From How the University Works:
I started my semester at one of my campuses this week (the other started last week). Upon checking my mail for the first time this semester, I found a letter stating that due to a lack of cash flow at the state level, all part-timers are receiving a pay cut. Or, well, not exactly. The money’s just held up, is all, and we’ll get it right after the school year’s over. Except, okay, well, they’re not entirely certain they’ll get the money. You know how state budgets are! So why don’t we just work the school year, especially since they told us after it was too late to find other jobs, and once we’ve done the work, mayyybe we’ll get paid for it!
What’s funny is that only part-timers’ salaries are affected by the state budget crisis. As far as I know, full-timers and administrators are fine. Funny, how that worked out. The union will be taking action, of course. But I refuse to get my hopes up.
This semester, the walls of both my classes were lined with students trying to add the course because so many sections were canceled after registration. These students were desperate; one looked ready to cry when I told her I didn’t know if there was room, and another pumped her fist when I did a head count and announced that I could add a few people. (Right now I’m violating the fire code by allowing students to sit on the floor. There aren’t enough desks. Oh, god, the first batch of papers is coming in a couple of weeks.) My suspicion is that many part-time faculty members saw the pay cut, realized they couldn’t pay their bills, and decided to try their luck elsewhere – either at other colleges (although most semesters have started) or in different fields. I don’t think this is the whole reason why we turned away so many students; enrollment is up because the economy is sending many people back to school, and I also wonder if the administration cut entire classes to save money. But whatever’s going on, it’s hurting both educators and students. And if a system is hurting both the people serving it and the people being served, then what’s the point of that system?
Part-time faculty members make up more than 70% of all college educators – and that’s before you count “visiting” professors, who can spend years going from campus to campus, city to city, state to state, before they find a school willing to keep them for more than a year. As other part-timers have pointed out, we’re no longer “adjunct” to higher education – we are higher education. The system would fall apart without us. We have to use our numbers to do something.
When I got my second job, I was really excited because I’d finally be making 30K a year. I’d been teaching college for three years, but I’d never made 30K before. I’d never known how it felt not to be worried about money, not to feel guilty about eating out or buying something frivolous. Now I’m working more and making the same amount.
When I called HR to ask about the pay cut, they did the calculation, told me my new salary, and then assured me that it was “no big deal.”
Phew! That’s a relief.
To the extent that higher education is funded by the public (and it’s a lot) we’re all served by seeing people get useful college degrees. So please don’t assume that only the students and teachers count.
That said…Having your pay cut after they agreed to pay you is crap. It might be illegal, if it were me I’d ask a lawyer. But the difference might be too small to sue over. Also, depending on what you teach the salary they agreed to pay you might be too high. If you did what I’d to if my boss told me I was getting a pay cut and walked away how long would it take them to replace you at the lower pay?
There’s a lot of non-cash compensation in being a college professor and in a lot of ways it looks like a lottery. The people that win the golden ticket really aren’t much ‘better’ than the ones that don’t. As long as the ‘gotta play to win’ mindset continues so will crap pay for adjuncts.
But from my perspective, if a classroom of students get’s a PhD to improve their ability to do math/read/write/think for 12.50 an hour, and the PhD is doing it of their own free will, who looses?
We have to use our numbers to do something.
Your numbers, unfortunately, are part of the problem. I’m sympathetic to the plight of the adjunct, but a large part of that problem is the vast population of people willing and able to do the work. If you did as Joe suggested and voted with your feet, your college would just take another applicant off of the enormous stack. So guess which population gets the slimy end of the stick when the budget develops hiccups…
Your forebearers understood this, and used gentleman’s agreements Back In The Olden Times to limit the number of PhDs they would produce, to keep the output within the natural demand and ensuring salaries would stay decent. That’s long past, though, and now it’s beancounters in the administration who make decisions like that, and for the beancounters, more PhD students = more money for the university, so pack ’em in!
The net result of this process is actually good for students. Two groups of people end up sticking with professorial work: the ones who love it so much they’ll do anything to keep teaching, and the ones who have enough money from other sources that they can work wherever they like. That second group isn’t hugely beneficial for students, but the first group is.
Correction, if she’s making 40k/ year it averages out to 20$ an hour for a standard work week, not 12.50. My brother makes less than her by doing construction.
