Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to VARN blog. and today I'm here with Max Siejo, formerly of the superstructure podcast of money on the left, but now liberated from such things, and we're here to talk about the perils of academia, critical humanities in academia and maybe even the limits of trying to popularize that discourse. So I'm going to start this off like I would in a meeting almost. How did you end up? an ex-academic? 

Speaker 2: Oh, that's a long story, Derick. Well, it's a. I'm happy to be back. Thanks for having me back on the show, perhaps a. 

Speaker 2: I guess a good place to start is maybe to talk about the two strikes both of different nature at the UCs One with UAW and one without UAW that sort of bookended my time in graduate school, and so one of them was the cost of living adjustment strike, which was a wildcat strike right before COVID. That COVID ended. And then the last one was the official UAW grad student, postdoc and researchers strike. That achieved, let's just say, a contract that certainly was not in line with not even the bleeding edge of the rank and file but the kind of big middle of what the rank and file wanted and only was achieved through giving perks to the bigger campuses, which is a long story, and there are other people who could tell that story perhaps better than I could. But these two events, i think, really colored my view of the way that graduate school academic labor and ideas kind of intersect and potentially obfuscate the kind of structural dynamics at the heart of these intellectual endeavors that certainly most think are the main goal of entering and maintaining a career in academia. 

Speaker 1: Okay. So your disillusionment is different than mine. I am also an ex-academic, although I quit twice. I quit once after I finished my MFA and became a public school teacher, and then I quit again after becoming a lecturer at a university in South Korea for several years and dealing with a lot of PhDs from Ivy League schools and being frankly under-impressed with them. But one of the things that got me out the first time is actually very similar to yours. 

Speaker 1: I worked in Georgia. People may or may not know Public sector unions are effectively illegal in Georgia. You can form associations, not unions. You cannot strike, you cannot do collective bargaining, et cetera. 

Speaker 1: And we tried to before it was cool, on the bleeding edge of academic labor form a union and we were very quickly informed that that was illegal and that we would be kicked out immediately upon doing so and probably even prosecuted. So we immediately dropped that and I worked as an adjunct for a little while and as an adjunct I made less than minimum wage actually when I figured ours worked because we were contracted per class at around at this time around $1,500 per class and you could only really get three or four. So if you put together multiple schools you could maybe make $16,000, $17,000 a year, you could beat the absurdly low US poverty line of $14,000 a year, which is, by the way, you have to make less than minimum wage to be under the poverty line in the United States. You could beat that if you worked at two or three schools And so that had no appeal to me, particularly with this pressures of also trying to publish on top of that to be able to get out of that situation And being told if I stayed in that situation too long, it would be assumed that I was happy with that and thus would be stuck in it, because you are doing this for some kind of altruistic reason, usually because you come from money and you just want to teach. 

Speaker 1: That scenario quickly led me to wow, there's something fundamentally fucked up about this. And I went. My institution went from undergrads being taught primarily by full associate or assistant professors to undergrads being taught primarily by TAs in the time period I was there, so I could see how this was happening downstream from the major institutions, which had arguably had to do it because of their class size. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny. It's interesting to hear you talk about the particular form of your experience because I feel like becoming disillusioned from academia is something that's like. there are many different paths to that outcome, many different forks and cul-de-sacs one can find themselves on at different moments in time in their career slash, i mean, it's hard to call it a career for some of the symptomatic reasons. I think that we'll get to And the stuff you're talking about is interesting because I think, certainly before my time, where the dynamics that you're describing kind of had already come into fruition, and these shifts whether it's at smaller, medium-sized institutions or some of the larger institutions that I did my PhD in well, never completed, but started and did about half, more than half of my PhD in these dynamics where grad student labor becomes kind of the crux of particularly in the humanities of the contact between students and the university, is something that I think any grad student now would kind of just assume and recognize as just the status quo, whether it's TAs, taking on grading workload or teaching workload or just generally being the kind of primary contact between students and their classes. it's funny to hear you say that because to me that was one of the kind of the last of my worries. Certainly, there was a lot of work that went into that sort of work, but that was something that I always felt like was it was more grounded in what the actual purpose of the institution was than some of the other aspects of the research side and the way that the contemporary academic job market, particularly in the humanities, really skews incentives to I mean, this is something we were talking about both on Twitter and then offline in DMs to create this striving for newness and for a form of brand management as ultimately the goal, because the only way to get hired is to be loud or to get lucky and to ride a wave and to appeal to a certain sense of novelty that will allow some boxes to be checked, whether it's by deans or administration, or even inside departments themselves, which are trying to position themselves or sell themselves as a particular thing that deserves to be funded for a particular reason. And this is something that you find across the board in many different disciplines, many different departments, many different universities. 

Speaker 2: I have my particular experience. You do as well. If you're on Twitter. you find this sort of thing all over the kind of public scholarship space, precisely because and it's a really unfortunate situation, but the precarity at the heart of the funding model is really polluted the general approach, i think, that many, many people take to the work And it's something that it's difficult to get around. I'm speaking from my experience and I'm implicated in this experience as well, but it's really tough. 

Speaker 2: There's a lot of people who do really diligent and interesting work, which I in no way mean to denigrate, but there is something I think, generally speaking, at the core of the way everyone is always looking upward to a particular power hub that has levers over funding in order to secure their particular trajectory or the trajectory of themselves and their friends, or this kind of patronage network at the heart of some of these hiring decisions, that something that really does get lost is what the purpose of this kind of intellectual work and teaching alongside it actually is, and I think it's hard to blame people for not really taking on that big picture of what the purpose is, because of the precarity and how it's so tied up in things like identity and politics in a way that is, in an abstract sense, not necessarily just the politics of the workplace. 

Speaker 2: So some hope that I at least have seen is more, greater politicization simply of the workplace of academia. over time, though, certainly if anyone is following the aforementioned UAW strike, it's hard to believe that unionization in these public institutions will be the thrust of transforming actually the incentive structure at the heart of it. It's certainly necessary, but it's not going to change the underlying terms. At least that's my view and my experience of these sorts of environments. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, so I have done a lot on the UAW strikes. It has some people who are involved on the bleeding edge. Come in tell me about limitations. Conversely, we've been talking about this problem in the humanities and novelty seeking and research And ironically, i think it's been to the detriment of the research And it's definitely been to the detriment of teaching. So what do I mean by that? There's a tendency to find niche things in text right now that leads you into all kinds of just almost actively ignoring prior research to make an original claim, on one hand. And then there's the other hand where there's a decoupling of any empirical or historical for lack of a better term rigor And I realize there's all kinds of associations with throwing that term around Where you're just basically ad-hoc-ing theoretical apparatuses together to generate something unique through one or two lenses, as if you are working with a kaleidoscope, and often I don't feel like that actually illuminates that much about either the lenses or what is being looked at. So these are two big tendencies you see in humanities academia. One of the things I've never understood, and this despite the quote post-modern turn in the and really, which is a post-structuralist turn, because postmodernism is too big a concept. 

Speaker 1: In the 1970s, there was an aspiration to be scientific, even down to the way that we decided to write in the humanities. We adopted a pseudo-scientific posture of thesis, hypothesis and whatever as a means of writing, not without some positive effect, but like it was based off the idea that what we did could be structured the same way as reporting on a scientific experiment, and thus we started this tendency that I think also disconnected us from humanities, academics in particular, from the general public, and made us easily, like made even good research easily mockable because of it. I mean, we can think about not so much the Elaine Soquel affair and the Soquel hoax but all the subsequent stuff that came after it As an example of this, where people could not, even if they were fairly well educated and literate, just pick up a work of humanities, scholarship and comprehend what was actually at stake in it anymore. Yeah. 

Speaker 2: I mean there's a lot there. I think I want to take the first part with what you said about the ad hoc theoretical apparatuses. It's funny. I have an example that I think speaks to this and it's a little on the nose but it's common In my time. So I was a PhD student in comparative literature at University of California, santa Barbara, which meant I spent a lot of time across different departments, including English, history, film and media and a few others religious studies, and we don't have that much time. 

Speaker 2: Over the course of that time I've heard both from multiple people and through direct kind of interaction with people and mentors trying to guide graduate students toward the job market in their career, who mean well, but the often like some of the suggestions that students would get is to pull together basically a few authors. So just take, for example, deluz Freud and then some contemporary author. Take a subject, whether it's a film or like an object, a work of art, some works of literature. Pull together some theoretical apparatus, literally invent a term, just come up with a term And then write essentially a narrative that speaks to all of the things you've corralled together in some coherent form. So emphasis on the coherence of the argument rather than the structure of Sorry, hold on, i'll just make it easier Emphasis on the coherence of the argument rather than the actual structure of the research and investigation In any sense that is durable, that's really deeply in touch with a field of knowledge. That's stuff you end up doing after the fact to dot i's and cross t's, and this is just a method for teaching grad students who ultimately want to be trained in something. 

