Two comments on specific lines from another thoughtful essay:
"Most professionals know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity rather than expanding it." Yes, but almost zero undergrads and parents that I talk to know this. It's so diametrically opposed to the American mantra of "more education = more options and higher pay" that it just hasn't caught on with the wider public... yet. But it will.
"Colleges and universities are bad at managing talent because they recruit faculty with a mythology about passion and purpose that contradicts what those same institutions claim their graduates will receive as a return on their investment in tuition." I think that they are bad at managing talent simply because there is so much more supply than demand. Why train and manage talent when everyone's replaceable and expendable? Chronic Ph.D. overproduction allows for studied neglect at all levels; those who quit are assumed to have been fated to fail anyway. (Academia is one of the last redoubts of double predestination, although of the secular sophist variety.) The faculty's idealistic mythology is like Boxer the Horse's "I will work harder" mantra--it leads to the glue factory but isn't essential to the overall storyline, which would have been the same either way. It just all goes down more smoothly this way.
The overproduction reality is true, but it's still pretty cold for institutions to exploit it, and I don't think it's actually in their best interest. I think you and I define excellence in teaching similarly, John, and we see that quality teaching is not one of those replaceable things, even if there are similarly credentialed people out there. It's hard to find people who are a good fit for an institution, who can reach students there and feel fulfilled at the same time. And it's expensive to see high turnover -- searches aren't cheap. Maybe the same is true in the oil fields, that there are a lot of strong backs but only a few really good roughnecks. But at least everyone knows that they are expendable there, and they either accept the proposition or not.
May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
Yes, we agree on most things, it seems!
I think Ph.D. overproduction itself is a brutally cold act by research institutions; even in 2023 there are still many forces within academia that promote the overproduction. Exploiting it isn't coincidental; it's all part of the same conveyor belt. I've seen this academic conveyor belt called "a mining and sorting operation" by an insider critic, namely the idea that you take in mass quantities of material (Ph.D. students), locate the gold and toss the dross. Except that the "dross" is people and families and their lives when their loved one washes out of a Ph.D., or can't get a job after getting the Ph.D.
And so I wasn't excusing anyone re: overproduction; it's in fact the key step in the whole process that must be stopped. But most of my colleagues probably wouldn't agree with the latter statement; there are all sorts of excuse-arguments such as, "Getting a Ph.D. is good for society." The logic supporting these excuse-arguments range from ok to laugh-out-loud-able, because so few people raise these questions to begin with, and the echo chamber of academia means that it's simply assumed that you couldn't possibly be questioning the whole academic enterprise at its root, could you?
I'm proud to say that in my career as a (teaching-intensive, tenured) professor, I have produced only 1 Ph.D., who has the non-tenure-track job she wanted (after seeing the tenure track up close, she didn't want to do that). So I have walked the walk, producing M.S. recipients who have generally found good work, taking risks on students that the system would ordinarily reject, and NOT adding to Ph.D. overproduction. But the academic winds blow so hard in the direction of overproduction that I'm one of the few who could get away with this at an R1 institution without serious damage to one's career. My tiny little blow against the empire.
I've heard both less and somewhat more for adjuncts, depending on the school. UGA was comparatively generous, with the rate during my temping years (2001-2008) of $3500 for a normal 3-credit course and $5000 for a "supersection," i.e. normally 150-300 students. I did the math, and when I taught a supersection of 200-ish students, not counting any out-of-class prep or grading time, my pay converted to $0.01/minute/student--a penny per student per minute of lecture. Or, 50 cents per student per lecture. They spent way more on the Coke they brought to class than on me. I've thought that a book on my temping years should be entitled "A Penny Per Student Per Minute:: Passage Through Permatempolis."
But the Staten Island adjuncts may be making less than that. They're getting a dollar per minute for a typical 15-week semester, again assuming there's no out-of-class work (ha!), so if they have > 100 students per class, then they're at an even lower rate than I was 20 years ago.
Affirming John's "but almost no undergrads or parents know this," referring to how advanced degrees usually limit options. I certainly didn't. But many of the people in the field blamed us new grad students for "making this choice," when I and most of my colleagues had no idea we'd done so.
I think about this when, for instance, I see another article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about another professor telling their students to "get out of academe while you can!" and the scandal that results. Too often, it derails that academics' career ... which is why the word doesn't get out more. There's a fear about being honest, especially since it reduces enrollments. Quite a mess.
So much of this rang true for me. Sitting in the middle of messy thoughts that seem to spill everywhere. Trying to write, while putting my only child through college, both of us incurring debt while pondering the choices my father made to leave a safe corporate job and move us into the mountains, and the consequences. I wonder about the seeds that stubbornness planted me and what the consequences will be.
Thanks for helping me feel seen as we ask the questions.
Thank you, Beth! You help me feel seen, too :). It sounds like that Merle Haggard song resonates with you, as well. The good old days when times were bad... I haven't written this essay yet, and maybe I'll tire of the elegies and polemics eventually, but if it is true that academe is like a cult, with a lot of brainwashing and shaming and forced conformity, then I think those of us who grew up in cult-like environments, where we learned to prize our own deprivations, are really preconditioned for exploitation when another power structure offers us that dream of autonomy while meeting basic needs.
There is presently a war within myself about whether I ought to grow up and finally learn how to function in the LinkedIn world or whether all of that is still as much of a lie as I was raised to believe. It's almost like people like us were raised on a different American Dream? I'm reprising here some of what I wrote about Tara Westover earlier.
Thank you for enriching my thinking life so regularly. (And for giving me excellent excuses for not turning back to my stack of final papers to grade). This is what Substack is meant for, at its best.
