Frameworks and Free Agents

Terry Caesar Frameworks and Free Agents (on James Phelan, Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life ofan English Professor [Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991]) At the conclusion of his journalized slice of professional life, James Phelan cries out about its rot. Getting a better job or publishing another book has to do with "the search for validation," which is not at all the same thing as the complex intellectual activity of teaching or writing . "The highest reward of the profession is defined as getting paid a lot for relocating to a prestigious school and not having to teach" (215). This is given by Phelan, who teaches in the graduate program at Ohio State, as an example of how wide the "infection" has spread. Phelan himself is not in the best of health. Trinity College considers him for an endowed chair, the University of Chicago Press considers the manuscript of his second book. By the end Trinity declines to offer a contract, but the Press is about to. Phelan winds up "shaking my head at my socialization, at the power the need for external validation seems to have (had?) over me" (216). Nonetheless, he proclaims himself still in control of his own narrative, eager for more, basically pleased with the story so far. Beyond the Tenure Track isn't only about searching for professional rewards. It's about the exertions of running, the challenges of playing basketball, and the joys of raising a family. His professional exertions have provided the whole rationale for his journal. Yet it is as if he can only remain in good health by far more personal physical and domestic economies. Phelan wouldn't quite see it this way. In all things professional and personal it seems he's a "pluralist." That is, life is hard, there are many decisions and few fixed positions, everything we do intersects with everything else at multiple points, and we need to be open both to the change and the complication of our own experience. In practice what this appears to mean is that one can be quite astonishingly ignorant about the difference between what is external and internal to one's life, as well as disingenuous about much else. I want to concentrate on one particular explanation here: the politics of institutional affiliation. Phelan's own individual temperament fails to account for why his record of academic life is so disappointing. We need to ask, for example, about the relation between his ignorance and the fact of tenure itself. What might the imperative of tenure foreclose one from seeing? Does one ever really get "beyond" it? More to my point, if Phelan is disingenuous, what does the simple fact that he teaches at Ohio State have to do with it? How separable, indeed, from 276 the minnesota review one's own professional fate is the reputation of one's university? I think we can judge tenured professors to have rarely been so securely tenured than during the last couple of decades. This situation is breaking up now. An aging professorate is rapidly nearing retirement. Before it goes it is slowly producing an account of itself in terms of disciplinary histories and ideological formations. But not of institutional structures. Phelan, only 37 by journal's end (in 1988), is virtually blind to them. Beyond the Tenure Track is, indeed, a kind of case study in a certain sort of impeccably academic inferiority, which, while appearing to be candid about things, manages to blur them in an incessant fog of qualifications , considerations, and discriminations. This is perhaps the distinctive way in which Phelan's journal tries to participate in a larger discourse about the profession, associated with such eminences as Richard Ohmann, Gerald Graff, and Stanley Fish. Phelan, as it happens , hears Ohmann at a conference. It is in fact at OSU, where Phelan also hears Graff. He plays basketball at Perm St. with Fish. But he never considers how the actual writing of each of these men might illuminate his own experience. He never quotes them. Although his text is marked by all sorts of capitalist vexations and theoretical conflicts , both of which could be critiqued, Phelan never does...