From Treasure to Trash: The Changing Meaning of Books in the New Social Economy of Higher Education

I am a retired college professor with a story to tell. My story is nominally about an event that I experienced while packing up my belongings and moving out of my office at the end of a 40-year career in academia. However, the story actually extends well beyond the details of this single event to include important changes in higher education I have observed over the course of my career. As I have reflected on this career-ending event, I have concluded that it is impossible to make sense of it without referencing the general trends that have altered the basic character of the US system of higher education in recent decades. Thus, the proper telling of my story requires the interweaving of two distinct narratives—one dealing with elements of personal biography and the other focusing on broad-based structural changes that have transformed colleges and universities in the last half century.

Apart from the significance of this story to me personally, it bears on important issues being widely discussed in the public sphere today. The claim that colleges and universities in the United States are failing Americans in various ways has become a persistent theme in the commentary of many media pundits and public officials in recent years. Some critics complain that colleges and universities do not adequately prepare students for occupational careers or their duties as citizens of a democratic society. Some conservative commentators offer a more serious indictment of higher education by asserting that students today are being indoctrinated by left-wing professors who teach them to hate their own country. And many observers of higher education, including potential students and their parents, question whether the costs of a college education today outstrip its actual value measured in cultural, political, or economic terms.

These are important issues that deserve the continued attention of both critics and defenders of contemporary institutions of higher learning, but my primary concern is to address a problem that runs deeper than these issues and may actually undergird them in some important ways. This more fundamental problem derives from social forces that are reshaping institutions of higher learning and the individual experiences of people belonging to key academic constituencies. Although my sensitivity to these forces developed over an extended period of time, the event I will now describe helped to crystallize the perspective I offer here.

The story begins with my decision to retire from full-time teaching at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Soon after I informed authorities of my intention to retire, I was asked to vacate my office two months before the official end of my employment contract in order to prepare it for its new occupant—not another faculty member but a mid-level administrator (it was a large, highly-coveted office). So, as I conducted an archeological dig through piles of old memos, letters, syllabi, course evaluations, lecture notes, articles, and other artifacts of my career, I became reacquainted with some of the details of my 40-year journey through academia. As someone who has taught at almost every level of the higher education system—from a graduate student instructor at a world-class public university, to assistant, associate, and full professor appointments at several top and mid-tier liberal arts colleges and mid-tier Research 1 universities—I have experienced a broad range of academic environments with varied demographic characteristics, student competencies, historical legacies, reward structures, and collegial expectations. My time spent in these diverse academic landscapes was reflected in the myriad of artifacts that emerged from my office dig.

As anyone who has moved out of a long-occupied home or office knows, the biggest challenge in these situations is figuring out what to save and what to throw away. Having changed offices numerous times, I was no stranger to the dysphoric experience of having to purge large amounts of stuff that had once seemed important but really wasn’t. Most challenging of all was devising a strategy for determining the fate of my collection of books. Since there was limited space for them in the overflowing bookcases of my home office, I was forced to distinguish between the really important volumes and those I could let go. After inviting friends and colleagues to peruse my collection and take what they wanted, I was still left with over 200 books needing new homes. Consequently, I was relieved when a colleague informed me of an organization that accepts book donations from college faculty for redistribution to disadvantaged students in Africa.

After contacting the organization and receiving instructions for the pickup, I stacked the books in several neat rows outside of my former office, flush against the hallway wall, and topped with a large ‘Do Not Discard’ sign with relevant information about the planned transport. During the next couple of weeks, as I worked at rearranging my home office to accommodate material moved from the College, I didn’t think much about my donated books, having resolved to not mourn lost treasures while transitioning to this new phase of life. Consequently, I was surprised and confused when I received a telephone call from a representative of the organization inquiring about the location of my donated books. He said, ‘I’m standing outside of your office right now and there are no books here’. Since I couldn’t explain the disappearance of my books and he was clearly agitated about making a long trip for apparently no purpose on a very busy day, he told me to forget it and perhaps arrange for another pickup sometime in the future—if I succeeded in locating the missing books. I did eventually determine the whereabouts of my books: they had been loaded by college maintenance staff into a large dumpster behind the office building and, soon after, transported to a landfill.

