Upstairs, Downstairs in the Academy

I've been deeply gratified lately to see increasing noise in the media about administrative salaries--and particularly presidential salaries--in higher education. For a long time, it seemed like the conversation about student debt and sky-rocketing tuition was focused entirely on faculty salaries, as if tenure-stream faculty were all living lives of outrageous luxury, sipping cognac from snifters in the fancy libraries of our old Victorian mansions. As someone who makes less than $60k (base salary) per year in a discipline where that's just about the average for my kind of institution and rank, I've found the blame put on faculty salaries a bit galling. (For the record, I do not have a Victorian mansion, and my "library" is a small room filled with Ikea bookcases. I don't think I even own a snifter.) What is starting to come to light now is what many faculty have known for years: universities don't have more overhead these days because of growth in the faculty ranks, but because of explosive growth of administrations and administrator salaries. Given their spending priorities, it seems like these new administrative behemoths are badly out of step with the mission and purpose of the university--at the expense of those most vital to the university's existence: faculty and students.

When confronted about the large sums paid out to high-level administrators, boards of trustees and PR departments always say the same thing: if you want to get the "best people" for the job, you have to pay out. It seems to me that there are two problems with this logic. First, this implies that the "best people" for the job of running a university are also the kind of people who will pursue the biggest pay-day, or who at the very least wouldn't consider doing the job for less than half a million dollars a year (before bonuses and other perks). Maybe this is crazy, but I'm not sure someone looking to get rich running a non-profit really understands what non-profit work is about. The fundamental mission of the university is about service: students and faculty come together to learn and to produce new knowledge for the benefit of our local, national, and global societies. While I won't pretend to understand everything that goes into running a university, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the "best people" for the job would have a deep understanding of and appreciation for this kind of service, and who would therefore be happy to be paid less for the opportunity to help such a beneficial institution thrive. Faculty, after all, have made just this sacrifice. We say all the time, "I didn't go into this for the money." Relative to our educations, most of us are underpaid--the majority of us radically so. But for the minority of us who are getting paid a livable wage, we think the lower salary is okay because we believe in the work we do. My goal isn't to make a lot of money, but to make a difference in the lives of my students, so as long as I make enough to live and to get some modest enjoyment out of life, I'm happy to be paid less than my "worth" to be able to do what I love. Dedication to the mission of the university should matter more than making a lot of money. That should be at least as true at the top as it is at the bottom.

But we can turn this logic around, too, and find a second problem in the "you get what you pay for" justification. I might be willing to accept the argument that universities looking for top talent to run their schools need to be willing to pay top-dollar, if that argument were also applied to the people who actually execute the mission of the university: the faculty. The faculty are the ones who teach students--which is ostensibly why tuition-paying students attend university in the first place--and we are the ones contributing to the production of knowledge in our fields. If salaries were determined by a motivation to get the best people to help the university thrive, then every institution should be in a salary-war with every other to get and retain the best faculty they can find. If you get what you pay for, and if universities are interested in providing a top-quality education to students, faculty salaries should be inflating at the same rate as administrative salaries. Instead, the opposite has happened. Among tenure-stream faculty, salaries have stagnated, with last year being the first year in the last 5 in which average faculty raises have outpaced the rate of inflation. More importantly, university administrations are paying considerably less on average per faculty member than they used to, because, instead of responding to increased student enrollments with a proportional rise in the number of tenure-track faculty lines, they have instead opted to have classes taught by part-time faculty getting paid poverty-level wages. Nowhere is this more true than at universities with the highest-paid presidents.

I am of course oversimplifying somewhat, ignoring "market realities" that drive down faculty salaries because of the large numbers of PhDs looking for faculty positions. But it's one thing to say that a university can hire an excellent professor of Latin literature at $59k per year, and another thing entirely to suppose that you can get the same quality instruction paying someone with the same credentials $3k per course, which is what happens when administrators look to free up some cash and "create flexibility" by hiring more and more part-time, contingent faculty. This is not to say that adjuncts are worse teachers than tenure-track faculty--they aren't, due to the extreme dedication and benevolence of educators--but that the university can't really expect to hire and retain "the best" faculty if they're going to pay them poverty-level wages. Yet this is what they do to half of their faculty.

So it seems like there are conflicting logics at work. On the one hand, we're told that universities need to pay upper-level administrators very large sums of money in order to attract the best people to do the work of maintaining and finding ways to improve the university. On the other, these "best people" turn around and hire faculty as cheaply as they can possibly manage. So when students come in, apparently they are getting top-rate administrators, but bargain-basement faculty. Which might be okay, if the students were coming to our institutions for the administrators. But they're not: they're coming here to get an education, which comes from the faculty. And most of our student are paying a lot of money--and going into a lot of debt--to do so. How is this model of paying administrators as much as possible and faculty as little as possible a responsible allocation of funds?

Of course, the ones who decide how to allocate funds are themselves administrators (with a certain amount of oversight from boards of trustees--boards which too often have no faculty on them and which tend to be well-connected with administration). Since apparently we believe in hiring administrators who want to make a lot of money, it's perhaps unsurprising that administrators give themselves the largest raises. But these spending priorities aren't simply a matter of greed: they reflect the tendency among administrations to treat themselves as more important to the existence of the university than faculty. At one of the institutions I've worked at, the school once hit a "crisis" of unexpectedly low enrollments that led to a substantial budget shortfall. The administration's response was to freeze all faculty hiring, which seemed reasonable enough; but at the same time they created three or four more administrative positions to "help deal with the crisis." That institution is hardly the only university where this happens. The administrator-brain thinks that the solution to a problem of enrollment is less (comparatively inexpensive) faculty and more (comparatively expensive) administrators: this tells us what we need to know about their priorities, and what personnel they deem most important to the continued existence of the university. And therein lies the real problem.

Parents and students should be angry about this, because outrageous administrative salaries correlate with the rise in student debt. Thanks to increasing media coverage of this correlation, perhaps the anger will come, and universities will be pressured into administrative reform (at least at public institutions). But at the end of the day, the money is one symptom of a larger problem, which is that the people running our institutions of higher education don't prioritize education--quality education, not "how many kids can we get to pay to sit in one classroom and how little can we pay the instructor who stands in front of them?" When I once described to a friend outside the academy my frustration at my administration's refusal to involve faculty in important decisions, my friend connected administrative attitudes to the general tendency in the U.S. to paint educators as lazy and incompetent. "It must be hard," she said, "when your own bosses treat you like that." Well, yes, actually, it is. As faculty, we work hard to create environments in which students can learn at a high level, and to participate actively in our fields so that we are able to provide our students with cutting-edge information and insights. When our work is devalued, not just by our social world, but by our own employers, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep working hard. We keep going because we care about our students and about our fields; it would be nice if our administrators shared that dedication with us.

