Just as in society as a whole, the academic upper middle class needs to rethink its alliances. Its dignity will not survive forever if it doesn’t fight for that of everyone below it in the academic hierarchy. (“First they came for the graduate students, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a graduate student…”) For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them.
From William Deresiewicz, "Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education" The Nation
Apt. 11d 
Stripped of the mindless left-wing rhetoric (I missed the usually obligatory sneer at Sarah Palin, but otherwise it’s all there), Prof. Deresiewicz proposes:
1. That “professors” (the good guys) fight back against “departments” (the bad guys). It’s a little like that cell phone commercial where the executive explains that he’s “sticking it to the man” until his underling reminds him, “Sir, you ARE the man.”
2. That professors (and here, one presumes, they will get both the wicked administrators and the oppressed graduate students to join them) demand more money from the government. That isn’t going to happen in any time frame relevant to an article printed on the quality of paper stock that “The Nation” uses.
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“Mindless left-wing rhetoric,” y81? Give me example from the article, please. I’m not at all convinced of everything the author claims. I think he’s ignoring the need to do some real, radical rethinking about what a society needs when it comes to the practical arts, and how the academy often gets in the way of that rethinking, particularly with its reification of “the liberal arts” or whatnot into static categories which because nothing more than meritocratic markers that we oblige people chasing after middle-class (or better) jobs to check off on their (expensive) way. So yes, it’s a defense of the status quo. But the status quo of academia, at least in so far as the last 10 years have taught me, is hardly “left-wing.” On the contrary, for every hoary Marxist in an English department somewhere, you’ll find twenty or thirty others who are completely sold on the vision of making higher education into a more efficiently marketable commodity. The greater tragedy of this piece isn’t that the author isn’t willing to dig deep enough into his own presumptions; it’s that hardly anybody, in the already-outsourced-to-the-hilt academic reality which exists for 90% of the professoriate out there, has the time or energy or inclination to actually articulate those presumptions in the first place anymore.
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“there’s a difference between a Roger Smith firing workers at General Motors and the faculty of an academic department . . .”
“They [administrators] want to pump up the stock price (i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to the next fat post.”
“What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class.”
“More people chasing fewer jobs means that everyone is squeezed for extra productivity, just like at Wal-Mart.”
Etc. I think this sort of mindless left-wing nonsense–obligatory sneers at Roger Smith, the stock market, Wal-Mart etc.–is like the air for most professors, they just don’t notice it.
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Roger Smith objectively sucked at his job.
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The article was very critical of professors. In many cases, they are the bad guys. Taking in graduate students who won’t get jobs so you can teach graduate courses–not good. Not standing up for the rights of adjuncts, or using a particular adjunct for years and when you get a full-time position hiring someone else–immoral. Frankly, that people can do that is terribly disturbing to me. Nothing in the article indicated that professors do not bear moral responsibility for their departments; they sure do. Who else?
And where did the article demand more money from the government? It pointed out that public institutions have been losing funding from their States for the last 30 years; that’s a fact. But is also criticized universities for their misspent money.
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Well, the political climate of the professoriate does change a little once you leave the humanities. (And NSF proposals make you think in terms of marketing jargon, at least a little.)
I have to say, though, equating the state of higher education to the oppression under the Nazis (“First they came for the graduate students, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a graduate student…”) really doesn’t make me want to buy this man’s newsletter, let alone agitate in the streets on his platform. It just seems really, really privileged and ignorant. And those are the polite, grown-up words for what I’m thinking of him.
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“Well, the political climate of the professoriate does change a little once you leave the humanities.”
Well, and there’s the case of the Koch supported professors at Florida State University. Yes, a foundation-funded endowed professor, but this one comes with 1) Koch’s approval for the higher and 2) continued review of the professors’ work.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-hiring-decisions-at-florida-state-university-raises/1168680
I think calls to arms for people to give up their privilege usually fail. Tenured professors are a privileged bunch, and their degree of privilege is increasing as the relative numbers of tenured v contingent faculty decrease in academy. The problem, as they see it, started when the tenured folks (“unions”) allowed the hiring of temporary labor to do the same work that they do (we talk about contingent instructors, but a parallel system exists in research-intensive fields as “soft-money” faculty). Over time, that decreased their influence in the academy (including with the “department”).
