Abstract
In her chapter, Barbara explores the idea of ‘academic career’ to trouble its ascendance as a commonsense way for describing our academic lives, especially its now insidiously dominant form, which is more in the ilk of ‘careerism’. By tracing out various broken and tangled lines within her own story of working in one university for nearly 40 years, and her ongoing ambivalences about applying for promotion to professor, Barbara confronts some of the difficult ethical issues endemic to academic life. Composed as a series of writing experiments – memories, litanies, recalled conversations – Barbara seeks to show how an ordinary academic life is rich with possibilities for resistance to the registers of neoliberalism that shape and inform the contemporary university and those of us who dwell there.
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- 1.
Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret and Collective, Women who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014/2011), 113.
- 2.
John Morrissey, “Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal University,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 36 (2015): 628.
- 3.
Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics 31 (1991): 26.
- 4.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 62.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
The category ‘professor’ in the British-based system, that Aotearoa/New Zealand subscribes to, refers to a position traditionally reserved for a small minority of academics judged to have reached a standard of “international eminence in their field” (Academic Standards for Research Fellows, Senior Research Fellows, Lecturers, Senior Lecturers, Associate Professors and Professors, The University of Auckland, HR Policy, p. 15, 20, 25). Traditionally that eminence was reserved for research activities but, in more recent times, people have become professor on the strength of (presumably also “international eminence” in) teaching or service. In 2017, 323 of staff at my university were professors (15% of 2189 academics), and 90 (28%) of these were women; overall, the proportion of professors relative to other academic ranks has steadily increased in recent years (eg in 2006 there were 174 professors, 9% of 1956 academics).
- 7.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 150.
- 8.
Throughout this chapter, I use many snippets of colleague-talk garnered over the past decade or so. Where the comment was in some way specific, I sought individual consent; most though were made in one form or another by divers colleagues. In Butler’s (1991) terms, they “arrive late”, reflecting pre-existing structural realities of academic life as much as personal ones.
- 9.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. (New York: Random House, 1967), 223.
- 10.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Collins Classic, 2014).
- 11.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 96.
- 12.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 62.
- 13.
Butler, “Giving an Account,” 26.
- 14.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 96.
- 15.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 113.
- 16.
A thoughtful reader reminds me you don’t need to take the money.
- 17.
University of Auckland Academic Staff Collective Agreement 2016–2017, 18.
- 18.
Stengers et al., Women who Make a Fuss, 45–46.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics 31 (1991): 22–40.
Morrissey, John. “Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal University,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 36 (2015): 614–634.
Stengers, Isabelle, Vinciane Despret, and Collective. Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014/2011.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. London: Collins Classic, 2014.
Acknowledgments
Thanks for incisive feedback on early drafts from my School’s doctoral writers group (Daniel, Lisa and Vanessa), and from valued academic colleagues (Fran, Niki and Viv). Thanks, too, to colleagues who, when asked, agreed to the inclusion of their tiny stories.
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Grant, B.M. (2019). Wrestling with Career: An Autoethnographic Tale of a Cracked Academic Self. In: Bottrell, D., Manathunga, C. (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume I. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95942-9_6
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