There's not going to be a permanent personal solution that works for someone as aware as you are of how his actions function within an inescapably exploitative system. But that doesn't mean you aren't helping make it better.
I kinda disagree about the wildness of the elk. etc. Inner life? Hmm. You have to know that you think in order to have thoughts. And why would that capability as such accrue only to animals in the wild?
Huzzah -- distracting someone from grading is time well spent. Especially if it is enriching :).
Thanks for your support. I hope I am making a difference in some small way here, if only by helping myself and others feel connected. As for wolves, elk, and bear -- I think there's been enough research into highly intelligent mammals to say that they have inner lives. Certainly they grieve, feel something like love, and experience memories (not sure the same is true of moose, who are notorious amnesiacs). Perhaps I'm overstating instinct as an inner compass (this is what comes of trying to produce new writing each week -- maybe it needs to simmer longer). But really I'm not talking about inner reflection so much as a kind of survival instinct that I think the culture of LinkedIn socializes us to suppress. I trust my gut reaction when it tells me that something might cause me harm. In that sense, I'm talking about something more visceral that I really do think is a common thread between wolves, elk, bear, and human animals.
I'm going to trust you on the wild animals, as your overall experience is much closer than mine. Plus I have no particular desire to prove that they are different or lesser in any way.
As for work, I forgot to mention the phrase--and there's a book with the title--Work Won't Love You Back. It pretty much says it all for me, lately.
They’re all just chapters. I was a daughter, then I was a student who bartended, then I was a graduate with a degree I used for a while, then I was a stay at home mom who homeschooled, then I was an empty nester and farmer, now, well I’m working on that chapter. All have been very different, requiring different knowledge sets and compounded experience. I’m still a daughter, an engineer, a mom, a farmer. You never really “fit”. You just flip through the pages and chapters of life.
It might be worth pointing out that I teach that a lot, since that's much of my focus as a social ethicist. And I use the term "externality" as well, as our entire civilization is built on moral and economic externalities. What's interesting about the academic case is that it's usually not highly educated people who get externalized.
I once calculated that my wage slavery brought in over $120k a year for the college I worked for in Texas, and I only saw 10% of that a year. I then realized that I, my own life and time on this Earth, was subsidizing the education that most of them didn't really want anyway. They just wanted a good job, so ... bleeding my life for them became farcical. I still did it 'cause I had nowhere else to go, but also because I did deeply care about those few kids who "got it" and whose lives I utterly transformed.
I started out by quoting you and Maureen with full names and then thought that you maybe didn't want to be publicly identified in that way after contributing in a more low-profile way in the comments. But I'm glad that what I'm writing here rings true with your expertise, since you have more training in ethics than I. This is so true: "What's interesting about the academic case is that it's usually not highly educated people who get externalized." And it is ironic that my grandfather's labor union had far more clout with timber corporations at the local sawmill than any faculty union has with its Board of Trustees. I won't recall the reference quickly, but there was something written not long ago about how unionization doesn't really help faculty much. I think Macalester College was the case study (though, ironically, TT faculty later opposed a union for adjuncts...ugh). Faculty can't afford the same firepower in legal counsel, and so even if they organize, the deck is stacked. But I suppose there are some successful faculty unions. I just don't know those models very intimately.
I was pleased that you included my comment in the discussion, and found the article very spot on. As for unions, that was my admittedly limited experience. Part of the problem is that faculty are taught to compete against one another, so working with each other for a common shared cause is foreign to most and anathema to more than a few. Faculty are also constantly told there is less and less pie to go around, and if they work hard, they will deserve the little pie crumbs that are left, and if they get the pie crumbs they are better than those around them. I used to say in job interviews that while I study hierarchies, I work better in a heterarchy. This went over well in state government and industry, but much less so in academia, where I don't think most understand what that term meant in any sense of the word. And I had no idea how hierarchical academia was (and again, I study the history of hierarchy). I wish there were a way to change things but I wonder if it's ever been any better, or always the same. Read "The Professor's House" by Willa Cather to see the long history of this in US academe.
We faculty compete. We are pitted against each other. We work in farcically, laughably inequitable structures and ‘shared governance’ is presented as ‘hey y’all, We consulted you, and some of You assented or consented, so we have the right to do A, B, C.’ We are also told that we are NOT labor, we don’t ‘labor’; we are “educators in a calling.” This disables any awareness that the shop owners are management! Solidarity is hard to build.
You know, when I was first starting out, I really did not understand the intransigence I saw in my older colleagues when it came to curricular changes. I saw it as a refusal to innovate or to take any risks. By the time I resigned, I came to understand that a system that strips faculty of power creates a powerful incentive to protect structures within which you've been able to exercise some degree of control. So if you've created a pipeline for a gen-ed course, and you've built a following of sorts, you don't want to just ditch that for the unknown. It makes sense.
As a faculty leader, I realized there was no possibility for unanimity. But I was quite wary of the tyranny of the majority. Often I'd meet with folks who I knew would dissent when a motion came to the floor, and I'd see whether there was any room for compromise. If there wasn't, usually we reached an understanding that there would still be a vote. In some cases, there was unavoidable hurt. But I think it helped for people who couldn't influence an outcome to feel heard.
One of the things that pushed me out the door was when faculty governance became a way for admin to hide behind hard decisions by pitting us against one another. We were asked to cut an unspecified number of majors to help address a post-COVID budget shortfall. And we were told that if we couldn't do this, other "blunt instruments" would be necessary. So many faculty were quite willing to vote out majors despite the protestations of colleagues teaching in those programs because they wanted to preserve themselves and feared the alternatives. I found that situation repugnant.
