Everywhere but in a small number of elite colleges, we are moving towards elimination of tenure and an army of contingent, cheap workers teaching primitive, basic courses that keep the gap between the elites and everybody else as wide as ever.
In order to do away with the concept of a professor as a scholar and thinker, professors are being lured into teaching courses where they can easily be substituted by cheap, fungible part-timers. In foreign languages, this is being done through the narrative of “you can still be a professor and a scholar even when teaching Spanish 101.” Once a gullible or lazy professor buys into this narrative, it will become super easy to get rid of him altogether.
My suggestion is: let’s not allow our expertise to be trivialized. Let’s remember that we are thinkers and intellectuals, and everybody, including students at state schools deserve access to our research and our knowledge.