Abstract
Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN 9781137506122.
Three arguments: Humanities, higher education, academic freedom
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Portland State University, USA
We argue that the crisis in the humanities is not a crisis of content but of deprofessionalization and its consequences for academic freedom.
Academic freedom, higher education, humanities, American university, contingency, tenure
We believe our’s (Bérubé and Ruth, 2015) is something more than the standard-issue “defense” of the humanities, or of the liberal arts tradition in higher education more generally (which would of course include the physical and social sciences—everything that is not a narrowly designed “vocational” program). The book is partly that, but we think there are enough of those out there. Helen Small’s The Value of the Humanities, to take one example, offers a painstakingly careful and measured assessment of the genre. We believe that the real crisis is that the profession of college teaching has been drastically deprofessionalized over the past 40 years, and that college teachers need to find ways of making this case to the general public—without suggesting that the legions of teachers off the tenure track are not doing professional-quality teaching. We want to explain to people who may not know what a provost is, or who don’t use the word “decanal” in conversation, what this crisis looks like.
So what are the “three necessary arguments” of our subtitle? They go something like this. The first two are familiar in some precincts of the academy, but not all—and very rarely get an adequate hearing outside. The third is wholly unacknowledged, and sheds new and disturbing light on the first two.
One, the humanities are in fine shape, insofar as their intellectual value is concerned. We don’t agree with every last thing every single person in the humanities has written or said over the past 40 years, but on the whole, the disciplines of the humanities are home to exciting and ambitious work in both emerging and traditional fields.
Two, while all this exciting and ambitious work has been going on, the profession of college teaching has been hollowed out as full-time, tenure-track positions have been converted to highly precarious positions (both full-time and part-time) that offer no possibility of tenure—which means, basically, all the job security of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s.
Three, the deprofessionalization of college teaching has had consequences with which no one has fully come to terms—in academe or out. These consequences have unsettling implications for the future of graduate programs and for the mundane but important business of running academic departments. They are complex and contradictory and hard to fix, and we elaborate on them in chapters two and three of the book; suffice it to say here that massive hiring off the tenure track has effectively foregone systems of professional review for college faculty.
Now a few words about what we hope to do in this book and why. The employment situation in American academe is this: contingent faculty members now make up over one million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities—about 70 percent of all faculty. Many of them are working at or under the poverty line, with an average salary of about $2700 per course, without health insurance; some of them, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2012, are living on food stamps (Patton, 2012). These faculty members have no academic freedom worthy of the name, because they can be fired at will; and, when fired, many remain ineligible for unemployment benefits, because institutions routinely invoke the “reasonable assurance of continued employment” clause in federal unemployment law even for faculty members on yearly contracts who have no reasonable assurance of anything.
In 1970, the situation was the reverse: more than 70 percent of college professors had tenure. Since then, ever-increasing numbers of students have been taught by an ever-decreasing number of tenured faculty. That is the real story of the relation between student enrollments and faculty jobs, and the numbers are staggering. In 1947, there were 2.3 million undergraduates enrolled in American colleges and universities. In 1972, that number was 9.2 million. That 25-year period after World War II is widely understood as an unprecedented boom, demographically and economically, followed by years of retrenchment and stagnant waves. But on campus, the boom just kept booming—to the point at which enrollments broke the 20 million mark in 2009, and have remained there in the years since. And yet that continued growth in undergraduate enrollment has not been met with a commensurate investment in higher education. On the contrary, State legislatures have drastically reduced support for their colleges and universities, offloading the costs onto students and their families, redefining higher education as a private investment rather than as a public good. In the University of California system, for example, in-state tuition was $300 as late as the year 1980 (out of state, it was a whopping $360). Today, it is over $11,000. We regard this as nothing less than an intergenerational betrayal: the people whose educations were subsidized in the 1960s and 1970s, the Boomers of the boom years, graduated, became taxpayers, lobbyists, and legislators, and decided not to fund the system from which they benefited so dramatically.
