State of the professoriate: Rant and lament

Triggered by William Deresiewicz’ book Excellent Sheep, the past year has seen its share of wailing and gnashing of teeth by Humanities scholars, most recently by Jackson Lears in Commonweal.  The laments, while familiar, have new urgency:

1. A soulless pragmatism squeezes the Humanities; universities have succumbed to rationalization and disenchantment, as management gurus and marketing flacks take over.
2. Liberal arts education is under attack from vocationally oriented bean counters
3. Students, oppressed by anxiety about the precarity of life in a modern economy, close themselves off from the true learning that their forbears had got from college education.
4. College threatens to become purely instrumental, a ticket to a good job, or a pathway to elite levels of affluence.

In other words, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /  Are full of passionate intensity.”

Does it bother you that a century old poem captures what is supposed to be a uniquely contemporary complaint?  Me too.  I’m tired of this kvetching.  Here is a corrective.

I write as a professor trained in the social sciences, recently retired after 30+ years of teaching undergraduates and MBAs at a modest sized Jesuit university.

I also write as the father of 18 year old twins, about to enter college, and coming off the grueling application process.

In my opinion, the Humanities professoriate brought this Gotterdammerung on itself.  The downfall started with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault.  It continued with postmodernism. The music stopped the first time a sociologist like Talcott Parsons lost the Bad Writing contest to a postmodernist Humanities scholar. It’s hard to remember the silly ravings that came out of English departments under the spell of deconstruction, but all that prattling, about how every text subverts its own meaning, has proved very costly.

I will not send my bright and reflective daughter to learn to write like Jacques Lacan. And I am most definitely not going to pay $45,000 in tuition, times four, for the privilege. The idea that she should indenture herself into loan servitude for the opportunity to listen to relativistic nonsense is beastly and wicked.

Next came the assault on the canon: dismissed as the yawp of dead white males. The surrender on this count continues to echo.  Once it was accepted, among segments of the Humanities professoriate, that people of color couldn’t get a real liberal arts education, when forced to read dead whites; and once everyone understood that a woman couldn’t benefit, by reading celebrations of patriarchal dominance, it followed directly that a transgendered person shouldn’t have to knuckle under to gendered hegemony; but likewise, that a disabled person of color shouldn’t have to read about the false struggles of privileged white transgendered persons.

It’s all relative anyway, according to Foucault (or according to those who read Foucault); let everyone read anyone they please.  Excepting white male students: their only hope of receiving a good education is a sustained and wide-ranging exposure to subaltern perspectives. Well fine; but again, I’m not going to pay large amounts of money for my son to be educated that way.

When the Western canon fell into disrepute, the argument for a liberal arts education succumbed with it. I doubt many Humanities scholars see the connection.  For myself, I got a good semblance of a liberal arts education in the early 1970s, before all this hit the fan. I’m easily persuaded by traditional arguments for the value of studying the Humanities.  But as a parent today, I don’t think that liberal arts education is on offer for a Humanities major, at any but a few schools that have made a fetish of the Great Books. In all too many Humanities departments, it has been replaced by identity politics, a far inferior good.

The problems in the professoriate run deep

In fairness to my Humanities colleagues, their current parlous state is not all their own doing.  They’ve also been tarred by two more general corruptions that have seeped into the American professoriate. The first is the tendency to see teaching as a burden, as compared to scholarship, now viewed as intrinsically motivating. At my mid-ranked university, where teaching loads are moderately high (by today’s standards), I have never met a colleague who didn’t believe both that he deserved, and could benefit from, teaching fewer classes.  For the same or higher pay, of course.

Universities—the parts not run by the Athletic department—really are driven by faculty concerns, even today. Once low teaching loads became linked to elite status among universities, administrators desirous of boosting their school’s standing made a devil’s pact with faculty hoping to minimize teaching. Just find an adjunct to replace you, and I’ll lop that course off your load.

My present discomfort is exquisite: having been one of those teaching-avoiding scholars, I’m now a parent, about to spend multiples of my annual salary, to send my children to be taught by … adjuncts?  No offense—there down the freeway, but for the grace of God, go I—but the atrocious working conditions visited on adjuncts are not conducive to delivering on the promise of a liberal arts education.

