‘Tis the season to lament the state of academic employment

With the AHA underway, it’s a good time to join the chorus of voices complaining about the academic job market. I will refrain from warning against anyone seeking a university career in the humanities, as Thomas Benton does in the Chronicle—“Just Don’t Go,” is how he puts it to those weighing the pros and cons of graduate school in the humanities. Rather, I would like to address some of the reasons for this current sad state of affairs, gleaned from my recent reading of Marc Bousquet’s much discussed book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.

Bousquet’s book is must reading. His main purpose is to understand the shift in the nature of academic employment that has taken place over the past 40 years. Whereas tenure-line faculty taught 75% of college courses nationwide in 1970, now, this number has dropped to 25%. This means that 75% of current college courses are taught either by graduate students or adjunct faculty. In other words, the vast majority of college teachers have tenuous working conditions, and can barely eek out a living. In short, they are exploited. Bousquet terms this the “casualization” of academic labor. This is all well known (although the numbers have been disputed--if Bousquet is even half right, it's a major problem, in my eyes).

One of the more provocative arguments Bousquet puts forward is that there is not an oversupply of PhDs. Rather, there is an undersupply of tenure-line jobs. (He reiterates this point at his blog in a number of posts on the AHA.) In other words, college students need teachers, as ever, but they are now mostly taught by exploited adjuncts and graduate students. The solution to our problem is not to limit the size of graduate programs. This would be impractical: administrators control the purse strings and benefit from larger graduate programs, since graduate students do the cheap teaching. The solution, obviously is to collectively organize. To fight back!

A skeptic might say: universities are merely responding to the market, to skyrocketing operating costs, etc. For the university to remain operative, cheaper teaching labor is imperative. In other words, Bousquet has to explain why universities, most of which remain, officially, non-profit in status, exploit teachers in the same way that corporations exploit factory workers. So Bousquet is compelled to make the case from the top-down: that universities, in fact, operate by the logic of capital. They're very bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don't reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile coaches make even more, and are usually a state's top paid employee (related to this, University of Texas faculty is protesting the new fat contract offered up to its football coach, Mack Brown); the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now.

One area of administrative growth that I’ve noticed on my campus is the whole “in loco parentis” industry. This is Christopher Lasch’s nightmare scenario—the “helping professions” are taking over the university! Entirely new classifications of administrators are popping up dedicated to the psychological well-being of our supposedly distressed students, giving lie to the bogus notion that the white middle class values rugged individualism. I see it as a way to profit from the “helicopter parent” phenomenon. (My wildly speculative hypothesis is that many such helicopter parents also hold ideologies about the welfare dependency in relation to the so-called “underclass.”)

Reading Bousquet has led me to questions related to previous discussions on this blog. First, is our discussion of a job market for intellectual historians—accentuated in our review of the Historically Speaking forum on the state of intellectual history—sheer folly in light of the overall situation? Have we been divided and conquered? By we, I mean intellectual historians as against, say, cultural and social historians? If we compelled the universities to shift back to the 75% paradigm, there would be more than enough jobs for all of us. In fact, there would be a shortage of qualified PhDs.

Second, has the creeping reality of academic labor shifted our attention away from the culture wars? Whereas in the 80s and 90s, professors of all ideological stripes engaged in culture war discussions—often against traditionalist conservatives, or as James Livingston makes clear, against one another over the legacies of liberalism—have we moved beyond that to focus squarely on whether our institutional niche is withering? Conservative critics of the academy certainly haven’t shifted gears. For instance, a blogger at a conservative academic watchdog site saw fit to review my book in light of my claims that the Cold War led to a more conservative educational system (even though, ironically, I’m a Marxist with a university job). This is still the stuff of the culture wars. Sure, most professors in the humanities are left to liberal. But why is this so concerning in light of the corporatization of the university? (Thanks to Ariane Fischer and Allison Perlman for discussing these issues with me.)

AH

‘Tis the season to lament the state of academic employment

With the AHA underway, it’s a good time to join the chorus of voices complaining about the academic job market. I will refrain from warning against anyone seeking a university career in the humanities, as Thomas Benton does in the Chronicle—“Just Don’t Go,” is how he puts it to those weighing the pros and cons of graduate school in the humanities. Rather, I would like to address some of the reasons for this current sad state of affairs, gleaned from my recent reading of Marc Bousquet’s much discussed book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.

