The Star System Revisited

David R. Shumway The Star System Revisited It has been curious to me that those who have responded, either in person or in print, to my essay "The Star System in Literary Studies " have usually ignored what I regarded as the main point of the piece. Bruce Robbins dismissively implies in "Celeb-Reliance" that my main point is a "complaint" about "celebrity." For Robbins, celebrity itselfis notsomething to complainabout; whatdeserves complaint is the "tendency ... to institute a two-tiered employment structure and a two-tiered salary scale: that is, to increase the already dramatic divide between fewer and fewer tenured and tenure-track people on the one hand (whether stars or not) and more and more untenured, adjunct, part-time people on the other" (1). Robbins here denies that the star system per se has any significance. On the face of it, Sharon O'Dair would seem to hold the opposite position. In her current contribution on the subject, she claims that "the academostar is a symptom [___] the disease is an emerging two-tier system of employment and remuneration" (this issue). Earlier she described the matter somewhat differently: Stars are born in the academy out of the necessity to publish and the necessity to publish is born out of a contracting job market, worsened by the effects of tenure and the (wasteful and immoral) overproduction of Ph.D.'s. Publications become for us commodities we can sell and that can sell us as stars or starsto -be. No one pays star salaries to those who think and read in order to teach. No one does now, and no one did in the 1950s or 1960s. ("Stars" 609) Or, one might add, in the 1910s or 1920s. O'Dair here betrays a lack of knowledge of the discipline's history. This lack allows her to ignore the historical specificity of the star system. She applies the term "star" so widely that it sometimes seems that anyone with a book and a job at a research university must be one. The defining conditions of visibility, personality, and intellectual authority don't even enter into O'Dair's account. Her discussion allows no recognition that the humanities star is a recent creation. It is odd to treat research , as O'Dair does, as a necessity forced upon the profession by bad economic conditions. Under the research university, the dominant model in American higher education since the late nineteenth century, research was the activity that defined academic life. Even if most professors spent more time teaching, research and publishing were what graduate students were trained to do, and these prac- 176 the minnesota review tices were the most highly rewarded. The leaders in the profession have always been those who published the most significant work. If a smaller percentage of professors were previously engaged in this activity, this should have rendered those who were so engaged all the more prominent. For O'Dair the star system consists in little more than that some people make lots more money than other people. In her earlier essay , she makes much of her own willingness to give a causal explanation of the star system. One difficulty with this assertion is that her "explanation" often seems to be simply a tautology. Stars, people who make big salaries, are a product of a system that pays a few people disproportionately large salaries. O'Dair's story does not explain how the newly large salaries came to be. Why should the necessity to publish and the weak job market drive either reputations or salaries up? The glut of publications and of would-be publishers should by rights have driven both down.1 Robbins and O'Dair may disagree about the connection between stars and the employment structure, but the employment structure is for both of them the main concern.2 Besides such life and death matters—or, at least, material interests—mere theoretical issues may seem trivial, so perhaps it is not surprising that my main point in "The Star System" has gotten lost. As I put it there, my purpose was to "consider the effects of academic stardom, most important, the way it functions in authorizing knowledge" (86...