It is routinely asserted that the current state of affairs, for academic jobseekers, is the result of an overproduction of PhDs. Like the claim about undergraduate enrollments in the humanities, this claim is usually presented as self-evident, and is followed with some loose talk about “supply” and “demand.” And like the claim about undergraduate enrollments, it is very wrong. As Marc Bousquet has been arguing for years, the faculty workforce is made up of hundreds of thousands of people who do not have a PhD—which, we would add, effectively calls into question the function of the PhD as a credentializing degree for college teaching. (That is why the deprofessonialization of the professoriate has consequences for graduate programs.) The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty was discontinued in 2004, but as of then, 65.2 percent of non-tenure-track faculty members held the MA as their highest degree—57.3 percent in four-year institutions, 76.2 percent in two-year institutions (Laurence, 2014). There is no reason to think that those percentages have gone down in the past decade, and every indication that they have risen. To wit, there are many factors affecting the working conditions of adjuncts, but the production of PhDs isn’t one of the major ones.
These numbers have implications that go far beyond the usual debates about the size of doctoral programs, because they illustrate how inadequate it is to think that we can solve the problem of contingent faculty simply by advocating that everyone be converted to the tenure track. Precisely because adjuncts are so invisible, even to the tenured and full-time non-tenured colleagues they work among, it is not widely understood that many of them have held their jobs—at one institution or at many, on a year-by-year basis or on multiyear contracts—for 10, 15, 20 years and more. Uninformed people tend, we have found, to speak of contingent faculty in two ways: either as bright, energetic 30-year-olds who enliven their departments and disciplines, working in the trenches for a few years before getting their first tenure-track job, or as professionals with day jobs in other lines of work who agree to teach a course at a local university for pin money. That part-time, informal arrangement for people who have other sources of income (be they actors, entrepreneurs, tinkers, or tailors) is the original function of adjunct faculty, and offers the only legitimate rationale for paying a college teacher less than $7000 for a college course; the Modern Language Association recommendation is for a minimum of $7230 for a standard three-credit course, and for a teaching schedule of six courses per term—for a very modest annual salary of $43,380. (Most adjuncts teach eight courses or more.)
The situation is complicated further by the terms of art by which institutions designate contingent faculty. They can be called “instructors” or “lecturers” or “visiting assistant professors” or “professors of the practice”—or pretty much anything. There is no universally agreed-upon designation for contingent faculty; there are even contingent faculty who do not want to be designated by the term “contingent faculty.” By contrast, on the tenure track, an “assistant professor” almost always designates someone who has not yet earned tenure; an “associate professor” almost always designates someone who has earned tenure (in very rare cases, people have been tenured while retaining the rank of assistant—cases too rare to be important); and “full professor” almost always designates someone who has risen from the rank of associate by means of a national or international system of peer review, to promotion at the highest rank of the faculty (leaving aside further striations in rank, including “distinguished” professorships and endowed chairs; these do not come with any formal promotion in rank beyond that of full professor). And there is no correspondence between a contingent faculty member’s title and his or her rank or degree of job security. As a result, some contingent faculty are effectively long-term, full-time, non-tenure-track faculty working on multiyear contracts for decades; some are hired on an annual basis by one institution, year after year (until they are summarily let go); still others, informally known as “freeway flyers,” cobble together an existence by teaching at two or more different institutions in an area—a course or two here, a course or two there. This is by far the most precarious form of academic employment, though it must be said that all contingent faculty are in a sense “precarious,” and all are subject to the fluctuating employment needs of their departments—which means, in many cases, that they are not informed about what they will be teaching until mere weeks (or days) before the start of classes, or (even worse) not informed that they will not be teaching at all until mere weeks (or days) before the start of classes.
