Jeffrey J.

Williams

Scholarly Reporter:
An Interview with Andrew Ross
Andrew Ross has been one of the most prolific critics of his generation,
writing on subjects from modern poetry to current music, but over
the past decade he has focused especially on contemporary work and
labor, in a series of trade books including No-Collar: The Humane
Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (Basic, 2003); Low Pay, High Profile:
The Global Push for Fair Labor (New Press, 2004); and Fast Boat to
China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free TradeLessons
from Shanghai (Pantheon, 2006). To do so, he has developed a hybrid
method that he calls scholarly reportage, which draws on detailed
interviews and departs from rote academic habits.
Born in Scotland in 1956, Ross was educated at Aberdeen
University (MA, 1978) and the University of Kent (PhD, 1984). He
first came to the United States in 1980, teaching at Illinois State
University and elsewhere until 1985, when he took an appointment
at Princeton University. He moved to New York University in 1993,
where he chaired a noted American Studies program and helped
found a new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis training
activists as well as academics.
Ross has been one of the most prolific critics of his generation.
His first book, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American
Poetry (Columbia, 1986), is a psychoanalytic account of modern
poetry from Pound to Ashberry. Thereafter he left literary studies
behind, writing on the New York Intellectuals and their fraught
relation to popular culture in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular
Culture (Routledge, 1989), which gained him wide attention. He
also was an active member of the editorial collective of the journal
Social Text for over a decade (1986-2000), from which he edited
several collections, the first of which was Universal Abandon? The
Politics of Postmodernism (Minnesota, 1988). His next group of
books deals with science and technology; they include Strange
Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (Verso,
1991); The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Natures Debt to Society
(Verso, 1994); and the edited collections Technoculture (co-edited
with Constance Penley; Minnesota, 1991) and Science Wars (Duke,
1996). On other cultural trends, he collected his essays in Real Love:
In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (NYU, 1998) and co-edited Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (Routledge, 1994). His more
recent books include The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the
38 the minnesota review

Pursuit of Property Value in Disneys New Town (Ballantine, 1999),

an account of a year spent living in the Disney town; No-Collar,
an account of his time observing high-tech companies; Low Pay,
High Profile, a collection of essays; Fast Boat to China, his report on
the new economy in China; and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life
and Labor in Precarious Times (NYU, 2009), a collection of essays
including The Rise of the Global University. He has also co-
edited the collections No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights
of Garment Workers (Verso, 1997), Anti-Americanism (NYU, 2005),
and The University against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the
Academic Workplace (Temple, 2008).
In previous issues of this journal, see The Case for Scholarly
Reporting, minnesota review 71-72 (2009); Undisciplined: An
Interview with Andrew Ross, conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams
and Mike Hill, minnesota review 45-46 (1996); and Susan Fraiman,
Andrew Ross, Cultural Studies, and Feminism, minnesota review
52-54 (2001).
This interview took place on 31 January 2009 in Andrew Ross
office at NYU in lower Manhattan. It was conducted by Jeffrey J.
Williams, editor of the minnesota review, and transcribed by Gavin
Jensen, an MA student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program
at Carnegie Mellon University.

Williams Im especially interested in the direction of your work in

the past ten years. For a while you were the personification of cultural
studies in the US, especially after No Respect, which has a chapter on
pornography as well as one on the New York intellectuals attitude
toward popular culture. But in the past ten years it seems that your
work has undergone a shift. Youve written a lot more on labor, and
you also moved to writing trade books. Do you see it as a shift?
What happened to draw you along that route?

Ross I certainly have moved across different fields, at least from the
perspective of an academic career or academic profile, but I think
that has more to do with having been released from the disciplinary
constraints of my original training to learn new skills and methods.
These days, when people ask me, Whats your discipline? Im more
inclined, if Im being flip, to say Im an agnostic rather than Im
an interdisciplinary scholar.
A good deal of the motivation for the shifts in my work was the
result of responding to circumstance, political conditions, gaps in
scholarship, and opportunities to do the kind of writing I felt would
be most useful. An important part has been about finding my own
voice, which I think is the most difficult thing for people to do with
 Ross Interview 39

a standard academic training. It took me many, many years to find

my own voice.

Williams Really? After having written so much, thats surprising to

hear.