Bousquet’s book is must reading. His main purpose is to understand the shift in the nature of academic employment that has taken place over the past 40 years. Whereas tenure-line faculty taught 75% of college courses nationwide in 1970, now, this number has dropped to 25%. This means that 75% of current college courses are taught either by graduate students or adjunct faculty. In other words, the vast majority of college teachers have tenuous working conditions, and can barely eek out a living. In short, they are exploited. Bousquet terms this the “casualization” of academic labor. This is all well known (although the numbers have been disputed--if Bousquet is even half right, it's a major problem, in my eyes).

One of the more provocative arguments Bousquet puts forward is that there is not an oversupply of PhDs. Rather, there is an undersupply of tenure-line jobs. (He reiterates this point at his blog in a number of posts on the AHA.) In other words, college students need teachers, as ever, but they are now mostly taught by exploited adjuncts and graduate students. The solution to our problem is not to limit the size of graduate programs. This would be impractical: administrators control the purse strings and benefit from larger graduate programs, since graduate students do the cheap teaching. The solution, obviously is to collectively organize. To fight back!

A skeptic might say: universities are merely responding to the market, to skyrocketing operating costs, etc. For the university to remain operative, cheaper teaching labor is imperative. In other words, Bousquet has to explain why universities, most of which remain, officially, non-profit in status, exploit teachers in the same way that corporations exploit factory workers. So Bousquet is compelled to make the case from the top-down: that universities, in fact, operate by the logic of capital. They're very bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don't reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile coaches make even more, and are usually a state's top paid employee (related to this, University of Texas faculty is protesting the new fat contract offered up to its football coach, Mack Brown); the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now.

One area of administrative growth that I’ve noticed on my campus is the whole “in loco parentis” industry. This is Christopher Lasch’s nightmare scenario—the “helping professions” are taking over the university! Entirely new classifications of administrators are popping up dedicated to the psychological well-being of our supposedly distressed students, giving lie to the bogus notion that the white middle class values rugged individualism. I see it as a way to profit from the “helicopter parent” phenomenon. (My wildly speculative hypothesis is that many such helicopter parents also hold ideologies about the welfare dependency in relation to the so-called “underclass.”)

Reading Bousquet has led me to questions related to previous discussions on this blog. First, is our discussion of a job market for intellectual historians—accentuated in our review of the Historically Speaking forum on the state of intellectual history—sheer folly in light of the overall situation? Have we been divided and conquered? By we, I mean intellectual historians as against, say, cultural and social historians? If we compelled the universities to shift back to the 75% paradigm, there would be more than enough jobs for all of us. In fact, there would be a shortage of qualified PhDs.

Second, has the creeping reality of academic labor shifted our attention away from the culture wars? Whereas in the 80s and 90s, professors of all ideological stripes engaged in culture war discussions—often against traditionalist conservatives, or as James Livingston makes clear, against one another over the legacies of liberalism—have we moved beyond that to focus squarely on whether our institutional niche is withering? Conservative critics of the academy certainly haven’t shifted gears. For instance, a blogger at a conservative academic watchdog site saw fit to review my book in light of my claims that the Cold War led to a more conservative educational system (even though, ironically, I’m a Marxist with a university job). This is still the stuff of the culture wars. Sure, most professors in the humanities are left to liberal. But why is this so concerning in light of the corporatization of the university? (Thanks to Ariane Fischer and Allison Perlman for discussing these issues with me.)

AH

Tim's Light Reading (1/7/2010)

1. Where is the history job market going?: Here's Robert Townsend's thesis. Here's Marc Bousquet's antithesis. Finally, this is not a Kantian synthesis, but here's a different train of thought altogether. I'm somewhere between the Bousquet and Mondschein camps---although I accept the immediate reality of the facts in Townsend's report.

2. Books of the Century: Berkeley graduate student Daniel Immerwahr has constructed an incredibly useful website containing lists of bestsellers and significant books from each decade of the twentieth century. Immerwahr is a PhD candidate under the direction of David Hollinger.

3. One Professor's Top 10 List on the Past Decade: University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole takes an admittedly slanted and negative look back. I'm not a Juan Cole follower, but I think historians will be sorting out his 10 points of concern for many years to come.