Blue Collar Academia

The reality of working in the academic world these days is that, more often than not, the rumors and announcements trickling out of administration buildings are bad news. Budget cuts, enrollment drops, hiring and salary freezes--I've been in my current position only 4 years, and it seems like the sky is falling more often than not. Last week was no different: a significant drop in freshman deposits from the previous year, and with it the usual rumblings of Bad Things to come. It used to be that these announcements filled me with terror and dread. What kind of job did I have, and what kind of institution did I work at, that the winds of change could shake us so terribly?  Do I need to look for another job? At my previous job, I was always looking for higher ground, because it seemed to me that the position I occupied would soon fall out from under me (not, as it turned out, an irrational fear--my previous employer just announced a bunch of tenure-track firings, including 11 in the division I used to work in). I went on the market every year in search of an elusive "good job." When my present institution offered me a position, I took it because, though I wasn't sure if it was a "good job," I was fairly certain that it was a "better job." But soon after, the intimations of dark days ahead began again. Initially, it panicked me: I'd moved to higher ground, but maybe it wasn't high enough? As time has gone on, however, I've started to recognize that my expectations for academic work simply didn't match the reality. The "good job" wasn't elusive: it was illusory. What I wanted for a job simply didn't exist anymore (if it ever did). More importantly, I realized that what I wanted was ultimately not very desirable in the first place--in fact, the illusion may be contributing to the worst of the problems in higher education.

As a graduate student setting out for the wasteland of the job market for the first time, my image of what it meant to be a professor was fairly narrow. I assumed that being a professor meant teaching your classes (in your field, of your own design) and doing your research. The proportion of time dedicated to each pursuit would differ based on the institution, and at some places there would be more or less funding for research support, and more or less "service" teaching, more or less release time from teaching obligations, etc.; but basically I would be able to do the same things I'd done in graduate school--which is to say that I'd be able to do my own thing. While I had a vague understanding that I would also have service responsibilities, my sense was that these were just an undesirable side-effect of the profession, obligations no one really wanted to do but that simply came with the job. I wasn't averse to the idea of service; I just didn't understand it as a real part of the job. The job--the real job--was engaging with the world of ideas with students and, via research, with colleagues. Like a lot of academics, particularly in the humanities, I was attracted to the job partly because of the independence it offered: I would be master of my classroom, and I would direct my own research, and--outside of scheduled teaching time--I would dictate my own hours. If I could get work as a professor, I would be an island, entire of myself. And if I could just get to tenure, no one would ever be able to take that away from me.

Thus when I was lucky enough to land my first tenure-track job, I was distressed to discover how deeply endangered this way of life had become, and how intent administrations seemed to be on hunting the tenured professor to extinction. At the time I was unaware of the statistics--that, for instance, nation-wide only about one-third of faculty are tenure-track--but it was clear to me that, at least at the kind of tuition-dependent private university I found myself at, administrators had no interest in the world of ideas, and were determined to make their faculty do as much teaching and service as possible with as little salary and research time possible. I realized quickly that the freedom I'd expected to enjoy was extremely precarious, that administration could change the terms of my employment at pretty much any time (indeed, I found out later that I'd come very close to losing my job when then 2008 crash happened and admin seized the opportunity to take some faculty lines back from the liberal arts). All of this indicated to me that I had landed in a "bad job"--though I recognized that there were worse out there--and that I needed to start looking for something better. What I discovered when I changed jobs, however, was  that even "better" schools face many of the same challenges (this is admini-speak) as the less well-ranked. Dependence on tuition for revenue meant our fortunes would rise and fall with enrollments; and, as I spoke to colleagues at other schools and read more about the state of the academy in the U.S., I learned that the tendency toward administrative bloat, which tilts university budgets away from instruction-related spending (i.e., away from spending on faculty and academic departments), is a national problem that the majority of universities are facing. The threat of salary freezes, of increased teaching loads, of diminished department and program budgets, of shrinking tenure-track lines and increased casualization: these are the daily reality for American university faculty.

What I wanted was to find a job where I didn't have to worry about my position, where I could simply focus on my teaching and research and not worry about how the money was managed or where the students would come from (isn't that what administration is for?). What I found was that everything I want to do, as a scholar and as a teacher, is under attack pretty much everywhere, due in large part to the unsustainable structure of modern higher education. There are no places (or very few) at which I would be "safe" just to do my own thing. But as I came to this realization, slowly another started to emerge, as well: that finding a "safe" position was the wrong thing to want. That, if quality teaching and scholarship are under attack at the American university, then part of my job should be to defend those things, to work to make the university--or at the very least my university--a place where those things are supported. Furthermore, if the causes of these attacks on quality teaching and research are administrative bloat combined with (and intimately connected with) the increasing corporatization of the university models that treats students as customers to be bilked of their funds (with the collusion of the government student loan system), then no one--not me nor my senior colleagues nor the new faculty majority working on contignent, mostly part-time contracts--will be "safe" unless all of us work to reverse these trends.

The problem with my original concept of the profession, I realized, was that no part of it was devoted to "defending the guild," as my spouse likes to say. I expected that "the university"--a vague entity given life by my naive faith in its "higher purpose"--would simply make a space for me to work, that I could study literature and help other people do the same, without me ever needing to participate in the actual functioning of that entity, without me needing to take responsibility for keeping it alive. I expected the university simply to function the way I thought it should work, without me or my colleagues having to do much to make it work that way. This isn't just a bad way to think of a job: it's a way of thinking that, if it's widespread, perhaps accounts for why American universities have fallen on such hard times. If we don't think it's part of the job of a professor to fight for the university--the university as a place for education, exchange of ideas, production of new ones, and participation with others across a range of interests and backgrounds in whatever projects we can imagine--then it's perhaps unsurprising that people with other ideas about what the university should be (specifically people who see it as a business) have taken over.

