Given that we as a discipline seem to feel empowered to develop a foreign policy, I figured I’d offer a few domestic policy ideas, a few resolutions that might take care of some our own local inequities.

The purpose of these resolutions is to suggest some ways out of what most everyone agrees is a generally miserable situation for those currently coming of age or working in academia. More or less, all of us want jobs for scholars and a free education for our students. Repeat that to yourself: jobs for scholars, free education for students. In proposing these, I’m also suggesting that we have some power over our academic, professional and disciplinary destiny and can and should act in concert. I see the decline in tenure-line positions, the specter of academic debt, and even the coercive and jealous guarding of scholarship by publishing cartels, as an invitation to collective action. We already have a communications infrastructure, national and international associations in place, as well as active local chapters across the globe (those hot-beds of activism, academic departments). From this point of view, we’re actually very well organized. All we need to do now is raise some consciousness and come up with a few action items. Should you doubt whether collective action is worthwhile or appropriate, it’s also worth keeping in mind the ways in which activists and unions are making the university a more livable, humane place (one example of each).

Here follow three resolutions. They are drafts. I accept and apologize for their limitations and shortcomings. They don’t talk about all that’s worth fixing (how could they?). I offer them to imagine what collective action on our problems might look like. Interested academic associations should consider them for debate, improvement, and vote.

NB: The preamble portion of these resolutions are going to be much shorter than they might be. There is a tremendous amount of research on precarity in academia and the conditions that creates. I suspect readers of Savage Minds are relatively familiar with this stuff. Moreover, were these to actually go live, they would be worked over, edited, revised, and most importantly, gilded with citations. The most certainly would not be the work of one person.

Resolution on Accreditation Standards and Adjunct Labor

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas there has been a historic shift towards a reliance on poorly-paid, short-term, contract appointments, with no tenure protections to satisfy the research and teaching aims of the Academy;

Whereas these conditions have led to the destroyed lives, thwarted dreams, and unfulfilled potential of thousands of competently trained scholars, our disciplinary children;

Whereas this is no way to treat your children;

Whereas society deserves to benefit from the broadest field of scholarly inquiry possible; and

Whereas students deserve to learn from permanently employed scholars with guaranteed freedom of inquiry.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall deny accreditation and incorporation to any university, college, and or institution of higher learning that, except in cases of emergency or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required for a particular course offering, makes use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no university, college, or institution of higher learning shall, however accredited and legitimized, except in cases of emergency and or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required to make a course offering, make use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on incorporation and accreditation are met.

Resolution on University Governance

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas the standards of accreditation, incorporation, as well as the general norms of university governance expect that trustees or their equivalent shall stand outside of the university community and thereby be “unconflicted”;

Whereas this reliance on outside governance for ultimate budgetary and executive authority in the University has led to a situation in which boards are often made up of people whose professional and personal experience has left them seemingly unfamiliar with the norms of scholarship and university teaching; and

Whereas, due to the nature of university board structures, universities in the United States have increasingly adopted the norms of governance that typify for-profit business enterprises, often referred to as the “corporatization” of the university, or one more manifestation of “neoliberal” ways of running something that is of great public benefit. Such norms include but are not limited to :

Exorbitant executive pay;

Bureaucratic bloat;

An embrace of audit culture;

An efflorescence of debt financing;

An over concern with PR and Marketing;

Prioritizing resort-like amenities over the academic mission;

Prioritizing athletic performance over the academic mission;

A reliance on poorly conceived yet bureaucratically appealing metrics;

A growth of institutes and centers, outside of departmental control, offering instruction;

A disregard for the debt and life possibilities of students, often referred to as “customers”; and

A general degradation of the professoriate.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall amend their accreditation and incorporation standards to require:

1. That all boards be composed of equal portions faculty, students, alumni, non-academic staff, and community members;

2. That all universities, colleges, or other institutions of higher education shall have democratic processes by which such boards are constituted, and may be challenged and changed;

3. Students shall have a veto over all tuition related decisions;

4. Faculty shall have a veto over all research, academic employment, and tenure related decisions;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated;

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on university governance are met.

Resolution on Student Debt

Whereas many measures of income, for the vast majority of people working in the United States have remained stagnant or declined over the last several decades;

Whereas universities, colleges, and other institutions of higher learning in the United States have become increasingly and relatively expensive;

Whereas American society has increasingly relied on debt and loans to pay for higher education, thereby placing the financial burden of provisioning for an education squarely on the shoulders of students and their families ;

Whereas we feel that it is society’s general and no person’s individual responsibility to provide for education and scholarship;

Whereas education and open scholarship are best conceived of as public goods or public commons;

Whereas student debt unreasonably constrains an individual’s life opportunities, and unacceptably commodifies education,  thereby denying the expression of human potential and flourishing that is one of the aims of higher education;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have historically had far lower, inflation adjusted tuition;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have offered an education at no cost to the individual;

Whereas a measure of the worth of a society is how it treats following generations; and

Whereas by this measure of worth we come up wanting.

Now Therefore:

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall offer education free of charge to all comers;

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go tuition free;

We resolve that all universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go student-debt free;

We resolve that all state and private sponsors of universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall create the conditions under which universities, colleges, and institutions of higher learning shall be able to go tuition and student-debt free;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties,
thereby going on strike, until such time as the above resolutions on student debt are met.

