Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
One of my co-contributors, Stephen Trachtenberg, recently posted on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators, then followed it with a post in which he questioned the usefulness of tenure for faculty, at least for those profs he described as “burnt out”:
The academy needs better, more imaginative ways for working with professors who are no longer happy warriors and who are not performing up to potential in the classroom or in research. We must look for creative ways to allow them to reinvent their career opportunities, to transition into new jobs.
He went on to complain that tenured faculty average $80,000 a year.
I couldn’t resist asking him to relate the two posts, and specifically requested that he talk about the movement toward massive insecurity for faculty:
Stephen, I haven’t followed all of your commentary here, but the relationship between your last two posts really begs a question.
On the one hand, you insist on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators.
On the other, you want more power to put the remaining small fraction of tenured faculty out to pasture because they earn $80,000 a year. (Woo-hoo! Shocking largess for folks with a decade of postgraduate preparation. Nurses quite commonly earn more than that. So do a lot of bartenders. Oh, and so do all those tenured administrators.)
What sort of “safety nets” do you have in mind for the majority contingent faculty?
Trachtenberg was gracious enough to reply and he wisely dropped the unpleasant assertion that tenure-stream faculty are overpaid while averaging $80,000 a year —a figure that includes boatloads of women faculty in English earning $50,000 while junior men in business earn $150,000.
Ultimately his remarks didn’t actually contain a response, arguing that the two posts “are apples and oranges and not linked the way you imply.”
I think most faculty would disagree: the desperate situation of the majority contingent faculty and the generous feedbag strapped onto the administrative snout are indeed related. That’s a core tenet of most contemporary budgeting schemes: Reward the administrator who succeeds in “doing more with less.”
Quite inaccurately, Trachtenberg goes on to suggest that the feedbag has been on everyone’s snout:
Institutions of higher education have traditionally been humane places for all constituencies — faculty, students, and staff. Over the past 50 years, schools have expanded benefits for all parties.
“Expanded benefits for all parties”? Over the past 50 years, schools have massively curtailed benefits for faculty and staff through massive outsourcing and permatemping. And they’ve massively expanded the hours worked by undergraduates. Eighty percent of undergrads now work an average 30 hours a week.
Faculty are on freaking food stamps, Stephen. So are graduate students and undergraduates, and the staff who’ve been outsourced to Marriott and other vendors. Administrators haven’t expanded the benefits of the majority academic workforce –- they’ve torn up the academic social contract, poured gasoline on the remnants, and are warming their toes by the fire.
I have more to say in direct response, and in the form of part two of my interview with Cary Nelson, The Academic Working Poor.
