Academic labor has lost a lot of ground, and fast, in the last few decades. In 1970 roughly three-quarters of professors were on the tenure-track; now only 27 percent are, according to the American Federation of Teachers. Most critics focus on the recent acceleration of this distressing situation, but the precarious position of college teachers was felt as early as the Progressive Era, when the modern American University first took shape. Looking at the difficult conditions of academic labor then—and the efforts of Progressive Era reformers—gives us historical perspective and insight into today’s labor crisis in higher education.
Between 1870 and 1920, the number of institutions of higher education in the United States nearly doubled, from 563 to 1,041, and the faculty population grew by a factor of almost nine, from 5,553 to 48,615. In 1870 only 1.1 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 were enrolled in postsecondary education; by 1920, 4.7 percent were. The average college in 1870 had 10 faculty members and 98 students, but by 1910, it housed 38 faculty members and 374 students, with the largest institutions boasting enrollments of 5,000 or more by 1915. Women and African-Americans entered newly founded colleges like Vassar and Spelman in the 19th century, and students also began to attend junior colleges and for-profit correspondence schools.
The academy’s rapid expansion changed how universities were run, who was running them, and what was taught. Governing boards, previously composed of ministers and clergymen, were stocked with businessmen, lawyers, and educators. Professional, medical, and graduate schools were added to existing colleges, and the elective and course-credit systems individualized undergraduate education. Responding to the developing needs of industrial capital, the overall goal of higher education shifted from the production of genteel citizens to preparation for work in the emerging professions.
Historians of higher education call this period the Age of the University, but one could just as accurately describe it as the age of university critique. No part of the fledgling institution was immune to debate and controversy. Railing against businessmen-cum-trustees in his 1918 book, The Higher Learning in America, Thorstein Veblen modestly proposed abolishing boards on the grounds that “they have ceased to exercise any function other than a bootless meddling with academic matters which they do not understand.” He was equally unreserved in his condemnation of university architecture, accusing campuses of “housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretenses.”
A young Randolph S. Bourne became the subject of a New York Times article on how “Students Pity Workers” when he editorialized in the Columbia paper about a “gaunt scrubwoman” and “undersized, starving child” staffing the University. “College life” became a popular fascination, and undergraduates alternately praised and scorned elite fraternities like those immortalized in Owen Johnson’s novel Stover at Yale (1912).
For faculty members, the Age of the University was a time of reorganization and power struggles. Most faculty members were untenured. Pay was considered insufficient to maintain them in the proper style, and some professors began their careers with debt accrued in graduate school. Ruled by autocratic presidents in thrall of plutocratic boards, administrations were derided as bloated and controlling. Curricular changes led teachers to self-deprecatingly describe themselves as department-store clerks hawking credits.
A first wave of Progressive Era criticism of labor conditions in academe focused on professors’ salaries. Upton Sinclair captured the feeling in his book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Higher Education (1923). To research the book Sinclair traveled to 25 cities and interviewed hundreds of educators and students. He summarized his findings: “There are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid, overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank-and-file college teacher. Everyone has more than he—trustees and presidents, coaches and trainers, merchants and tailors, architects and building contractors, sometimes even masons and carpenters.”
Sinclair’s description stands in contrast to the widespread belief that college teaching became professionalized at the turn of the century. Professors were beginning to earn doctorates, more of them were turning to specialized research and joining professional organizations, and business and government began to consult this emerging class of experts. But the trappings of a profession didn’t initially include increases in salaries or status, and many college teachers felt that they lagged behind fellow professionals like doctors and lawyers. Angry articles, editorials, and studies appeared regularly in popular magazines, academic journals, and journals of education.
Skimming the flood of complaints, you get the sense of a work force subjected to severe austerity. But that wasn’t entirely true. As is the case today, economic hardship was unevenly distributed across regions, institutions, and ranks. At the top of the pay scale, full professors at elite universities were paid $2,300 to $2,500 per year in 1908, while their counterparts at poorer institutions earned between $200 and $1,300. Instructors fared worse at all institutions, with the best-compensated earning $1,000 and the rest well below that. To give these numbers some context, in 1908 the estimated poverty line for a New York City worker’s family was around $800, and the mean income of all wage-earners in manufacturing was $475. During the period when complaints about salaries were fiercest, most professors still made around twice what an auto worker would.
