About the Author

Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.

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Recent Posts

Democratic Elitism | Comment [13]

NEH in Obamaland | Comment [34]

Resizing and Reshaping | Comment [2]

Academic Publishing in the Humanities | Comment [15]

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Featured Articles By the Author

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The Small Paycheck and History Teaching

In this week’s Chronicle Review section, two of my friends call attention to a serious problem. Tony Grafton is one of the most distinguished humanists in the Western world and a colleague in the Princeton history department. Tony was for three years the elected officer in charge of the Professional Division of the American Historical Association. Rob Townsend administers the AHA’s office of research and publication, and he is just finishing a Ph.D. in history at GMU. He is the numbers guru of the AHA, and his periodic reports in the AHA’s Perspectives on the statistical state of the history profession are authoritative. These are people to reckon with.

Grafton and Townsend ask us to think more systemically about the plight of junior faculty in history in “Historians’ Rocky Job Market,” but I suspect that what they fear for historians is true for most young humanities professors. They contrast the short and brutal careers of today’s beginning history professors with the long and lucky careers of my generation, that is, those of us who received our degrees in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Competition for faculty was so intense in that era of institutional expansion that newly-minted history Ph.D.‘s could expect to find tenure-track jobs right out of the box. But as the supply of Ph.D.‘s expanded dramatically (there were 200 graduate students in the University of Wisconsin history department when I arrived as an assistant professor in 1965), supply soon exceeded demand.

The infamous job crunch of those years forced many new historians either into nonteaching jobs in libraries or public history, or out of the profession altogether. But the market for history professors stabilized (albeit at a lower level) in the 1980s, only to come unstuck again in the 1990s.

The result, as Grafton and Townsend explain, was to reintroduce what they call a “threshold” stage into postdoctorate history teaching careers — postdocs, lectureships, visiting professorships, and a variety of adjunct positions. None of these positions were likely to lead to tenure at the institutions where they were held, though some of their incumbents escaped to institutions where they found permanent employment. But most did not, and do not, so that we now have a large and growing adjunct population, struggling to earn a living and to do scholarship, essentially unconnected to any institutional home.

That is bad enough, but Grafton and Townsend also argue that the lucky few who become tenured tend to be locked into low pay scales due to the buyers’ market in which they were hired in the 1990s and early 2000s. These are men and women for whom even regular incremental raises do little to bring their salaries up to respectable levels. History salaries today are well below the average for all disciplines.

Alert observers of the profession (and certainly Rob Townsend’s Perspectives readers) know something of all this. But Grafton and Townsend contextualize the problem for us, and challenge senior history faculty to wake up and pay attention to the plight of their juniors.

Quite right, I say. And, to repeat myself, I think tenured faculty in other humanities fields ought to take note, for it would surprise me if their juniors were doing any better than the historians.

Comments

1. And then there are those PhD’s who are completely unemployed and would be glad to be on the low end of the pay scale. A few more months and I may be headed for a homeless shelter.

   — Unemployed · Jul 8, 05:01 PM · #

2. With all due respect, Stan, the issue isn’t an “oversupply,” it’s casualization: the conversion of work that used to be tenurable.

   If all the work that “your generation” was hired to do tenurably was still done by tenured faculty, there wouldn’t be an “oversupply.”

   And that’s an analysis that doesn’t let “your generation” off the hook the same way that your version does. Because if what’s happened is not market forces beyond one’s control but instead the intentional re-structuring of the job while “your generation” has been doing administrative work, opening graduate programs that provide cheap labor, etc, then y’all might bear some collective responsibility beyond hand-wringing about “the job market.”

   Even if you want to take the view of a labor economist, Stan: it ain’t a a “market in tenure track jobs” when theoverwhelming majority of work is done by faculty serving contingently, graduate students, nonfaculty, and even undergraduate workers. It’s a market in contingent work, and it’s pretty shitty out there.

   Sorry to be a little crabby. But I’ve been telling this story since the early 1990s. Every grad student and faculty member serving contingently gets it. But I get tired of repeating it to folks—like yourself—who ought to have figured this out a long time ago, and who could make a difference if you took on casualization and stopped hand-wringing about convenient bogeymen like market forces supposedly beyond anyone’s control.

   — Marc Bousquet · Jul 8, 05:21 PM · #

3. Economic surplus, economic surplus, economic surplus.
   Society values a service at a demand level of x.
   We providers expect it to be valued at 5x.
   Market: 1, Academix: 0.
   How ‘bout them Cubs (Sox) (Indians) (Padres) (Devil
   Rays) or other highly valued service provider?

   — Tnachtrab · Jul 8, 11:42 PM · #

4. Tnachtrab, who is society? The students and their parents who pay more and more for higher education each year? Or, the corporate administrators and trustees who choose to exploit academics and bust unions? Just as in America in general the corporate elite have used their riches to wage class warfare. The inequality of wealth distribution in the U.S. isn’t greater than during the Gilded Age for no reason. You can shrug your shoulders at injustice, but you can’t blame it on an impersonal “society”.

   — Unemployed Academic · Jul 9, 03:55 AM · #

5. As a young historian now bracing for his fourth year of junior faculty life, I have come to the conclusion that it is professionally irresponsible in these conditions to encourage young people to pursue academic careers. I have stopped doing so, but have found that I needn’t really worry about it any more. The brightest of my Y-generation undergrads have absolutely no interest in becoming educators, leading me to wonder about the qualitiative effect of low salaries on the professoriat, to say nothing of primary and secondary school teachers. I fear growing old in an academic field and wider profession poulated increasingly by “less gifted” younger scholars whose paths were clear because their brighter classmates eschewed academia and went on to other more rewarding careers.

   My own position is relatively good compared to many I know of, but I have found that even “relatively good” is not satisfying enough to make me want to do this for the rest of my life.

   If I don’t see what Grafton and Townsend believe to be an unlikely improvement in my situation, I have no problem sitting for the LSAT while I’m still credibly young enough. I’ll work harder as a lawyer, but I’ll make a much better salary and will actually be able to choose where I live and work rather than depend on a dysfunctional hiring system that reduces many of our most promising young humanists to snivelling bores whose happiness depends on scoring some pathetic 45K job.

   To me the transition would be far preferable to spending a long, dull career resenting my lot in life and having all of the other increasingly common problems. I have way too many colleagues in their 50s who can barely afford to send their own children to college to look at it in any other way.

   To contextualize within current generational sensibilities, academia is beginning to look a lot like the thing I did before I turned 30 and did something responsible with my life.

   — bored with academia · Jul 9, 06:04 AM · #

6. “hiring system that reduces many of our most promising young humanists to snivelling bores whose happiness depends on scoring some pathetic 45K job.”

   Well, “bored with academia” has a selfish perspective, but it’s helpful.

   The casualization of academic work has affected the tenure stream in a variety of important ways. It has placed steady wage pressure on the tenure stream: when professional leaders don’t object to the work being done by students, staff, and contingent faculty for 1/4 of the cost, wages are radically depressed even for those who win the lottery of the “pathetic 45k job.”

   It also affects the talent pool—only persons with the minimum intellectual attainments and a secondary source of income can contemplate the long haul toward tenure—now typically 20 years: 10 years of doctoral study, 3-7 years of contingency (some overlapping with study), 7 years on the track. All to earn maybe 10 or 15 thousand more, at many intellectually-modest schools with spiffy campuses.

   And it strongly shapes the psychology of those who enter and persist. As the rather disappointing selfishness of “bored,” and the very inadequate NYT article on “generational change” suggests.

   — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 06:43 AM · #

7. tnachtrab…There’s no labor surplus. The number of folks with PhDs in relation to the work that persons with PhDs used to do is smaller than it has been in most of our lifetimes.

   There is however a rigging of the demand side by management, which has laid waste to academic professionalism by substituting nontenurable labor across the board over three decades.

   If academic labor were supplied by Halliburton, Dick Cheney would be whining for regulation so the market could “run properly.”

   The stockholder class may be willing to pay you and neoclassical (“autistic”) economists rather well for making complexity and injustice seem simple and right.

   But actual intellectuals can and should do better.

   — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 06:51 AM · #

8. There are many issues contributing to the current situation. Some that should receive a little more attention include the fact that the academy no longer values history the way that it once did. A generation ago undergraduates were required to take two semesters of western civ and two semesters of American history. Now that it is frequently argued that the world’s problems are caused by America and that the west’s history is one of oppression, we stopped requiring those history courses. There appears to be more interest in ‘multicultural’ history courses than in those that were the staples of History departments. With curricular ‘choice’ now being a prime value and fewer and fewer requirements in place, administrators require a greater degree of flexibility to plug holes and move money around as student decisionmaking fluctuates. I am not letting anyone off the hook here. Many small ‘liberal arts’ colleges now continue their existence with almost no faculty, the bulk of the courses being taught by adjuncts and the bulk of the budget being provided by ‘continuing ed’ courses and part-time cash cow programs. The academy has changed. Part of it is the result of corporatization, but part of it is the result of changing academic values. These ‘values’ have not helped History departments.

   — Outside observer · Jul 9, 07:12 AM · #

9. We adjuncts are simply PROFIT MULES. There is no reason in the world for our shameful second-tier status at colleges and universities constantly building new administration lounges, athletic and “arts” facilities (excluding Language Arts) and other things to impress freshmen parents—-we enrich these schools in every way and get absolutely nothing (except insults) in return. Would I recommend that students become teachers/professors? What for? A life of poverty?