And here Deresiewicz’ book crosses paths with the more recent one by Frank Bruni of the New York Times. Deresiewicz bemoans the self-induced misery of students at elite schools; Bruni counsels students they don’t have to make themselves miserable, by going to, or failing to be admitted to, such schools.  They both miss the salient fact, which looms so large for me, as a knowledgeable faculty insider, now turned desperate parent: only at elite schools will your child be taught mostly by tenure track faculty with stellar academic accomplishments. Elsewhere, your child has a 50-50 chance of taking a class from a person, who, well perhaps just as bright as his tenured colleagues, has never enjoyed the resources required to accomplish significant scholarship, and has no wealth of reflection, arising from such scholarship, to share.  How could they, in a life spent without benefits, flying down the freeway, adjunct rather than tenured?

This is the rational side of the seemingly irrational rush to get into Stanford and its ilk. There are now only a few private colleges and universities worth the $45,000 per year.  Everywhere else, your child risks watered-down gruel.  The whiskey of college has been cut to the proof of high school beer.

True, at top-ranked state universities, your child will still be exposed to professors who are accomplished scholars; but you’ll have to share these luminaries with the other 300 students in the lecture hall.  Only at a Stanford do you get both the scholar and the small class size.  And only at a Stanford do you get the world-class scholar who is voluntarily teaching undergraduates, rather than huddling with Ph.D. students, or off pursuing a grant. Princeton is actually worth the $45,000, just as Berkeley or Michigan are worth the $15,000, after accounting for class size.  To get the same price-value relationship anywhere else in academia, you’d have to look to community colleges. Everywhere else, the price-value relationship has been knocked out of whack by tenured faculty members’ disinterest in teaching undergraduates, and the accompanying spread of poorly-resourced adjunct faculty.

And that brings me to the second corruption seeping through the professoriate: the incredible cost of even a mediocre undergraduate education. A venal sin among the professoriate is to complain about “all those administrators” driving up costs. I’m sure there is bloat there, but overall I think it is rounding error.  The real factor driving tuition costs is faculty compensation.

The oppression suffered by adjunct faculty should not blind us to the emoluments enjoyed by the tenured. To be a tenured professor at a mid-ranked or higher university has become a very, very nice job. If the average Humanities professor were more economically literate, this fact would be more widely understood. We tenured faculty, most of us, are overpaid, relative to our contributions, and after factoring in our dolce working conditions. Yes, there are other occupations which are also overpaid; but don’t try to change the subject.

You probably have not heard this acknowledgement, that our pay is all too generous, from a professor before.  Faculty aren’t that much more self-reflective than other wage earners—everyone thinks he or she is underpaid.

The tenured faculty gig has gotten so good, I do not think it can last. I cannot in good conscience recommend it as a career to my children.  It’s too sweet; I don’t expect academic career opportunities to endure through their adulthood.  It will be rationalized away, under the dread logic of “neoliberal hegemony,” as Lears and other Humanities scholars might say.

Here is a gloomy prognosis. No one knows the future; but it can be useful to explore negative as well as positive scenarios.

On this downbeat scenario, the spread of adjuncts, the withdrawal from teaching, and the escalation in pay were the first steps toward the collapse of the current American university regime.  The pending aggregation of thousands of students online, under the tutelage of a single star professor, will be the second. The ongoing financial demise of marginal private colleges will continue. Next, legislatures in a few states lacking any top-ranked university will abolish tenure, and hollow out their state universities with online supplements.  Sometime after that, in the worldwide financial crisis of 20xx, tenure will be swept away at nearly every public university, and all except the best endowed private schools will fail or be bought out.  Little will change at Harvard, Stanford, and the like; it’s the changes all around them that will change private colleges back to what they once were, bastions of the privileged few.

Who may once again receive that liberal arts education, which now only exists in the fevered dreams of conservative humanists, and in the memories of the aged, like me, who enjoyed it once, but cannot any longer promise it to my children.