Part of what caused me to rethink my notion of what it means to be a professor has been my increased involvement in what had always seemed like the throw-away part of my job: service to the campus community. The experience of this kind of work is very different from what I trained to believe. When I was a graduate student, my mentors rarely talked about service as part of faculty life, and, when they did, it was overwhelmingly in a negative context. When I was new faculty member, my senior colleagues represented service in the same light. Bitching about committee work is a surer mark of the (tenure-track) professoriate than corduroy jackets and glasses. To an extent, the bitching is justified: much committee work is inefficient, and sometimes by design--administrations seem to love forming committees just to be able to ignore their recommendations. But even in our way of describing service work--that is, as "service"--our profession seems to denigrate participation in the administrative side of academic life. Teaching serves students; research serves our larger community of scholars. Yet participation in the decision-making processes of our institutions is singled out as "service," as if this were the menial, laboring part of our job, compared to the more noble activities of teaching and scholarship (we even call the teaching we don't like to do "service teaching"). I remember, as I was heading off to my first department meeting as a tenure-track professor, senior colleagues rolling their eyes at me: "Now you get to see the fun part of the job," one commented sarcastically. What they didn't understand, however, was that I was excited to be at a department meeting, because it was the first time I would have a voice in deciding how things would work in my workplace--at least in the limited context of the department. I've seen this scene repeated every time a new faculty member arrives (and I may, I'll admit, have been guilty of playing the role of the jaded senior colleague once or twice myself). Worse, I've seen tenured faculty members telling non-tenure-track members of the department that they're lucky they don't have to--or can't--go to meetings, as if it's a privilege to be entirely disenfranchised in one's workplace. (We should start calling service the "tenured-professor's burden.") The overwhelming tendency among tenure-stream faculty, at least in my experience, is to treat service as a waste of our time and "beneath" us. The prevailing attitude is that this is not our real work.

Yet this is precisely the work that is most important for faculty members to engage in at this point in the history of the American university. By now it should be obvious that we cannot leave the running of our universities to administrators, boards of trustees, or legislatures. If we want the university to be a place we want to work, we are the ones who have to make that happen. The good news is that, if we change our attitude about this kind of work, we are more than up to the task. What I've discovered from committee work is that, while sometimes time is wasted and solutions are poorly implemented (or just ignored), generally speaking when you put a bunch of smart people in a room to figure something out, they are in fact capable of figuring it out. And I expect that we'd get better at it with practice (and perhaps by using our well-developed research and learning skills to find out and teach ourselves a bit about negotiating, collective decision-making, and administration). This is work we can do, rather than letting those with a more business-like model of the university do it for us.

This is also work that requires us to understand ourselves not as little islands of intellectual productivity and contemplation, but as part of a larger community working together for the benefit of students and of our social world. This means developing a sense of solidarity with the others working towards the same goal--which includes not just tenured or tenure-track faculty, but also students, adjunct faculty, our administrative assistants (who often do most of the meaningful work of keeping our departments running), librarians, janitorial staff--everyone who does the work on the ground of helping students to learn more about their world and of supporting the production of knowledge. Having this sense of solidarity means getting away from the notion that some of the activities of the university are "beneath" us. I have known tenured faculty who could not be bothered to copy their own syllabi or to fill out their own post-conference paperwork, who expected others to take care of these things so that they could focus on more "important" work. This is the ivory-tower mentality. I used to think that this generalization about the profession was bullshit (I function very well in the "real world" despite having a Ph.D., thank you very much), but as I've come to understand why the university system is in so much trouble, I've also noticed that we tenure-stream faculty tend to avoid grappling with the reality of our own working conditions. Our ivory towers don't keep us separate from the rest of the world; we locked ourselves in these towers to avoid dealing with the rest of our own institutions, leaving it to the people in the castle below us to make sure that the towers didn't crumble. When we hold ourselves apart from all the non-academic activities of the university in this way, we both let others suffer for our sakes (for instance, allowing an army of precarious, contingent faculty into the servants' quarters to do our "service" teaching), and we failed to guard the gate against those who wanted to raze the castle and build an industrial park in its place. If we want to start to undo the damage and rebuild, we have to come down from these decaying towers, roll up our sleeves, and stand shoulder to shoulder with everyone else toiling in the day-to-day of our institution's functioning.

My point here is not that we tenure-stream faculty need to involve ourselves in more committee work, though committee work can be worthwhile to the extent that committees are empowered to make and implement decisions. We might instead look to the example of adjuncts, who have taken it upon themselves through unionization and information campaigns to fight the casualization of our profession. We can also look to the examples set by many students, such as those at the University of Southern Maine, who have likewise organized themselves and taken their complaints to administration and to the trustees with enough noise and enough numbers that they cannot be ignored. It takes very little searching to find examples of university members banding together to create positive change within their campus communities, whether it's students uniting against a commencement speaker or faculty uniting against the unilateral decision of a board of trustees. The important thing is that we be willing to do the work, and that we be willing to do it together.

If being a tenured professor ever meant living a life of leisure, it certainly can't any more. There is work to be done--a lot of it--to save American universities from attacks on education and the production of knowledge. Instead of being tower-dwellers within the university community, we need a more blue-collar ethic, one that doesn't disdain the kinds of work necessary to take back our universities and then to run them the way they should be run, and one that recognizes our place in a community and our solidarity with those community members. As I start to recognize this fact, and as I look around at all the people already engaged in the fight to take back campuses for the purposes of education and knowledge production, I find that I'm must less anxious about the future than I was when I spent all my energies trying to scramble for higher ground (without stopping to think what would happen to the people on the ledges below); and I realize it's because, by recognizing my solidarity with others, I find I'm not alone. For years, I made the mistake of thinking that getting a "good" job meant getting a position that would leave me alone to do my own thing. What I've learned is being alone is precarious, and that a good workplace isn't simply something that will be given to me: it's something we have to fight for, to create, together.

Confessions of a Boss

I'm nearing the end of my first year with new administrative responsibilities that give me oversight of a campus-wide program and the significant number of adjunct faculty and graduate students who teach in that program. As the semester draws to a close, I've found that I'm becoming paranoid about whether I'm doing a good job with this program. The problem isn't that I've been getting negative feedback: the problem is that I get almost no feedback at all, particularly from the people most affected by the decisions I make--the adjuncts and graduate students. A former chair once said to me that the hardest part of her position was that it changed the way people spoke to her--specifically, it made people less likely to do so. The revelation here isn't that people are reluctant to speak to their bosses; it's that this makes it difficult for the boss to do her job. I'm starting to understand now just how problematic the silence that surrounds power--in this case, power over people's employment situations and the conditions of work--can be. And this is revealing to me how such hierarchies, without strong protections in place for the workers, can make for bad managers.