The details of this unexpected turn of events emerged after repeated inquiries, which eventually led me to a senior member of the administrative staff, an Associate Vice President in the Business Office. I emailed him about the incident and he responded with a curt message stating that he had authorized the removal of my books to the ‘recycling container’ because their presence in the hallway was a violation of the local Fire Code and the American Disabilities Act (due to ‘the stack protruding more than 4 inches into the travel path’). He also asserted that I alone was to blame for this unfortunate event because I had failed to notify the appropriate authorities of my intentions for the books (my detailed sign apparently was not sufficient). He concluded his email with the statement that the actions taken were ‘correct and appropriate’. As for the status of our exchange on this matter, the tone of his message clearly indicated his position: Case Closed.

To say that I was stunned by this response from the Associate Vice President is an understatement. In a state of shocked disbelief, I kept asking myself: ‘How is this possible? How can anyone in a position of authority at an institution of higher learning ever think that destroying a faculty member’s books without permission is a ‘correct and appropriate’ act?’ After I regained my sense of equilibrium, I resolved to pursue the matter further. As far as I was concerned, the case was NOT closed.

In a lengthy response to the Associate Vice President, I expressed my outrage over his order to trash my books. Beyond his clear dereliction in failing to contact me before he acted, I pointed out that the 200 books were my personal property, possessing significant economic value that I could no longer claim. Moreover, I had chosen to surrender the economic value of my books because of the personal value I placed on them, which was precisely why I decided to donate them to deserving students. I ended the message with this admonition: any high-level administrator of an academic organization who fails to understand the importance of books to the educational mission and the value they hold for the two principal academic constituencies—students and professors—should reassess his or her priorities. To increase the chances for some degree of accountability, I copied the Provost of the College on the message. The response to my message? No response—from either the Associate Vice President or the Provost.

So, I have been left with this conundrum to contemplate in my postretirement life: how is it possible that an administrator of a respected college could order the destruction of a senior faculty member’s books and the Chief Academic Officer of the College be utterly indifferent to the transgressive nature of this act? In searching for answers to this question, I have resisted the natural impulse to assail the moral character and motives of the specific individuals involved in this incident. In fealty to my professional perspective as an academic sociologist, I have decided that greater insight can be gained by considering how the broader structural conditions of higher education today allow these individuals to view their actions as reasonable. Consequently, this event has inspired another trip down memory lane, one that involves analytical reflection on the dramatic changes I have witnessed in the character of higher education over the course of my career.

To people outside of the academic world, I can imagine that my response to the actions of this book-destroying administrator may seem quaint. Most members of the US workforce today toil within bureaucratic environments dominated by administrators positioned at the peak of the power hierarchy and their decisions are often perceived by workers as either capricious, unjust, or both. For laborers involved in core productive activities (i.e. producing goods and services), ideas about the dignity of one’s work and respect for the autonomy of workers may no longer seem relevant to contemporary bureaucratic realities. Consequently, the righteous indignation of college professors complaining about their subservient position in the hierarchy of authority may often be viewed as a sign of their general cluelessness about the working conditions that shape the daily struggle of most workers.

While the insularity of academic life may blind some college professors to the plight of workers in other economic sectors, their complaints do accord with an important idea proposed by occupational sociologists—the assertion that the work of college professors and other ‘professionals’ possesses a distinctive character in the occupational structure of modern societies. The analytical logic in support of this proposition can be briefly summarized as follows. In an economy organized on the basis of free market principles, the central norm guiding the actions of the key economic constituencies—employers, employees, and consumers—is that actors should be guided by self-interest alone. Indeed, if other free market conditions prevail (the absence of authority in matters of the market, the inability of any constituency to impose its terms on other the constituencies, etc.), then anything other than the pursuit of self-interest is irrational, viewed at either the individual or collective level. As expressed in Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’, all individuals seeking to maximize their self-interests ultimately result in the full realization of the collective good, the latter defined more specifically in terms of ‘the best product for the lowest price’. ¹ However, in a free market system that ensures the sovereignty of consumer choices, there is a hidden danger: what happens when consumers must make choices, but lack sufficient knowledge and understanding of the things they wish to purchase? It is one thing to be able to freely choose the brand of underarm deodorant that is best for you; it is quite another thing to receive a cancer diagnosis and be forced to choose from among a wide range of treatment alternatives extending from faith healing to chemotherapy.