I’m not sure I see a way out of the de-professionalization. The time to have made the tough decision was when the department had a chance to hire an inexpensive lecturer (instead of the real hire) so that the tenured faculty salaries could go up.
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Y81,
I’ll grant that I “just didn’t notice,” as you put it, some of what you call “left-wing nonsense”–a reference to Roger Smith (whom I assume you know about the same way the author likely knows about a failed corporate CEO from the 1980s–from the Michael Moore film), a reference to Wal-Mart, a vague gesture at stock prices. So perhaps I’m guilty as charged. Then again, it is interesting to me that you noticed what appears to me to be about 30 words out of a 6000+ word article, and came to the conclusion that it’s all “mindless left-wing nonsense.” Pretty sensitive there, I think.
As for his general analogy of academia to the state of the present economy, in which enormous wealth has been generated for a very small number on the top, relative deprivation has extended to more and more people on the bottom, and the costs of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle have gone up, resulting in its narrowing, can be fairly clearly demonstrated through any number of studies: looking at wages, percentages of wealth, etc. I’m not sure there are even many conservative economists anymore who deny the increased financial stratification and inequality of American life any longer.
More broadly, Lisa is correct: much of what he is railing against can be laid as much at the feet of academics as anyone else. As I said, the man is defending an idealization of the status quo; all sorts of forces have been taking about that ideal for 30 years or more, and that’s a tragedy, but what that calls for is a rethinking of the status quo, rather than reducing the whole problem (which he describes quite well, I think) to an attack on it from the outside. BJ is probably correct that the de-professionalization of the ideal is probably unavoidable by now; too much has been invested in propping up a system with all sorts of flaws. But that doesn’t mean screaming about what is being lost in the meantime, as the original article does, is mindless. On the contrary, it’s necessary–just not sufficient, that’s all.
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“Well, the political climate of the professoriate does change a little once you leave the humanities.”
Hahahahaha!
Oh wait, you’re not kidding? Do you work in a humanities department? I do.
Btw, the latest bug up my butt at work is how many *non*-humanities profs are giving their finals on the last day of class, not a week later, during officially scheduled final exams. I’m starting to feel like a chump for actually staying at the office giving exams till next Thursday. Maybe if I knew more about how corporations really work, I’d be cutting corners too. But no, silly communist me, sitting up there, doing the work I was contracted to do.
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“I’m not sure there are even many conservative economists anymore who deny the increased financial stratification and inequality of American life any longer.”
Let in 20 million of the most miserable of the earth to do all the dirty work of a 1st world country, and inequality is going to result.
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Wendy–I do work in a humanities department, for the moment at least. I’m on the border of humanities and social science, however, so I’ve been in both. But I study people in the sciences. I really do get a sense, at every R1 I’ve been at (and not as one of the tenured elites), that the expectations and attitudes of the professors is a bit different. Not to say that unenlightened jerks don’t exist anywhere, but whether you expect funding from outside, what’s considered normal in terms of adjuncts, etc. does change.
I’m a bit peeved at our administration here right now. Grades are due after graduation–that just seems cruel for students who think they might be done, but waited until the last minute to take the requirement they are now failing. (I’m sympathetic, but they still fail.)
I suppose I could get angry that the days of the senior faculty getting good-paying jobs straight out are done, and that adjuncts are becoming normalized….
But I did not go into this with much in the way of economic expectations. If I don’t get a tenure-track job in the next one or two goes, I’m currently planning on getting out. But how new is this situation? Because I’m also the kid of a prof, and even though he had a TT job when I was a girl growing up, I did not grow up materially wealthy.
Or maybe I’m just living up to the Gen X pessimistic apathetic stereotype, and I should move to Portland to put birds on things.
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As a grad student, I agree that the system as is is depressing, with a handful of super start faculty making hundreds of thousands a year, a small class of respectable tenured professors, and tons of adjuncts at the bottom. In a microcosm, that might pit adjuncts against TT faculty, but in the larger picture, increasing professionalization of the university has meant that money primarily goes towards administration and amenities designed to attract students and alumni donations, e.g. fancy gyms, sports stadiums, landscaping, high tech buildings, etc, at the expense of the professoriate. As a class then, it is worth it for all professors and lecturers to agitate for a higher proportion of spending to go towards professorships (hiring TT faculty) and grad student support, rather than, say, a new conference building for the business school, or multi-million dollar salary for the president. In that sense, saying the eevill tenured professors are behind the crappy adjunct system is like saying that teacher benefits are what bankrupted Wisconsin.