Ross Yes. I often think the best I can do for my graduate students is
to try and shortcut that process so that theyre not thinking with the
language of the disciplinary consensus or theyre not trying to ape
some master thinker who has been influential in a related discipline.
In trying to fashion their own voice, the idea is they will be more
likely to be thinking for themselves. At least, thats been my own
experience.
The books that I was writing in the early 90s, while they probably
did fall within the expansive boundaries of what one considers to be
cultural studies, were really on the margins of cultural studies at
the time. For example, I was responding to emerging technologies
in the context of the history of technology in a book like Strange
Weather. So, too, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life was a full-on
engagement with environmentalism. In the last ten years or so, my
focus has shifted toward labor and urban research. The graduate
seminars that I teach are either on urban and suburban studies, or
courses that are studies in work. So those are the two main areas that
I try to keep up with in terms of the latest research.

Williams When did it feel like you found your voice? With a
particular book?

Ross Probably The Celebration Chronicles. Id done some bargain

basement ethnography at an earlier part of my career in various
places, but it really wasnt until I had the chance to be in the field for
a year, in Florida, that the opportunity fully arose. That project was
cooked up by my literary agent and an editor at a commercial press,
so it was in large part funded by an advance, not by a scholarly grant.
It was their idea to send me there, and I liked the sense of being
commissioned. Of course, it was up to me to find the story, and the
investigative challenge also appealed to me.
There werent too many precedents I could look to for writing
models. In terms of scholarship, it had been a long time since
sociologists had gone out to do residential studies of suburban
communities. In fact, there hadnt been all that much since The
Levittowners and some work in the early seventies. The study of
suburbia had been grossly neglected by urbanists, who are quite
disdainful, in general, of low-density settlement. So I felt I was
40 the minnesota review

helping to revive that tradition. But also there was a high volume of
journalistic scrutiny of Celebration, and it was important for me to
be responsive to that scrutiny if only because of the role it played in
the lives of residents.
By force of circumstance, then, the writing of that book
produced the blend of ethnography and investigative journalism
that seemed to make sense to me as a writer. I got to feel comfortable
with that kind of hybrid voice, and the trade books Ive done since
thenNo-Collar and Fast Boat to Chinahave also been in that
vein. Its something I recently called scholarly reportage, which may
have family resemblances to what others call creative nonfiction or
public sociology.
Sociologists and anthropologists are very territorial about
ethnography, so in our American Studies program we call it people-
based research, as opposed to research that takes documents or texts
as its primary materials. Social scientists trained as ethnographers
are more or less obliged to always keep an eye on polishing their
method, for reasons of disciplinary evaluation (But is she a good
ethnographer?). For me, the method is really quite simply a means
to an endits the primary vehicle for me to build a picture of a
community, topic, or tendencyand so I dont have to deal with that
academic pressure. Nor, as is the case with professional journalists,
do I have to labor under the pressure of coming up with a fairly
conventional storyline, studded with character profiles to ensure
human interest. Plus you can protect your informants in a way
that professional journalists often cannot because the authenticity
of their story depends on revealing and naming their sources. For
the kind of scholarly reportage I do, I can camouflage my informants
with impunity. The net outcome is that one can avoid what is most
stultifying about the respective requirements of the professional
journalist and social scientist alike.

Williams Do you think its more genuine than the academic way
you were trained?

Ross To me, its more genuine only because I feel Ive come about it in
my own way. Its not a style that emulates any professional standard,
or at least not that I am aware of consciously. Right now, I have
started to do field work on sustainable development in the desert
so Im spending lot of time interviewing in Phoenixlegislators,
planners, developers, community organizers, and the like. At this
point, I have a level of confidence that I can turn it all into something
readable and useful, unlike back in my Celebration days when I had
no model and no experience to draw on.
 Ross Interview 41

Williams How do you go about doing your research? One thing

thats different from journalism is that you dont swoop in to, say,
Celebration, do three days of interviews, and swoop out. Thats why
its more like ethnography, because you try to inhabit a place, and
its more detailed.

