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Abstract
Over the past four decades, forces have been set in motion that are proletarianizing professors—reducing their control over their workplaces. This has been in part propelled by a resurgence of laissez-faire doctrine that has legitimated public policies which have fueled soaring inequality. This article addresses the threat to freedom and economic dynamism posed by the debasement of professors by examining six forces that are driving the proletarianization of the professoriate: the replacement of tenured with contingent faculty, an expansion of for-profit colleges and universities, the rise of online education, the introduction of annual evaluations and merit pay, the development of outcomes assessment, and the increased reliance on external research funding. The essay then surveys how laissez-faire doctrine and rising inequality have led to cuts in government funding for higher education, have placed an increased emphasis on providing student consumers with vocational training as opposed to a liberal education, and have reshaped higher education through the introduction of corporate values within universities’ systems of governance. The article concludes with reflections on the evolution of the status of professors in higher education as a symptom of the betrayed promises for personal and social life held forth by economic abundance following WWII.
Notes
1 Note that this is the average salary of full-time lecturers, not their starting salary, so the gap is likely to be larger than what is computed here.
2 It is perhaps in part because of this that political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg flippantly writes that “At some schools, the faculty has already surrendered and is hoping that the Geneva Convention will protect it from water boarding” (2013, 2).
3 Part of this expansion has been due to more laissez-faire policy stances. Professor of education Roger Geiger notes that under the George W. Bush administration, “A for-profit-sector lobbyist was placed in charge of the higher education division of the Department of Education, and she gutted the restrictions on recruiters (2002)” (2019, 321).
4 Apollo Education Group owns several private for-profit higher education institutions, most notably, the University of Phoenix.
5 Roger Geiger reports that “recruiters operated in a boiler-room atmosphere where they were under intense pressure to meet quotas . . . [preying] on unsuccessful and dispirited young adults, often found in welfare and unemployment offices and public housing. Members of the armed forces were choice prospects, especially valuable because veteran benefits did not count against the 90 percent federal limit” (2019, 321).
6 Southern New Hampshire opted to treat its online instructors as salaried lecturers, offering compensation similar to the data reported above (i.e., about $55,000 a year).
7 Similar trends are taking place in England, which along with the United States has witnessed the greatest surge in laissez-faire doctrines. Historian and novelist Marina Warner writes of “the government’s business model for higher education” and “the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business.” At the University of Essex, for instance, seventeen targets were set with progress assessed in meeting them occurring twice a year (Citation2014, 43).
8 Collini continues: “. . . the use of metrics is very often not the result of a neutral or benign impulse to see how ingeniously we can replace the messiness of existence with the apparent clarity of numbers, but part of more systematic attempts by one group of people to control the behaviour of others. . . . ‘Accountability’ is the fig-leaf that covers up this systematic bullying” (Citation2018, 37).
9 Data available at: https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/datatables/herd/2018/ (authors’ calculations).
10 The number of foundations in the United States increased from 32,401 in 1990 to 86,203 in 2015 (Statista Citation2019).
11 Sheldon Wolin claims that elites have created a new form of totalitarianism that has “cultivated a loyal intelligentsia of its own. Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins” (Citation2010, 68).
12 Economist Richard Easterlin concurs:
To judge from the historical experience of the world’s twenty-five largest nations, the establishment and experience of formal schooling has depended in large part on political conditions and ideological influences…. A major commitment to mass education is frequently symptomatic of a major shift in political power and associated ideology in a direction conductive to greater upward mobility for a wider segment of the population. (Citation1981, 1, 14).
As might be expected, a decline in worker political influence has the opposite effect. (Wisman and Pacitti Citation2015).
13 Economic historian Joyce Appleby reports that “Almost a million veterans took advantage of the GI Bill, which paid the costs of a college or technical education along with a stipend to live on. At the peak year of 1947, nearly half of America’s college students were vets, the majority of them the first in their families to go to college” (Citation2011, 300).
14 Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating after 2000, state and federal officials began demanding tangible measures of higher education outcomes, arguing that taxpayers should be getting their money’s worth. Many of the measures proposed and sometimes implemented “ignored the intellectual and cultural content of a liberal or general education that had dominated conceptions of college education in the postwar era” (Geiger Citation2019, 339, 341).
