Wednesday May 13 Links and Banter
Is it football season yet?!
It's been far too long since my last offering here at OTR, but most of that is down to my annual basketball-season-inspired hibernation. With the return of summer, and (hopefully) more abundant free time, I'm hoping to be back to somewhat more regular offerings here. Those columns will feature the level of general stupidity that AlmaOtter graciously tolerates in my writing. [Ed: Your words, not mine!] And the puns will be back, too. But this isn't one of those columns. This one is mostly therapy.
Within the ranks of contemporary American academia, there are two parallel career tracks. The more traditional of these is made up of tenured or tenure-track faculty (looking at you, MNW and BRT). Typically, tenured faculty have three legs to their professional responsibilities– teaching, research/scholarship, and service. But there is also a second class among university faculty– what are referred to as non-tenured faculty (at my institution, we're referred to as "NTEs"). Non-tenured faculty teach courses and have service responsibilities, but are typically not required to produce scholarship. At a lot of institutions, NTEs are also referred to as "contingent faculty," because these positions typically come with a level of job security that's somewhere between minimal and non-existent. Non-tenured faculty represent an increasing share of university faculty throughout the U.S., because a) We're cheaper, and b) We're abundant and disposable. Mostly it's because we're cheaper. Hiring a new NTE faculty member costs significantly less than hiring a new tenure-track faculty member, and in the world of 2020s American academia, cost savings are king (What if your institution has plenty of cash on hand and could afford to hire tenure-track faculty? Fuck you, you plebe, nobody asked you to ask questions).
As NTE faculty go, I am certainly one of the lucky ones. My institution has a strong and active chapter of the AAUP (the American Association of University Professors, the union/professional association that represents university faculty at many U.S. colleges and universities). I've been privileged to serve our chapter as an officer for well over half a decade. We have--or, rather, had--a degree of job security that NTE faculty at a lot of other institutions didn't have. Our NTEs were integrated as full members in our bargaining chapter during my first year of employment, and I jumped on that opportunity like a dog on a carelessly-dropped slice of bacon. After a certain number of years of service, our employment is no longer contingent (or, rather, was not)--i.e., we have continuing contracts, we're not employed year-to-year. We have a path to promotion. I'm at the end of the promotion process currently, and unless something really strange happens, then starting next year I'll be at the highest rank that our NTE faculty can attain.
This should be a cause for celebration. And I am happy about it. It'll be a bit more money, but it'll also mean that I've done enough for long enough to be recognized as worthy of that rank, and I'm grateful beyond words to be in that position.
But given the overall environment within which my colleagues and I have to exist these days, it's hard to take as much enjoyment from the job as I used to. Ohio...is not in a good place when it comes to higher education. Our state legislature decided last year that they, in fact, know more about how higher education should function than actual educators (their attitude toward physicians is pretty much identical, an outlook that has caused as much frustration for Mrs. Transient as their attitudes toward education have caused for me).
It's pretty much full-spectrum batshittery. A lot of it is efforts to engage in union-busting via the legislative process (by expanding the list of things that are considered to be "prohibited topics" in contract negotiations, i.e., things that unions are legally denied the right to bargain over). A lot of it is nanny-state surveillance, efforts to police the content of course offerings. There's a real emphasis on finding ways to crack down on faculty who teach "controversial" topics. "Controversial," of course, is a term that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. But I'm sure it'll work out fine for me, because nothing about history is controversial. While we're not quite there yet statewide, the ultimate goal is pretty clearly to functionally end tenure (and continuing appointments) for all public university faculty within Ohio, because that worked out so well for Wisconsin when Scott Walker and his merry band of vandals went down that path a decade or more ago.
We're in a bad way right now. There are other states that have it a lot worse than we do, I've heard the horror stories that my co-workers have relayed to me from friends they know working in places like Texas or Florida. But it's not good, and things are going to get worse before they get better. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia during the late 1910s and early 1920s, university faculty were among the first groups that they started aggressively persecuting. The Nazis did something similar when they came to power during the 1930s. It's not a sign of a healthy society when political leaders start targeting those who teach, but our state legislature looked at that historical record and said "Give us some of that!" They haven't gone after K-12 educators yet, but that'll come. They're probably aiming to finish up with us first before they go in that direction.
I suspect that among our institution's administrati, I'm viewed as some sort of fire-breathing radical. If it weren't so tragic, I'd find this hysterically funny, because when I embarked on this career more than a decade ago, what I wanted, more than anything else, was to be left alone. In truth, that's really all I want now--to be left to my own devices to design my courses and teach my students in the manner that I see fit, on the basis of my education and professional training. To the extent that I've become something other than a voluntary recluse, it's because I've been driven to it.
So what's the remedy, then? Hey, I'm just a historian. We look back at the past, we don't make recommendations, that's for the political scientists. What I do know is that if we're going to be saved, we're going to have to save ourselves. Our university administrators won't save us. If you have characteristics like "a capacity for independent thought," or "a surplus of moral courage," you're not getting hired as a higher education administrator in Ohio. When it comes to dealing with our state legislature, the collective motto of university administrators might as well be "Please, sir, may I have another?" They haven't quite twigged to the fact that once the legislature gets rid of us, they become superfluous, too. Again, in another context, this utter lack of self-awareness would be funny, but it's hard to derive much amusement from the situation given our current position.
It's the hypocrisy that gets to me the most, I think. We recently finished our Spring semester, so we've just gone through graduation season. This means a lot to faculty, because we get to see the students who we've worked with and mentored as they're reaching a significant milestone. We take pride in what they've accomplished, and we hope that in some small way we've made an impact on who they are, and what they'll do in the future. All of that is great. It really is, it's the reason most of us do this in the first place. But graduation season also means listening to endless speeches from administrators (or, worse, trustees) who on the one hand pay lip service to the work that faculty have done to help our graduates--while with the other hand doing everything they can possibly do to make our work environment less pleasant and more difficult.
How they square this circle, I don't know. My working hypothesis is that when people become university administrators, they have a top secret surgical procedure done that allows them to completely suppress cognitive dissonance. Probably there's a simpler explanation. In 1934, Upton Sinclair wrote "It is difficult to get a man [or woman] to understand something, when his [or her] salary depends on his [or her] not understanding it." I imagine that's what does it for a lot of people in those sorts of positions.
Do you work at a university? Do you know someone who does? How do your own experiences align with mine? Please leave your thoughts in the comments, we can make this our own little group therapy session.
And the next time I post something here, I swear it's going to be about football. You have my word on that.
