John Protevi's Blog

Chris Newfield, Ivy and Industry, quote 2

I recommend that anyone interested in American HE read Chris Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. Here's a follow up quote to yesterday's passage. From page 33: 

Since they couldn't turn money into capital, universities focused on controlling costs.... The bulk of any university budget is payroll, and payroll has been a prime target for every kind of financial discipline.

The American university tradition of low faculty salaries goes back 370 years. An equally old tradition has allowed colleges and universities to save money by letting faculty go and herding leftover students into remaining courses.... When salaries rose after World War II and again in the 1960s, largely because of federal infusion of funds into technological fields, payroll costs were contained by expanding the use of non-faculty instructors, especially teaching assistants enrolled in doctoral programs (emphasis added). Since 1980 universities have controlled payroll costs by increasing the use of nontenured and part-time instructors at not quite double the rate of full-time faculty.

The use of GTAs as instructional labor is why we can't act as if "the job market" begins post-PhD; GTAs are already in a "political economy of philosophy instruction" that puts them in competition with TT and NTT folks.

Open Letter on the Illinois / Salaita / academic freedom issue

Chancellor Phyllis Wise
University of Illinois
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Dear Chancellor Wise:

I write with alarm and dismay at the decision to not forward Professor Salaita’s name to the Board of Trustees. This is a direct blow to the principles of academic freedom. The American university has provided great benefits to our society and to the world at large precisely by supporting the right of academics to speak openly, frankly, and vehemently, even when — especially when — it is received with opposition by others. This protected sphere provides the widest possible range of views on the most difficult social and political issues of the day. I know that you know this, and I ask you sincerely and respectfully to enter your name in the list of our greatest protectors of academic freedom, such as John Dewey, rather than in the list of those who hurt their legacy by allowing the passions of the day to cloud their judgment and betray those principles.

With respect,

John Protevi
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803

(Affiliation provided for identification purposes only; this letter represents only my personal views.)

Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty

Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University (Oxford UP, 2013). (Link.)

There are three big problems with Ginsberg's book. 

First and foremost is its lack of connection to any story of neoliberalism in and around HE. Take the Bayh-Dole analysis for example. It's pithy, punchy, and memorable, with its talk of "triple dipping" (public direct support, indirect cost capture, and patents) and the "scientific anti-commons." But Bayh-Dole didn't appear out of nowhere, and Ginsberg has no account of its roots. Nor really does he have an account of the erosion of public support for state schools, rise in tuition, taking on of institutional debt, etc. 

Second, he doesn't really look at different sectors of US HE; many of his examples are mix-and-match anecdotes from private and public schools -- Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, and Chicago cheek-by-jowl with stories from Tennessee, Michigan, and regional publics. 

Third, while he now and again discusses admin preference for cheap and disposable labor as driving rise in NTT hiring, he doesn't connect the last dot and look at GTA labor. He thus takes a wrong turn (IMO, of course) with his line about "overproduction" of PhDs, without distinguishing people looking for clinical or industry work, and without discussing admin destruction of demand for TT hires caused by GTA and NTT labor, instead using the telltale "jobs available" formulation -- as soon as I see that I think the author hasn't thought the issue through properly. For me it's not (alleged over-)supply of humanities PhDs that's the problem, it's the (under-)demand for TT (or even good NTT) jobs that's the problem.

So yes, for sure, the examples he collects are outrageous, but without the political economy framework there's nothing here that a reasonably attentive faculty member won't have picked up by observation after a few years. It's a good overview and a good collection of stories of administrative takeover, with some statistical analysis here and there. It should be read by graduate students and new faculty, but it can't compare with the explanatory power of Chris Newfield's books (link and link), which remain the gold standard.

On merit in TT hiring: the Trading Places hypothesis

Excerpted from this talk at the 2013 APA Eastern.

Let's say, for the sake of argument that, notwithstanding some exceptions, merit is a necessary condition for TT placement and advancement in university philosophy programs. But it doesn't follow from that that merit is a sufficient condition for that; there are many talented people who end up in precarious academic labor. But this injection of sheer luck into placement and advancement is hard to accept for some people; they want to think that those who end up in precarious labor deserved it somehow; the reason they didn't make it was some lack of merit on their part. In other words, some folks just don't want to accept that we have a tragic job system where bad things happen to good people. 

There's a wrinkle here: if you don't win the early TT job lottery [this is a strong way to put the anti-"merit as sufficient condition" position, but what the hell, let's go with it], your work conditions are going to be such that your productivity will suffer and it will look, retrospectively, like you always lacked the merit that would have warranted your getting a TT job. But this lack of productivity is produced by external circumstance as much as – or better, more than – it is an exhibition of some inherent quality of the person. So we're back to our critique of the attribution error -- we have made   network position into the property of a person.

In other words, there's nothing about you, Asst Prof X, that would let you show your merit in a precarious labor position. (Again, this is an extreme formulation, and probably should be reworked along population thinking lines – given a big enough sample, the odds of a good sized random sub-sample of early TT hires placed into precarious labor positions being able to gain the publications and citations that would allow a "merit" perception would be much lower than that of a similar random sub-sample of precarious labor people placed into a TT post getting those publications and citations.) Call this latter point the Trading Places hypothesis.