   — Dr Jack Dempsey · Jul 9, 07:15 AM · #

10. I just finished reading “The Last Professors”, an excellent book on the problem of contingent labor in academia as well as the degrading of non-contingent jobs. I have plans to read Marc Bousquet and Joe Berry’s books next. It astonishes me that despite the efforts of some adjuncts to form trade unions to fight for their interests, there is such a low level of resistance. I speak with some knowledge about this since I know a number of adjuncts in the NY area. No matter how unhappy they are with their situation, collective action is the last thing they think of to remedy it. That, of course, is a function of operating in a field that is characterized by individualistic competition. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, they will hang separately unless they find a way to struggle together.

    — Louis Proyect · Jul 9, 07:35 AM · #

11. Perhaps if students, parents, legislators, administrators, and colleagues in other departments viewed more of us as doing more scholarly work rather than polemic work driven by our personal, social-political agenda, perhaps, just perhaps, our work would seem more important to society, and not just to us. Perhaps more students would take or even be required to take more of our courses, if the courses were seen as something important to them and the World, rather than as a weak form of brainwashing. Perhaps it would make sense to have more of us on the tenure track, if our scholarship was scholarship. Just perhaps.

    — Mary McD · Jul 9, 07:38 AM · #

12. From the Chronicle Review piece Stan cites:

    On the one hand, these are laudable, politely phrased sentiments. But I’m going to be impolite about them, precisely because they’re too polite, and, like, decades overdue.

    “But by focusing on the larger contours of the market, we can help our students and junior colleagues understand the conditions in which they are now looking for work.”

    This part is standard bad wisdom by professional associations and leaders—misconstruing casualization as if it can be studied as a “market in tenure-track jobs.” That’s what lead to Princeton president William G. Bowen’s absurdly flawed but widely-cited and rarely critiqued projections for the humanities “job market” of the 1990s through the present. Which every professional association trumpeted for a decade or more despite all the misery of the majority, contingent, faculty, and all of the overwhelming evidence of casualization.

    “More important, we can begin to think about the direction in which employment in history and related fields is moving — and to consider whether it might be time to exert pressure against some of the developments that we have lived through, and that younger scholars must now live with. That places an added responsibility on senior scholars. It is their duty to be stewards of their departments and their disciplines — to gather information about their fields, to assess the impact of recent changes in the academic life cycle on their junior colleagues, and, when necessary, to remind administrators that we cannot achieve economy and flexibility in the present at the cost of future academic generations.”

    Hurray for the “more important” but:

    “begin to think…consider whether it might be time. … when necessary, to remind administrators that we cannot achieve economy and flexibility in the present at the cost of future academic generations…”

    “consider whether it might be time” (!!!) For crying out loud, it was time to “begin to think” thirty years ago.

    “when necessary remind administrators” … gee, thanks for sending along an email of support. It’s been “necessary” for a heck of a long time to do more than politely remind one’s cronies that it’s unseemly to whack away several hundred grand a year while young phds are on food stamps.

    And “academic life cycle” ending in poorly paid tenure—that’s like analyzing the “bee life cycle” as if all bees became queens, not drones.

    It’s “time” to acknowledge that the NORM of faculty experience has become contingency, and that well-paid administrators have done it on your watch, while feeding you nice raises, institutes, plenty of eager, ever-more-compliant grad students, and a cheap line of bull about “economic necessity,” “competitiveness,” and so on, while building health clubs, business centers and stadia for sports spectacle for the pleasure of your neighbors in the nice suburbs with the good schools.

    The majority experience—the real “academic life cycle in the humanities” is this: grad school, drop out or contingency, schoolteaching, law school or real estate sales. The academy functions on donated labor that it does not have to accord workers’ rights—and top administrators are well paid to keep it that way, by any means necessary.

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 08:45 AM · #

13. I think there are many good points here but there is also much demonization where it doesn’t belong (if demonization ever belongs). The issue isn’t casual labor vs. tenure track slots, nor it admin vs. faculty, – several people have pointed out that the academy is changing – public support is changing, students are changing, academic values are changing, the faculty is changing –
    A real issue is that the the academy in general tends to be a tortoise in a race with a hare – changes have to be made at lots of levels – and they should be strategic and adaptive but often are reactionary. Saying – ‘things should be like they were’ , we should value history, we should not be using adjuncts, etc is not helpful. Instead we could be asking ‘what should history look like in a 21st century liberal (or professional) education’, or what should the academic workforce look like in the 21st century’, and so on.

    — cfox · Jul 9, 09:40 AM · #

14. Actually, if you read the administrative discourse of “change,” it actively, compulsively demonizes—the tenure-stream faculty who represent an obstacle to the “change” that administrators (intentionally) seek to institute, and have instituted.

    It very much is a question of whether to have a majority casual labor force or a norm of tenure.

    And in trying to answer that question other than administrators have answered it, it also is a question of “admin vs. faculty.”

    The whole “tortoise/hare” story of flexibility and change and “strategic adaptivity” is just self-justifying administrator rhetoric.

    That doesn’t mean we can’t ask the questions you pose: “‘what should history look like in a 21st century liberal (or professional) education’, or what should the academic workforce look like in the 21st century’, and so on.”

    But let’s not pretend that administrations have been, and are, conducting what amounts to a war—sometimes a war of attrition, sometimes more aggressive—on tenure, and on faculty rights, and on the faculty individually and collectively.

    It would be pleasant for some if we pretended there was no relationship between the administrators’ struggle for “change” and casualization, and faculty misery (and lousy student outcomes). But it wouldn’t be fair to the losers in that struggle—the majority of faculty and students, and it’d be lousy history, as well as the foundation of (more) bad policy.

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 09:50 AM · #

15. There’s a supply side and a demand side, and Marc is right, if the demand side (i.e. the number of tenure track jobs) is dropping all the change in the world to the supply side won’t make much of a dent. I agree that there should be fewer history grad students in the world, but if that discussion stops the discussion of why there are fewer tenure track faculty positions then even it is counterproductive.

    — Jonathan Rees · Jul 9, 10:48 AM · #

16. As someone who is not a historian, I wonder why anyone would want such a job if it is that bad? Who can blame the administrators for hiring at “low” salaries if they have more applications than they can review at current rates of pay?

    Part of the problem is that potential grad students just make bad decisions. They don’t know what a good salary is ($50K? That’s a lot of money!) They don’t know what an academic job is, either (the life of the mind – do research, then pop into class to lead a discussion of revolutionary ideas, then back to research). When I was debating between a grad program in the humanities and in a field with real opportunities, I got the best advice of my life from a history prof – stay far away from the humanities! I regularly thank the guy for that advice.

    Another part of the problem is caused by faculty themselves. Many faculty criticize research as a selfish, worthless activity. If that is the case, what is the benefit to hiring a tenure-track professor? Why not hire adjuncts/grad students/guys off the street to teach our classes if research provides no benefits?

    And when was the last time a humanities prof provided a plan to make humanities profs more valuable to the university?

    Sitting and whining will not get you a higher salary. You’re still doing your jobs, still busting your butt for peanuts, so why would things change?

    — me · Jul 9, 11:10 AM · #

17. You know, #16, some of us did/do know what we’re getting into, and still believe that a life studying and teaching the humanities is worth doing. Because the humanities are worth doing (surely you’ve heard why). If it was ALL about the bottom line, then of course, the rational thing to do would be something else. And I don’t think you’d hear me complaining about a $50K salary.

    But it’s not all about the bottom line. At least for me. I would suggest that earning a PhD is about making sacrifices for the life of mind and all that. That doesn’t mean that adjunct humanities PhDs should be thrown upon the altar by those with the power to improve the situation.

    — anonymous in sc · Jul 9, 12:13 PM · #

18. But Santa Clara University is one of the prime offenders of exploitation of adjuncts to replace tenure track professors or even multiple-year contracts. In the department where I worked, they actively employed more adjuncts than necessary so as to avoid paying benefits, and if they had a class come open, would add an adjunct rather than give an existing adjunct enough of a courseload to earn benefits. Would cancel contracts mid-semester for the next claiming “low enrollment” – that is, cancelling the class so it couldn’t enroll, then telling the adjunct that their class was cancelled for low enrollment! And the full-time, tenured faculty were fully knowledgeable and approving of the situation, encouraging the department chair in this behavior – more goodies for them. There was no women’s center on campus, and calls to the academic senate officers went unreturned. There was no evidence on campus that anyone gave a shit.

    Effectively, humanities professors are indeed to blame. By proliferating grad programs that turn out a surplus of low-grade Ph.Ds, they ensure what they imagine to be more interesting teaching for themselves (god forbid they should teach a steady diet of intro courses), fat travel and research budgets…..and the demise of their own profession. The entire experience has made us supportive of an end to tenure. If all those assholes had to compete on the open market, they would be out of work in short order.

    — Abby S. · Jul 9, 02:00 PM · #

19. If Mr. Katz really wants to solve the problem and he believes in a supply-demand equation, then he should encourage universities to limit their Ph.D. enrollments to only the number of anticipated jobs in the upcoming job market (a reasonable estimate can be made) But given the paucity of tenure-track jobs, that would mean far fewer students, and then, the need for history departments would dry up. And then what would all the tenured history professors do? Ph’D departments are not held accountable for the size of their enrollments because they are only concerned about the size of their current student population, not what happens to the students afterward.