I wouldn’t say adjuncts drop courses after a pay cut just for better employment opportunities elsewhere. There are some instances where I’d be paying to teach an on-campus course, if you factor in gas money, childcare, copies and book purchases (not covered by anyone on campus). MAYBE I’d pay to teach a course once, for networking purposes in a new town, or as a favor for a friend in crisis. But unless I was that motivated, I’d drop a course that I was losing money to teach, absolutely, even if I didn’t have something else lined up. In such cases, the “better opportunity” is sometimes not working at all–or at least not working at a university. And hey, there’s oxygen off campus! Who knew we could survive without a spacesuit out here? ;)
(Teaching online courses makes way more money sense for me–no childcare costs, no gas money, and no hard copies of anything. Good deal.)
The “just limit grad school admissions!” argument is just about the oldest myth out there, and has been disproven several times. Schools are already desperate for teachers – when I got my second job, I asked for one class and the department chair tried to get me to take two instead. The population of educators hasn’t changed in relation to the number of positions available; on the contrary, it’s quite easy to find work. It’s just that you’ll be teaching your full-time load at 2 or 3 campuses instead of one.
The problem isn’t that there’s too many of us. The problem is that we’re complacent, demoralized, and easily cowed.
I’m sure the students whose papers I can spend no more than five minutes grading would agree with you. Who needs facts when you’ve got a nice, shiny theory?
My choirmaster (he’s also our organist) is an adjunct professor of music at a school that’s reasonably well-known – at least, in the Midwest. After two years of that I was stunned to find out that he couldn’t get health insurance from them. We are now paying for it. I thought that was pretty outrageous.
I’m interested in this and have never see a discussion of PhD’s to students ratio before. Can you point me to the studies you’re talking about?
A great place to start is Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works; he compiles a lot of work that’s been done on the subject. On page 25, for example, he points out that Humanities programs only award PhDs to between 20 and 40 percent of their graduate students, yet these non-degree-holders – who by their very definition are not qualified to teach college, except in cases of terminal degrees like MFAs – have no problem whatsoever finding low-paid lecturer positions (which, like I said, make up the vast majority of college teaching jobs). So the issue clearly isn’t a build-up of qualified job applicants; it’s a system that has deliberately restructured itself to justify a wider wage gap between administrators and faculty. Bousquet explains job market theory and rhetoric in more detail on page 41 and in chapter 6.
yet these non-degree-holders – who by their very definition are not qualified to teach college, except in cases of terminal degrees like MFAs – have no problem whatsoever finding low-paid lecturer positions (which, like I said, make up the vast majority of college teaching jobs). So the issue clearly isn’t a build-up of qualified job applicants
This is self-contradictory. If they aren’t qualified to hold the job, then how are they getting the low-paid lecturer positions? I’ve had a reasonable number of non-PhD instructors at various colleges; college guides even list the % of courses taught by non-PhDs as part of their ranking (since it is better, ceteris parabus, to have a PhD doing the teaching). It seems like you’re ruling these people as “unqualified” (despite decades of their regular use) in order to argue that there isn’t an oversupply of the “qualified”. Yet, it is the very number of these people that points to the oversupply.
Robert,
I agree with you that many college courses do not require PhDs, but there is probably some marginal benefit from having a PhD teach a course. Greater knowledge does tend to come through somehow, even if it hard to quantify.
The issue of course isn’t whether there are “too many” PhDs or “too many” jobs. Instead it is a question of matching.
Most people who get PhDs and who want to teach would like a tenured faculty position. Those are incredibly hard to get, quite possibly one of the most competitive fields in the country depending on discipline. It is obvious that there will always be more applicants than positions and that this would have been true even in the old days. There simply aren’t all that many PhD programs, they expend infrequently, and a typical professor will “produce” more than one academically-inclined PhDs over the total of the professor’s teaching tenure. The applicant/position ratio would increase, yes?
Well, that would seem to be the core of the very problem I’m talking about, wouldn’t it? Look again at what I said about the system being restructured in order to justify lower pay. If you want to argue that a PhD isn’t necessary to teach college, fine (keep in mind that adjuncts often teach upper division or even graduate courses), but at that point we’re having two different arguments. Let’s bring it back to my original point in the post. Do you agree that college instructors should be paid less than high school teachers, and have no benefits or job security? If so, why?
It occurs to me that the facts on the ground might not be clear here. The number of tenured positions hasn’t remained the same over the past twenty years – it’s gone down drastically. Adjunct positions haven’t been added to tenure-track positions, they’ve replaced them. When a professor retires, s/he’s more likely to be replaced by two adjuncts than one professor.
