When we talk about working conditions in the university, we often compare today’s job market with the labor practices that prevailed only a generation or two ago. Viewed against the boom period of the 1950s and 60s, the situation looks grim indeed. But the comparison is a bit parochial, given that universities have existed since the 11th century and that contemporary academic culture can trace its origins back to the Greeks. To fully understand how the university works — both in real and in ideal terms — we need to take the long view.
In real terms, academics have rarely enjoyed middle-class wages. At colonial American colleges, for example, faculty members worked contingently and often held second jobs. Tutors typically lived on the campus with their students, and they served not just as teachers but also as residential assistants and sometimes food servers and monitors. Many colleges at the time were religiously affiliated, and it was generally understood that teaching was virtuous, thinking its own reward, and compensation would come in the next world.
Such ideals still shape academic culture, and they are not easily reconciled with purely materialist critiques of present working conditions. Many underpaid faculty members put in lots of off-the-clock work because they believe their job is a calling. It would be glib, even intolerant, to say that these folks lack class consciousness. In fact, they are part of a longstanding ethical and spiritual tradition.
Even after the rise of the modern research university in the 19th century, adapted from Europe, life for academics didn’t change a whole lot. Universities, as nonprofit entities, often struggled to balance their books, and even the country’s most prestigious private institutions faced severe financial constraints. Given the shortage of funds, professors could not be paid lavishly. Notably, in the 1930s, Lionel Trilling found it difficult to make ends meet at Columbia University. In his history of the university, Robert A. McCaughey notes that Trilling complained about “his inability to survive on his salary.” Seen from that vantage point, today’s labor crisis could be considered part of our heritage as academics.
But Trilling’s station had improved significantly by the 1950s. Observing that intellectuals were suddenly “close to the top of the social hierarchy,” he was encouraged by the good salaries offered professors, which helped bring new prestige to their enterprise. Throughout the 50s and 60s, new Ph.D.’s were all but guaranteed gainful employment. Such a drastic shift in working conditions was, of course, the result of heavy government investment in higher education. During the Cold War, the university was flush with cash, because it functioned as a veritable research wing of the Department of Defense.
Instead of seeing our bad wages as a sign of shame, we might wear them as a badge of honor.
That golden age, however, gave many academics a bad conscience. As the historian of education Roger Geiger pointedly documented in his book Research and Relevant Knowledge, during the 1960s many professors and students, not willing to be complicit in the Vietnam War, protested that the government should stop pouring cash into academe for military research. Congress quickly heeded the call and began to slash funding. As campus activism helped strip the university of its supposed nonpartisan status, higher education was no longer indisputably deserving of public funds. For decades now, public support for universities has steadily decreased. The government stopped paying the university piper, because the university stopped playing the military-industrial tune.
In other words, our own capacity for moral scrupulousness is at least partly responsible for the current job market. Academe’s ethical/spiritual outlook, which before World War II underwrote the relative poverty of professors, is returning us to those working conditions. Today’s labor issues are not necessarily the result of a “neoliberal” conspiracy to remake the university on a free-market model. They’re the contemporary inflection of an age-old norm, and they may very well reflect our own cultural values as academics. I, for one, think that’s something to take pride in.
Many of us working in this profession — whether we admit it or not — would simply prefer not to prosper too much. Asceticism is ingrained in academic culture (as Stanley Fish wittily described in his essay “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos”). Indeed, faculty members have traditionally practiced a kind of contemptus mundi.
Even if academe is no longer booming with good jobs, it at least still provides a home for people who want to dedicate their lives to thinking. For centuries, poverty and self-sacrifice have been part of the bargain. Instead of seeing our bad wages as a sign of shame, we might wear them as a badge of honor.
That is precisely the message of that great medieval tractate Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, required reading for all intellectuals in the Middle Ages. Boethius gives us an instruction for the life of the thinker. The Consolation describes how the sixth-century philosopher advanced his career at the court of King Theodoric. But then he fell out of favor and was sent to prison. Awaiting execution, Boethius lamented that he had lost his cushy job and powerful friends. Lady Philosophy appeared to console him, reminding Boethius that, as a philosopher, he had no right to despair about the loss of worldly goods, for he was no court toady but a spiritual being made for higher things.
Boethius’s story could be read as an allegory for the history of American academics. We were once, like Boethius, living high on the hog. Today many of us are reduced to working-class jobs. Our response to this situation needs to account for our traditional ethical norms.
I’m not arguing that academics should receive low salaries, nor that they should retreat to a medieval enclave away from the world. But I am asking us not to forsake our values. More faithful to those, we might — like our predecessors, including Boethius and the 60s generation — take up a posture, if not of worldly renunciation, at least in favor of pursuing a purer life. Even if we’re poorly paid, we can still ennoble our work.
Spiritualizing the cruelty of the job crisis could, at least, offer some philosophical consolation.
A.W. Strouse is a doctoral student in English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and teaches as a graduate fellow at Hunter College. His book of poems, Retractions and Revelations, is available on Jerkpoet.