What is so demoralizing about the system is it is the very wealthiest schools who are doing this. It’s one thing for a rural community college to cut on benefits or avoid paying professors decent wages, it’s another thing for Harvard to do it. I say this as a student in the top department in my discipline, with the best placement rate in my field. We fill probably about 80% of TT jobs in top R1 schools in the field, and even our students on the market are complaining about the crappy underhanded tactics at schools to avoid having to invest in professors. E.g, three year visiting prof deals, so that the school can avoid investing in a 401k, which, conveniently, they have to do after 3 years. Or, the below 20% tenure granting rate at top institutions, which allows Ivies and similar to hire top young scholars, get 6 years of work out of them, deny them tenure, and then bring them back once they’ve made a name at another school. Correlated with this is the ridiculous demands for tenure, where basically the sky is the limit. (e.g. Columbia now demands scholars have two books out in addition to articles and teaching to even be considered.) The junior scholars I know are even more overworked and miserable than the grad students. I don’t know if I want to be 40 years old and pulling all-nighters on a regular basis for 6 years. (Of course, this is in part the fault of the department, but it’s also due to university pressure to not grant tenure.) At top institutions there’s a doughnut shape forming, where superstars are secure in their job, promising young scholars get brought in, and then mid level faculty are either denied tenure or, even if granted tenure, are pushed out by the university through other means. My dept. just lost 3 highly respected mid-level tenured faculty due to crappy university policies. The department went to bat for them against the admin, and lost. They did get great jobs at other institutions, but it was a huge blow to our institution. This is an example where the interests of the professoriate, the grad students, and the dept. in general were all aligned, however it was not in the interests of the university to try to keep mid-level faculty when they could instead let them go and get the dept. to hire junior level faculty instead.
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E.g, three year visiting prof deals, so that the school can avoid investing in a 401k, which, conveniently, they have to do after 3 years.
I doubt that visiting prof positions have much to do with the 401k and everything to do with tenure. They don’t mind it so much because a 401k is a known cost, not an indeterminate promise like tenure or a defined pension. At least, I’ve had no trouble getting a 401k from universities, including one school that let me get a match (and keep it) after only a year.
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Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale’s junior faculty situation’s not very new, and if it’s not common knowledge, it should be. It can’t be that old (there’s an emertis here who remembers when Yale’s departments were populated with the best of Yale’s PhDs–but that in and of itself is not necessarily healthy).
I’m not saying I wouldn’t take a job there, but it’s really a postdoc in all but name (unless you’re a rock star, but seriously that’s not something to necessarily bank on). And it’s why my current department could make grabs at new PhDs that Yale’s given offers to.
But I believe that this has been the case for twenty years or more, so I’m not certain it’s the start of the decline of the professoriate. Perhaps–I’d have to ask a colleague who studies that in particular. (And I wonder about MIT and Stanford, which aspire to the same level of eliteness. My understanding is that U of Penn and Cornell both have TT jobs with actual expectations that you’ll be a candidate for tenure, as oppose to a rolling roulette bet on genius.)
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LMC is right about the different climate in the sciences*. At least in the health sciences it is almost impossible to move-up the ladder without taking junior faculty and turning them into grant-getting tenured faculty. You need to get your name last one a bunch of papers, unless you actually do cure cancer at 28 or something. And you need techs, coders, statisticians, and nurses to do the research. They pay as little as possible, but there is outside competition for all of those jobs.
*This is speaking of research, not teaching, which is where the money is at an R1.
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I hadn’t seen lmc’s last comment when I started writing my last. Not that I disagree with it, but my last comment was addressing the one farther up.
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“Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale’s junior faculty situation’s not very new, and if it’s not common knowledge, it should be.”