Speaker 2: But there aren't the resources, whether it's of mentorship or of time, given the teaching workloads we spoke about, given the exploitation that needs to happen of graduate students' labor, to really dig into the university context of the origins of what the universities were, which I'm not saying those are necessarily good, but we have to remember what universities are as an institution with the history, which isn't fundamentally a place simply for the training of public scholars who are meant to influence the world in some sense. These are often places of the intersection of free thought and religious authority, historically, at least in some sense. So the incentives and then the mentorship around this sort of ad hoc theoretical work, coupled with, again, the precarity of the job market, means that structurally speaking it is incredibly difficult to actually venture into deep historical work, and I want to bracket the departments in history a little bit, because they are somewhat exempt from this in certain ways. However, they have an even deeper funding crisis, and I think those are not unrelated than other parts of the humanities or things like the digital humanities which serve big tech and these notions of the innovative side, of humanist discourses that often are overlapped with corporate interests and the interests of certain stakeholders across the economy. 

Speaker 2: And so what all this leads to is, like you said right, and I think, knowing your audience and knowing you a bit and your interests often these revivals of these certain brands of returns to different scholars in a kind of cyclical way that actually ends up ignoring anything learned along the way. 

Speaker 2: So, instead of reading the history of Marxism, we just read Marx again. Instead of reading the lineage of something like psychoanalysis, we'll read a chapter from a Freud book in a seminar and that'll be that, and we'll have these general contacts with these primary sources, maybe a few secondary sources, and then the rest of it ends up being a very niche interest that, i think, ultimately succumbs to your point about post structuralism or postmodernism, to be a bit sloppy, with the overlap that these niche interests can't cohere really as a structure of a field or a discipline in any genealogical sense but ultimately end up fraying into a bunch of different nodes that sit in singular pieces individuated from one another, which I think is a symptom of whatever you want to call it neoliberalism or just the continual rise of individualism. That is liberalism. It's incredibly deeply entrenched in discourses around in the humanities in American universities and also, a little less perhaps, in Europe, but that's a complicated story that I think we might bracket. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm thinking about this. One of the things about the humanities and my background is actually similar to yours My master's is in poetry, master's of fine arts is in poetry, but I have a subspecialization in theory and I have a master. I have education in writing, which is practical as the teaching of writing to young students, and then degrees and liberal studies In my case that was mixture philosophy and anthropology and a degree in like traditional English major sort of background And I've done, because of that particular background and because that I'm effectively ABD too, i've done a whole lot of research and a bunch of different things. I mean, what I thought I was training to be, believe it or not, was a Koreanist way back in the day when I thought I was going to get my going to go back and finish a PhD in Korean American literature and study Korean culture. So it was a very strange path to what I was on, but what I discovered was fads, basically, and a teaching that was both and it's hard to explain how it ends up being this both entirely too broad, and I don't mean that in like the generalist sense, because it doesn't produce generalist. You take your first. I took five philosophy courses before I got to a philosophy course where we actually completed more than one entire text, like here's three essays by Klein, here's an essay or a part of an essay by Wittgenstein, here's some stuff by Carnap, here's some stuff by Nietzsche, here's some stuff by Heidegger. I had good luck with that. You know, let's talk about Foucault and the death of the author, blah, blah, blah, but nothing of any significant engagement even to understand the context of the essays I was given. 

Speaker 1: And then when I started and when I was in the master's program and in the MFA program and I started specializing as a subspecialization to poetry, like a critical theoretical apparatus to back that up, it was hyper specific. Immediately You know it's like okay, now you need to like read everything by Althusser and get into Althusser and Althusserian Marxism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And also we're only applying this to the works of Southern authors from 1880 to 1950. And even better yet if you limit which race of people you're studying And it's just like okay. So you move from the hyper broad to the incredibly specific very quickly. Actually it's like it's like we've been studying everything. 

Speaker 1: You have some subspecialization in your senior year, in your undergrad and then you immediately go into micro specializations, and part of that feels like it's because it's supposed to track the way you learn science, i guess, like because that kind of makes sense if you think about a broad scientific education, but it doesn't make sense when you're talking about, like I can't even contextualize all the debates of which I'm being exposed to And also ask to teach. So for me. Oh, you know, this is this was my ambivalence about the whole teaching time. You made a point that I think is really good. That's actually tends to be more relevant to what you're. You know what the institutions for and what you're doing. I started learning all these debates not from the classes, not even from my research, but to be able to answer the questions of my students, like which also meant that I had to be willing to do additional research on basic shit, that I wasn't taught to do a job on top of trying to create original research myself. Now, i was an MFA, so this is both creative work and research, because that was the nature of the program. 

Speaker 1: Sometimes programs are one or the other. I had to do both And that was nuts. Then I get moved into a teaching program which is so completely different that you don't even know what to do with it, like it's not anything at all. Like the rest of academia, it's basically a practical training program with a lot of stuff about how to do paperwork, frankly. And then some, there is some credible pedagogy in there, there is some scholarship, but the scholarship standards are also, frankly, way lower, and you just realize, oh, the humanities are very specific in what they're asking. And then, however, when I'm trying to help students figure out why this would be relevant to them, this is actually somewhat hard to do with the like what's talk about composition theory and how Omi K Babas D Colonial X applies to this very specific Korean American text from 1985. And it took a lot of the fun out of it for me, particularly when I realized the stuff I was pouring my energy into had no audience. Its likelihood of being read by anybody was pretty low even when it got published. 

Speaker 2: And that point I think, is so crucial. I mean everything you said, but something that's really I mean. I'll use this word also with the kind of cyclinolytic intonation hovering It perverse about. I think the experience of contemporary mid to high level academic discourse is precisely that. There's these two poles right, and you narrated them right. There's this sense of generality and this niche pole, this sense of expertise or narrowing. One could probably draw it in many different kinds of graphical forms where not only right you're meant to have an outwardly facing general understanding of many different debates. Right, you're supposed to check boxes. Does your work have a critique of political economy? right? Do you say the words like in capital, x, y and Z? Yes, okay, good. 

Speaker 1: Do I throw? 

Speaker 2: the word material interest around enough. 

Speaker 1: There you go, material conditions or whatever. 

Speaker 2: All these buzz words, right, that have to check boxes in order to maintain a certain amount of disciplinary relevance and then social relevance, both in the discourse of academic thought but also in the wider sense of what many of these humanities programs see themselves as doing. And I keep coming back to that point, right, because I think there's a later on in this point that I'm going to make. There's a kind of deep identity crisis actually at the heart of the humanities And there's a crisis in the humanities about what it is and what it's doing. And I think you're pushing on this point about audience and you're pushing on this point about what training really looks like, what it's for. And so I say all of that to say right, being pulled in these two different directions. 

Speaker 2: On the one hand, i have to know the ins and outs of decolonial theory, the environmental humanities, the history of German philosophy and media theory, the history of political economy in the Western world, a general sense of post-colonial thought, formal analysis right across different aesthetic categories, linguistic skills, right, you have to know, at least it is said one has to know or have a translating knowledge of two or three languages in many humanities programs. So there's this general sense of which a generalist, a general knowledge of the history of thought is a must And something that you have to have, or at least you have to be able to speak, to gesture at. You have to be able to fake it Exactly. 

Speaker 2: You have to be able to fake it because you have to gesture at it in ways that show that you are gesturing at it right. When you actually dig or ask critical questions about these things. There's nothing there. Often, right, some people have specialties and have studied these things and sure they know the ins and outs of it. But in a more generalist sense, it's a facade, and I think that's kind of how a lot of work is right in contemporary society. Right, you have to speak to a general understanding and then have one or two things that you actually understand. So that's a way in which academia doesn't deviate very far from typical corporate life. 

Speaker 2: And then it comes down to, like you said, what the actual skill set is. What is the actual interest, what is the skill set? And so, for example, one of mine was I taught German language And that is something that I could do. That was a skill. That was something that students wanted to learn, because often because they wanted to be engineers, sometimes for a sense of cosmopolitan cultural knowledge. But that is something that could be marketed And was marketed right. It was an enterprise. It was seen as such to the department and other departments that I encountered in my time, and another aspect of what I ended up having to really learn and get a deep knowledge of was ancient to medieval Western literature. This is not something that I specialized in, this is something that really played a part in any of my research or my public intellectual engagement, but this is something that, when brass brass tax, i had to understand and learn the insides and outs of Greek tragedy, of all the way up until from Greek works of literature up to Dante and the very early modern works of literature. These are classes that I taught over multiple years, but the thing about that is so. I think it's interesting, then, how thinking with at least my research trajectory cutting edge theory, political economy and the humanities was what my research agenda was, but when push came to shove, what I actually did for the university was taught engineering students German and fulfilled a requirement to teach almost five weeks of the Odyssey and then another sampling of other works of literature, and there's variation there. 