    — vwoodruff · Jul 9, 02:30 PM · #

20. Well, it’s good to see the furor erupting 30 years after “adjunct pools” were begun. I saw that then, and gave my Ph.D. (humanities) to the women’s movement. All us nice girls just saw the baloney and decided to fight it then. But the guys protected their jobs and pretended not to notice what was happening. Now they’re retiring and Princeton fellows are beginning to express indignation. Ho Hum. Where were you 30 years ago?

    — jay fraser · Jul 9, 02:39 PM · #

21. Marc you rock! You deserve a standing ovation.

    — ACR · Jul 9, 03:15 PM · #

22. Abby S, don’t hold me responsible for the SCU administration! I started a task force on the status of faculty serving as lecturers the year I arrived, served on it weekly throughout the second, and have been through a lot as a result. (Including from a whole string of faculty serving as lecturers willing to step up to the administration and say, “hey, talk to me, not nasty MB! I’m reasonable!”)

    In the end, faculty serving contingently will have to consider whether all of the tenure-stream faculty’s hand-wringing and support—whether it’s in good faith, as most would say mine is—or in bad faith, as in the case of some others—will do the job in the absence of self organization.

    My observations have overwhelmingly convinced me of the necessity of faculty self-organization—especially for faculty serving as lecturers. Thinking that others “with the power” can do things for you overstates their power to do anything excerpt serve themselves while serving Power, and also overestimates their character.

    If you want to know what most tenure-stream faculty will do for you, just look at what they have done for you over the past four decades. Pretty much zilch, even in their unions. I’d bet heavily on that trend continuing.

    Sorry for your experience at SCU. Hope you landed well elsewhere—and in a union! Solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 03:15 PM · #

23. Thank you, ACR. (modest blush.) And my apologies to Stan for hijacking his corner of the ‘storm for the day. Solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 03:22 PM · #

24. Market forces also lead to equating students with consumers and assessing education by their retention and/or immediate satisfaction. My dean has recently begun requiring the supervisor of a first-year liberal-arts program to include a faculty member’s latest student-evaluation scores, expressed as a decimal over five, along with her recommendation to rehire or not, the obvious implication being that there’s a connection. In a field in which achievement comes from intellectual challenge, how many of these teachers will risk it? When tenured faculty bemoan their upperclass students’ intellectual complacency and lack of preparedness, where should they lay the blame? Market forces are supposed to improve product quality, but this particular analogy broke down long before that.

    — Steve Street · Jul 9, 04:15 PM · #

25. My goodness! I had to go into NYC for a doctor’s appointment today, and did not check in until now. My blog has never generated such attention, and I suppose I should be pleased, and grateful to Marc. I could not agree more that “organize” is exactly what contingent faculty should do, though I am pretty skeptical about the chances of that happening in an effective way anytime soon. But until casual laborers organize, I see little hope for improving their situation. I mentioned the problem only in passing (this seems to have set Marc off) because I was trying to write about the plight of younger tenure track faculty in History. There are still tenure track faculty, and I think they deserve our interest as well. The larger point that emerges from time to time in many of these thoughtful comments is hostility to the corporatization of the academy. I could not agree more with that point as well — I have long admired Bill Readings <I>The University in Ruins</I> — but I don’t see any easy way to bring the academy back to where I (and I think most of the commentators) would like it. So I am in incrementalist, and would like to call attention to both the casual labor problem and the assymetry of work and reward in the teaching profession. But, in response to some of the comments, I think that many of us felt a calling to teach, and some of us have been fortunate enough to earn a living pursuing that calling. It is sad that so many cannot. But if it is “just a job,” then the economy will indeed have its way.

    — Stan Katz · Jul 9, 04:22 PM · #

26. I have mentioned this before on another thread of this blog: Faculty like the blog host who retire from a tenured position and then “double-dip” as lecturers in retirement are themselves contributing to the casualization of the workforce. Universities count on the greed of such professors in order to continue to justify the adjunctification of the humanities.

    It is nothing less than shocking that an historian can write this thread’s posting and not be aware of his own complicity in this system which deprives the younger scholars of the tenure track positions which should and could be there for them.

    So, Princeton chaired professor now turned casual lecturer, having written above that “until casual laborers organize, [you] see little hope for improving their situation”, it is time to show the leadership necessary to begin to organize the class of workers to which you now technically belong. Only that could perhaps begin to justify the financial “gaming” of the system which such positions represent. Failure to do so while drawing both a paycheck and a retirement annuity is nothing short of another nail in the coffin of the profession.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 9, 05:54 PM · #

27. Marc, my apologies if I seemed to take you personally to task. I only meant to suggest that even universities where faculty speak out have some of the worst offenders. In my case, yes, I landed elsewhere, but not on the tenure track and certainly not in a union (having never seen a job in my field with one). May leave the profession, when possible – but that’s difficult to do. Far more difficult than sunny Chronicle articles make it seem.

    As for organizing, it’s nice to think that contingent faculty could organize. But in reality for instance: we were made homeless by the chair and faculty shenanigans. Quite literally. Fortunately, were able to find housing with an extended family member while we launched an unexpected job hunt – from another state. Because of this, we were unable to collect any unemployment, ran through our meager savings, then began to run through our meager retirement. Many weeks could not pay our cell phone bill, used computers in the libraries of other colleges for the job search. Often had to decide whether to apply for a job based on how much copying (cost) it required. I’m not sure with what money we would have been able to participate long distance in an organizing effort. Maybe after we pay off the $2000 emergency room bill because we had no health insurance but all the stress that landed us in the hospital with an unexpected illness while we tried to finish the publication that “should” improve the fall job market?

    So it’s the same old-same old: those that have, are busy feathering their nests further. That would bother me less if they didn’t blame those of us who don’t, through no fault of our own, for not “doing even more” (!) about their own plight. I can think of not a single civil rights movement that did not have the active participation of some “have’s.” So it’s more than a little galling to read, week after week, about the difficulties that tenured faculty have – which hotel to stay in at their overseas conference, for instance.

    Buddy, can you spare a dime? Or an hour to do something about a situation all of you tenured, aging “radicals” created?

    — Abby · Jul 9, 06:01 PM · #

28. The change in the profession has to come from above. Self-organizing is a nice concept, but immanently impractical for graduate student adjuncts or recent PhDs who are working to the point of exhaustion, running between several different jobs and then must still find time for research so that they might one day be competitive on the job market. For various other reasons, it is doubtful that strategies derived from a nineteenth century industrial context fit the academic market of the 21st century. Responsibility lies with tenured faculty whose positions rely upon the exploitation of junior scholars that they themselves train. This is a matter of conscience. What can tenured faculty members do? For starters, they can protest the low pay of part-timers in their own departments. They can lodge continuous and public complaints with their university administrations over the failure to give adjunct instructors health benefits. They can educate the public about the need for humanities education and qualified, well-supported instructors. As numerous posters have already pointed out, there has been numbing silence from the voices that should be most effective.

    — too tired to organize · Jul 9, 06:05 PM · #

29. BTW, it takes approximately three months in George Bush’s economy to get even a retail job – when one has experience.

    What would the comfortably tenured suggest others live on while they organize? (and simultaneously jobhunt)

    — Abby · Jul 9, 06:20 PM · #

30. On Comment 28:

    Absolutely. I have consistently argued that position on the CHE blogs – the chinks in the wall come from the top down.

    As in the case of this blog’s host, the tenured and the retired-tenured are precisely those among the “happy few” who have the time and the money to do serious organizing. But, in general, like Liberace, they cry all the way to the bank – with their pension (and surplus adjunct salary!) paychecks.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 9, 08:44 PM · #

31. P.S. In the end, this dictum to organize which flows so freely from the lips of the tenured to the ears of the contingent is really, when you think about it, only another way of “blaming the victims” for their victimization. Yes, Frantz Fanon has taught us that the dignity of the self is preserved in the resistance to oppression, but it is more than somewhat galling to see so many tenured academic careers built (and sustained) upon “advice” to the adjuncts of academia. Surely, from the beneficiaries of academic (indeed, here, Princetonian!) privilege much more should be expected….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 9, 08:51 PM · #

32. Thanks again, Stan, for being kind about my camping out here.

    Abby, what a story. I hope you consider telling it in the Chronicle yourself (in a “First Person” piece?), or in AAUP’s Academe, or over at Inside Higher Ed.

    AHA. Hoo-boy. Argh. Wearing your tinfoil hat again tonight? And after weeks of playing nicely with others, more’s the pity.

    Look, we all agree: the tenured minority have failed the nontenurable majority. Spectacularly.

    It is my humble opinion, based on nearly two decades of close observation of the movement, that the tenured a) don’t have the power you think and b) wouldn’t dream of using it in the ways you’d want if they had it.

    So then what? Empirically: faculty serving contingently who have organized—at the New School/NYU, at Cal State, Wayne State, and elsewhere, have won serious gains, including job security. Yup, it’s hard. It’s also hard for poorly educated service workers in the hotel industry. It’s unbelievably hard all over (just finished reading Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze, will blog it soon.)

    Just as you say, faculty serving contingently have often been screwed over by their representation, especially in joint units. There are solutions to that, but it isn’t easy either. I don’t have easy solutions. But if it really makes you feel better, every time you say that tenured faculty should be better persons, you can say that Marc Bousquet agrees with you. But I don’t think it’s going to do much good.

    Solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 09:09 PM · #

33. There’s a common perception that you don’t earn a degree, you buy it—that is, you pay the money, you do a little work, you should get the degree. Degrees are obtained to provide support for job applications—getting a job is MUCH more degree-oriented than performance oriented now owing to the litigious nature of our society—not for the sake of education. In this context, instructors can be “deliverers of content” rather than teachers, and college becomes training rather than education.

    Consequently, almost anyone can “deliver content”, or be part of the process: good teachers or good scholars are not required for most purposes. Of course we see the casualization of labor, and demand for real teachers and scholars decreases.

    Economic competition among colleges contributes to the idea that “you pay the money and you get the degree”. Who doubts that what used to be required to get a bachelors degree, now gets a masters, what used to be required for a masters, now gets a Ph.D.?

    I don’t see any sign that the driving engine of all this—pay the money, get the degree, train rather than educate—is going to change, so prospects are grim for all college teachers.

    — Community College instructor · Jul 10, 05:55 AM · #

34. As the author of #5, I must take exception to:

    “Well, “bored with academia” has a selfish perspective, but it’s helpful”

    What on earth, Dr. Bousquet, is so “selfish” about wanting to live and work where one chooses and wishing that we were all paid better salaries that would enable our profession to continue or resume attracting top talent by providing liveable incomes in the way that other professions, including emerging or expanding ones like nursing and computer engineering, now do? Could you please explain exactly how me wanting the same for our humble profession and my own life in it deprives other people of something or reflects negatively on my character? Or how my inclination to spend three more years of my life in school studying law – at what would be my own considerable expense, mind you – is a selfish one?

    I would suggest that the real “selfishness” you and others should find “rather disappointing” is that leaders in our profession – yourself included – expect their junior colleagues to accept decaying working conditions without complaint and, if they speak out about their dissatisfaction, publicly label them with put downs like “selfish,” as you chose to do to me, even if you are more sporting in your reaction to poor Abby the Adjunct.

    As far as selfishness is present in this discussion, one could also think of those who willingly put up with (and thus enable) this deeply flawed system for 20 years, force their families (if they have any, which many of us don’t or can’t) to live in some hideous place, and then tell their kids that decades of navel contemplation and/or exacting and minimally rewarded teaching will barely be able to provide them with the college education the parent has spent a professional life giving to others.

    As for:

    “It also affects the talent pool—only persons with the minimum intellectual attainments and a secondary source of income can contemplate the long haul toward tenure”

    Two points:

    1. These “minimal intellectual attainments” are falling. Only 15-20 years ago graduate students in my field had to know both French and German. Now you can do it without either. My own institution’s doctoral program is anemic, but colleagues in “healthier” ones lament the decline of their incoming students in terms of preparedness, writing skills, analytical ability, self-confidence, and most other indicators of success common to academia and the more promising fields to which gifted students are increasingly attracted. Compare that with the ever more competitive admissions processes at elite undergraduate institutions and law and medical schools.

    2. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had secondary sources of income?! Well, not all of us do. Other types who contemplate the “long-haul toward tenure” include the merely idealistic, people with supportive and understanding spouses, those who get their first job at 35-40 and lack the flexibility or gumption to change careers that late in their lives, people from modest backgrounds who feel a great sense of achievement for having reached even the low end of professional life, those willing to accept immiseration and keep hope alive for that 10-15K salary boost, work-averse individuals who do the minimum necessary to stay afloat and try to enjoy or make otherwise profitable their large amount of unstructured time, and, of course, the socially awkward who don’t do well outside of the library. We could add to this list natural and gifted teachers, but yet another grating problem with academia is that for tenure and promotion purposes teaching is only rarely as important as research. Guess which category receives less attention?

    As a recent Chronicle article pointed out, humanities Ph.D. students are tending to come from wealthier backgrounds. I have colleagues whose parents have bought them homes, either in graduate school or right after. On the one hand this privileges elite students, but one trend I have noticed is that the financial cushion often reduces their sense of motivation and thus their productivity. Remember the worthless Professor Welch in Kinglsey Amis’s Lucky Jim, whose wife has a private income?

    So in a lot of ways academia is turning into an awkward mixture of embittered poor people who are justifiably disenchanted and liberal rich kids all grown up who can fall back on family money but who also often experience disappointment because they find that their work does not entitle them to quick advancement or much beyond a casual satisfaction of youthful intellectual interests. In some cases – requiring a large portion of a small family fortune to support them into middle adulthood, finding out their subprime mortgage-holding family is suddenly out of luck, economic downsizing cutting their high-income support, voluptuous babyboomer parents indulging in expensive divorces, and so on — they even risk becoming embittered poor people themselves. Neither group is the ideal model for our future, a role which the recent historical scholarship on professionalization tells us usually belongs to a solid middle class that in 21st century America is ceasing to include academia.

    So, yes, if I’m unsatisfied, why shouldn’t I contemplate a career change, especially since you “don’t have easy solutions,” at least beyond calling people who don’t want to inflict the consequences of an academic career on themselves and their loved ones “selfish?”

    — bored with academia · Jul 10, 05:56 AM · #

35. >>>stan, thanks for letting me jump back on>>>

    “Bored,” I clearly misjudged you, and I’m sorry. In this unmoderated forum, we get a ton of trolls, especially of the managerial or fourth-hand armchair-neoclassical-economist variety. (“Well, if you don’t like it, why doncha leave? Go where the Market will pay ya, hyuk, hyuk”).

    In your case, you were just very clearly and helpfully explaining what it looks like from the “rational chooser” perspective, which many people inhabit simultaneously with many other perspectives (social-analytical, social-altruistic, curiosity/gratification, etc). And “rational choice” is very differently constrained for persons with more or less wealth!

    This is hardly an excuse, but it’s a bit of an explanation: I was thinking about the New York Times piece’s portrait of young faculty, which I had already compressed in my head to my own generation’s stereotype of “yuppies” with a latte added, and read your piece straight into the stereotype.

    Your perspective is, naturally and quite obviously from your remarks today, far broader than my narrow (mis)reading of your first post.

    I couldn’t agree more with your analysis of the difficulties faced by junior faculty, and the way that the profession is increasingly inhabited by those who can afford it—whether it’s by inheriting wealth, parental/spousal support, unsustainable loans leading to bankruptcy, winning the lottery or a legal settlement or retiring on a pension.

    (I’ve written, for instance, about a fellow who supported his doctoral studies and teaching career after retiring from 20 years with the NYC Transit Authority as a bus driver).

    So, my apologies. I was squeezing in my day-long commentary with a ton of other things and was sometimes hasty.

    I’d urge you to share this perspective at the Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, or Academe. Good luck, solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 07:19 AM · #

36. The point, MB and others, is indeed that not all tenured faculty are cut from the same cloth. But those who profess to have concern about adjunctification and its ultimate result in the death of the university as we have known it, they need to be the leaders in organizing not only the contingent but the tenured to these ends.

    And when we say that the chinks in the wall of adjunctification must come from the top down, well, that also means at the top universities down to the local community colleges. So, it is galling that this blog thread is just a sigh on the way to the next topic (on the way to the bank) rather than the opening salvo from an influential Princeton historian leading a reform movement within universities.

    Yes, indeed, waiting for the tenured faculty to cease to “game” the system for themselves may take long — but their conversion is essential to the success of the organizing in the end. For they are also the present and future administrations of our colleges and universities — unless, of course, the adjunctification of the university continues to adjunctify even the presidencies themselves with the new trend toward appointing non-academics to these posts.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 08:20 AM · #

37. Doesn’t tenure give senior faculty the extraordinary ability, not available to workers in any other industry, to speak out freely against exploitation of their junior colleagues, especially adjuncts, and not fear reprisals from administrators—at least in any overt way? And is it not in their own self-interest to pressure for change in a system that will benefit a wider number of their academic peers, according to a simple utilitarian calculus? So, why are they not doing so in sufficient numbers to make a difference? Is it because academic life, perhaps especially in the humanities (in contrast with the sciences, where cooperation is expected and required to advance in one’s career), fosters an extreme form of individualism? I speak myself from an unprotected (by tenure) place within academe, viz., the university press, which is itself witness to a lot of irrational and self-defeating behavior by universities, such as their treatment of revised dissertations, a key to tenure and promotion, which are increasingly difficult for presses to publish because libraries won’t buy them even though tenure and promotion committees insist on having books as parts of humanities dossiers.

    — Sandy Thatcher · Jul 10, 08:43 AM · #

38. For #‘s 3 and 4. Who is society?? Who makes the decisions? Even in our so-called democracy, it’s not the majority but two or three people in a room (the number hasn’t changed through the century) — who manage to convince others that whatever they deem should be done. What alllows for this sort of charisma is an interesting question. And are we – the public at large – to be blamed because of our own apathy and greed? (Certainly our elected officials understand the system and support it unconditionally — as I found out when I asked my state representative who he voted for public support of several baseball stadiums!)

    — Anna L · Jul 10, 08:46 AM · #

39. “In this unmoderated forum, we get a ton of trolls, especially of the managerial or fourth-hand armchair-neoclassical-economist variety. (“Well, if you don’t like it, why doncha leave? Go where the Market will pay ya, hyuk, hyuk”).”

    Sorry Marc, now you’re playing the troll. You’re obviously not an economist. But if you want to be the voice of morality for the academic world, you need to answer a very basic question. If it’s that bad, why do they keep doing the job? Why do they choose this career?

