[csaa-forum] FW: Ivory Ceiling

[Ian Stuart]

LOVE IT ...  I have been briefly following this thread .. thinking ..
well, if you don't like it you can all get out there and get a real
job!!!!

I teach in a small polytechnic, earning (relatively) bugger all money
(but I do have full-time tenure)...  and it is the BEST and MOST
well-paid job I have ever had!!!

I have worked in tanneries, in shearing gangs, driven forklifts in
wharehouses, been a clerk, factory hand, a shop assistant, a gardener,
labourer, unemployed, a hotel porter, .. and a journalist for several
media organisations.

Now I am an academic (unashamedly) and it feels like I have come home
after walking out of the Ivory Tower (for vaguely anarchistic reasons -
to steal someone else's phrase)

Yes, I work long hours, yes I sit up till the early morning banging
away at a keyboard .. yes, the managerial approaches, etc etc drive me
crazy!!!

But it beats starting work at 5am and running around a shearing shed
until 5pm .. it beats stacking railway wagons in the freezing cold ...
and it sure beats the unemplyment benefit ... I get to sit and talk,
argue, discuss, I get to go to conferences, I get time just to sit and
think!  What a huge luxury!  How many other jobs pay you just to sit and
think!!!

It may be the Ivory Tower, warts and all, but it is the best thing I
have ever done for money!

Ian Stuart

PS  the role of the intellectual is to justify the role of the
intellectal. Bruce Jesson  

>>> pbarker at queenslandballet.com.au 12/08/2004 1:41:50 p.m. >>>
I have being trying to avoid engaging with these exchanges because I
only worked in the Academy under very short term contracts some years
ago - but desire being what it is/does... 

First, the way the debate was framed at the beginning of these
exchanges
is interesting. Defining academic work as 'conceptually rigorous (&)
theoretically engaged' already responds to an 'Academy' that imagines,
and has constructed itself in a particular way: as the intellectual
inside - where the real intellectual engagement is?  But is it? 

In any case those of us who may not belong to 'it' perhaps should not
allow our only response to be that of experiencing ourselves as 'on
the
outside': unable to theorize intelligently, or with any kind of
validity
because we are here and not there - on the inside.  Indeed this is the
dangerous, sometimes seductive and debilitating trap that the
inside/outside dichotomy lays before us. 

For me the important questions are: where's the next pay cheque going
to
come from?  And, how is it possible to do - let's just say -
'intellectual' work, no matter where the day to day of our lives takes
us.  

To the first the pay cheque can come from anywhere as other
respondents
have already suggested.  At present I work in Marketing and
Communications.  If I choose I can take 12-18 months every 4 or 5
years
to write full-time.  I have had two books published in this way - one
with Harvester Wheatsheaf (1993), one with Edinburgh University Press
(1998).  So it can be done and the work - whatever its relation to the
Academy is - goes on. 

As to the issue of intellectual isolation, that surely is more
difficult
but not impossible to overcome given today's technologies.  

What is most critical at the outset is to reject the position that the
Academy is the only location where - rigorous and theoretically
engaged
work or indeed - just thoughtful intellectual work takes place?  

Of course this is also true of the outside - which is probably why
there
is sometimes a certain difficult pleasure to be found in writing
from/to
the in-between.  

Phil Barker
 
 
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