I'm glad it was OK to quote you. It was too late to ask permission. You're right that some of Godfrey St. Peter's ennui may always have been part of the culture of academe, especially at provincial schools. Professor Crane's poverty and pettiness in that narrative is another sad refrain. But, as I've written, I really was a good fit for the private liberal arts college where I worked, and I think I could have done it for a lifetime if it hadn't been for the creep of consultants, assessment, and COVID cuts that deeply divided the faculty. There was a notable change in the last five years. Some of that change might have also been my own awakening to timeless truths, but I don't think so -- there are too many of us saying the same thing.
This line got me: "Part of the problem is that faculty are taught to compete against one another, so working with each other for a common shared cause is foreign to most and anathema to more than a few." What you have said here would hold true if you substituted "men" for "faculty." It's why the dads at the playground are always alone, not teamed up with another dad friend. And it is an underlying tension between male writers in a climate where community-building and network sharing is really the only way to advance.
I'm tall, I'm intense, and I keep joining all those pesky social justice organizations! Though I'm only "loud" or "dramatic" in print.
Though, as a side note, I find my fellow woke allies to be far more dangerous than our "opponents." When it comes to union work, too many are motivated by self-interest rather than justice. At my local union, it's entirely dominated by stooges (in the old sense of the term) or what we're now-a-days call "useful idiots."
I took a different track through undergrad, but I'm sure everyone's bored about me telling me story.
Instead, I just want to point out that as a first generation student I didn't "know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity." In fact, I was so good at philosophy that my professors assured my parents that I'd be fine, despite the odds. Only later did I realize that I was being mentored by a bunch of intergenerational upper class people who just didn't get how much of a handicap being first generation is ... just as I didn't know until later.
By the time I figured that out, years later, I also felt "like walking down a narrowing passageway through doors that lock behind you," as past opportunities disappeared. It's part of why I get angry when I hear the "sunk cost fallacy" thrown at graduate students and early career Ph.D.s. Well, for us humanities folks, the opportunity cost of a Ph.D. all but requires burning bridges with anything else, given the stigma against us.
I've seen studies on Ph.D.s that indicate that an ever greater proportion of them are coming from parent Ph.D.s and the upper class. I believe that it's a majority at this point, which the studies note that only the wealthy can afford the financial handicap anymore, as they chase after things other than money.
Yes -- the gentrification theme is clear. I think I linked to a WaPo story on that subject in the Friday thread. First-gen faculty are seriously endangered, and even moreso in the next generation of scholars.
Fabulous article. I'm a faculty brat, but my late father worked for low pay at a state university, but enough pay to buy a house on one salary and raise a family. In turn, some old alums from the University of Idaho (my dad's employer) were talking about how there used to be like less than 10 main admins on campus: president, provost, dean of students, head of financial aid, and a few others. That was it, and the university ran well, it was taught by many faculty (even at Idaho) with doctorates from Ivy League and Berkeley, the tuition was insanely low for in-state students, and things were good. At least that was my impression.
Flash forward to today's institutions rife with admins and staff, more than faculty, to keep students towards graduation when none of the metrics show that all these additional staffers have increased anything except tuition. The problem with everything in America is there's no going back. Not one admin or rich alum or state legislator, will wake up one morning and say, "You know what, the system is broken." Two big causes of skyrocketing tuition: reduced state support AND increased layering of 6-figure administrators. Colleges always bemoan the former and never speak of the latter.
Agree. The administration at my former employer created four new positions once: they called them Class Deans. Ostensibly they were to help mentor all students in a given class, but their primary function was remedial support. The prez took a victory lap about it in an op-ed, but then the data revealed a few years later that there had been almost no effect on retention. But that didn't dissuade anyone from continuing the positions. There was a Wellness position and a Writing Center position, too -- maybe others. Six new posts at a campus of about 1,200 students is quite a lot, especially since those are twelve-month contracts, which typically pay more than the ten-month faculty posts.
This all began during my undergraduate years. I was a college freshman in 1993, and I resented having to take a Strategies for Success class my first year. My mentality was that preparedness for college was squarely my responsibility. That might be extreme -- there's nothing wrong with offering students support. But all of this comes at the expense of academic resources. And there isn't much funding for things like a quality visiting writer series if you're just trying to keep kids from dropping out.
I don't think the Bennett Hypothesis -- that federal and state support for higher ed directly incentivizes higher tuition and fees -- checks out, except at for-profit institutions. But there does seem to be a point at which the bloat must pop. As long as colleges are balancing their budgets and/or growing their endowments, though, I can't see that happening. There have already been some pieces out trying to predict who will be the first institution to charge $100K a year in tuition. Many are getting close.
Do you know of another industry model where the product is grossly overpriced and people are still exploited within the system? Maybe professional athletics. The cost of ticket prices is often prohibitively expensive. But I suppose there's a similar expectation there for more comfortable seats, more entertainment and technology (big screens, etc), that the fan subsidizes.
I used to be an academic advisor at a western state university. Despite my efforts and two interns, out grad rate didn't inch up one iota. I knew people in the career center, despite their efforts the job placement rate didn't move up at all.
I read in Newsweek some 15 years ago that Penn added five majors since 1983, while adding 300 administrators. It's rather stunning there's no accountability for this, especially at state schools.
In the dark ages when I was a student you signed up for classes, if you struggled you went to the profs. The writing center was very minimal, mostly run by senior students. Failure and success was up to the student. In turn, the clubs consisted of liberals, republicans, minorities, music majors, whatever. Students ran all of it, no v-p for student life needed. Things moved along just fine and the grad rate way back then was higher than it is today with massive admins on campus.
