FC: By way of introduction, let me begin by noting that one of the aspects of your work that I enjoy is your examination of current practices in the profession. In your upcoming piece, "The New Belletrism" and in "The Posttheory Generation," you analyze the development of theory in literary study in relation to the growth of the research university, and you link the new forms of literary criticism to shrinking resources. You provide a material explanation for the move to theory and for what you argue is happening now--a move to a "new belletrism." It is this focus on the material aspects of the profession and how they play out in our work and our lives that makes your perspective particularly important for readers of workplace. Perhaps you could talk about this. 

JW: One thing that I've tried to do in my writing is to talk about theory in a different way than usual. It seems to me that many of us discuss theory in a metaphysical way, as if the practices we call theory existed solely within their own field of discourse. As one might construe a literary history in terms of a history of authors and texts of a period or genre, one construes theory in terms of the arguments and terms of theorists, as if they exist in an ether of their own devising and invention. We come to imaginatively inhabit that ether if we're trained in theory. I'd prefer, to carry out the metaphor, to look at the physics of theory, the material effects of the practices summarized under its rubric, or the material conditions that promulgate the currency of theory. It's hard for me to get around the simple fact that we do theory very much as part of our professional activity, and within the parameters of the research university. Theory has other uses than metaphysical validity or enlightenment, and those other uses are what I find most telling. 

In "The Posttheory Generation," I argue that theory dispelled the touchy-feely aura of literary study and provided a research rationale and agenda for the humanities during the great days of the public research university, in emulation of the sciences and in competition with the social sciences. In other words, theory proclaimed that we do research too, just like those in other disciplines. The previous model of close reading provided a pedagogical rationale for the humanities in the context of a different university, the post-WWII GI Bill university, that required a reproducible and eminently teachable method (Graff is very good on this in Professing Literature). I try to give an explanation of the intermediate place that those of us who came into the profession through the late 1980s and early 1990s faced, during the time of the breakdown of theory (hence posttheory) and the breakdown of the research university (hence shrinking funding and jobs for my generation). Though I try to avoid making a pop-sociology generalization about a generation--and I admit I was influenced by all the talk of Generation X in the early 90s--I deliberately stress how these changes impacted a cohort, a group of people, formed by our terms of employment as well as our discourses. 

In "The New Belletrism" I update the story. Now it seems to me that the dominant practice in literary studies has shifted to more recognizably literary modes, evidenced by the spate of academic autobiographies appearing through the 1990s and now, although I also place other modes, such as the public criticism that Michael Bérubé or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. does, and the more appreciative type of criticism that Greenblatt and others have turned to, under the same umbrella. In other words, it's not just navel-gazing and not a blip, but a concerted change. Overall I argue that this represents the assertion of a revivified form of belles lettres as a primary professional mode, rather than social-scientific-aping theory. This justifies the humanities by readopting its tried and true object of study--literature--and rationale--literary appreciation and aesthetic pleasure. I think this is the case because we can no longer justify our work as "research," research that has discernible results as it might in engineering or the ag school. Thus it's a shift, for lack of a better word, to the spiritual values that the humanities has to offer. It's the one thing that we offer that you don't get in the sciences or social sciences. 

And I link this materially to the decline of funding for research. The humanities were basically parasitical within the funding structure of the research university since they do not bring in any significant external funds, which was nice while it lasted but is no longer supportable in a time of hyper-accounting. The turn to a new belletrism offers both a disciplinary rationale, as I mentioned, and a revamped public rationale, supplanting the intra-university rationale that theory offered. In some ways, it offers a revived rationale for teaching, reembracing the pleasures of literature. This isn't to claim that there's a one-to-one causal relation between changes in theory and the university, but it is to claim that our professional practices have a particular function for the mandates of the research university, and thus certain practices become dominant and others subside. 

FC: What is the source of your perspective on theory? How did you come to think this way? 