    Economics is based on common sense. Unlike what humanities profs all believe, there is thinking ability outside the humanities. Just because the question is one you don’t want to think about does not make someone posting the question a troll.

    Oh the horrors! We should try to answer economic questions using basic economic theory!

    — me · Jul 10, 09:22 AM · #

40. “Economics is based on common sense… We should try to answer questions using basic economic theory!”

    In reality, as opposed to economic models constructed for one’s market-fundamentalist paymasters, the vast majority of human beings act pro-socially, and against their individual interest. Especially when they are removed a few iotas from fear and desperation.

    The “autistic” greed-pigs among us and their paid enablers—the purveyors of “basic economic theory!”—need to see their piggery as the simple, inevitable, product of justice and right. But it’s actually the complex, far from inevitable result of centuries of jealous, callous struggle to maintain the power and wealth of the owning class.

    As Warren Buffett likes to say, “There’s class war all right. And the rich are winning.”

    Young people still line up to enter grad school because other alternatives have been foreclosed. Professionalism is steadily less of an “escape” from working-class experience, and working-class experience is of growing immiseration.

    People stay in graduate school because there’s a chance they’ll be luckier than the others (and there are still few alternatives). Or else they leave and join one of the alternatives—typically management, like choosing to be a police officer instead of being a miner. Unless they have family wealth or another source of income, in which case they might afford to be a social worker or a teacher, etc.

    People work contingently because they hope, or because they can afford to—they’ve married a manager, inherited money, etc.

    People struggle on wages lower than those of bartenders despite years of education because they don’t know what else to do, and the job is often at least as pleasant as bartending.

    But why don’t they act rationally and organize?

    Well. Often the law is rigged against them, in the most labor-hostile “industrial democracy” on the planet. So is public opinion (filled up with the nonsense of your “basic economic theory” in the one of the most educated-into-ignorance populations in history. And they face the opposition of powerful, numerous, well-paid administrations and the crude, ignorant, self-interested piggery of many fellow profs in the “market-smart and mission-centered” disciplines.

    So, troll-boy: Nope, I’m not an economist. Neither is Nelson, Berube, Rich Moser, Joe Berry, Eileen Schell, or a dozen others. But we’ve described the system of academic labor better than any neoclassically-trained econometrist, including William Bowen. And I’ve explained why. In a book with big words.

    So get off your pseudonymous self-congratulatory flame-baiting troll’s ass and read. You can read over a hundred pages in free pdf at my site, in case you’re having trouble making payments on your Beamer.

    Then if you want to have a grown-ups’ informed debate, I’ll meet you anywhere, anytime. With cameras. To debate all the economics you want.

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 09:54 AM · #

41. Thanks Marc (post #40). I’m quite glad to find out that fundamental laws of economics don’t apply to History PhDs. Further, I’m thrilled to hear your many reason why they don’t apply.

    Right now, students with a BS in Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering that my little school produces start at $55K-$70K per year and most of them have multiple job offers. When the economy slows down, the demand for my graduates declines and it’s a little harder for them to find jobs. We recognize that our graduates are valued according to the fundamental law of supply and demand and we tell them so and — fortunately for us — these laws of basic economics seem to work pretty well.

    Maybe there is a simple lesson here that might apply to History and other humanities. I’m not sure because I’m just a simple engineer and we don’t spend too much time talking about class wars and the like.

    — Sgt. Rock · Jul 10, 10:32 AM · #

42. Sure, “basic economic theory” is a coherent system and a useful tool for analyzing labor markets. But it’s not the only tool. Economic theory has a history and makes certain assumptions. While many in humanities have not studied economic or managerial thinking, many of us have studied it, lived it, and have chosen to reject many of those assumptions. People on both sides screaming ‘you think I’m stupid!’ is not helpful.

    It’s not a simple opposition between business-sense and humanities thinking, anyway. You can argue from an econ/business/org behavior approach that exploiting a contingent academic workforce is not good for the organization long-term either: effectiveness over efficiency, quality over quantity, Deming Mgt Method and freedom from fear. Econ and business is much more than an individual consumer making rational decisions in a cruel world, in the same way that literary analysis is more than a close reading of a poem about an urn.

    Sure, supply and demand works, but just saying “supply and demand” isn’t helpful if you’re part of the supply undemanded, nor is it an excuse that those who control demand can hide behind. Organizations (academic departments) need to exercise some leadership and open up demand, and realize that a robust full-time, well-benefited faculty can produce a better educational experience for students. Those well-benefited faculty also will be less dissatisfied with their jobs and will be more motivated to make personal investments in the department.

    I don’t know what individual contingent faculty are to do to put this into effect, really, and that is where the idea of collective action is so attractive. But then you run the risk of further antagonizing the situation, and then there’ll be scabs, etc.

    Really I just hate to see humanities people — Marc and others commenting here excepted — concede the economic argument entirely. We need to continue to argue the issue in terms thoroughly humanistic, but the fight can also be taken up in the very economic terms that are used against us.

    — anonymous in sc · Jul 10, 11:16 AM · #

43. Yes, Sgt. Rock. Good for you. Glad what appears to you and your educated-into-astonishing-ignorance cronies as the “fundamental laws of supply and demand” (read much? even in economics? clearly not) work as a proxy for quality of life & justice for the very small group of people you spend time with and care about—you know, those folks who are actually proud that they “don’t spend too much time talking about class wars and the like”.

    Too bad the “fundamental laws” of your reality-bubble don’t work so well for the rest of the country (which you’d know, if you, uh, read anything outside of your discipline—including even some neoclassical economists).

    Funny how your “fundamental laws” don’t seem to apply to the rest of the world. Where there are plenty of places where the “fundamental laws” are those of reasonable degrees of equality, guarantees of justice, and educations that allow the citizens to have both the brains—and the time— to talk about social class “and the like.”

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 11:20 AM · #

44. “. . . recent historical scholarship on professionalization tells us usually belongs to a solid middle class that in 21st century America is ceasing to include academia.”

    Actually, the “solid middle class” is including less and less of America (academic and otherwise) all the time, thanks to decades of breath-takingly hypocritical greed on the part of our masters. As pointed out above, the growing gap between haves and have-nots is already of Gilded Age proportions. The brilliant business insights of recent times, e.g. outsourcing, are nothing but retread dickensian abuses. The geniuses running this country, from Cheney’s Chimp in the Oval Office on down to the bean-counters ruining what we still call academia, either don’t realize that these are the very policies, attitudes, and (God, how I show my age) ethics that led to the growth of organized labor in the first place, or they think they can get away with it.

    Having the mass media in the pockets of our masters just makes it easier for them to keep everyone ignorant or exploited or both. When Reagan busted the air-traffic controllers’ union, that was the first shot of the war.

    And yes, basic economics does apply, but to a point. Among the most revolting features of this social catastrophe is the political prostitution of religion in order to hang on to power.

    I’m raving, but that doesn’t prove I’m wrong.

    — dan · Jul 10, 11:31 AM · #

45. Like Marc Bousquet, I have been telling this story for decades, though mine started in the late ’70’s when the bottom dropped out for English PhD’s. Sgt. Rock’s cartoon view of history still makes it hard to see matters clearly. Naively, perhaps, I see the issue in terms of parenting. The professoriate has not taken care of its young and, worse, many “parents” have profited and thrived at their expense. And the old line social Darwinists are always quick to jump in with sage comments about how there will always be jobs for the really good candidates.

    # 39 says “economics is based on common sense.” There’s a conversation stopper! For some years now I’ve been fascinated with this new theology that sometimes springs from thinking like an economist (allegedly). It creates a marvelously simple world in which everyone acts reasonably and predictably. The better and deeper thinkers about such matters, and I suspect some are economists, understand what a silly sense of the human condition this really is. Sadly, Sgt. Rock and his ilk persist in talking about “fundamental laws of economics” as if those laws had scientific status. Want to go to the moon? Newton and science -informed technology will get you there. Same thing with achieving societal goals, right? Just obey the laws of economics and everything will be “managed” ok. And if you believe that, give me a holler: I’ve got lots of land in Florida for sale.

    — George Karnezis · Jul 10, 11:35 AM · #

46. What if accreditation required that the vast majority of instruction be provided by full-time faculty?

    How might that happen? Maybe look and see how NCLB has been ported over to higher Ed…there is a lesson there…

    — perplexed · Jul 10, 12:06 PM · #

47. The business school at my college can’t even find accounting Ph.D.s to interview for tenure-track jobs. And the market starting salary is, oh, around $100,000. Is this because administrators love accountants? That they wouldn’t casualize accounting if they could?

    — PJ · Jul 10, 12:28 PM · #

48. On Comment 47:

    Unfortunately, accrediting bodies (and the visitation teams) are run by administrators so we can’t expect much change there. Also, universities and their lobbies have recently staved off the threats of the US Department of Education to transform the accreditation arena.

    On the economics of the situation:

    I have argued on the Greenberg blog that the humanities have failed to see the communal nature of their mission and to argue forcefully for major Federal and external funding of cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional research teams. Much of the rationale for the better salaries of the sciences, even for grad students, is based on the “soft money” principle.

