It turns out that people still sincerely believe it’s possible to preserve the model of academic life where you teach your Intro, Beginners, and Survey courses with an occasional poorly attended upper-level seminar, publish an article or a book review every 3 years, go to endless unending dead-end conferences, veg out on committees, and collect tenure, promotions, and $60-90,000 salaries for all this inhuman effort.
It’s like it’s still 1989 in their minds. Scary.
What am I missing here? The person you are describing is teaching three classes, serving on a committee, attending conferences, and publishing (although the publishing is a bit slow.) What else should a professor do in your opinion?
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Who’s going to pay such enormous salaries for a person to teach intro classes and do nothing but busywork aside from that? An instructor can be found to teach these courses for $40 an hour with no benefits. And an administrator can be bussed in from Utah at $20 an hour to do the admin.
Twenty years ago it was still possible to have this kind of life because there was a lot of crazy money swirling around. But today? We’ll see our departments close down if we cling to this model.
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At my university, we are forced into intro classes because that’s more attractive to the General Education curriculum. We only get to teach upper-level classes as a reward. The intro classes are what keeps us employed.
As far as I understand, most faculty would prefer upper-level classes: more focused students, more engaged students, smaller classes. It’s the introductory classes that professors generally try to avoid teaching.
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That doesn’t change anything, though. People saying “yes, I would have preferred to teach more complex stuff but there weren’t enough students” won’t save departments from being closed down.
A department needs at least one scholar whose existence will justify the whole department being kept in place. That will be its unique offer. 10 sections of Intro Whatever aren’t a unique offer and they can be placed online anyway.
We can’t keep working like it’s still the time of the previous Clinton.
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What do you mean by “one scholar whose existence will justify the whole department being kept in place?” Short of maybe (maybe!) Judith Butler or Homi Bhabha, my institution (and, from what I understand, most institutions) doesn’t care about scholarly productivity. They want professors to write a little–so they can can justify that the university is different from a high school–but that’s about it. Scholarly productivity is not highly prized at my institution nor is it prized at the institutions that my friends work at. To be clear, no productivity will get someone fired but there is no prize or reward or respect given to individuals with high levels of productivity. All the institution wants is people who are willing to teach many classes of large numbers of students.
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We are the institution. If we decide that we value the scholarship of an outstanding scholar less than the presence of somebody else at some stupid committees and workshops, then we deserve all that’s coming to us.
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Highly paid administrators run the institution–many of whom have limited experience in higher ed. Who is this “we” that you describe?
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I’m not at a school where there are highly paid administrators. All of our administrators are from academia. We have low-paid support staff that’s not from academia but everybody else- the president, the Deans, the associate deans, etc are professors. They are even mostly from Humanities.
And still, these are our collective priorities. Oh, how I would love to blame some outside, managerial administrators for all this. But I can’t, unfortunately.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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