“Universities have a role to play here by offering workshops and courses to their academics and students. This can help develop creative non-fiction writing skills.”
So, dear academic friends, do y’all really wish to speak to audiences beyond your discipline? Or would you really seek to do that work given that your livelihood basically depends on your ability to speak only to a specialized audience (at least in the humanities)? I know you do, Patrick Iber, with Dissent and other work. Max Rayneard, I know you made a choice here. Danielle Sparkles, I saw you beat the game and odds with work I respect and think matters– tell how you do it! Margaret Rhee, what do you think here…
Myself, I’d be happy to be hired to “teach creative nonfiction skills,”…as hustling for peanuts, facing the constant disrespect accorded non-tenure track faculty, while doing more public-facing communication than anyone in my department (In the last year? In the last five years?) in general audience publication, appearances, talks to non-academic audiences, radio, podcasts, gets exhausting. But honestly, academia is about the game of academia within the tenure-system, and while much of what I care about in the world floats in the wake of the university, it seems to me that what is valued in contemporary scholarship is increasingly peripheral to the Deweyian ideal of public education that insists that the purpose of school is to learn how to live well and thoughtfully and ethically, regardless of one’s station. Departmental politics and tenure-track positioning is rather about confirming one’s station among the fifteen other people capable of affirming a permanent paycheck.
Or, to put it differently, all you poets and fiction writers who did English phds as a part of specializing and career-positioning to better appeal to the academic apparatus and demands of universities and emglish departments– do you see you yourselves as buying time and space to do important creative work…or being a part of the institutionalization of literary art that moves it toward the closed-system, hierarchal nepotism and irrelevance that this article claims of academia?
I have no time for anti-intellectual posturing, which I feel this article lends itself to. But the machinery of the sausage factory that is the modern university, which values money, connection, relevance, and institutionalized or monetizable legitimacy and status, and the structure, function, and hierarchy of academic discipinarity, seems hopelessly fucked.
(posted from Facebook)
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