When I was an undergraduate in the early/mid 90s, I was assigned to read a contemporary academic novel where that was a big plot point. A hero (or heroine?) gets a job at an Ivy League school, but then has to deal with the fact that he or she can’t get tenure at that institution as a junior faculty member. Tenure is for rock stars who have made it big elsewhere.
This year, two graduate students from my husband’s program got tenure track jobs. There was also one 1-year position snagged. This is not a highly-ranked graduate program, but it has its own ecological niche.
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Ditto to lmc and Amy P. When I was an undergrad in the late 70s, it was the general situation at Yale that assistant professors did not get tenure: they were booted out after six years of teaching freshman English while senior superstars from other universities were offered tenure to come to New Haven. What may have changed is that back then, (i) you didn’t have to be an absolute grad school superstar to even get the six-year assistant professorship at Yale and (ii) after the six years at Yale, you could get a tenure-track position (or even tenure) at UT-Austin or BU or whatever.
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MH
I agree that tenure is a big part, but even for visiting profs, the university is required to provide benefits after the third year. As it is, it appears as though these schools (also wealthy private schools) plan on getting the most out of a scholar before having to make much of a commitment.
lmc,
I don’t think it is new, and I do think it is fairly well known inside academic circles (which is why the Ivies have difficulty sustaining highly regarded programs in my discipline, few graduate students want to come in and work with an up and coming professor who is just going to leave), but I would say that it’s indicative of a larger problem, if the wealthiest schools in the nation can’t be bothered to invest in a professoriate, then why should the rest? The 4 people I know who just got TT jobs at Harvard and Columbia view their jobs as 6 year visiting positions, knowing that they have very little likelihood of getting tenure.
I think more generally, though, and that was the main point of my last comment, that the priorities of schools are something that need to be discussed openly. It might be because I am at a school that doesn’t really try to pretend not to be evil, but I think in the long run, screw over your junior and mid-level faculty and grad students, you really hurt your institution, because those are the people who really keep the academics running, provided you care about that beyond your US News & World Report ranking.
Also, repealing the law that forbids grad students at private universities from unionizing might be a step in the right direction.
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but even for visiting profs, the university is required to provide benefits after the third year.
I guess I hadn’t considered the “visiting prof” would include those with no benefits at all. Of course, my other benefits are more expensive than my 401k.
Also, repealing the law that forbids grad students at private universities from unionizing might be a step in the right direction.
What state has that law? I am aware that some states outlaw closed shops across the board, but that doesn’t seem to be what you are talking about.
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MH
The Bush administration decided that graduate students at private universities are not employees, and therefore do not have the right to legally collectively bargain. Grad students at public universities can unionize though.
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I just learned that the college has finally fixed the graduate student health insurance situation. It used to be fake insurance, basically the same as an undergraduate policy. The old insurance wasn’t too bad for individuals, but graduate families used to go on Texas Medicaid, which ought to have been embarrassing to the college (local graduate families tend to be pretty prolific). Under the new regime, graduate students themselves will have medical insurance paid for and can pay half to cover their families. I’m not sure how affordable the family coverage will be, but it’s with Blue Cross Blue Shield, it’s real insurance and it’s less expensive than the old version. The old version didn’t cover major medical expenses, which is the whole point of medical insurance. The improvement came at the behest of the graduate student organization.
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Blue Cross Blue Shield’s pretty good insurance, even as a HMO or PPO.
One problem with unionizing graduate students in a few places I know about are research assistants/RAs. Well, and I suppose more generally the fact that the graduate students can be thought of as three different job groups–those on fellowship, those doing lab work (on outside grants, mostly), and those as teaching assistants/lecturers. For the first two groups, when the money comes from outside of the university, it seems to make unionization technically more difficult and politically a hell of a lot more difficult.
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Amy P,
We have worse health insurance than the neighboring state school, even though they’re broke and we’re fairly wealthy. Families are a huge problem–adding 1 dependent costs almost twice what the out of pocket rate would be for us, and each dependent is increasingly expensive, which is kind of counterintuitive. The informal grad student union got some things improved (e.g. wait times for appointments at the student health center), but our insurance still could use some improvement. This isn’t totally the university’s fault of course, it’s also an insurance company problem. In fact, the university is thinking of self-insuring next year, because no insurance company is offering a competitive bid, apparently.
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