As for the applicant/position ratio increasing, it’s another nice theory, but it doesn’t hold up in reality. Like I said to Joe, the number of people attending college is growing, and there are plenty of jobs for people interested in teaching them. To bring in another example – a public university recently required adjuncts to sign wavers saying they’d be willing to teach full-time loads without benefits because the school was so desperate to find teachers. How does that point to a shortage of jobs?
Let’s bring it back to my original point in the post. Do you agree that college instructors should be paid less than high school teachers, and have no benefits or job security? If so, why?
I think that college instructors should be paid the market value for their work, same as every other job. If the market value is less than you feel your skills are worth, then take them to another job. If there is no other job for those skills, then your estimation of the value of the skills may not align with the consensus estimate provided by the market.
TGD, I am simply pointing out that even in the Good Old Days, after enough time one would expect there to be more would-be tenured professors than could find tenure track positions.
I share your thoughts insofar as I am not a huge fan of poorly educated adjuncts. I have had the disappointing experience of being “taught,” if you can call it that, by a “professor” who was only slightly more educated and experienced than I, but who wore the pomp of a full academic. PhDs should really be a requirement for all but basic college courses.
An interesting question is what kind of jobs you would want to be made available. Schools could hire more full time professors, of course. But–as you note in your post immediately above–that would simultaneously 1) cut the available positions right now in half or so (“two adjuncts replace a single faculty member”) and 2) have an even greater effect on the positions next year, when all those professors stay right where they are, determined not to create a job for someone else by giving up theirs. If you make the full-professor cut you’d be better off. If not, you might be worse off.
Of course, we could always improve the pay given to adjuncts. That would increase competition, as it would attract more people to teaching who otherwise could not afford to be in the business. There remains the question of where all that money is going to come from, though, seeing as student costs are already quite high. If, as you say, adjuncts are 75% of the faculty… well, doubling the salary of 75% of your faculty is not free.
Making matters worse is the “in or out” nature of academic hiring. Be it unions or tenure, the reality is that once you hire a professor is is exceedingly difficult to fire them if you don’t like them. Possible, but difficult.
The same is not true for adjuncts. And it is fairly obvious that from an employer perspective, if you have the choice between locking yourself into a hire for all time or being able to evaluate (and pay) your staff on a more individual basis, you will generally choose the latter. This is especially true if you need (or think you need) the ability to increase and decrease your staff in response to changing student demand.
Like Sailorman, I agree that filling classrooms with adjunct instructors is a bad idea. I draw a distinction between that preference, and my opinion of what the salary for a person with a particular job ought to be.
And do you think that $1,200 – $4,000 per course per semester is the market value? If so, on what basis are you making that judgment? (To say “because that’s what the market is paying” is circular logic.)
It absolutely would not, because almost all adjuncts teach full-time loads at multiple campuses. For example, I and a colleague both teach full-time loads at the same two campuses. If she and I were to just switch half our classes with each other, then we’d both be teaching the same loads at single campuses. Similarly, if more full-time positions were created, adjuncts would simply consolidate their current loads into those single positions.
Are you saying that all adjuncts switch jobs every year? I’m not sure what you’re arguing here.
Why not just turn each two part-time jobs into one full-time job?
I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s a crucial question. It’s true that state budgets have a lot to do with it. However, I’d like to point out that administrators routinely make six-figure salaries for work that doesn’t take any more skill than teaching college courses. Most universities are profit-driven, even if unofficially.
I absolutely agree that the tenure system needs to be reevaluated. If you’re saying that unionization is a bad idea, though, I’m not really interested in arguing with you.
And when I say “no job security,” I mean that adjuncts can be fired at any time, for no reason, with no luxuries such as severance pay. This is because adjuncts are classified as “temporary,” even if we work the job indefinitely. This isn’t fair in any other field – why is it fair in academia?
And do you think that $1,200 – $4,000 per course per semester is the market value? If so, on what basis are you making that judgment? (To say “because that’s what the market is paying” is circular logic.)
That’s what people are willing to pay, so that’s the market value. The value of a thing is what the thing will bring.
It’s possible that universities’ teaching labor costs are a case of market failure, where collusion, subsidy, taxation, regulation or some other force/combination of forces is causing a breakdown of the price-setting mechanism. That’s something that happens with fair frequency, particularly in weird cases like the public-private hybrid system of US higher education. (I don’t know enough about other countries’ models to say anything about how they work, but I think you’re talking about the US.)
The test of whether a market is failing is to check the price of the commodity or service in another context where there isn’t market failure. In this case, that would be the salary that could be commanded by the adjunct’s skill set in the open labor market, which is a very competitive market. If most adjuncts could easily score $90,000/year jobs with benefits in private industry, then that would be a strong indication that the price for adjunct teaching is too low.
