Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Class Consciousness in Composition

Abstract

I argue that we need to acknowledge how the material interests of part-time and adjunct teachers, graduate assistants, tenure-stream faculty, and administrators can come into conflict in composition in order to negotiate fairly among them. I then call on bosses and workers in composition to form a new class consciousness centered on the issue of good teaching for fair pay. I discuss how the culture of academic professionalism militates against such a consciousness, and I propose three ways to forge a more collective view of our work: involving faculty at all ranks in teaching the firstyear course, devising alternatives to tenure as a form of job security, and pressing for more direct control over staffing and curricula. Comp droids and boss compositionistsIn a recent essay on the MLA Workplace Web site, Cary Nelson offers a despairing view of English departments filled with "comp droids" who have few of the intellectual interests of the professoriate but instead merely "beep and whir and grade, that's all." Nelson's aim is to denounce how we have allowed the job of teaching introductory English to become what economists call an "elastic commodity"-a position that requires little specialized training, with correspondingly low status and pay-and I think, to be fair, that he is trying to be wittily empathetic in describing colleagues reduced to the status of droids. But to those of us working in composition, the joke is a stale one and even more annoying when it comes from a self-professed academic radical and advocate of labor in English studies. Droids are a management fantasy of the ideal workforce-docile, productive, faceless. And comp droids-that is, graduate teaching assistants, adjuncts, and part-timers-have for years provided the economic support for the work of senior faculty in English, both through teaching the introductory courses that such faculty no longer want to be bothered with and by enrolling in the graduate seminars that those professors have been freed up to offer instead.Cary Nelson should know better. And so I want to give his misstep some emphasis, to note his use of droids as a reminder not only of the routine contempt that English still holds for intellectual work in composition, but also of the willingness of the English professoriate to participate in the ongoing economic exploitation of composition teachers. While we have seen in the last two decades a flurry of proposals to recenter study in English around new or different sets of texts and issues-theory, cultural studies, global Englishes, teaching the conflicts, even composition and rhetoric-there have been few serious attempts (the 1986 Wyoming Resolution being a striking exception) to reconfigure who does what sorts of actual work in English departments, under whose supervision, under what conditions, and for what pay. Working as a comp droid in a department run by conservative New Critics is pretty much the same thing as working as a comp droid in one run by radical cultural theorists. What has occurred in such cases is less struc...

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