JW: I probably have a predilection for reflexive thinking; the questions that I keep coming back to are why are why are we doing literature? How in turn do we use literary texts such that they make us literary professionals? Why are we doing this thing called theory? How does theory make us institutional actors? Do we do theory because it's socially useful? Perhaps, but only with a great deal of mediation if not contortion, and at best it's only one implicit effect of certain kinds of theory, among many other effects. Some people simply say we do theory because it's a mindful pleasure. This is Fish's argument in Professional Correctness, and it repeats a longtime justification of literary studies. Though I don't think this is finally a very good professional rationale for people to pay us to do this, and reduces what we do to a hobby, I almost prefer it to the self-inflated claims for our social utility. 

I have also come to think this way about theory because of my own course through institutions. I was trained as a theoryhead at SUNY-Stony Brook in the mid-1980s, from 1984-89, when the sometimes vehement debates over theory, over deconstruction, against theory, and for cultural studies, were taking place. It's hard to re-imagine the headiness of that moment now, when the overwhelming issue that confronts the profession is jobs, as well as the issue of what a humanistic education should be and what role public entitlements like higher education have. I also attended the School of Criticism and Theory, which was then at Dartmouth, in the summer of 1989, which seemed to provide a crescendo for The Theory Experience. 

When I got back from Dartmouth, I got a dose of the material world. I'd applied and interviewed for a few academic jobs, without any success (in retrospect, I was still too early, since I only had about half my dissertation done), and I found out a job I'd been promised at Stony Brook had fallen through, so I had to scramble to get work and had to move back to my parents' house. I picked up a job on a landscaping crew for the rest of the summer--they found it quite humorous that this was the end result of my time in grad school, and made it a point to call me "professor"--and in the fall I got a job in publishing, at Routledge. 

These experiences made me see theory, our institutions, and the university a bit differently. It's made me wonder how the experience of people, particularly those from elite programs who don't have the same pressures nor pinched job prospects that people from less prestigious programs have, influences their politics, especially since those from elite programs most likely become the dominant groups speaking for the profession. Not that everyone from elite programs has it easy, but, without adducing the statistics, this is obviously a deeply classed profession. 

FC: Could you tell us more about how your experience at Routledge influenced your views about the academy? 

JW: In 1989-90, it was an exciting moment to be at Routledge, which was cresting as the hot academic publisher of that time, and in a sense invented hot academic publishing. Judith Bulter's Gender Trouble came out that year, and Routledge editors William Germano and Maureen McGrogan seemed to invent the publishing niche of gay and lesbian studies, and later queer theory, among other categories. I'm still impressed by the intellectual energy of the people who worked there. Anyway, my time at Routledge gave me an entirely different way to see the field. It gave me an idea of the market of academic work, a market that we are aware of and might gossip about, but that is mystified and barely analyzed. 

But my perspective on the university and theory wasn't only formed by my time with Routledge. In 1990, somewhat fortuitously and against the odds, I got a tenure-track job teaching theory at East Carolina University. My first few years at ECU probably induced me to turn more to the issue of professionalism, since I was trying to figure out what it meant to be a professor. Through the mid-90s I became more conscious of what was happening to the university. One would've had to have one's head buried in sand, or the library stacks, not to feel the effects of drives for accountability, external funding, privatization, and the like. 

I also came to think about the university more in terms of its being one of the few class ladders and extant public spheres. If one espouses a progressive politics, what possibilities are there for class leveling? The university, especially the Great Society legacy of our vast system of public universities, provides one of the few zones for any sort of upward class mobility and one hopes for some sort of class remedy. And, despite what seems an impoverished, sound-bitten, present-day public sphere, the university provides one of the few existing for a for public conversation. This is probably more a classically liberal view than a radical one, though it seems radical in the era of daily stock market headlines, but public institutions such as the university are, after all, liberal constructions. 

FC: So you see theory, the hierarchy in the profession and the academy, and the job crisis as connected. In addition to your analysis of these interrelated problems, I think you are also developing a plan for addressing them. What is it? 

JW: I fear I sound like one of my crotchety old uncles who extolled the virtues of paying your dues, but I'd be all for a kind of national university civil service, or higher education job corps on the model of required French military service, that would make everyone work their first, say, two years, at community colleges or at out of the way places, and only then be able to apply for higher status jobs. This could be tied to some abatement of grad student loans, and I think it would have a significant equalizing effect on the profession, though I recognize it's not likely to happen. 