My experience of adjunct instructors, by and large, is that this is not the case, although of course my experience is far from exhaustive.
Complicating this is the status and emotional satisfaction of teaching work. One of my adjunct professors was a brilliant statistician with a list of major clients as long as your arm who drove from his consulting business to the university in a gorgeous black BMW. He was not teaching Stats 201 because he needed to make the mortgage payment; he was teaching it because he loved teaching stats. He didn’t want to become a tenured professor, although he could have had his choice of slots in the business school or the liberal arts school, because he also loved doing his private work and didn’t want to teach full-time. For him, it was a beloved hobby. Instructors like that are probably hurting the “cause”, but helping their students, since his motivation was off the charts.
That instructor was the outlier. Most of the other adjuncts I had were people with a master’s or a doctorate in their field, but with no private sector experience and a relatively poor fit of mental skills and attitudes for ordinary employment. Teaching was the best job they could get. In many cases (not all), a tenure-track position in academia was their goal and the adjunct process was the foot in the door; hoping for great evaluations or great connection to the school so that they’d get one of the few tracked positions that open each year. Those adjuncts tended to see the process as the dues-paying portion of their career.
It would not surprise me in the least to learn that universities exploit the opportunity presented by such teachers; “let’s suck a few good years out of these folks, hire the very occasional True Genius Teacher, and let the rest burn out in despair.” Which is crappy on the part of the university, just as it is crappy for the universities to churn out a gazillion English MAs every year knowing full well that most of them can never find high-quality employment.
So, long story short: what’s the best job you could get outside the university, and what does it pay? Answer that (to yourself, it’s none of my business unless you feel like sharing), and you know whether your adjunct instructor pay is sub-market or not.
And when I say “no job security,” I mean that adjuncts can be fired at any time, for no reason, with no luxuries such as severance pay. This is because adjuncts are classified as “temporary,” even if we work the job indefinitely. This isn’t fair in any other field – why is it fair in academia?
It’s fair in any field. If you want a secure job, then apply for a secure job (and accept the costs thereof). Adjunct teaching is advertised as temporary work; that someone chooses to take a series of temporary jobs doesn’t create an obligation on the part of the temporary employer to redefine the position(s) as permanent. If they want you as a permanent employee, they’ll hire you as one.
With my degree and expertise, I could easily get a job making $50,000 or more. Which I’ll probably do, if the academic labor movement or my own career doesn’t make any progress in the next couple of years. Many of my colleagues are already doing it. I know more than one brilliant young scholar who has surprised me by announcing that they aren’t even going to bother trying to find an academic position. So, yes, the majority of teaching jobs are sub-market, and academia is hemorrhaging talent as a result. I don’t want to have to choose between doing what I love and getting health insurance, but there you have it.
All right, I think we’re done here. You believe employers don’t have any responsibilities to their workers aside from the very lowest wage the market forces them to pay. If we don’t share a definition of workers’ rights, then there’s not much point in arguing about a specific situation.
People have to do that all the time. Many of the engineers I know really wanted to work in racing, but the pay was bad, the good opportunities were rare, and working on washing machines, radar or what have you was there for fall back.
If I were fishing for sympathy over not getting to be a full-time novelist, that’d be one thing, but you’d think we’d consider teaching a bit more stable than racing.
Okay, now I’m really done.
GD, do you think this is being driven by a genuine need for colleges to cut costs in order to avoid raising tuition even more, or is it something else?
(When I read this post, I thought about Baumol’s disease (which I posted a bit about last week).)
I agree with you that the current system doesn’t seem likely to be sustainable over the long run, if we want good colleges — the best people are going to be driven out of teaching.
GD, I’m sorry I was an ass. What I meant to say was very different from what came out. I’ll try pull my thoughts together better later on.
All right, I think we’re done here. You believe employers don’t have any responsibilities to their workers aside from the very lowest wage the market forces them to pay. If we don’t share a definition of workers’ rights, then there’s not much point in arguing about a specific situation.
I believe that employers have a slew of responsibilities to their workers, and vice-versa. Some of those responsibilities come from the law, others come from past labor activism, and some come from mutual negotiation.
What I don’t believe is that my conception of what the relationship ought to be, overrides what the relationship is. There is a difference between arguing “temporary jobs suck and we should put pressure on the university to get rid of these temporary jobs and replace them with permanent positions”, and arguing “temporary jobs suck so I’m entitled to expect my job to be permanent even though I knew full well it was temporary when I took it”.
