By Robert A. Weisbuch

Every spring I seem to suffer a bout of March Madness and become rhetorically confrontational. Frustrated by the long winter of tact required of my presidential position at Drew University, I rush off the campus, a bull from the china shop, into the academic wilds. Thus freed, I howl. And others howl back.

Two years ago, it was at a friendly and polite meeting of trustees at another institution on whose board I sit. "I don't care how much you bluster at your own university," a fellow trustee complained after my outburst. "Don't do it with our staff." But, I wanted to explain, this is my only chance. I can't bluster at my home institution. There, it's the opposite of the family situation, where you can be at your worst among loved ones. But when I travel off campus, I'm like Vivien Leigh's Blanche; I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Last March I greatly expanded my circle of aggression at a meeting of humanities folk gathered by the fine National Humanities Alliance in Washington to lobby Congress for our cause. On a panel intended to advise our fellows on how to advocate for the public efficacy of the humanities, I quickly gave my version of that and then asked why we don't practice our own rhetoric, why we continue to prepare students for the narrowest academic career that will never happen for most of them. As a colleague noted, it's a Ponzi scheme worthy of Monsieur Madoff. We stand in our tweeds, enticing students to emulate this lovely academic life, knowing (or not knowing, for the data get so obscured) that very few of them will achieve that role.

We've been in an economic depression for nearly 40 years, I thundered, and it is your fault. The "you," in this instance, were representatives of those guilds that represent the humanities, and they did not like to hear this. My main point was to say that people trained in the humanities are critically needed in every sector of society, including elementary and secondary education, government, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit companies. A closed economy is a bad economy, and if we think of the doctorate as developing highly versatile skills, the humanities can powerfully inform every segment of society. But it was hard for the people in that room to recover from my insult and hear the positive aspect of my message.

Then I praised and quoted Thomas H. Benton's "Just Don't Go" essays from these very pages, and that was it. The unease was palpable, and in the question period a representative of the Modern Language Association bared rhetorical fangs. I was a self-satisfied, self-aggrandizing administrator in her view (I had mentioned that Drew was replacing two very large and underresourced doctoral programs with a small history-and-culture program, fully financed and capable of preparing students for a spectrum of careers, academic and otherwise). My statistics were misleading, she said.

"In fact, we promote data and do not run from it," she argued. The organization's data, she said, showed that 60 percent of all Ph.D.'s in English achieve tenure-track positions within three years of graduation.

Does anyone really believe that figure?

Still, one lie deserves another. I have failed to note that I am a cowardly bull, and I immediately sought for peace. "I'm not here to blame," I lied, "but to advocate for a solution." Actually I was there to do both, but I had suddenly reverted to my presidential cause-no-harm mode, Ferdinand the BSer.

The truth, of course, is that we are all to blame, but none of us have been intentionally crass. The associations haven't even attempted to grapple with the problem of how to fit too many Ph.D.'s into too few academic jobs (or how to help those Ph.D.'s understand their own possibilities beyond academe), but that is largely because we grant our associations little power. We encourage them to condemn American foreign policy but not our own academic policies. We grant them low authority, and they live down to it.

As for the administrators, we haven't tried to solve the problem, either. Just do the math. The average English department in 1960 had 10 faculty members, teaching three courses apiece every semester, with one member on sabbatical in any given term. Thus 27 courses. Today that same department of 10 has one professor on sabbatical and another on research leave, and the teaching responsibility for the remaining faculty members is two courses, which adds up to 16. Who is teaching the other 11 courses? Why, low-paid adjuncts, but they cost something, and not a single penny has come into the system. So the dean must gobble up another good position, leaving only nine faculty members.

And if it is the fault of those tenured and tenure-track professors, well, they don't know it. They have just been operating on normal self-interest, and no one has told them that, counter to the superficial expectation, the fewer courses they teach, the fewer good jobs there will be.

The answer to all of this is to make the doctorate a degree that leads its recipients beyond the usual professorial cloning, with the department making contact with all the social sectors in search of potential jobs for its graduates, not just with its top 12 peer institutions. But where is the agency to push us in that direction? That was the real challenge I wanted to make, although I now note I said nothing of the sort. Instead, I ran for rhetorical cover—Mike Tyson one moment, Neville Chamberlain the next.

I did manage to say that I thought the MLA data tended to obfuscate the harsh reality, that they exemplified an institutionalized coverup. But it was only later that I realized how bizarre the representative's protest seemed. Her point, apparently, was that if a little over half of all people—after perhaps eight to 10 years of postbaccalaureate study and three more years of job-searching while semi-starving—attain steady academic work, somewhere, anywhere, then everything is just peachy. "Where is Charles Dickens when we need him?," I now ask boldly from the fortress of my study.

"Bobby," my wife laughed as I recounted the incident that evening, "didn't you learn in fourth grade to know your audience?" She added, with a particular mode of affectionate address reserved for the impaired, "Don't be a flamethrower if you can't handle the heat."

"Oh, hush," I didn't say, for marriage is more like Drew than like the wild pampas of public controversy.

What I do say is this. While students use spring break to journey to Florida and take off their clothes, my break consists of going anywhere and taking off just my gloves. Our similarity is in making fools of ourselves.

Stay tuned for this year's sequel, for March is upon us. "The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth," wrote Alexander Pope, and I'm ready to rumble. Further, let me make this offer: If you are planning a conference for March 2011 and fear that it might become dull because of too much of a consensus, I am at your service. Just address your invitation: President, Drew University, Under His Desk, Mead Hall, Madison, N.J.

Robert A. Weisbuch is president of Drew University and a former president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is chronicling his experiences as a first-time university president.