Marc Bousquet and I have been having a recent exchange of memos. To gain the full context, please see earlier postings.
Experience has shown me that the world is full of inequities, variables, and marketplace conditions. Life is contingent. Adults understand that. They also understand that choices have consequences. A lot of lawyers hate their work but like the money. They make their beds.
In one of my early contributions to this page I remarked that on many campuses football and basketball coaches make more than French professors — a situation that appears to be out of line with traditional academic values. Perhaps there are fewer football coaches in the marketplace; perhaps certain schools place a higher value on football than they do on French. Perhaps at some colleges more students attend football games than enroll in French class. I doubt, however, that it is an arbitrary allocation of resources.
About that we do not disagree — though Mr. Bousquet’s characterization that the division is strictly male vs. female I will quarrel about. Gender equity is far easier to address than it is to homogenize, making compensation uniform, across disciplines — even within a single college. That is to say, within the arts and sciences, science faculty — chemistry, biology, physics — tend to earn more than those in the humanities — in great measure because of the marketplace. A woman neuroscience professor can find employment elsewhere much more readily than can a male professor of poetry and will be paid accordingly. Does that mean one is valued more highly than the other? Perhaps but one must ask by whom.
Pay and social necessity in our country have little symmetry. We don’t need Al Shanker to remind us that high school teachers have a far greater teaching load than do full-time university faculty, and work under far more difficult conditions, yet we financially reward the faculty with greater remuneration. And as for life’s necessities, I’m all in favor of raising the pay for members of the fire department and garbage men as a first priority. A memorial word here for John L. Lewis and a hoorah for the mineworkers union.
I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy. Self-characterizing his condition as one with a feedbag around his neck does make me wonder if it is money alone that drives his complaint. Surely so articulate a man could do many things. I disliked being a lawyer so I found an alternative career.
Faculty are not all saints; nor are administrators all devils. Leaders of the faculty senate do not come into the room wearing halos on their heads nor do deans carry pointed lances ready for the kill. That version of the academy I leave to the story books. Campuses are communities. Rhetoric prevents useful ideas from being discussed. If the conversation is going to advance the needs of everyone, then those sitting around the table must maintain a level of mutual respect that allows points of view to be heard, parsed, reviewed, represented, agreed upon, and then put into action. The war of words and olde tyme arguments grows tiresome and thin.
Faculty, being human, experience mid-life crisis like other people and it is not anti-tenure to acknowledge that and ask if there might not be a way to assist those in pain. It is not all about the money. Meet my friends the heart surgeon and his wife the litigator and they will tell you that making pots of money doesn’t make the daily grind feel less like work. Work is work even when you love it, which is why the Lord invented the Sabbath.
