When I started blogging ten years, some of the problems in higher ed — the abuse of adjunct labor, the over production of graduate students, the rising cost of tuition — were percolating in the back recesses of the academic blogosphere. Now, they are front page issues. And a few tenured professors are getting defensive.
There are growing calls for increasing the salaries and benefits for contingent faculty and for reducing the number of PhDs in light of the bad job market.
In Inside Higher Ed this morning, one writer says that graduate programs should not voluntarily shrink their programs, because it would cut back on the need for tenured faculty.
When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of graduate programs, which means, willy-nilly, that you decrease tenured faculty lines (the demand side) because they are the folks teaching in grad programs. Administrators would be happy to shrink our programs and eliminate some tenured lines through attrition and retirement because new, cheaper temp hires can easily fill in to teach the few undergraduate lower-division classes that some tenured faculty teach.
The gurus of supply and demand would like nothing better than for us graduate faculty to do our own regulating by cutting down of our own accord on producing so many new highly educated people schooled in the legacies of critique and dissent. We then serve the wishes of those seeking more power to hire and fire at will the most vulnerable among us who have no protections under a gutted system of tenure and diminished academic freedom. The system can play itself out under the contraction model, then, as a vicious cycle of reducing supply, which reduces demand for tenured faculty (while increasing the non-tenure-track share of the faculty), which calls for further reducing of supply. To believe that contracting the size of graduate programs can, in and of itself, improve the situation is a misattribution of cause and effect: The real cause of the job misery is the agenda for privatization and defunding public expenditures orchestrated by the global economic system that has been producing misery and suffering for millions of lives around the world as socioeconomic inequalities continue to magnify.
It’s a plot. A plot, I tell you!
There is plenty of demand for tenured faculty. The demand is in those intro class that have been farmed out to adjunct teachers. If graduate programs are cut, then those faculty will no longer teach specialized seminars to highly motivated students and instead teach the basics to large numbers of surly undergraduates who are still hungover from last night’s keg party. They really don’t want to do that.
I sympathize, but I think that honesty is a good policy, instead of hiding behind opaque critiques of capitalism.
Apt. 11d 
Maybe if they taught the undergrads would start taking an interest and actually get inspired by the subject and major in art history or something…I really hate this attitude which pervades all of academia. And I work in it. And everyone is always complaining about doing stuff that is THEIR JOB.
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This is another of those increasing common situations where I find myself in near-total agreement with the author’s basic critical and theoretical perspective, and yet totally unable to accept the author’s conclusions, because they are, theoretically solid or not, completely bonkers.
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Where’s the Like button when you really need one?
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It’s articles like that guy’s that remind me, in the midst of agonizing through grading the papers of students who can barely string words together, that the great privilege of my job is the opportunity to bring a love of language and literature and argumentation to people who don’t think it’s very important. Tomorrow I will get to teach Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” to a bunch of business majors who probably think they could not care less about it, but during the two hours I teach it, at least a few will start to become transformed by the story and the ideas Walker raises. At this point in my career, you could not pay me enough to take a job that involves teaching grad students who already love literature.
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Upton Sinclair, he said: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ This guy is nucking futz, that’s my view. The only thing he offers which seems like some sort of justification for the system which supports him in his nice life, while immiserating pupal grad students who later emerge as poverty-stricken adjunct butterflies is: “…cutting down of our own accord on producing so many new highly educated people schooled in the legacies of critique and dissent.”
So, having a lot of embittered PhDs with their noses pressed against the academic windows, who will never get the jobs for which they have trained, but who are ‘schooled in the legacies of critique and dissent’ is worth blowing their best years for marriage and child-bearing and establishing themselves in careers? I’m with Upton Sinclair on this.
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If your basic theoretical perspective is leading to conclusions which are completely bonkers, then your basic theoretical perspective should be changed (unless you are having fun, of course).
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Laura, discussions about academic discontent “percolating in the back recesses of the academic blogosphere” were what drew me to blogs, including yours, a decade ago, and I’ll admit I find it disorienting to see issues that were obvious in 2003 finally getting some attention, not only in a new wave of angry and heart-wrenching blogs but also in the major media. Do you think we’re reaching a turning point, or is this just the latest in what will necessarily be a series of slowly building waves of discontent? (I can’t decide.)
Dave S. raises an important point, one I don’t think many people embedded in academia quite understand: The current system is embittering people by the tens of thousands, not without consequence. When those disillusioned grad students go out into the wider world in whatever new field offers them refuge, their experiences will affect how they raise their kids, where they spend and donate their money, what they tell colleagues and friends about higher education, and perhaps even how they vote. I’m having a hard time thinking of any other field that so efficiently produces more potential enemies than allies.
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“Do you think we’re reaching a turning point, or is this just the latest in what will necessarily be a series of slowly building waves of discontent? (I can’t decide.)”
I’m not sure. It is disorienting as an observer, for sure. I think that there are going to be major changes in the next decade or so. Because academia refuses to reform itself, change is going to be rough with some real losses of some of the great things about the American university system.
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His basic self-interest leads him to his bonkers conclusion, ie “destroying people’s lives is okay because it means I can keep my job.” His theoretical perspective is the means for justifying stupidity. Probably any theoretical perspective could be used for that purpose.
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This is completely inconsistent with my experience in a very large undergrad/moderate to large grad major. All faculty teach both grad and undergrad classes, perhaps 75% undergrad.Reducing the #of grad students might change that ratio a bit but it certainly would not eliminate the need for t-t faculty
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When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of graduate programs, which means, willy-nilly, that you decrease tenured faculty lines (the demand side) because they are the folks teaching in grad programs.
Hasn’t he transposed supply and demand? After all, it’s the graduate students who are paying (tuition, poorly-paid labor for years, loss of time on the job market) to receive an education which should prepare them for a position as a tenure track professor. The graduate school faculty supply access to the education their students demand.
Graduate degrees provide entrance to the tenure track, however they’re massively overpriced, to the extent that they’re akin to buying a lottery ticket.
I do wonder what would happen, were universities required to inform applicants (and their parents), front and center, how many of their classes would be taught by real, live, tenure-track professors. “We outsource teaching to poorly paid adjunct faculty and graduate students” is not prominently featured on any college’s website or promotional material, to my knowledge.
A system which requires people to pay more for less cannot last.
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A system which requires people to pay more for less cannot last.
Comcast seems to be doing fine.
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(Sorry, I’m congenitally too serious.)
In many towns in our state, Comcast is the only source for cable. It’s a local monopoly. Colleges have competitors. University graduate programs have competitors.
Should a nonprofit be held to moral standards in behavior, such as not impoverishing its graduates?
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I wasn’t that serious.
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