Nelson's work draws its title from a mediocre work not widely read in academia (but popular outside it), Roger Kimball's 1990 screed Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education. Rather than shrug off Kimball's work as the ill-researched simplification that it was, Nelson takes it seriously. He treats it as one in a series of baffling gauntlets thrown at the feet of academia by a culture grown hostile to it.

Manifesto is a crushing counter-attack that does a masterful job of transvaluing the term radical; in many ways Nelson returns to the core meaning of the word, so that this is a manifesto of, for, and about fundamental issues in higher education, in a way that Kimball's work was not.

In this tripartite volume Nelson rides forth as a self-appointed but much needed defender of the cultural work of higher education. He tilts at windmills at times, a Don Quixote bewitched by his own passions, but more often Nelson wields his pen like the sword of a true samurai. He looks clearly at a difficult situation and cleaves it through the heart in a stroke of loving expertise.

I have my problems with Nelson's work, as I have voiced elsewhere (in my review of Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis) and will voice again below, but on the whole, yes, I'll accept him as my champion, because for all that he glories in his radical status, in this book more than ever Nelson seems moved by values that should warm the heart of oldest of old school supporters of the liberal arts: truth, justice, mercy. To cut to the chase, I suggest this book to everyone working in academia, especially those laboring in the fields of English or cultural studies. Read Manifesto. Argue with it, puncture its unfortunate weaknesses--and keep it with you as a well-thumbed prosthetic conscience to guide you at professional conferences and faculty meetings.

A warrior's conscience may be exactly what today's academic needs, for Nelson paints a portrait of an institution in deep crisis, suffering traumas so deep and critical that they make past disciplinary battles like those over the entry of theory into the humanities seem like neighborly quarrels over whose leaves fell in whose yard. Section I, "The Politics of English", begins by reviewing that very quarrel, asking just how has theory changed literary studies? In the process of providing an answer Nelson works through a pocket history of theory and what it has meant through the last forty years. This chapter, and the two that follow it on anthologies as social texts and literary history in the shadow of poststructuralism, are solid enough, and make any number of good points, most often by contextualizing questions too often abstracted and thereby pointing out the moral dilemmas too often glossed over. However, many of the better points have been made before by other scholars. As a result these early chapters read very much like Nelson is covering familiar territory in order to build up momentum.

He and his readers need it to carry them through Chapter Four, in which Nelson reviews the state of cultural studies and issues a sixteen point manifesto of what cultural studies is and what it should be. Here in miniature Nelson exercises the host of techniques that make this work excellent and this chapter required reading for all graduate courses in cultural studies. He does this not, I might add, through the sheer novelty of his points, but rather by the integrating how his concepts are formed with an ongoing contextualization, and moral challenge. This chapter on what cultural studies should be is itself a fine example of the sort of work Nelson calls American cultural studies to be. What's more, through foregrounding the personal and political contexts, he demonstrates how to insist on rigor without sliding into rigidity.

He begins the chapter by reviewing two major conferences of 1990, both of which attempted to define cultural studies. Examining the physical, financial, and theoretical structure of each conference forces us as academic readers to follow all sixteen of Nelson's rules for cultural studies, but especially guides us in turning a critical eye on the framing structures of academia. Nelson meticulously combs out the meaning of conference fees, organizing practices, and even the ephemeral nature of conferences, always in the process of asking us, is this the way we want to act? Is this the right/best/true way to be an academic? An intellectual? A cultural studies scholar?

Here I must introduce the first of my complaints about Nelson's work. He thinks too well of people, and, in doing so, pays too little attention to disciplinary pressures. This may be an odd critique of a man who has broken ranks with fellow faculty to side with underpaid teaching assistants who were seeking to unionize--and raised a fairly vituperative voice on their behalf--but I will explain.

Under the guise of critiquing and theorizing the current state of academia this book asks academics to rework their entire ethical systems to what is, frankly, a much higher and much more active level. Nelson thinks too well of people in that, despite the fact that he has catalogued all the shifts in the field towards increasing professionalization, harsh competition, and alienation, he retains his faith in people. Though he writes about academia becoming more of a job than a calling, he writes as if his readers could be hailed back to being true intellectuals through rhetoric alone. In this Nelson acts not in the tradition of great warriors but of prophets, penning a jeremiad for American intellectuals.

And I fear that this book will, like most jeremiads, function better as a textual camp meeting than as a source of actual change. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but I fear in this case that Nelson the idealist has trumped Nelson the Marxist; sections II and III are devoted to delineating the economic and political forces forcibly reshaping higher education, but Nelson writes as if these deep structural changes in the economy he describes can be warded off by moral fervor.

Take the opening chapter of Section II (which deals with the academy and larger debates about American culture) as an example. In "Progressive Pedagogy Without Apologies" Nelson continues his work of theorizing the daily work of academia in an admirable fashion by describing an incredibly ambitious project of teaching radical poetry to undergraduates. He contextualizes the semester in terms of personal history, disciplinary change, and the larger political arena, all in a few crisp pages. Reading them, one is invited into a brief seminar in pedagogy and cultural studies in which the instructor shares his conflicts, however personal or unflattering. I owe Cary Nelson for this, for I pulled from these pages a complex sheaf of lessons that I yearn to try in the classroom.

But I wonder--does Nelson realize how distant this project is from the realm of the possible for most of the teaching assistants or adjunct faculty he claims to champion? He chose the text, the class, the format, and to include the fruits of his decades of research and collegial sharing with comrades combing archives to add to the textual store of radical poets.