I wondered: why, when, and how do we call ourselves anthropologists? Of course, there are academic conventions, and institutional structures. But there’s also a sense of belonging to a professional community, a global tribe, if one is pushing the cliché. In undergraduate and graduate programs, we’re initiated into the history of the discipline, into understanding seminal moments (Writing Culture is still fresh in my mind from a course from last year), as well as into the ‘field.’ We are privy to the workings of the discipline; we see how our peers, teachers and institutions (the AAA, for instance) have responded to political questions like institutional boycotts, or Black Lives Matter (not to mention scandals within anthropology – the Yanomamo being another ‘seminal’ moment in pedagogy).

Yet, we are asked, perhaps more so than any other discipline, what anthropology’s relevance to the world is? Very often, it is a question asked in classrooms – both, by students new to anthropology and by those who’ve been here for a while. I do note a crucial difference between asking, ‘How can we be relevant?’ and ‘Are we relevant?’ Both, of course, operate in a similar rhetorical level. But the latter can be particularly challenging.

***

Can we, as the title of this post insinuates, describe a privileged professional community such as anthropologists as subalterns?

Not in the literal or scholarly sense, of course. And that sort of comparison was not my intention in the first place.

I use the term ‘subaltern’ more metaphorically (and, not to mention, with a heavy dose of irony), to evoke a relationship of power within which we can find ourselves. It is inspired by my (attempted) reading(s) of Spivak, and J. Maggio’s inversion of her question, i.e., ‘Can the subaltern be heard?’ instead of ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ But that’s just the background – and I really wish to avoid a theoretical argument here!

If we do imagine anthropologists as subalterns, then it would be in relation to how we ‘lose out’ to other disciplines like economics, political science or even sociology in the public sphere, and in formulating public opinion. Therefore it is not so much that anthropologists, like the subaltern, cannot speak; but rather that we cannot be heard.

As there are real structural issues confronting the discipline, the ‘anthropologist-as-subaltern’ position is a helpful exaggeration because it allows us to see our discipline – and its relevance – in a particular way. Such conversations, however, more often than not lead to prescriptive positions, almost always concerning ‘public anthropology.’ But, as Rex argued here previously, ‘how much public anthropology is enough public anthropology?’

Of course, we have scholars in academia who have always engaged with public discourses: in my classes, we’ve discussed Berreman, Scheper-Hughes, Fassin, and Fortun, to add a few more to Rex’s list. And I do agree with him that anthropology needs to be taught differently in universities for there to be a realization of the debates going outside of academia. But on the other hand, I am also wondering what it might mean to visualize the practice of anthropology outside of academia’s ivory tower.

What do issues like the crisis of representation, postcolonial critique, or maybe even the ontological turn, mean for those who Gerald Berreman once described as ‘professional anthropologists’? So what I want to ask instead is, what does the anthropologist-as-consultant, the anthropologist-as-researcher, or the anthropologist-as-activist, have to say to their academic counterparts, and to the public?

Admittedly, there are cases when such roles merge seamlessly with more academic ones. Indeed, teaching is a public role for anthropologists, albeit a rather complex one (given how accessible university education is in a given society, for one). But there are also cases when individuals decide to pursue research or activism, either out of disenchantment with academia or purely because they want to (I know both kinds of people).

With this group of people, their  question of subalternity – of speaking, but not being heard – while qualitatively different, is further compounded by a position of precarity with neoliberal attacks on university structures and job markets (thanks to @Keguro_ for the conversation we had on this on Twitter). These are the ‘Sidelines’ of anthropology – which was the subject of an earlier series on Savage Minds – where uncertainty, collaboration, stepping out of comfort zones, learning new skills, and unlearning old ones, characterizes this position. Again, this is not to say that a sociology, philosophy, or literature gradate doesn’t face precarity. My main concern is the relation with anthropology here, since that’s the one I can speak about.

Even under conditions of precarity, I do think that anthropologists and anthropology graduates are carrying out important public engagements in various roles where – and this is the critical point – it is their training in anthropology (and especially ethnography) that makes their work unique than that of an economist or sociologist (and we work in collaboration with them, as well). More importantly, it is our engagement with local communities that I feel makes our interventions unique, in that we are able to critique the language of ‘tools,’ but offer precisely a toolkit to do grounded and contextual research (I am thinking of George Marcus’ ‘third spaces’ and ‘para-sites’; as well as Kim Fortun’s idea of ‘generating new idioms’). Broadening the perspective from just an academic concern with public anthropology or public engagement, to one where we are engaging with publics in different capacities, I think is an important move for people attracted to anthropology, and for those of us who have invested a great deal of ourselves in it.

Recognizing this is to not only counter our position as curious (and ironical) subalterns, but to demonstrate that our work is in many ways a part of the public – by the virtue of fieldwork, through professional engagement, and through teaching. It necessarily means, following Berreman, rejecting the fact that there can be two kinds of anthropologies – laissez-faire and principled. For, as he says, ‘There is no place anywhere for unprincipled anthropology or anthropologists.’

***

As a postscript, I think a global collaborative project on evaluating anthropology-trained graduates – the kind of work they do, their levels of engagement, the knowledge they produce, and so on – seems fascinating. It would shift the dogged insistence from the academic proselytizing of public engagement (in Rex’s terms) to an investigation of how we are situated in the publics (a la, Fassin); in Sherry Ortner’s terms, ‘real people/anthropologists doing real things.’ This idea is inspired by several posts I’ve read here on Savage Minds, the series on Sidelines and precarity, and also Rebecca Neilson’s post on ‘NGOgraphy’ being the more exemplary ones. If anything, it would certainly be a more grounded response to a student’s query, ‘Are we relevant?’