Ross Thats correct, and in the few remaining print newspapers

that allow for investigative journalism, the deadlines are tighter
and tighter. I like to do deadline-driven work and research, and I
wouldnt publish so much if I didnt, so Im not one to defer. Also,
Ive found that I thrive in research environments where journalists
are focusing on the same issues so there is some kind of professional
rivalry involvedthats productive for me. That was certainly the
case in Celebration. Also with No-Collar, my book about new media
workplaces. There was a blitz of journalistic coverage of that sector
at the time. As for my China research, there was a good deal of press
about white-collar outsourcing in the early 2000s, though it was
mostly about India. In addition, in spite of the flood of commentary
we have seen about Chinese workplaces and the rise of the Chinese
economy, strangely enough I didnt meet one scholar or journalist in
the Lower Yangtze high-tech industrial corridor, which was where
I was doing my interviews. This region was becoming once again
the primary engine of the Chinese economy, with the lions share
of foreign investment showing up there, but once I got outside of
Shanghai and upriver, I didnt meet anyone who was working the
same story as I was. Even to this day, there has been virtually no
English-language research published on that corridor.

Williams Do they not get permission or do they just stop at

Shanghai?

Ross I honestly dont know. The labor spotlight is still primarily

on the South China workplaces, because they are the low-wage
core of the export economy. Perhaps they are more accessible from
Hong Kong than the Yangtze Delta factories are from the Shanghai
region, but as an Anglo researcher that was not my experience. The
only doors I found closed to me were in Japanese or Korean-owned
companies, and I didnt try all that hard to get into them.

Williams You mentioned circumstance and that your agent and an

editor set up the book about Celebration, but what draws you to a
project?
42 the minnesota review

Ross I have to feel that its going to be politically useful to a range

of audiences and also that its a story which is not being told. For
example, with No Collar there was a flood of journalistic attention
to dotcom business models and the investor impact of the so-called
New Economy of that period and, along with that, there was some
initial press interest in the nature of the workplaces themselves, but
after a while it was all about following the money. My hunch was
that the work mentality and the workplace customs were going to
be the most durable features of that industrial milieu, and so that
was what I focused on. Arguably, these features have become much
more normalized in different work sectors in the interim. That self-
directed, risk-taking, entrepreneurial profile is now the normative
working environment for folks in creative labor and in the creative
industries. Since this creative class, as Richard Florida calls it, are
designated as model workers in the post-industrial economy, this
work mentality doesnt register as non-orthodox anymore. But in the
late 1990s it was quite novel, and thats what I set out to document,
the adolescence of that kind of workplace culture, rather than focus
of the business models and the economy. So that was a direct response
to circumstance. Plus, I was not on leave at the time, so the research
was mostly done in New York City en route to my own office. I had
workplace berths in each of those companies, and I would check in
whenever I could to do interviews or attend meetings.

Williams How often did you go to them? You researched them for
over a year, if I recall from the book.

Ross It was about a year and a half. One of the companies was in
Soho, so it was literally between my apartment in Tribeca and NYU.
The other was over in Chelsea, so it involved a little more trekking.
In the course of a day, if I was lucky, I could get to my NYU office
and also spend a little time at each of the companies, but more often
than not I would choose one or the other.

Williams How did it work out that they gave you permission?

Ross I was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Razorfish,

which is not untypical, and my publishers legal department
negotiated parts of it to facilitate writing the book. Its fairly standard
for employees to sign NDAs, and I had to be careful about abiding
by it with Razorfish. But the owners liked the idea of having a
scholar around, studying the workplace, and I went back there after
the book was published to give a seminar about the findings, as I had
done at Celebration. I like to think most of the employees recognized
 Ross Interview 43

their experience in the book, though management didnt appear to

think there were any lessons to learn. My arrangement with 360 Hip
Hop was much more informal, as was the workplace culture.

Williams How did it work out that you did the book on China? I
can see how it related to labor, but what prompted it?

