The logic of the HMO increasingly governs higher education. Management tightly rations the teacher’s time. Thirty-five years ago, almost 75% of all university professors were tenured. Only a quarter worked as an assistant, part-time or non-permanently.
Today, those proportions are reversed.
If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, there’s a good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a Ph.D. and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession have come under intensive scrutiny from their peers. peers. related to the tenure system. In your other three classes, you’re likely to be taught by someone who started a career but didn’t finish it, was hired by a manager who isn’t a fellow professional, may never post in the field you’re teaching, and who got into the group of people considered for work because they were willing to work for wages close to the official poverty line.
In almost every course in most disciplines using non-tenured or adjunct professors, a person with a recently earned Ph.D. was available and would have gladly taught his other three courses. But they couldn’t afford to pay off their loans and housing with the wages offered.
This is a topic explored in depth in my new book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Higher education employers can only pay those salaries knowing that their employees are subsidized in various ways. For student employees, the huge debt burden subsidizes salary. For the low-paid contingent faculty, the vast majority of whom are women, strategies vary, but include consumer debt, reliance on another job, or the income of a domestic partner.
Like Walmart employees, most of the female contingent academic workforce relies on a patchwork of other sources of income, including forms of public assistance like food stamps and unemployment compensation.
It’s perfectly common for casual college professors to work as grocery store clerks and restaurant servers, earning higher wages in those positions, or to have been retired from previous occupations like bus driving, steelmaking, and car assembly, enjoying those higher paying professions. a pension sufficient to enable them to pursue a “second career” as university professors. The cheap education system does not work out for the best teachers. It mandates that people who are in a financial position accept compensation below the living wage. As a result of management’s irresponsible hiring practices, more students are dropping out, taking longer to graduate, and failing to acquire basic skills, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on a credential that has little merit in the eyes of employers.
The real “Profscam” is not the imaginary depicted in Charles Sykes’ fanciful 1988 book, which invented the image of a lazy tenured faculty taking voluntary absence from teaching.
Instead, the “faculty scam” turns out to be a deceptive game run by management, maintaining a permanent layer for marketing purposes and to generate funded research, but so dispersed with respect to undergraduate teaching that even More privileged undergraduate students spend most of their education with teachers working in increasingly less professional circumstances.
As non-tenured union activists will tell you, the problem is not in the intellectual quality, talent, or commitment of the individual people who work without a chair; it is the degraded circumstances in which they are forced to work by higher education leadership, teaching too many students in too many classes too quickly, without security, status or office; work from standardized study plans; outsourced tutoring, remediation, and even grading services, leaving no time for research and professional development. Working in the “kitchen” at McDonald’s, even Wolfgang Puck’s talents are put to work for the QuarterPounder. Despite the tens of billions “saved” in teacher salaries by replacing a disposable workforce with tenure-vetted professionals, managed higher education is becoming increasingly expensive.
Enrollment skyrocketed 38% between 2000 and 2005, outperforming almost all other economic indicators.
Where is the money going from the stratospheric tuition and reduced teacher salaries? In for-profit institutions, the answer is obvious: it goes into the pockets of shareholders. Lacking even the veneer of a permanent stratum, the dollars squeezed out of a 100% informal college joined with tax and tuition money from the nation’s poorest families to enrich the shareholders of education providers. But in nonprofit education, which only “pretends” to “act like” a corporation, where have the billions gone?
At first glance, there are no shareholders and no dividends.
However, the uses to which the university has been put benefit corporate shareholders. These include bearing the cost of job training, generating patentable intellectual property, providing sporting events, selling goods and services to captive student markets, and converting student aid into cheap or even free labor. . A considerable way forward, then, is the relationship between the financial transactions of nonprofit organizations and the growing dividends enjoyed by the shareholder class.
Shareholders of private corporations are not the only beneficiaries of the proletarianization of college and the tuition gold rush.
As public nonprofits have been receiving ever lower direct subsidies from federal and state sources, there has been a general belief that the higher enrollments and exploitation of staff have somehow been achieved by savvy managers. and combative with at least some version of public welfare in mind, if only within the narrow framework of “reduced spending.” But that belief is questionable, as managers have been spending quite freely in a number of areas.
One area where educational management nonprofits have been spending freely is on themselves.
For three decades, the number of administrators has skyrocketed in close correspondence with the growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has also skyrocketed, also closely related to the reduction in compensation for other campus workers. In a couple of decades, administrative work has gone from being an occasional service component in a professor’s life to a “desirable career path” in its own right (Lazerson et al, A72).
Nonprofits support deans, presidents, associate deans, and directors of arts and sciences programs comfortably in the six figures. Salaries run into the mid-six figures for many medical, engineering, business, and legal administrators. College presidents have begun earning seven figures, hot on the heels of their basketball coaches, who can earn $3 million a year and are often the highest-paid public employees in their state. In thirty years of managed higher education, the typical faculty member has become a non-tenured part-time woman earning a few thousand dollars a year with no health benefits. The typical manager is a man, enjoying tenure, a six-figure income, little or no tuition, generous vacations, and excellent health care.
There are plenty of other areas where nonprofit managers have spent even more. Supported by activist legislatures, they have especially enjoyed playing venture capital with campus resources and tax dollars by participating in “corporate partnerships” that generally generate financial benefits for the corporate partner but not for the campus (Washburn) .
More prosaically, they have engaged in what most observers call an “arms race” of spending on physical plant and facility expansion. And as Murray Sperber and others have documented, they have recklessly spent on sports activities that, despite broadcast revenues being in the millions in some cases, often lose large sums of money. The commercialization of college sports has raised the level of participation so much that students who would like to play can’t afford the time to practice. Students who would like to see cannot afford the ticket prices.
Traditionally, the phenomenon known as “cross-subsidization,” the support of one program for revenue generated by another program, meant primarily a modest surplus provided by the higher tuition and lower salaries associated with undergraduate education, used to support research activity it was unlikely to find an external funding agent. In managed higher education, cross-subsidization has eroded undergraduate learning across the curriculum and become a gold mine for all sorts of activities that cater to entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and workhorses. administrators:
Digitizing the curriculum! Building the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Leading more souls to God! Win the All-Conference Championship! Why have those who control nonprofit colleges and universities so easily fallen for the idea that the institution should act like a for-profit corporation? At least part of our answer must be that it offers people in that position some compelling rewards, both material and emotional.
This is an era of executive licenses. In addition to a living wage and lavish benefits, George Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. University administrators typically enjoy higher salaries and comparable benefits, and have the privilege of waging war on rival sports, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, or industrial pollution.
It feels good to be president.
As a “decision maker,” one can often arrange to strike a blow on behalf of at least some of one’s values.
What needs to be swept under the rug is that the ability to do these things rests on their willingness to continually squeeze compensation out of almost every other worker on campus. The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine. If nonprofits accumulate in some way other than dividends, there is more surplus for administrators, trustees, local politicians and a handful of influential professors to spend discretionally.