This dilemma helps explain a core feature of modern occupational structures in a system of consumer capitalism organized (at least ideally) according to the logic of the free market. As several sociological luminaries (see Parsons, 1951) proposed many decades ago, modern societies distinguished by the rapid expansion of complex specialized knowledge and sophisticated technology face a special challenge when this knowledge and technology is applied to alleviating individual human problems. In the modern condition, a wide gulf exists between service providers who possess highly specialized knowledge and purchasers of these services who lack such knowledge, creating an asymmetrical relationship that is ripe for potential exploitation. The general imperative to be guided only by self-interest in economic exchanges clearly puts consumers of highly technical services (like medical, legal, and similar professional services) at risk: since consumers may not understand the true nature of their problem, or even know that they have a problem in some cases (as with certain medical maladies), they may not be intellectually or emotionally prepared to choose an effective course of action. This defines the socioeconomic void that was filled by the modern professions. Organized around an alternative set of normative principles that oppose the individualistic ethic of the free market, true professionals eschew self-interest in their interactions with purchasers of their services and are compelled instead to provide advice and service that works in the best interest of their clients. To ensure adherence to this normative ideal and related standards of practice, they create collegial associations (such as the AMA, ABA, AAUP, etc.) with the authority to negatively sanction members who violate professional norms. These associations serve the additional function of protecting professionals from potential domination by nonprofessional agents (business owners, administrators, or even clients) whose interest-oriented agendas may threaten the integrity of professional work. ²

Are college professors properly designated as professionals according to the sociological criteria identified here? I believe they are, in the sense that they are tasked with transmitting highly specialized bodies of abstract knowledge to laypersons and are bound by the professional requirement to act in the best interest of their clients. This basic normative obligation is tied to an enduring dilemma that college professors (and all professionals for that matter) face every day—the challenge of ensuring that they attend to what clients need as opposed to what they want. Anyone who has spent time in the trenches of the college teaching landscape today understands the difficulty of this challenge. There is no mystery about what most (but, importantly, not all) college students want. First and foremost, they expect that the investment of time, effort, and money in a college education will yield an important credential—a college degree—which will place them on a pathway to economic success or, at the very least, protect them from the miserable economic fate of the uncredentialed masses. In addition, most students (but not all) would prefer to get their credential-ticket punched with less expenditure of labor rather than more, have access to a wide range of ‘co-curricular activities’ (sports, campus clubs, etc.), and experience opportunities to fulfill the venerable undergraduate quest for drink, dalliance, and danger. And, of course, all of this is combined with a deeply engrained desire to ‘get good grades’ while pursuing these other goals.

If we can think of students as mere consumers of the college experience, it is not surprising that these are the things they expect to purchase with their tuition dollars. After all, most undergraduates are passing through a phase of the lifecycle that is unmatched in the intensity of its opposing energies, with young bodies primed for action, minds permeated by some combination of fear and optimism about the future, and souls conflicted by their dual status as children wanting to please their parents and free adults freshly liberated from parental authority. However, when they encounter academic professionals entrusted with delivering the goods, students are often (but not always) confronted with resistance. While the problem of prioritizing ‘student needs’ is a subject of ongoing debate in higher education today, most college professors believe that their formal training as knowledge specialists dictates their primary professional responsibility to students. The essential obligation of the professor’s role is to impart his or her knowledge of a particular field of study, to ‘profess’ what he or she knows about the domain. Thus, from the standpoint of the faculty, what students need the very most, and professors are obligated to provide, is a transformative educational experience: by the end of their undergraduate careers, students should be broadly educated individuals who have internalize a representative set of concepts, perspectives, and insights from a variety of academic disciplines.

So, student ‘customers’ and academic ‘professionals’ occupy common spaces for long stretches of time and often engage in meaningful interactions with one another, but they are worlds apart in their understanding of the nature of their collective enterprise—as one of my former colleagues put it, professors are from Mars, students are from Venus (or maybe the other way around). Over the course of my academic career, I have seen this chasm between students and professors grow steadily wider and become a source of intensifying dismay on the part of both populations. Each group has become more inclined over time to impute alien qualities to the other, giving rise to dueling epithets—the deadheads versus the eggheads. The contrasting expectations of students and professors have fueled mutual frustrations that permeate most interactions between the two groups. Students cannot understand why they are required to learn material that is needlessly complicated and abstract, especially when it has no direct bearing on their postgraduate career ambitions. The use of rigorous grading standards by many faculty is often met with confusion and resentment from students who view the fine distinctions created by these standards as dubious and divisive. Indeed, many feel that the grading process should be open to negotiation: as a frustrated student lobbying to have his grade in my class raised from B+ to A− once informed me: ‘I don’t pay tuition at this place to get B pluses!’ On the faculty side, professors lament students’ lack of respect for their professional judgment on decisions pertaining to what students should learn, the best ways to achieve learning, and the appropriate techniques and standards for assessing what they have learned. Thus, colleges and universities today are best described as places of an intensifying ‘culture clash’ between students and their professors. ³

