My previous two columns have addressed the crisis in higher education from familiar standpoints. I hope I made some original arguments in these pieces, but I acknowledge that my two main targets—the upper administration at large research universities and bloated Division I athletics programs—are fairly easy and familiar targets. Any social gathering of “regular” faculty will often feature complaints against these two pillars of the increasingly dysfunctional American university. These complaints—mine, other faculty members’, graduate students’—are richly justified, and voicing them is an important component of citizenship. However, as I hinted earlier, the faculty are complicit in many of the problems that make our present system of higher education unsustainable.
It is a commonplace—one backed up by numerous studies—that faculty members are on the left end of the political spectrum. There are many reasons for this, perhaps primary among them the fact that the idea of reality-based critical thought is now the exclusive province of liberals in our society. Especially in the social sciences and humanities, a conservative is a rare bird indeed. I fit squarely within this stereotype myself, rarely departing from left-liberal orthodoxy. However, I also share the Marxist ideal that one should critically examine the material conditions of one’s life and how they affect others, in the workplace and elsewhere.
What I have come to notice through this examination will not surprise many readers of this column. The high-minded leftist ideals expressed by many faculty members in public contexts—letters to the editor, rants on the faculty listserv, etc.—are routinely betrayed in everyday practice in the workplace. The colleagues who make waves about marriage equality or another worthwhile issue (while not actually inconveniencing themselves in any way—a far cry from the Civil Rights and Second Wave Feminist movements that I remember) routinely reproduce structures of oppression in the academy.
The division between faculty and staff is permeated by class, race, and gender. Staff members are often “locals,” such as William Carlos Williams’ “pure products of America,” uninterested in the cosmopolitan agenda so valued by faculty members. I have heard on more occasions than I can count professors being condescending and patronizing towards staff members, who earn maybe one-third of what faculty members do, even if they hold advanced degrees. It is not uncommon for professors to create additional work for staff, simply to save themselves the indignity of copying or handling mailings. To add insult to injury, these faculty members often impute to the staff retrograde political beliefs (e.g., being a member of the Tea Party), which are not generally consistent with their interests or worldview. (I have not seen studies, but I would guess that university staff members also tend towards the liberal end politically).
Staff members at least have long-term contracts and rights guaranteed through collective bargaining and federal employment law. The least powerful, but increasingly irreplaceable, component of the university structure is the body of adjuncts, who now teach more than half the classes offered at American universities. This phenomenon runs the gamut from the ultra-elite schools of the Ivy League to public, land grant, and regional universities. As I argued previously, the benefits redound mainly to the upper administration, who literally line their own pockets with the savings from the lower expenditures on instruction. However, it would be naïve and dishonest to deny that “regular” faculty benefit from this arrangement.
Faculty salaries have risen well above the rate of inflation during the past two decades. Even more dramatically, the expected teaching load for the privileged among us has dropped by almost half during the same period. At most major research universities, a teaching load of one course per semester is not unheard of, and a 2-2 load is usually the upper limit, at least in Ph.D. granting departments. This is subsidized by the 4-4 loads often maintained by adjuncts, temporary lecturers, and the like. While a full professor at a research university will typically earn a salary in the low six figures, adjuncts make approximately $3,000 or less per class. Thus, instructors working full-time will likely make as little as $24,000 per year. Depending on the individual circumstances, adjuncts may or may not receive benefits. I know of cases where adjuncts with Ph.D.s have enrolled in MA programs at their university in order to obtain benefits.
The culture of the university is, despite its reputation as an “ivory tower,” removed from the exigencies of the “real world,” fully a part of the neoliberal political economy that defines other sectors of the economy. As in a field such as investment banking, we live in a Hobbesian world in which we compete for limited goods, whether money or “honor,” in the sense that Hobbes meant it (similar to Bourdieu’s notion of social capital). We have a star system in which a privileged few (especially those who obtain significant external funding) can obtain rewards (spousal hires, for instance) unavailable to others. Thus, it is always to one’s advantage not only to tootle one’s own horn, but to denigrate colleagues as well. Of course, colleagues can fight back in kind, but adjuncts, dependent on the goodwill of the “regular” faculty for continuation of their meager living, cannot.
I recently saw a memo from a department chair to the pool of potential temporary lecturers for some lower-division service courses (as good an approximation of Marx’s “army of the unemployed” as I have seen), in which the competitive and uncertain nature of the potential employment was stressed. Rhetorically, it was both condescending and insensitive. For instance, it mentioned that, while service duties were not required of temporary lecturers, any such activities would be noticed and, possibly, rewarded. So, in sum, someone (who may in fact hold a Ph.D.) teaching a 4-4 teaching load, making less than a quarter what this department chair was earning, should take on service obligations as part of a strategy to retain this underpaid and exploitative employment.
Such obvious examples of bad faith, exploitation of powerless people, hypocrisy, and, I don’t know, general asshole-ishness, are the defining feature of the American academy. The fact that we spend our free time sending radical Facebook posts to one another is simply a curious sideshow.
Michael E Harkin is professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, where he has taught since 1993. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1988. He has held visiting positions at Emory University, Montana State University, Shanghai University, and the University of Graz, where he held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies in 2011. He has published on Northwest Coast ethnology, ethnohistory, the Lost Colony, religious movements, ethnoecology, and the history of anthropological thought. He is editor-in-chief of Reviews in Anthropology and co-editor of Ethnohistory. He received the Wyoming Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship in 2004, and has published poetry and creative nonfiction in a variety of venues.
via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/15/tenured-radicals/
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