Speaker 2: But I think this speaks to a kind of crisis where a lot of the institutional legacy of academia and these departments is very caught up in its canon, its genealogy, and I think rightfully so, in the sense that that is how institutions work right. The institutions develop over time. People are trained over time to teach a particular set of canonical texts and then add on particular research agendas to that. That is often how departments work. I mean, the joke in film departments is the first film anyone ever learns is Citizen Kane, and that is again for a reason. 

Speaker 2: There is a genealogy and a canon that people speak to, but then what ends up happening is the other pull ends up asserting itself, this pull to novelty, this facade that is necessary to continue to generate the idea of an innovative research trajectory over time and of the development of particular disciplines as having some sort of movement forward in almost like an idealistic sense of moral good. And so what ends up happening is, though, is there's this duality at play, and it's a perverse set of incentives where the canon pulls us in one direction, and then the need to be cutting edge, novel, i think, a word that we brought up in some of our conversations polemical, political asserts itself on the other end, and one is more of the traditional sense of what the university has done over a long period of time. The canonical stuff And the other is both a political imperative but, in a more deeper sense, a material imperative at the heart of needing to justify the existence of the humanities. To begin with Because in and there are maybe deeper people who think more deeply about the present and present political, economy and history. Maybe the Fukuyama stuff there could speak to something about this. 

Speaker 2: But in our contemporary moment there is, i think, a deep sense in which whether it's the kind of fracturing of neoliberalism or like what neoliberalism wrought for so many years, there's something lost about what the purpose of academia is, And so it ends up spinning in this way to try and find that sense of purpose, that place in society, and I think we even see shifts right. 

Speaker 2: There's a split on the right and the left, and the left has a view of the critical university and things like that that I think are in the abstract and in the sense of what my opinion is just good, like generally a good thing, but the right has a view of an intransigent, traditional, western, civilization-based analysis of a particular historical narrative and canon, and so these two things are pulling against each other And I think there's a fracture then at the heart of what academics are meant to do amidst all of these torrents of variables And then when they have to think about ultimately, when push comes to shove and there's salaries on the line, the ideals often go out the window. 

Speaker 2: At least, that is my experience of many, many academics in this moment navigating things like financial crises or budget crises or things like strikes, where it takes actually putting oneself on the line to really be in solidarity with people in the lower strata. So there's a lot there, but I think that that's me trying to speak to what you're describing right This sort of generalist view. We're not producing generalists And there isn't an acknowledgement of what is happening, which is really a very niche a continued fraying into many different niche interests on behalf of research agendas, which I think, generally speaking, are good, as in. It's good for people to be able to research things that they're interested in, but that comes in complicated tension with the market and the institutional structures that that kind of self-guided research sits within. Stay with us, we'll be right back. 

Speaker 3: I am Jeff Ado. This is Lunacy, a podcast where we discern the sacred from the insane and admit that, whether we like it or not, we are all profoundly affected by the cycles of the moon. How? Join us each week as we wax philosophical on the underlying nature of reality, discover new ways of raising our consciousness and deliver on swapping out our inherited fear-based operating system for love operating system. Listen to Lunacy wherever you get your podcasts. 

Speaker 1: Yes. So there's the critical apparatus, there's the research apparatus, which may or may not overlap with the critical apparatus, and then there's this traditional apparatus And let's first be honest about where the humanities come from. Like it comes from religious instruction and legal instruction In the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century in both the US and in England. It was an answer to the German academic programs that were beginning to develop in the middle of the 19th century, particularly German theology, which is why we started building a literary canon and a classics canon, constructing it the way that we do now, with elements of the old Christian Stuff in there, of the Protestant stuff in there go back all the way back to ancient Greeks. I mean, you know I make this point all the time. From that's a logical point of view, the reason why we think of like ancient Greece as Or Western civilization, and we want we think of it as Western civilization at all, as opposed to like claiming Persian civilization as Western, which maybe we should, or something like that like is kind of an accident of competing nationalisms in the 19th century To think of the you know, and kind of tenuous relation to the classics, trying to come up with a secular justification outside of Christendom for the need for these universities that I think in humanities That's more intensely felt, because that's where our canon comes from. And then other political competition that emerges in the mid 20th century and the way that Institutionalize itself in the teaching of children, so like if there's a, there's an awful lot of modernism and the way we teach Like contemporary literature to kids, because that's what it was fucking formulated like. We nailed this together as something other than like some school marms somewhere trying to get people to read anything in the 1920s to the 1950s and it shows up in our, our canonical texts and then its expansions, you know, continue. For example, when we started including like Latin literature or our African-American literature, the moment we started including, it's the moment you start seeing the stuff that's in there and And while there is innovation in that from the universities, i can tell you if you, when you go and like say you, you learn English and you go and teach English, the irony is, is what you teach students in an English class. 

Speaker 1: If you're a traditional English major you haven't read since you've been in high school Like you were not actually trained on the great Gatsby or the Shakespeare's the exception, but like, but in general, like no, you don't actually read that stuff that much anymore. It's not, it's not part of what you do. And then there's all the other. Yeah, so, like I remember the first time I was asked to teach like a literature 2010 class and I'm having to teach Tartuffe and and Oedipus and I got obsessed with all this stuff. But again, i was. 

Speaker 1: My my research background was Poetry of the Americas. Like it's just like American poetry, latin American poetry, poetry in in Spanish and English and a little bit of poetry in German, because I have a work in your sanity German and to speak to your thing about the the practical and the the language component of this, even before I had stayed in Germany, like I passed that German language exam. I am not fluent in German. I'm pretty, i'm okay at it. I am proficient in German, although If you really wanted me to like teach German literature with that level of knowledge, it would be a joke. 

Speaker 2: Well, i mean, i'll just say straight up, right, language proficiency in graduate school unless you're in explicitly like, for example, a German department or a French department, where You are day in, day out teaching that language as an end product of your training, but generally across the humanities, it's a joke, i mean it's, it's, it's a, it's a box-checking exercise, and I and it and it makes sense that it is because no one has the time To spend the years required to learn a language. I mean it, right, like it's one of the the harder things to do, not as a child, right? I mean this. These are things that just like go on, said and unremarked upon, right? The only reason why I know German is because I lived there and, and and then was able to add on after the fact, right through study and reading and things like that. 

Speaker 1: But I Lived in German and I still not for it. I mean, i lived in Germany, i looked in and lived in Munich for about for about nine months, and I'm still. 

Speaker 2: No, the grammar is a difficult one, but But this is just right, it's a. 

Speaker 2: It's another example. Like and like you said, right You are, you end up encountering and having to teach works that you've never really Encountered, read, maybe not since high school. So what ends up happening is Students and then professors get trained to be readers. Right, you are meant to encounter a text and like I'm not going to get into the formalist versus, you know, contextualist debates and these sorts of things, like I don't want to get into literary theory here, but the point point being is you encounter a set of texts and a set of histories and contexts, with a kind of preset methodological approach how you interpret that text, and this is generally how people interpret text. But There's a difference between, okay, doing like there's a, you know a thing called grad school reading, and any grad student would know, right, you grad school read a book, which is usually parts of the intro, maybe a chapter that you're interested in, move on, and There's a lot of skimming that happens, a lot of just not reading at all. That happens. 

Speaker 1: I mean let's, let's be honest about that your reading list you're given when you go into a phd program or an fa program, any terminal degree. You can't meaningfully do it in two years and it be Close reading. You can't. It's impossible. 

Speaker 2: No one actually right because once again We we run into the structural identity crisis at the heart of what the university is, right, where it's like. What is it that we're doing here? Are we meant to spend, like, six years doing a phd, not teaching at all, reading one very narrow, disciplinary canonical list, writing on one of its forefathers, and then producing a piece of work like I I still? you know, i worked with academics who were old enough that that is what they did right back, you know, before the 70s or maybe in the 70s, where that was what the job was right. You would master the canon Inside it out, right. 

Speaker 2: If you were a germanist, you would read. You'd read Kant, hagel, nietzsche, freud, and if you wanted to take some ventures into more of the idealists or others, you'd pick. You'd pick your, your poets, and you'd pick your literary figures and you would focus in that tradition On those particular questions. The tradition itself was seen as prestigious enough to justify the endeavor, whereas now there is a greater need to justify the self as the researcher, outside of any traditional tradition of works Up with which one embarks upon researching and this produces a a deeply Intention and ultimately confusing set of incentives for people, um and and oftentimes the work ends up being the result of that, of those incentives to Jumbled together, right, and this is where I think we get into a lot, of, a lot of writing that ends up deeply political and, and, i think, ultimately, from a, from a moral perspective, deeply, deeply good In the, in a, in a sort of abstract sense, but that can't actually capture any of the underlying structural imperatives that are at the heart of why there is this feeling of such, uh, a political impasse and such a confusion of Trajectories. 