However unlikely, I mention this because I think it urgently necessary that we imagine and propose new job configurations, both for ourselves and to serve a public need. A few years ago, Louis Menand published in The New York Times Magazine a proposal that Ph.D. programs in the humanities be streamlined, on the model of law school, to three years. I don't think this is a good idea, but it strikes me that we need more such proposals, rather than bemoaning our fate, or reacting with stopgap measures, such as reducing the number of admissions to Ph.D. programs. Short-term answers change nothing structurally in the way jobs work. I've said before, but think it's worth repeating, the job crisis is not due to a lessened need for teachers--look at the enrollment caps in freshman composition courses (now twenty-seven at East Carolina University, where I used to work)--but the greater extraction of labor from teachers. And this is at the detriment of students, and our presumed public service. 

FC: To get back for a moment to the posttheory generation, you argue that the posttheory generation developed from about 1970 to the 1990s. Graduate students being trained today are still being trained as theorists. Will they be a part of the posttheory generation, or will they find themselves "mistrained" for a newly changed workplace? Are they being trained as theoreticians when the university is turning back to teaching? 

JW: Actually, I'd specify the posttheory generation as the cohort who received their training in the 80s, in the wake of the theory years, and who received their first jobs in the late 80s or early 90s, in the crucible of that job market. It was formed by two professional facts of life: the hyper-professionalized state of literary discourse, and the scarcity-inflected socialization of hyper-competitive job prospects. I think it's remarkable because it is a large cohort, simply due to the actuarial fact that there was a job spike in the late 80s through the early 90s, so that something like 10,000 people got jobs within five years, as opposed to a thousand or less per year through the remaining years of the 90s. Those who got jobs before that, from the late 70s and through the 80s, I would call the theory generation. It would be a mistake to think that that previous generation had it easy, for the job shrinkage began around 1970. But it did not seem as if the job crisis became a common cause. I'm not sure why this is so; there was a certain complacency about it, as if it were an accident or aberration, that the job shrinkage was like the weather and would end after a dry spell, rather than a structural reconfiguration of labor and a defunding of higher education. It's become progressively clearer that it's neither temporary nor an accident. 

FC: Right, and this is what make the Graduate Student Caucus position striking. They insist on recognizing the structural dimensions of the job crisis. 

JW: As for the cohort of people finishing graduate school in the late 90s, they face a different institutional scene of formation. I'm not sure what I'd call it, and maybe it's for you instead of me to name. In terms of professional discourse, I don't think it's a posttheory generation; discourse is now grouped not around the rubric of theory--deconstructive theory, feminist theory, etc.--but around "studies" rubrics--gender studies, film studies, and all the permutations of various identity studies. Theory hasn't disappeared and seems to be part of the professional groundwater, but it no longer has the force it once did. In terms of material circumstance, it strikes me that one fact of professional life is a much more active stance toward the job market, after earlier bewilderment. So perhaps I'd call it the activist generation, since it sees its situation in terms of professional-political struggle. More bleakly, I might call it the forgotten generation, to reflect the daunting fact that a majority of people who did graduate work through the 90s have not gotten or will not get permanent jobs. 

About mistraining, I think that mistraining is endemic and essential to the hierarchy. James Sosnoski has a book called Token Professionals and Master Critics in which he argues that our profession is structured on this kind of mistraining, that most of us are trained for and try to emulate those who have entirely different material conditions of work and career trajectories. That is, most of us are token professionals. It's hard to keep up on your reading of Critical Inquiry, not to mention writing something for it, if you're teaching 4-4 with little hope of a semester off. But one still tries, or feels the lack, so the model perpetuates itself. In other words, I don't think the fault is theory per se, but the internal class structure of the profession. 

The tendency of our training is to misrecognize the actual, concrete job tasks that the vast majority of us do. In a sense, though, this derives from a contradiction of professionalism. If our professional rationale were simply that we teach students, which I think would be an exemplary and publicly conscientious goal, it is not likely that we would have the same professional standing; we would be equivalent to secondary school teachers. This is not to slight school teachers--my brother, who's taught school for twenty years, would beat me up if I did--but to point out that they simply do not have the same professional privilege or status that university professors do. How professions work is that they attribute and control a body of knowledge--for us, theory, literary scholarship, gender studies, whatever--that confers distinction upon those credentialed in the profession. 

