{"id":2334,"date":"2017-03-15T12:46:45","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T20:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2334"},"modified":"2018-02-01T19:15:43","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T17:15:43","slug":"academic-work-as-charity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/03\/15\/academic-work-as-charity\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic work as charity"},"content":{"rendered":"

In so many ways, academic work is hard to recognize as being\u00a0work<\/em> in the standard wage-labor sense of that word.\u00a0It can take place at all hours of day or night, outside of standard workplaces,\u00a0without wearing standard\u00a0work clothing \u2014\u00a0in bed with the laptop at midnight, perhaps. American popular stereotypes allege\u00a0that teaching is\u00a0outside the realm of productive action and thus second-rate \u2014 “those who can’t do, teach<\/a>.” That’s a\u00a0maxim which\u00a0devalues the feminine work of reproduction\u00a0in favor of an implicitly masculine image of labor, but I digress; my point here is just that\u00a0such claims reinforce the image of academic work as being in a world of its own.<\/p>\n


\nThe motivations for academic work are similarly supposed to be other than pecuniary. One is supposed to work\u00a0for existential reasons, or out of commitments to higher values that go beyond the purely economic\u00a0\u2014 the “pursuit of knowledge”\u00a0in some quarters, the dedication to making citizens or producing\u00a0social justice in others. Yet it’s no criticism of these values to observe, as many have already observed<\/a>, that these higher values can become alibis for an amplified self-exploitation.\u00a0“You’re doing it out of\u00a0personal commitment,” they tell you as you\u00a0donate\u00a0your weekend to the institution.<\/p>\n

A strange moment in this process, though, is the moment where colleges\u00a0and universities\u00a0beg their own employees for charitable donations<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thus I’ve been surprised to receive email and paper mail requests numerous times per year from my current employer, Whittier\u00a0College, originating in their Office of Advancement. As the illustration for this post shows, they\u00a0even emailed me before the end of 2016 to suggest that “Charitable giving might help reduce your income tax bill.<\/strong>” But the only reason I have<\/em> a tax bill is\u00a0because they themselves are paying\u00a0me a salary. So if I gave them a donation, that would …\u00a0essentially be returning a portion of my salary to my employer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which amounts to asking me to work for free, or anyway for less, as if, again, academic work\u00a0wasn’t actually something you do for a living<\/em>. (I say “for a living” and not “for the money” to signal that what motivates me is\u00a0the practical survival of our household, rather than money\u00a0for its own sake. For people motivated by the latter goal,\u00a0academia is obviously an inefficient route.) In any event, this seems a strange message to send to one’s employees. The same thing used to happen when I worked at the University of Chicago, so it isn’t just Whittier College in question; but in that case at least I was actually an alumnus.<\/p>\n

I would recommend to academic employers that they at least ask their employees to opt in<\/em> to\u00a0the list of prospective donors, rather than\u00a0giving their names to Institutional Advancement purely because of\u00a0the mere fact of their employment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In so many ways, academic work is hard to recognize as being\u00a0work in the standard wage-labor sense of that word.\u00a0It can take place at all hours of day or night, outside of standard workplaces,\u00a0without wearing standard\u00a0work clothing \u2014\u00a0in bed with the laptop at midnight, perhaps. American popular stereotypes allege\u00a0that teaching is\u00a0outside the realm of productive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[502,485,729],"tags":[762,771,567,726],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2334"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2583,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334\/revisions\/2583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}