Surprises in the Academy (Not!)
by P.D. Lesko
News Flash: A Department Education study has found that 62 percent of college faculty with full-time jobs are men. Of the 1.2 million college faculty employed in the United States, 80 percent are white. Shocking news. I know. Especially for the part-time faculty out there, 48 percent of whom are women.
Between 2001 and 2003, the number of men employed full-time rose by one percent, and the number of whites teaching in higher education dropped by one percent. The good news? If these trends hold, by 2025, 60 percent of college faculty will be white, around the same percentage of college students expected to be white at that time. The not-so-good news? Around 79 percent of full-time faculty will be men. Hmm….
Maybe Harvard’s President Lawrence Summers is really a Delphic Sibyl. Greek philosopher Heraclitus writes, “The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the gods” (Heraclitus, fragment 12). And there’s Dr. Summers saying that perhaps women don’t thrive in scientific fields because they’re not as good in mathematics as men. Maybe he’s on to something. Maybe men are better at mathematics. And English. And social sciences. And modern languages. And medicine. And law. And well, I think you get the drift. Men dominate the full-time professorate not because they’re better at their particular disciplines, but because higher education has quietly created a place for women (and non-whites): the part-time and full-time temporary professorate.
In its June 3, 2005 edition, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece about the aging professorate. In the piece, Chronicle writer Piper Fogg makes no connection between the increased reliance on temporary faculty, and the fact that America’s universities are coming to rely heavily on faculty over 60. Ms. Fogg’s reporting concludes that the full-time professorate is aging, because people are living longer and those full-time faculty are holding on to their jobs longer.
By ignoring the increased reliance on part-time and temporary faculty, Ms. Fogg (and The Chronicle) draw conclusions based upon a methodology akin to walking into a crowded room and focusing on the people wearing certain color socks. The American professorate is aging because increasing numbers of full-time faculty are being replaced, when they retire, with part-time and full-time temporary faculty. The pool of full-time faculty is shrinking in number and aging. To address one of those aspects without addressing the other is like standing in front of a room full of people and explaining that women don’t thrive in scientific fields because men are simply better at mathematics.
For Dr. Summers, his was a $50 million dollar blunder (the amount Harvard has pledged to fund gender initiatives). For The Chronicle, it was, perhaps, a temporary attack of editorial myopia.
For higher education in the United States, unfortunately, a full-time professorate dominated by men, and a part-time professorate dominated by women has become business as usual.–P.D. Lesko
