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Robert burns, an astute student of human nature, wryly observes in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gi'e us / To see oursels as others see us.” What we may learn is not always palatable. It is no secret that, in the eyes of many of our colleagues in disciplines outside language and literature, English too often appears as a bewilderingly undisciplined discipline—irresistibly drawn to the latest fashionable theory, riven by tiresome factionalism, and shamelessly encroaching on the disciplinary territory of others. The view from within is not always rosy either, on the evidence of satirists such as David Lodge in Small World and Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. In our own eyes, of course, we are stable, responsible, hard-working, and absolutely central to the humanities. It is our colleagues in foreign language departments, we sometimes insist, who are the fractious and feckless ones, and who give the humanities a bad name. But these, our closest colleagues, see us—institutionally, if not individually—as arrogant and imperialistic, and ill content to tend our own gardens, as Voltaire urged. The heart of the matter is that we deem ourselves qualified to teach and to write about works of literature in translation, sometimes without adequate knowledge of the language, culture, or relevant literary tradition. Moreover, in many institutions, world literature is the exclusive—and zealously guarded—province of the English department. How can we reconcile this disciplinary imperialism, not to mention our suspicions about the effectiveness of often balkanized foreign language departments, with the fact that for more than thirty years the most influential theorists have been French, German, and Russian (Auerbach, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Iser, Jakobson, Kristeva, et al.) and that, for the most part, we read them in translation too? Occasionally, of course, English faculty members have been the translators.
Robert burns, an astute student of human nature, wryly observes in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gi'e us / To see oursels as others see us.” What we may learn is not always palatable. It is no secret that, in the eyes of many of our colleagues in disciplines outside language and literature, English too often appears as a bewilderingly undisciplined discipline—irresistibly drawn to the latest fashionable theory, riven by tiresome factionalism, and shamelessly encroaching on the disciplinary territory of others. The view from within is not always rosy either, on the evidence of satirists such as David Lodge in Small World and Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. In our own eyes, of course, we are stable, responsible, hard-working, and absolutely central to the humanities. It is our colleagues in foreign language departments, we sometimes insist, who are the fractious and feckless ones, and who give the humanities a bad name. But these, our closest colleagues, see us—institutionally, if not individually—as arrogant and imperialistic, and ill content to tend our own gardens, as Voltaire urged. The heart of the matter is that we deem ourselves qualified to teach and to write about works of literature in translation, sometimes without adequate knowledge of the language, culture, or relevant literary tradition. Moreover, in many institutions, world literature is the exclusive—and zealously guarded—province of the English department. How can we reconcile this disciplinary imperialism, not to mention our suspicions about the effectiveness of often balkanized foreign language departments, with the fact that for more than thirty years the most influential theorists have been French, German, and Russian (Auerbach, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Iser, Jakobson, Kristeva, et al.) and that, for the most part, we read them in translation too? Occasionally, of course, English faculty members have been the translators.
The Rhetoric o f "Job Market" and t he Reality o f t he Academic Labor System Marc Bousquet The overall balance between supply and demand in academic labor markets will shift markedly, we believe, over the next few decades. The most dramatic changes will occur in the 1997-2002 period, when we project a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences. If present trends persist, we would expect that there would be roughly four candidates for every five positions-a condition that could continue in subsequent years unless significant adjustments occur or policy changes are made. Although we project no comparable imbalance during the 1987-92 period, we do expect some appreciable tightening of academic labor markets to begin as early as 1992-1997. Bowen and Sosa 118 iven the dramatic and startling nature of the conclusions of Bowen and Sosa's 1989 "job market" study, Prospectsfor Faculty (that faculty jobs would soon appear like manna in the desert), and its origin in an unusual collaboration between a sitting university president (William G. Bowen, Princeton president) and an undergraduate student (Julie Ann Sosa, then the editor of the Princeton student newspaper), it's more than a little surprising that almost no one seems to have questioned the Bowen study before a 1994 blurb in the Chronicle of Higher Education-with the interesting exception of Lynn Cheney, who wrote a scathing New York Times editorial regarding the assumptions guiding it. Even after the report's projections proved wildly erroneous, few have troubled to analyze how those errors came about. Without anywhere confronting the organization's own history of en-An associate professor at the University of Louisville, Marc Bousquet is founding editor of Workplace: A Journalfor Academic Labor and coeditor of Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University. His essay, "Composition as Management Science: Toward a University without a WPA" received the 2003 Kinneavy award for most outstanding article published in Volume 22 ofJAC, and a forthcoming issue of the journal Works and Days will republish several of his essays on higher education under the title Information University: Rise of the EMO.
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