Terence Renaud
@terry_renaud
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historian & secondhand dealer in ideas | author of NEW LEFTS | lecturer at a university
leiden, netherlands
Joined January 2018
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how do you keep radical politics forever young? European “new lefts” thought they had the answer. my book examines efforts by antifascists, left socialists, & anti-authoritarians to build sustainably democratic alternatives to Social Democracy & Communism
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wow, cartoon in the New York Call (June 9, 1908) predicts the twitter left
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a first-year student of mine has just died by suicide. I won't mention their name here, but please spare a moment to think of students like R, who was bright & curious & funny & passionate, and who was struggling with mental health during these inhumane times
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turns out AI models collapse quickly once the AI trains on data created by other AIs instead of original data by humans. three things follow from this:
i) AIs must continue mining human content in order to function, thus can't substitute for human labor
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finally gives the lie to the misleadingly low unemployment numbers for the past few years: our economy was sustained by precarious jobs that evaporate in a crisis
How bad will unemployment claims be next week? Shockingly, shockingly bad.
We're already at 600k+ based on data from just 15 states, per
@JustinWolfers
&
@qdbui
. (Today's *nation-wide* data showed 281k initial claims last week.)
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June 30 was my last day of gainful academic employment. I was terminated after 6 years of work as an instructional faculty member, neither for budgetary reasons nor for performance, but in order to uphold the dean office’s ideology of merit:
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Herbert Marcuse visited his ex-teacher Martin Heidegger in his Black Forest hut in 1947. here's what HM wrote to MH (8/28/47):
"Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from...identification [with the Nazi regime]" 1/
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looks like I’m losing my job for no good reason. for 6 years I’ve been lucky to work as a lecturer on terms that are pretty good for an adjunct, but the reality of contingent labor in academia is that the axe always hangs over you.
hard to take when your uni is filthy rich 1/6
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“financial suicide”: this should be the first (though not the only) thing academics should say to students who ask whether they should do a PhD in the humanities or social sciences.
total loss of earning potential in 20s-early 30s, plus X years of subpar pay & costly moves.
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snapped these photos as I moved out of my office in the expensively renovated Humanities building: near the placard honoring the uni’s investment guru is a crest with a Latin motto meaning “always grow,” which I assume refers to the endowment
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the thing about imposter syndrome in academia—and I hope this isn’t a projection of my own imposter syndrome—is that there really are imposters
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my dumbest and most sincerely held opinion about academia is that faculty ought to teach in full regalia, all the time
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I should note that the dean’s office overruled my chair, who recommended my renewal & demonstrated a teaching need, and numerous professors who wrote letters on my behalf.
there’s a serious lack of faculty shared governance here: the corporate managers are in total control
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ii) functioning AI models trained on past human data will also reproduce human errors, so that AI will always *reinforce* the existing society, its biases, and its antagonisms.
and iii) the AI feedback loop is a super-accelerated index of the existing society's irrationality
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just 25% of college faculty nationwide are on the tenure track, so it’s a shame that academics refer only to the fraction of that fraction who don’t get promoted to assoc prof (secure employment) as being “denied tenure.” the vast majority are denied tenure! we never got a chance
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on a Zoom call, hearing Yale senior faculty defend grades & upholding meritocratic standards during a global pandemic, is peak cringeworthy
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my teaching performance & research output were irrelevant to the decision (this I was told directly).