Oh my goodness, what a wonderful and piercing essay. I feel like you said so many of the things I’ve been struggling with myself. I think you are right where you should be . . . Writing these essays and building this community.
Beautiful. One of your best essays yet. Very insightful. You really pull the curtain back on academia. Fascinating.
“Knowing thyself is hard. What is the arc of my professional past? It could be the story of a man who can’t stick to the plan. Always leaving. Never satisfied. A man whose childhood isolation creates self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection and marginality in adulthood. Or it could be the story of a self-respecting person who doesn’t want to waste his one wild and precious life. Who trusts the nausea when he feels it and keeps moving forward toward better opportunities, healthier environments.
There are still days when I’m not sure which story is true.”
Such a thought provoking piece, I can't wrap my own thoughts around it yet. Going to let it simmer, but as someone still in academia (but defeated in many ways), I see the truth in your words. I think the system is truly broken. And my husband, who is on the outside, thinks we're all crazy to put up with any of it.
Paige, it has been both affirming and disheartening to discover, while writing about this trend in The Chronicle and on Substack, how ubiquitous the problem is. From an objective standpoint, your husband is right. But when much of one's adult life and identity is wrapped up in the broken system, it's not objective. It's really hard.
very well said. I wonder how much this is also a very American problem. As academic education has become so incredible commercialized. Big names stand like towers for best education when in fact they are just best in the branding game in the end. It is said to see for lovers of education and wisdom.
Exactly -- branding is a big part of the problem. And it has a sordid history. Perhaps you've seen this other piece, but I'll share it as an addendum to your comment (sorry to be throwing my archive at you 😊). Barbara Ehrenreich warned us about these trends in business more than a decade ago.
Personally, I love this piece because it parallels something I'm experiencing right now. I'm an English professor who then became a Dean for six years--a position I just left because of massive burnout and regular turnover at the higher admin level that found me working under new bosses 3 times. So I'm on a sabbatical right now as I transition back to the faculty ranks, but a lot of what you write here is where I am at mentally. Make the leap to something else? Bet on myself and an entrepreneurial path? Find a place in the work world where I am valued, yet I maintain my own outside/home-life identity because higher ed absolutely destroys that boundary and, by design, fills up every minute of your life that it can while making hollow calls for "self care." So now I am where you are/were: searching for not just the "why," but the "what."
Thanks for sharing more of your story, Chuck. I resigned a tenured position that I'd held for 16 years -- full professor, department chair, even won a teaching award my last year there. The upheaval you describe is precisely why I chose not to join the administrati, even though many colleagues encouraged me to consider it. IMO, the compensation for admin work is just as bad as for faculty work. Sure, you get paid more, but for what? No work/life balance? Endless churn in leadership? Needing to move every 5 years, either to trade up or escape the mess you couldn't fix? No thanks. Sorry if I'm triggering your past.
My sense from speaking to some presidents and deans is that exactly no one who enters those roles has adequate training or preparation for the challenges they'll face. I have little sympathy for the executives who parachute in from industry, but folks like you who rise from within the faculty ranks really are trying to fix a broken system. It's heartbreaking to have seen so many friends and colleagues chewed up and spit out.
And, yes, if I were a better satirical writer, I'd have written something about those brutal invitations to yet another workshop on self-care (how about gift cards to a spa or a gym?). Or, better yet, the consultant one president brought in to guide us through a series of seminars on "building a culture of appreciation." When all we'd been asking for was his appreciation of us.
Look forward to keeping in touch. Glad you have tenure to fall back on in the meantime. But I'm seeing that it's not the life raft it used to be.
Totally agree with you here--every word. I can tell you that, to your point, the lack of mentoring was insane and stupid. Basically, it was "congratulations, now you're a Dean." One month after I was hired we had a merger, then our President and Provost left, then... the pandemic. And magically I'm a fundraiser. Honestly, I think leaving when I did literally saved my life, as health and stress were really getting away from my control.
This refusal to be domesticated you mention may indeed manifest itself in academic life. I know if I were to pursue that career once my PhD is hanging on the wall, I know it would give me more reading time than other professions. And I would truly enjoy reading anything related to my California literature specialty apart from the absolute tripe. But this is also why Samuel Beckett walked out of Trinity College, Dublin after only a week. Perhaps the wildness you mention explains why Montana, against all odds, has produced enough literature to give it its own distinct tradition. (I also see what you meant earlier when you talked about being an "outsider," despite growing up there: Montana lit must be a truly experiential tradition) Now I really want to read more: this connection to "wildness" and the art of literature is something well worth exploring, and it only occurred to me reading this article: so I owe you a glass of good Ceske pivo in the future. It reminds me of Poland's beloved (for those in the know) Gypsy poetess, Papusza, who wrote in Polish-influenced Romany. You can only find English translations in sporadic publications online, but they capture both the horrors of war as well as that nomadic spirit of restlessness the Gypsies once took for granted. I never encountered anything like it in literature. http://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/issues/issue-three/the-library-beneath-the-harp/
I will check out that book Tomatoland. It's a relevant topic now that child labor has returned to the US. Another reason why I don't believe we live in normal times. (And why I write with that abnormality in mind) Although I suppose a cynic might argue that it's a return to the normalcy of people starting work as kids all throughout history, or the US simply becoming "normal" just like every other country.
Two comments on specific lines from another thoughtful essay:
"Most professionals know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity rather than expanding it." Yes, but almost zero undergrads and parents that I talk to know this. It's so diametrically opposed to the American mantra of "more education = more options and higher pay" that it just hasn't caught on with the wider public... yet. But it will.
