John Protevi's Blog

Professor Strangelove, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Corporate University

University Board Chair Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what John Dewey once said about universities?

Department Chair Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.

Jack D. Ripper: He said universities were too important to be left to the administrators. When he said that, 100 years ago, he might have been right. But today, universities are too important to be left to the faculty. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow faculty infiltration, faculty indoctrination, faculty subversion and the international faculty conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious capital accumulation and strategic synergistic disruptive innovation fluids....

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Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to allow faculty to give grades? Grades, Mandrake, students' grades.

Lionel Mandrake: [very nervous] Lord, Jack.

Jack D. Ripper: You know when faculty grading first began?

Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.

Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war faculty conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious diploma purchasing system without the control of the individual student. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core faculty works.

Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen... tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?

Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of strike-breaking.

Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of grading control.

Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Faculty, uh... faculty sense my power and they seek grading control. I, uh... I do not avoid faculty, Mandrake.

Lionel Mandrake: No.

Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them grading control.

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Inspired by recent events.

Who is the competition for TT jobs?

I ran this post in 2011 and 2012 over at New APPS. The comments over there are well worth reading or re-reading. Here is the main body of the post again, as it's that time of the year.

(The intro to the 2012 update includes some good links: "[Please read, at Leiter Reports] a post by Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the APA. By the way, all of Ferrer's posts at LR deserve reading.")

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The past month (September 2011) we've had a series of interesting and informative posts on preparing graduate students to enter what is commonly called "the job market." The presupposition here is that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD. 

I don't want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. To put it in a formula: the real job market for philosophy teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches philosophy, holders of the BA and MA included. [UPDATE: and now with MOOCS we have to factor (or at least increasingly factor) in undergraduate labor as providing "calibrated peer review." (For another post on MOOCs, see here.)]

When our frame of reference is the "political economy of philosophy instruction" we can explicitly talk about several factors that are only implicit in the discussion of the (post-PhD) "job market."

First, we can see the role of university administrators, who are, after all, responsible for the shifts in employment patterns in philosophy instruction. (It is hard to find stats just on philosophy, but some stats on overall university patterns are here and here.) To an administrator, a section of Logic or Intro to Phil or Intro to Ethics or ... taught by a BA or MA is a section taught, and taught at low cost. This focus on adminstrators enables us to connect "job market" discourse with the analyses of the "corporate university," the "privatization of the university," and like matters.

Second, we can see the connection to other issues in political economy, such as long-term employment trends toward precarious labor in other industries. We can also see the connection to constantly increasing health care costs in the US system in which employment has been a traditional avenue to health care insurance; precarious labor does not require the long-term commitment to offering health insurance that (current?) TT jobs do. And we also see the connection of the current (post-PhD) job market to "austerity" programs in response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 

To conclude: an excellent resource for further study of these issues is Marc Bousquet's blog, How the University Works. One of his excellent columns is here. A post discussing Bousquet from my old blog is here.