I have described the expanding consumer-professional divide in higher education by initially focusing on the faculty–student relationship, but it is also important to know where college administrators fit into this picture. The professional model described above was broadened in subsequent sociological research to address the work of professionals within bureaucratic environments. Since professional work has been subjected to the same bureaucratization trends that have restructured almost all forms of work in the modern era, the notion of ‘professional organizations’ was introduced to address this change. Professional organizations differ from typical bureaucracies in several important ways, but the most salient difference here is the relationship between organizational administrators and professional staff. If a defining feature of professional work is the normative requirement to address clients’ ‘needs’ as opposed to ‘wants’, then professionals must stand between their clients and all third parties who may exploit clients for their own gain. In other words, third parties must defer to professional judgement when it comes to determining what is best for clients. The only legitimate function of administrators within professional organizations is to develop and implement policies and procedures that assist the efforts of professionals to better address the needs of their clients—in short, to help professionals do their work.

While it is not clear that colleges and universities have ever functioned as professional organizations in this ideal sense, the importance of the professional organization model to college professors is reflected in the long history of struggle over faculty governance issues. College faculty in the modern era see themselves called to a mission that can be fulfilled only by individuals with their disposition and training: they are tasked with discovering the essential truths of the universe, both human and cosmic, and transmitting these truths to individuals who seek to ensure their individual and collective survival in a world of unprecedented complexity and uncertainty. Facing the seriousness of this task, faculty have long asserted their authority to exercise substantial control over how this mission will be pursued, an influence that is embodied in principles of academic freedom, faculty control of the curriculum, faculty recruitment of academic staff, and the sanctity of the student–professor relationship. Consequently, the notion that faculty must have a significant voice in the day-to-day operations of academic institutions still resonates strongly with most members of the collegium. ⁴

In spite of the enduring appeal of this idea to faculty, there can be no doubt that it is increasingly disconnected from the reality of higher education today. While I can recall times early in my career when I heard college presidents, provosts, and deans speak about the importance of faculty governance and the special nature of the student–professor relationship, these references became steadily less frequent and more perfunctory as time passed. A series of waves washing over higher education in the last half century, deriving from multiple points of origin but all moving in the same general direction, transformed colleges and universities from institutions that operate less as professional organizations and more as corporate entities. The primary effect of this transformation has been to reconfigure the structural relationships between the primary academic constituencies: while students and administrators have been carried along by the same dominant current, college professors have been left behind, stuck in a swirling eddy of increasing irrelevance. Academic institutions today are no longer rooted in the relationship between professional teachers and their student clients, but rather in market transactions between corporate administrators and student consumers. In an ironic historical turn, college professors have become the outsiders, increasingly marginalized by the growing dominance of the consumer ethos that currently unites students and administrators.

So this is how things have changed over the course of my teaching career. My sense of these changes was spurred by an array of events, experiences, observations, and exchanges occurring both inside and outside of the classroom. Some of the precursors to my growing recognition of the new reality were overt and quite dramatic, as for example, hearing a past president of my college routinely refer to our students as ‘the customers’. This individual, who liked to refer to himself as the ‘CEO of the College’, insisted on his right to control both faculty hiring and the college curriculum, which led him to regularly contravene faculty hiring recommendations in favor of his own personal choices as well as instituting and staffing courses and programs that the faculty strongly opposed. ⁵ Other influences on my thinking have been more subtle and impressionistic, such as observing the gradual shift in the ecology of academic institutions. While college and universities were once cloistered places dominated by the trappings of intellectual culture, today they increasingly resemble retail environments that appeal to a wide range of consumer tastes, offering students fast food courts, gourmet coffee shops, luxury residence halls, high-tech entertainment facilities, and campus book stores that devote most of their space to college branding apparel and sports gear. Students of previous generations may have experienced college life as a temporary retreat from the distractions of commercial culture, allowing for a contemplative existence of self-reflection and moral and intellectual growth, but the college environments they occupy today remind them of the deep imprint that consumer capitalism has left on their souls.

