"In other versions of the story I have told, I have spoken about the structure of the university as an institution, and my particular university in particular: a half-hearted and, I think, dangerous and uncaring orientation to undergraduate education that serves only the incredibly motivated and the incredibly privileged while leaving the rest to flounder in a morass of bureaucratic details and learning failures; an almost pathological obsession with STEM as what will save the university that directs research dollars in particular ways, marginalizing the humanities in palpable ways—to give one example, of the multiple emails I regularly received from the office of research, I recall perhaps one or two that might have benefitted the humanities; a broadly anti-intellectual professionalizing atmosphere that is inimical to the long, slow life of sustained thinking and unwilling to support it, with, I think, terrible consequences for the humanities—tellingly, the most productive scholars in my department have won multiple external fellowships that keep them away from campus; an administration that is indifferent to its workers’ affects—at one meeting I attended, presented with statistics that over 50% of women and other minorities were so dissatisfied that they planned to leave, administrators said that such “threats” were a constant feature of academic life and moved on to more “pressing” issues; a fetish on productivity that is self-serving and, to my mind, disingenuous—our annual reports are presumably tied to some kind of merit pay system that has not been operational since I was hired, but is a fiction under which we traffic; colleagues who have been so beaten down by the system and have so bought into it that they do not know how to engage as scholars and are fiercely defensive. All of these combined with a profession run by a vulnerable—and becoming even more so—precariat makes it impossible for me to continue to be part of this thing as it currently exists.thenewinquiry/essays/on-quitting/
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 06:26:29 +0000
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