Ross The China book was motivated by the work Id been doing
in the anti-sweatshop movement. Though I was heavily involved in
thinking and writing about offshore workplaces, I had never actually
visited one. So I made a preliminary visit to some of the export
zones in Guangdongand wrote up the results in Low Pay, High
Profilebut realized there was already quite a lot of documentation
about these factories, mostly by folks based in Hong Kong. So there
wasnt much point in my duplicating that kind of research. Plus
there would be the Cantonese language problem and difficulty with
access in general. Instead, I realized that there was a story to be
told about the high-tech workplaces in the Lower Yangtze that was
not being written, and so decided on Shanghai. I learned enough
Mandarin to get by in the year before I went to live in Shanghai, but
I couldnt conduct my interviews in Mandarin and it wouldnt have
been easy for me to access the low-wage factory workplaces.
I arrived there with virtually no contacts at all. After a few
weeks I called one person whose name had been given to me by a
colleague. She invited me to a dinner party and there happened to
be ex-presidents and the current president of the American Chamber
of Commerce in attendance. It was a very interesting conversation
and I decided to start my research at the top, at the Chamber. That
opened a lot of doors, and I found my way going down through the
managerial ranks to the workplaces themselves and was surprised at
how much access I got. If I were a trained sinologist, Im not sure
that would have been a path that I would have taken, plus I was
interested in the impact of transnational flows of capital, as it were,
and a sinologist would, again, have been more focused on China
exclusively. After all, I was as much studying Americans abroad as
I was studying the Chinese employees who were employed by the
Americans.

Williams You mention in the introduction of the book that you

moved your whole family there when you went. You werent just a
researcher in the field but there were the three of you. How did that
work to bring your family to China for a year?
44 the minnesota review

Ross It wasnt all that difficult. My partner was writing a dissertation

at the time, so she was mostly busy at her desk, and my daughter,
who was a two year-old then, went to a local neighborhood school.
She actually learned some Shanghainese, much more than I did in
the year we spent there. I was affiliated with Shanghai University,
and the folks in the Cultural Studies Program there (the first in
China) helped us find a place to live. Shanghai is probably the most
Western of all Chinese cities so its fairly easy for foreigners to set
up shop.

Williams I can see how that displacement might be refreshing, since

you must be pulled in a lot of different ways when youre in New
York, and you wouldnt have all the administrative obligations you
do at NYU.

Ross Indeed, I seem to have put in a lot of administrative labor here

at NYU. Ive directed two programs and chaired one department in
the time Ive been here, and when youre at that level of engagement,
its as if everything in your body is connected to the apparatus of
an institution, so you have to get away to another place to do that
kind of extensive, in-depth research. For sure it was helpful in that
regard.
On the other hand, Ive never had much trouble writing while
doing administrative work. I know a lot of academics go through
sheer hell writing anything, and Im thankful that I actually enjoy
writing and that I can write quickly.

Williams That explains all your books. Have you always been able
to write quickly?

Ross Yes. Ive never had any desire to be a journalist but clearly could
have been quite comfortable with the pressure of daily deadlines.
I do publish journalism every so often, but tend not to pursue
assignments. My feeling is that I already have a livelihood and so I
dont want to poach on someone elses. Especially these days, when
there are so many layoffs and so many people struggling to get by
doing freelance. They really need that gig more than I do. Unless
its something that no one else could write, I generally wont do it.
Thats one of my ways of responding to the weary lament about the
decline of public intellectuals. If academics really aimed at a broader
public, we would be doing some very good independent journalists
out of a job.
 Ross Interview 45

Williams Just to ask some particulars about how you work, is

there a particular time you write? For instance, when you were in
Celebration, did you take notes at the end of the day? Whats your
process?

Ross It works differently now because I have two young children,

and Im the primary caregiver. So these days its whenever I can
grab any time in the day, during daylight hours. I dont write at all
in the evenings anymore. As for writing technique, I dont make
plans, sketches, or map out something before I write it. Ive never
done that. I always encourage my graduate students to do that, but
Ive never done it myself. Its more of an adventure to me to work
out ideas in the course of the writing. Theres a force of gravity that
kicks in. Plus, I get bored easily, so Id always be deviating from the
script if I had one.

Williams For me the difficulty is not really in the writing but

in the revising. Sometimes its a bit of a curse. Maybe because I
became an editor, I learned to revise at a certain point, which is
something I didnt really know how to do in graduate school. Its
good because things come out better, of course, but its incredibly
time consuming.

Ross Self-editing is important because editors really dont do much

these days. In the publishing trade here in New York City there are
only a handful of editors who are known, and appreciated, for the
time they take to edit a manuscript. Thats not the fault of editors
themselvesthey generally have to spend all their time in sales
meetings and they are taking on many more titles so they simply
dont have time to do what used to be their main jobs. Ive never had
an editor at a trade press that edited my books. If you have published
a few books they figure, This guy knows how to write a book and
theres not a lot of work for me involved, so its easier for me to take
it on, whereas for a first-time author, they may have to put a little
more work into rearranging and restructuring the narrative. But line
editing is almost unheard of these days.