I say this because I think that it bespeaks a serious problem in drives for unionization, which I'm all for. If we are to unionize, it will dispel some of our professional distinction--as with school teachers. I can live happily with that, but I think this is part of the reason that there is more than a little resistance among established faculty toward it, most apparent in the unconscionable statements of some of the Yale faculty during the Yale grad student strike. They probably became professors to separate themselves from the union rabble. 

FC: By mentioning unionization, you are touching on the future of the university. In an interview with Nancy Fraser, you asked her what the role of the university will be in the future. To turn the question to you, what do you think the role of the university will be? 

JW: I've written about this in a piece called "Brave New University," which, as its title indicates, holds out a not entirely optimistic future, and that future is largely here. One element of this, which is probably no surprise to readers of workplace, is that the university has become more and more the research development arm of corporations. On my campus at the University of Missouri, there's a big debate about Monsanto's funding research into agricultural genetic engineering. This is profitable for corporations because they don't have to pay plant costs and permanent salaries to maintain an R & D department, and it is attractive to administrators who are looking for ready money. However, at risk of stating the obvious and even if you accept the sanctity of the capitalist system, the problem is that private corporations, by definition, operate for the private interest and profit of their shareholders, whereas public institutions operate for the public interest and good. In the logic of privatization, the reasoning is that if Monsanto prospers, we all prosper. But as one can see from the wildly climbing stock market of these past ten years and the increase of, for instance, children in poverty, this is quite simply a lie. So the immediate future of the university in its liberal sense as a public institution is bleak because it has been given over increasingly to serve private rather than public interests. 

Another element of this, that has not received nearly the attention that corporate funding has, is the creation of a debtor class of students through massive student loans--something like twenty billion dollars a year for GSLs alone, compared to ten billion dollars total for the first fifteen years of the program through the late 70s. This is a result, again, of the shift from public to private interest, garnering enormous profits for Citibank et al. I find this especially perverse for those of us in education since presumably our purpose is to give those coming after us a leg up, a public entitlement, but instead we are leading them into indentured servitude. This might sound melodramatic, but the statistics are appalling. How much in student loans do you have? do your fellow grad students have? your students? Ten years out of grad school and I still have a 20k nut. It's hard to estimate the social effect that this will have, but, with that kind of debt, it augurs a nasty and brutish future. 

Having said all that, I do have to say that public universities are still a good thing. Maybe not utopian--in a world of my devising, they would be free, and in fact there would be no private universities--but not dystopian either. State universities are still relatively affordable, thank god. The concept that I keep returning to in thinking about the university is "franchise." "Franchise," of course, carries two familiar senses: its approbative if not heroic American sense as attaining a vote and more generally a position of power in civil society, and its more prevalent contemporary sense as a branch of a namebrand corporation. I would recuperate this first sense, of the university as holding out a public franchise, a class remedy, rather than as being a storefront for private profit. Public universities still represent one recourse to a public franchise. 

FC: What about graduate students? What role will they have in this "brave new university?" 

JW: I'm not sure. It's hard to see the current system being sustained--enrollments are down, Ph.D. programs are shrinking, and it seems part of graduate orientation is a gauntlet of warnings about jobs, as if one were entering a plague-strewn field. So I can see a shift from relying largely on graduate students to staff, say, freshman comp, to a mixed underclass of graduate students and lecturers or "teaching specialists." Which is already happening, in the now prevalent bipartite labor division of departments between term staffs--lecturers, those on term contracts, and so forth--and permanent staffs. Permanent staff will become, if it hasn't already, more oriented toward management and administration, not just research, to deal with term workers, who carry the majority of undergraduate hours. A permanent staff won't disappear; it's necessary for the continuous operation of departments. 