"Colleges and universities are bad at managing talent because they recruit faculty with a mythology about passion and purpose that contradicts what those same institutions claim their graduates will receive as a return on their investment in tuition." I think that they are bad at managing talent simply because there is so much more supply than demand. Why train and manage talent when everyone's replaceable and expendable? Chronic Ph.D. overproduction allows for studied neglect at all levels; those who quit are assumed to have been fated to fail anyway. (Academia is one of the last redoubts of double predestination, although of the secular sophist variety.) The faculty's idealistic mythology is like Boxer the Horse's "I will work harder" mantra--it leads to the glue factory but isn't essential to the overall storyline, which would have been the same either way. It just all goes down more smoothly this way.
The overproduction reality is true, but it's still pretty cold for institutions to exploit it, and I don't think it's actually in their best interest. I think you and I define excellence in teaching similarly, John, and we see that quality teaching is not one of those replaceable things, even if there are similarly credentialed people out there. It's hard to find people who are a good fit for an institution, who can reach students there and feel fulfilled at the same time. And it's expensive to see high turnover -- searches aren't cheap. Maybe the same is true in the oil fields, that there are a lot of strong backs but only a few really good roughnecks. But at least everyone knows that they are expendable there, and they either accept the proposition or not.
Yes, we agree on most things, it seems!
I think Ph.D. overproduction itself is a brutally cold act by research institutions; even in 2023 there are still many forces within academia that promote the overproduction. Exploiting it isn't coincidental; it's all part of the same conveyor belt. I've seen this academic conveyor belt called "a mining and sorting operation" by an insider critic, namely the idea that you take in mass quantities of material (Ph.D. students), locate the gold and toss the dross. Except that the "dross" is people and families and their lives when their loved one washes out of a Ph.D., or can't get a job after getting the Ph.D.
And so I wasn't excusing anyone re: overproduction; it's in fact the key step in the whole process that must be stopped. But most of my colleagues probably wouldn't agree with the latter statement; there are all sorts of excuse-arguments such as, "Getting a Ph.D. is good for society." The logic supporting these excuse-arguments range from ok to laugh-out-loud-able, because so few people raise these questions to begin with, and the echo chamber of academia means that it's simply assumed that you couldn't possibly be questioning the whole academic enterprise at its root, could you?
I'm proud to say that in my career as a (teaching-intensive, tenured) professor, I have produced only 1 Ph.D., who has the non-tenure-track job she wanted (after seeing the tenure track up close, she didn't want to do that). So I have walked the walk, producing M.S. recipients who have generally found good work, taking risks on students that the system would ordinarily reject, and NOT adding to Ph.D. overproduction. But the academic winds blow so hard in the direction of overproduction that I'm one of the few who could get away with this at an R1 institution without serious damage to one's career. My tiny little blow against the empire.
I saw an adjunct position advertised on LinkedIn today. Two courses. $2,300 each. In Staten Island. Profane.
I've heard both less and somewhat more for adjuncts, depending on the school. UGA was comparatively generous, with the rate during my temping years (2001-2008) of $3500 for a normal 3-credit course and $5000 for a "supersection," i.e. normally 150-300 students. I did the math, and when I taught a supersection of 200-ish students, not counting any out-of-class prep or grading time, my pay converted to $0.01/minute/student--a penny per student per minute of lecture. Or, 50 cents per student per lecture. They spent way more on the Coke they brought to class than on me. I've thought that a book on my temping years should be entitled "A Penny Per Student Per Minute:: Passage Through Permatempolis."
But the Staten Island adjuncts may be making less than that. They're getting a dollar per minute for a typical 15-week semester, again assuming there's no out-of-class work (ha!), so if they have > 100 students per class, then they're at an even lower rate than I was 20 years ago.
Coming back to this.
Affirming John's "but almost no undergrads or parents know this," referring to how advanced degrees usually limit options. I certainly didn't. But many of the people in the field blamed us new grad students for "making this choice," when I and most of my colleagues had no idea we'd done so.
I think about this when, for instance, I see another article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about another professor telling their students to "get out of academe while you can!" and the scandal that results. Too often, it derails that academics' career ... which is why the word doesn't get out more. There's a fear about being honest, especially since it reduces enrollments. Quite a mess.
So much of this rang true for me. Sitting in the middle of messy thoughts that seem to spill everywhere. Trying to write, while putting my only child through college, both of us incurring debt while pondering the choices my father made to leave a safe corporate job and move us into the mountains, and the consequences. I wonder about the seeds that stubbornness planted me and what the consequences will be.
Thanks for helping me feel seen as we ask the questions.
Thank you, Beth! You help me feel seen, too :). It sounds like that Merle Haggard song resonates with you, as well. The good old days when times were bad... I haven't written this essay yet, and maybe I'll tire of the elegies and polemics eventually, but if it is true that academe is like a cult, with a lot of brainwashing and shaming and forced conformity, then I think those of us who grew up in cult-like environments, where we learned to prize our own deprivations, are really preconditioned for exploitation when another power structure offers us that dream of autonomy while meeting basic needs.
There is presently a war within myself about whether I ought to grow up and finally learn how to function in the LinkedIn world or whether all of that is still as much of a lie as I was raised to believe. It's almost like people like us were raised on a different American Dream? I'm reprising here some of what I wrote about Tara Westover earlier.
👍👍
Thank you for enriching my thinking life so regularly. (And for giving me excellent excuses for not turning back to my stack of final papers to grade). This is what Substack is meant for, at its best.
There's not going to be a permanent personal solution that works for someone as aware as you are of how his actions function within an inescapably exploitative system. But that doesn't mean you aren't helping make it better.