4. The Fate of the Liberal Arts in Tough Economic Times: Mary B. Marcy reflects on the usefulness of, and demand for, the liberal arts. This NYT article touches on similar concerns (i.e. drop philosophy?!). John Fea responds directly to Marcy's article and raises other questions. As a former student advisor, I especially appreciate Fea's point about educating parents on the long and short-term needs of their college-aged children. Yes, these are perennial issues (a result of the mid-winter blues?), but all three pieces contain a number of poignant points and bits of information. I'm particularly intrigued by the UCLA/HERI data from 2008. Yes, that data predates the crisis, but it says something about student desires. That data mollifies my occasional concern, from the demand side at least, that some administrators won't be happy until the only majors offered are business, finance, computer science, or fill-in-the-blank-professional-school prep. It is clear, however, that tough economic times do not mean that questions about the big issues---the "Great Ideas"---are permanently forgotten by students. The hopeful professional in me sees those questions as only occasionally submerged by a deluge of present needs.

5. The Return of The Baffler: This is somewhat off-topic with regard to USIH, but Thomas Frank's thoughtful magazine is set to reappear in 2010.

Tim's Light Reading (1/7/2010)

1. Where is the history job market going?: Here's Robert Townsend's thesis. Here's Marc Bousquet's antithesis. Finally, this is not a Kantian synthesis, but here's a different train of thought altogether. I'm somewhere between the Bousquet and Mondschein camps---although I accept the immediate reality of the facts in Townsend's report.

2. Books of the Century: Berkeley graduate student Daniel Immerwahr has constructed an incredibly useful website containing lists of bestsellers and significant books from each decade of the twentieth century. Immerwahr is a PhD candidate under the direction of David Hollinger.

3. One Professor's Top 10 List on the Past Decade: University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole takes an admittedly slanted and negative look back. I'm not a Juan Cole follower, but I think historians will be sorting out his 10 points of concern for many years to come.

4. The Fate of the Liberal Arts in Tough Economic Times: Mary B. Marcy reflects on the usefulness of, and demand for, the liberal arts. This NYT article touches on similar concerns (i.e. drop philosophy?!). John Fea responds directly to Marcy's article and raises other questions. As a former student advisor, I especially appreciate Fea's point about educating parents on the long and short-term needs of their college-aged children. Yes, these are perennial issues (a result of the mid-winter blues?), but all three pieces contain a number of poignant points and bits of information. I'm particularly intrigued by the UCLA/HERI data from 2008. Yes, that data predates the crisis, but it says something about student desires. That data mollifies my occasional concern, from the demand side at least, that some administrators won't be happy until the only majors offered are business, finance, computer science, or fill-in-the-blank-professional-school prep. It is clear, however, that tough economic times do not mean that questions about the big issues---the "Great Ideas"---are permanently forgotten by students. The hopeful professional in me sees those questions as only occasionally submerged by a deluge of present needs.

5. The Return of The Baffler: This is somewhat off-topic with regard to USIH, but Thomas Frank's thoughtful magazine is set to reappear in 2010.

Historians Need to Learn How to Write

The Historical Society blog posted selections from a roundtable in the January edition of Historically Speaking on "Teaching the Writing of History." In the lead article, Stephen J. Pyne questions why we are variously trained in a multitude of methodologies we consider legitimate--"statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography," to name but a few--yet not in how to write a book. The forum includes responses from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos.

The following passage from Demos relates to our discussion below on Louis Menand and popular history:

"Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down."

How would a graduate program that took the teaching of writing seriously look different? What are solid pedagogies for teaching the writing of history?

Historians Need to Learn How to Write

The Historical Society blog posted selections from a roundtable in the January edition of Historically Speaking on "Teaching the Writing of History." In the lead article, Stephen J. Pyne questions why we are variously trained in a multitude of methodologies we consider legitimate--"statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography," to name but a few--yet not in how to write a book. The forum includes responses from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos.

The following passage from Demos relates to our discussion below on Louis Menand and popular history:

"Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down."

How would a graduate program that took the teaching of writing seriously look different? What are solid pedagogies for teaching the writing of history?

The Metaphysical Club: Popular History?

I really should have read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America a long time ago. It's probably the most talked about work in U.S. intellectual history in decades. But it was published while I was in grad school, none of my professors assigned it, and then I moved onto a dissertation, which turned into my first book, and then after that a second book project. Both my published book and my book-in-progress are on different eras than that covered by Menand. (The Metaphysical Club covers the Civil War through WWI—my books cover the early cold war and post-1960s America, respectively). But over this winter break, I've had a little extra time, including jury duty, which allowed me many hours of reading. So I finally got around to reading it.