    Now, there’s a serious trade-off. Soft money at most universities means a soft position – it disappears if the money dries up. And the tenure-tracker is often forced to sell his/her soul to industry to keep the money flowing in to the university. Not too much academic freedom in this model, of course. But it is the model which would force the university to follow its perverse reasoning to the end were the humanities to attempt to be more self-sustaining in creative rather than “adjunctive” ways.

    On the supply and demand arguments:

    Well, actually, the faculty of graduate programs are to blame by keeping humanities doctoral programs from being other than mills for producing replicas of themselves.

    Humanities doctoral programs which would conceive of themselves as having practical missions as well as teaching and research missions (e.g. medical schools are multi-faceted in their “doctoral” training) could be “producing” PhD’s that many markets would covet.

    I recall smiling with pleasure at learning that Toyota hired PhDs in linguistics as part of its car design teams. And the head of Mazda North America a few years back quipped that he only wanted to hire people who understood that a car meant different things to anglophone and francophone Canadians – so marketing needed to reflect those social realities.

    Much of what feeds the Enrons these days is the anti-intellectual position that one shouldn’t do a PhD in the humanities unless one wishes to be a professor (or an adjunct, as is more frequently the case).

    There should be more rather than fewer humanists in our world; universities need to expand the scope and horizons of their programs to, at last, deal with our lived planet through the ethical, linguistic, historical, and philosophical lenses of the humanities. If you build those kinds of humanities programs (e.g., where the PhD philosopher minors in economics and writes on contemporary corporate ethical issues), the jobs in many sectors will indeed come….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 12:34 PM · #

49. On comment 48.

    Sounds good to me.

    — PJ · Jul 10, 01:03 PM · #

50. Contingency labor has dramatically increased in all job sectors in the US, from factory work to the service industry. This is an larger economic issue than just in academe. Perhaps if we academics looked at what is happening in all employment sectors, we might find allies.
    The issue for students in increasing numbers of two and four year schools is not too much freedom to select courses, it is two little freedom. Degree plans are highly restrictive, often requiring only one or two humanities courses. This is part of the trend toward turning colleges and universities into vocational schools. This also reflects the control that departments have over their own degree plans. The easiest way to grow a department is to require more courses in the major.
    Degree plans in Texas were hitting 72 credit hours in CCs and 160 credit hours at universities, mostly caused by adding required courses in the major. The Coordinating Board stepped in and set limits. What gets cut? The few electives there were in the old plan.
    I am a contingent instructor in two schools, one of which has 25,000 students and the other 21,000 students. When I look over the course offerings in the humanities and social sciences in both schools, I do not see the breadth of courses in each field that I experienced, just lots of freshman and sophomore intro type courses. This is because students must take so many courses in their quasi-vocational areas, like nursing and engineering.
    When I was an undergraduate, I had so much more to choose from, so that I was able to take courses far afield from my major and participate in a liberal education. My daughter, in contrast, must fill her schedule completely with courses in her major. For my son, it was worse. After his first year, all his courses were in engineering and math.

    — Kathleen · Jul 10, 01:09 PM · #

51. Marc,

    You certainly are a wonderful advertisment for the academy. People who disagree with you are trolls. Rather than engage in reasoned argument you put forth strident rhetoric. And we wonder why the public doesn’t think much of college professors!

    — hippokleides · Jul 10, 01:39 PM · #

52. Marc,

    I have been a colleague of perhaps the preminent neoclassical economist. Last week he was given the honor of unveiling the new Adam Smith statue on Edinburgh’s royal mile. And I have never once heard him personally criticise an intellectual adversary. Probably because he trusts in the logic of his argument. Now you, on the other hand…

    — DR · Jul 10, 01:56 PM · #

53. I am not in the system, and I haven’t read the whole thread, but as far as I tell the university is giving so little support to young humanities scholars these days that many fields will be moribund 20 or 30 years from now. Retiring tenure-track people are not being replaced, and lower-ranking faculty are too harried to keep up their skills.

    — John Emerson · Jul 10, 01:58 PM · #

54. On Comment 50:

    Excellent points. And the reason why so many students – outside of elite private education – graduate in more than four years.

    But again, if the humanities departments were discussing Shakespeare and Enron and Pynchon and engineering principles, and collaborating with faculty across the relevant departments, well, some of those humanities courses would be cross-listed in those other majors, at the very least. But that would mean doing the true intellectual work of the humanities – and not just regurgitating solipsistic scholarship, often from yellow-ed notes, at that.

    “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars/But in ourselves that we are underlings”. – Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 02:01 PM · #

55. Addendum to Comment 54:

    Just think of Brutus and Cassius, of course, as the equivalent of tenured professors in the Roman Senate, disgruntled with their administration and other Senators/tenured faculty. They are especially not to be confused with the adjunct faculty – who truly are the underlings of the ruling elites.

    AHA-Erlebnis

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 02:09 PM · #

56. I appreciate and applaud Sandy’s questions (37) and am grateful for them. What a whopper the opener is! They are all worth addressing, especially the question of individualism. Thanks, Sandy

    — George K. · Jul 10, 02:37 PM · #

57. Dr. Bousquet, please allow me to accept your explanation and apology. I do believe it is important to realize that growing dissatisfaction and an attempt to reconsider one’s professional bearings are legitimate reactions to what is happening in the humanities. What I took most strongly from the New York Times article was that junior faculty tend to seem more moderate or at least less “activist” out of an understandable aversion to risk. Why get caught in ideological crosshairs when you can so easily be denied tenure or otherwise persecuted with no real legal recourse? Look at the Finkelstein case! The younger generation senses its vulnerability in a social and political climate that has little sympathy for it or mobilizing cause. With a worsening economy, it’s simply scared.

    A positive aspect of the current situation – one I see being ignored in this thread and indeed throughout our profession – is that even with the impending recession, we live in an unprecedentedly dynamic economy, especially for younger people. Economists who study long-term employment patterns tell us that having 2-3 careers over a lifetime will be the norm and that having only one job within those careers the far exception. The prolonging of “adolescence” to what many now believe to be 26 or 27 means that graduate students and junior faculty types do have a great deal of choice and substantially more control over their professional lives than many people — including they — probably realize. Nowhere is this more true than among the current generation of administrators, who came of age during the hard times of the 1970s and early 1980s. Their formative experiences happened in an extremely difficult job market and at a time when career changes were far less common. They have yet to learn that trained humanists do in fact have a wide range of credible alternatives inside and outside academia, and, not understanding that, often act as though we don’t and can be treated as badly as they were when they were junior faculty or unemployed Ph.D.s. Those days are over. As a single 30 year old not particularly enjoying academia today, contemplating law school is totally reasonable and totally doable. I’ve set a certain timeline and established criteria that must be met for me to remain in academia, but if it doesn’t work out, I know very well that I will simply move back to a big east coast city where I would be happy, retool, and move on to the next career. No sweat.
    I don’t believe there’s any reason one couldn’t do it at 40.

    Today it’s both easier to get another job within the system and much more possible to transcend it altogether and do something else. I have grad school classmates – humanists all – now happily working in government, consulting firms, pharmaceuticals, travel and tourism, and law. Earlier this year I myself was offered a job in commercial real estate consulting in my region of specialization. How is this possible? Well, as many private sector employers realize and appreciate, to get a Ph.D. we have to master a broad array of critical and analytical skills, as well as valuable regional expertise, foreign languages, public speaking, and other marketable assets. A major problem is that we are emphatically NOT trained or encouraged to apply them beyond the classroom or archive, still less to “network” or engage the private or government sectors. A pervasive opinion I have encountered within academia holds that to reach beyond the Ivory Tower is to “sell out.” (Sell out what, I ask? An unfulfilling career? A low salary? Living in debt?) Senior colleagues seem to believe it’s either impossible or too impractical to consider (though a number of them seem to maintain lucrative consultancies easily accommodated by their 1-1 teaching loads). Almost all of my academic colleagues discourage me from considering law. Some, I believe, legitimately feel that I would be less happy. I have the impression, though, that a majority would find that my transition might somehow invalidate or undermine their own career commitments, break solidarity with their suffering, make them envious, or create an unsettling source of temptation. Revealingly, virtually all of my friends and professional contacts outside of academia, including a number of lawyers (about whom we hear little good) and every single Ph.D.-J.D. I have spoken to, think it’s a terrific idea. To add another depressing observation, it strikes me that the worse off a colleague is in academia, the more likely that colleague will be to pooh-pooh law school.

    — bored with academia · Jul 10, 03:00 PM · #

58. #48 says, “There should be more rather than fewer humanists in our world.”

    Who decides how many? Margaret Spellings? Marc Bousquet? The AFT? The AAUP? Students? Faculty senates? Stanley Fish? Carey Nelson? Harvard? Anti-hypocrisy advocate? Stan Katz? Howard Zinn? Dana Goia? Congress? A Commissar of Higher Education?

    All things considered, the market is probably the best decider…maybe not in specific wages and working conditions (we all know that unchecked competition in labor when there’s an oversupply of laborers leads to “a race to the bottom”), but probably in whether the society should have more professors of civil engineering and fewer professors of history, or the reverse.

