Crisis? What Crisis?
by Brian Caterino
WHILE MORE CIVILIZED pursuits like NFL Football have outlawed the practice of taunting one’s opponent, adjunct faculty and graduate students still have to endure the verbal equivalent of
the throat-slashing gesture: the job crisis discussion. It usually involves calling adjuncts’ character or judgment into question: “get a real job.”
Conservative columnist George Will knows what motivates adjuncts. He argues in an April 25, 1999, column that academic activists are Marxists who hate capitalism and ignore the discipline
of the market. Like other greedy consumers, they hold an “entitlement” mentality. While not seeking a new Cold War, ex- MLA president Elaine Showalter’s contention that grad students should “corporatize” is equally troubling. Echoing the logic that the market is an irresistible natural force to which we must submit, she claims that protest against employment conditions is “outdated and self-destructive.” Even some sympathetic critics find those who stay in academia to be brainwashed by a narrow, cult-like atmosphere that makes them fear entry into the outside world.
With a few exceptions, these views smack of cynicism. They blame those on the bottom for the structural problems in academia, and they ignore the larger context. How can a society in times
of “record” prosperity skimp on the basic needs of education? Christopher Lasch was right: social and economic elites, especially in America, display an ever-weakening concern for the welfare of
other members of society.
Is the job crisis in academia really a matter of an overproduction of Ph.D.s or an under-allocation of teaching positions? A cursory look at production of Ph.D.s over the last years questions any
exclusive reliance on the overproduction explanation.
In the last three decades, the number of Ph.D.s has more than doubled from about 18,000 in 1965-6 to over 42,000 in 1997-8, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, the number of students who received degrees (I count both associates and four-year degrees) has grown even more quickly, from about 630,000 to over 1,700,000. Thus, the percentage of Ph.D.s produced in relation to a growing student population has actually declined. In 1965 and 1970, Ph.D. production was about
3 percent (one for every 33 degrees) of the number of graduating students. In the 1970s and 1980s, production decreased significantly to under 2.5 percent (as low as 2.35 percent, or about one for every 43 degrees). It has risen somewhat in the 1990s, but is still lower than the 1965-70 figures (to about 2.56 percent, or one in 39). Figures for the most crowded fields, such as English, history, philosophy, and political science showed even larger declines. In each, Ph.D. production declined at least 30 percent throughout the late 1970s and all of the 1980s and has only risen closer to the level of the mid-1970s in the last decade.
This rough measure doesn’t take in to account a lot of factors, but it does suggest that the job shortage should have eased somewhat over time: it hasn’t. During the downturn in Ph.D. production,
full-time jobs decreased faster than the decline in Ph.D.s. The percentage of part-time faculty rose from 20 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent today. In the light of decreased funding available to
colleges, employers sought a work speedup. Unlike in normal productivity increases, however, workers are “rewarded” with decreased wages and poor conditions. Wasn’t there more than a touch of cynicism in this trade-off?
A recent issue of The Minnesota Review (new series 50-1), which contains a series of responses to Elaine Showalter, illustrates two divergent strategies for responding to the sagging job market.
Krista M. Christensen and Michael Bennett accept the GSC (Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA) position that “Ph.D.s are teachers.” The GSC holds that the primary focus of academic associations ought to be towards creating and academic work. They resist discussion of alternative careers, which they see as a strategy to deflect attention from and avoid addressing bad labor conditions. Bennett argues that “rather than accommodating the market, the current crisis offers an impetus to join with others in challenging the market relations of which academia is part.” Michele Tepper and Annalee Newitz also disapprove of Showalter’s corporate vision but consider the GSC position too narrow.
They feel the GSC position tends to stigmatize those who want to pursue alternative careers and also excludes discussion of viable alternatives.
Both parties in this discussion seem to be arguing at cross-purposes. The sympathetic critics have in mind cases in which students choose not to become teachers. The GSC position envisions a situation in which students or faculty are thwarted in their pursuit of academic jobs, eased out of academic life and into meaningless jobs.
We need to develop more op-tions both for those within and for those who want to work outside academia, and to make academic work the meaningful vocation it is meant to be. Achieving those
goals however, requires asking more fundamental questions and pursing more extensive reforms than the cynical consciousness can be bothered with. We’ve all heard this or some variant from a faculty member (I got the news from my Ph.D. advisor): “It’s not my responsibility.” Questions about the nature of work are, however, central ones for a developed society entering a new millennium. They can’t be brushed aside with a smirk and a shrug.
While the GSC concerns may be too narrowly focused, they do hit the nail on the head in one way. Tenured academics who “advise” grad students and adjuncts about their future often do so in a
spirit of bad faith. The department that uses a triage system to rank and recommend students for jobs, while claiming to support all students, and the faculty member who has published little and
glided through a career and now advises students or younger colleagues to get cracking, lack credibility. They are more than willing to hold students and adjuncts to a higher standard then
they would hold for themselves, and they are insensitive to the conditions that faculty and grads have to face. Noam Chomsky recently observed how faculty fail to recognize “how often [one’s]
attitudes are shaped by one’s role in an institutional structure of authority and domination.”Without recognition of the sources of the job crisis, and a commitment to address it, faculty “advice” is hypocritical.
The growing loss of trust is the underlying theme of these responses. In his contribution, Cary Nelson names names of progressive faculty, such as David Biron Davis, Sara Sulieri and Gayatri Spivak, who cultivate identification with the subaltern, but show a surprising lack of solidarity when it affects them personally. Michele Tepper, in “Doctor Outsider,” writes of her despair in
finding that the faculty members she most respects find her voice “incomprehensible” when she fails to conform to their expectations.
Annalee Newitz recounts her father’s experience as a disillusioned academic in a second-tier school and asserts that cleavages in the academic status system run deeper than the division between part time and full time. For this “cultural underclass,” the burdens of academic life are becoming greater than the rewards. Newitz feels that “we should not remain academics under unfair conditions.” Instead of sacrificing our lives, she advocates refusal: “Let’s say screw the cultural capitalists.”
She may be right. The current impasse, which has been building over the last couple of decades, only promotes cynicism and alienation. Major aspects of graduate education and the employment system need radical reform. Without that reform, the foundation of trust between students, adjuncts, and faculty, already rotting from the inside, will collapse under even slight provocation.
Already I think, many students feel they can’t trust faculty and can only do serious work in opposition to them, and many faculty distrust and fear students who stand up to them. Many adjuncts
I know trust no one. Take that trend a step further: real learning and real progress toward equity will take place outside the confines of the university not within it.