Thus, the emerging stereotype of today’s student is an individual who shows up to an early morning class with a Mocha Frappuccino in hand just purchased at the Campus Starbucks, wearing sweat clothes emblazoned in school colors and logos purchased at the Barnes and Noble Campus Bookstore, armed with a laptop computer that he or she will use for checking Instagram and surfing other websites during class. The student will purchase lunch after morning classes at the Campus Food Court where he or she will choose from among a broad range of nationally-franchised fast food alternatives. After completing afternoon classes and participating in co-curricular activities before dinner, this student may return to the Food Court for a meal and downtime in the adjoining game room, before retiring to his or her room in the luxury dorm tower overlooking the lake. The evening will be spent doing homework, which is completed in spurts while keeping track of Facebook posts and checking websites for interesting download opportunities (video games, music downloads, and even pornographic videos perhaps). So, while many colleges and universities continue to be cloistered environments in a geographic sense, they are no longer sheltered from the pervasive influence of consumer culture.

The institutional trends I have described, which were perceptible at the beginning of my career but have intensified in recent decades, are instantiated in a recurring vision that has occupied a prominent place in my consciousness in the last few years. I find myself confronted with the inscrutable gazes of students, administrators, and staff persons with whom I interact every day and I struggle to interpret what seems to be the common underlying sentiment in all of these countenances. It certainly isn’t respect or admiration, but neither is it fear or hostility. After considerable reflection, I believe I have finally been able to discern the unifying attitude—it is a sense of indifference. To be sure, conflict often arises in professors’ dealings with both students and administrators today, but the disputes are usually predictable and fleeting in character. However, most of the conflict between these parties occurs against a background of shared wisdom possessed by students and administrators—they understand that the things faculty care about the most are largely irrelevant to contemporary college life and therefore need not be taken too seriously.

This attitude of indifference is largely misunderstood by most college professors today. On the matter of the professoriate’s public standing, I have heard my colleagues express a broad range of opinions and perspectives over the years, but two opposing orientations stand out. ⁶ Some faculty imagine that they are held in high regard by laypersons for their superior intellect and knowledge and they choose to ignore any evidence to the contrary. These individuals usually take themselves very seriously and are prepared to strut their stuff, in a scholarly way, both inside and outside of the classroom (they seem to genuinely enjoy parading in faculty regalia during formal academic ceremonies). Others adopt a more critical view. They realize that professors do not command the widespread respect and admiration that they once did, but they are overly dualistic in formulating an alternative interpretation—they read the signals they receive from students and administrators as expressions of disdain or overt hostility, perhaps as responses by students to the purported liberal bias of college professors or their role in assigning student workloads and grades, or, among administrators and staff, reflections of a more deeply-held sense of envy and resentment of the work-life privileges that college professors enjoy (tenured positions, flexible schedules, freedom from direct supervision, and relatively good pay).

I believe that both interpretations miss the mark, although there are elements of truth in each viewpoint. The critical faction correctly intuits the absence of admiration for college professors among laypersons today. However, the declining respect accorded to college professors is not accompanied by intense enmity from students. Indeed, for myself and many of my teaching colleagues, hostility from students toward anything we said or did in the classroom would be a welcomed alternative to the responses we normally get. Anger or hostility would signify a level of student engagement that is conspicuously absent from most contemporary classroom environments. Since they see and hear little that seems relevant to their preoccupations and experience, most students are merely indifferent to the substance of the material presented in readings and classroom lectures. To be sure, they are engaged enough to ensure steady (or for some, more erratic) progress toward the completion of course requirements and the ultimate prize of notching course credits on their warrior belts. But for most, their immersion in the world of intellectual ideas runs no deeper than this.