    And a tip to Marc Bousquet: This sort of stuff—“So get off your pseudonymous self-congratulatory flame-baiting troll’s ass and read…in case you’re having trouble making payments on your Beamer”—doesn’t do any good. Some of your most passionate supporters, e.g., Anti-hypocrisy advocate, are pseudononymous trolls (so am I; that’s the nature of these forums), and you haven’t the faintest idea whether “me” drives a BMW (on payments) or a Prius he paid cash for from working nights as an orderly in an ER. And you haven’t the faintest idea whether “me” is lazy (“Get off your…ass”) or ill-read (Milton Friedman may have been wrong from our point of view, but he wasn’t ill-read). You’re not convincing anybody with such invective (and I’d assume that, as an activist, you want to win some readers to your way of thinking); you’re just making a few people wonder if they’ve stumbled into the Ultimate Fighter blogsite by mistake.

    I may not be quite as left/progressive as Bousquet, but I’m on his side about contingent faculty, unionization, the corporatization of the university, etc. So the above paragraph is meant in a spirit of, er, solidarity.

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 10, 03:38 PM · #

59. 51 & 52. Thanks for the rhetorical tip, pseudonymous interlocutors. I see that you pass over the insults and provocations of the similarly pseudonymous interlocutors to whom I responded.

    I also note that your remarks claim expertise in rhetoric —criticizing mine— but don’t address the issues at hand. Nice ad hominem work there—the best kind—oh, I’m not ad hominem, and I have nothing to say on the issue—just wanted to point out that you’re a meanie.

    Good work, fellas. When you want to put your big-boy pants on, use your grown-up names and address the issue, you can be assured of my courtesy. I’m very kind to the folks I disagree with in the book—folks with names, signed to arguments and scholarship.

    I play by the rules agreed. You want to play hidey-snarkey-wah-wah on an unmoderated forum without accountability for yourselves, fine. You want to play scholar, even better. You know where to find me and my work.

    — Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 03:50 PM · #

60. bored with academia-

    You’re right that humanities professors should be more comfortable with the idea of doing work in the private sector.

    You tend, however, to make it sound like the motivation for working in higher education is roughly the same as it is for working in some other private sector job. Sure, some humanities professors probably could make the switch to law or business or whatever and would end up loving it, finding that they get paid well and are still very happy with their lives.

    But aren’t there some (many?) humanities professors who put up with the bad pay, lack of job security, etc. because they think that the teaching, research, and writing that they do are extremely important, and that they will not be able to do these things while they are practicing law?

    I have not worked in academia, so forgive me for speaking out of ignorance here, but if one values a sense of intellectual fulfillment, or places importance on imparting the beauty and wisdom of the humanities to a pupil, I have to imagine in many cases one would be better off poor and drifting in academia than wealthy and working in a law firm.

    Because, in my own experience, even though they mean well, a lot of people in law and the private sector tend to be boring, and many are scarily barbaric (not in the snotty, elitist sense of the word, but the “I’m glad I’m not gay because these people would step on my skull for it” sense of the word). In any event, if an ex-humanities student were to look for work in the private sector he should expect to have to set aside his interest in the humanities for 50-60 hours each week and not expect to hear a lot of Milton or whatever being discussed in the breakroom, etc. I say this as someone working in the private sector in NE, for a “Fortune Top 100 Company To Work For, “ who interacts with MBAs and lawyers on a regular basis.

    — outsider · Jul 10, 03:53 PM · #

61. On Comment 60:

    I think it may be precisely because you interact with MBAs and lawyers (and not “humanists”) on a regular basis that you find the private sector boring and “scarily barbaric”. On the other hand, I think you would find a great number of academics who would use the same adjectives to describe the university.

    My point is that the humanities should not simply be found in the Ivory Tower but in the corporate and large and small entrepreneurs’ world, as well. If they aren’t, it’s the fault of the humanities profession.

    I am reminded of the story told by John Seely Brown about his time at Xerox when the habits of French copier repairmen seemed inscrutable to American management. The French technicians took long coffee breaks and they seemed to be “at work” less time than “at play”. Xerox actually called in a team of anthropologists to observe the situation and report back. (Yeah, okay, so most people would call an anthropologist a social scientist, but it’s borderline.) And they found that the coffee breaks were where the technicians swapped stories of what worked when they were doing the repairs. So, rather than discontinue the breaks, the anthropologists recommended that they be encouraged and that the “stories” be “captured” in electronic files.

    In other words, the corporate world would be only too happy to have humanists and social scientists helping them achieve their goals. But the humanist needs to take the private sector seriously enough to analyze it and to make known what the humanities have to offer to make it a more civilized and, indeed, humane place. “Selling out” is neither the goal nor the by-product of what I’m recommending. Being an activist-humanist is what this idea is all about….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 05:09 PM · #

62. Outsider, I’m sure there are many committed professors who believe in the value of what they do. I’m very proud of my own academic achievements and really enjoy the intangible rewards of teaching students and the satisfaction of seeing my research appear in print. Nor do I regret having gotten the Ph.D. and worked in academia for a few years – after all, I lived through my entire 20s spending every summer in Europe and never getting up before noon on a regular basis. I have an enormous amount of time off. This is/was all quite satisfying. But the problem is that the sources of dissatisfaction outweigh them, even in my relatively rosy case. I deeply resent not being able to live where I would choose to. I hate having limited colleagues with substantial unchecked power over my life and future. My financial situation is, as I said, relatively good, but so many of my colleagues are insolvent that I really believe there is a systemic problem. I also feel that the work I do and take such pride in is undercompensated; there’s a principle involved there. Even in my free time I often feel unengaged and bored. And the potential for failure is statistically so high (nationally 50% of Ph.D. students don’t finish the degree; something like 40% of humanities Ph.D. don’t get full time jobs) that I wouldn’t feel responsible advising a young person to do it.

    Determing how these factors balance each other is ultimately a matter of personal experience, subjective opinion, and ordering of priorities. Some personalities are well suited to life far away from friends and family, to small towns, low salaries, and so on. Others see their academic work as a mission. I personally don’t fall into these categories. I feel that I do a professional job in a field that should be – and once was – very respected. I would be the first to argue to corporate types (and have) that our global competitiveness depends heavily and in virtually every way on well educated people. Most seem to agree. But to get that result our higher education system (to say nothing of our secondary schools!) needs to attract and retain top talent. Instead today it mostly makes people feel insecure rather than build their confidence. It imposes stressful financial difficulty rather than relieving it. It tends to isolate highly educated specialists from everything else in the world. And it alienates many of the people best suited to do it with low compensation, lengthy and opaque advancement processes, and isolation.

    Clearly the business world is a different environment. Nevertheless, I can assure you that I have encountered large numbers of boring and barbaric people in academia. A colleague in my first job even challenged me to a fight on campus!
    At the same time I can also honestly say that one of my best read and most travelled friends is a partner in a law firm, while some of my best conversations about history are with an older friend who never went beyond a B.A. but was always interested and owns an internet tourism company. I rarely see historians taking active roles in local community life, appreciating the arts, doing charitable work, or even dealing in a substantive way with daily life in the countries in which they specialize. In my experience this is done much more by people outside of academia. A discreet problem in my field is that many “specialists” in it actually don’t know the language that well. Obviously, if you care enough for a subject and have the requisite intelligence, you can keep up. Being in academia, furthermore, is no guarantee that you will find intellectual fulfillment. A large majority of my colleagues have neither known nor cared to know the subject of my work. Milton might not be a raging subject of conversation in the breakroom, but who can stop you from reading it at home or on the subway?

    — bored with academia · Jul 10, 06:19 PM · #

63. Let me suggest that the real question is not whether there are bores and boors in different professions (there always are). The real question has always been for me the evisceration of the professoriate by the proliferation of contingent workers. This situation is community destroying, and by that I mean that there is less of a chance of creating a faculty that have created and shared and continue to sustain a certain continuity of experience thru teaching in a particular place. It’s this sort of stability that can build a campus’s culture —- the analogy is with what Wendel lBerry has to say about farming and how its industrialization inhibits and undermines the culture and community of relatively small landholders. true, there’s always the proverbial dead wood around; but there is a real virtue in having a faculty that is more “together” and less fragmented for our students’ sake. Yes, i know this seems idealistic, but I firmly believe that it is precisely the hope for such sustaining communities that led so many of us into teaching.

    — George Karnezis · Jul 10, 07:49 PM · #

64. On Comment 63:

    Indeed, is it not extremely ironic that administrations worry far more about student “learning communities” than they do about faculty “teaching communities”?

    I have found that “community” does not exist in most departments with a majority of adjunct faculty members. The hierarchical divide is too wide to breach, the resentments and the stresses too hard to discuss and so, most of the time, faculty scurry past each other in hallways with a perfunctory and often nervous smile and “hello”.

    Indeed, adjunctification is destroying the university as many of us had come to know it. “The university is dead. Long live the university!”

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 10:10 PM · #

65. Sadly this is at least as true among tenure-track junior faculty. The situation might not be as desparate, but ultimately we are paid minimal professional salaries and must supplement them by competing for our depts’ and universities’ meager resources, as well as for administrative attention, student affection, merit based awards if applicable, and, of course, tenure. In my dismal last job a fellow assistant prof as much as told me we were rivals. Having been an undergrad at the same institution and being 8 years older made her feel entitled to win, but she always lost and her attitude toward me got worse and worse. Fortunately in my current position I’m the only assistant prof and need not deal with it so close to home.

    — bored with academia · Jul 11, 09:46 AM · #

66. “All things considered, the market is probably the best decider”

    Besides being a kneejerk cliche, this is probably not true. In any case, the market doesn’t decide now, and it never has in the past.

    — John Emerson · Jul 11, 05:18 PM · #

67. OK, Mr. Emerson, who, or what, decides if the society will have more (or fewer) humanists in the immediate and near future?