Speaker 2: Right, it's it. Nothing is clear with which, where you are supposed to go, where you're supposed to begin, um, and and that confusion ends up being the breeding ground for, uh exploitation of, of, of labor and of uh labor in multiple forms, including uh in in assistantships, um, but also, of course, uh In just under underpaying teachers, um, and and under housing, uh and, and ultimately relying on people, like you said, who have independent wealth or loans to, to perpetuate, um The system. And so there's, there's something that that is kind of, it's pretty deeply untractable, uh, there, which which is not to say that the work is not interesting, but I it has to be viewed through the lens of that That those intractable contradictions. In the first place, i think, to understand what it means socially and historically, outside of The terms that it, that a lot of this work is setting up for itself right. 

Speaker 1: I mean, i think again to add this institutional history back, we might. We have to remind ourselves what, what the university comes from. Uh, my friend and me call and drum and I actually talk about this and we talk about like okay, yeah, in some ways the university is a medieval institution. It's one of the few left of any any huffed in um modern life in anywhere And its structural setup reflects that. In other ways it's a completely modern institution. That's really an invention of the cold war and then graphs it on to that. 

Speaker 1: And this is where a lot of you know, a lot of people make superficial and rather dumb Uh, comparisons about like oh well, you know, there's a class of educated managers and I'm like, well, at the end of the four-day system There was an attempt to use universities to educate management. Then it became a way to Sort people and outsource training from all jobs into the public. Costs, fear are onto private coffers and not the job itself. So, for example, i used to work in insurance and I know the history of of things like actuaries. It's a weird thing to know the history of, but I do. Um, actuarial stuff used to just require an associates level understanding of math and statistics, um, you could get it with a high school degree and, uh, in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and Your job will play for you to get a few more classes to have the specific kinds of statistical knowledge you need and you know, and, and then it became a kind of program with an accounting Um, and now it requires something like the equivalent of a master's degree basically to do Um. Some of that is because the increased complexity and statistics you have to deal with, but a lot of it is actually just to limit job applicants. Um, one of the interesting things about right now that we have to look at in this like political, economic turn, is we're going to see a lot of those credentializations reverse because there's just not enough people Um, so, but that's been grafted on and yet changed the nature of the institution and the humanities in particular. 

Speaker 1: Um, i think we talk about the split like okay, we're in one hand, we're viewed as the stowers of this cultural tradition of Western culture or even let's take even broad view multi, multi, multi-ethnic liberal culture. Both things are Have cannons and which we inculcate, and we also inculcate both of them, like um. But we're also seen as practical job trainers, as you said you were teaching german to engineering students. Um, i used to teach people how to write english and read english, or they could, you know, in other countries so they could participate in science, scholarship, um, and then there's this, this other critical mission in the humanities that we see ourselves as like. Well, we're also criticizing this tradition, that we're safeguarding and developing new forms of inquiry through this criticism. But, as you said, there's this need for for originality and There's also a need for programs to be attractive. So there's a couple of different pools. So, you see, pools towards incorporating pop culture, but with advanced scholarly critical lenses are moves towards, you know, finding marginalized groups in the past and bringing up the literature, but often also somewhat overstating how common it was to have read them. 

Speaker 1: Um, and This, these are, these are actually good things. Uh, i think in some ways, all of these things except for maybe outsourcing jobs, training from private institutions into the public, um, are good things, but In the humanities were kind of expected to do all of them, like. I will say this the sciences have their issues and science and, and They are numerous and and beyond the scope of the show, but, but they are different on this front, like, and one of the weird things right now okay, we're talking about the crisis of history um, you can't convince people to be English majors, even though it's, like, more profitable than being a Business major, and I don't think we should justify it that way. It's just like there's so few of us who do it, uh, that now it's become a sought-after skill to, to, to have the basic level of leading and writing, and yet, uh, i I couldn't tell you what we're actually like. I have trouble understanding why the traditional English major exists still, other than to create teachers for high school students, but but even that, we increasingly don't teach that kind of literature in high school anymore. Like, there's just less and less of it. 

Speaker 1: Um, so Who are we? what? what is this preparing anyone for, including the scholars themselves? And it's not clear to me that it is, and it's also. There's another element of it I guess we kind of beat around the bush about it where we are training people off of the assumption We're training them to, to do the thing that they are studying under, which is to be a university level, a university, a researcher and teacher, a professor of some sort. But we all know that we're not To like, like there's way too many people Needed to uphold the system, that even keep it functioning, then there could possibly be jobs, that. And so there's this pervasive cynicism in the humanities, and yet people aren't like, and I'm like okay, and this. This is something where I almost become sympathetic to the conservative critique, where I'm like So we're spending, we're having people spend, if not Hundreds of thousands dollars of the money, hundreds of thousands of dollars of their time. 

Speaker 1: Lost income and, yeah, opportunity right To, to maintain a system of which one and 20 of them are going to be able to To actually use what they're being trained for, and yet we're also not changing what we're doing with that in mind it. 

Speaker 2: It's so interesting. I'm so glad you brought up this last point because, i mean, it's one of those things that everyone says, right, like, well, obviously there's not enough jobs. Right, and like, yeah, there obviously is and everyone knows that. But, like you said, um, no one changes behaviors. Right, like, there, there is, there's these. 

Speaker 2: What it ends up being is this aspirational desire for there to be more jobs and then, okay, well, there aren't jobs, but you're here, which is, you know, understandable. Like I understand, professors who approach graduate students say you're here, i have to try to give you the best mentorship that I can, given the circumstances, which is often do something That is flashy and new and interesting. Right, um, that is, at a particular intersection, you set you pitch your sail just perfectly to catch the wind and maybe you'll get lucky, um, but I'm in the habit, more recently, of trying to strip down Institutional social arrangements into, um, what the kind of bare bones experience of them are. That's at least how I'm approaching the world. And, as you were talking about all these particular different grafted on um responsibilities that then the humanities has to Do all of, because they have to self justify. What it made me think of is is what, right, what the, what the actual experience of a university is like actually, what it is right, outside of these abstract notions of the things that we are studying in our head and um, and it comes back to me at least for me, back down to that, that kind of Purpose, right, that that is this legacy of the medieval institution and then, as you said, right this, this challenging the, the german university, and it's uh, it's stature in the 19th century, um, which itself had a very distinct cultural role within Protestantism, um, and a juridical role and a very complex intersection that I don't necessarily Need to get into for this point. 

Speaker 2: But Really, what it is is it's a place for people to congregate, pass on knowledge, relate in many different ways in, in culturally approved and disapproved ways. It's, it's a space of a particular form of relation that provides an experience to students, whether they are undergrads or graduate students or, crucially, professors, right, it's an experience of life that is distinct, um, and it's a space that is meant to host that experience of life, um, And it's one that's meant not to be grounded in toil and physical activity, but mental, mental work and um and mental discipline alongside um, collaborative forms of kind of, like you said, like liberal coming together of a, of a multi, multi ethnic or more or diverse, uh, polity that is meant to inhabit that space in a particular way And that then ends up going on to produce, you know, good citizens, quote-unquote, good workers or, uh, good thinkers Along along the way. But if someone were to have told me before I went into graduate school look, you're not going to get a job, but like, really you're not going to get a job, not like, but you never know, right, not the, there's the hope, but what you can get is a particular experience that is distinct and interesting, uh, and will allow you to investigate things that you are particularly interested in, ways that are, you know, not on a strict nine to five time schedule, like, we forget to talk about these things, right, the perks and benefits that are, um, where you have summers off and a winter break And a spring break, you know, as an adult, um, and you're surrounded by by other people your age, we're doing a similar thing. Um, there is, there is meaning to be had here as as a social experience, right, one that is that enculturates and offers a space for A particular kind of self edification, um, that we often end up seeing Uh, the, the, the results of the research being anyway um that I think could be socially useful. Um, when it's positioned and and framed or approached in in the right way, um, and I think I think that that's honestly the way most people view it is is a haven From, from the toil of of the workplace, um, and and you know, um, and and to me I'm very sympathetic and have benefited from, from that um, but but I think the problem ultimately is is that ends up being completely divorced from what the, the underlying institutional purpose, ends up being. So you have these fraught Tensions that end up playing themselves out and you know, in some sense That's just humanity, um, this is just an institution and that's kind of how they work. But in another sense, i think um, that view really cuts against. 

Speaker 2: Like the question, any answer to the question that is put in clear terms, like what is actually the purpose of an english degree of, of? 

Speaker 2: You know, of reading james joist, you know, is it to understand the, the innate post structural impulses in the sort of 20th century pre-fascist, um western european context, or is it just a way of, of thinking through certain aspects and affects that are inherent in, in a kind of literary approach to the world, i mean that that we inhabit, right, like, where is the actual locus of, of causality and, dare I say, like That, the sort of grounded meaning of what is actually going on here? 