To make matters even more complicated still, while many (if not most) contingent faculty would prefer positions on the tenure track, some would not—as they repeatedly informed me during my time as MLA president. This is so for a variety of reasons. Some faculty actually teach off the tenure track voluntarily: some prefer a teaching-intensive position to a position that includes requirements for research and service, or, as one creative writer said to me, “don’t you go dragooning me onto your campus committees—and I will do my creative work on my own time, thanks.” Some were hired into full-time, non-tenure-track positions as part of spousal/partner arrangements in which the spouse/partner works on the tenure track. Others, including some of my non-tenure-track colleagues at Penn State, report that they chose to seek full-time positions off the tenure track because it allowed them to decide where they want to work—namely, here. (The tenure-track world, by contrast, ordinarily gives job candidates about as much control over their geographical location as military recruits have—namely, none.) There are positions among these that no doubt should be continued (with more job security) for all kinds of programmatic reasons, but if we are to reform a system most of us agree has fallen into serious disrepair, the status quo needs to be challenged. All qualified applicants should have an opportunity to apply for positions, and the majority of positions must have access to the academic freedom the tenure system makes possible. Our book hopes to explain why.
More controversially, our book will attempt to explain how. We propose that many full-time faculty lines off the tenure track be converted to teaching-intensive tenured positions. The tenure process for such faculty would involve rigorous peer review, conducted by their tenured colleagues at the same institution, but would carry no expectations for research or creative activity. (We set out the procedures for these conversions in our Appendix.) The controversial part is that not everyone now teaching as contingent, adjunct faculty would be equally eligible for conversion to the teaching-intensive tenure track. In the course of this book, we distinguish sharply between faculty (on or off the tenure track) who are hired in competitive regional or national searches and faculty (always off the tenure track) who are hired locally by means of random ad hoc procedures that are answerable to no one. Getting college faculty back on the tenure track, we believe, involves eliminating as much random, ad hoc hiring as possible, thereby diminishing the amount of faculty hiring that works as a patronage system and increasing the amount of faculty hiring that abides by nationally recognized standards of professionalism. Moreover, our proposal would give priority to faculty who have completed the doctorate, on the grounds that (a) the doctorate is the appropriate credential for tenured faculty (except in fields where the MFA is the terminal degree, as is the case with creative writers or fine and performing artists) and (b) we are currently producing cohort after cohort of new PhDs who are dumped into a system staffed by thousands of faculty who do not have PhDs. That is the structural cause of the crisis in graduate education.
As you might imagine, current graduate students, recent PhDs, and adjunct faculty members with PhDs will find a great deal to like in this plan. Full-time non-tenure-track faculty without terminal degrees, especially those who have been teaching for many years, will be far less enthusiastic. And, of course, not every institution of higher education will agree with the proposition that the terminal degree should be the necessary credential for a job; community colleges, especially, tend not to hire PhDs precisely because they associate the degree with research rather than with teaching. We have no illusions about the difficulties involved with our proposal, and no delusions that it will meet with universal acceptance by faculty or by institutions. And of course, we believe that faculty who have been teaching for many years off the tenure track, whatever their degree status, deserve the benefits of academic due process; such faculty should be given greater consideration than faculty who have been teaching off the tenure track for only a few years.
But we strongly believe that no one is facing these problems squarely. Not only has no one proposed a fix for the people-without-PhDs problem identified by Bousquet; no one has even acknowledged that the vast majority of off-track hires follow no established procedures. The result is that the profession of teaching in colleges and universities has been eroded by unprofessional hiring practices—and none of us has been eager to admit that all of us engage in those practices, not just overpaid central administrators. Deans do it, department heads do it, even educated PhDs do it. And as a result, there are entire departments with majority-contingent faculty who will resist our proposal because it is “elitist.” But of course, if you don’t believe that a profession should abide by professional hiring practices, you have nothing to complain about when your profession finds itself deprofessionalized.