I kinda disagree about the wildness of the elk. etc. Inner life? Hmm. You have to know that you think in order to have thoughts. And why would that capability as such accrue only to animals in the wild?
Huzzah -- distracting someone from grading is time well spent. Especially if it is enriching :).
Thanks for your support. I hope I am making a difference in some small way here, if only by helping myself and others feel connected. As for wolves, elk, and bear -- I think there's been enough research into highly intelligent mammals to say that they have inner lives. Certainly they grieve, feel something like love, and experience memories (not sure the same is true of moose, who are notorious amnesiacs). Perhaps I'm overstating instinct as an inner compass (this is what comes of trying to produce new writing each week -- maybe it needs to simmer longer). But really I'm not talking about inner reflection so much as a kind of survival instinct that I think the culture of LinkedIn socializes us to suppress. I trust my gut reaction when it tells me that something might cause me harm. In that sense, I'm talking about something more visceral that I really do think is a common thread between wolves, elk, bear, and human animals.
I'm going to trust you on the wild animals, as your overall experience is much closer than mine. Plus I have no particular desire to prove that they are different or lesser in any way.
As for work, I forgot to mention the phrase--and there's a book with the title--Work Won't Love You Back. It pretty much says it all for me, lately.
They’re all just chapters. I was a daughter, then I was a student who bartended, then I was a graduate with a degree I used for a while, then I was a stay at home mom who homeschooled, then I was an empty nester and farmer, now, well I’m working on that chapter. All have been very different, requiring different knowledge sets and compounded experience. I’m still a daughter, an engineer, a mom, a farmer. You never really “fit”. You just flip through the pages and chapters of life.
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Where you quote me on market exploitation ...
It might be worth pointing out that I teach that a lot, since that's much of my focus as a social ethicist. And I use the term "externality" as well, as our entire civilization is built on moral and economic externalities. What's interesting about the academic case is that it's usually not highly educated people who get externalized.
I once calculated that my wage slavery brought in over $120k a year for the college I worked for in Texas, and I only saw 10% of that a year. I then realized that I, my own life and time on this Earth, was subsidizing the education that most of them didn't really want anyway. They just wanted a good job, so ... bleeding my life for them became farcical. I still did it 'cause I had nowhere else to go, but also because I did deeply care about those few kids who "got it" and whose lives I utterly transformed.
I started out by quoting you and Maureen with full names and then thought that you maybe didn't want to be publicly identified in that way after contributing in a more low-profile way in the comments. But I'm glad that what I'm writing here rings true with your expertise, since you have more training in ethics than I. This is so true: "What's interesting about the academic case is that it's usually not highly educated people who get externalized." And it is ironic that my grandfather's labor union had far more clout with timber corporations at the local sawmill than any faculty union has with its Board of Trustees. I won't recall the reference quickly, but there was something written not long ago about how unionization doesn't really help faculty much. I think Macalester College was the case study (though, ironically, TT faculty later opposed a union for adjuncts...ugh). Faculty can't afford the same firepower in legal counsel, and so even if they organize, the deck is stacked. But I suppose there are some successful faculty unions. I just don't know those models very intimately.
I was pleased that you included my comment in the discussion, and found the article very spot on. As for unions, that was my admittedly limited experience. Part of the problem is that faculty are taught to compete against one another, so working with each other for a common shared cause is foreign to most and anathema to more than a few. Faculty are also constantly told there is less and less pie to go around, and if they work hard, they will deserve the little pie crumbs that are left, and if they get the pie crumbs they are better than those around them. I used to say in job interviews that while I study hierarchies, I work better in a heterarchy. This went over well in state government and industry, but much less so in academia, where I don't think most understand what that term meant in any sense of the word. And I had no idea how hierarchical academia was (and again, I study the history of hierarchy). I wish there were a way to change things but I wonder if it's ever been any better, or always the same. Read "The Professor's House" by Willa Cather to see the long history of this in US academe.
We faculty compete. We are pitted against each other. We work in farcically, laughably inequitable structures and ‘shared governance’ is presented as ‘hey y’all, We consulted you, and some of You assented or consented, so we have the right to do A, B, C.’ We are also told that we are NOT labor, we don’t ‘labor’; we are “educators in a calling.” This disables any awareness that the shop owners are management! Solidarity is hard to build.
You know, when I was first starting out, I really did not understand the intransigence I saw in my older colleagues when it came to curricular changes. I saw it as a refusal to innovate or to take any risks. By the time I resigned, I came to understand that a system that strips faculty of power creates a powerful incentive to protect structures within which you've been able to exercise some degree of control. So if you've created a pipeline for a gen-ed course, and you've built a following of sorts, you don't want to just ditch that for the unknown. It makes sense.
As a faculty leader, I realized there was no possibility for unanimity. But I was quite wary of the tyranny of the majority. Often I'd meet with folks who I knew would dissent when a motion came to the floor, and I'd see whether there was any room for compromise. If there wasn't, usually we reached an understanding that there would still be a vote. In some cases, there was unavoidable hurt. But I think it helped for people who couldn't influence an outcome to feel heard.
One of the things that pushed me out the door was when faculty governance became a way for admin to hide behind hard decisions by pitting us against one another. We were asked to cut an unspecified number of majors to help address a post-COVID budget shortfall. And we were told that if we couldn't do this, other "blunt instruments" would be necessary. So many faculty were quite willing to vote out majors despite the protestations of colleagues teaching in those programs because they wanted to preserve themselves and feared the alternatives. I found that situation repugnant.