Speaker 2: uh, whether it's from read, from a very strictly Sort of critical political, economic lens, or or a critical psychoanalytic one, i think ultimately they both end up intersecting back towards that, that project of enculturation, and that's the space of that experience, which is why, which is why the conservatives and the right wingers do have to attack the university, because that goes against um, in that those their project of uh, eliminating the, the self in, in in a liberal sense, um, and cultivating a good, ordered, conservative society. But at the same time they also have a vision for the academic life As an, as a part of that project of enculturating their good citizens as well. So I mean, at least that's how I'm looking at the, the way this, this crisis, is manifesting politically, and then at the level of the, the underlying structures. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I think that's interesting and I think we have to ask ourselves in, i mean, to me there's two liberal subjects to you. I mean like, for example and this is not something we've mentioned but the totally cynical element of not working in the humanities that can emerge, particularly at the IVs, and in which case the humanities really is there for people to leave it and then to start other things, whether it's public advocacy, jobs, editing, going into law, whatever. And in those cases, how do I say this? The humanities is kind of a holding ground, and yet, you know, i don't think that's most people's experience, but it is an experience out there. And when conservatives want to say something, that's what they're going to bring up because that's the easiest thing, well, oh, it's not really about education anyway, it's just about networking, like, and, to be honest with you, there is a certain amount of truth to that. But so that's like a fifth or sixth thing we're scaffolding onto this, yeah. 

Speaker 2: I mean there's a lot of education alongside, right, i think I would never say there's not education, but it's education in a vacuum. It doesn't. It means, it means very little, i think. To me, right, it's like where does that then go? How does that, that intellect and that and that what is learned, get directed both individually and then socially? 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's that's to me. that's important, because I don't think taking a completely cynical view of what's going on is actually going to help you. and by that, oh, it's just networking, or I learned a lot in grad school about how to read. that has enabled me to be able to self educate at a pretty rigorous level. I was not, for example, my interest in Marxism in history. I'm an autodidact in that. But but to say but I'm not really an autodidact because I was trained in how to read and contextualize text, like in the shitty way that I was trained in some cases because it was, you know, way too much at a time. It's like I remember going to a class and they're like, ok, we're reading a theory book and a novel by Faulkner every week, which, no, you're not like, like, i mean, i, i attended, nobody is. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i mean you know, i think the one time I fully read the like when, when, with an out within, like an insane assignment like that, the one time I actually fully read it was like my second quarter, before I knew better, and I, you know, was would start reading at 6 pm And I would finish at midnight and over the course of the week I'd be able to to complete the the assignment. But like you can't, it's impossible to sustain that level of vigorous. I mean, at least I I think, at least plausibly speaking, like from my experience of other people reading, that's not what ends up happening, right? 

Speaker 1: My was the same thing as I for the first, the first semester of my graduate school, i really did the reading for real and I almost died, right, because I also had to grade 120 essays a week and and then write papers And my paper quality started really declining because I was doing the work, which was absurd. So you learned how for most professors and there was and everyone hated these professors there were professors that would try to, like old school, trick you and like, ok, we're taking a May master class and we're going to. This was another third one Read everything Hal Thern's ever written in four weeks, right, right, and I'm going to test you with quote explication tests, which don't come up a lot. 

Speaker 2: Well, there are a few sadists out there, so yeah, yeah, yeah, and this was, this was one of those professors that totally would like you know your graduate degree. 

Speaker 1: Well, you just got your B, which for everybody who's not in graduate school that's for most people it's not a big deal for graduate school. It's like oh, oh yeah, rare. It's rare not to get an A in graduate school. 

Speaker 2: I think it's kind of hard. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, you actually have to not do the work, except in this. This is a really rare thing, except in this, this class, but it was. It was a good reminder of how impossible it was, because it's like in some ways actually exposed the lie, because it's like we all know that we can't really do this to any significant level of rigor and do everything else you're asking us and meet all the suggestions and teach, ok, and also, i'm teaching by the second year I'm teaching myself. You know undergraduates. I got to do the reading for that And, honestly, i usually do actually have to do the reading for that as to not totally appear like a jackass for my students. 

Speaker 1: So there's this weird sort of dissidence where you're like, ok, the stuff that I'm supposed to be reading for myself, i'm actually not reading very deeply at all. I'm like I'm doing exactly what you say. We're going to read the beginning, ending. We're going to, we're going to do keyword searches for for anything related to anything interesting. I read in the thesis And I'm going to read some secondary literature about it, and then I'm going to go back and find quotes to back that up, and then that's how we're going to approach this, except for the key work that I'm going to be actually doing some serious work on And I really am going to read that very closely. 

Speaker 1: But but then, like I'm reading, all this stuff is not even supposed to come up, that I'm teaching, that I'm just supposed to already be super familiar with, which we all have talked about how we're not, and so we're having to read that because in some ways, like I know, my students are going to catch me out I'm not really knowing that more than my professors Want to catch me out on it. It's like they know that they're teaching me and no one ever says this, but they know it. They know that they're teaching me a way of of showing and elect and a lot of areas and like having passable seeming knowledge but not really having to engage it except on a few key points Like, yes, if you, if you don't know what you're writing your dissertation on, and real intimate detail, you are indeed fucked, right, but Right, i don't think anyone really expects you, even for one of the hardest contests. Who have actually slowly and deeply read all 350 books on your reading list for cops? 

Speaker 2: No, i mean it's, it's a joke. I mean I have to say, right, it's, it's. There's the moment where you're assigned the reading list And then there's like the wink, you know, right, it's like and and that's. And it's funny because I was in a department that was, like, considered archaic when it came to comps because the the remnants of the sort of older comp lit discipline, which was a lot more kind of, let's just say, rigorous in within its terms, it, it, it was very difficult. And these, these exams were very difficult when I compared them to, for example, english or our film media and other types of exams that that people would, would do and take. But And and it's funny, like in the department I was in, like we just reformed that, we just changed that and made them easier because no one could meet the standard of that old way of doing things. But These things have just slowly happened without an actual like reform of the underlying purpose and structure. 

Speaker 2: And I think I want to address, in the part that you said about networking, because I don't want it to be misconstrued that what my suggestion is is that the humanities, or the university, is all about networking. I think I think much more so than networking. It's about self, self edification, self discovery and the experience of adulthood through this mediated form of an intellectual life that is meant to prepare you for encountering the world. And so there's this funny heuristic I have like thinking about and reflecting back to grad school. It's like you. 

Speaker 2: You can know the trajectory of someone by what happens after they read Nietzsche. 

Speaker 2: Do they decide to make peace with the world and enter it and and and leave, or do they do they take the deeply cynical route that ends up staying in in the structure of the academic space that Nietzsche so hated and rejected after his his time in it? 

Speaker 2: Or do they completely erase all the insights and end up just deciding that it is and can be a haven from the world, even when it very deeply isn't an outside of of the structures of the economy that most in the humanities would at least passingly critique? And I think that ends up being the problem for for a lot of scholarship. That ends up getting stuck in a few of those different pathways. Right, you end up being a deeply, a deeply critical Marxist or a post structuralist that really believes in, in outsides, or you end up down the path of a kind of how would I put this? Just a little bit more idealistic approach to reform than perhaps is is merited, and usually those, those people are on a tenure track. I guess I would say Yeah, but if you actually learn the lessons of the critical scholarship. 

Speaker 1: It's often detrimental to your critical scholarly career. That's the problem, right? That's ultimately the problem. 

Speaker 2: I think, right That I think that statement captures the, the structural contradiction that's at the heart of this job. Right, because in a lot of ways, there isn't much more to say. That's, that's. I think, ultimately, the problem that I, i can't, i couldn't unsee is that there isn't that much more to do or say. Right, it's like there's the, there's the economic structures that are intransigent and can be struggled against by different levers and means, including unionization, etc. There is the psychoanalytic components, there's the institutional logic. What else is there? That's kind of it. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and so Well. You know, one of the things I would say is I would also limit this. Like, i did not network in university very well And if I was only in there for the cynical reasons, i probably could have and done a lot more with it. But I don't look back on my days of being in graduate school As as like that And I also, despite the economic cost, despite the absurdity of some of what we're talking about, i don't completely regret doing it. You know, yeah, same, but I'm glad that I didn't go all the way, because I do think that I know people who, who. 

Speaker 1: That becomes a great example of what I'm saying, a cul-de-sac for them And there are ways out of it and people are trying to figure that out. But, like you know, it's, it's often very damaging to people And I find it interesting because I've had conservative friends who dropped out. I've had very, very left wing friends. One of my mentors was a conservative Hegelian scholars, part of how he became a Marxist, to his great shame. You know he probably lose his sleep about it now, but he eventually dropped out. They become like a philosophical ethics counselor, like because he just found the work unrewarding and not just from like oh, it's full of liberals. I mean, he was complaining about that too, but he was just like I don't, like I don't know. What the work is doing anymore is what he would often talk to me about. It's like it's not even that, you know, oh, it's just pushing. You know, he would have said politically correctness at the time that I was talking about. 

