There's something deeply ironic about someone complaining how academics are clueless about class writing something like "Gollleeee, cousin Jim-Bob . . ."

Collective problems require collective solutions. Preach it, Marc!

Seriously, for quality of life, should professors really be looking enviously at high school teachers?

No one, regardless of political, social, economic, or other outlook, is immune from self-deception. T. S. Eliot remarked once that half the evil in the world is caused by people's need to think well of themselves. If it requires hypocrisy, no problem.

The academy is not only not leftist, it isn't even liberal, unless by liberal you mean 19th century liberalism. The "liberal" academy is only "liberal" about abstract political issues. As a workplace, the academy is medieval in structure and attitudes, highly stratified and contemptuous toward work. Scholars who are ready to make ringing statements about political rights, such as free speech on campus, are appallingly silent about the work conditions of contingent faculty (not to mention often rude to academic staff). Low pay, poor work conditions and bad behavior are justified in terms worthy of Gilded Age Social Darwinists.

The author writes: "Of course I've debunked the inanity of the "overproduction of Ph.D.'s" thesis many times before. There is zero such "overproduction," since what has happened is a restructuring of demand."

Checking the reference he provides, I find this statement:

"I also want to offer some caveats: Circumstances differ from field to field, and I willingly acknowledge that my own perspective on academic labor is shaped by my more intimate understanding of working conditions in English. I sometimes make erroneous assumptions on the basis of that more intimate understanding."

So this bloviation is based on one person's opinion about the state of employment in English, and he admits he might even be wrong about that. I guess this is "rhetoric", eh?

One useful quote here, which I regard as a self-reference:
"triumphant crowing of the half-smart, sprinting forward with their cliched faux analysis"

roguerouge---h*ll, no, they should not be looking at high school teachers! My husband is a high school teacher and he routinely puts in 100 hour weeks for no extra pay, for an annual salary of around $30,000 a year (in years when he doesn't get furlough days), and then has to pay extra out of pocket each year for professional development to keep his certification current. He has no job security (the teacher contract protects the school district, not the teacher's job), 1/3 of the kids in his classes have documented disabilities that affect their ability to learn, and because he's a big guy, he's who they call when the little darlings decide they're going to try to stab each other. And while you're thinking, "at least he gets his summers off"---no, no he doesn't, he is getting 7 weeks off this summer and spending most of it doing various types of professional development he doesn't have time to do during the school year. I've been an adjunct, and would do it again (I'm an administrator now), but I would never be a high school teacher!

Here's a thought: maybe ALL teachers and other education personnel should think about unionizing. I can't help but think that many of the problems of higher education are not so terribly different from the problems of education as a whole, and, organized, the education sector would have enormous power.

Thank you, Mr. Bousquet! Like most Chron readers, naturally, your subject here is one I know well from much bitter personal experience from youth to retirement, and up-close personal observation over the decades. Like slavery, child labor, labor generally, and Civil Rights of minorities and women over the country's nasty, brutish, and short life, this is our current little corner and chapter of its unbroken tradition of having to state the obvious about the evils surrounding, abounding, comprising the waters we swim in, until we find our way out of that oil-choked part that's killing us and into nature's fresh currents. Keep stating, brother; no other options...

Roguerouge, all teachers unionize? Great. The two major teachers' unions, among the largest in the country (and aligned with the Teamsters in my home town - nobody busted those picket lines), have done wonders for their profession, haven't they? Look at your husband's working conditions and ask if the union has really done much to change anyone's fortunes since their rise to prominence in the 1960's. If a union that large can't manipulate their own environment, how would an even larger one with, at best, a membership with fragmented purpose, and at worst, a class-tiered one, have any hope of navigating the myriad contractual and individual economic concerns of today's college professorate and their institutions? I can't imagine a more ineffectual bureaucracy. And I'm a liberal - I'm supposed to LOVE this idea...

rbg

Touche, nordic expat, my bad. But swing and a miss, schultzjc: you'll have to do a lot better than that!

