‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’ | The Chronicle of Higher Education
How the humanities survive on exploitation.
Source: ‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’ - The Chronicle of Higher Education
I am not, generally, a big fan of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I have soured significantly on "the academy" – as it is now constructed and run, not as it once was and has the potential to be again – in recent years and decades. The linked article is a good explication of why. Here is just one brief excerpt:
"The abysmal conditions of adjuncts are not the inevitable byproducts of an economy with limited space for literature. They are intentional. Universities rely upon a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates. Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, so that the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write. We take the love that young people have for literature and use it to support the research of a tiny elite."
As much as I love writing, and as much as I respect those who write well and on worthwhile subjects, when I was dreaming of becoming a professor, I did not want to write, primarily and as a major end of my professorship: I wanted to teach. I wanted to share such knowledge as I had, by God's grace, managed to acquire with young (mostly) people who were hungry for it, in some cases whether they knew it or not. The old saw, "publish or perish," stuck in my craw, as I knew that would take time and energy away from actually teaching – actually professing, the theoretical job of a professor (a.k.a. "teacher of the love of wisdom," philosophiae doctor, the meaning of Ph.D.).
Clearly, the situation has not improved in the decades since the mid-1990s, when I pretty much laid that dream to rest. "Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, so that the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write." That pretty much says it all. Don't get me wrong, I (of all people) am not knocking writing, per se! But when it takes so much time away from actual teaching that the only way to maintain the educational function of an institution of higher learning is to hire underpaid, easily-fired adjuncts to do the "dirty work" of actually teaching – because the "ladder faculty" are so busy writing they don't have time to actually interact with students – something is badly wrong.
The problem is not limited to higher education, of course; non-profits, and even county- and state-funded agencies, rely on low-paid or non-paid interns, volunteers, or seasonals to do the majority of their work. I have written before of the bitter irony that volunteers are considered to be "worth" $24.14/hour (as of 2016), based on their value to the organization, according to Independent Sector – while those same organizations pay their part-times and seasonals (which describes just about everyone except the director) $9 or $11 an hour. The situation clearly is not much improved if you've spent years of your life and many thousands of dollars getting a doctorate. That is appalling.
The writer of this article is a literary critic, but the same is true throughout the humanities. He goes on to add, "This is the great shame of our profession. We tell our students to study literature because it will make them better human beings, that in our classrooms they will learn empathy and wisdom, thoughtfulness and understanding. And yet the institutions supporting literary criticism are callous and morally incoherent."
That is indeed – or should be – a source of great shame. Surely we can do better. Surely we must!