Williams I want to ask you more about your various administrative

jobs. Youve done a large amount of administrative work at NYU, for
instance as founding chair of the American Studies program.

Ross Actually, the American Studies program preexisted my coming

here, but it had no resources. When I came on board in 1993, there
were ninety doctoral students on the books and there wasnt even an
46 the minnesota review

office. All we had was a filing cabinet. So my job was to hire core
faculty and build up the program into a department, and somehow
see these ninety students through. At the same time, I was involved
in building up the Africana program and the Asian American Studies
program, and also helping found the Gender and Sexuality Studies
program. We all worked fairly closely together and, after a while, we
decided to all go in together and create a new departmentwhich
is now Social and Cultural Analysis. There are six programs in the
department, each with its own identity. Because of its federal nature,
its a particular challenge to chair this department, but its also an
adventurehow often do we get to create a new department? We
chose Social and Cultural Analysis as a name because it is entirely
bland. We wanted a name that wouldnt define in any way what we
do, so we could start off with a blank slate.

Williams It must not have been easy to get a university to start a

whole new department.

Ross Actually it was quite easy. Its much tidier from the deans
perspective: instead of having six programs to administer, they only
have to deal with one chair. Several other colleges have shown an
interest in starting up a similar kind of department. Ive had visits
from colleagues in different kinds of universities who are interested
in doing this.

Williams Do you feel that the program developed from what cultural
studies had been?

Ross In fact, the deans wanted to call it the department of cultural

studies, but all of us said no. We didnt want the baggage that comes
with cultural studies; we didnt want to have to be answerable to
the many versions of cultural studies that exist in peoples minds.
In my own work, Ive never had a vested interest in thinking about
the boundaries of cultural studies or its goals. American Studies Ive
probably been more committed to as a discipline. American Studies
was a very welcome haven for myself and a whole generation of my
peers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Williams When you first came here?

Ross Actually, in Princeton, where I regularly taught in the American

Studies program, and directed it for a year before I left. It was a small
undergraduate program that was an important part of the landscape
there for me at that time.
 Ross Interview 47

Williams Its amazing that you manage to do all of these different

things, not only write so much but work as an administrator.

Ross Well, this is my last year of administration. I go back to

civilian life after that. Actually, Im more active in the AAUP these
days. I chair the NYU chapter and I sit on Committee A of the
national AAUP, which is the committee for academic freedom that
investigates complaints we receive. We put universities on the AAUP
censured list or take them off.

Williams When did you start doing that?

Ross This is my third year. I guess Im part of the Cary Nelson

slate. Its an interesting moment at the AAUP. It has played such an
important historical role but the membership has been declining
steadily for two decades. People take it for granted, but with the
profession eroding fast, the complaints and violations of AAUP
standards that get logged every year have been skyrocketing. Without
the AAUP, lord only knows how university administrations would
feel free to ride roughshod over faculty.

Williams Its like the Internal Affairs of the academic business.

Ross Yes, and let me tell you that university presidents dont like to
be on that censured list. Even though most of our investigations are
of small collegesreligious colleges are where the worst violations
occurthere are some big research institutions that occasionally
find their way onto our list. NYU itself was on and off it.

Williams I was going to ask you about NYU. I know you were an
active supporter of the graduate student strike.

Ross For at least the first half of the strike, which lasted for seven
months, many NYU faculty were supportive. We regularly collected
up to three hundred signatures on faculty petitions in support. The
whole affair is analyzed in a book I co-edited called The University
against Itself, which was not just a documentation of the strike and the
lessons learned, but also a profile of NYU as this archetypal modern,
entrepreneurial university. NYU seems to be on the frontline of so
many of the tendencies running through higher education. And the
faculty has a difficult time protecting their rights in environments
like that. Its very easy to buy them out, which is what happens
around here.
48 the minnesota review

This year, the AAUP chapter has been very busy with NYU Abu
Dhabithe brand new NYU campus that our president decided to
build that is bankrolled by the Abu Dhabi crown prince.