poorer institutions surely do cut faculty labor for budgetary reasons, but rich ones do so to sustain the ideology of merit & to keep churning through early-career scholars
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fellow contingent faculty have been sharing absurd tales with me… academia has to be one of the few (only?) industries in which on-the-job experience actually disqualifies you from the best jobs. it’s like non-tenure-track faculty have the mark of Cain. /
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this is a key passage, indicating that AI models are in a stage of primitive accumulation of free human content. future profits will derive from the competitive advantage that early models have over later ones
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I hadn’t originally been hired in a full search, and it was decided that any further renewal of my lectureship—or promotion to senior lecturer, for which I was eligible—would send the wrong message that it was possible “to get in through the back door” (so I heard secondhand)
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love this IWW cartoon from July 1919 by "Sam," showing the popular leviathan of the general strike destroy the carceral state
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needless to say, I was an at-will employee on a fixed-term appointment (not even a “contract”) and there is no union for instructional faculty at this place
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I hesitated to mention this at first, but when the dean’s office refused to renew my lectureship my department scrambled to hire a new postdoc to basically do my job (for less pay) and—I kid you not—they interviewed my partner for it, not knowing we were connected
@terry_renaud
@dhnexon
This is code for "we're not replacing your position, we'll just get other staff to overwork themselves to compensate"
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thinking I’ll scrub the current PhD off my CV, apply again to grad school, write my second book as the diss, and improve my chances on the job market as an ABD
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solidarity to the superb and beloved lecturers in Harvard's Hist & Lit program who will be unemployed after this semester due to the university's absurd policy of firing them all after 3 years to ensure "pedagogical innovation" by new blood
#TheChurn
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should've mentioned earlier that my family and I have moved to the Netherlands, where I've been appointed lecturer at Leiden University. and now I ride one of these:
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I will not read that article about Marx being unimportant before 1917, but I will assert a truism of intellectual history: everybody we include today in the canon of "great thinkers" has an irregular reception history, and many were unimportant until recently, for example: 1/
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Angela Davis remembers the day when MLK was assassinated. she was further to the left than him, and shares her “amorphous sense of guilt” that it took his sudden death for her to realize that MLK’s vision was part of a broader unity of Black liberation struggle
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I’d urge my tenure-track colleagues to wake up to the reality of labor conditions on campus, to challenge corporate uni administration, and to demand shared faculty governance in a more concrete form than the current rubber-stamping senate. 4/6
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this passage from Marx about the palace vs the hut is a great illustration of the fact that all needs & desires spring from society, and all immiseration is relative. human satisfaction can’t be measured by any absolute standard; progress can’t be measured quantitatively
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much more to say, and maybe I’ll write a longer statement. for now, please read my book, accept my pitches, send me leads, & above all:
fight for materially supported intellectual work. the world is burning & we must cultivate our critical resources 🔥 6/6
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the rage I feel when needing to submit CV, cover letter, teaching statement, syllabi, student evals, diversity statement, writing sample, referee info, & transcripts AND input my life history into a dysfunctional online portal to apply for a ~4/4 NTT lectureship*, is boundless
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given recent chatter about the academic job market (and the AHA, which I almost forgot still existed, lol), it seems worth sharing these two paragraphs from my book's acknowledgments
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this semester I'm excited to teach CLR James's The Black Jacobins for the first time. the book is a bit long, so I created an approx 50-page abridgment that may be assigned to undergrads in one week. happy to share it with you all:
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I don’t think people outside higher education (and maybe outside the most precarious workers in higher ed) know just how degraded teaching & learning conditions have become, while tuition continues to rise and the gap bt ever richer elite unis & ever poorer institutions widens…
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good point here that the burnout felt by tenured/TT faculty is a function of the insecure employment of the majority of PhDs: that burnout is real, but it’s also “phantom pain where their colleagues should be”
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rumors are trickling down at both Yale & Harvard that they might delay the start of next semester, basically offsetting AY2020-21 so that the fall semester would take place in SP21 and the spring semester in SU21. I've heard that this is a 50/50 possibility...
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Marcuse: "the Nazi system... demonstrated to the world what, after more than 2000 years of western Dasein, men can do to their fellow men... Perhaps we are still experiencing the continuation of what began in 1933. Whether you would still consider it a 'renewal' I am not sure."//
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"A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters... But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews—merely because they were Jews—...and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite."3/
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Marcuse: "Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?... Common sense (also among intellectuals)...refuses to view you as a philosopher, because philosophy and Nazism are irreconcilable. In this conviction common sense is justified." 4/
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as I near application
#200
, I wonder how much time & attention I've wasted on applying for academic jobs. I've started thinking of this as a regressive "tax" on the majority of humanities PhDs who lack secure employment, further diminishing our ability to research, write, & teach
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tenure-track faculty also deserve better, not because of your scholarly “merit,” but because you are *academic workers* without whom the university cannot function. 5/6
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it’s not even accurate anymore to say, “there’s no guarantee that you’ll become a professor.” it is most likely that you will *not* end up with secure academic employment. the proportion of secure faculty positions is ever smaller, though the absolute number of jobs may grow.