Since I have taken over this managerial position ("administrative," in academic parlance, but that's just a way to obscure the management-worker relationship that is in fact the reality of academic labor just as with all other kinds of labor), I have heard very little from the adjunct faculty I oversee. Though I have tried to emphasize that I see mine as a support role--my job is to help secure for the instructors in the program the resources and support they need to do their jobs well--I rarely hear from anyone about problems they are facing in the classroom. Initially, I didn't understand why I heard from my faculty so rarely, and I was shocked and somewhat appalled when I realized that I'd only heard about a single case of plagiarism in the program in my first semester (statistics tell me that plagiarism is happening; either it isn't being caught, or when it is caught it isn't being reported). But when I stopped to think about why this might be happening, I realized that, however "open" and supportive I might try to be, the structure of my position relative to my instructors makes me all but inaccessible. I've certainly in the past, both as a graduate student and as a junior faculty member on the tenure-track, been nervous about bringing problems to my superiors, because I was worried about how those problems reflected on me and my abilities as a teacher. Maybe this rash of plagiarism is somehow my fault; or maybe this student is disruptive because I've mismanaged things somehow. And, even if that's not true, what if my supervisor thinks that's the case? Will my abilities be judged if I ask for help? I've asked these questions from positions with a certain amount of job security: as a graduate student, I knew I wasn't going to lose my fellowship, and as a junior faculty member on the tenure track, I knew that my department would need stronger inducements to get rid of me than a few problems in the classroom (academic job searches are exhausting, after all). I can only imagine how much more worried I would be about bringing problems to my supervisor's attention were I an adjunct faculty member, able to be fired (or rather, not re-hired) at the end of each semester for any reason--or no reason. The real miracle is that anyone ever comes to me at all.

The precariousness of my instructors' employment situation thus creates a problem that I can't overcome simply by telling everyone that I'm on their side. At the start of my first semester, I made the effort to drop by people's (shared) offices to say hello, but I stopped soon after because I worried I was creating the impression more of surveillance than of helpfulness: "The boss is checking up on me--what did I do?" It doesn't matter how "nice" or well-meaning I may be: I can't escape the fact that one of my roles is evaluative--I'm supposed to make sure that everyone in the program is doing their jobs--and I can't pretend that there isn't a power imbalance that separates me from the people I oversee and that colors every interaction I have with those people. That power imbalance encourages instructors to hide problems from me, rather than seeking out my help. Even worse, it likely silences any criticism my part-time faculty might have of the program, or of my management of it. No one likes to tell the boss she's wrong; but when the boss has the power to dismiss you without cause at any point--regardless of whether she's likely to exercise that power--the inducement to stay silent in cases of mismanagement is going to be overwhelming.

As a result, my contact with the people I oversee and support is limited, which is not ideal. If part of my role is evaluative, more of it is formative and supportive. The goal of my program is to provide the best quality instruction to our students that we can; it's thus my job as manager of that program to give the people I work with the resources to excel at their jobs, to provide useful, formative feedback, and to support them in trying out new things and tinkering with their instructional design. In an ideal world, instructors would leave the program better teachers than they come in, and my job would be to facilitate that. This supportive role is extremely difficult to perform, however, when the power dynamics of the situation discourage instructors from ever showing weak spots. Moreover, if no one can tell me when I make a bad choice, how do I fix my mistakes? How do I get better as an administrator if no one can offer me feedback on the success of my attempts at management?

Frequent feedback is how we identify strengths and weaknesses and thereby improve; it's why the faculty in my program are observed at least yearly. So why is there no structure in place to observe my performance and provide feedback? We say that we want to provide for our students the best instruction possible; but if the quality of instruction is in part tied to the support for that instruction--that is, to the management of the program--then why don't we put the same energy into assessing the bosses as we do the instructors? This lack of oversight for those in administrative roles is particularly galling when we consider that student evaluations remain a common metric for evaluating teaching. We ask people who, particularly in lower-division classes, are just beginning to enter adulthood, to judge our performance at a task these evaluators have never engaged in and have no training or expertise in; and the bosses think this is a valid assessment tool. So why then are their no evaluations of administrators by their faculty? Why don't we ask grown, professional adults to assess the performance of bosses who are, in terms of credentials and often in terms of experience, their colleagues?

The answer to the question is obvious: people in positions of power don't tend to create mechanisms that might limit that power. But this is a really bad thing. If it's good for the program for me to offer formative feedback to my colleagues working in the program, then it's also good for me to receive formative feedback in return, to find out from my instructors both what I've done right and what I can improve on. If a decision I make is a bad decision, I need to know that, and know why, so that I can rectify the situation and avoid making a similar mistake again. But the current structure makes the part-time faculty much more likely just to grin and bear the weight of any mismanagement on my part, rather than to point out the problem. This is not a recipe for successful management, or a successful program.

My ideal solution to this problem is simply to have a world without bosses, one in which programs are run by the faculty who teach in them, and in which no single member of the organization is granted so much power that they become difficult to criticize. I'm guessing the bylaws of most universities make that an impossibility (though bylaws can always be rewritten), so another solution that fits with the current structure of most institutions is to provide part-time faculty with (1) sufficient job security that they know they will not be subject to capricious sanctions by their boss, so that they can feel safer bringing problems, whether within the classroom or the program, to the boss's attention, and (2) a mouth-piece capable of approaching the boss with the concerns of the faculty without identifying particular faculty. In real world terms, one way to achieve this solution--one way that adjunct faculty members are achieving this solution--is with a union. A union contract generally requires that, when people are fired, they are fired for cause, and bargaining units get to elect stewards, whose job it is to serve as a kind of go-between between management and employees. As a result, the union structure gives employees the kind of voice and support they need to be able to provide feedback to the boss--feedback that, if the boss is doing her job, helps improve the program by improving the training and support that program can offer to its faculty to help them teach as well as possible.

Recently, Volkswagon came out in support of unionizing one of its U.S. factories, recognizing that it's good for business to enable employees to provide more input into decision making, and that a union structure can enable them in this way. If this is true for a car manufacturer, whose first priority is to maximize profit, it seems to me much more true for educational institutions, where the mission of the institution--to provide an education to its students--is carried out entirely by the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. The people on the front-lines know best how decisions made by the bosses affect the students, and affect the faculty's ability to educate students. Being a good boss in this situation means having access to feedback from the front-lines; and getting feedback means providing faculty with mechanisms for providing that feedback without fear of reprisal. Silence is--or should be--a boss's worst nightmare. What we want, if we want to provide our students a good education, is to have a conversation that travels the length of the academic hierarchy; and that only happens if there's more power in the hands of the faculty.

The Net that Enmeshes Us All

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,

And out of her own goodness make the net

That shall enmesh them all. (Othello 2.3.355-57)

I have been troubled by a recent conversation in which I found myself trying to persuade a more junior faculty member that she should not propose to team-teach because it would increase her workload (since, at our school, a team-taught class wouldn't count as a full class, and there's no way to get a reduction for 1/2 classes). She asked, "But what if the reasons for it are really good?"--in this case, improving the student experience and getting an adjunct faculty member better teaching. Here was a fairly new faculty member trying to take onto herself the burden of improving teaching and learning conditions at a university to compensate for the fact that the administration has recently taken several steps to raise faculty workload and make teaching conditions for the adjunct faculty less rewarding. It was a kind, self-sacrificing gesture. And here I was, telling her it was a bad idea.