Probably the biggest effect on graduate students will be a more rigid internal class structure. You'll be more decisively stamped according to which grad school you went to. This bodes badly not just for jobs but for the kind of jobs one might get. The job search has an egalitarian aura; we all get the same MLA list, and putatively have the same credentials. Not that it was ever a level field, but I think it has become even more tilted. This is only anecdotal evidence, but in the past three years at Missouri we've hired entry-level assistant profs almost exclusively from elite schools, from Harvard, Duke, Cornell, Chicago, and the like. If I scan the faculty roster of senior faculty, there are a few Ivies, but most people came from a mix of state schools--from Tulane, UNC, Indiana. This suggests that one effect of the job shrinkage is that elite universities will return to their earlier roles as being the master training grounds for what Kant called the higher faculty, and less prestigious universities will train the lower faculties, the teaching staffs. This is already happening, and a lot of state universities seem to be focusing more on niches--say, producing rhet/comp grads, since they can't compete with Duke for theory people. 

FC: We have been discussing the future of the profession, which is quite a broad topic. Let me get more specific and ask you about your work with the minnesota review. You have been editing and publishing the minnesota review for many years and part of your work with the journal has been building an institutional base for activism. What are some of the problems and rewards you have encountered with this project? 

JW: Yikes, "many years" makes me feel aged. I've been editing minnesota review since 1992, when I took it over from Michael Sprinker, who had edited it since the mid-80s. What are the rewards? I feel like I've been able to foster the kind of work that I think is important and underrepresented. My goal has been to take up unexamined issues and to push the profession, however incrementally, to talking about them. I've had special issues on, for instance, academic publishing, I hope demystifying how it works and examining how it bears on our institutional life. And I sponsored the recent issue on "Activism and the Academy" that you alluded to, which provides a forum to answer past-MLA president Elaine Showalter's somewhat blithe prescription for jobs, as well as other things, like the interview with Fraser and interviews with Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Foley, and Alan Wald. In general I've been fairly adamant about making it a journal of cultural politics--I've also sponsored issues on things like PC, whiteness studies, and the academic star system--rather than yet another literary journal carrying x number of readings of y literary texts. I don't think we need more readings of literary texts. 

Sprinker, who died this past summer after a long battle with cancer, was always deriding the vanity of our colleagues and saying that, "at the end of the day, the work is what matters." The biggest reward for me is the engaged, timely, and sometimes spiky work that the journal has carried. I should also add that I don't see my editorial work as divorced from "my" work, but as part and parcel of whatever intellectual project it is that I'm trying to do. I probably get this from Sprinker too, who was a truly exemplary left editor, for Verso, for New Left Review, and myriad other things. 

It's also been rewarding to me to try to change--again, however incrementally--the genres a normal academic journal carries. Despite our rhetoric of transgression, our journals are almost all formally conservative and predictable, with their bevy of twenty page articles with notes. I've carried interviews in almost every issue, and would like, at the end of my time, to have assembled a kind of oral history of the so-called cultural left and the profession circa 1995-2005. I like interviews because they are so readable, they give some historical idea of intellectual formation, and they offer a synthetic view of someone's work that you just don't get in a single essay on a normal academic topic. And I've carried a lot of review-essays that eschew the usual five paragraph summary with a paragraph at the end saying it's a good book, which essentially serves a quasi-advertising or blurb function, to give larger views of what a book or other events signal about a field. I've tried to encourage reviews of things like journals, conferences and other academic and cultural events, which I think are usually more revealing and, bluntly, more interesting; why are reviews always of books, that, truth be told, not all that many people read? And I've run a section of "Provocations," which includes short and sharp ripostes, like those to Showalter and some to Bérubé and Nelson about their proposal to pare down grad programs. 

I'm a pretty hands-on editor, too, and work closely with people in crafting their prose and arguments. Sometimes it feels like I pay far more attention to people's words than they do themselves. And occasionally not everyone is happy with how I edit their essays--they think I'm Attila the editor--but most people are. It strikes me as odd, or more to the point, irresponsible, that, in a profession of writing teachers and that devotes itself to literature, there is really almost no editing, and writing is frequently bad. I'm not always sure of the effect I've had as a teacher, but I think that my deepest pedagogical effect has probably been in editing, so that's been a reward. 