Speaker 1: This is about 15 years ago And we were colleagues at that point. 

Speaker 1: But it's like I don't know what I even want from this institution, like I don't. I don't know if I got the classical education that I'm, that I like supposedly promote as a good, you know conservative educator, that it would even fix the problem, which I admired him for being that self honest. And I think a lot of my leftist and liberal friends had the same kinds of cul-de-sacs because they they were in a lot of ways encouraged by this culture to view everything critically, to see everything politically to and morally, and you know how I feel about conflating those three things, But, but but then realizing that what they were doing had like no effect on that And it seemed wild that they would have ever believed that it would Like yeah, and that's. You know, it is weird when I try to explain like yeah, you know, there's a lot of people when I was in grad school who really thought the critical humanities were going to change the world And like it's. It's very hard to see Now, like why anyone would have ever thought that. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i mean, i guess it depends what you mean by change the world, but I think I agree with the sentiment. 

Speaker 1: I think yeah, but I also think to not be totally cynical for a moment that If we had been able to deliver on the mission in which we were supposedly engaged in, which was truly read, not abandoning Western culture And he said that's I think that's a conservative, like straw man of what, what left in liberal academics are really trying to do, but really re, re interrogating, re, integrating it, expanding it, making it re, re-relevivizing it, etc. 

Speaker 1: And by re-relevising it I don't mean like relic, like Making it knowledge relevant relative, i mean like making it relevant again as part of our understanding, both for good and ill, of how are the narrative are, of the way we understand our political economy and culture. I think if we'd actually been able to do that it would have had some pretty big social effects And interestingly, we kind of have done some of that. One of the things about this that we have seen is, like when I was in grad school, the kinds of terminologies we used in grad school you would have never seen in the New York Times, why, even if they were discussing some of the same books. Now you can find that stuff on blogs for teenagers like and. So that has twpled out but Has a bit as effective as we hope? 

Speaker 2: I don't know. Well, i guess this is right, that this is the culture wars stuff, right that that I think maybe you know, we, we could gesture towards right, like discourses around around culture and and and gender and and race and and justice and And discourses around trauma and these sorts of things are, are things that that do come in part right Not completely, and I would never want to misconstrue that causation but in part from the critical humanities In certain ways, like you said, blog posts is, you know, you see that that kind of language and in blog posts and these sorts of things. But then the issue is, like you said, like why Like it worked, but why didn't it work? right? I guess would be the sort of double-bind question that we're left with and I think, ultimately for me is that again, i mean you know all It's funny after After all this time that that this would be coming out of my mouth but Did the underlying structural dynamic change right? 

Speaker 2: Have have we it has? has the culture stuff and and and some of that critical work given new potential weapons to particular Polities and the struggle over the structure, the political structure of the family, of the way we think about The way we talk about political issues. Absolutely. Did that create real effects? absolutely? Now, the question, though, does? ultimately, it has to revolve back to What structural dynamics shifted right in the aftermath of that, what incentive structures shifted in the aftermath. Math of that, what? you know, i think shorthand, i think the word material gets misused, but What? what material structures have shifted and changed? and some have, some have shifted and changed, but It's, it's hard to parse the Interplay between the, the way we talk about certain things, and how that relates to the actual change. Dare, i say like on the ground in the structures themselves and and I can, i can say it Quite clearly like, for example, in, in academic, in, in just my particular experience with The, the UAW fight as a rank and file member, right, not in leadership, but we had there were plenty of ways of voicing and talking about and using critical language to interrogate and investigate the relationships of power at the heart of that, of the negotiation and the, the precarity that graduate students feel and and experience, and None of that Really brushed up against the power itself, right. 

Speaker 2: So then it becomes that question right and in an almost way that we have to keep coming back to right, like what actually is going to be the thing That exerts the force, that that that opens the door for That talk in those, in those intellectual understandings To really apply themselves. And I think that's where you know we have to look to history for Answers to when, when and how those sorts of things have happened. And I know, you know, i know your interest in in the Soviet Union and and other Experiences of a sort of left left attempts to apply the ideas. You know that I'll defer to those Those conversations and those shows that you've done. 

Speaker 2: And this is where questions over you know, things like Social democracy and things like that, you know, have to keep rearing their head like, actually, how are these ideas going to be able to be applied in institutional contexts? And this is where I think ultimately, that a lot of like the left left lawyer space becomes a space where There's potentially meaningful avenues to affect change through levers of power. But you know there's a lot of difficulties there too. But I I think, given my experience and given My proximity to certain types of polemical political Language over the over the years, i Don't see how that language Can do more at this point then convince people Intellectually of what Justice could look like. Then the question becomes What are we gonna do? and I think I mean you know who has the answer to that. I mean, certainly make yourself known, if you do, you know that. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i think this is actually some some really crucial things to think about, because You know I think about the Soviet Union, think about, i mean, one of the things I'll say is, like, the educational Capacity of the USSR Even if you're not a Marxist, you know, i think that's a very important point, even if you're not a Marxist has to be remarked upon how, how fast they build up an educational capacity of a serious degree and of which, compared to say, modern Western academia, both in the United States and in contemporary Europe, was more actually meritocratic. And I say that's a person who thinks almost all notions of meritocracy are kind of bullshit. Oh, but, but there was more there. I also think it's led to a lot of people to like miss some some crucial things like, for example, even to this day, russia is a highly educated society. Does not lead to What a lot of people who try to sell education As a neoliberal improvement project or a formless improvement project or whatever. 

Speaker 1: It just clearly doesn't do that. You know I can. I Cannot tell you how many civil and structural engineers I met, and in Egypt and in Mexico, who were working menial labor jobs like with, with, and it's way more than you would think like it was actually sort of shocking. So I don't have any illusions about what this does in and of itself, but I do think Um, um For the people who are inclined towards it. And I want to like, i don't want to overvalue Education either, but I don't want to undervalue it. We live in this. 

Speaker 1: I feel like we live in a time, because of our particularly political economic structure, where we have a kind of Incoherence, not quite right. The other metaphor is insulting to people, it's schizophrenia, so I'm not going to use it but, uh, contradictory and unstable notion of of what You know, the value of intellectual work is um, and the value of this kind of training would be Um, and whether or not everybody really needs it. And my answer is no, but for the people who could do it, they could actually help a whole lot of people by doing it who don't need it. Um, and I, i do really believe that I, and I don't want to say like, oh, everybody needs to go to graduate school. No, not everybody does um, but There's a lot of stuff that, if we could, you know, ground this and other and other more stable social systems. 

Speaker 1: You talk about social democracy, talk about universal basic services, um, and I use universal basic services um advisedly, not just universal basic income, um, where this might be a more meaningful distinction, where we can start saying, okay, well, you know, some people don't need this, some people to do, uh, everyone's needs are met, there's, there's enough work to go around, so, and And we can utilize these skills if we want to. So You know, there are ways to do this that are Interesting. And I think another thing that we haven't really talked about is, you know, the cultural part of this is really good, but, um, and I do believe in institutions as social institutions and learning a social. So I should also caveat like there's a reason why, even if you use side hub to break all the all, the all the barriers to access, you're still going to have issues. 

Speaker 2: Well, right, yeah, yeah like um, um uh. Precisely because, uh, if there's anything that grad school has taught me, is that, uh, reading is not a stable, uh, objective process. Um, so there are many different ways to approach reading texts, and without that's the social layer, the, the sort of the, the libertarian version, just it, it ends up conjuring a void of, like you said, social learning. 

Speaker 1: Right, you don't know. There's a whole lot of stuff beyond the texts that you need to really Engage and and do the text. I mean it's like when someone asked me This is completely different, but it's it's related Um. Someone asked me, for example You know, which book should I read to become a buddhist? This has been asked to me multiple times in my life and my answer is always a question. There isn't one like um. 

Speaker 1: You need to find a community that will, and then you can access the scholarships and whatever. Um. And there's plenty of scholarship out there and a lot of it's available for free. Um. But It's not Something that you can just go about and do on your own, because it has to be like that. Learning has to be Embodied in some way, and that's true for most learning, even the kinds of stuff we're talking about here. You know there's some cynical comments at grad school shuffling lexicon as a coining phrases, and there is a certain amount of truth to that. Um in the humanities, uh, but there's also a way in which that's not Really all that's going on um. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, nothing is really ever. One thing I think is is often a safe bet, right? So, yeah, i mean, there is that, um, but yet, at the same time, to take the more positive, uh, less cynical side, seriously right, i think what grad school can be at its best is, uh, a community formation for Trying to understand the world and what the world is. What. What has it been? How does it work? in many different ways, um, what? what kind of expressions uh, in, particularly in the humanities, have people made of their experience of the world and of their context and Trying to, and you know, taking and part of a community that is dedicated to doing that? Um could be what? a graduate school Project could be right. 