I've had a lot of conversations recently about the fact that education in this country--including higher education--only continues to function, despite continued attacks from governments, private corporations in the education "business," and think-tanks, because of the intense dedication and massive self-sacrifice of most educators. To put it simply: if we all just "worked to the contract," it would all fall apart. If teachers really were as lazy and as self-serving as union-busting politicians want to claim, very few students would learn anything.

To give just one example: recently the IRS set guidelines for calculating how many hours adjunct faculty work per course. They recommended counting all instructional hours and all office hours, plus 1.25 hours for each hour in the classroom. In my program, this means that the IRS thinks that a faculty member works 9.75hrs/week for each course taught. Speaking for myself, 9.75 hours covers the amount of time it takes to teach, hold office hours, prep for class, and read minor assignments (journals, pre-writing exercises before major papers, etc.). Any time a paper is due, however, 9.75 isn't going to cover it. Given the number of students in a section, multiplied by the amount of time it takes to grade a single essay, a grading week requires 8-12 more hours of my time. I'll admit that I'm a slow grader (I struggle to grade a paper in less than 30 minutes), but I also provide my students with a lot of quality feedback on their work. If I were to teach only the hours the IRS believes a college faculty member works for each course, I'd have to resort to grading the way many of my professors did when I was an undergraduate: a grade plus  a two-word comment ("Very nice," "Needs work," "See me," etc.). Or I'd have to stop assigning papers, and instead teach through multiple choice, Scantron exams--which is not a great way to teach or assess the critical thinking and communication skills central to my discipline. Instead, of course, I just work more hours, because I don't see the point in teaching if I'm not going to try to do it well.

Or another example: in response to efforts by the school's adjunct faculty to unionize, the president of Point Park University, asserted that adjunct faculty don't require access to office space because, he claimed, they aren't required to hold office hours (a claim some of the school's adjuncts dispute). Imagine if the adjuncts at Point Park were then to teach according to the letter of their contracts (as far as their president understands them). Want help on a draft of a paper? Tough, kid; according to the president of your university, your professor's job doesn't involve seeing you outside of class. Of course, regardless of whether it's required, the adjunct faculty at Point Park generally hold office hours (for which, apparently, they are not remunerated); they want to help their students succeed, and that means giving more of their time.

These underestimates and misrepresentations of the amount of work that faculty are required to do attempt to justify the wild underpayment of academia's most vulnerable workers, adjunct faculty. On the other side, administrations continuously raise the workloads of full-time faculty, both tenure- and non-tenure-track, to extract more labor without a commensurate raise in pay. At my institution, expectations for research productivity are higher than they've ever been; at the same time, the administration just raised the teaching load of the faculty in my division. Since the service demands haven't diminished, there are really only two options for the faculty: simply work longer hours (again, without a raise in pay), or find ways to cut corners, to save time in either research or teaching activities. Realistically (since it's hard to cut corners in research), this would mean assigning fewer papers, meeting with students outside of class less, teaching the same courses again and again instead of designing new ones, refusing to take on independent studies, refusing to advise student groups, etc. I don't know anyone on the faculty who has taken this approach. When news of the workload increase first came down, we threatened (among ourselves) to stop assigning papers and to do multiple choice exams, to resign from our service commitments, to stop taking on independent studies: but no one actually did these things, because none of us are willing to sacrifice our students' education for something that is not, in fact, the students' fault. We won't let the sons pay for the sins of the fathers.

And this is what administrations are counting on. They know that our dedication means that we will work harder, that we will sacrifice personal lives and family and leisure, to minimize the impact of administrative decisions on the students. They know that they can undervalue our work while demanding more of us, and that people like my new colleague will find creative ways to do more with less--at the expense of her time and ability to advance at the university. They know, in short, that our love of the work we do (not necessarily the same thing as a love for our "jobs" but too easily conflated) makes us eminently exploitable.

This brings me back to the quotation from Othello at the beginning of this post. The speaker here is Iago, one of Shakespeare's most notorious villains, and he's plotting to use Desdemona's good pity towards a friend to engineer the downfall of Desdemona, her husband Othello, and his lieutenant Cassio. In other words, he will use Desdemona's virtue--her desire to help a friend--to destroy her and everyone around her. If there's a better definition of "evil" than this, I don't know what it would be. Iago is semi-demonic in the play; his early announcement of his malignant duplicity--"I am not what I am" (1.1.64)--travesties God's "I am what I am" in Exodus (3:14), and situates Iago as a kind of Satan-figure in the play. His intention to trap Desdemona and Othello in a deadly net made of her virtue, to take what is good and use it to evil ends, is the hallmark of this demonic nature, and will be reprised in Milton's Satan 60 years later:

If then [God's] Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil. (Paradise Lost 1.162-65)

The theological aspect of this dynamic aside, it seems to me obvious that the will to take what it best in people and use it to hurt them, to "enmesh" them in damaging, exploitative structures that are sustained only by the very virtue they twist and destroy, is the highest and most disturbing form of villainy. It is, as Milton's Satan knew, perversion, an attempt not just to exploit, but to convert virtues like dedication to others into damaging forces--that is, to destroy virtue itself, by destroying its ability to effect positive change in the world.

It is thus not, I think, over-dramatic to say that the fight against the devaluation of the work of educators is a fight between good and evil. When we fight for the support to do our jobs well--that is, when we fight for the resources we need to help our students learn--we are at the same time setting a powerful example to our students by refusing to accept the perversion of our dedication into a mechanism of exploitation. We are fighting to show our students that virtue should be rewarded, that the desire to help others is a worthy--not a worthless, devalued--endeavor.

How Not to be an Asshole: Search Committee Edition

I wrote before with some advice for job candidates on surviving the search process while preserving a modicum of sanity. Now that the work of my own search committee is underway, I've been thinking about what search committees can do to help job candidates in their quest for sanity. There's a lot about the search process that inevitably produces anxiety for candidates. When every job ad pulls in 100-250 applications (more for some 20th-century jobs), it's inevitable that good people will get cut even in the first round, many for reasons that have less to do with the quality of their work than with their ability to demonstrate that quality in the c.v. and/or in the language of the job letter. This isn't the fault of individual search committees: it's built in to the current structure of the academic job market. But, like so much else about academic labor, a large part of the suffering experienced by candidates on the market is a product of numerous small indignities inflicted on them, too often needlessly, by search committees. It's the death of a thousand cuts. Small changes in the way those of us on search committees interact with candidates could help those candidates a lot, just by making them feel like we view them as human beings.


