I WAS BORN ON THIRD AND HAD THE WIT TO KNOW I HAD NOT HIT A TRIPLE

There is a great deal to talk about these days, but I want to begin by responding to the heartfelt comment that was posted anonymously at 6:17 a.m. today.  I urge you to read it.

I have long been painfully aware that I was, to put it as simply as possible, just plain lucky to have my academic career coincide with the glory days of American higher education.  I and the others who came along when I did had no difficulty getting good tenure track jobs, and then tenure, with good pay and low teaching loads.  This was not true for the generation that preceded us and it is not true now.  By the time I was a tenured professor, in the sixties and seventies, graduate students were getting tenure track jobs almost before they were ABD [“all but dissertation,” for those of you not in the trade.]  Publishers would pester us for book ideas and offer contracts on the basis of a title.

Academics who got their degrees in the pre-war generation often did not get tenure even when they could find jobs, and many of them were compelled to teach in high schools. In 1947, when I entered Forest Hills High School in Queens, NY, the chair of the Math department was Dr. Frank and the star Biology teacher was Dr. Brandwein.  Bad for them but great for us kids.

Two things made life cushy for those of us who came along in the ‘50s and ‘60s:  the explosion of public higher education after WW II, and the Cold War.  The first rapidly created new campuses and enlarged old ones, producing an insatiable demand for professors.  The second led the federal government to pump money into area studies, applied science programs, and those Social Science departments [Economics, Sociology, Political Science] that could contribute to the struggle against Godless Communism.  Little bits of this money slopped over even into Philosophy, Lit Crit, and other useless fields. 

Because there were so many more campuses, each with a library, publishers could not lose money on a scholarly title.  By the time the author had distributed copies to his or her extended family and the libraries had sent in their orders, the publishing house had recouped its costs.  If they were lucky enough to bag a star, like Herbert Marcuse or C. Wright Mills, they cleaned up.  Textbooks were money printing machines.

In those days, there was a universal military draft.  Men who were 1A were eligible until age 26.   If you were a full time student in good standing, you could get a deferment, and although technically that made you eligible until 35, the Army did not really want to deal with Buck Privates in their thirties, so if you made it past 26, you were home free.  Suddenly, a whole generation of young men found that they had an academic calling.

As the decades passed, things turned sour, though of course not for those of us who already had tenure.  Universities started replacing scholar-administrators with business leaders, and more and more they decided to “cover” classes with cheap, unbenefited labor.  Academic departments, which admitted many more degree candidates than they could possible place in tenure track entry level jobs, flooded the market, creating the academic equivalent of what Marx famously called the reserve army of the unemployed.  Some departments responsibly cut back on graduate admissions, but many [at Columbia, for example] continued to admit large classes of doctoral students because that guaranteed enrollments in professors’ graduate courses.

The person who wrote the anonymous comment gives us a vivid, painful picture of the current state of things in Academia.

I was lucky.  Not smart, not creative, not brilliant, not deserving, just lucky.