On what is very much the other hand, many, perhaps most adjuncts in English are handed a required text and told to teach it. Period. Poems outside the text must either be photocopied at the underpaid adjunct's expense or justified to a departmental supervisor. If they are distributed, it is very much with an awareness of the risk involved. The time it took Nelson to seek these poems out, the tenure that protects him, the right to choose what he's teaching without finding his job in jeopardy, the simple question of "How much of my own money do I want to spend photocopying for this class?" . . . the closest Nelson comes to recognizing these pressures are his sincere but very brief comments in later chapters defending tenure in the most general terms (as necessary to protect free speech). I envied Nelson while reading this, and resented him a fair amount too. For him the problem of dissatisfied students complaining about his politics was a matter that apparently bothered him mainly in the conscience; for most of us, it would bother our pocketbooks.

If in this area Nelson acts too much the knight defender, not fully aware of the concerns of the peasants for whom he rides, in the rest of the second section he is too much in the fray, and shows another warrior's weakness of not seeing the enemy clearly and therefore swinging widely, and becoming in the process too much like the enemy. In his attacks on the Right--however witty and enjoyable--Nelson often shows the same failings of which he accuses his political opponents, attacking without evidence, attacking personalities rather than principles. This flaw is most evident when Nelson attempts to deal with sweeping political forces. When he speaks of the Right as if it is monolithically unified, Nelson ignores the open, even vicious infighting on the Right that regularly make national news. His response to Dinesh D'Souza's attempts to link deconstruction and defenses of multiculturalism, part of a chapter on the cannon wars, shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the logocentric ideologies of the Right work, and begs the question of just what philosophical foundation does multiculturalism rest upon. Moves like these weaken Nelson's argument, and makes him a vulnerable target for some of the very individuals he had hoped to refute.

Nelson's argument returns to both aim and power when he once again contextualizes it; when he includes detail born acute local observations steeped in history, he is unstoppable. In section II this is most evident in chapter 8, "What Happens When We Put the Left at the Center?" There his economic review of how American historical narratives have closed to exclude the left could serve as a primer in historiography. It also asks, by implication, what is wrong with us/with our history/with this system, that we are so far from acknowledging historical reality?

If Section II closed with that haunting rhetorical questions, Section III, entitled, "Lessons from the Job Wars," moves directly to stunning practicality. Each of these final four chapters includes sections of great moral clarity; this clarity is all the more valued for being focused on areas often shrouded in mystery like the politics and mechanics of a job search. The greatest of these gifts is, however, Nelson's "Twelve-Step Program for Academia." By adopting the form of the popular group therapy programs--are we to be Academics Anonymous? Intellectuals Anonymous?--Nelson suggests that the academy is in deep trouble and needs the help of a higher power to change. The addiction Nelson seeks to cure is the heady mix of individual professionalism and a willingness to relinquish control of higher education to the corporate inhumanity that has been restructuring American society since the 1980s; the higher power that will save us is collective action born of collective responsibility.

The first two of his twelve steps, "Write a bill of rights for graduate students, teaching assistants, and part-time or adjunct faculty." and "Teaching assistants and adjunct or part-time faculty should unionize." serve to show just how this collective identity might be sparked--and what forces might block it. Coming to a consensus on how part-time faculty should be treated and who is answerable for failure to do so can only happen through an extended and brutally honest debate in the public sphere; unionizing will happen a campus at a time, and will required years of education on the level of trench-fighting. I know; I was at Iowa during the years graduate students tried to unionize and was among those who failed to see the need for a union. I voted for it, but tepidly, and did not give the union active support. I was not alone, and the first attempt to form a union failed. It took over two years of further immersion in the graduate labor market for me to pierce the veil of idealization that had been wrapped around higher education.

Those years of reluctant realization were hard for me, and I had nothing major invested in the concept. Imagine then how much harder it will be to open this discussion with older faculty, who have to reason to be exposed to these conditions. With administrators, ground between the budget cuts generated by state legislators on one hand and increasing expenses on the other. With students and parents of students, who associate unions with blue collar labor and higher prices. With those who have been working in marginal schools trying to upgrade to the new technologies and feel they can fight only one battle at a time.

Nelson closes the section on unionization by repeating a cry he admits is melodramatic "You have nothing to lose but your chains." This may be true for his primary audience--the ethical and the disempowered of the academy--but I suggest his twelve step program is going to sound like a little different to those who stand to lose money, power, identity, control of departments and curriculum, and the amorally professional--to the majority, in other words. Nelson's message is going to sound like war and rumors of war. When he gets to step five, in which he suggests not increasing faculty salaries, his audience is going to be sure of it.

This brings me to my final statement on this piece. Nelson chose to take up Kimball's clumsy challenge because, as he himself notes, too many accusations have been tossed at higher education and been shrugged off as too grossly simplified to deal with. This has allowed the enemies of higher education to set the terms of the debate. Manifesto changes that. As a piece of persuasive rhetoric, it is greatly lacking. As I said above, I fear it will persuade few people directly; I now add that it will certainly offend some. But it will at least wake them up. Rather than dying in their sleep, academics will now realize there is a war on, (even if they point to Nelson and his cohorts as its source). And by cutting away the myriad wrappings surrounding key issues, Manifesto will change things in a fundamental way. Manifesto of a Tenured Radical should set the terms of the debate over power, ethics, direction, and autonomy in higher education for the next several years. That, in itself, is a victory.