A Review of Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors

I must be a masochist at heart, since I have been spending a lot of time lately reading about the perils of my profession. Tonight I finished burning my way through Frank Donoghue's brief and insightful The Last Professors. In it, Donoghue argues that the current generation of professors in the humanities will be the last, and will soon be replaced in most, non-elite institutions by a "casualized" workforce. Unlike other commentators, however, Donoghue argues that this phenomenon has largely taken place already, and that there really isn't a whole lot that can be done about it.

The one knock against the book might be that it's too episodic and doesn't hold together as it should; at times it reads more like a collection of essays than a cohesive statement. That being said, Donoghue makes five very prescient insights worth considering. In the first place, as I just mentioned, he points out that the humanities professor is already a disappearing breed. However, the public and most tenured academics seem totally unaware of this fact. Few people in America realize that most classes these days are not taught be traditional professors, but by adjuncts, "visitors," and graduate students. Because practically everyone apart from the new academic labor workforce is ignorant of the changes that have already happened, almost nothing is being done about them.

The Last Professors also manages to get at the real issue with the rise of for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. It isn't that these fly-by-night companies necessarily take away students from traditional universities, it's that their labor practices and ethos are now being adopted by a whole host of university administrators. They now have models of how to destroy shared governance for good and to cultivate a low paid, "flexible," docile workforce. Tenured professors in the humanities will soon be a luxury good maintained only by the Ivy League and other prestigious universities who can get their students to pay big bucks for scholarly sages.

On an entirely different note, Donoghue exposes the serious issues in the realm of academic publishing, a subject that more academics should be taking seriously. State-level cutbacks have meant cuts for university presses, which have shortened their lists and now only publish books with a potential to make money. At the same time, more and more universities are increasing their research expectations, driving up the number of prospective authors at a time when getting a monograph published is that much harder. With so many professors publishing to get tenure and so many adjuncts publishing in order to get a tenure track job, academic research has become more instrumentalized, and by virtue of its greater volume, devalued.

As those of you who have braved the academic job market well know, a long list of publications does not guarantee a tenure track job. Donoghue might be at his best when laying out some plain truths about the jobs situation. As I mentioned yesterday in this blog, he asserts, quite rightfully, that there is no job crisis because there has been an endemic shortage going back to 1970. We must put aside the hopes that the job market will somehow "recover" or "get back to normal." It has about as much of a chance of improving as I do of becoming queen of Spain. Donoghue correctly connects this state of permanent crisis at a time of growing enrollments to the tremendous increase in adjunct labor in the last thirty years, not PhD "overproduction."

Last but not least, The Last Professors addresses the myths of tenure. In the first place, Donoghue claims that it is being eroded, in large part because of the relentless causualization of academic labor. On top of that, he makes the claim that tenure actually doesn't protect academic freedom because professors without tenure can be fired for all kinds of reasons unrelated to their performance. As an untenured assistant professor, I can tell you that the fear of reprisal if I dare speak up about any of the issues I see with my department and university encourages me to keep my mouth shut until after I go up for review. (And even makes me paranoid about this blog, hidden identity or not.)

There are many more notable observations than these in The Last Professors, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone who is concerned over the future of the humanities. However, Donoghue might be a bit bleak, even for my tastes. He doesn't seem to think that anything can be done to rescue the humanities professors, who are meeting their Waterloo. It's not much better, but I prefer to see the current situation as Dunkirk: we humanities scholars have been defeated and are running for our lives, but we still have the hope of coming back victorious. It can happen, but we need to really start fighting. Like the labor movement of yore, we need to unite (and I mean tenured, tenure track, and adjunct together) and get in the faces of our more complacent colleagues and ask them, as the old song goes, "which side are you on?" I'm not sure it will happen, but dammit, if we're gonna go down, we ought to go down swinging.

Quotes of the Day

Here's a game. Can you guess what year the following quotations were written?

"The labor practices of many American colleges and universities could have been designed by the manager of a Southern textile mill."
***
"One of the most remarkable aspects of the job crisis in college English
teaching is that most graduate departments of English still seem to be operating
as if it did not exist--merrily turning out unemployed Ph.D.s like a beserk
engineering school training regiments of specialists in the manufacture of buggy
whips."
***
"It is now estimated that only about thirty percent of the people awarded
doctorates in English this June will be able to find any sort of academic job
anywhere."

The answer? 1977.

These quotations come from a New Yorker article by the ever-witty Calvin Trillin, whose downbeat assessment of the job market in the humanities could have easily been written today. I came across a reference to it while reading Frank Donaghue's book, The Last Professors (a review of this book will be coming soon.) Donaghue himself has a real gem of a quote, too:

"This problem [the job shortage], then, is not a crisis because no one who
started graduate school after 1970 has experienced anything else. The
academic culture of the humanities has been forged since then in conditions
of extreme hardship, defined by the constant prospect of unemployment or
underemployment and suffused with an atmosphere of brutal
competition."