I'm glad it was OK to quote you. It was too late to ask permission. You're right that some of Godfrey St. Peter's ennui may always have been part of the culture of academe, especially at provincial schools. Professor Crane's poverty and pettiness in that narrative is another sad refrain. But, as I've written, I really was a good fit for the private liberal arts college where I worked, and I think I could have done it for a lifetime if it hadn't been for the creep of consultants, assessment, and COVID cuts that deeply divided the faculty. There was a notable change in the last five years. Some of that change might have also been my own awakening to timeless truths, but I don't think so -- there are too many of us saying the same thing.
This line got me: "Part of the problem is that faculty are taught to compete against one another, so working with each other for a common shared cause is foreign to most and anathema to more than a few." What you have said here would hold true if you substituted "men" for "faculty." It's why the dads at the playground are always alone, not teamed up with another dad friend. And it is an underlying tension between male writers in a climate where community-building and network sharing is really the only way to advance.
Josh, I will never be low-profile.
It's not in my nature.
I'm tall, I'm intense, and I keep joining all those pesky social justice organizations! Though I'm only "loud" or "dramatic" in print.
Though, as a side note, I find my fellow woke allies to be far more dangerous than our "opponents." When it comes to union work, too many are motivated by self-interest rather than justice. At my local union, it's entirely dominated by stooges (in the old sense of the term) or what we're now-a-days call "useful idiots."
Josh,
I took a different track through undergrad, but I'm sure everyone's bored about me telling me story.
Instead, I just want to point out that as a first generation student I didn't "know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity." In fact, I was so good at philosophy that my professors assured my parents that I'd be fine, despite the odds. Only later did I realize that I was being mentored by a bunch of intergenerational upper class people who just didn't get how much of a handicap being first generation is ... just as I didn't know until later.
By the time I figured that out, years later, I also felt "like walking down a narrowing passageway through doors that lock behind you," as past opportunities disappeared. It's part of why I get angry when I hear the "sunk cost fallacy" thrown at graduate students and early career Ph.D.s. Well, for us humanities folks, the opportunity cost of a Ph.D. all but requires burning bridges with anything else, given the stigma against us.
I've seen studies on Ph.D.s that indicate that an ever greater proportion of them are coming from parent Ph.D.s and the upper class. I believe that it's a majority at this point, which the studies note that only the wealthy can afford the financial handicap anymore, as they chase after things other than money.
J
Yes -- the gentrification theme is clear. I think I linked to a WaPo story on that subject in the Friday thread. First-gen faculty are seriously endangered, and even moreso in the next generation of scholars.
Fabulous article. I'm a faculty brat, but my late father worked for low pay at a state university, but enough pay to buy a house on one salary and raise a family. In turn, some old alums from the University of Idaho (my dad's employer) were talking about how there used to be like less than 10 main admins on campus: president, provost, dean of students, head of financial aid, and a few others. That was it, and the university ran well, it was taught by many faculty (even at Idaho) with doctorates from Ivy League and Berkeley, the tuition was insanely low for in-state students, and things were good. At least that was my impression.
Flash forward to today's institutions rife with admins and staff, more than faculty, to keep students towards graduation when none of the metrics show that all these additional staffers have increased anything except tuition. The problem with everything in America is there's no going back. Not one admin or rich alum or state legislator, will wake up one morning and say, "You know what, the system is broken." Two big causes of skyrocketing tuition: reduced state support AND increased layering of 6-figure administrators. Colleges always bemoan the former and never speak of the latter.
Agree. The administration at my former employer created four new positions once: they called them Class Deans. Ostensibly they were to help mentor all students in a given class, but their primary function was remedial support. The prez took a victory lap about it in an op-ed, but then the data revealed a few years later that there had been almost no effect on retention. But that didn't dissuade anyone from continuing the positions. There was a Wellness position and a Writing Center position, too -- maybe others. Six new posts at a campus of about 1,200 students is quite a lot, especially since those are twelve-month contracts, which typically pay more than the ten-month faculty posts.
This all began during my undergraduate years. I was a college freshman in 1993, and I resented having to take a Strategies for Success class my first year. My mentality was that preparedness for college was squarely my responsibility. That might be extreme -- there's nothing wrong with offering students support. But all of this comes at the expense of academic resources. And there isn't much funding for things like a quality visiting writer series if you're just trying to keep kids from dropping out.
I don't think the Bennett Hypothesis -- that federal and state support for higher ed directly incentivizes higher tuition and fees -- checks out, except at for-profit institutions. But there does seem to be a point at which the bloat must pop. As long as colleges are balancing their budgets and/or growing their endowments, though, I can't see that happening. There have already been some pieces out trying to predict who will be the first institution to charge $100K a year in tuition. Many are getting close.
Do you know of another industry model where the product is grossly overpriced and people are still exploited within the system? Maybe professional athletics. The cost of ticket prices is often prohibitively expensive. But I suppose there's a similar expectation there for more comfortable seats, more entertainment and technology (big screens, etc), that the fan subsidizes.
I used to be an academic advisor at a western state university. Despite my efforts and two interns, out grad rate didn't inch up one iota. I knew people in the career center, despite their efforts the job placement rate didn't move up at all.
I read in Newsweek some 15 years ago that Penn added five majors since 1983, while adding 300 administrators. It's rather stunning there's no accountability for this, especially at state schools.
In the dark ages when I was a student you signed up for classes, if you struggled you went to the profs. The writing center was very minimal, mostly run by senior students. Failure and success was up to the student. In turn, the clubs consisted of liberals, republicans, minorities, music majors, whatever. Students ran all of it, no v-p for student life needed. Things moved along just fine and the grad rate way back then was higher than it is today with massive admins on campus.