Two ways that faculty could begin to rethink their labor conditions:

1) Question the kinds of contracts we're asked to sign when publishing in academic journals and academic presses. (For an analysis of those contracts see Ted Striphas' essay "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (March 2010).

2) Question why institutions do not have any other alternative hiring practices that address quality of life issues other than the spousal hire. Why not create a petitioning process akin to the spousal hire that takes into consideration other aspects of a candidate or employee's personal life, such as the need to live in a certain part of the country in order to be closer to aging parents?

Many tenured faculty members have been more than complicit. They have been active perpetrators in the exploitation of non-tenured faculty and the debasement of the profession. They often have, as tenured faculty, managerial authorities that allow them to structure the positions of non-tenured faculty. In exercising this authority, it is not uncommon for faculty members to denude contingents of all academic freedoms and to put them in positions of extreme insecurity. Their reasons for this have nothing to do with attachment to a political/economic philosophy such as neo-liberalism. Rather, they have power and they abuse power because they believe it serves their interests and because the system does not hold them accountable. The end result is a profession that is suffering a deep moral crisis that undercuts its ability to act as an independent, learned voice of conscience for the rest of society.

So many of the problems complained of, if not all, are created by faculty themselves. Intolerable work conditions for any faculty--who sets up the standards, the reviews, the hoops and hurdles? Senior faculty, swaddled in their own self-security. Senior faculty or groups of faculty, who make the rules for how the younger must be judged, and make the assignments for departmental offerings, can really solve many of these issues, if they really want to. Instead, too many of them act like frat boys whose main joy in life is to haze the pledges. "How I hated being hazed and how I am shamed for volunteering for it and tolerating it, but I'll have my revenge on the pledges when I'm an active." Doesn't this look like too many faculty? Really, if you take away the tenure track and the institutionalized torment, you can solve much of this yourselves. If no one with scholarly credentials would sign up for such a job, then the colleges and universities will have to change other aspects of the job to entice them. Some market aspects really do apply. In part, at least, it's because the suckers keep lining up for the jobs that the jobs don't have to change. When all the smarties find something more rewarding to do with themeselves, the work conditions will have to change. Vote with your feet! Make them beg to take you back! Go to those jobs where you could make so much more money! Leave the torment behind!

Yes, eudaimon, well put. I'd only add that in my observation that the kind of active complicity in academic-freedom violations that you describe is perhaps more often motivated not by direct self-interest but by commitment to a value related to their academic field of study, sense of a discipline, etc: "I'm not going to let these people snuff out the light of Continental philosophy!" or whatever.

That is not to excuse them, of course: attachment to culture is pervasively one of the commonest motivations for human violence, from soccer thuggery and ruining careers, to war and even genocide.

No dog in this fight, i.e., just watching the discussion without taking sides, but...

I thought #5 rather caught out Prof. Bousquet and that "But swing and a miss, schultzjc: you'll have to do a lot better than that!" in #9 was about as much a rebuttal as, "So's yer old man!" Can Prof. Bousquet do better?

The tenure system is outmoded, outdated, and destructive to the profession. It creates a system wherein faculty feel that they have to "stay put" even if they are in unhealthy, abusive situations, simply because there is no where to go, because EVERYONE is in the same boat. I have had many friends who left the profession (from senior, tenured positions) because they could not longer take the abuse they had to endure from their "colleagues" (NOTE: NOT from the administration -- from the other faculty in their departments!). I am not a great believer in the power of the "market" in all things (like oil drilling, for example), but I believe the academic world would be a much happier place if we abolished tenure and relied on a faculty union system to monitor workplace and fairness issues. (And, yes, I've worked on a union campus...)

My discipline may well be the most leftist of the social sciences. We talk a lot about power and priviledge, and our solidarity with the poor, etc. etc. Recently, the professional organization sent around a survey asking members to evaluate the website and the journals. We were asked to what factors influenced our evaluations of the association's journals, and one of the choices was "Fair labor practices." Yet, my discipline is filled with un- and under- employed PhDs, and as the general labor market continues to falter, non academic jobs are becoming increasingly scarce.

