The imbalance between older tenured faculty and a much younger (and more female and less white) group of non-tenure faculty does create tensions. For instance, hiring committees now demand young faculty applicants demonstrate productivity in a fashion that would have been unthinkable twenty-five or thirty years ago, when older now-tenured faculty were hired. New hires are often expected to exhibit more productivity in terms of publications than some of the folks on the hiring committees have demonstrated over the course of their entire careers. (This is not to say that many older professors who published infrequently were doing poor work, but to point out the unreasonable demands placed on young faculty applicants in the current market.) Younger faculty often complain that older faculty members have no familiarity with the new media technologies that the younger generation has learned to employ in their teaching (and, in fact, is pressured to employ by administrations who believe that somehow technology will enable fewer teachers to teach more students). Caught between administrative pressure to use new media and the certainty that older peers will not credit new media work in tenure or promotion review and will not help protect young faculty from the pressures of administrators in this instance, it's easy for younger faculty to resent comfortably tenured older peers for a kind of willful ignorance about technology and technological innovation in teaching and scholarship. The divisions are fueled, in many institutions, by an increasing gap between graduate students and a much older tenured professorial class, so that younger faculty (particularly those in non-tenure positions) find themselves politically and philosophically allied with graduate students in the battle for graduate student labor rights, while older professors often (though not always) decry the organizing efforts of their graduate students. And untenured and non-tenure-track faculty feel all of these divisions deeply. They cannot ever afford to forget that appointments for adjuncts and tenure decisions are made at the departmental level--most often by tenured faculty members. They know that if they push too hard to defend or support their interests they risk losing their jobs. It's impossible to have an environment in which ideas and opinions are freely exchanged between all members of the academy when one group wields most of the departmental power, and another is almost voiceless.

But the answer is not to force the older faculty to retire--that tactic would cut the power of faculty down to almost nothing in many institutions and, as much as we may differ with our older colleagues on some issues, such a strategy would not help either younger or older scholars in the long run. In my opinion, the only thing that can save the profession from the corporatist mentality of university administrations is solidarity between faculty members, and between faculty members and graduate students. Unless older faculty members realize that the long-term interests of the academy are not being served by non-tenure-track hires (despite their cheap short-term cost), and unless older and younger faculty members unite to protest both the exploitation of non-tenure-track faculty AND graduate students, internal divisiveness will render us ineffective and the administration will take sole charge of the future of the university, biding its time until the last of the "dinosaurs" retire and all institutionally powerful faculty voices are stilled.

-- Kali Tal, Professor of Humanities, Arizona International College, University of Arizona (posted 8/30, 12:05 p.m., E.D.T.)

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