Abstract
This essay locates the primary cause of the proliferation of contingent faculty in the university to nearly forty years of relentless federal and state cuts in the funding of public higher education. Public and private universities increasingly view themselves as corporate entities that maximise student tuition and corporate and philanthropic revenue while minimising labour costs. The article analyses why most tenured faculty naturalise this deterioration of the academic labour market as inevitable and why they fail to resist this phenomenon in a concerted manner. Many tenured faculty now act as a labour aristocracy who place the greatest value on the portable capital of their research records. While in the short run this self-interested calculation may seem rational, in the long run it threatens the very existence of the tenured jobs that faculty hope their graduate students attain.
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Notes
- 1.
On the nature of the neoliberal university, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War On Higher Education (New York: Haymarket, 2014); Nancy Folbre, Saving State U: Fixing Public Higher Education (New York: New Press, 2010); and Dan Clawson and Max Page, The Future of Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 2.
For tenured faculty concerns that adjunct unionisation might erode tenured faculty control over faculty appointments and university governance see “Union Efforts for Adjuncts Meet Resistance in Faculty Ranks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2014, p. A23.
- 3.
On the reproduction of class and of parental social and educational capital within the higher education system (and K-12), see Ann L. Mullen, Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class and Gender in American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
Even left wing tenured social scientists rarely admit that their class pedigree may often have more to do with their success than their alleged innate intelligence or work ethic. Their own studies show that where one goes to graduate school strongly affects one’s job market prospects. And where one goes go to graduate school is heavily determined by where one went as an undergraduate. And one’s undergraduate pedigree is heavily determined by one’s parental class background, as 80 percent of students at highly select institutions come from the top quintile of the family income distribution. That is, the class and racial patterns of recruitment into top graduate programs are partly set before a child is born.
- 4.
Occupy and other “flash protests” against neoliberalism in Greece, Turkey, Spain, the Middle East and elsewhere (as well as the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns) have drawn their participants disproportionately from under-and-unemployed recent university graduates. These protests often have not been sustainable because there does not yet exist a majoritarian left that can govern and reverse neoliberal policies. A revived governing left would have to build cooperation among states on at least a regional, if not international, scale. For example, unless the left and working class of Northern Europe reject the bi-partisan social democratic and conservative embrace of austerity policies, there can be little hope for reversing neoliberal austerity in southern Europe. For the nature of “flash protest” movements against neo-liberalism see David Plotke, “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements and American Politics,” Dissent (on-line), August12, 2012, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/occupy-wall-street-flash-movements-and-american-politics.
- 5.
See Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
- 6.
See Suzanne Mettler, “Equalizers No More: Politics Thwart the College’s Role in Upward Mobility,” The Chronicle Review (March 7, 2014), pp. B7–B10.
- 7.
On the role of the GI Bill in providing opportunities for upward mobility for the white working class (and of the role of the civil rights and women’s movement in expanding those opportunities more broadly), see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
- 8.
For the effects of the Reagan and George W. Bush’s 2001–2006 tax cuts in reducing federal tax revenue by close to 2.1% of GDP each, see The Tax Policy Center, “The Tax Policy Briefing Book,” 2012, especially p. I-13–7, “The Bush Tax Cuts: How Do They Compare to the Reagan Tax Cuts?” http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/upload/Background/I-11thru1-14TheBushTaxCuts.final.pdfReference to Bush and Reagan tax cuts from Future of Dem Equality.
- 9.
See Robert Hiltonsmith and Tamara Draut, Demos, “The Great Cost Shift Continues: State Higher Education Funding After the Great Recession,” http://www.demos.org/publication/great-cost-shift-continues-state-higher-education-funding-after-recession/.
- 10.
For the increase in tuition as a percentage of funding of total public higher education costs, see State Higher Education Officials, “State Higher Education Finance, FY 2012,” especially p. 29, http://www.sheeo.org/sites/default/files/publications/SHEF-FY12.pdf.
- 11.