In Defense of Teachers

The journalistic world is a highly predictable entity; some social issues have been discussed with exactly the same tropes as long as a I can remember. Case in point is education reform, which is nearly always portrayed as a battle by innovative administrators trying to change the system for the better who are arrayed against intransigent teachers and their obstructive unions. The New Yorker has published several such articles in recent months, including a profile this month on Arne "Katrina is the best thing that happened to the New Orleans school system" Duncan. According to the standard trope, our current ranks of teachers are lazy time servers who refuse to make the necessary changes to rescue the education of our children.

Today I'd like to defend teachers, and to ask the media to consider the voices of actual teachers in their reporting.

This article, like practically every other I've ever seen, does absolutely nothing to consider the thoughts of rank and file teachers. Union reps might be consulted, but they are usually speaking in their capacity as labor leaders, not classroom leaders. There's also an assumption that all teachers who support the union are goldbrickers. This is simply not true. My mother, little sister, and wife are all teachers who put in 50 hour weeks and constantly look for new ways to engage their students. They also all happen to be active in their respective unions.

According to the standard narrative, this is a gross contradiction, but it's not when the realities, rather than myths, of the classroom are considered. Rather than avoiding change, teachers are forced to change every two years or so with the pedagogical seasons and with whatever new half-baked idea that their administrators foist on them. School administration itself is a highly volatile profession whose members are constantly looking to climb up the greasy pole towards more prestigious jobs. To do so, they must burnish their resumes by applying whatever new trend happens to be in vogue at the time to their faculties. The teachers, who actually know the classroom and through years of experience have gained an idea of what works, get understandably resistant under these circumstances.

Case in point: the government and large portions of the media pushed the test-centric No Child Left Behind initiative, but at the time I did not know a single teacher who thought it was a good idea. Guess who was right?

So please, members of the journalistic profession, stop being so lazy with your reporting. Do not take the sanctimonious drivel spouted by school administrators at face value. The majority of them are careerist hacks who care much more about enlarging their power than improving education. Actually take the time to talk to career teachers, and stop assuming that they are inferior to 22 year old Ivy League graduate Teach for America types, who make up in arrogance what they lack in classroom experience. Stop treating teacher unions solely as defenders of shiftless layabouts; the NEA and AFT often deserve criticism, but hard-working teachers support these organizations because they are the only thing protecting them from capricious administrators and fickle parents. On the last point, start levelling your sites on parents, too. They block meaningful change by howling whenever their precious snowflakes are held to high standards by teachers. Perhaps worse, they are failing to get their children to read outside of school or develop any kind of respect for knowledge. When children are raised to be secure in their stupidity, there's not much a school can do for them.

Question Time for America?

Political activists from a broad range of ideologies -Grover Norquist to David Corn- have gotten behind an initiative to import a British political institution to America: question time. I have long been a big fan of question time, and back when I was a debater in college I watched CNBC religiously every Sunday night to see Tony Blair and John Major spar with each other and learn how to beat down aggressive questions. (Both have strikes against them as leaders, but they were both witty and engaging debaters.)

[For those of you who don't know, once a week the British prime minister fields questions from members of Parliament in a televised event full of audience participation and sharp arguments.]

If done properly, I think this would be a great idea, although it might make Americans even less sanguine towards our political system and its endless bickering. In any case, the leader being questioned gets to push his own initiatives while still having to directly confront the attacks of his opponents. This would be a vast improvement over our current system, which is an endless parade of press releases, prevarication, and punditry. As we lsaw ast week in president Obama's trip into the Republican lion's den, these direct debates are one of the few opportunities that exist for politicians to call bullshit on each other face to face. (Watch as the president lays the smack down on the lies from the other side.)

However, there are a couple of things that might leave this practice lost in translation. In Britain, the Speaker of the House is a non-partisan position; to bring question time to America we would need to create a similar office and find a referee who can be impartial and above reproach. Unlike the presidential debates held every four years, we should not have media figures as moderators. Maybe we could get Ed Hochuli, he's intimidating enough to call "order" when it needs to happen. Furthermore, the president is the head of state, not the head of government. As such, the office of the presidency commands a greater level of respect and decorum, and thus might make it difficult to replicate the free-wheeling nature of Parliament. If these issues can be ironed out, I'm all for it.

David Brooks At It Again

As my longtime readers know, one of my earliest sports on this blog was putting David Brooks' columns through the wringer. Since he is actually a rational conservative, and thus sidelined in the Beck-ized new teabagger right, I've had less cause to take him to the mat. However, his column today was so ridiculous that I have to comment on it.

