“Crisis” is a word you hear a lot these days in conversations about American higher education. There’s a crisis of the humanities — English majors are way down. Rising tuition is a crisis of such magnitude that Republicans and Democrats concur that government intervention is necessary. Then there’s college athletics run amok, student alcoholism, pervasive campus violence against women. Crisis upon crisis.
The crisis I want to examine here is spawned by another crisis, namely the collapse of the academic job market. Nowadays only a handful of doctorates get tenure-line jobs at stellar colleges. A few runners-up get tenure-line jobs at adequate or doleful places. The rest, or the overwhelming majority, are the tenure system’s “losers” — the contingent faculty.
We live in an age, then, where countless deserving individuals find themselves trapped in dismal professional situations that are completely incommensurate with their achievements. Good scholars routinely end up ’juncting and underemployed. Lesser scholars routinely end up at elite places vying for tenure. Herein lies the crisis of which I speak: the crisis of standardlessness.
Example 1: These days, it is not unusual to find a department where a bloated full professor, age 72, has been outpublished by a scrawny adjunct, age 35. The adjunct did her apprenticeship in the late aughts. That was the era when it became evident to everyone that the job market was not about to pull out of its prolonged spiral dive. Unfortunately, it did not become evident to her.
To survive she published obscene quantities of peer-reviewed research. The graybeard, by contrast, received tenure decades ago. Back in the 70s, one could get hired and promoted for flossing regularly. The older scholar makes about five times as much as the adjunct. Naturally, he teaches half as many classes.
Example 2: Amanda and Irene were best friends in grad school. Both studied theoretical linguistics. They received the same training. They worked under the same doctoral adviser. They possess nearly identical publication records — two articles apiece in respected field journals. They even both somehow showed up at the party celebrating their successful doctoral defenses in the same distressed high-rise, skinny jeans from Madewell! Yet Amanda teaches part time at a community college and supplements her income doing data entry for an HMO. Irene has a tenure-track job at a top research university. Their relationship has grown strained.
Example 3: Professor Welch, over at Exquisite Boutique College, has been laboring for a quarter-century on a seminal study of late-19th-century Russian art. Colleagues like to recount tales of his epic labors, his devotion to craft, his personal sacrifices in pursuit of his subject matter. Welch has not yet published his masterpiece (“my very own Fabergé egg,” he likes to joke). In fact, he hasn’t published anything in his pipeline — which extends to Siberia — since the fall of the Iron Curtain that coincided with his being granted tenure.
Deadwood blossoms among Ivy. World-class sprinters labor at schools considered also-rans.
Welch is revered in his field. Much more so than Boris, who teaches at a college no one would ever describe as exquisite and who churns out four workmanlike, peer-reviewed articles per decade. Welch sits on well-regarded editorial boards. Boris sits in his tiny, windowless office double-checking his footnotes. Welch chairs steering committees for his professional scholarly association, the Nicholas II Society of Russian Arts and Letters. Boris chairs a foreign-languages department whose 24 instructors argue with one another for reasons that are nationalistic, ethnic, religious, personal, and sometimes completely incomprehensible. Welch is consulted by nonprofits that dole out grant money to humanists. But not humanists like Boris.
Professorial prestige, I contend, is an awfully arbitrary thing.
Among professors, where one works is a marker of status. Thus, the assistant professor employed by an Ivy League college accrues greater glory than her counterpart at a midsize regional university. The latter, in turn, is more esteemed than an assistant professor laboring at some far-flung small liberal-arts college. The same hierarchies prevail, I guess, among high-school seniors comparing their college-acceptance letters as they hotbox their parents’ Toyota Priuses.
The juveniles and, distressingly, the professors are just following the logic of popular college-ranking systems. They are assuming that the greater the renown of an institution as measured by U.S. News & World Report, the greater will be the quantity and quality of research produced by scholars in its employ. Is this assumption accurate?
If it were, it would follow that an assistant professor in anthropology at Princeton University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 1) publishes more and better work than her exact counterpart at the University of Southern California (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 23). The USC savant, in turn, outperforms the identically ranked anthropologist at Clark University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 75). The Clark ethnographer has a heftier CV than a comparable scholar employed at Oklahoma State University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 149). The better the institution, the better the research its tenure-line professors produce. Right?