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I’ve come to believe that, when students inquire, it’s dishonest and irresponsible of us not to lead with the devastating financial consequences of pursuing a hums/sosci PhD
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Marcuse: "But you have never uttered such a statement... I—and very many others—have admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man..." 2/
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I'll also note that, in most respects, simply being an American of a younger generation is financial suicide. doing a PhD deepens the default malaise
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in case you needed encouragement to read this book, here's Jameson's take: "For if the new cultural revolution, the new proletarian pedagogy [that the novel describes and embodies] is a kind of aesthetic education,..." 1/2
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Marcuse's final reply (5/12/48): "This is not a political but instead an intellectual problem—I am tempted to say: a problem of cognition, of truth. You, the philosopher, have confused the liquidation of occidental Dasein with its renewal?" 9/
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Marcuse: "For only outside of the dimension of logic is it possible to explain, to relativize, to 'comprehend' a crime by saying that others would have done the same thing." he then states the obvious fact that German deportees suffered nothing like the murdered Jews. 11/
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Marcuse on MH's comparison of Nazi extermination of Jews to Allied deportation of Germans from East: "With this sentence don't you stand outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible—outside of Logos?" 10/
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about 10% of higher ed faculty nationwide are tenured and secure in their jobs. about 25% are on the tenure track and in the existential situation of publish or perish. for the rest of us 65%, it’s publish *and* perish. there is no correlation between merit and these categories
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I’m grateful for all my students over the years who showed such dedication and creativity in the study of the humanities, history, and critical theory 🙏 2/6
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I’m also grateful for my contingent faculty colleagues who’ve shown solidarity under conditions of senseless austerity and work speedup. you deserve better ✊ 3/6
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poignant paragraph by Mike Davis about international workers’ solidarity, leaps of consciousness, and non-utilitarian action: “There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly…”
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late development in the academic job circus:
I managed to land a full-time but limited-term position as instructional professor in social sciences at U Chicago, so my family and I are moving to hyde park in 2.5 weeks 🤯
send me your best and worst chicago recommendations
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Marcuse ends the letter by repeating his demand that Heidegger issue a public disavowal of his Nazi past, but also says that he's still sending his former teacher a CARE package against the advice of friends. 5/
here's how Heidegger responds:
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sharp footnote by Fredric Jameson denouncing Agamben & Foucault’s biopolitical concepts (e.g., bare life) as “ideological derivations” of the more concrete social reality of unemployment
from Representing Capital, p. 125
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the term "elite" is one of the chief ideological mystifications of our time. it has some explanatory value if you qualify it as "cultural elite," "political elite," or "power elite" and then historicize the relationship bt those various elites. but otherwise, an empty signifier
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hic rhodus, hic salta: my book will exist this september
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@jn_professor
there’s no faculty union at all at Y
@le
. there is a militant staff union, which accounts for the greater job security of staff vs faculty. grad student workers have been fighting for decades to get recognized as part of that union. it’s a vehemently anti-labor institution
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from a job ad for "assistant professor in residence": "This is a full-time, 9-month, non-tenure track position that is annually renewable, contingent on positive reviews and program funding, and may lead to a multi-year appointment."
how do you plan your life around that?
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since we're nearing the end of rejection season on the US academic job market, it's worth reiterating, esp for laypeople who inquire, that THERE ARE MANY JOBS (not no jobs), but they're insecure & otherwise shitty bc the corporate pyramid of academic labor exploits us all
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Heidegger concludes by calling Marcuse's description of Nazi crimes "dubious" while also claiming that the "bloody terror" of the regime was kept secret from most Germans. then he does a whataboutism in re the plight of German deportees from the East. 8/
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maybe my happiest moment in this grim semester was getting this shout-out by a student
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the “change your attitude” approach to the humanities jobs crisis is preferred by tenured professors, because it doesn’t require them to change anything.
not to mention the fact that 90% of PhDs *don’t* immediately leave academia: a large percentage work as contingent faculty.
Part of what is broken in the humanities is that we see it as *negative* that 90% of PhDs go out into the world beyond the academy to contribute game-changing insights. These innovators are not ‘failures’ of the system; they are, by far, its most valuable contribution to society.
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Mike Davis: “Right now, my mind is occupied with fairly extremist ideas about what needs to be done. Once you accept what the real stakes are [of climate catastrophe]—I’m not advocating violence, but I’m advocating confrontational politics writ large.”🔥/
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amazing to consider how much more persuasive, and shorter, Hannah Arendt's book Origins of Totalitarianism would have been if she had deleted the faulty comparisons with Stalinism and focused only on fascism: The Origins of Fascism would've been *the* definitive account
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the anti-Leviathan of the general strike, smashing the carceral state
by the Wobbly artist “Sam” in July 1919
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and here’s the kicker: I had already interviewed for her old job at another elite uni, one that purges its NTT lecturers after 3 years as a matter of policy
it didn’t work out this way, but we nearly swapped jobs (and pay cuts)! such an absurd & wasteful system
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there's a growing number of highly qualified candidates for entry-level academic jobs who are 5+ years out from their PhD. hope it's not presumptuous to say that the biggest obstacle they face is the search committee's sense that, "this person should have tenure"
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Mike Davis channeling Ella Baker:
“Unlike the broad-chested heroes of proletarian novels or Eisenstein films, rousing their workmates to rebellion with a single fiery speech, the classical rank-and-file organizer was more like a patient gardener…”
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another one for the annals of cruel & unusual requirements for the 1st round of an academic job search. these institutions and search committees should be ashamed
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Heidegger (1/20/48): "[In 1933] I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of western Dasein from the dangers of communism...In 1934 I recognized my political error and resigned..." 6/
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call me a champagne socialist, because the advance copy of New Lefts has arrived! thanks
@PrincetonUPress
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Heidegger claims that his and his family's lives would've been in danger had he issued a public statement in 1934. as for after 1945, he says "the Nazi supporters announced their change of allegiance in the most loathsome way; I, however, had nothing in common with them." 7/
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@DanielDenvir
interviews
@Ocasio2018
in
@jacobinmag
: "If you are a person that can mobilize bodies, you can make change. ... Go out, organize. That’s the end-all, be-all of our democracy."
