Today the Grey Lady lent the op-ed page to yet another Columbia prof with the same old faux “analysis” of graduate education.
Why golly, the problem with the university is that there aren’t enough teaching positions out there to employ all of our excess doctorates Mark C. Taylor says: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).” Because there are just too many folks with Ph.D.’s out there, “there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.”
Um, nope. Wrong. _The New York Times_ loves this bad theory and has been pushing it for decades, but the reality is clear.
In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the “excess doctorates” out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the “excess” doctorates in many fields.
The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of “demand” so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master’s or a B.A., or even by undergraduates. During the whole period of time that _The New York Times_ has been pimping junk analysis of graduate education (that there’s an “oversupply” of doctorates), the percentage of faculty with doctorates has been dropping, not rising.
The piece is hilariously out of touch — noting the rise of adjunct labor, the Columbia philosopher of religion and author of 20 books wrings his hands that per-course pay is “as low as” $5,000 dollars a class.
BWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Reality? Annual income for many adjuncts is about $5,000 dollars a year. On pay that can be lower than a grand per class.
They’re on food stamps.
But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will insure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.’s will be able to work for those wages.
Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.
How’s that working out? Well, gee, we’re graduating a very poor percentage of students. Various literacies are kinda low. We don’t have a racially diverse faculty, and women, especially women with children, are far more likely to have the low-paying low-status faculty jobs.
Nice! Let’s get more of that!
It’s not just his inadequate grasp of the facts. Taylor’s whole analysis is wrong. His idea is that higher education is too Fordist. (”Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning,” he intones.)
But higher education isn’t too Fordist — it’s actually the brilliant, innovative post-Fordist employer par excellence. Every other employer wants to employ its people on the model of the campus — to get people who work for love, as perpetual students, eagerly discounting their labor in hopes of a future reward that someone else will provide.
I dunno if we should end the university as _The New York Times_ or Mark C. Taylor claims to know it.
But we really oughta end the university as the rest of us know it — as not merely exploitative, but as a creatively super-exploitative employer.
Recently:
- Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
- Kindle or Netbook?
- Occupy the AHA!
- History “Job Czar” Shuts Down Phd Production (PhD “Oversupply” Continues For Two Decades)
- Who’s A Historian to the AHA?
- At the AHA: Huh?
- “I Re-wrote those Motherfuckers from Scratch”
- Spring Appearances
- UC Davis Occupiers Force Negotiations
- Students Occupy UC President’s Office
Comments
This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under "job market theory" and why it's silly, academic labor system, faculty on food stamps, intellectuals are workers, proletarian thought, undergraduate labor, youth is a category through which class is lived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] been some misgivings, not unwarranted misgivings, but misgivings. Not unsurprisingly, Marc Bousquet is concerned about the treatment of the faculty and argues that jobs exist for faculty, but the university has […]
I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed reading this post, especially to see you let loose with such gusto! At first, I was in pain from all the laughter, having read this thrashing. Afterwards I realized that you succeeded in making your key points very memorable.
I am one of those who tells graduates that tenure-track academic jobs for PhDs in anthropology are few and far between, and in Canada almost nonexistent now. That’s not something I invented, nor is it a misunderstanding: the jobs are really not being advertised.
However, I think you are saying that the jobs “really” are there, or could be there, if we stopped preying on part-time and temporary teachers. I agree without reservation.
Yet, given the system as it currently is, does this not amount to the same thing, i.e., that the tenure track jobs are not available, and that we are training people to become underpaid, poverty-line, part time workers, after years of hardship and sacrifice?
What would you advise telling students in a field that is suffering from severely diminished job opportunities?
To be fair, some of Taylor’s points about research are good, I think; but yeah, the problem is that the piece is implicitly offered as an general analysis of higher education’s future, when in fact it has far less scope…Taylor has nothing to say about undergraduate teaching. Nothing. He’s not talking about the American higher ed system; he’s talking about a small handful of grad programs. And this–
“Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.”
–this is vacant biz-lit rhetoric. ugh.
hi Marc,
Nice post.
One thing, re: the Detroit comparison. I can’t speak to Fordism vs Post-Fordism as an accurate descriptor of the diploma-and-research industry but it seems to me that Taylor’s Detroit comparison is premised in part on a dishonest (or at least inaccurate) account of the problems in the auto industry. The whole “it’s out of our hands, it’s the economy” rhetoric that you’re attacking re: higher ed is, I think, a similar rhetoric to that being used against autoworkers and their unions.
take care,
Nate
Marc
Nice analysis of the Taylor Op-Ed. I believe you are correct when you say “tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.” However, I do think Taylor is correct as well when he comments that, “If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.” Bottom line is many graduate programs are unsustainable and will be increasingly eliminated.
[…] End the University as We Know It. As Chris says, “this op-ed sucks.” Kerim points to another great rebuttal from Marc Bousquet. The readers’ comments at the Times are also much more illuminating than the op-ed […]
[…] exactly encourages people to enroll in doctoral programs? 29 04 2009 Yipee! Marc Bousquet is back, drawn out by the same silly op-ed I wrote about earlier this week. If you’ve read How the […]
[…] Here and here. […]
[…] Many of you have probably read Mark Taylor’s op-ed in the Times regarding the graduate education. I should probably write my own analysis, but I think Marc Bousquet has said just about everything I need to say, pretty well: More Drivel From the New York Times | How The University Works. […]
I hope a student occupation trashes this Ivy Douche’s office. OMG, I can’t even begin to say how angry this article made me.
[…] been some misgivings, not unwarranted misgivings, but misgivings. Not unsurprisingly, Marc Bousquet is concerned about the treatment of the faculty and argues that jobs exist for faculty, but the university has […]
[…] More Drivel from the New York Times […]