It was one of those funny coincidences. On the day last July when George Steinbrenner died, I happened to see an ancient bumper sticker attached to an even more ancient car. It read: Steinbrenner Killed Baseball.
Steinbrenner helped create the free-agent system that now rules the game—a system where players move from team to team in search of ever-larger paychecks. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that with players coming and going so often, fans were really just rooting for the uniforms. But Seinfeld, of course, is a well-known Mets fan.
There may be no single figure like George Steinbrenner in higher education, but without a doubt over the last generation faculty free agency has come to campus. And while faculty members have railed, quite justly—though without much success—against the ways in which institutions of higher education have refashioned themselves, corporationlike, into University Inc., we have largely been silent about the Steinbrenner Effect on colleges and universities. In fact, the dirty little secret, I suspect, is that we have largely embraced it as enthusiastically as major leaguers embraced free agency when it came to baseball in 1975.
It’s hard to argue with free agency. Given the arbitrary, often capricious nature of the academic job market, the job we wind up with, if we are lucky enough to get a job at all, is almost purely an accident, the result of some alchemy over which we have virtually no control. So there are plenty of perfectly compelling reasons that many faculty members set their home page to the job listings.
Some of us are caught in terrible two-career commuting relationships; others feel the pull or obligation of family responsibilities. Still others find themselves in places uncongenial to them socially, politically, or culturally. To say nothing of those of us stitching together adjunct teaching gigs to make a living, holding office hours in our cars. Given the peculiar way the academic job market works, or doesn’t, it is no wonder that so many faculty members are looking to move.
But let’s be frank. Faculty free agency has created a structure of incentives that rewards a devotion to a narrowly defined careerism—scholarly production first, last, and foremost. It has created a considerable number of us who are committed only to lengthening our CV’s, increasing our visibility on the market. Padding the stats, as it were. We are free agents because we want to get ours in a system where that seems the only way to get ahead, even if it comes at the expense of our other roles as faculty members—teacher, mentor, institutional citizen.
Some of the consequences of the faculty free-agent system are obvious and measurable. Many institutions, by playing in the free-agent market and recruiting “stars” away from other places, have created two classes among the faculty. As a perfectly predictable consequence of rewarding free agents with big salaries, chairs and deans necessarily punish others whose salaries remain “compressed,” especially at times when budgets are under pressure or even shrinking, as they are today.
The free-agent contract usually includes more than money, of course. The bigger salary often also comes with perks—like less teaching than others and fewer institutional responsibilities. Some of the more high-profile free-agent contracts challenge the old Woody Allen maxim that 80 percent of life is just showing up. With reduced teaching loads, guaranteed leave time, generous travel budgets, etc., a few of those free agents have brought that just-showing-up figure down closer to 50 percent.
But the courses must be taught, the committee work must be done, and so another aspect of the two-class system that results from free agency is that the slack must be picked up by those without the star contracts. A wise, now-deceased colleague of mine reduced the results of the free-agent system to a wonderful adage: To those who have much, more will be given; from those who have less, more will be taken.
Which in turn compels more of us to play the game in the first place. The lesson that many of us draw is that while virtue may be its own reward, hard work, productivity, and good citizenship will not be recognized by our employers. At least not without the proverbial “outside offer.” What else can we conclude? Mostly the lesson is implicit—we learn it by watching others. Administrators at my own institution at least have had the honesty to tell us, at the orientation for new faculty members, to bring in outside offers. It’s good to know where things stand from the first day on campus.
Needless to say, this is a strange way to run an institution, even a corporation. It’s hard to imagine a big law firm or a major bank deliberately creating an institutional culture in which some number of its senior employees are always looking to leave because only then will they receive any recognition from their bosses. But this is especially perverse in higher education, where tenure means that employees might well stick around for 30 or 40 years. Russians have an old proverb: Sidet’ na chemodanakh. Roughly translated it means, “Sitting on your suitcases.” It describes people who always have their bags packed, ready to move at the first opportunity because they are not quite rooted where they are. That, in effect, is the culture across much of higher education now, and in that sense higher education has outdone the private sector, where fostering employee loyalty and the retention of successful employees has become a mantra.
Questions of equity—salaries, teaching loads, and service responsibility—could all be quantified if we wanted to do so, though I suspect most administrators don’t do so because the results of such an exercise would make us all a little ashamed. But I also suspect that there are other, more ineffable, consequences of the free-agent system we now work in and which many of us have embraced. Put bluntly, can a faculty of independent free agents be a faculty in any meaningful, collective sense at all?
As we have watched the erosion of faculty autonomy and faculty governance, at least at many institutions, we have blamed it on the enormous growth of the administration, the proliferation of “professional” administrators, and the general aping of the corporate model. Fair enough.
But at the same time, maybe, just maybe, we bear some measure of responsibility, too. Perhaps, like anything else, the administration of higher education abhors a vacuum, and professional administrators rush in where careerist faculty members have been indifferent to tread. Many of us have been trained from our first moments as professionals to avoid institutional work like the plague. Perhaps the power of faculty members to shape the important decisions at our institutions has been ceded as well as taken.
It is a truism, or it used to be, that the faculty is the institution. Student generations turn over every four years, and increasingly administrators don’t last much longer. In the midst of that transience, the faculty remain. That is no small thing at institutions dedicated to teaching and research, where the fruits of those labors are measured in years, not in budgetary quarters.
Yet can that claim still be made, much less acted upon, when faculty members are driven primarily by the interests of their own careers and make choices about their time, effort, and commitments accordingly? I think we need to acknowledge that the benefits that may accrue to us individually by playing the free-agent game come with costs for us as a collective body.
I heard a story not too long ago. Faced with declining enrollments and revenues, a small Midwestern college was about to lay off its youngest and most recently hired professors. Instead the entire faculty voted to redistribute the salary income so that all could keep their jobs. Stunned?
Okay, perhaps it isn’t a fair example. The college was Antioch, and the year was 1933. Still, the actions of the Antioch faculty all those years ago stand as the antithesis of the free-market/free-agent system we operate in now. How many of us can imagine a similar faculty gesture today?
The final irony about the academic free-agent system is that, like the lottery, while many of us play it, few of us will ever win. Free agency in baseball may have created absurdities like Alex Rodriguez’s $275-million, 10-year deal, but it also helped out the journeyman players as well. After 10 years of free agency, the average salary had risen to $413,000 a year; by 2009 it had ballooned to nearly $3-million. But universities aren’t Major League Baseball. Or any corporation, really—among other things, they simply don’t have George Steinbrenner’s money.
In our embrace of the free-agent system, we faculty members have done our small part to turn universities more into corporations. But while free agency may well have been good for a small number of individual faculty members, and it hasn’t killed academe yet, it certainly hasn’t been good for the faculty, or the university, as a whole. In the absence of an alternative career model, however, we eye the job listings to see if we can feather our nests or perhaps fly the coop altogether.
Free agents at the corporatized university. Sitting on our suitcases.
