Metro_audin

June 17, 2020, activists rename the Paris metro station “Gallieni” in honor of the combattant-e-s de l’indépendance algérienne Josette and Maurice Audin

Before I attempted to describe the “business as usual” of the hiring process, I wanted to remind readers of the contrast between conflicting visions of the university, as articulated by Stefan Collini:

a partly-protected space in which the search for deeper and wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of developing analytic and creative capacities is a worthwhile social purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested enquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods

or the notion, more easily understood by decision-makers, of

market-driven corporations that are governed by the financial imperatives of global capitalism

This reminded me of the equally striking contrast between the essential conservatism of the comment by just different — asking why a social revolution would be necessary to change the curricula and admissions (and presumably hiring) practices while leaving the underlying “market-driven” structure of higher education and “global capitalism” intact — and the frequently encountered suggestion that racism is inherent in the content and practice of contemporary mathematics, not least because it is embedded in the racist as well as “market-driven” structures of the modern university.

I’m not yet ready to address the latter, more radical, elements of a critique of mathematics, because I haven’t yet seen a comprehensible synthesis (there is, on the other hand, quite a lot of radical material about mathematics education, but that’s not really the question at hand).  I was planning instead to get started on the dreary and tiresome aspects of hiring reform (number of available positions, how MathJobs serves as an initial hurdle, that sort of thing) but I was sidetracked by two articles, published in the space of three days in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Times Higher Education Supplement, and making exactly the same claim:  that the “academic solidarity statement” signed by all the familiar academic left celebrities as well as a host of lesser lights (yes, you’ll find my signature too), in reality expresses nothing more than “the feudalistic mentality of even the most radical leftist scholars.”  The THE article goes on to argue that the suggestions in the solidarity statement

perpetuate the myth of academic meritocracy and the atavistic desire that tenure, the job market and universities as we know them will survive in a post-Covid world.

and reminds the reader that

some commentators have already proposed the re-evaluation of tenure criteria. Others have even challenged tenured professors who are sympathetic to the plight of their contingent colleagues but are reluctant to take action to “renounce their own tenure” and step into the fray as at-will employees themselves.

while the Chronicle article insists that

The overemphasis on research is a direct obstacle to the change universities need. To reshape a university to meet basic standards of equity and justice, we must put teaching ahead of research.

But neither article breaks with the vision of universities as “market-driven corporations.”  What I find inexcusable is that neither author seems even remotely aware that the French trade union movement has for years been resisting successive revisions of labor law that have eliminated protection for workers in France, where until very recently a version of tenure — the contrat de duration indéterminée (CDI) — was considered the norm in all sectors, and not just in academia.  Before the pandemic there was a series of protests and strike actions, met in some cases with very real police violence, in opposition to the loi de programmation pluriannuelle de la recherche (LPPR), Opposition was particularly acute to the proposal to introduce tenure-track positions, with a higher salary scale but with no guarantee of tenure, as an alternative to the current system in which all hiring is in principle permanent — except, of course, for the increasing recourse to ad hoc arrangements with more than a passing resemblance to the system of adjuncts and contingent faculty with which we are all too familiar.

After the comprehensive rejection of Macron’s party in this spring’s municipal elections, I expect resistance to the LPPR to intensify.   There is no guarantee that the resistance will succeed, of course.  In the meantime, it’s comforting to see the name of a mathematician taken as a symbolic alternative to the celebration of French colonialism, as in the image at the beginning of this post; or to see a Columbia colleague trained as a philosopher of mathematics invited to compare racism in its French and American variants.