As I ponder the implications of the various turns my life is about to take, I notice that Marc Bousquet‘s new book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has been getting some buzz, and I come across an article by Scott Mclemee about public intellectuals. Judging from the review and the blog for How the University Works, Bousquet outlines the problem of “predatory employment” in higher ed, and contends that as contingent faculty take more prominent roles in professional organizations (such as MLA), they will be able to force change in the industry. The problem, for those who don’t know, is that universities increasingly rely on graduate students and part-time instructors to teach classes, which is cheap, but leaves people in a situation where they are teaching classes at 4 different places, with no benefits and, often, little respect. Many of these people hold a Ph.D and are looking for full-time employment in a tenure-track job, which are becoming harder to find, due in part to the reliance on part-time labor.

Mclemee, in a review of Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, details the material conditions that led to the demise of the public intellectual in the 1960s, part of which is the increased specialization of the media, and part of which is the absorption of intellectuals into academia, and the drive for professionalization, which further isolates academics from the general public with jargon and hyper-specialized discourse, etc. At the end of the article, Mclemee concludes that this might change:

Under the circumstances, any notion of a public-intellectual sphere functioning apart from institutional machinery seems preposterous.

Unless, of course, that machinery accidentally re-creates some of the constitutive elements of the old cultural order: a body of surplus intellectuals who are not very well integrated into the system. Who have (for example) full access to the range of questions and ideas debated within scholarly networks but cannot find full-time employment in academic institutions—the products, but also the victims, of a system of higher education that is ever more dependent on a parttime labor force.

A group of writers and of thinkers—and even, who knows? of eloquent yellers—who enjoy no economic security and occupy low rungs on the status ladder, without much reason to think this will change. Such people, finding themselves excluded, might in time start wanting to “exclude the excluders.”Then the tenor of intellectual discourse might change, and public life with it; and a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension.

He seems to be suggesting that with so many intellectuals feeling alienated from institutions of higher education, in large part due to current hiring practices and what some consider an overproduction of Ph.D’s, perhaps new venues of public discourse will emerge. What might they be? No doubt media such as blogs, online journals and other cheap publication technology can (and do) facilitate the beginnings of such a discourse. I hope that the choice facing new graduates expands beyond either working part-time while looking for a tenure-track job, or getting a job in the “real world,” (a dichotomy I have never liked, but that seems appropriate here). A more productive, more public intellectual discourse may provide a healthy alternative and bring changes in academia as well.