Another positive aspect of my work with the journal is bringing in a lot of people, who are getting maybe their first or second publication. I've published a large proportion of graduate students and people early in their careers. (The "Activism" issue, for instance, includes a lot of grad students, and the central cluster was compiled by two grad students, Rachel Riedner and Noreen O'Connor, at George Washington University) I think journals should do this more, not just altruistically, but because I want to hear what new people are saying; frankly, I've already heard what well-known scholar x is going to say about his or her field, but I don't know and want to hear what the Heathcliff or Cathy peering in the window of the profession will say. I've also cajoled and induced senior left academics into writing on topics they normally wouldn't, such as the upcoming issue on what I've called "Academostars." 

I guess it's rewarding that the journal has received some press, in the Chronicle and elsewhere, and that helps when you try to get support from deans, but, to be honest, I don't really have much of a sense of its impact. I wish I did. For me, the journal is the two file cabinets in my office and eternal pile of papers on my desk there, so I'm too much inside it, but wish I could get a sense of where it fits among other journals, who reads it, who gets something from it and what they get. 

FC: And what about the problems? 

JW: There are some worries, like management. I feel like I've become a manager of a small shop. These are not skills you learn in graduate school. This has its rewards--there are so many people who've worked for the journal, many of whom are good friends, and many for whom it's helped in getting an editing or nonacademic job--but it's draining. The biggest problem is the time. The journal is independent, which means it's published from my office at Missouri. I'm negotiating with a press now, which will alleviate a lot of the most unrewarding kinds of work--it's hard to get excited about entering subscription renewals in a database, which I do myself, or about setting up proofs in Pagemaker, and a press would take care of that. I'm probably nearing the end of my time as editor, but I'm trying to set up a structure of associate editors who will take up more of the work, as well as infuse it with new energy. Right now I'm fortunate to have a new colleague, Andrew Hoberek, who's taken up a lot of the responsibilities for doing the review-essays. 

FC: the minnesota review began as a student operated journal. Are there similarities between it and workplace? What do you see as the role of journals such as these and what is their future? 

JW: Though the early history of the journal is sketchy to me--there are no archives nor records, and but a few early issues--from what I can gather mr was founded in 1960 by some grad students at the University of Minnesota (hence its name, which everybody asks me about) as a literary journal devoted to avant-garde or experimental work. That is, I don't think it was overtly political. And I'm not sure how it migrated from Minnesota to Indiana, where it was edited by Roger Mitchell for a number of years in the 1970s. There it began to take more of a political profile, and in fact Frederic Jameson was part of the editorial staff, and published issues on utopia and other things. It moved to Oregon State in the early 80s, edited by Fred Pfeil and later Sprinker, and then to Stony Brook in the late 80s. So it's different from workplace in having passed through a more typical academic path or history. workplace, as I take it, is a direct response to the political issues confronting the profession and the university now, formed in the crucible of the job shrinkage and defunding of public entitlements. 

I see the role of journals like mr and workplace as fostering oppositional work that might otherwise not get published, and to spur people to take up politically pressing topics that the normative range of academic venues ignores. Hence, the job market, or unions, or the position of grad students or adjuncts. To repeat one of my peeves, for a profession that extols the non-normative, our practices are fairly conservative and normative. The pressing task right now is not to come up with a brilliant and inventive reading of the impact of the novel in the eighteenth-century public sphere, but to do something about our workplaces and the university. You might not get rewarded in the normative channels, but there is a constituency. (I much prefer this word to "audience," since I think we need to see what we do in political terms, as having and building a constituency, rather than a neutral "readership.") I think there's also a way in which people work for the approval of their teachers, or what they see as the standard of judgment in the field; I'd rather bet on the future constituency of the field, and lay down a plank toward that future. 

FC: You can't talk about these projects without talking about activism. What would you like our readers to know about your own history as an activist? 

JW: I'm a writer and editor, that's what I've been trained for, and do, I hope, with some skill and political conscience. I say this because I think there's sometimes some misrecognition about our roles as academic-intellectuals, and what it is that we should do, and sometimes some guilt about not being out there throwing bombs, or at the other end of the spectrum, some self-aggrandizement about what finally are modest political tasks (I shook the hand of Martin Luther King!). One has to believe writing has some worthwhile political effect, otherwise we're in the wrong business. 

