Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (review)

It is appropriate that the cover art of Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy should feature an alarm clock. Flanked by two stacks of paper, said clock sits on the back edge of a desk, the two hands on its round face tolling away seconds, minutes, and hours. The time the clock tells, the cover suggests, has everything to do with the academic phenomena Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt explore and hope to prompt, "activism" and "change."

Time is indeed pressing in an academy in which much of the recent change the two authors witness has steadily been for the worse. Office Hours addresses this sense of history through a two-part structure in which genealogical analyses of the institution ("Where We Are and How We Got Here") provide the basis for reform-minded visions ("Toward Alternative Futures"). In the book's first six chapters assessments of current institutional practices reveal that time, or indeed, a set of temporalities peculiar to the academy, underlies a host of interrelated phenomena. Thus time binds and separates teachers whose fate Nelson calls diasporic (26) from "faculty monsters" (35-6); if both devote a significant portion of their lives to being in the academy, they are precisely distinguishable by how the academy has ended up valuing their time. The former, comprised of those who have put aside intellectual dreams for pragmatic (and sometimes unhappy) decisions and those who, in a kind of a futurist melancholia, continue dreaming about positions that are in every way the stark opposite of their daily toil as adjuncts and lecturers, mark for Nelson and Watt one history the academy must no longer suppress. Meanwhile the latter, the product of an "entrepreneurial" careerism that treats every moment as a necessity for advancement, cares only about a future in which (s)he is the primary subject. The first six chapters of Office Hours might be said to define a temporality constitutive of the identity formation of academic subjects: faculty, students, staff, administration. In this temporality a well-intentioned postdoctoral program is just as likely to create perpetually new ranks of the exploited as it does opportunities for new PhD's needing more time to polish their research and vita (47, 49, 52). In this temporality the phrase "lifelong learning" describes not so much learning unfettered by time as it does a "treadmill of job training and retraining" (83). Finally, in this temporality there is seemingly—and ominously—no time for "the future of higher education" (36).

Office Hours, however, does not end after offering its diagnoses and critique. Indeed, as the second half of the book suggests, institutional theorizing is only as good as the activism it makes imperative. Implicit in "Towards Alternative Futures" is the notion that the seeds of activism are sown, interestingly, through its narration. Anecdotes thus dominate the second six chapters in which academic subjects emerge as effective activists for an academy of their collective envisioning. These narratives take readers to the offices of the MLA and AAUP, where differences in the procedure, ideologies, and behavior of the two organizations enable individuals to negotiate and use their affiliations with both to their advantage; to a series of campuses, where the concerted efforts of graduate students, faculty, and community members result in an imaginative variety of acts (including, in one instance, the minute planning that led one graduate employee organization to take over an administrative building); even to the process of editing an anthology. Captivating stories all, these narratives not only imply models for further activism but suggest as well a subjectivity necessary to activist work. Thus Nelson observes that narrating his participation in efforts to "reform the Modern Language Association and other disciplinary and transdisciplinary organizations" is a deliberate gesture, one that provides "an instructive example . . . of how senior faculty members can make a difference if they choose" (100). For his part Watt goes so far as to assert that he intends his essay ("Is It a...