Speed-up in the ivory tower

Colleges and universities are certainly not sweatshops. But they seem to be heading in that direction.

The latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has two articles—Robin Wilson’s “The Ivory Sweatshop: Academe Is No Longer a Convivial Refuge” and Ben Gose’s “Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs” (only Wilson’s piece is available for free)—that register some of the changes in faculty jobs and working conditions that are taking place within the new corporate university.

According to Wilson,

With standards for tenure at major research universities rising year by year, professors say academe has become such a pressure-cooker environment that faculty jobs barely resemble those of a generation ago.

Gone are the days when academe was considered a convivial refuge from the corporate world, a place where scholars had ample time to debate ideas—often during lunch or over drinks after class. Professors, particularly those at research universities, are simply working much more and much harder these days. They are competing for scarcer grant money, turning out more articles and books, coping with the speedup in communications afforded by better technology, and traveling the globe to establish the kind of international reputation that’s now necessary to thrive.

Gose observes a similar phenomenon:

The notion that college professors lead easy lives isn’t quite dead, but it may soon be history.

A decade or two ago, it wasn’t hard to find state legislators, pushing for university budget cuts, who complained about the leisurely lives of academics. Try a Google search for such criticism today, and not much turns up.

There may still be full professors who teach three or four classes per year, head off to their cabins for the summer, and send their own children to college with a generous employer subsidy, all while enjoying job security denied to most other workers. But each year, fewer and fewer professors have it so good: An increasingly small percentage of those standing at the front of a college classroom are on the tenure track. For adjunct instructors, who now make up more than half of the professoriate, life is a scramble to piece together as much income as a bartender’s. And the young academics who do win coveted tenure-track appointments are hardly coasting—they’re working harder than ever before.

The fact is, changes in the academic job market mirror those in the rest of contemporary capitalism: there are many more job-seekers than jobs available. That means speed-up—in terms of research, teaching, and service—for those who actually get and keep one of the available jobs.

The problem is, the speed-up is not just demanded by academic administrators; it’s based on the complicity of faculty members themselves. Together, they are attempting to increase productivity, which is moving in the direction of creating a three-tiered system: academic administrators who run the corporate university; research faculty who publish, get grants and sell patents, and spend less and less time in the classroom; and the rest of the faculty, both full-time and part-time, tenure-track and adjunct, who shoulder an increasing share of the teaching responsibilities and yet are still expected to publish and do service.

The fact that faculty can perform many of their tasks on a flexible schedule, often at home, means these are not traditional sweatshops. Maybe they’re more like the putting-out system.