At the New Hampshire presidential debates Saturday, Charlie Gibson imagined that a faculty couple at the host institution were in the $200,000 income bracket.
They laughed so hard he practically blushed through his makeup.
The reality: in the absence of spousal hiring policies, faculty couples tend to be one tenure-stream, one not: combined incomes for most such couples will be less than half that figure.
On the scab Jon Stewart show last night, Ronald Seeber, a Cornell labor-relations prof, erroneously suggested that the professoriate wasn’t unionized. Reality: it’s one of the most unionized professions in the country (faculty are unionized at a rate 300% of the national average), and for good reason. A labor-studies expert should know better. The problem is that the unionized tenure-stream faculty have–like most other unions–helped to bargain the second-tier faculty into existence, preserving benefits and wages for current tenure-track folks while permitting new hires to be steered into nontenurable positions.
And Karl Steel of Cliopatria-award winning medievalist blog In the Middle has a great post discussing the US News report on higher ed teaching as one of the “best professions.” Reality: most humanities faculty earn in the same range as bartenders and waitstaff.
And of course there’s the Faculty on Food Stamps video, plus a good story by Inside Higher Ed.
Recently:
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Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under academic labor system, corporate university, faculty couples, faculty on food stamps, higher ed in the news. 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.
Very interesting…but a contingent and culturally embedded problem I too frequently note is the use of conventional-default language, such as “spousal hire” to name the policies those of us who are not “enspoused” have to live with, unfairly I think.
Always interesting how even the most progressive and well-meaning Marxist/critical-theory-inspired pro-worker critiques that make it into the mainstream press neglect or avoid (much like mainstream conservatives neglect or avoid) the the reality of nonheterosexual orientations working alongside their hetero comrades…
Excuse the rhetorical swell.
Yet…it’s not at all clear to me, prima facie, why any university’s hiring policies should privilege heterosexual married couples (still most often privileged and most often white). Isn’t honoring this policy asking a bit much, given the contemporary employment figures you cite? Isn’t it at least a bit presumptuous to expect special privileges–the sort rarely extended in other work domains, private or public–in this economy (?)
Given the frightful tenure-hire odds you and others cite, I’d say being fortunate enough to “win the lottery”–getting hired on as a couple, thus gaining as a couple one tenured faculty member job as well as one full-time non-tenure contingent faculty member job (most often appointed with implied renewal, for obvious reasons) is a pretty sweet deal! Also, typically this non-tenure half (usually the wife of the tenured hire) will enjoy more privileges via her husband than, for instance, other contingent faculty members who are hired and single–although I understand this difference in treatment cannot be quantified, anecdotally at least contingent faculty who aren’t permitted by law to marry, or who are single, have experienced what it’s like to feel “lesser” than their same-ranking colleague who is married (thus seen as an extension of)to a tenure-line professor.
The commonplace assumption that this archaistic practice continues as reasonable in the hiring policies of late capitalism’s universities seems suspect…as well as somehow out of joint with the praxis of promoting greater equalities for all.
AMV, I completely understand your thoughts here, but rather than contract partner-hiring practices, I’d expand them, beyond heterosexual couples. (There was a move, fiercely contested by the state, to do just that even on the less-than-enlightened U of Louisville campus recently.)
And you’re right to mention race as well. But the impact there is the opposite of what you think. Failure to have spousal hiring policy is–along with poor salaries and many other factors–one of the reasons that persons lacking substantial family wealth cannot maintain a professorial career.
Since there is vastly more family wealth in white hands, all policies that make this a profession that only the wealthy can afford have real consequences for the racial composition of the faculty.