The dark picture I have painted of a profession increasingly marginalized from the organizational mission it once led and delegitimized by general indifference toward the knowledge and expertise it possesses seems to suggest that professors no longer fulfill a useful organizational function. Although it certainly feels this way to many college professors today, I don’t think this conclusion is warranted. In fact, the ascendant value of the faculty to the instructional mission of colleges and universities today is revealed in the stance adopted by the first faction of college professors previously mentioned—those who mistakenly believe that they are held in high regard by laypersons and therefore are more likely to perform their professorial roles with conviction and enthusiasm. These individuals respond to the indifference of students with an impenetrable armor of self-satisfied congeniality and are eager to play their part in maintaining academic traditions and rituals. In contrast to their disgruntled colleagues within the critical faction, they are less likely to complain about the increasing anti-intellectualism of students, administrators, and the public at large. They are content to immerse themselves in their own personal intellectual projects and do not question the singular importance of their academic ventures, no matter how narrow and obscure these endeavors may be. They are the troopers among the faculty. They are the ones that keep things humming.

I submit that the approach these individuals take to their professional roles represents the purest expression of the new function fulfilled by faculty within the academy today. The way they conduct themselves as college professors satisfies a key functional requisite of the consumer-oriented academy. Their role orientation is best understood as an untroubled expression of the decorative service provided by postmodern teaching faculties. The traditional professional obligation of college professors to satisfy the epistemic needs of their student-clients may have faded in recent decades, but this does not mean that faculty are mostly irrelevant now. In order to fully respond to consumer demands, academic bureaucracies must continue to provide the adornments supplied by individuals who have embraced the life of the mind: students and their parents prefer that the faculty gatekeepers to course credits and grades have impressive academic credentials; they expect professors to cultivate personal and intellectual expressions of authoritative deportment; and they want faculty to evince a serious commitment to the institution’s rituals and traditions, such as participation in convocations, student awards ceremonies, graduation rites, and the like.

This is the character of the professoriate in the postmodern era: it is a body that provides the kind of decorative displays highly valued by student-consumers and administrative-producers in the academic market today, while it struggles with the indifference of these organizational actors to its professional resources and normative ambitions. Understanding the faculty’s transition from professional to decorative service—and the indifference to intellectual ideas this transition has engendered—helps to explain much of what college professors typically experience in their work lives these days. For students, professors are exotic creatures who inhabit domains separated from the ‘real world’, but they believe that many professors are capable of being friends to students, helping them achieve their pragmatic goals and providing emotional support when it is needed. In the second half of my teaching career, I became more cognizant of the disconnect between the increasingly dismal atmosphere of the classroom experience and my students’ individual feelings about me as a person. Lecturers who regularly confront audiences of militantly disengaged students—an assemblage of expressionless stares and flaccid bodies—naturally conclude that they are not well-liked by their students. This conclusion is usually incorrect, however. What I have learned over the years is that students generally do not blame professors for their lack of engagement with the course material. In a somewhat endearing way, they seem to send an implicit message to their instructors: ‘It is not your fault that we are not interested in what you are trying to teach us. Perhaps we should be interested, but we’re just not. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends!’

For most academic administrators, the shift in higher education from professionally organized institutions to the consumer-oriented enterprises is far less problematic than it has been for college faculties. In fact, this transformation has been a welcomed change for many administrators since it has been accompanied by an expansion of administrative power. On the production side of the academic market, the two major players are engaged in a zero-sum game: as students and the public at large become more indifferent toward the professional ‘products’ offered by the faculty and assign increasing value to the things that administrators control (the credentialing process, the scope of co-curricular activities, the luxury of living arrangements, etc.), professional power has declined and administrative power has increased. As almost everyone recognizes today, the success of all but the most prestigious national universities is determined by the efficiency and creativity of academic administrators, while the professional accomplishments and reputations of faculty members are largely insignificant. Consequently, in the same way that the commercial transformation of higher education is reflected in the altered ecology of student life, it is also reflected in a new ecology of work-life among academic employees. A walk around most campuses today immediately reveals key significations of the prevailing authority structure in academic organizations: individuals who are the best dressed, drive the most expensive cars, have the best parking spaces, and the most desirable offices are almost always administrators. Correspondingly, these individuals are usually the highest paid employees in the academic workforce.

So, what does all of this have to do with the trashing of my books? I started this essay with the story of the disappearance of my treasured collection and my sense of outrage over the loss. As a person whose life has been transformed and enriched by my introduction to the world of important books, I couldn’t help but see this event as simply a consequence of individual depravity. But as I have stated, I have chosen to move beyond attributions of personal deficiencies and consider instead how social context shapes one’s sense of legitimate and justifiable problem-solving behavior. During my four decades in academia, I have witnessed the rise of a new social economy of higher education that has allowed those who would destroy books in the service of a college’s institutional mission to feel that such an action is . . . well . . . unremarkable.