I also think it is possible to overestimate the value of permanence. I have a system set up in my writing business where I have essentially open recruiting for new projects. Anyone who doesn’t strike me as a complete moron can try out on a project, do a few assignments, get paid. My editorial team then sorts the outcomes and figures out who’s doing a great job. Those people get more work, and eventually we close the big door and stop having open recruitment on the project. Over time, we end up with a very small group of people who do all the work on the project – and they’re the ones who really enjoy it and who are also really good at it. A hundred people get to try, two people end up with jobs, and the costs to everyone involved are very low. If I used a “hire only the best from the beginning” model and permanent jobs, I’d end up with lower quality and with people who didn’t really love the work, because they locked into the job before they really knew it.
Arguably, adjuncts can work the same way. The university can find out who’s actually a good professor, the adjuncts can find out if they actually enjoy teaching college, and the costs are low. This assumes that the university is acting in good faith, of course, and really is looking for those one or two gems in the pool, and not just churning through graduate suckers to keep their costs down. But we agree that the latter behavior is objectionable. I wonder if you agree that the former behavior makes some sense.
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I have met some adjuncts who are worth $8000 per semester and I have had the unpleasant experience of being taught by some who are worth a tenth of that. I do not know what the market value is, but in a certain way, the whole point of market value is that it was more practical that theoretical. It is impossible to predict market value in advance: You can say as loudly as you want to that you are worth $10,000 per semester (and I can say that i am worth $500/hour) but unless you can find someone to pay you that much, you’re not really worth that much.
If you think that is circular logic, then I assume you are arguing for an objective theory of worth. Before we go down that road, is this a correct assumption?
The “almost every adjunct is a full time adjunct” claim doesn’t match my own anecdotal knowledge nor what i have read. I am quite happy to assume you’re right and I will operate on that assumption for now, but I may revisit it at some point.
Not all adjuncts switch jobs every year. However, many of the ones I know are in positions which are temporary. Many of them switch jobs on a frequent basis–for example, because they were filling a slot for a teacher on sabbatical. My understanding is that while some colleges deliberately hire “permanent adjuncts” there are many of those positions which are transitory.
I am not so sure about that skill claim, actually. Where are you getting that?
[shrug] Unionization can be a good idea or a bad idea. It is what it is: it has costs and benefits just like everything else in life. If you are saying that you always consider unions to be a good idea, and/or that you believe they offer benefits without any tradeoffs, then I don’t want to waste time arguing with you either, I promise!
Generally speaking, unionization of faculty positions is likely to make things a hell of lot better for the “winners” who get hired/protected/whatever, and likely to make things worse for the “losers.” As usual, I might add, for unions. It is also likely–though not guaranteed–to raise the average income, or the median income, or both. So whether you support it as a result probably depends on the degree to which you think you will be in the “winner” group, and/or the degree to which you’re willing to sacrifice personal benefit for the general good.
Arguably, a union already exists. It’s called the tenure system. You’re just not in the union; you’re not a “winner” as it were. You would have better job options if not for the tenure system. And when/if YOU succeed in securing yourself better protection, then (just like with tenure and every other union) the folks who don’t make it into your system will also be hosed.
I think your “isn’t fair anywhere else” issue is way, way, way, off. LOTS of people are classified as “at will” employees. I have been in the workforce since the mid to late 80s and I do not think I have ever worked a job in my life where I was not an at will employee. Neither has my wife. Neither have most of the people I know. When I hire people–which I will–they will be at will employees, too.
In fact, not only is it “fair” in other fields, it is probably fairly common. Your concept of guaranteed job security is, in my opinion, further from the norm than you think.
And of course you need to consider the effect of job security on salaries. More security for employee = higher risk to employer = less immediate income to employee.
If I could hire someone and know that I could fire them on a week’s notice if my work slowed way down or I got sick or whatever, then I might pay them, say, $30/hour. They are accepting a higher level of risk for an increased return. If I knew that they expected me to bear the risk of fluctuation, I would pay them less. If I would not only have to pay them severance but also, say, have to justify every firing to a third party, then I would pay them even less.
Now, this might be beneficial to the employee: if they place a higher value on security than I “charge” to absorb the risk and provide the security they want, then they have a net gain. Or it might be harmful to the employee, if they don’t give a hoot about security and just want cold hard cash.