On the precipitous decline in the real value of Pell Grants compared to tuition and room and board fees see Tyler Kingkade, “Pell Grants Cover Smallest Proportion of College Costs in History,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/pell-grants-college-costs_n_1835081.html.
- 12.
See “Average Rates of Growth in College Education,” Trends in Higher Education, The College Board, http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-rates-growth-tuition-and-fees-over-time.
- 13.
See Phil Oliff, Vincent Palacios, Ingrid Johnson and Michael Leachman, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “Recent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years to Come.” http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3927. 2013
- 14.
On the student debt crisis, see Rohit Chopra, “Student Debt Swells, Federal Loans Now Top a Trillion,” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, July 17, 2013. http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/student-debt-swells-federal-loans-now-top-a-trillion/
- 15.
On the stagnation of incomes of recent college graduates and on the scarce nature of high-wage STEM jobs, see Colin Gordon, “The Computer Did It: Technology and Inequality,” Dissent (Spring 2014), pp. 73–76.
- 16.
For historic trends in number of students enrolled in post-secondary institutions, see National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, 2013. http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=372
- 17.
On the steady increase in the proportion of college and university students taught by adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty see the basic bible on the characteristics of the faculty teaching at all institutions of higher learning (including community colleges). See The National Center for Education Statistics, “Employees in Post-Secondary Institutions, Fall 2011 and Student Financial Aid, Academic Year 2010–2011,” http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012156rev.pdf. See in particularly p. 9.
- 18.
See again, National Center for Education Statistics, “Employees in Post-Secondary Institutions, Fall 2011,” p. 9.
- 19.
For a summary of the change in the composition of university faculty and administrators from 1976 to 2011 see the analysis of the Institute for Post-Secondary Education Statistics from 1976 and 2011 by the American Association of University Professors staffer John W. Curtis. The chart from which this data was taken appears in the “In Brief” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2014, p. A 23.
- 20.
Marc Bosquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press,2008) offers considerable insight into the rise of contingent academic labour as part of the growing proliferation of “precarious” and low-wage employment even among college graduates. He also provides considerable evidence that there is no shortage of teaching jobs for recent PhDs. Rather, too few of these jobs provide humane and just working conditions. See especially chapter 6, “The Rhetoric of the Job Market and Reality of the Academic Labor System,” pp. 186–209.
- 21.
For a good primer on the rise of “contract” and “temporary” workers in the neoliberal labour force, see Sarah Jaffe, “Temporary Insanity,” In These Times (January 2014), pp. 18–21 and Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “Death of the Middle Class Dream: The Professional-Managerial Class in Crisis,” In These Times (January 2014), pp. 22–23.
- 22.
Benjamin Ginsberg examines how the shift in incentives towards research facilitates a new class of non-academic professional administrators becoming the dominant voice not just in university services and finance, but in determining curricular matters and faculty hiring and promotion, decisions traditionally controlled by the faculty. See Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press), 2011.
- 23.
For an ironic, perhaps tragic, look at how these trends play themselves out at a mid-tier public research university that aspires to move into the “top 50” in US News and World Report, see Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 24.
For two excellent summaries of the Delta Cost Project report on the precipitous growth in university administrative personnel, see Scott Carlson, “Administrator Hiring Drives 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force Report Says,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/. February 5, 2014. And Jon Marcus, “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom in Higher Ed Administrators,” New England Center for Investigative Reporting, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html. February 6, 2014.
- 25.
See Benjamin Ginsberg, “Administrators Ate My Tuition,” The Washington Monthly, September 2011. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all
- 26.
For Clifford Geertz’s musings as to whether he would have received tenure in today’s hyper-professional environment see chapter one of Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- 27.
On the status of adjunct faculty within the CUNY system see The CUNY Adjunct Project, http://cunyadjunctproject.org/
- 28.
The concept of equality of standing or democratic equality advanced here is, in some ways, a more political and policy-oriented version of Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities approach to theorising about justice. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
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Schwartz, J.M. (2019). Resisting the Norming of the Neoliberal Academic Subject: Building Resistance Across Faculty Ranks. In: Manathunga, C., Bottrell, D. (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95834-7_4
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