Well, practice has a habit of trolling theory. Let’s imagine an experiment. All four of our hypothetical tenure-track anthropologists are asked to submit an updated CV and all of their relevant publications. Upon their arrival, these materials are scrubbed of any identifying markers. The anonymous files are then forwarded to a panel of experienced academicians, no-nonsense types who understand how the game is played. Their task: Figure out which CV corresponds to which sage employed at colleges ranked 1, 23, 75, and 149.
Our arbiters, I’m convinced, would fail this blind test. They would fail even if we asked them not to look at mere quantity of publications but quality as well. That’s because the contestants would all look puzzlingly similar. The judges might assume that the assistant professor at Clark worked at Southern California. And, yes, it is not unthinkable that they would place the Oklahoma State ethnographer in New Jersey. The problem is not that the Princeton person is a slouch. The problem is that all four are publishing a lot and all are very impressive on paper. Ergo, it would be impossible for the judges to distinguish between scholarly Coke and Pepsi.
Now, I would not deny that the distinctions among colleges are a bit sharper at the ranks of associate and full professor. In other words, tenured faculty at elite places often — but definitely not always — will have stronger publication records than their nonelite counterparts. We can’t say for sure why. Do senior faculty members at leading colleges and universities publish more because of their genius and/or hard work? Or is their success due to having fewer teaching responsibilities and more support for research?
Still, I repeat, there exist an infinity of exceptions to this rule. Deadwood blossoms among Ivy. World-class sprinters labor at institutions considered also-rans.
The credentials of nearly all assistant professors as researchers at institutions ranked numbers 1 through 150 (and beyond) are strong and indistinguishable. Their skills as teachers are likely weak and indistinguishable. Few get into this business to teach — though I wish more would. If I had to guess, I’d say the pedagogical edge probably goes to the scholars at 150. They will most likely be subject to tenure formulas that incentivize them to pay attention to undergraduates. They’ll have plenty of opportunities to improve their craft, even if they don’t want to. They are contractually bound to teach 3–3’s or even 4–4’s. Over at the elite palaces, the requirement is a 2–2, or a 2–1.
But let’s get back to our perplexing observation about research output. How could it possibly be that the quantity and quality of publication is so similar among scholars at widely disparate schools? How could the standards for tenure-track professors be so out of proportion to institutional rankings? The first answer, as noted above, hinges on our conditions of labor.
The lack of lines in the humanities means that people with very similar, usually excellent, qualifications have fanned out to every imaginable postsecondary institution.
American professors are confronted with an unprecedented crisis of employment. There are plenty of jobs, mind you. The problem is that most of them are odious when compared with what was once available. Just a few decades back, our tenure system was robust. Now it lies dying. Very many scholars in the liberal arts are trained at very good, very prestigious graduate programs. Very few tenure-track jobs exist for them to ply their wares. Study after study relays the grim news that tenure-track lines have been disappearing for decades.
While lines are being steeply cut, we have witnessed what one influential report calls the “spread of contingency.” The phrase sounds terrifying, like an outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague. The metaphor is apt: As far as most professors are concerned, the contingency virus portends the extinction of our species.
Earning a doctorate in the liberal arts once entitled a person to a sense of self-worth, honor, and usually a decent-paying job. It now entitles most scholars to become members of an “industrial reserve army,” or a “surplus labor pool.” The collapsed market results in a brutal asymmetry. A glut of qualified academics applies for every available full-time job, and it makes little difference whether the post is at an Ivy League school or a community college.
Any scholar who sits on a hiring committee for a tenure-track professor knows this reality all too well. Hundreds apply for each advertised line. Of those hundreds, maybe 50 are quite good. Of those 50, maybe 10 are remarkable. Of those 10, often five are staggering in ways that make search-committee members feel less confident about their own abilities. Which brings us to the cruelest statistic of all: Of those hundreds, of those 50, of those 10, of those five, only one will be selected for the post. Did the selection committee snag the best applicant? We’ll address that shortly.