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what are your favorite histories of the left, labor movement, communism, socialism, or anarchism? any geography, multi-volume sets welcome
I need to spend what remains of my small research fund on books before I lose my job in June, and believe me, I will spend every last penny
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Herbert Marcuse on NBC (1/31/1971) speaking about Angela Davis: "she has been the best or one of the very best students I had in more than 30 years of teaching in this country..."
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this job is a pie in the sky, but since I'm applying anyway, I resent this deeply
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buried the lede: “non-tenured faculty like Lee are employees at will and can be terminated at any time under contract law”
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a few professors have actually admitted to me that in order to reduce the pile of 100s of apps for each TT job, an overworked search cmte will often disregard anyone 3+ years out from their PhDs, on the assumption that past searches had rendered their verdict on that candidate. /
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in her interview she was asked how she’d teach such and such course material, and she was tempted to reply, “I’d ask my partner what he did”
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it’s mainly due to corporate mgmt, but also TT need to uphold the ideology that they deserve their success. this is less the case w younger TT who have at least experienced the post-1990s job market, but still NTT must be invisibilized in order for the tenure system to persist. /
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that assumption is illogical (they admit search cmtes are not rendering fair verdicts), but ideologically necessary.
since it’s time from degree instead of biological age I doubt one could bring a legal case against this ageism, alas.
solidarity! and where you can, ORGANIZE //
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when people criticize the new consumer model of US higher education, they too often target students as the coddled, self-interested culprits. the real culprits are the corporate administrators who imposed that model, which has turned most faculty into disposable sales associates
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my students continue to blow me away: a first-year wrote an essay that reinterpreted Tocqueville's idea of democratic revolution through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of history. the title was "The End of History and the Last Democracy." so good
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line from my book's acknowledgments: "The life of the mind is a lie: scholarship is embodied intellectual work that requires access to resources, professional networks, and stable employment."
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more fun Fredric Jameson content: here (2011) he denounces the entire discipline of political theory, defined as constitutional theory, as having exhausted itself in the 18th century:
“A constitution is always a counterrevolutionary construction designed to foreclose change…”
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tfw a young tenured professor who should know better tells grad students a) the academic job market will recover so just hang in there for a few years; b) you’re so privileged to earn $30K in a major city so consider yourself lucky; and c) buck up, buckle down, and get to work!
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received the printer file for my book due out this september, NEW LEFTS: THE MAKING OF A RADICAL TRADITION
– a history of antifascism, left socialism, & anti-authoritarianism in Europe from 1918 to 1968
– a general theory of neoleftism
table of contents:
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hire me, I work on transnational approaches to global history of the past 2,000 years and specialize in gender, race and/or ethnicity, climate, and indigenous things, with a side interest in interdisciplinarity
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reminded of how regressive the benefits are in academia: faculty who make the most $ and have most security get moving allowance, homebuyer assistance, daycare subsidy, literal free lunch, etc, while those making the least with no security are lucky to get basic health insurance
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I teach a course on public intellectuals, and I think I need to add a unit on public idiots, which is a specific (and distinctly American?) kind of intellectual that dominates social media
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my translation of "Everything changes" (1944) by Bertolt Brecht: a dialectical poem for dark times
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the English subs on youtube for Gaus's 1964 interview of Hannah Arendt make a big omission that must have been deliberate. in re women's emancipation, she claims “I was always of the opinion that there are certain occupations that are not proper for women, that don’t suit them.”
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anecdotal evidence of rightward drift: when I took AP US History at a public h.s. in a purple suburb of Albany NY ca 2002, our teacher decided (correctly) that the official textbook offered a conservative view, so supplemented it with Zinn's People's History. there was no protest
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I'm addressing here the most common scenario of undergrads or recent grads in their early/mid 20s inquiring about a PhD. I recognize that older folks decide to pursue higher degrees and might be in different financial situations
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I’m so depressed that we’re being called to devote our energies to a rearguard action in defense of bare democracy (voting rights), and meanwhile people are burning the planet & making $billions off a pandemic.
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some more fuel for the bonfire of the humanities: the norm for people entering grad school after 2008 is *dead-end PhD*
anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed, lying, or trying to sell you something
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here’s a deal: if some university gives me secure employment, then I promise to write a new intellectual biography of Herbert Marcuse
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Zizek has a new essay out on class struggle in
@crisiscritique
's excellent new issue on the theme of class, and the abstract sounds bonkers
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