview and several book reviews. Keith P. Feldman, Anoop Mirpuri, and Georgia Roberts interview geographer Derek Gregory. This interview, "Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War," grows out of the work of the research collective, "Public Rhetorics and Permanent War," work strongly influenced by Black British Cultural Studies.

Alexander D. Barber's "Lessons from the Grand Inquisitor: Carl Schmitt and the Providential Enemy" is a review essay discussing Kam Shapiro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics and Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory. Upenda Baxi reviews Francois Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics. Finally, Kara Keeling's The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense is reviewed by Nicole Ridgway.


Introduction 12.3
Jodi Dean
Michael J. Shapiro

Essays
Freud and the Political
Mladen Dolar

The Messiah who Comes and Goes: Franz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community
James Martel

Parables and Politics: How Benjamin and Deleuze & Guattari Read Kafka
Laura Penny

Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia
Antonis Balasopoulos

The Eternal Jouissance of the Community: Phantasm, Imagination, and 'Natural Man' in Hobbes
Joanne Faulkner

A Traversal Beyond the Pleasure Principle: From Pervert to Schizophrenic
Michael Williams

Interview
Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory
Keith P. Feldman
Anoop Mirpuri
Georgia M. Roberts

Reviews
Lessons from the Grand Inquisitor: Carl Schmitt and the Providential Enemy
Alexander D. Barder

Reading 'Terror': Reflections on François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics
Upendra Baxi

Rethinking the Politics of Visibility through the Black Femme Function
Nicole Ridgway

More comments on the communique

Another section of the communique:

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

If the university is already dysfunctional, then preventing the university from functioning IS participation in the status quo. Indebted students, underpaid teaching-assistants, over-worked adjuncts, collapsing infrastructure, dissolving libraries--this is the current dysfunction. What about making the university serve another function? What about making it function for common ends, for common futures? This is the more vital task--and it is so much harder. It requires discipline and sacrifice, not the affective intensities of manifestoes and blockades.

Yes, calls for unity are empty. But working to forge a commonality, a solidarity, a collective is the only way that a taking that is not empty is possible. The university is more than a set of crumbling buildings. What if part of the real dysfunction of the university has been the way its capitalist subsumption has prevented students (and sometimes faculty) from valuing ideas, history, theory, thinking. What if part of the crisis is the crisis of imagination--students are captured because they don't read, don't think, and we (faculty) aren't teaching them to do so.

The real destruction of the status quo involves more than occupying buildings. It involves reclaiming the capacity to think critically and becoming disciplined enough to do so.

Comments on the communique

Here is a passage from the communique:

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.  They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past.  But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.  We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.   The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.  We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.  The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

There are problems with this argument. The first is the claim regarding social programs that depended on high profit rates and vigorous economic growth. The public university system in the US did not depend on high profit rates and economic growth. Rather, the system depended on high levels of taxation and limited expectations regarding growth. High taxes helped decrease short-term incentives for gain and helped equalize opportunity. They also funded those enterprises deemed publicly important. In fact, part of the economic crisis of the seventies was brought about by capitalist sectors tired of their declining rate of profit. Those capitalist sectors are the ones that have inculcated US society with suppositions regarding high profit and economic growth rates.

The second problem concerns the autonomy of the university under capitalism. Much rides on what autonomy means. If it means completely outside capitalism, then of course there is no autonomous university. If the lack of autonomy means that the completely dependent on capitalist economic incentives, then that is also false. One of the ways that capitalism insures its success is by allowing for areas of life that are not immediately subject to its logics and demands even as they support it--the family, religion, leisure time, art, and, yes, parts of the university.

Third, the function of the university has not 'always been to reproduce the working class.' In the US, only approximately a quarter to a third of high school graduates get a BA degree. The university here is supporting an elite, a managerial class, a technological class, a class of symbolic knowledge workers, medical scientists, legal experts to manage the affairs of the rich etc. The university, then, isn't reproducing the working class--it's reproducing the bourgeoisie. The crisis of the university is their crisis--they are the one's whose life and future is deeply threatened. Their fear is of becoming-worker, of the loss of what was supposed to be guarantees of quality of life and security. Workers in the US only briefly had these guarantees--from the forties through the seventies.

