JAC Volume 12 Issue 1

The grandson of slave-owners, Old Nasty has lived his own life in the most horrific century in the history of homo insipiens. Though he has had the luck to work with and for some teachers and colleagues whom he revered, he has also seen respected humanists behave like jackals. Consequently, he believes, as he has said, that reasoned argument rarely overcomes immediate self-interest narrowly conceived.

The structure of English departments and English studies in big Ameri­can universities is built on the exploitation of graduate students and contin­gent workers. To end that exploitation, administrators would have to reverse their priorities and revise their budgets, and the professoriate would have to give up lots of its accustomed goodies. Nobody should find it remarkable, in these circumstances, that fifty years of reasoned argument haven’t persuaded the academic haves to do justice to the haven’ts. Pious talk makes profes­sional committee members feel all warm and virtuous inside, but loquacious piety about democracy through language is in reality obstructive. It gives the illusion of action when no real action is being taken. English departments continue to mirror the abominations of the larger society.

Since task forces, committees, and proclamations unbacked by various power have proved useless, what should be done—but almost certainly won’t be? Old Nasty made some few suggestions in the essay which so pained Ms. Wallace. He made others in the paper that he read when he launched his fruitless petition to the MLA (a paper now printed by C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz in Composition and Resistance [Boynton, 19911). Fifteen years ago, he took the kind of opportunistic action occasionally open to any academic when he prompted a great fuss in the Texas legislature about phony courses and the abuse of teaching assistants at UT Austin. But when people in charge of doing ask what they should do, they aren’t doing anything. The exploitation of contingent labor in our universities could be stopped if its beneficiaries genuinely willed to stop it.

But they don’t and won’t. There’s little to hope from the professional societies. People who would never be actively cruel passively tolerate cruelty because cruelty is necessary to their continued privilege. Without that persistent cruelty, the MLA in its present form could not exist. That’s why Old Nasty says mean things about those good professionals. They pave hell and defend their handiwork.