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.