One clear consequence of the ascendancy of administrative power in colleges and universities has been the increasing encroachment of the bureaucratic system of governance on traditional academic culture. While all agents of the academy may have harbored a sense of the almost ‘sacred’ quality of books and other artifacts of intellectual culture in an earlier time, the growth of administrative power has spawned an uncritical acquiescence to bureaucratic rules and regulations. Thus, when the Associate Vice President for Business responded to my initial email inquiry about my missing books, he clearly felt confident invoking Fire Code regulations and provisions of the ADA to justify his actions. Indeed, I detected a sense of indignation in the tone of his message, which could be expressed this way: ‘Why are you wasting my time with this complaint about your precious books when this problem arose in the first place because of your brazen violation of the Fire Code and the ADA? My God, man! Your stack protruded more than four inches into the travel path!’

If the bureaucratic imperative has largely supplanted traditional academic culture in establishing appropriate norms for organizations of higher learning, this normative transformation has been reinforced by the new ‘ecology of power’ I have described. One could imagine that fear of reprisal might give pause to an administrator contemplating the destruction of a senior professor’s personal property, but faculty and staff of most academic institutions today occupy an organizational ecology that is not likely to stoke such fears. On almost all symbolic measures of status at our college, the Associate Vice President clearly outranked me. So, while it most certainly crossed his mind that I would be unhappy about his decision to trash my books, and I would probably register a complaint with a higher authority, the significations of status that he shared with other members of his administrative echelon likely reinforced his sense that he could act with impunity. He apparently assumed that an official response to my complaint would be improbable—and, of course, he was correct in this assumption.

However, to fully account for the actions of my book-destroying administrative colleague, it is also important to consider the functional significance of college and university faculties within the new social economy of higher education. As academic institutions shifted from the professional organization model to the consumer-based system, faculties have become increasingly marginalized but not entirely redundant. The primary consequence of this transformation for college professors has been a redefinition of our core teaching function within the academy. Where we once functioned as true professionals serving the educational needs of our students, our primary function today is to supply the academic decorations demanded by consumers of higher education.

I have described the kinds of faculty decorations valued by consumers of postmodern higher education, ranging from the academic credentials of the teaching faculty to the colorful display of faculty regalia during important academic ceremonies. But these are not the only decorations supplied by college professors. Less obvious forms of adornment can be found in certain faculty appurtenances, such as the standard trappings of professors’ offices. Serving as primary workspaces for many faculties, these spaces are often filled with stacks of student papers, piles of research documents, arrays of post-it notes, legal pads, formulae-covered whiteboards, and other artifacts employed by individuals who are producers and disseminators of knowledge. The distinctive character of faculty offices reflects the practical demands of academic work, but most people expect faculty offices to look this way and they appreciate the decorative value of the display of creative disarray. The same thing could be said about faculty attire: in my experience, most college professors’ choice of everyday work clothing is based on a practical interest in being comfortable while teaching, doing research, writing, and conducting other scholarly and instructional activities. However, the stereotypical image of somewhat disheveled professors dressed in jeans and tee shirts, socks and sandals, and other kinds of casual clothing possesses a certain cachet that appeals to many academic consumers.

Although the practical orientation of college professors toward these kinds of artifacts dims their awareness of their decorative value, ⁷ administrators and staff tend to be much more cognizant of professorial adornments and somewhat resentful of the dispensations that enable such eccentricities. Consequently, many staff persons come to disdain the decorations of the academic world, viewing professors’ cluttered offices, shabby clothing, and cartoonish regalia, as signs of their detachment from the real world of everyday work life. This has particular significance for understanding the fate of my donated books. If the character of faculty offices and clothing can be seen to serve both practical and decorative ends, academic books may be the best example of an artifact that fulfills this dual function. For scholars and teachers, books are the most essential tools of our trade because of their practical function as the primary repositories of the knowledge we produce and seek to share with others. ⁸ So for college professors of my generation, nothing possesses greater practical importance than the key texts we read during our academic training, the personal collections of continually-referenced books we assembled throughout our careers, the volumes we have written ourselves in an effort to contribute to the general stock of knowledge in our respective disciplines, and the books we select for our students to inspire their engagement with the world of ideas. It would be no exaggeration to say that our ability to do our work effectively depends in large measure on our access to important books.