Williams Like the Guggenheim?

Ross Guggenheim, the Louvre, and NYU are all to be built on a

cultural enclave called Saadiyat Island. Bryn Mawr was offered a
similar kind of deal, but they decided not to go ahead with it. Needless
to say, we have a lot of issues with the Abu Dhabi project. One of
the things weve been trying to pioneer is a code of conduct that will
govern the labor subcontractors who are building the campus and
protect the workers. The Emirates are notorious for exploitation of
migrant workers at construction sites, so weve been working with
Human Rights Watch on fashioning a code that is an extension of
the Worker Rights Consortiums anti-sweatshop code of conduct. If
it were to be adopted by NYU, then it would be the strongest code
of conduct in the region, and if a highly visible employer like NYU
took it up, it might have some impact in raising labor standards.

Williams How does the administration respond?

Ross So far, not so well. I think the NYU administration, ever since
the strike, has dug itself in, as if under siege. There wasnt a lot of
faculty consultation before the strike and theres even less since.
During the strike, we wanted to figure out some way of having
an active boycott on the part of scholars elsewhere of NYU as an
institution, and there was a lot of internal debate about how practical
or how ethical that might be. One of the practical lessons we learned
during the strike was the university has most of its money in the
bank at the beginning of the year, when they collect tuition, whereas
corporations often depend on daily revenue. Theyre different beasts,
so they really do require different tactics when it comes to strikes.
After Obama was elected, the administration saw the writing
on the wall as far as the temperature of the NLRB goes. In order to
head off a reversal of the Brown ruling, they have now reorganized
the grad student funding package so that teaching is no longer
obligatoryonly encouraged. Henceforth, there wont be any TAs
at NYU. Their wager is that new recruits wont see any point in
joining the union. It was a big blow and expressly aimed at crushing
GSOC, but I dont think that will be the end of the story. GSOC
will shape its own destiny.
 Ross Interview 49

Williams It seems one of the more immediate issues facing the

university is speedup and casualization. Who knew that universities
were forerunners of figuring out how to do that? What avenues do
you see to remedy that? One thing is unionization, but where do we
go from there?

Ross Of all the professions, higher education has seen the most
rapid and most pervasive penetration of casualization. Practically
speaking, I like the idea the AFT is pushing in Washington State
for conversion of part-time positions back into full-time positions,
with the goal of restoring the status quo of 70-3070 percent
being tenure trackthat they think is an acceptable goal. Theyre
pushing for legislation that would restore what would be considered
an equitable or reasonable balance. At NYU currently, as at many
institutions, the ratio is exactly the opposite. We have 72 percent
teaching at NYU off the tenure track. The numbers are better in our
school, Arts and Sciences, but NYU has a lot of other schools where
there are hardly any tenured people.

Williams So what do you see happening with the university? Where

is it going?

Ross Im on record as believing that a lot of the talk about the

corporate university is a lazy shorthand for the situation were dealing
with. Academics have this siege mentality where they only see the
changes coming at them in their own environments. They dont get
out a lot and theyre not really aware of whats happening in other
workplaces, especially corporate America. They dont see that theres
a two-way traffic through which more and more of the customs and
mentalities of academic life find themselves in corporate workplaces,
especially knowledge companies. In truth, the modern research
university and the modern knowledge corporation are coevolving into
species that didnt exist before, and its this new mode of production
that we have to keep our eyes on and chart and analyze it. To do
that we really have to go beyond this siege mentality of thinking
that our workplaces and our institutions are simply being invaded
by corporate logic. Sloganizing about the corporate university is
good for consciousness-raising and activism, but its not a very good
analysis of whats going on.
Besides, its not just the research mentality but the organization
of labor within the university that is a model business people are
looking at very closely. When I was in China, I used to attend social
mixers at the Chamber of Commerce. Every speculator in the world
who is looking to make a fast buck ends up at these events sooner
50 the minnesota review