Communicate with candidates. When you're searching for jobs, a million anxieties about procedure fill your mind. Did I send that letter to the right address? Did I address it to the right person? Did I send everything that the ad asked for? In the digital age, sometimes it's easier for candidates to double-check these things: you can also look through your email or check your interfolio receipt. But the digital age adds an additional fear: did the files I sent actually get there? At bare minimum, then, search committees should acknowledge all materials they receive. It's not hard to write up a quick, 2-3 sentence form letter that can be copied-and-pasted into response emails. In case anyone thinks this is too much work, I'll make it easy for you:

Dear [Candidate],

Thank you for your interest in our department's job opening in [name of field]. We have received all required materials for your application/In order for your application to be complete, we still require your [name of missing materials]. The search committee will be contacting candidates from whom we would like additional materials within [timeline].

Sincerely,
[Whoever's in charge of the emails]

Cut, paste, rinse, repeat. Similarly, if you know you are no longer interested in a candidate, let them know, so that they can stop hoping. While you know pretty well by the time March has rolled round with nary an email from a search committee that you probably won't be getting that job, there's always something particularly demoralizing about the flood of rejection letters that pours in after the campus visit window has closed. I know that some HR departments forbid search committees from sending out rejections until a candidate has accepted an offer, but I suspect that this isn't the majority of institutions. If your school doesn't have a rule against sending out rejections, then you can make it easier for job candidates to manage the emotional toll of rejections, and the terrible anxiety of not knowing, by sending a simple rejection email as soon as you know you will not be pursuing a person's candidacy.

For those of you who perhaps ask your department's administrative assistant to handle emails to candidates: make sure that you communicate frequently with that person to be sure that the emails are being sent out in a timely fashion. In fact, ask to be cc'd on the emails, so that you know that they are going out, and going out to everyone. Your administrative assistant likely has no first-hand experience of the horrors of being on the academic job market. This means that they might not understand the importance of those emails, and therefore might not make them the priority. More importantly, your administrative assistant is likely over-worked and under-paid. This is a good reason to do the work of sending out these emails yourself, but if you choose to ask your administrative assistant to do the work, it's still your job to make sure that the emails get sent. And if your administrative assistant helps you with this, make sure to bring them a bottle of wine or a gift card to thank them for doing the extra work--think of it as a gift from you and the candidates.

Be reasonable in your demands. This means a couple of different things. First, it means that you shouldn't ask for specialized materials at early stages of the process. The first cut in the search process is brutal: a committee wants to get a pool of 150-200 candidates down to 30-40 that they'll look at closely. A committee does not have time to read a job letter, c.v., teaching philosophy, 2 syllabi for job-specific courses, a research statement, a 25-page writing sample, and a teaching portfolio in the first round: thus, if you're on a search committee, you shouldn't ask for these things. I was once on a committee that asked for a lot of material upfront, with the reasoning that it would save the committee time after the first cut--they wouldn't have to ask for the materials. But in trying to save the committee the week or so it would take the candidates to send their additional materials (and usually it was a lot less than a week), the committee was creating more work for the candidates, both by asking them to have at the ready writing samples and recommendation letters (which always come in late) earlier in the process than is necessary, and by adding more materials that the candidates had to assemble (and thus worry about) in the early stages. In the search process, the committees have almost all the power, and the candidates almost none. For those of us who actually care about this power imbalance--which, in the humanities, probably should be all of us--here's a good rule of thumb: it's never okay to make less work for yourself by making more work for the candidates. It's just asshole-ish behavior. I don't think most search committees who ask for lots of materials necessarily think about the fact that they're creating more work for the candidates, but that's kind of the problem. If you're on a search committee, it's your responsibility to think about how your requests are going to affect the candidate. If nothing else, those of us on search committees should always ask ourselves: (1) why do I want this, (2) am I actually going to read it, (3) how much work does this create for the candidate, and, given (1) and (2), is it really necessary?

Second, being reasonable also means looking at the materials you do request with a certain sympathy for the candidate's situation. By this I don't mean that, because searching for jobs sucks, we should keep every candidate alive out of pity--that obviously won't work. But it does mean that we should be careful about the kind of criteria we use to bounce candidates out of the pool. I have known people to throw out applications for things like incorrectly addressed job letters (i.e., job letters accidentally addressed to a different school) and other typos. I've also known people to throw out applications for not sufficiently "responding" to the language of the job ad. Here's the reason I disagree with this kind of practice: in a good year, a search candidate is sending out 20-30 job applications (my biggest year was 42), all due between October 15th and November 1st. In the process of customizing each letter for each job, mistakes are bound to happen. If a person otherwise looks like a viable candidate, I'm just not too worried if they accidentally addressed the letter to a school that precedes mine in the alphabet. It's not a sign that, as one person told me, the candidate "is not serious about the job"; it's just a sign that they're applying to a lot of jobs. I'm generally going to start from the assumption that everyone who submits themselves to the tortures of the job market is serious about every (any) job. As far as the demand that candidates respond to the job ad specifically, this runs afoul of the rule of thumb above--it's asking the candidate to do a lot of extra work (given the number of letters they have to send out in any given 1-month period) to make the job of the search committee easier. This demand also creates a pressure for candidates to misrepresent themselves in order to show that they "fit." Recently, Rebecca Schuman devised an excellent plan for taking some of the time out of the search process for the candidates by moving to a "common dossier clearinghouse" in which candidates could simply upload their materials, and departments could access the materials of those who fit their criteria. This would do away with job letters that responded to specific job ads; it would also make the whole process a lot more straightforward for everyone involved.

Drop the "best person for the job" bullshit. Academics in the humanities are experts at exposing faulty assumptions, subjecting "common sense" to critique, and demystifying ideologies. (This is why we're so much fun at parties.) And yet, somehow, that critical mind flies out the window once we're on search committees, and suddenly we accept as truth the vague, ideologically-freighted assumption that we're looking for "the best person for the job." (For the record, I'm not innocent of this: I've used this phrase more than once, though I'm learning to hate myself a little bit every time it escapes my lips.) We would not accept a first-year paper that argued that people should watch hockey simply because it's "the best sport," without a carefully articulated explanation of what "best" means in this context. Yet somehow we don't hold ourselves to the same standard. The fact is that, if we actually knew what we meant when we said we wanted the "best" candidate, we wouldn't say that we wanted the "best" candidate: we'd say we wanted the candidate who fulfilled a specific set of criteria. Of course, I doubt any search committee could actually agree on those criteria, since we all tend to have very different ideas about what constitutes good scholarship and good pedagogy, so instead we resort to the language of "the best candidate" to hide that fact that we really mean a candidate who makes the most number of people on the committee/in the department happy while pissing the least number of people off. To be less cynical about it, there's an inevitably subjective component of the job search that is a product of the fact that a search committee is made up of people with specific perspectives, biases, preferences, and aversions. Even the best-intentioned of us can't remove all personal bias from a search, no matter how mindful we try to be of them. I've been on two committees in subsequent years searching in the same field for two different hires. We had a lot of repeat applications, and in some cases candidates who were cut in the first round in the first search made it significantly further in the second. The work didn't magically get better from one year to the other; the composition of the committee changed. So the language of "the best person for the job" really doesn't make a lot of sense.