At the same time that academic books serve these practical ends, they also function as important scholastic adornments within college or university environments. Among the various significations of the power of knowledge on college campuses today, perhaps the most impressive are numerous book collections dispersed across the campus landscape—the mega collections contained within college and university libraries as well as personal collections that line the office bookshelves of individual faculty members. The willingness of academic and state authorities to commit major economic resources to academic libraries in the modern era is due not only to the practical importance of books but also to their symbolic significance. In addition to providing protected spaces for warehousing books and other scholarly materials, library expenditures ensure that these buildings can be experienced as ‘temples of knowledge’. This is revealed in the dramatic architecture of many university libraries, the display of important art pieces or rare relics of intellectual history, material forms of homage paid to academic forerunners such as busts of literary and scientific luminaries, inspirational quotations on library ceilings, original manuscripts encased in glass, and similar artifacts. Like the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, these buildings are designed to inspire a sense of awe and stamp visitors’ souls with the power of the truths that can be revealed within these spaces.

On a much smaller scale, faculty book collections are also symbolically important in this way. Among the various decorations that contribute to the unique character of faculty offices, book-lined walls are perhaps the most powerful significations of a distinctive culture centered on the life of the mind. In fact, my initial sense of the importance of faculty adornments was spurred in part by a reoccurring student exchange I experienced throughout my teaching career. A student enters my office for the first time, surveys the surroundings, and immediately takes notice of the five or six bookshelves filled with monographs, textbooks, and other documents and asks, ‘Have you actually read all of these books?’ When I respond ‘Well, yes, most of them . . .’, they appear perplexed and amused. They seem simultaneously bewildered by the knowledge that someone has taken the time to read so many academic books and beguiled by their unlikely association with a species of this sort. Thus, while office book collections clearly possess professional value for scholars and teachers who put them to practical use in their work, they have mainly decorative value for student consumers who interact with professors in their faculty offices.

But there is another crucial influence: in the same way that the meaning of every human act is contextually determined, the meaning of humanly-produced objects also derive from the context of their appearance and use. So in the case of academic books, the practical and decorative significance of these objects depends on their location in appropriate spaces, such as libraries and faculty offices. ⁹ Consequently, if they are removed from these spaces, they often acquire a different meaning, especially if they are located in spaces controlled by someone other than library authorities, faculty members, or students. Herein lies the problem I failed to anticipate when I decided to donate my collection: when books are arranged on office bookshelves, they may possess great practical importance to their faculty owners and decorative importance to academic consumers (students, parents, etc.) who visit faculty offices, but when they are stacked in building corridors—spaces controlled by administrators like the Associate Vice President for Business—their practical and decorative meaning is superseded. Now they can be defined as mere hallway litter and this definition carries the weight of authority.

This act of redefinition is enabled in part by the increasing tendency to view books more as decorations than as intellectual tools. In a general sense, decorations are ephemeral in nature. They are used to mark an occasion, to enhance a setting, or to signify distinction in a ceremonial context. But once they have fulfilled these functions, they can be easily discarded. Confetti creates a magical effect when it is floating in the air, but it becomes something to sweep up and dump in trash bins when it accumulates in piles on the floor. In contrast, tools are substantial things that are used over and over again until they wear out and are replaced. While tools are usually put away when a task is completed, decorations are often thrown away when they no longer generate an intended effect. Thus, when the value of books is measured more in decorative terms and less in professional terms, it becomes much easier to simply discard them when they are not spatially arranged to achieve their decorative purpose—stacked in a hallway instead of arrayed on office bookshelves. Like confetti, they may possess a magical quality in one space, but become trash in a different space.

So as I reflect on my personal academic journey over the last 40 years, these are the dramatic changes I have witnessed: the transformation of colleges and universities from professional organizations to commercial service enterprises, the rise of administrative power and the steady decline of professional power, the shift in faculty roles from ‘professors’ of knowledge to suppliers of academic adornments, the conversion of students from clients to customers, and most importantly, the growing indifference of students, administrators, and the public at large toward the truths that academic institutions seek to impart. I have chosen to focus on these changes as the best way I can explain how my books ended up in a dumpster. It is my hope that this account reveals how the mundane practices of everyday life, governed by institutional imperatives that evade our critical awareness, often produce outcomes that should surely shock us all.