So, again, the students' fear is correct: that they are not needed or will not be needed--perhaps they should connect this with current and idiotic calls for Free (as in free labor and free consumer goods)--Free means no one gets paid, no one is needed on the job because of the reserve army of the unemployed. But this is not a crisis of the working class. It's the crisis of the middle class--and we do well to remember what happened in various "Third World" countries as structural adjustment policies wiped out their middle classes, sending millions into poverty--back to the working class and peasantry (itself actually becoming decimated through export oriented corporate agriculture) now configured as the un and underemployed--a tiny elite with everything and an enormous all with nearly nothing. That's the crisis of the US middle class, the crisis of the universities.

How to free the university? Fund it. Fund it with taxes. Fund it with the collectivization and nationalization of banks. Fund it with the end of insurance companies and the beginning of singular payer health care. Fund it by dissolving the debts of individuals and families. Fund it by ending financial support for militarism and weaponry. Fund it by defunding the prison-industrial complex. Fund it by letting people with skills in building and carpentry and electronics and plumbing teach students how to repair our collapsed cities and having students work and learn and help. Fund it by turning off so many screens and computers and energy sucking devices and sending students into archives and libraries.Fund it by capping senior faculty salaries, by paying everyone in the university within the same salary rather than letting markets drive up salaries.

The only autonomy lies in getting beyond capitalism--it doesn't exist yet.

Communiqué from an Absent Future « we want everything

From the UC strike:

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).  Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.  We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project.  University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers.  Even leisure is a form of job training.  The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office.  Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.  We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.  We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle.  “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.  A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.  Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.  We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around.  Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color.  Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003.  What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.  What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.  Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school.  Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.  No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition.  On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum.  And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement.  Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit.  But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.  And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers.  Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for.  It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things.  One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience.  First we pay, then we “work hard.”  And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed.  It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience.  Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.  Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here:  was the course easy?  Was the teacher hot?  Could any stupid asshole get an A?  What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes?  Who needs memory when we have the internet?  A training in thought?  You can’t be serious.  A moral preparation?  There are anti-depressants for that.

via wewanteverything.wordpress.com

Best of APSA

I've been at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. A friend told me that this sounded as exciting as a convention of dentists. Actually, I had a great time. These meetings are fun after the first 10-15 years of annual misery and abuse. Maybe because the abuse constitutes a new submissive subject, a subject capable of enjoying sitting through hours upon hours of panels? At any rate, I am that subject. I like seeing what folks are doing, what direction their work is taking, the little shifts in argument that appear over time. I also very much like seeing friends I haven't seen for a year or two.

Now, all sincerity aside, I will list some of the papers I didn't hear. I list these because political theorists are criticized for not talking to the rest of the field, for using jargon that no one else understands. But what about these guys?

"Using the Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit in  Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series Setting to Clarify the Political Economy of the Ratification of, and Compliance with, Human Rights Treaties"

"Correct Confidence Intervals for Time-Invariant and Rarely Changing Variables in Panel Data: A Boostrap Approach"

"Testing Copula Functions as a Method to Derive Bivariate Weibull Distributions"

On Being Postacademic

On Being Postacademic: Kenneth Mostern (an excerpt)

The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar.  Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship.  Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed.  The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. .  The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping.  Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.

The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department.  This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join.  And while there is a relationship between micropolitics and geopolitics, it is far more tenuous, far more mediated by local institutional conditions, than the new faculty first imagines.

Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it.  For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum.  The fact that the new person was hired with accomplishments and expectations much higher than so many senior faculty members does not help this form of fear, of course.

While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one’s unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members.  Senior faculty don’t exactly help or support one another either.  Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness.

