Two Currencies
Pierre Bourdieu spent the late 1960s and 1970s collecting data on French professors and published Homo Academicus in 1984. The book maps the university as a space with two poles, and the finding that made it useful is that the poles pay in currencies that do not exchange.
At one pole sits temporal academic power. Committee seats. Control of appointments. Deanships and directorships. Editorship of the journals through which a discipline reproduces. Doctoral students whose careers you launch and who owe you. This is power over the corps and it accrues slowly, through time spent in rooms.
At the other sits scientific consecration, which is the recognition of peers for work. It is measured in citations, in reviews by people who matter, in being the man whose argument a field has to answer.
Bourdieu added a third holding, intellectual renown, meaning recognition from outside the field. The trade book. The lecture circuit. The press.
The finding is that these three convert badly, and that two of them are negatively valued at the pole that governs promotion. Temporal power is built out of hours, and every hour in a committee is an hour not spent producing. External renown is read by peers as a sign that a man is addressing the wrong audience. Bourdieu’s professors did not choose one currency in a deliberate way. They followed a feel for the game, and the feel led them into portfolios they could not liquidate.
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer has been an associate professor at Northwestern since 2013. That fact wants an account and Bourdieu supplies one without requiring any guess about persons.
Set out the portfolio.
Temporal power. Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies from 2012 to 2016, which carried with it the directorship of the Jewish Studies program, the graduate cluster, and a seat on the Holocaust Education Foundation board. Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Director of undergraduate studies twice. Chair of the search committee for the Israel Studies postdoc four years running and for the Israel Studies assistant professorship. Member of the college ad hoc tenure committee. Candidate for the college committee on tenure in 2017. Co-editor-in-chief of Prooftexts since 2017 after twelve years as associate editor. Seven doctoral students advised, including three outside his own department and two at other universities. Jury service for the American Academy of Religion book award for four years and for the National Jewish Book Award.
That is a heavy holding. Bourdieu’s point is that each line is time, and the time comes out of the same account that pays for books.
Intellectual renown. The Talmud: A Biography on Princeton’s general list, which won the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Identity in 2018. A Coursera course that has enrolled tens of thousands. Coverage in Tablet, the Times of Israel, the Chicago Tribune, the Jerusalem Post. A synagogue and community circuit running across Orthodox, Conservative, and unaffiliated rooms in Chicago, New York, Washington, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.
Also heavy.
Scientific consecration. Two monographs. A featured review of the first by Steven Fraade in AJS Review, which called it original and valuable and then raised two objections. A response to Boyarin in JQR in 2011. A chapter in the Boyarin festschrift, a chapter in an Oxford volume on crime in law and literature, an article in JQR in 2023, and a festschrift chapter in 2024.
Respectable, and thin across the middle years, which are the years the other two columns fill.
Bourdieu’s model explains the sequence and not only the totals.
In 2011 and 2012 Wimpfheimer held three fellowship offers at once. The Alice Kaplan Institute at Northwestern, the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at NYU Law, and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at Michigan. He took the local one and declined the two that would have moved him. In the autumn of 2012 he became director of the center.
Those are the years immediately after tenure, which in Bourdieu’s terms is the window when the scientific clock is running fastest and the temporal clock has barely started. A year at the Frankel Institute buys research time and national visibility among peers. A directorship buys control of appointments, a budget, donor relations, and a graduate cluster. He took the second, and the book he produced during those years was the one for the general list.
None of this needs to have been a calculation. Bourdieu’s whole point about the feel for the game is that agents make the move the position makes available and describe it afterward as an opportunity that came along. A small field asks the person who can do the work to do it. Somebody has to run the center or the center closes.
Two qualifications the frame requires.
Bourdieu was describing a national system with centralized reproduction, concours, and a small number of consecrating bodies. American departments differ, and religious studies is a small field where one person may have to be the whole infrastructure. The negative valuation of administrative work is weaker in the United States than in the France Bourdieu measured, and the negative valuation of trade publishing varies by field.
And the model says nothing about the quality of anyone’s work. It describes the currencies a field pays in and the rate at which they exchange. A man may write the best book of his generation and hold whatever rank the local committee assigns.
Here is where the case corrects Bourdieu. His scheme treats external renown as a devalued currency, the mark of the man who could not win his peers and went looking for an audience. That valuation assumes a field whose existence is guaranteed by the state and whose funding does not depend on public affection.
Northwestern’s center is called the Crown Family Center because a family paid for it. The chairs, the postdocs, the lecture series, the Israel Studies line, the Holocaust Education Foundation, all of it rests on donors who are moved by the sense that the work matters to a community. The Jewish Book Council award is not a peer honor in Bourdieu’s sense and it is a real signal to exactly the people who write the checks.
So the renown currency, which the model marks down, is the currency that keeps the local field solvent. A man who gives thirty thousand people a course on the Talmud and writes a book a donor’s cousin can finish on a plane is producing the conditions under which the department exists. He is doing it in a currency the tenure committee does not weigh, and the department that would not exist without work of that kind is staffed by people whose promotion turns on work of a different kind.
Bourdieu would have enjoyed the structure. A field that depends for its material existence on a form of capital it declines to recognize will produce people who hold a great deal of the wrong money.
Notes: Bourdieu. Homo Academicus (French 1984, English 1988).