It depends on the college. In this case, I think the need to cut costs is genuine, but the fact that only part-timers have to pay the price is where it gets exploitative. There are many universities, though – including public ones – in which much of tuition is funneled into the salaries of administrators, star faculty, and coaches, and away from the people doing most of the teaching. (It’s true that, in the case of sports programs, ticket and merchandise sales garner a lot of revenue, but students are still footing much of the bill for multi-million dollar contracts.)
I am a tenured associate professor (who does not have a PhD or an MFA, though I now coordinate the college’s Creative Writing Project) in the English Department of a large community college on the east coast, and we have a very strange situation here in that there are two faculty unions, one for full-time faculty and one for adjuncts. I belong to both unions. Why? Because I occasionally teach an extra course or two to make some extra money. The fact that there are two unions has caused problems in the past: the adjunct union has undermined, or tried to undermine the full-time union, by making the very valid point that adjuncts do the lion’s share of teaching on campus (though they very conveniently ignore all the work that full time faculty have to do that they don’t: committee work, etc. that ultimately keeps the college running so that there are all those classes for the adjuncts to teach), and the fact that the two unions often end up being at loggerheads obscures the fact that, if we really think about it, we have more in common than not. We all teach; we all have the same needs in terms of the classroom, etc. Full-timers could not do our jobs if there were no part-timers, and part-timers would not have the classes to teach, because the college would cease to function as an accredited institution, if we did not do ours; and we all should have access through our employer to health insurance, etc. (In fact, adjuncts here do now have that access, though I do not know the details of the policy.) My point is that, at some point, the theoretical distinction between full-time and part-time faculty is a false one–though it is made very real, of course, by the economics–and that we would stand to gain a lot more if we acted as one body of college instructors rather than allowing a kind of divide and conquer mentality/strategy to rule how we see ourselves and each other.
Every time adjuncting gets discussed, someone trots out their supply-and-demand theory to brush off the extremely disturbing nature of the situation to which academics, like most of the world’s population, have been subjected.
Essentially, university trustees and state legislatures are running up tremendous debts with credit cards. They are trading off of the good reputation that universities achieved in the past with majorities of tenured faculty on their staffs (especially in the ‘50s and ‘60s when they educated a huge new swathe of the American population). Having sold the public on the need to attend university with the promise that they could provide the same or better level of education as in the past, they then cut back on maintenance of infrastructure – both human and physical (many to most universities have severely underfunded upkeep and renovation on existing buildings). At the same time, tuition increases have exceeded inflation by 3-1. The reason for this seems to vary by institution: some are spending money on fancy gourmet meals and other gew-gaws to attract materialistic students; others are spending money on new buildings (in which case the funds get diverted to developers, many of whom are best buds with the trustees, or even trustees themselves); still others lavish money on debt-ridden athletic programs (according to a recent NCAA study, only 5% of athletic programs actually break even or make money – that’s 17 programs total) to attract students who will pay full tuition; others are state institutions that suffer under the four-decade-old movement to shift the burdens of society from the wealthy to the less wealthy (which has resulted in our current Gilded-Age-topping inequality in wealth distribution – Americans are something like 30% more productive than they were in 1968, but make about $2,000 less in salary than they did then). And, get ready for the computerized university! If most administrators have their way, they will trade their universities’ reputations in for an even greater degradation of the instructional environment by moving to online courses. Courses, that is, that do not require as many buildings to operate and which can be outsourced to Bangalore (just see pp. 42-3 of market polyanna T. Friedman’s The World Is Flat).
Now, the market fundamentalists are probably saying “So what? When their products decline to a certain degree, this will create a niche for competitors who will offer more traditional educations.” Well pardon me if I am not so enthusiastic about such a virulently anti-social ideology. While waiting for the “market” to catch up with reality, we wast tremendous amounts of talent, both in scholars deprived of the support to continue being scholars because they are teaching too much to stay current and students who do not have the leisure to focus on learning because they are working 2 or 3 jobs. And, this waste ripples throughout society: if you have to spend enormous amounts of time just making a basic living, then you have little time to participate in politics, to raise a family, to engage in your community, etc. Market fundamentalism is inherently damaging to society in the short term, even if it might lead to utopia in the long.
It won’t, of course – lead to utopia, that is – because it is really a religion that elites have used to fleece non-elites. As well all know, supply and demand are not the only forces at work in the economy. If they were, you would not see so many politicians prostituting themselves for a few million in campaign cash and the conventions would not be so awash in corporate advertising. I understand that the market has been sold as a force of nature, but it’s not and it’s time we started caring about the plight of the other laborers in our community.