Oh my goodness, what a wonderful and piercing essay. I feel like you said so many of the things I’ve been struggling with myself. I think you are right where you should be . . . Writing these essays and building this community.
Thank you, Liz. I do wonder where I fit, still, but I appreciate your warm words about belonging here.
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Beautiful. One of your best essays yet. Very insightful. You really pull the curtain back on academia. Fascinating.
“Knowing thyself is hard. What is the arc of my professional past? It could be the story of a man who can’t stick to the plan. Always leaving. Never satisfied. A man whose childhood isolation creates self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection and marginality in adulthood. Or it could be the story of a self-respecting person who doesn’t want to waste his one wild and precious life. Who trusts the nausea when he feels it and keeps moving forward toward better opportunities, healthier environments.
There are still days when I’m not sure which story is true.”
This is me as well. 100 💯
Thanks, Michael. Let's get that memoir group going!
Such a thought provoking piece, I can't wrap my own thoughts around it yet. Going to let it simmer, but as someone still in academia (but defeated in many ways), I see the truth in your words. I think the system is truly broken. And my husband, who is on the outside, thinks we're all crazy to put up with any of it.
Paige, it has been both affirming and disheartening to discover, while writing about this trend in The Chronicle and on Substack, how ubiquitous the problem is. From an objective standpoint, your husband is right. But when much of one's adult life and identity is wrapped up in the broken system, it's not objective. It's really hard.
very well said. I wonder how much this is also a very American problem. As academic education has become so incredible commercialized. Big names stand like towers for best education when in fact they are just best in the branding game in the end. It is said to see for lovers of education and wisdom.
Thank you for a great piece!
Exactly -- branding is a big part of the problem. And it has a sordid history. Perhaps you've seen this other piece, but I'll share it as an addendum to your comment (sorry to be throwing my archive at you 😊). Barbara Ehrenreich warned us about these trends in business more than a decade ago.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/branding-will-be-the-end-of-us
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Personally, I love this piece because it parallels something I'm experiencing right now. I'm an English professor who then became a Dean for six years--a position I just left because of massive burnout and regular turnover at the higher admin level that found me working under new bosses 3 times. So I'm on a sabbatical right now as I transition back to the faculty ranks, but a lot of what you write here is where I am at mentally. Make the leap to something else? Bet on myself and an entrepreneurial path? Find a place in the work world where I am valued, yet I maintain my own outside/home-life identity because higher ed absolutely destroys that boundary and, by design, fills up every minute of your life that it can while making hollow calls for "self care." So now I am where you are/were: searching for not just the "why," but the "what."
Thanks for sharing more of your story, Chuck. I resigned a tenured position that I'd held for 16 years -- full professor, department chair, even won a teaching award my last year there. The upheaval you describe is precisely why I chose not to join the administrati, even though many colleagues encouraged me to consider it. IMO, the compensation for admin work is just as bad as for faculty work. Sure, you get paid more, but for what? No work/life balance? Endless churn in leadership? Needing to move every 5 years, either to trade up or escape the mess you couldn't fix? No thanks. Sorry if I'm triggering your past.
My sense from speaking to some presidents and deans is that exactly no one who enters those roles has adequate training or preparation for the challenges they'll face. I have little sympathy for the executives who parachute in from industry, but folks like you who rise from within the faculty ranks really are trying to fix a broken system. It's heartbreaking to have seen so many friends and colleagues chewed up and spit out.
And, yes, if I were a better satirical writer, I'd have written something about those brutal invitations to yet another workshop on self-care (how about gift cards to a spa or a gym?). Or, better yet, the consultant one president brought in to guide us through a series of seminars on "building a culture of appreciation." When all we'd been asking for was his appreciation of us.
Look forward to keeping in touch. Glad you have tenure to fall back on in the meantime. But I'm seeing that it's not the life raft it used to be.
Totally agree with you here--every word. I can tell you that, to your point, the lack of mentoring was insane and stupid. Basically, it was "congratulations, now you're a Dean." One month after I was hired we had a merger, then our President and Provost left, then... the pandemic. And magically I'm a fundraiser. Honestly, I think leaving when I did literally saved my life, as health and stress were really getting away from my control.
This refusal to be domesticated you mention may indeed manifest itself in academic life. I know if I were to pursue that career once my PhD is hanging on the wall, I know it would give me more reading time than other professions. And I would truly enjoy reading anything related to my California literature specialty apart from the absolute tripe. But this is also why Samuel Beckett walked out of Trinity College, Dublin after only a week. Perhaps the wildness you mention explains why Montana, against all odds, has produced enough literature to give it its own distinct tradition. (I also see what you meant earlier when you talked about being an "outsider," despite growing up there: Montana lit must be a truly experiential tradition) Now I really want to read more: this connection to "wildness" and the art of literature is something well worth exploring, and it only occurred to me reading this article: so I owe you a glass of good Ceske pivo in the future. It reminds me of Poland's beloved (for those in the know) Gypsy poetess, Papusza, who wrote in Polish-influenced Romany. You can only find English translations in sporadic publications online, but they capture both the horrors of war as well as that nomadic spirit of restlessness the Gypsies once took for granted. I never encountered anything like it in literature. http://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/issues/issue-three/the-library-beneath-the-harp/
I will check out that book Tomatoland. It's a relevant topic now that child labor has returned to the US. Another reason why I don't believe we live in normal times. (And why I write with that abnormality in mind) Although I suppose a cynic might argue that it's a return to the normalcy of people starting work as kids all throughout history, or the US simply becoming "normal" just like every other country.