Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist, a tenured associate professor at Emory University School of Law, and Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. For the last five years, her research on work law topics has led her to study faculty tenure as a contractual employment protection. Her ac-trade book, The War on Tenure, is being released this month by Cambridge (20% discount code: ACEVEDO25). The book explains and defends tenure to non-academic readers who know little about academia except what right-wing politicians have told them.

Join Deepa and Karen on Friday, September 26, for their “fireside chat” during The War on Tenure’s book launch at Emory University! Webinar link HERE.

Deepa and Karen will be on from 3:15 – 4:45pm Eastern (full event runs 1:15 – 5:15).

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To the readers of Karen’s blog (which, by the way, I have read devotedly since grad school):

I began studying tenure during one global crisis—the pandemic—and I’m releasing this book during what is rapidly shaping up to be another global crisis and is definitely an industry crisis moment for those of us inside, outside, and uncertainly circling American academia. Although I always try to write with humor (it’s more fun) and although I tried especially hard to write this book with humor (it’s more accessible), I recognize that the tone in this excerpt may be off-putting to many of you. I apologize for that. But I do believe a light touch can make it easier to think about hard topics, and I want lots more people to think about why job security for academics matters. One of the reasons, as this excerpt from Chapter 11 begins to argue, is that academics are forced to engage in a kind of “auto-depreciation” with regard to their own skill set simply in order to play the game. In other words: to play the game of academia—which society still generally wants some people to play—you need to reduce your ability to play any other kind of game.

11

Butlerian Dialectics

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This sentence is famous. Not Vanity Fair, meme-worthy, journalistic frenzy famous – but within a certain (pretty sizable) portion of the academy, and even among the literati who exist outside universities, it’s famous.

The sentence was written by Judith Butler, a philosopher and gender studies scholar who’s taught at Berkeley since 1993. Butler is famous for generating ideas about sex and gender that have proven so influential that they are now, in many circles, common sense. (And even in those circles where they are not common sense, people are often arguing against Butler without either meaning to or wanting to.) The notion that sex and gender are distinct? Butler was an important force in championing it. The view that gender identity is something we make real through performance (speech, mannerisms, clothing, etc.) rather than something that inherently, permanently, exists? Butler is largely responsible for it.

In addition to being famous for producing influential ideas, Judith Butler is also famous for producing difficult prose. The sentence quoted earlier won first prize in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest run by the journal Philosophy and Literature. It (along with the rest of Butler’s writing) went on to be critiqued in the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and more academic articles, books, and blogs than I can name here. And for good reason: even if you understand all the inside-speak of “homologous ways” and “Althusserian theory,” I dare you to read that sentence from beginning to end on just one breath of air.

Over the years, supporters have articulated many reasonable defenses of Butler’s writing. It’s not unclear to its intended audience; it’s not unclear at all (otherwise how did Butler’s ideas become so influential?); it needs to be unclear to be radical because clear writing just replicates existing ways of thinking; it’s no more unclear than scientific or legal jargon that often gets a pass because those fields, unlike the Humanities and Social Sciences, are viewed as genuinely, technically, complex. What rarely gets acknowledged, though, is that Butlerian prose is just an extreme example of a larger phenomenon that has devastating employment implications for academics. The phenomenon I’m referring to is the way in which academics are trained to acquire certain skills or are conditioned to behave in certain ways that are not valued in the general labor market or society at large. Even worse, academics are required to abandon, unlearn, and ignore skills and behaviors that could help them in the general labor market. I’ve been thinking of this phenomenon as a kind of “auto-depreciation” because it involves academics actively reducing the exchange value of their greatest asset – their own skilled labor – in order to succeed in academia.

This argument, as you can imagine, is not popular with academics.

To begin with, the idea of auto-depreciation transforms individuals into commodities for exchange. (The very term “exchange value” comes from Marxist theory and is part of Marx’s broader critique of capitalist economics; it carries all kinds of bad baggage in scholarly circles.) At the same time, most academics would agree that we do live in an age of rabid capitalism where people are thought of as commodities. We build personal brands and develop portable skills, and we are required to explain, if not always explicitly identify, our “value-add” to potential employers. Academics are workers who must do all these things, too. I see little point in pretending otherwise. The difference is that preparing oneself for exchange and advancement in the academic job market requires actively un-preparing oneself for almost every other kind of labor market there is.

Another line of objection is substantive in nature. It’s not taking issue with the implications of what I’m saying (“it feels icky to compare people to things”). It’s disagreeing with my conclusion by saying that academia does give people generally marketable skills. In other words, if you train to become a professor but ultimately can’t or choose not to become one, your education will still have provided you with skills that are valued by nonuniversity employers. Usually, these skills are things like critical thinking, close reading, reasoned argument, project management, and personnel management. (Clear writing does not show up too often on these lists.) If you’re thinking to yourself that these are relatively abstract abilities that many nonacademics are also trained to develop, you’re right. And, if we take a closer look at the specific skills you must acquire to succeed in academia, it becomes hard to agree that scholarly training and  professionalization processes translate well outside academia…