Re: Anecdotage (was Re: Prof. combats ignorance about Islam, women)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>Kelley wrote:

>>i've sat on far to many committees constructing courses and
>>anthologies and worked with enough editors in the process to
>>know that plenty of faculty who think of themselves as leftists,
>>feminists, anti-racists and so forth do so in a rather unreflective
>>way:

>Anecdotes like the above have nothing to do with "a structural
>analysis of apitalist class relations, etc.," either.

Kelley focuses on activities which are officially academic. It is not a
surprise that on a faculty committee faculty should act like faculty. One
would (of course) find as much silliness in a random selection of the
workers in any other enterprise.

Back in the mid-60s, just as at a rather advanced age I was moving
left, I attended a conference of Radicals in the Professions held
in Ann Arbor. A point raised there has guided my relationship to
the campus ever since. A speaker queried, "Are we radical teachers
or are we radicals who are teachers?" (Note the analogy to "radical
hamburger flippers" or "radicals who are hamburger flippers.") I
decided on the spot that I was a radical who happened to earn his
living by teaching. Why shouldn't campus liberals be campus
liberals? We don't get so excited about mail carriers who are
liberal mail carriers or disabled who are disabled liberals.

The problem is more, I suspect, with campus radicals who are
too intent on living an unalienated life -- of achieving a harmony
between their work and their politics. It isn't in the cards. A
capitalist job, at a university or at MacDonald's, is a capitalist
job.

If a professor happens also to be a useful marxist scholar
or theorist, that is separate from his/her professional
activity, just as it would be if she earned her living as
a carpenter or programmer rather than as a professor.
If that marxist scholarship happens to count
also as professional publication, that is a bonus, but
still does not represent any real unity of professional/
political work.

Kelley's summarized anecdotage takes faculty performing
professional labor and judges it as though it were political
work. Silly. See those fellow committee members simply
as people earning a living and stop bellyaching. Whether
plenty of them are unreflective or not tells us nothing about
the left. There is no particular reason to expect professors,
politically considered, to be any more reflective than
machinists, typists, farm laborers, or lab technicians. And
it is as offensive and as wasteful of energy to endlessly
complain about liberal professors as endlessly to complain
about liberal hamburger flippers.

Carrol