The net that academics are ultimately caught in, regardless of the structure or the “progressiveness” of the specific department, is the net of personal power. Within the capitalist professional class, the criteria by which alliances are formed and judgments made is generally limited by an abstract and objective, rather than personal, question:  did you make money for the shareholders?  Even where personality or group dynamics dictates one or another poor relationship, there is some criteria of performance evaluation outside of academia’s twin criteria:  personal alliance and ideology.  In truth, it takes an incredible number of hours to evaluate adequately any individual’s research.  For all but a handful of us, the number of people who have given our work that kind of attention is miniscule.  We are tied to those individuals not the way a consultant is tied to a client’s account books, but the way we are tied to lovers and friends — and ex-lovers and enemies.  Obviously, I am aware that markets create winners and losers, and also, that there is no “free market” unconstructed by the intervention of human psyches.  Yet at least within the bourgeoisie the existence of a monetary reference point provides some resistance to personal power, while the structure of institutionalized intellectual work permits no such outside reference point — not community service, not ethics, not, in light of the inability of humanities scholars to agree about what such a concept might mean, truth.  Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it.

Who Controls Journals? - Inside Higher Ed

News: Who Controls Journals? - Inside Higher Ed.

At the same time Sage was landing a prestigious batch of journals, it was trying to reassure political scientists who have been trying to figure out what was going on with the leadership of Political Theory, a key journal in the discipline and one published by Sage. The political science blogosphere has featured unconfirmed reports that Sage replaced the editor in what some have called a coup. While Sage officials insist nothing of the kind happened, and the original editor is in place, another political scientist has confirmed that he was offered and accepted the editorship, then withdrew when he learned of the controversy.

While Sage officials will acknowledge only some sort of "misunderstanding," they admit that whatever it was they were were trying to do was done without consulting the scholars on the editorial board of the journal, and they are apologizing for that.

Needless to say, having respected editors removed from their positions at journals without any consultation with editorial boards is exactly the kind of move scholars fear when they consider corporate management of their journals. While some have speculated that Sage was taking sides in some kind of philosophical battleground, many have said that the problem here isn't one of philosophy or of one editor or another, but of academics not making the decisions.
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Exactly what took place at Political Theory remains murky -- in part because Sage won't provide details. Most members of the journal's editorial board who could be reached declined to comment, with several saying that they did not want to hurt their relationships with Sage.

What is clear is that in the last 10 days, rumors started to circulate that Sage had ousted Mary G. Dietz, a political scientist at Northwestern University, from the position of editor. The rumors appeared to have substance when Mark Bevir, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, posted an online notice that he had been offered and accepted the editorship of the journal but had then withdrawn.

Bevir wrote: "I am posting one message here to state facts now that I am no longer bound by confidentiality. Sage approached me about the editorship of PT. They asked me to submit an application, which I did. They offered me a contract and I accepted. Throughout I had no knowledge that this procedure was at all unusual. Once I knew it was unusual, I asked Sage to explain their position. I understood that Sage had reasonable concerns about existing editorial practices. But I had no desire to be stuck in the middle of that dispute. I therefore offered Sage my resignation. The future of PT now depends on Sage and the existing editorial team."

Bevir could not be reached for comment. Dietz, via e-mail, said that she was still the editor and that "since the situation with Sage has been resolved to our complete satisfaction, I don't see any need to comment further on it."

One editorial board member who did respond was Terrell Carver, a professor of politics at the University of Bristol, in Britain. He said via e-mail: "Sage has apologized in an e-mail to me for breaching academic protocols and necessary consultation with the editorial executive committee of Political Theory. They have expressed their full confidence in Mary Dietz's ability to continue to edit the journal and are giving their full support in going forward productively. Sage reports that it has severed any connection with any third party in the matter of the editorship."

Carver also posted a notice on one of the online discussions of the matters, urging colleagues to move on to other issues and saying that "members of the Editorial Board have emphasized the importance of vigilance in defense of academic freedoms, principles and protocols in relation to commercial interests, where they are sometimes not fully understood ... which is what happened in this case."

Jayne Marks, vice president and editorial director of Sage, said in an interview that there had been "a misunderstanding," but that Dietz had never stopped being editor of the journal. "It's all been cleared up and everything's back to normal." She hinted that Sage's view is that it was trying to line up a successor to Dietz by saying that it was appropriate for publishers to engage in "succession planning."

But she declined repeatedly to explain what took place, or to acknowledge that anything had happened. Asked explicitly about how another political scientist said he signed a contract for an editorship that wasn't apparently open, and that many political scientists were expressing concern about the lack of information, Marks repeated that everything has been "sorted out" and that she wouldn't say more.