The whole thing is his usual gambit of a false dichotomy (young versus old) combined with suspect sociology. While Brooks acknowledges that the elderly suck up a lot more federal money than the young, he ends with this ridiculous conclusion, which I had to re-read several times to make sure he wasn't joking:

"I used to think that political leaders could avert fiscal suicide. But it’s now clear change will not be led from Washington. On the other hand, over the past couple of years we’ve seen the power of spontaneous social movements: first the movement that formed behind Barack Obama, and now, equally large, the Tea Party movement.

Spontaneous social movements can make the unthinkable thinkable, and they can do it quickly. It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

It may seem unrealistic — to expect a generation to organize around the cause of nonselfishness. But in the private sphere, you see it every day. Old people now have the time, the energy and, with the Internet, the tools to organize.

The elderly. They are our future."

First off, the Tea Party movement is not as "equally large" as that which put president Obama in power; just compare the number of people who showed up to his inauguration as those who have been to Washington for the teabagger events. They just happen to scream louder, and their anger hasn't changed the fact that the president is more popular by far nationally than Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, or any other telegenic airhead that this movement has tried to turn into an authentic folk hero. (I also love how Brooks has turned into a fiscal conservative now that his party is out of power after eight years of spending and tax-cutting like a bunch of drunken sailors.)

Second, the enraged elderly teabaggers who talk of fiscal responsibility have absolutely zero interest in sacrificing any of their Social Security and Medicare benefits, which are by far the two largest entitlement programs. We also happen to be in debt because of two unpaid wars and a bout of tax cuts for the rich. The elders screaming their heads of at Congresspersons this summer have no interest in raising taxes or putting an end to these wars, either.

Health reform would benefit the young, who right now don't get free health care from Medicare. Since the financial crisis there have been viscious cuts in public higher education at the state level, which has been compensated for with tuition increases for young students. The oldsters, who went to school when public higher ed was practically free, want to keep what's theirs, and let the devil take the hindmost. Expecting them to do otherwise is indicative of Brooks' eternal detachment from reality.

Short Note on Howard Zinn

Since I gained a more critical take on American history after a chance encounter with The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teenager, reading Zinn was not the revelation to me that it was to others. Nevertheless, he more than any other historian of the last thirty years has punctured the nationalist mythology that often passes for history in the media and many of our schools. Many academic historians continue to do so in their work, but Zinn brought this knowledge to the masses, something few historians who aren't just looking for a paycheck have done.

Yet with his passing, we ought to confront a great fallacy in his writing which is being proven with every passing day. Namely, Zinn spoke of this amorphous "people" in his book that was always the victim, not perpetrator of America's crimes. This despite the "people's" historical enthusiasm for American imperialism, red baiting, and racist violence. When I see the tea bagger rallies with their hateful depictions of the president and insane talk of secession and conspiracy, I can't help but think, regardless of their "astro-turf" nature, that these people are indeed part of "the people" just as much as the massive crowds that turned out for president Obama's inauguration.

As we mourn Zinn's passing, we ought to admire his determination to gain a more critical and truthful picture of American history, but take that one step further and acknowledge that we have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.

Why Student Apathy Makes Me Emotional

Now that I am in my mid-30s, my emotions tend to be pretty even keel, after years of adolescent Sturm und Drang that lasted a lot longer than it should have. However, today I snapped a little bit and cried some bitter tears of rage.

I don't want to get in trouble, so I won't get into the details. Let's just say that I encountered a larger than average dose of entitled, obnoxious student apathy in the classroom today. My emotions stayed in check in front of the students (I am a professional, after all), but they burst out when talking to my wife about it afterward. A torrent of what I can only call sad-anger overtook me, akin to how I felt after George W. Bush won the 2004 election.

Why? Because when I encounter students who are so brazen in their entitled laziness and self-righteous in their apathy, I think of my Dad's father. He held a life-long fascination with history and constantly had a book in his hands. He also had an eighth grade education, since he came from a poor family and had to support his ailing mother from a young age. He didn't get to live the college life; he farmed before two droughts and a flood led to foreclosure, after that he pumped gas and hauled trash until he was almost eighty years old.

I often think of how much he would have enjoyed the opportunity to go to college, and how poverty and bad luck conspired against him (he certainly didn't lack the will or the intelligence.) When I then think of the alarmingly high percentage of students in my classes who don't seem to have any self-motivation to be in school whatsoever, and who act angry when I try to get them to learn something, it just makes me sick with rage.

My only comfort when I feel this way is that every morning I get up to do the job that my grandfather would have wanted for himself. One of my most fervent wishes is that he could be alive today to know that.