When I was at Stony Brook in the late 80s, I participated in a graduate student strike that beckoned the rise of grad student unions. I held signs, stood in front of doors, maybe even sprayed a little graffiti. But, although I keenly realized the effects of class (I grew up in a working class family, my father drove a truck and then worked in a cement plant), I don't think I developed a full political sense until I went to East Carolina. Before that I was trying to finish my dissertation, to pay bills, and to raise a daughter as a single parent. At East Carolina, I saw more palpably both the effects of academic employment and the effects of political economy in the town. Greenville, NC, is sort of a boom town, but perceptibly striated along class and race lines, and I lived on the wrong side of town. I was involved in the formation of the first Socialist Party chapter in the state--at one time, I was even vice president, although I confess that was of a membership of eleven, four of whom were at the meeting when I was elected! And I was involved in a chapter of Committees of Correspondence, which has members like Angela Davis and Manning Marable and split off from the CP fifteen or so years ago. We did things like picket the county meeting for the vote on the privatization of the local hospital. I also wrote a column in a local independent newspaper, pointing out things like the difference between West and East Greenville, which prompted a headline calling me "the Greenville Marxist" and my chair to ask that I not use my academic affiliation in the paper. And now, at Missouri, I'm the faculty advisor to the Socialist Party student club that one of my students just started. It's hard to start over and build new roots, and it's made me wonder about the political effect of deracination enforced by academic jobs, where you might be posted, as in the army, to a place like Nome, Alaska, that you have no organic connection to. 

I think the lesson I learned at East Carolina was that politics, in and out of the academy, are long, incremental, and humbling. Though there are heady moments, I think that we often have this image that politics are glamorous, kind of like the way television shows about lawyers mostly represent courtroom dramas. Maybe my correction is of my own adolescent image of storming the ramparts, but I guess I've learned they're a long road. But I do like to think that perseverance, if not stubbornness, wins out, or at least is a better way to live. 

FC: You have answered this question already indirectly, but I want to ask you outright. Do you see activism and scholarship as distinct, competing activities? 

JW: Not at all. After my first article--a sort of narratological reading of Tristram Shandy, and deconstructive critique of narrative theory--everything I've written takes up the politics of the profession, the university, and the role of intellectuals in some explicit form. And my work with the journal obviously complements this. I try to take aim on issues that I think are politically pressing, albeit in the domain of cultural politics, since that is the field I know. At a certain point, I made a conscious choice: I could publish article after article and book after book, say, giving readings of various novels through the prism of my theory of choice. This, after all, is a tried and true model of career, and there are real rewards to it. But I think my course through institutions disabused me of my internecine academic ways. As I said, the obvious pressing task in front of us is what's going on with academic jobs and the university, so I think it's mistaken if not irresponsible not to take up these tasks before any others. If you're poor, or those around you are suffering from poverty, you worry about food on the table before you worry about getting a home entertainment system. And, after all, we are supposed to be smart people, so why haven't we found a way out of this dilemma? 

FC: We have talked about the future of the profession and also about activism. I would like to shift gears again, and ask you about the profession as it is now. In your article, "The Other Politics of Tenure," you call tenure "enforced abjection" and note disturbing trends, such as reduced full-time tenure lines and increased student to teacher ratios. You also highlight the trauma of the tenure process and its long-term effects. Given all this, why should graduate students enter the profession? 

JW: About tenure, I make a distinction between the material relation of job security--which is a good thing, and really not exclusive to academics since civil servants effectively have tenured positions--and the affects circulated around the idea of tenure. This second sense is really a shorthand for the internal work relations and imagined hierarchy of those within academic departments, and I think those relations are frequently fucked up. They devolve upon abjection, and they're often personally damaging as well as counterproductive workwise. This strikes me as one of those unexamined things that needs our attention, and needs to change. It is a good thing to have a fully franchised professional position, but our work relations should be better. 

As far as graduate students entering the profession, I do think that, if you believe that the kind of intellectual work that we do is important, and that universities serve a public good, then it's a worthwhile profession. It's hard to get around the job question, though, other than stating the obvious, that we need more fully franchised positions. As I said earlier, the problem isn't a lessened demand for college teachers--and the demographics have it that there will be more students coming of college age soon--but the greater extrapolation of labor from teachers. 