When a university appoints one of those fine 50 to a tenure-track position, this leaves 49 other qualified scholars desperately searching for employment. I estimate, generously, that in a given year there might be nine or 10 tenure-track openings that are appropriate to each of the imagined anthropologists named above. So when application season ends, roughly 40 of our fine 50 are left scrambling for postdocs, contingent positions, and whatever sanity they can preserve.
They join a luckless procession stretching back at least a decade. Doctorates minted in 2017 will apply for an assistant professorship along with the ill-fated of the classes of 2016, 2015, 2011, 2008, and so forth. Their careers, hopes, and dreams have been decimated by contingency.
This has resulted in a peculiar disconnect between the quality of an institution and the quality of its faculty. The lack of lines in the humanities means that people with very similar, usually excellent, though somewhat anodyne, qualifications have fanned out to every imaginable postsecondary institution, from East Coast Ivies, to Midwestern land-grant universities, to West Coast community colleges.
And when they get there, the inflated hopes of a demoralized and desperate department are upon them.
To review: The academic job market is in tatters. As a result, every tenure-line position in the country attracts a surfeit of applicants. Among the best of these candidates, the differences in accomplishments, talent, and potential are small and subtle. So, in order to make the right decision, evaluators must marshal the diligence, focus, and cold impartiality necessary to tweeze out those fine distinctions.
Those tweezing evaluators will almost always be us, the faculty. Which is perhaps why academic searches provide us with so much rich comic material. Even when there were positions to be had — in the once-upon-a-time era of the undisrupted academy — our hiring protocols left much to be desired. Now, more qualified candidates than ever vie for our attention. We stand, as always, unready, unwilling, and unable to properly assess their prodigious talents. The demise of tenure isn’t the only factor that leads to standardlessness. It synergizes with our own dysfunction, our campus-novel folly.
A comparison with another industry may provide some useful context. The National Football League conducts its annual draft every April. The proceedings are splashily broadcast to the multitudes. Viewers are mesmerized by eye-lacerating graphics, torrents of analyses, and endless clips of very large men pulverizing other very large men.
Prior to all that sound and fury, 32 professional franchises spend the fall and winter studying thousands of college athletes. The work is entrusted to well-staffed scouting departments that trek to gridirons across the nation. Ever eager for comprehensive data, the evaluators consult with leather-lunged college coaches, Red Bull-stoked assistants, and shifty athletic directors. After that, the scouts hunker down in dark film rooms poring over infinite spools of tape. All the better to pinpoint the precise merits and demerits of the players they vet.
The prospects are graded according to rigorous criteria and then reassessed, in person, at a combine. At this event, even more observers, including hundreds of sports journalists, join the scouts and front-office people. Security and background checks are performed on the athletes. Intelligence and psychological evaluations are administered. The process spans months and costs each team millions of dollars. And even with all of that effort, all of that toil and industry, football teams select terrible players, often referred to as “busts,” on a regular basis.
Scholar drafts are somewhat different — except for the part about busts. Which is unfortunate because a person hired to a tenure-track job is not expendable like a nose tackle selected from McNeese State. Our busts can conceivably gain tenure and hang around the “team” for half a century or so.
Everyone reasons that the New Guy, whoever she or he might be, will balm a thousand wounds, redress an infinity of injustices, and generally set things aright.
The NFL’s draft occurs every year. Conversely, no one quite knows when an academic job search might take place. If your department does get the nod — euphoria. A collective delirium takes hold. Everyone reasons that the New Guy, whoever she or he might be, will balm a thousand wounds, redress an infinity of injustices, and generally set things aright.
The New Guy’ll teach the intro class (which no one wants to teach and has gone untaught for three years). The New Guy’ll run the unstaffable capstone seminar that meets Friday at 4 p.m. New Guy’ll coordinate and oversee the 23 members of our contingent staff. Who knows, maybe New Guy will be cute or a quick wit — we haven’t had a good laugh here since the global financial meltdown of 2008. Come to think of it, we haven’t had a line since then either. Yes, we’re going to like New Guy!