We can argue that this is "just semantics," but I think this attitude actually has a negative impact on the search process and on the psyches of job seekers, because it allows us on search committees to justify our cuts by saying that candidates aren't "good enough": I find it hard to believe that this attitude doesn't affect the way we treat eliminated candidates in a variety of intangible ways. So I think we can do a service to job seekers by adjusting our perspective on the situation. In any given job pool, probably 1/4 - 1/3 of the candidates would be perfectly suitable to the job; and maybe half of those would be great at it. We might be able to make fine distinctions between them--it's in fact the work of the search committee to do so--but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of candidates have done the work and have the skill to do a great job in the position. The sad part of being on a search committee (and in part why, I think, we desperately try to convince ourselves that the search is a straight-forward meritocracy) is that we can only give one job when there are so many deserving candidates. This is what we should focus on when we are searching. We're not trying to find the "best" candidate: we're trying to make sure that the one job we have to give goes to one of the many people who will do a great job at it. When we reject people, it's not because they aren't the best; it's because the realities of the situation require us to, and so for a variety of reasons that have less to do with outright merit and more to do with the particularities of our situation, we've decided that we prefer one very qualified candidate over another.


Being on a search committee is hard--not anywhere near as hard as applying for jobs, of course, but hard because otherwise well-meaning people are put in a position where we have to say "no" to people who don't deserve to be rejected, and because we have to put people through a process that (if we got our jobs in the last decade and a half) we know to be dehumanizing and cruel. And because we're generally pretty smart people, we're very good at coming up with rationalizations for the process to protect us from the fact that we're participating in this cruelty, that we're inflicting suffering on others. Within the context of the search committee itself, there's only so much we can do about the structural evil. But the one thing we can do in that context is to be critical of our own rationalizations, assumptions, and process, in order to treat our candidates as humanely as the situation permits. We need to recognize that the people whose materials we look at are not initiates beneath us, only the best of whom will ascend to our ranks: they are colleagues, many of whom as skilled (some more so) in their fields as we are in ours, distinct from us only by virtue of one search committee's decision. Ultimately, then, when we look at candidates we need to have our own search-committee-version of the golden rule in mind: do unto candidates as you wish search committees had done unto you.

Surviving the Academic Job Market

I've been lucky enough to have been off the job market for the last several years, but the debut of each year's MLA job list somehow still produces a thrill of anxiety, like the sound of the alarm clock that woke me up for school as a child. I spent 5 years "on the market," and I've watched many of the people I care about go multiple rounds with the academic beast. As a result, when the list comes out I feel bad to be part of a profession that makes its promising new members suffer through a process whose mechanisms are often mysterious and whose rewards often seem to be doled out at random. The systemic problems with the academic job market are myriad and well worth our concern, but the larger questions of how to "fix" the market don't offer much to the individuals who are trying to find academic jobs at present. So, for what it's worth, I've assembled here a few pieces of advice, based on my experience searching for jobs, talking to people searching for jobs, and participating on search committees, for surviving the process as it currently exists.

Remember that it's not personal. Not getting a request for more materials, or not getting an interview, always feels like a gut-punch, but the fact is that, a lot of the time, the reasons search committees don't pursue specific applications have little to do with the worth of the candidate. I have seen job applications thrown out for a lot of reasons, and only rarely has the reason been that the committee members felt the work was sub-par. Sometimes, people are thrown out because they are ABD and there's already a large pool of candidates with a degree in-hand. Sometimes, applications get tossed simply because the work of the candidate is too close to the work of someone already working the department. I've also seen candidates passed over because the work was too different from what was being done in the department (as in, "This person is too theoretical for this department"). On the more sinister side, I've seen applications thrown out because of ideological commitments and petty internal politics. As a graduate student serving on a search committee, I saw (what I thought was) a promising application scrapped with only the comment, "Ugh, a real formalist!" In that same search, I saw Committee Member A argue (successfully) against the candidate preferred by Committee Member B simply because Committee Member B had successfully argued against the candidate preferred by Committee Member A. This isn't to say that all search committees are insane: but even healthy search committees generally find themselves with more qualified, interesting candidates than they do opportunities to interview them, and so, even in well-meaning, self-aware search committees decisions get made not so much based on the individual worth of the candidate, but for more nebulous reasons of "fit." Everyone who goes on the job market gets more rejections than interviews, and so, while rejections are never easy to take (particularly when that school you'd give your right index finger to work at doesn't even ask to see your writing sample), it's important to remember that rejections have a lot more to do with the state of the job market than they do with your worth as an academic. Given that fact, it's important that you...

Focus on what you can control; try to ignore what you can't. This bit of advice applies to all areas of life, but I think it's particularly tricky on the job market, where the line between what can be controlled and what can't sometimes seems a little blurry. It's easy to get drawn into trying to anticipate what a search committee is looking for, whether at the application stage or the interview stage. I've seen people work themselves into fits trying to personalize job letters for specific schools, trying to word everything just right to please this member of the department or to avoid pissing off that other member. But the fact is that, even if you know who is in the department, you don't know (at least at the application stage) who is on the committee. You also usually don't know the internal politics of the situation, which, as I mentioned above, can have an unfortunate impact on the choices that get made. You cannot read minds, and you cannot be all things to all people. What you can do is put together application materials that present the main ideas of your project clearly, that explain why these ideas are interesting, and that demonstrate your commitment to your classroom. In other words, to adapt a phrase from Jersey Shore, you do you, and search committees do them. In the job market process, the only thing you have control over is your work and your presentation of that work, so focus on doing that well, and, as much as possible, try to avoid imagining what the search committees can be thinking. That way madness lies.

