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.
2 comments:
I belong to one of the younger generations and got my Ph.D. well after the well of tenure-track jobs had largely run dry. Things worked out well for me because the teaching side of professorhood always appealed to me much more than the scholarship/research/publishing side. Since I was a philosophy/math double major as an undergraduate and my Ph.D. work in philosophy was in a math-adjacent area, it wasn't difficult to find a steady position teaching high-school math at a private school that didn't require a state teaching certificate, and I've been much more satisfied professionally since making that switch.
I mention this because, if anyone reading this is in a position like that of the anonymous commenter earlier and wants to talk to someone about how to make the shift to high-school teaching, I'd be happy to discuss this with you. I'd prefer not to share my email address publicly here, but if you leave a comment below, we can find a way to start up a private conversation about this.
When I wrapped up at UMASS there were no jobs other than gypsy scholar gigs - one or two semester contracts, no benefits, and low wages. I did that at UVM for a couple of years, but finally saw the light and decided to quit. What brought me to that was a class I had put together on a multidisciplinary study of nuclear war. Enrollment was 3x that expected and I decided to accept all the students, found a large lecture hall, and got to work. The first class, however, led me to my decision to stop the gypsy scholar thing. After class I calculated the tuition paid by the students, noted my paltry salary and said 'The hell with this." The class got great reviews, and I enjoyed it My subsequent career involved political campaign work, then working in state health and human services. The later was the equivalent of another advanced degree in public administration. When all is said and done, no regrets. Nearly everything I studied, first as an historian and later political scientist, has prepared me well to understand the current crisis. And understanding federal HHS regulations was a breeze compared to any number of philosophers!
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