FC: You recently gave up a tenured position to take an untenured one. For many graduate students, a tenure-track position is the holy grail of academe, which makes it hard to imagine relinquishing it. Why did you give it up? 

JW: Simply, it was a better job--two-two teaching load at a research I, the chance to teach Ph.D. students, the usual reasons. Probably more decisively for me, though, was that I was ready for a change--I was getting flat at ECU and my daughter had just gone off to college--and I picked up a really good vibe at Missouri when I visited. I think there are moments that institutions go through, and it's a very good moment at Missouri right now because we've had and will have a lot of hiring, in part due to retirements and in part due to enhancement, so I feel as if I can be a catalyst in building a vibrant department and work with good people. It's been slightly disconcerting to me that I'm rewarded at Missouri for things that made me the odd man out at East Carolina. I'm not going to revise my criticism of professional affect and tenure, but it's definitely a model of a productive department, whereas East Carolina had a less than productive professional ethos. 

That I gave up the grail of tenure seems to be one of those details that sticks in people's minds. While it would flatter my vanity to represent this heroically--and I have been known to hum a few bars of "I did it my way" when walking around the hallways--in labor terms, I would have to stress that the job I moved to is a permanent--that is, tenure-track--position, and thus, structurally, not really any different from the one I had. And I was fairly well assured of getting tenure at Missouri, which I received this past year. My point about tenure is that it shouldn't be so freighted, as a grail or a gauntlet, but a simple, common guarantee of job security. 

FC: In "Brave New University," your suggestions for what faculty can do to counteract the growing corporatization of the university are to reinvolve faculty in the empowerment of the public and to reinvent the image of higher education. Throughout this piece you portray an institution and profession influenced by strong outside pressures. Do academics really have the power to make the changes you call for? 

JW: Part of my point in "Brave New University" is that we are frequently faculty-focused, or facultyocentric, in imagining, analyzing, and responding to the state of the university. For instance, calls for "public access" that were popular about five years ago, most famously in Michael Bérubé's book of that title that extolled us to get out there and tell what we do to the public, really were about translating our interests, our work, to a public. In other words, it advocated, in a nonperjorative sense, a kind of public relations. This PR work was corrective or reparative, from the bad rap we'd been getting, particularly in light of the PC wars. But it was not necessarily a great stride for oppositional politics, or economic justice, or social justice. Rather, it was academic justice. 

This also occurs in many of the classic texts on the university, as well as academic novels: they are from the perspective of faculty, of academic-intellectuals. Kant's famous treatise on the university is "The Conflict of the Faculties," assuming that faculty is the essential element of the university. However, what would the university look like from the reverse lense? We frequently grumble at the satiric or skewed portraits of the university and especially of English teachers in movies or TV shows, but I think that these images are revealing, albeit through their layers of mediation, of the public projection of the university and what social role the university has. In "Brave New University," I argue that we then need to look these representations of the university, to decipher what it is in terms of public need. We sometimes only listen to our own prescriptions, which often reveal more of our own interest than a public one. One academically unpopular conclusion of this is that, in the humanities, maybe we really should privilege teaching more than research. 

So, to answer your question, I would say that no, academics don't have undue power, nor should they. But on the other hand, yes, academics do have some power, and, especially as literary intellectuals, have an obligation to imagine better vistas for the university. Another way to put this is that we should see ourselves as part of the social fabric, serving a public need. It's a two-way street, which sometimes gets lost in the realm of professional affect, which casts us as brainy individuals doing unique research projects, rather than as participants in public life. 

FC: You have expressed an interest in supporting graduate student activism through work such as the special issue of the minnesota review devoted to "Activism and the Academy." Do you have any suggestions for what students and groups such as the Graduate Student Caucus can do next? 

JW: Take over the institutions and build your constituency. In this business, we frequently respond to what has been rather than imagine what will be, and work to gain the approval of what Bourdieu calls "the legitimating bodies" rather than work to supplant them. The one thing I've been very conscious of, with minnesota review and in my own writing, is that I write for a constituency to come, not the one that is. But workplace is already doing this, so you should probably be telling me what I should be doing, and what needs to be done, so I can pitch in. 

FC: You have already started "pitching in" with your contribution to here and I thank you for your time and thoughts. It was a pleasure working with you.