And finally, there is the question of why the general public should care about any of this. If you read any online essay about contingent faculty in Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education, you will quickly find, in the comment section, that (a) the higher-ed press is read avidly by people who hate professors, and (b) relatedly, there is not a great deal of sympathy out there for adjuncts making $20,000–25,000 a year. Especially since the near-meltdown of 2008, things have been, as the phrase has it, tough all over. It is accordingly harder than most exploitatively underpaid college professors might think to tell people that many college professors are exploitatively underpaid. It's a particularly tough sell in communities already devastated by prolonged economic hardship. But it might be possible to play on the still-widespread belief that college professors are professionals, and that parents who are sending their children to college should have some expectation that professors have the professional resources—offices, phones, mailboxes, e-mail and library access, meaningful performance reviews, protected participation in department governance—that make it possible for them to do their jobs well. It might even be possible to do this without construing students as consumers and parents as aggrieved consumer advocates demanding that they should get what they pay for. The analogy, instead, should be to the ideals and practices of professionalism: if you need an attorney, and you go to a firm that fobs you off on an associate who has to consult with you in a hallway because she doesn’t have an office, would you stand for that? Is it OK that your kid is going to a college that treats its faculty that way? Or think of it in terms of what a college promises and what it practices. Is it telling students that a college degree is a pathway to the middle class, while paying its own instructors, with postgraduate degrees, food-stamp wages?
This line of argument seems especially necessary when one stops to consider the primary concern most people have about college—that is, its cost. College tuitions at both public and private universities have outpaced inflation for many years; at public universities, the tuition hikes are largely attributable to the decades-long withdrawal of state support for higher education, while at private universities the increases have more to do with prestige and facilities. At both public and private universities, however, there has been a dramatic expansion in the administrative and managerial ranks—and in administrative salaries. (In this, too, academe is far from alone.) Not surprisingly, student debt has soared over the past 10 to 15 years. Taking on the student loan industry is the task of another book, but we hope it will suffice to say two obvious things here. The first is that the debt apologists are fond of claiming that average undergraduate debt—now over $25,000—is no more onerous than buying a car. But of course, the young graduate might still need to buy a car; and as my firstborn child, now 29, pointed out, $25,000 will get you a very nice car by the standards of the average 22-year-old. (“I could buy two Kias for $25,000,” he suggested.) The second thing is that when you are saddling 22-year-olds with $25,000 in debt—and it is a special, venomous kind of debt, undischargeable even in bankruptcy proceedings—you are giving them a powerful incentive to study subjects that (seem to) promise very quick returns on investment after graduation.
The arguments about money are necessary, because few people outside academe understand that these hefty increases in tuition have actually gone hand in hand with the seismic shift away from tenure-track faculty and toward low-wage contingent faculty. But there is another critical principle at stake here, as well. We need to tell people that non-tenure-track faculty members need a measure of job security and academic freedom if they are going to be able to do their jobs at all. This is dicier than it may sound at first: it amounts to telling parents, students, administrators, and legislators that they have to fight for the right of professors to challenge their students intellectually, free from the fear that they will be fired the moment they say something unfamiliar or upsetting about sexuality or evolution or American history or the Middle East. This argument will surely resonate with people who understand what higher education is all about, and who are long-term supporters of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), National Public Radio (NPR) or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They are a subset of the American electorate, but they know why academic freedom is essential to an open society, and they believe in the promise of higher education. The question is whether they can be persuaded that the promise of higher education is undermined when 70 percent of the professoriate is made up of people who can be summarily fired for upsetting the wrong person.
“It is sometimes said that society will achieve the kind of education it deserves. Heaven help us if this is so,” University of Chicago President Edward Levi said in 1970. Levi didn’t say what such an education would look like, though it might well look like the one we have today. In 2015 higher education reflects the inequality of American society: a widening divide between the academic quality of the elite and that of the ordinary institutions, between well-compensated executive teams and an army of contingent professors, and between wealthy undergraduates and those shouldering crushing student debt. Universities under intense economic pressure, threatened with one fiscal challenge after another, seem to be inconceivably remote from the genteel world Levi sketched in 1970, a world suffused with “the magic of a disciplined process, self-generating, self-directing, and free from external constraints.” This ideal of academic freedom, Levi continued, “describes a central thrust carried forward at particular times by enough scholars and enough institutions to have had a pervasive influence” (Levi, 2007: 169). Our argument here is that despite the incredibly hostile conditions it now endures, this ideal is alive and well—and represents the only way to reverse the deprofessionalization of the profession. It is an ideal whose seemingly precarious life is renewed every time its extinction is predicted. The value of a university degree may be in question today; but the university’s legitimating principle, the idea and the ideal of academic freedom, is not.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.