Have a plan B. Everything I've just said points to one of the biggest problems with the academic job market for those who are suffering through it: candidates have very little control over their fates. To a large extent, I think maintaining some measure of sanity on the academic job market requires finding ways to get a bit more control over your own future. And the more I think about it, I believe one of the best ways to do this is to actively search out other possible career paths that would make you happy. On a campus visit my second year on the market (for a job I did not get), I was exchanging job market stories with a junior faculty member, and he told me about how close he'd come simply to leaving the academic game altogether. After a few years of searching without a tenure-track offer, he'd made up his mind: if he didn't get a job on the next cycle, he was going to become a substance abuse counselor. Of course, in the next cycle, he got his job, but what struck me about his story was how much more relaxed he said he'd felt that last year on the market. It wasn't just that he'd decided, "It's this year or nothing"--that, I think, would have been more anxiety-producing that anything else, since it would have put all the eggs in one basket and then set that basket on explosives set to a timer. Instead, he'd come up with a concrete, alternate career path, and started looking into what it would take to follow that career path, even while he was continuing his search for academic jobs. One of the most disempowering aspects of the academic job search is the extent to which we feel trapped by it. Our fates are held hostage to a year-long search process during which we have no control over what the "gate keepers" of the profession will do, and for a lot of people on the market, it feels like there's no choice--or at least no good choice--but to subject ourselves to this mysterious machine. But the fact is that we are all talented individuals capable of doing many different kinds of jobs with our academic training: we shouldn't have to be held hostage to the dehumanizing process of the academic job search. Thinking about what else you can do--and what else you'd want to do--is a good way to take back some measure of control because it allows you to decide when enough is enough. Looking into alternate career paths does not mean giving up your dreams of being a college professor: it's simply a way (1) to remind yourself that you have worth regardless of whether the academic job market recognizes it, (2) to give yourself options in a situation where choice is power. The ability to choose to go another round on the job market, rather than feeling forced to do so, makes a big difference for your mental and emotional well-being. It also, I think, makes a big difference to your self-presentation, which can sometimes improve your chances on the academic job market.

The World's End

This post has absolutely nothing to do with academic issues; but it's my blog, and I'll digress if I want to...

My spouse and I recently went to see Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's most recent film, The World's End. Having been fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (the swan kills me even in memory), we were looking forward to another successful parody film. What I liked best about the first two was that they managed at once to be send-ups of a genre (horror film and cop movie, respectively) while also being rather successful examples of the genre. This has always been the hallmark of good parody to me. The World's End wasn't quite the same kind of thing, however. It might be called a parody of a sci-fi film, but, particularly given the similarities between The World's End and Shaun of the Dead, that seems like a stretch. The film also wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as the previous two. Somehow, however, I walked away from The World's End liking it the best of all three.

My musings on the film might have ended there, were in not for the fact that, the day after I saw the movie, Simon Pegg tweeted this essay by A. D. Jameson that provides a fairly involved and interesting interpretation of The World's End. The link he makes between the film and the Medieval quest narrative in many ways solved the generic confusion I felt after the movie, and his analysis of the references within The World's End to the previous films makes me think that, if the movie is a parody of anything, it's a parody of the other two films. But what most struck me in Jameson's reading was his analysis of the main character:

King begins the film a tragic character, his many flaws all apparent. Only he recalls the past as glorious. Everyone else is glad to have left it behind, and now thinks him mad—a loser unable to function in the world of 2013. King’s biggest mistake, his error, is that he never moved on, never shaped up, never got with the program—he never grew up. As such, he’s treated like a child—as he later cries, complaining about the rehab center, “They told me when to go to bed!”

The message would appear simple: This is going to be a film about learning to mature. “You can’t live in the past, Gary King!”

But what if it turns that out one can? What happens if we take Gary King seriously?

Jameson proceeds to do just this--to take Gary King seriously--and in doing so he gets at what I now realize was for me the central attraction of the film: for once, the fuck-up doesn't have to either (1) "grow up" or (2) die.

I have always liked main characters who are a little bit (sometimes a lot) bad--who are subversive in some way, unwilling to "behave" according to rules determined more by social forces than common sense or necessity. (This is probably why I've spent a good part of my academic career on Milton's Satan.) But the consistent trajectory of such characters in our culture's narratives leads them either to be destroyed by their own destruction (think Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or to be domesticated, tamed, and reformed into someone capable of maneuvering within a pre-existing framework (think Rebel Without a Cause, SLC Punk, or, as Jameson points out, Shaun of the Dead). Both options convey the same message: deviance will not be tolerated. But in some ways the second--the reform narrative--is worse because it tends to relegate rebellion to the realm of youthful exhuberance, a phase that inevitably we all have to grow out of to take our place in a world made by others--a place within what The World's End calls "the Network." The hero can live, but rebellion must die.

There's a part of me that prefers rebels without causes. It's not that I have anything against causes: quite the contrary. But to an extent the channeling of rebellious energy into a cause is just a remaking of rebellion into palatable form. We can accept the desire to fuck shit up only if there's ultimately a goal, the promise of a new order that will arise out of ashes of the destruction. This requirement that we place on rebellion to an extent echoes the tired refrain of Occupy critics. All this youthful energy is fine and well, but where's the message?, talking heads whined: what are their goals? Leaving the side the fact that the Occupy movement did in fact have a message that the media mostly ignored, the specious demand that Occupy articulate a specific, unified message was just a way to invalidate the anger. Being pissed off that the world sucks, apparently, isn't okay: you're only be allowed to be angry about it if you have a plan to fix it. We seem incapable as a society of imagining the possibility that the appropriate response to a problem might simply to burn everything to the ground, and it seems to me that this refusal to consider such a thing even possible grows more out of fear than reason.

Which brings me to the other, closely related related feature of The World's End that I liked so much. The apocalypse in the film isn't presented, as it is almost universally in films, as the worst thing ever. Things are harder now, Andy Knightley tells us at the end, but it's really not so bad. Most of us live in fear of order collapsing: both, I think, for the very real reason that the sudden demise of the structures that govern our world would likely cause immediate physical peril--how do we feed ourselves if the world goes dark in winter?--and for the reason that the structures by which we make sense of our lives would cease to exist. I am a college professor, and have always wanted to be: what happens to me when "college professor" isn't a thing any more? There's something therefore brave in the willingness to look at the prospect of total chaos, shrug, and say, "whatever--it's not so bad." In The World's End, the world's end is a comedy, not a tragedy. And the fuck-up hero gets to keep on being a fuck-up, only now in a world where that just doesn't matter. The rules end when the Network collapses, and suddenly what looked like a weakness in Gary--his utter refusal to conform to the norms of the "grown-up" world and his childish desire to lead a band of pseudo-knights--is a strength. He's not afraid to let the world burn for the right to keep being a fuck-up, and somehow, after it burns, being a fuck-up just isn't the problem is used to be. And the world keeps turning.

None of this is to say that I think it's a good idea to live like Gary King (or Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or that this is what the film advocates. It's a film: I don't think it's advocating anything. But I think part of the charm of the movie for me is the way it stands our fear of rule-breaking on its head. We think that, if rebellion or aimless antagonism towards social boundaries goes unchecked, the world will descend into chaos. The World's End entertains exactly that notion, but it shows us an end-result where the chaos isn't the horror show we all think it will be. It asks us to look at the fear of losing order--of losing control--that is so pervasive in our culture (as evidenced by the recent popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives) and laugh at it.