A second swell of Progressive Era university activism was aimed at defending academic freedom. The dismissal in 1900 of the Stanford University sociologist Edward A. Ross—who condemned the use of Chinese immigrant labor on the very railroads that made the university founder’s fortune—was still fresh in the minds of most academics in the 1910s, a decade that witnessed many forced resignations and dismissals based on professors’ political, economic, and social views.
In response, the American Association of University Professors was founded in 1915. The Association worked not as a union but as a professional organization, exposing and chastising restrictive universities by investigating and publicizing offenses. What the early AAUP couldn’t address—and what remains a great threat to academic freedom—were quieter methods and various structural means of controlling professors. Throughout the Progressive Era, and escalating with the first Red Scare during World War I, professors worked in an atmosphere of suspicion. Sinclair devotes a chapter of The Goose-Step to what he called the “world of ‘hush.’” He got his first inklings that the faculty might be tongue-tied when he received numerous refusals to talk with him and letters from victims of administrative harassment pleading to have their names removed from the manuscript. Sinclair’s notes provide glimpses into the paranoid and disappointed affect of the era’s academic workers: “There is a tremendous absence of freedom, but the victims don’t realize it; they think they are merely being polite. ... No man who thinks can tell just when he will become a victim, or how he will be tripped up. ... Yes, our men are free; they are horses that stand without hitching.”
Sinclair concluded The Goose-Step with a call to form a professors’ union. He wrote that “the formula, ‘In union there is strength,’ applies to brain workers precisely as to hand workers,” but of the AAUP, “what spoils the usefulness of the professors’ association is precisely that feeling of class superiority, which makes them as fat rabbits to the plutocracy.” The professoriate’s reluctance to align itself with the working class prevented the faculty from effectively organizing at the very moment unions may have been most influential in determining labor conditions and setting precedents in what was then a relatively new institution. Though American Federation of Labor and American Federation of Teachers locals appeared at a number of colleges in the early 1920s, by 1929 all but three had disappeared.
The situation of academic labor today is surprisingly similar to what it was a century ago. According to the American Federation of Teachers, 73 percent of college teachers are nontenured and not on the tenure track, leaving them with little recourse if their academic freedom is infringed upon. Pay for adjunct instructors and stipends for graduate student TA’s are often below the minimum wage. Administration is the growth sector in university hiring, and the relationship between universities and businesses remains a subject of heated debate. The expansion of online learning, global universities, and for-profit colleges suggests that many students prefer to be treated as customers and see no conflict of interest when a school both educates and profits from its students. In such a world, the curriculum risks losing all trace of its roots in liberal education.
The story of academic labor in the 20th century should be plotted on an arc rather than a simple downward slope: The decades immediately after the Second World War were not only the golden age of the university, but also the high point of job security, adequate compensation, and freedom for academic workers. So while it is accurate to speak of a decline since the 1970s, it is mistaken to assume that the conditions afforded by the postwar research university were the norm in the long history of American academic labor.
Along with this reminder, the struggles of the Progressive Era offer several lessons for today: First, the conditions academic workers enjoyed at mid-century did not emerge organically as the American university developed; they had to be fought for and won, and they require continuous defense. Rather than describing tenure as an “eroding” institution, for instance, we should see it as being dismantled. We need to locate and hold accountable the people and policies responsible for today’s retrenchment.
Second, professionalism cuts both ways. While organizing as professionals (as did the early AAUP) can provide and protect some autonomy and power, it can also promote the sense that professionals are above the rank of ordinary workers, thereby discouraging participation in labor-related struggles and encouraging a steep hierarchy within the work force.
Third, universities in America have had sustained and dynamic relationships with both the state and industry, and thus corporatization and militarization have long histories within the academy. Our critiques would benefit from analysis of the causes and consequences of earlier contact with corporations and the military if the goal is to learn how most effectively to curtail their impact and shore up the public purpose of university teaching and research.
Like the Progressive Era, our present moment can be a depressing one for academic workers. But especially in a situation like our own, it’s worth taking the time to reflect not only on good times past, but also, and more important, on how those good times came to be in the first place.