    If taxpayers and tuition-payers want ‘em, society’ll get ‘em. If not, not.

    If some top-down mechanism (say, colleges saying students will be required to take a whole lot more humanities courses so that they can hire more humanities professors so that more grad students will enroll in humanities Ph.D. programs, etc.), it won’t work. At least for more than the few years it takes for the no-thank-you of the “market” (those students, taxpayers, and tuition-payers) to kick in.

    And if the market has never decided things in the past, I wonder where all those Schools of Communication, Sports Medicine, Business, Digital Media, etc., etc., came from, and why those isolated German Departments have closed.

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 11, 06:16 PM · #

68. (1) Marc keep up the good work.

    (2) On “economic” theory. One of the most consistent fallacies I have observed in people who use “ the market” rhetoric is the notion the human behavior is simple and can be reduced to a few axioms that conviniently explain everything. These comments tend to be matter of fact and simplistic. Also, they rely on a smugness that comes with adhering to the predominant ideology rather than actually using realistic and well justified arguments and data. Also, these “economists” seem to fail to realize that there are many people who study economics (my self included) that disagree with the prevalence of these “fundamentals”. For instance, much research has consistently shown people tend not to act in a completely rational way, or that markets are as much a product of social structures (power) as they are of supply and demand. So, before you go off on Marc for checking your self congratulatory arrogance it might be a good idea to dig a little deeper into what you are talking about…….

    — AT of WSU · Jul 12, 04:36 AM · #

69. AT:

    Why do you keep putting “economists” in quotes?

    — PJ · Jul 12, 03:00 PM · #

70. An economist is one who studies economic behavior and makes predictions based upon empirical data placed in the context of logical theory. An “economist” is a half-wit who uses simplistic axioms to describe often very complex behaviors and patterns. Also such people use the “rhetoric of the market” to justify their position. The use of such rhetoric has little to do with rationality and more to do with an emotional attachment to a certain ideology. In the instance of the academic labor market you have individuals trying desparately to justify an obviously broken and inequitable system through the use of market rhetoric. In doing such these individual are effectively making two statements: First, what is occurring in the academy is reflective of market behavior. Second, since the market is some type of god that knows no evil or flaw therefore there is nothing wrong with what is occurring. Ever hear Bush cook up excuses about the housing bubble or oil being alright since “The market works”? I would rather place stake on other logic aside from this bullshit…..

    — AT of WSU · Jul 13, 01:57 AM · #

71. AT of WSU:

    Really sharp and informative comment. Thank you. Compensation for human labor—including that of colleage teachers—shouldn’t be left entirely to an unregulated market. “Race to the bottom” and all that. But whether or not society is to have more or fewer humanists (as with blacksmiths, or trapeze artists) is probably, in the longer haul, a market question. If tuition-payers and taxpayers want them, they’ll get them. If not, not, unless some top-down authority says, “Society must have more humanists.” Perhaps with rural GP doctors or ambulance drivers or sanitation workers or firefighters, the top-down approach fits with our supposedly free-choice society. But with humanists?

    Just curious, though: “I would rather place stake on other logic aside from this bullsh**t…” What, exactly, would that logic be?

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 13, 07:11 AM · #

72. I think we have to view the reorganization of academic labor in the context of global capital in general and its low-wage labor strategies in particular. To take the US as an example, we’ve been through years of downsizing, outsourcing, and offshoring with the resulting unemployment and underemployment offset by work speedup and unprecedented increases in productivity. We only need to look around to see that huge segments of the working and middle classes are now being pauperized. Many are defaulting on mortgages, home loans, and credit card debt; they don’t have medical insurance and, increasingly, can’t afford home energy (if they still have homes), gas, and in many cases food — let alone college tuition.

    I’m not saying we should sympathize with them at the expense of adjunct and tenure-line faculty. I am saying that the now congealing formation of global capital, aided by neoliberal voodoo economic theory and pro-business policy, is driving the people of this country and many others into the ground (and yes, by “people” I mean all but the super-rich and other elites, though they won’t be too comfortable when the economy tanks and society is destabilized).

    There are no relatively simple solutions for the casualization of academic labor because it’s part of a larger and more complex process.

    — Ellen Messer-Davidow · Jul 13, 03:53 PM · #

73. Just Passing Through: To answer your question. Although this might sound strange I often believe that economics will save us or at least contribute greater to the resolution of these matters. Although I lean far to the left one fundamental thing I believe is that certain things need to make sense “economically” to be effective. Although ideals are good they often lead us astray. However, a proper understanding that we need to invest in people and society I think fundamentally can guide a reformation of the present system. Rather than use a perverse “economic” ideology we need to start asking ourselves questions of cost and benefit along with ones of investment and return. In the instance of higher ed what is the true cost of present system? Not just in money saved but relative to individuals and society? Also, relative to higher ed we must ask the question if we invest in decently paid (you should not be an academic for the money) professors and adminstrators what is the return in terms of teaching and social good. Same question applies to students. Right now we are forcing millions of students to incur huge amounts of debt while also completely excluding others. If we (the citiczens of the country) were to foot the bill what would be the investment and what would be the return? To me at least these are represenetive of the economics we should be using in our discussions, rather than the smug garbage you hear so many spew out as an excuse for injustice and inefficiency…

    — AT of WSU · Jul 14, 02:33 AM · #

74. I work in a Japanese university where all departments are paid the same and my particular university has perhaps the highest pay scales in the world when housing costs are considered. There is almost nothing to recommend to the world from Japanese higher education EXCEPT paying all departments the same. Also administrators are paid just the same as full professors eventually. The result of all this egalitarian Japanese delusion is a lack of apologetics by the underpaid to the overpaid and a lack of the bombast from the overpaid to the underpaid. The result for students is apparent plausible equal value for bodies of knowledge as distinct as history and business. The culture on campus this produces is knowledge is knowledge and all of it is vital, not those that lead to money alone. I have to admit I like that culture better than the money grubbing of US faculty, especially the vulgar crap that goes for talk and course contents in business schools at top ten universities.

    For practical people reading this—nearly all leading Japanese universities seek competent foreign faculty teaching history but have never found any. The foreigners all want tenure in their nation of birth and cannot stand living in Japan where crime is nil and 50% of salaries are held back in two annual bonuses where they are usually completely saved for retirement. Japanese students are extremely dilligent by US standards (11 of my 15 seminar students got 800 out of 800 on GRE math, and 800 out of 800 on the Toefl writing test) and they tremendously benefits from hearing history from non-Japan points of view and eagerly eat it up. So you can start at $50,000 a year and at age 40 be making $80,000 a year in history without yet being assistant professor and at 50 be making $130,000 a year without being full professor in HISTORY!!!! Then there is this Japanese diet that is low on all the things American diets are high in.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Jul 14, 10:19 AM · #

75. RTG: Do you speak/write Japanese? Do you teach in Japanese or English?

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 14, 01:08 PM · #

76. I have been reading this thread from my perch in Israel, where nearly all the universities — and above all the humanities faculties — are in protracted states of collapse, with slots closing as older faculty retire, virtually zero prospects in any field for new PhDs, and increasingly large numbers of young academics heading abroad. (Acc. to some estimates, up to 1/4 of Israel-trained academics now live and work abroad.) From here America and its numerous (by Israeli standards numberless) universities has seemed the academic land of plenty. Judging from what I read here, we all need to find ways to integrate trained academics into a range of societal roles apart from university teaching, and find some way of interesting society at large in what it is that we have to teach, or we — academics and non-academics alike — will be in very big trouble.
    (As for me, I have an advanced professional degree from one ivy league university and a humanities doctorate from another and am unable to get even one adjunct course at the universities here and cobble together two-thirds of a living from working at various think tanks and given local circumstances consider myself lucky indeed, even if I have next to zero time for academic research and publication.)

    — Idle in Zion · Jul 15, 10:23 AM · #

77. Well, well, History friends, welcome to the club! As a 60 year old Music Ph.D. long stuck in “adjuncitification,” I just have to shake my head in wonder at the indignation of yet another humanities discipline that has suddenly found itself being discarded in the marketplace of academia. Since Music has never really been accepted as an academic discipline (Music departments traditionally have existed to provide football bands and madrigal groups for receptions at the President’s house), nobody in the “real” humanities disciplines thought it surprising when music departments began to be discarded starting back in the early 70’s. Then, as 45 and 67 have alluded to, the same “baby bust” market forces began to weigh on some disciplines that thought their place in the academic lifeboat would always be guaranteed. The first to go was “Classics”, and it was somewhat amusing to read the shocked reactions of the tweed jackets with leather elbow patches appearing in the Chronicle. Then, as noted above, English, and now History. Since, of course, mechanical engineers and lawyers don’t need to know anything about music, languages, history, English literature, or even be able to read and write, universities can now get on with being glorified vocational schools while the humanities community fights over the crumbs. Except, of course, the tenured faculty who got their places in the lifeboat before the post-baby boom Titanic of the higher education industry sank. They get to keep on doing research until those nice TIAA-CREF checks start coming in.

    — David · Jul 16, 01:29 AM · #

78. On Comment 77:

    And when the TIAA-CREF checks start, they will add to them their post-retirement adjunct salaries, as those “similarly-situated” to the blog host do. All the while a-wondering just how these disparities all came about….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 16, 12:09 PM · #

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