Speaker 2: But then I think what we're talking about is, uh is a broader Again, a broader shift In our approach to the world itself, um, because I think, in a lot of ways, there's, there's a, there's an avoidance of what the world is at the heart of a lot of um, a lot of Humanities, discourse, an almost utopian avoidance, right, and uh, uh, particularly when it comes to um, the, the arts, um, which I think that's a part of what the world is, i mean, dare I say that, like Venturing into imaginary worlds, is not a part of the world. 

Speaker 2: It very much is, but, um, i think there is. There is a again a, a kind of intractable problem there whereby um, we, we, we are gonna struggle to, to study the world, um, until At a certain point one can make peace with what the world is and has been, um, and that is often very bloody and brutal and precarious and scary, so That I think that that might be kind of the, the last piece piece of this for me. Where That sort of stuff get, it has to be worked out and There's always going to be an imperfect institution to house it, but The, the university as it stands, is extremely imperfect. Let's just put it that way. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i would. I would agree with that, and I guess my only thing I'd add is the one thing I wish that we would talk about, more About this to really push on this is getting this out there, for Even for the people of which this would never be appealing and they don't really need it, but we need to be in dialogue with them, like that's one thing I do not love about academic culture as it is. It is It is often cordoned off in a way in which we can't benefit from the experiences of people who aren't in it and they can't benefit from our knowledge base. And, um, i know that, like I was reading chrysler lash again, i have a bad habit of doing that and um, and he was talking about the cultural revolution as this attack on learning, and, and I was like it really wasn't, though it was, it was like For for all the things that we could talk about, about the problems of the cultural revolution, there were and there were many the the rest of the case of the intellectuals was not actually to punish the intellectuals, it was to equalize Knowledge bases between intellectuals and rural communities. That's what its aim really was about. 

Speaker 1: Whether it worked or not, open question, right, i think I think there's some evidence that it kind of worked, but nothing ever works as well or as As completely as anyone would want. Um, but and it was resented afterwards for sure, um, but You know, um, i think I think that's a moment That we could actually learn something, and I kind of don't like the way marxist discourse has gone on this particularly, um, because right now there's a kind of marxist discourse that That flattens out the quote professional managerial class, which is anyone would agree into, like a horde of of bad liberals who are all overprivileged and don't know anything about the true blue collar working class. And, um, if we just, you know, rustificated them and let them have the knowledge of what it was likely, you know what it's like to be a real worker, they don't really understand. And, of course, the people saying this are all academics, right, like, of course, like, yeah, um, and I hate, i don't like that, but I do think there is a way in which, like, no, we should start figuring out, because we've been like, i guess the other thing that we were kind of talked about in the in your, your way of framing us within two union battles is, uh, academics are being pro-leterinized in a real way, um and That, and and initially there was some benefits to that's what I'm talking about like it actually caused the spillout into culture of like. 

Speaker 1: But you know, we got a bunch of grad students who got don't have enough jobs and we got blogs like um, and so the disappearance of the public intellectual into academia actually was interestingly kind of undone in recent years by the oversupply of of academics, um, but That really hasn't actually gotten through the other social problems in our society that has classes curtailed from each other etc and so forth. 

Speaker 1: And I know I don't think everyone has to learn how to speak all this jargon, um, uh, but There are things that I did learn in grad school that I try to teach to like everyday people because it really does help them to know how to I don't know read, for bias are um, yeah uh understand what a claim really is doing are, uh, figure out What the most important information is in any given text so you don't waste a whole lot of time on the parts of it that aren't um, those kinds of things Are the kinds of things that perfected in grad school and they do help people and they can be taught to people, um, in public. 

Speaker 1: And I think you know There are ways to that. 

Speaker 1: We have to think about doing that, but it's gonna have to be part of a larger social project and I guess that's that's my Big push is, i think, for me, i, you know, i, you and I have basically a little bit talked about our class backgrounds before off air. 

Speaker 1: Uh, but I really was sold academia as like the one place in american life where there still kind of was meritocracy, um, and thus it was a way that, like somebody from a intermediate background, whether that be class or racial or whatever, could actually like take advantage of that and uh, um, that ain't true really. It's not completely not true, but it's. I would say it's like 80, false to add a meaningful list, a meaningless statistic to it, like, like, um, and And I think there's a whole lot of people who are who are in that situation, um, particularly right now, uh, uh. I guess that my final note is um, we all know that there's a reckoning coming down the pipeline for academia, no matter what like, because their student base is going to drop significantly and it seems like the idea of of just replacing that with, uh, immigrants Students is is becoming unpowdable politically for whatever reason. 

Speaker 2: I mean I'll, i'll just say the business model. When I started graduate school in 2019 um at the uc was to explicitly recruit uh Chinese nationals as students to play, to pay out of state tuition Yep, um, and that just is not going to happen any uh anymore, i mean because of the geopolitical stuff, it's it. So They, they're like you said. I mean there is. There is that part of this too which is like it's it as a business model, um, as a, as a has a business model right, as an experience. 

Speaker 2: Uh is gonna keep going through shifts that I think will continue to erode, particularly in the humanities the um, any residual uh semblance of What the intellectual project of the humanities is, and I honestly think There are ways in which that is, of course, very bad and harmful for the people that sit within that those projects, and I think there are ways in which that um, the, the facade um is, is is actually quite socially harmful in a lot of different ways. 

Speaker 2: That, and not for the ways that uh any conservative would would say, and I think it's because it colors. It colors the critical in this gloss of of, of untruth and, and I think that That's a problem for a critical politics and and and I'm not particularly hopeful about a broader social project in America for a lot of reasons, um, but I do think if there is going to be one, it is going to be as a result of something like a kind of, um, a pretty deep uprooting of of some of the ways that these institutions have, uh, have been, have been operating, and and I I don't see that as an accelerationist view, because I actually don't want that to happen, but, uh, i think there are a lot of ways in which it probably will, probably will. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i, um, i don't have a whole lot to add to that because I I think I've been on that that war path for a while. When I, when I was working in the universities abroad, i there was this whole academic complex. It was just getting foreign students in the the us so they would pay more tuition, um, and I actually remember a couple of times, like sitting down and trying to talk people out of it. You'd like, you know, maybe you can, i don't know, you could stay here, go to europe or someplace cheaper, um, uh, but none. The west, it is what it is, but that's, that's, that's over. Um, it really is over. Uh. There are some other attempts at the major universities who try to get out of it, like ivy leagues opening satellite campuses with slightly different uh Acceptance standards in places like dubai uh, yeah, nyu dubai or things like that. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but um, then I knew people used to work in that world. So for people who want to know how I got my my world traveling in, that was how I have got. I can't afford this shit. I can't like I'm not, i don't come from money. I had to have academics pay for it. Uh, but, um, i could. I could see the writing on the wall even 10 years ago that this was going to hit some real geopolitical problems and that it wasn't possible forever because, like, eventually the people are going to just go to institutions in their home country. Now They got the education here. No, even if they're what in the geopolitical decoupling? 

Speaker 2: um, and I suppose one might imagine if, if, if one buys into this whole new cold war with china structure is a reinvigoration of the cold war university. Um, i know, i don't know, maybe maybe talking with someone like daniel bezner about something like that would be interesting, but, um, i, other than something like that. I mean, i think it's, it's. I mean, of course, thinking into the future is always difficult, but it seems, it seems difficult for me to imagine a way, um a way to understand how the humanities continues to go forward Along the terms of this business model and not continue to hemorrhage. It's, it's funding sources. Um, it, it's tough, it's tough one. Yeah, it's, it's tough Um. 

Speaker 1: And and to, i guess, make one more point about labor. 

Speaker 1: It's also hard for me to see how these I think these labor subfutes are important and I think that can make Provisional winnings. 

Speaker 1: But you said, you know, as you said, there's, there's some fundamental problems here that even that the unionization of this labor isn't going to fix um and and. Yeah, there is, and there are some really structural, pernicious things that are outside of the university too, like, um, if you're a union bureaucrat, uh and I know leftists aren't supposed to throw this word around, but they do exist Um, and you have a steady supply of temporary Union members who, however, are not going to develop a whole lot of skill An expertise says, rank and file in the five years They're going to be in that union, because that's the max they could possibly be in it. Um, it's kind of a good income stream, but it doesn't require a lot of work because, like, they're not going to be there forever and um, and so, like your investment in that is kind of a, it's kind of its own thing. Lastly, someone's saying the IVs are gonna just fine. The IVs are endowments with the universities attached and then not the other way around. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's boutique. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, like we're not. I'm not really worried about the poor IVs collapsing, but I am worried about the poor state schools collapsing if they're not just mass, are just turning into what they kind of are becoming in some places, like in the South, where they're just massive landlords. 