Then an ad is posted and an entire civilization of wannabe New Guys comes calling. Some of their applications arrive the day the ad goes up. A few, inexplicably, show up the day before. Still others come in outsize boxes delivered on hand trucks by courier services. I confess to having a soft spot for the letters that materialize weeks after the deadline. Those are always accompanied by a human-interest story: “From the outset permit me to apologize for the late delivery of these materials. While researching my forthcoming monograph in Vitebsk, Belarus, I was detained and incarcerated by local authorities whom, the State Department now informs me, ... “
Football teams employ squadrons of well-paid scouts whose sole task in life is to vet potential draftees. Colleges, by contrast, entrust that mission to stressed-out, overworked tenure-line professors. They are never compensated for this service. Colleges and universities get what they pay for.
In pursuit of New Guy, professors will be confronted with hundreds of applications, three times as many letters of recommendation, and enough offprints to fill the Library of Congress. By my estimate, the committee members will scrutinize each CV for about two to five minutes.
Besieged by a surfeit of credentials, the typical harried evaluator will focus on two vital metrics: 1) where a scholar received the doctorate, and 2) what the scholar has published. That takes about 90 seconds. In the remaining 90 seconds, assuming the applicant has not been consigned to the thickening reject pile, the reviewer glances at what courses the applicant can teach. So much for pinpointing precise merits and demerits! And it goes without saying that no psychological evaluations are ever administered.
The search is kicking into high gear. Timeless irregularities of academic culture begin to infest the deliberations. For starters, scholars tend to hire tribally, preferring people with similar intellectual interests. Politics and ideology also rear their scowling heads. The radical Left is notorious for commandeering search committees. That’s why some film departments are staffed solely by Deleuzian Maoists or vegan Derridians. Sometimes professors look exclusively for people who attended their own graduate schools. How many departments have I seen with a forensically suspect cluster of hires who received their doctorates from the same place, under the same thesis advisers?
In accordance with these peculiar criteria, roughly 95 percent of the aspirants will soon be eliminated. The field has been narrowed to three or four outstanding individuals (though that decision is always contested and accompanied by a few resignations from the committee expressed in 10,000-word manifestoes). Once the shortlist is drawn up, rituals of backchanneling, influence peddling, and whoremongering ensue. On-campus interviews are booked. Rumors run rampant. Unexpected alliances crystallize around unexpected candidates.
Cross-cutting through this intrigue are other distractions. Scholars have the ill-advised tendency to fall in love with one another. Their passion gives rise to an “academic couple” — perhaps the most dreaded phrase in a search committee’s lexicon. No search, it seems, is complete without this ghastly spousal subplot. It comes out of nowhere — like the toothy maw of the monster from Jaws emerging from the sullen deep — and drags the entire process down into some dark, litigious murk.
Ought I mention inside candidates? The seamiest secret of the academic job search is that its outcome is often foreordained. A tenure-track line is a precious commodity. Is there any wonder that the desire to attain this treasure trumps our ethical impulses?
Often, the job description, the composition of the committee, the questions asked at the interview — all of these have been rigged to assure that one predetermined candidate (or trailing spouse) is hired. Need I point out that for the poor applicants, the entire ordeal is time-consuming and expensive? Rebecca Schuman, writing in Slate, has chronicled this well. She reminds us that a job seeker in academe actually has another job: applying for jobs. The ritual is needlessly degrading.
That a process such as the one I am describing rarely conduces to positive outcomes for employer and employees is overdetermined. In the NFL, general managers with a bad record of drafting are always fired. Their scouting departments go down in flames with them. In higher education there is no comparable form of accountability. We never look back after a decade and ask if the committee made the right choice. No college has the time, resources, or will to conduct such an inquiry.
Audits are conducted only in the minds of irate scholars, the ones who didn’t get their dream job back in 2007. They toil and seethe at some lesser place, a place shorn of hope. That they eventually outpublished the person who was selected for the position they coveted is only a minor consolation.
Jacques Berlinerblau directs the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. This essay is adapted from his new book Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t, for Professors, Parents, and Students (Melville House).