or later, but, after a while, I realized that a lot of the folks propping
up the bar were representatives of American universities. Some of
them were there for social reasons but most were there to network,
and they were treated just like any other investor. The Chamber even
had a Education Committee. In the nineteenth century, foreign
missionaries came to harvest the souls of the Chinese and foreign
investors came to turn them into consumers. The investors failed
miserably and, to this day, have only made meager inroads into the
China market. By contrast, the missionaries founded colleges that
have subsequently grown into Chinas most famous universities,
institutions that have far outlived and surpassed the influence of
the business class. Now that record of success is not lost on the keen
business mind.
These days, investors talk about a multi-trillion dollar global
market for higher education services. The evidence so far is that
this global market has not been impacted by the financial crisis to
anything like the same degree as have national education systems
in the West. Higher education analysts estimate that the global
university will expand to as many as 200 million seats by the
year 2020 (the currently enrolled are from 110 to 115 million). The
numbers are based on estimates of the growth of the middle class in
rapidly developing countries (scheduled to recover most quickly from
the recession), and the evidence that transnational student mobility
is increasingly funded by private family wealth and is not therefore
dependent on state inputs, which are shrinking almost everywhere.
It is hardly surprising that private investors start to salivate when
they look at a market that has the potential to grow by 80 percent
over the next decade.

Williams I know you have an essay on the global university that was
in The University against Itself. Are you working on a book on the
global university?

Ross I had wanted to go back to China to work on it. The state is

focusing its funding on rural education. Thats why so many foreign
universities are encouraged to set up shop there to respond to the
demand for skilled labor. However, the logistics of relocating for
another year proved too complicated.

Williams So what is your next project?

Ross Right now, Im doing field work in Phoenix on sustainability.

The mayor recently announced that Phoenix would be the greenest
city in America, and for many outsiders that sounds ludicrous. On
 Ross Interview 51

the face of it, Phoenix metro is the archetype of sprawl, and the
energy consumption and lifestyle of residents must seem particularly
unsustainable. So the assumption is that if Phoenix can do it, anyone
can. The city is built on the ruins of a pre-Columbian civilization
that exceeded the carrying capacity of its land and water resources,
so theres always a parable waiting to be realized. In many ways, its
a one-industry townreal estate developmentand that industry
just fell off a cliff. Im sure there are a lot of residents who dont
imagine that Phoenix could become the Detroit of the twenty-first
century, but thats one of the prospects in the offing.

Williams Let me ask you one last question. Looking back on your
career, how do you reflect on the early part of your career? You were
fairly youngin the British system people usually finish much
earlier than people in the American systemand you had a lot of
success early on. You wrote a great deal and obviously worked very
hard. How do you see it when you look back on your work?

Ross I dont look back very much; much of it is too embarrassing.

I had a training in film and literature that wasnt all that orthodox.
When I started teaching over here it was at a time in the mid-eighties
when there was a breach in the walls of what had been a very four-
walled discipline of English. I just went through one breach after
another and never really stopped. Because English itself is a fairly
weak disciplinary formation, theres a lot of anxiety about such
things. Once you broke down the inner fortification of the canon
and then moved on through the other fortifications, its not so easy
or desirable for that matter to go back. When I was at Princeton, no
one ever asked me to teach poetry, which was my primary doctoral
field. So I just started teaching a broader field of material, mostly
in the American Studies program, looking at culture and society
more broadlyas it should be studied, I think, culture and society
together, not in any segmented way. After that, I followed my
instincts.

Williams If you think in terms of your career, what advice would

you give to students? If you were to think in terms of Letters to a
Young Social and Cultural Analyst, what would you say?

Ross The best advice you can give graduate students is really about
confidencehow to research and write with confidence. One way I
go about that is to focus on methodswhat do I need to do to get
from A to B? Theory can be a pretty good way of getting from A to
B, but its not the only way, and I saw a lot of people get stuck in
52 the minnesota review

between, spinning their mental wheels in the airsome of the best

minds of my generation, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg.
So my advice to students is to get a sense of what A and B
are, first of all, and figure out the questions they have to ask to get
politically useful outcomeswhat methods do I need to answer
the questions? It could involve going to archives; it could involve
interpreting documents very closely and using textual analysis; it
could involve people-based research, picking up a phone, doing a
survey, doing face-to-face interviews, consulting data bases, etc. But
whats most important is getting to B. I think with the conventional
four-walled discipline, the method always comes first. You learn the
method and then you apply it, and how well you apply the method
is what credentializes you. Its quite the opposite, I suppose, with the
way I teach students. The methods are simply the means to an end.