My Day Job: Politics and Pedagogy in Academia
For most of us, what we present at meetings
like the ESS is our art, our life, our valued work. And what we do to pay the mortgage, put shoes
on the kids, get the money to go to meetings like this, is teach.
Some of us -- more and more of us -- are doing
our teaching as piece work, course by course, and as in pre-union days, without
any 'benefits.' As courses move online,
for some that work --like old style garment industry piecework -- is done in
our homes, one corner of our living space used for production, providing our
own supplies, laptops now rather than sewing machines. For others, luckier,
teaching is done as a full time job with full benefits, from a solid college or
university base, whether on-line, in person or both, doing our 10 community
college courses a year, or our 6 or so undergraduate courses, or even just a
lovely one or two doctoral courses, or whatever mix we've worked out for
ourselves. But that teaching, our day
job, most often slips under the radar when we meet as professional
sociologists.
At this meeting, we can and will talk about
our interesting publications and our grant-funded research and all of that --
but let us also talk about our day jobs.
While papers will be welcomed in all areas of sociology, and
mini-conferences will address a range of issues and concerns, the theme of the
conference will be our day jobs. What is
happening to universities and colleges as America becomes ever-increasingly
corporatized and privatized, as more and more of all work is outsourced, as
students and their families become 'customers' and faculty are responsible for
'product'? How are we managing, coping,
and rising above all that? How do we
remain dedicated to our craft of teaching, our vocation of transmitting our
sociological imagination?
The meeting was a success, thanks to the hard work of the program committee, headed by Vilna Treitler and the wonderful ESS headquarters team headed by Emily Mahon.
Attendance was good, about as good as it has
ever been in Boston I’m told, and the panels on the theme were thoughtful,
well-attended and addressed the issue.
I’ll be working on turning my Presidential Address into an article for
our journal, SOCIOLOGICAL FORUM. Thanks
for all who came and worked on this!