Why is my discipline's major professional association so concerned with fair labor practices among the organizations that publish our journals, but doesn't give a shit about the employment situation among it's own folk? Or perhaps, gives only lip service?

I think the problem is arguably not leftism vs. liberalism, but entitlement, and replacing one version of it with another won't necessarily help. I see many senior faculty as feeling entitled to "be allowed to focus on their research". And I think that they excuse this because as liberals they believe that education is the path to salvation- and as the most educated they are clearly morally superior.

Leftism might in theory replace this with a duty to the job... but would it do so in practice? The sorry state of the communist world suggests that the entitlement mentality kicks in there too. "I'm entitled to a paycheck because I'm serving society... never mind how well I do it."

Ultimately political ideologies have to take second place to personal commitments to one's colleagues and students. I'm delighted to be joining a department where the culture is that senior faculty take on the service courses, while junior faculty teach subjects in their discipline that give them more time to get tenure. Maybe there are shades of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence there, but more of that kind of an attitude would go a long way towards reducing academic entitlement.

How about having academia join the rest of the world? Eliminate tenure completely, and replace it with contracts. Don't give me the "acacemic freedom" complaint...wish there was enough energy going into teaching to have to worry about that,but the reality is in most situations "academic freedom" translates into "I want to do (or not do) whatever I want whenever I want (or don't want) to".

A national study found that 46.1% of faculty are politically moderate ("slightly liberal," "middle-of-the-road," or "slightly conservative") compared to 44.1% who say they are "liberal" (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Engross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf). The small group who consider themselves to be Marxists and activists are in the oldest age range, so it's possible that one person's social network of faculty members could tilt toward the "tenured radical" type. But over time, during the decades in which academic labor has been restructured, the political shift has been toward the center.

I think it is true that most tenure-track and tenured faculty don't know what modern college-degree-level non-academic jobs are like in terms of autonomy, hierarchies, and stability--and thus believe that no matter how bad things get in academia, they are still better than elsewhere. Many have worked in non-academic jobs at some point in their life, but generally not in jobs comparable in income and prestige to their academic jobs. Academics seem to think of academia as more moral than the rest of the work world. They believe that they work in a meritocracy, particularly if they have been given tenure.

Given these beliefs, it is not surprising that tenure-track and tenured faculty would fail to recognize the contingent-faculty problem as their problem, too: it might be in the interest of their department, university, and discipline to do so, but it is probably against their immediate personal economic interest--and perhaps their psychological interest as well. If contingent faculty were better-paid, what would that mean for the salaries and raises of tenure-track and tenured faculty? If salaries come from one department or college faculty-salary pool, then lower salaries for the lower tier give higher salaries to the higher tier. That thought produces intense discomfort among TT/T faculty. How can it not? It's personal. It is too difficult to believe simultaneously that the work value they produce will be rewarded, that academic workplaces are fair, and that the work value contingent faculty produce will not be similarly rewarded. To make the thoughts fit together, they reduce the value of contingent-faculty labor. Giving contingent faculty more job stability, administrative support, respect, role in curriculum development, and professional development would make it more difficult to maintain that boundary between deserving and undeserving.

In many unproductive threads about adjunct and contingent faculty in the CHE forums, individualistic market-oriented advice has been the dominant message: if these are bad jobs, stop working in them; or publish your way out of that job and get a tenure-track (i.e., "real") job; or "all the contingent faculty I know don't need benefits," or "you're lucky to have that job at all." Little concern is given to the ways in which demands on tenure-track faculty have intensified as there are fewer of them; institutional needs such as supporting people who are good at teaching and who want only to teach, as if quality of instruction were not a priority (and maybe it is a luxury rather than a necessity at most colleges and universities); the benefits to the institution of worker stability; the ways in which student outcomes in advising and retention are reduced by lack of support for and integration of a large number of faculty; how not supporting research or disciplinary involvement by the people who teach most undergraduates diminishes the public's understanding of and support for universities' research missions; how academic freedom is becoming an artifact available only to a small and shrinking corps of tenured faculty; how faculty governance is fading into myth; how customer satisfaction becomes ever more important when job security is low. (And the intersection of contingent jobs and issues of gender equity? Shhh.)