To be honest, another reason it took me so long to open Menand's book is because I was skeptical of it, due solely to its popularity and celebrity. I tend to instinctively avoid popular history books. I suppose I'm pessimistic that popular history books, or popular non-fiction books more generally, have much to offer other than appeals to the lowest common denominator, which, lets face it, is pretty low. I don't think I'm elitist. I enjoy all kinds of lowbrow movies (The Hangover being a recent example). I just don't like to waste my time reading crappy books, which I think tends to define most bestsellers. Most are closer to Sarah Palin's ghostwritten book Going Rogue, currently atop the New York Times bestseller list, than anything serious or smart. (Reviews of such books, on the other hand, can be quite enjoyable to read—check out Jonathan Raban's excellent one of Going Rogue in the recent New York Review of Books.)

The Metaphysical Club reached the bestseller lists. And it won the Pulitzer. It thus easily qualifies as popular history. And yet, most scholars have had nice things to say about it. For good reason. It's fantastic! Some critics have pointed out that Menard probably puts too much stock in the power of biography. He implies that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and John Dewey—the central characters of a large and compelling cast of intellectuals—were uniquely capable of adjusting the nation's social thought to the post-Civil War, modernizing world. But Menard is convincing, even in making the case for the driving force of personality, because he is such a subtle chronicler of changing intellectual contexts. The way he connects the tissue of pragmatism to modernism, Darwinism, and most importantly, to the post-Civil War need to conceptualize authority without force, is skillfully done.

Other critics have argued that Menard's book is derivative. But even if it's true that the book is synthetic, this is hardly a serious complaint and smacks of professional jealousy. Just because Historians A and B first made original, disparate arguments doesn't mean that Historian C can't bring the two arguments together. Sometimes it's the synthesis that is the breakthrough. At the very least, Menard's beautifully lucid prose makes old analysis seem fresh, or it makes concrete the post-Cold War return to thinking about pragmatism.

I suppose my enjoyment of Menard should compel me to rethink my anti-popular history stance. It's not like I haven't enjoyed bestsellers or award winners in the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, often criticized by academic historians for simplifying complex processes, or by judging history solely through a moralistic lens, convinced me that I wanted to be a historian (or teacher or activist) when I first read it 15 years ago. And it has sold over two million copies. And I absolutely love Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's biography, American Prometheus: The Truth and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which has sold many copies and won the Pulitzer and various other awards. Plus, if one of my books ever becomes a bestseller, I certainly won’t complain.

I have another thought with regards to popular history. Is Menand's book as widely read as it is sold? Is it really popular history? I suspect that, rather, it is one of those intellectually fashionable books that people who want to be seen as intellectually fashionable buy but don't read, at least not cover-to-cover. Why do I suspect this? Mostly because, although Menand's writing is superb and clear, the material is complex, and the subject matter is not likely as riveting to the multitudes as it is to those of us who practice intellectual history. As an example, when Menand describes how statistics-driven thinking on probability helped shape the instrumentalist, process approach of pragmatism, the narrative does not exactly excite most, I imagine, to the same degree as a Stephen Ambrose description of storming Normandy, or some other heroic feat of war. To this extent, I place The Metaphysical Club alongside Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which millions purchased, yet which millions can't have read cover-to-cover. The masses might have been drawn to Bloom's motif about how moral relativism is destroying knowledge—especially conservatives who enjoyed having their preconceptions confirmed by a famous University of Chicago philosopher—but I seriously doubt many Bloom fans actually delved into his close readings of Nietzsche, which even my most impressive students find obtuse.

In sum, has The Metaphysical Club joined The Closing of the American Mind in its propensity to collect dust on bookshelves across America? Am I crazy? My friend Varad Mehta, a European intellectual historian, pointed out to me that there is a difference between popular history as such, and rigorous, scholarly history that becomes popular. This is a good point, and if this distinction holds, Menand clearly falls into the latter category. Varad also historicized the problem by arguing that what we now consider serious intellectual work was once popular history—Gibbon and Hume, for example. Thus, in his eyes, it is us, professional historians, who have changed, and as such, it is we who are to blame for the gulf between popular and professional history. I agree with Varad’s historical point, but would argue that changed contexts mean different paradigms. Prior to the carving out of institutional space for the study of history, there was no distinction between popular and professional historical writing. There was just plain history. And Hume and Gibbon hardly wrote for the masses to the degree that Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter does.

I’m mostly interested in reader responses: Is The Metaphysical Club popular history? And if so, what does this mean?