Speaker 2: Or like explicitly politicized, like in Florida with the new college which is like two hours down the road from where I am right now. So you know these, there's threats in multiple angles, you know, to these universities. And yeah, i mean a lot, of, a lot of airway of time has been spent talking about how universities, like you said, are just landlords or like the material economic kind of base or endowments. But I think it does need to be said as well, like right what one commenter is saying, right, feudal patronage system. There's a way in which there's almost like a realignment of what the university is at the moment alongside some of these economic structures. that to me it speaks to an interesting kind of politicization of society at large in ways that I think maybe could be talked about, but not in the, not in the like Republican or Democrat sense, but in the sense of like a more explicit understanding of the way the world is working, being kind of put front and center. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i think that's. That's an interesting thing to think about. I guess, my, i guess, when I think about this, I come to this point of like we do need to have a bit of complexity in how this exists because all the like you said earlier, all these things existed in the same institution, like from the most cynical to the most ideal. like there are real pockets of these idealistic things that we are talking about that do really exist in the university, probably pretty minor, but like I encountered them. Like they're not, and not every actor is cynical, why. 

Speaker 2: Of course not, yeah. 

Speaker 1: Right. 

Speaker 2: So That's what's kind of heartbreaking about it too right Like at times where right, like so many. 

Speaker 2: There are many people who mean very well and then have to encounter these structures in particular ways that are very difficult and require, unfortunately, at times, like you know. I mean like, say, some of my mentors and advisors during the strike would give lip service to the strike and then, you know, cross the picket line and do our work for us and things like that, and these are people who are imagined as critical intellectuals. Right, and people have said this all the time. I mean we there's tons of stories from from Judith Butler giving money to Kamala Harris, to you know, things that I think come from structure, like people who do mean well. 

Speaker 2: That's not necessarily a personal attack on Butler at all, i'm a big, i deeply respect their work but there are structural limits to our capacity as actors within systems that go way deeper, historically and at grander scale than our individual agency can allow for. And so that's just. That's just what happens, right, when you throw people into a system and a structure that produces these very confused and perverse, contradictory incentives and impulses and punishments as well. So Yeah. 

Speaker 1: One last thing I'm gonna address is one of the questions in the chat, which is could at least part of the class be prevented by slimming down the university administration? And I would say temporarily maybe, but I'm gonna actually say a lot of that university administration exists for a reason other than its own self-perpetuation. Like the whole, i've never been a believer in the Graeber bullshit jobs thesis, because usually when we get rid of those jobs we discovered that there was a reason why they were there. The reasons for a lot of the university administration is, frankly, legal. 

Speaker 2: Right, well, it's legal. And then I think another thing I would add is I mean, if we're gonna say it's a medieval institution, it has to be that way, right? Like, the structure of facilitating the different funding sources up the chain of mediation requires an immense bureaucracy, and that's something that, yeah, i mean maybe you could shift around who gets paid what, obviously, and you could trim things here and there. But again it comes back down to a question of what is the university? What actually is it doing? Rather than well, what if we just chop off this arm? Let's see what happens. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, this arm that we all hate. But we forget that the arm might be there for a reason, even if it's choking us like, yeah, i tend to this for the same reasons. I tend to think we have to look at what the university does, and you know, i'm gonna echo something you've strongly implied is that there isn't anybody in the system and I don't just mean by this by academics, like people funding it, the states who are procuring this, the endowments, et cetera who really have a strong incentive to look at all of what a university is doing, all of its social functions, and that makes it a very unwirly thing to reform or to fix. I don't blame anyone for leaving it, but I also don't blame people for staying, and that's kind of like I mean, if nothing else, as a person who's changed careers four or five times, there is eventual suck costs. You just like it's real hard to get out of this own cost. Oh yeah, absolutely. 

Speaker 2: I mean, I don't think I tend to think that people shouldn't be blamed for very much. I mean, I think there's always reasons why people make the decisions that they do And that can be tricky to play that game, You know. It becomes often a mise-en-game where you lose the thread pretty quickly. And I just wanna answer Colin's question in the chat. Actually, yeah, we talked about I think we cited you, Colin, on your and Varn's conversation about the university having a kind of legacy medieval structure to it. It's certainly more complicated than just asserting that outright. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, to call it a medieval institution is to maybe give it too much credit. Yeah, I agree. 

Speaker 1: It's also a Cold War institution, it's a neoliberal institution And I will say this university life, for reasons that I don't entirely understand, seems to be recuperatable in ways and restructurable in ways that other kinds of institutions have a hard time being. But so anything we say about it, whether it's the legacy medieval university to, oh, the neoliberal university, it's like partly true, like, but yeah, thank you so much for coming on today. You give me about two hours of your time and it's a lot. I'm glad we had this conversation And just so you guys know, part of the reason why this exists is not just for me to advocate for a political position, because I'm not a member of any political group. I am a Marxist analyst, i'm a Marxist advocate, but I'm not a member of a Marxist party. Fuck, i don't even join the DSA. I am in a union, but that has nothing to do with what I do here. 

Speaker 1: This contradiction of academia and the audience problem has been on my mind for like 15 years. Where I'm like I have skills, i want the good parts of these skills to be spread around And they're weirdly our means to do it, even if they're shitty and capitalist or whatever, but they're free or semi-free for the loser, at least way cheaper than a degree. But then you do come up with some of the other functions of the university, like, yes, i can educate you, but that's not gonna get you a credential, it's gonna help you get a job. So you know, there are other parts of this that I want people to look at, but one of the reasons why I'm having this conversation is like answering some of the problems that come up in this. As part of why I do this is because I'm like, oh yeah, there's stuff that's life-changing that you can learn from some of the scholarship. There's also a lot of bullshit, but, like you can't have one without the other. Honestly. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's life. I think, Yeah, life. 

Speaker 1: Like we're not gonna get the good stuff if we don't have to wait through some crap And so, on that note, i want people to just think about that and think about maybe the social conditions that we should be advocating for that would enable the people who need it And again, i don't think everybody needs to be an academic, my God, but Please don't, yeah But for the people who need it are, more importantly, people who want it and could benefit from it, for it to be available to them in some ways, even though I have no delusions about replicating all the social functions of a university. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'll say two things. One, if you want a five-year contracted job at a wage that's pretty stable, if that's what it is to you, it's not a bad choice to go into grad school. I think that should be said and it's important that that is said. And then to your point, Varn, about having conversations like this. I just wanted to say like I appreciate the fact that you've always been open to having a genuine conversation about things with people who aren't necessarily linked up to the particular status games of, dare I say, just like kind of all of the attention economy, including academia, And that's something that is hard to find, And I really appreciate that personally for the conversations that we've had over the years, but also just for listeners as well. So thank you, Thank you. 

Speaker 1: The other part of the mission is finding people who I think would be interesting, regardless of whether or not anyone would care. Yeah, like it's just, you know, like I could do the easy route. and this is not to slight him, i actually am quite fond of him. I could have Matt Christman on every day and I guarantee you this would be bigger, but I don't think people would learn as much from it. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, no, i mean, trust me. I had a podcast where we fought with him and it generated a lot of numbers. But I think an honest conversation like this honestly does more teaching and is more insightful than that, which is no slide on him. I actually find him kind of insightful nowadays, but Yeah, me too. 

Speaker 1: I like Christman, but yeah, also, people should go back and listen to that interview you guys did with him on Superstructure, because I I listening to it. it wasn't a matter of who won, it was like who actually understands what the other person means, and I got by the end of it that both of you kind of did a little more, but it was an exercise in like your assumptions about what political is or isn't were completely different And, interestingly, as a site, just as an outside person who's listened to both of you and talked to you now for two or three years, you're closer to each other now than you were when you had that conversation. 

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I definitely agree with that, which I think is it's kind of beautiful in a way. I think it's one of those things that that's how life goes sometimes, and I think there are ways in which a kind of hopefully I mean dare I say like a consensus around this kind of like materialistically inflected Keynesianism with touches of Freud can be something that people can dip in and out of in ways that don't feel too theoretically charged or sectarian. but that might be a more hopeful gesture on my part. 

Speaker 1: But anyway, Maybe it could happen. I hope so, but on that note, thank you so much. Have a good evening. I would ask you if you have anything to promote, but we were talking off air, i guess. Do you have anything to promote these days, or do you just? 

Speaker 2: No, not really. If you wanna follow me on Twitter, you could, I don't know, see my tweets. Sometimes I say things that are funny, sometimes insightful. but yeah, you know, Yeah, I do enjoy your Twitter. 

Speaker 1: You know where to find me. But I will also say it's Tinner's change in the last year. 

Speaker 2: So Yeah, certainly it has All right well, have a great day, Thanks.