15 Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab details how this decline in state funding has harmed working-class students the most (Citation2017), thereby increasing inequality which in turn reduces state support—a reinforcing cycle.
16 The manner in which the increasing inequality of the last several decades influences public expenditures on public goods such as education was addressed by Christopher Lasch in his last major work, The Revolt of the Elites (Citation1996). He noted that as economic elites take an ever-greater share of income and wealth, they tend to isolate themselves in social enclaves such as gated communities, exclusive clubs, and private schools. They tend to work in jobs, live in neighborhoods, and move in circles where they literally do not see those struggling to stay on their feet. Because of elites’ disproportionate political power, this withdrawal from the wider society and from direct contact with the concerns of other citizens erodes support for public services on which those further down the economic ladder depend—services such as public schools, parks, transportation, public safety, and a clean environment. As Secretary of Labor during the Clinton Administration, Robert B. Reich has put it, “members see no reason why they should pay to support families outside the gates when members are getting everything they need inside . . .” (Citation2001, 199).
17 A century ago, in a book entitled The Higher Learning in America, Thorstein Veblen analyzed the “incursion of business principles into the affairs of learning” that accompanied the previous thirty years of industrial concentration and exploding inequality, generating a “popular sentiment [that] businesslike administration is the only sane rule to be followed in any human enterprise.” He lamented that it redirected the focus of higher education from the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge to the provision of vocation skills such that “Plato’s classic scheme of folly, which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge” (1918, 161, 202, 57).
18 Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have documented how trust in other people as well as social institutions weakens as inequality rises (Citation2011, Citation2019).
19 Prior to the 1980s, most senior academic administrators were drawn from the ranks of faculty, who generally intended eventually to return to teaching and research. They brought to administration the culture and values of the faculty. More recently, however, following practices in the corporate world, about two-thirds of presidents of universities and colleges are sought by head-hunters (Ginsberg Citation2013, 5, 17). Their culture and values are more those of the business world. Nevertheless, “About three-fourths of current college and university presidents hold doctoral degrees and about two-thirds held faculty positions before becoming administrators” (Ginsberg Citation2013, 21).
20 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers” (Citation1848, 476). Although this characterization of these professions may have been an exaggeration at mid-nineteenth century, it is proving to be an accurate prediction for contemporary times.
21 As of 2011, 60 percent of scientific publications in the United States were authored by university scientists, whereas 80 percent of scientific publications had at least one university author (Geiger Citation2019, 355). Ginsberg reports that “in virtually every field of inquiry, it is members of the tenured faculty at research universities who produce the books, papers, reports, inventions, and studies that drive the American economy and make higher education one of the nation’s leading export industries” (2013, 157).
22 Although tenure in the United States only dates back to the early twentieth century, the concept dates back to the twelfth century in Europe where it was widely embraced (Ginsberg Citation2013, 144).
23 Ginsberg writes that “without tenure there is no academic freedom. Where the faculty lacks the protection of tenure it is the administrators who are free to interfere in the classroom and in the laboratory—and they do so with alacrity. Where they can, administrators will interfere with even the most meritorious academic research, publication, and communication if their results challenge the interests of important donors and constituencies or threaten administrators’ own interests” (2013, 158).
24 Former Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker proposed changing the University of Wisconsin’s “the Wisconsin Idea” from “the pursuit of truth” to “workforce needs.” After much blowback, Walker, who did not graduate from college, backed off. Nevertheless, he slashed the Wisconsin university system budget by $300 million over the next two years, representing a 13 percent reduction of state funding. To make up for the cut, he proposed increasing professors’ workload (Samuels Citation2015, A1, A4).
25 The explosion in tuition has heightened the need for a careerist education among students and parents alike so as to get their money’s worth. Unbeknownst perhaps to both parents and students, “studies have found that in the corporate world, liberal arts graduates were more likely than others to rise to senior management positions” (Ginsberg Citation2013, 176).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jon D. Wisman
Jon D. Wisman is a professor of economics at American University, Washington, DC.
Quentin Duroy
Quentin Duroy is an associate professor of economics at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.