Crises like the continung Covid-19 pandemic often serve to clarify the state of the societies and institutions they impact, highlighting dynamics that have long been present but have gone unnoticed or underdiscussed. Higher ed is no exception. At colleges nationwide, institutional responses to the pandemic underscore just how much the ordinary lifestyles of tenured faculty are premised on the production and exploitation of “disposable scholars.”
The 2020 cohort of Ph.D.s is facing a nearly nonexistent job market. But of course, even before the coronavirus pandemic, most graduating Ph.D.s faced bleak prospects. National Science Foundation data suggest that 40 percent of recent Ph.D. graduates had no employment commitments of any kind (not in the private sector, nor as postdocs, nor as contingent or tenure-track faculty). Of those who did get commitments in academe, tenure-track appointments were relatively rare. According to the American Association of University Professors, nearly three-fourths of all teaching jobs today are not tenure-eligible. As a new report by the American Federation of Teachers highlights, these non-tenure-track jobs tend to provide low wages, few benefits, and little job security — with contracts extended or retracted capriciously from semester to semester. Many contingent faculty members, even those working full time, have to rely on government assistance just to make ends meet. Many are also saddled by immense debt, incurred in the hope that a terminal degree would provide a pathway to a stable and well-compensated academic job.
Rather than reducing their numbers, many universities have increased their Ph.D. cohorts. Why?
Contingent faculty members have very little academic freedom, as I discovered firsthand in my previous role at the University of Arizona. In my case, it was the willful mischaracterization of my political and religious views by a Fox News contributor that served as the catalyst for my being dropped. However, colleges will cut contingent faculty members for almost any reason. They will eliminate them without hesitation in order to placate angry mobs or trustees, whether the attacks come from the right or the left. A single bad teaching review can result in one’s contract not being renewed, driving many to inflate grades. A disagreement with a tenured professor can result in the same, leading most to keep their heads down in such interactions. Contingent faculty generally have no right to vote on departmental issues, although they must live with committee decisions. And once you’re on the contingent-faculty track, it is difficult to get off.
Many appeal to fiscal pressures brought about by the 2008 financial crisis, or to the broader neoliberalization of higher ed, to explain the growing proportion of contingent versus tenure-eligible faculty members at colleges nationwide. The problem with these accounts is that they fail to explain why departments continue to produce Ph.D.s at a rate that far eclipses the number of faculty opportunities available. Why do departments consistently admit far more students than they could plausibly place?
This tendency is perhaps most pronounced at “non-elite” schools, although even Ivy League departments increasingly struggle to place their students. But rather than decreasing Ph.D. admissions to accommodate this reality, many have increased the size of their Ph.D. cohorts. Why?
The ugly truth is that departments refuse to reduce admits because their tenured and tenure-track professors want to teach graduate seminars on their topics of interest rather than teaching core and introductory courses to large classes of undergraduates. Achieving this requires two things.
First, it requires a sufficient number of graduate student “butts in seats” to justify the seminars tenured professors want to teach. Large cohorts of new Ph.D. aspirants help with that.
Second, it requires that someone else teach the classes tenured and tenure-track professors are trying to get out of. Having large numbers of underemployed Ph.D.s provides departments with an easy way to cover these courses at little cost. Meanwhile, having large numbers of grad students provides tenured and tenure-track faculty with abundant TAs and graders for the classes they do teach — and RAs for their research projects — which leaves them with more time for the parts of their work they find most rewarding (while “others” attend to the more menial tasks). The publications and grants these faculty are able to secure, precisely as a result of this privilege, are then used to justify institutional inequality on meritocratic grounds: We deserve our advantages — look at our rate of production compared to everyone else’s!
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Reducing Ph.D. admissions would allow departments to better ensure that they can place the students they admit, and a scarcity of academic labor would put even contingent faculty in a stronger bargaining position with respect to wages, benefits, rights, and so on. But faculty members would have to cancel many of their pet seminars due to insufficient enrollment, and instead focus on teaching high-demand courses, largely to undergraduates and master’s students. They would have fewer TAs, RAs, and graders at their disposal — meaning they’d have to do more grunt work themselves. Consequently, they’d have less bandwidth to do the kinds of tasks that help them build up their CVs and climb the academic ladder.
The current dynamics create a pool of desperate academics who will take on extreme workloads for low pay, no benefits, and little security, all in the (typically vain) hope of working their way into a tenured or tenure-track job. It is horrible for them. Yet, whether they admit it or not, tenured and tenure-track academics like having this subordinate labor pool and are not particularly interested in doing without it. And most of them are not too keen on having many of those currently serving as postdocs, lecturers, adjuncts, and so on hired as “peers” — with all the rights, protections, and status entailed thereby.
In striking such a posture, tenured and tenure-track professors exploit and perpetuate racial and gender inequalities within the academy: These faculty members are disproportionately white and/or male. Adjuncts, meanwhile, are disproportionately women and minorities. Universities are feeding students from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups into the pipeline and saddling them with debt, knowing that most of them will not be able to find academic jobs. They use these students as cheap labor while they are enrolled, and brag about the growing diversity of their admitted students. Upon graduation, most are consigned to the reserve pool of labor. These workers are then sloughed off like so much dead weight at the whims of faculty, administrators, and even students.
Academics are happy to condemn “elites” for failing to do their share (apparently oblivious to the fact that most tenured or tenure-track faculty are, themselves, socioeconomic “elites”) — but are often hesitant to take concrete steps within their own communities and institutions to address the very injustices they condemn. Prolific scholars on feminism, antiracism, and other social-justice issues are often able to realize their high levels of productivity and achieve their status precisely by exploiting institutional inequalities. The same University of California system that requires “diversity statements” as a political litmus test for filtering out insufficiently woke job candidates also fired TAs en masse for organizing for better pay and benefits, while most professors stood idly by.
It is all well and good to think, say, or feel the right things; doing the right thing is far more important. And if academics cannot get our own house in order, why should anyone take seriously our prescriptions for the broader society?