The embededness of these ideas about "fair inequality" makes me think that tenure-track and tenured faculty will not take on this problem. On my campus, I hear more about getting rid of contingent jobs than improving them. At this point, the level of full-time faculty nationally who are non-tenure track is about 35%, about the same, I think, as the ratio of "just in time" contingent, temporary, or contract workers in the total U.S. labor force. Contingent academic labor seems to be here to stay, but thinking of the transformation as temporary allows people to avoid dealing with its problems.

To get out of the current definition of the situation as either "there is no problem" or "there is a problem, and it's the fault of the people who take those jobs," pressure will have to be applied from some direction other than faculty, such as administrative response to accreditors, student and parent demand, or rankings. Faculty have had no success holding back the invasive growth of administration, so I don't see how they could fight for increased contingent-faculty salaries to come from that area. They can't be expected to give up any of their own salary and benefits and the boundary-settting that gives them comfort. The moral pleasure of doing the right thing for students, the discipline, the department and university, or coworkers can not outweigh personal, immediate economic benefit. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so.

One thing that is clear is that accurate data would be helpful across the board. Academics and potential academics and graduates of all stripes would benefit from an understanding of actual and projected supply-demand imbalances. Generally, these are more available than discussed. These though are absolutely critical, because supply-demand as much as collective action or inaction determines wages and relative workforce power vis-a-vis management/administration.

Broader knowledge of the non-academic workplace might aid faculty in accomplishing more "liberal" outcomes, for its issues are often the same. Portability of tenure, as of benefits, could benefit mobility, and, by freeing more to move to the highest bidder, upon wages as well. But doesn't this already exist? And many of the behaviors ascribed to the tenured Obama supporting faculty of English and liberal arts departments would never be tolerated by the most conservative Bush voter in corporate management!

Broader knowledge of current events might also help. There are reasons that unionization is on the decline nearly everywhere except in government service: disservice to membership combined with public dismay. After months working without a contract, the unionized teachers of Grosse Pointe, Michiganhave finally signed their new contract. The holdup? They sought wage increases and to avoid copays... in the metro area with among the highest unemployment in the country. The cost of this solidarity? Not secure employment but dozens of teachers separated every year... because, just as in higher education, it is the tenure faculty that "matter." (By the way, their average salary is already over $85,000.)

Act collectively? When has that ever happened among university faculty unviersity wide or even department wide. On balance, college fauclty are badly paid and as pointed out in the article, forced to live in places they wish they didn't and often bring along families/spouses who cannot get jobs and are equally miserable living in a place they never through they'd live. The faculty cannot change jobs -- they have tenure, and the very few advertised jobs that exist are for the assistant level. They are stuck in their jobs. Their partners and spouses are often worn down as the faculty member makes little $ for the family. The lack of $ and living often in the middle of nowhere is a recipe for problems in a marriage. I am a faculty spouse and I am deeply resentful of my husband's so-called job. he's a full professor, published a couple of books (well received), working at a state institution in a rural area with no possible way of switching jobs or making a better living. I am very lucky to have work -- I work full time -- but most spouses do essentially nothing as there are very few jobs. I merely lucked out.
Before we moved here I worked in cities in for-profit industy. Lots of problems here of course. But people seemed, well, happier. People who work at universities are so miserable, I daresay they are the most unappy people I've ever met. And it takes everything I've got not to become one of them. Colleges are filled with faculty who feel underappreciated, undervalued, and underpaid -- all of which are basically true. Because of this, they are divided, each working to make the best deal for him or herself regardless of the repurcussions for others... MOst people cannot get past their own situation to think about others'.