Upstairs, Downstairs in the Academy

I've been deeply gratified lately to see increasing noise in the media about administrative salaries--and particularly presidential salaries--in higher education. For a long time, it seemed like the conversation about student debt and sky-rocketing tuition was focused entirely on faculty salaries, as if tenure-stream faculty were all living lives of outrageous luxury, sipping cognac from snifters in the fancy libraries of our old Victorian mansions. As someone who makes less than $60k (base salary) per year in a discipline where that's just about the average for my kind of institution and rank, I've found the blame put on faculty salaries a bit galling. (For the record, I do not have a Victorian mansion, and my "library" is a small room filled with Ikea bookcases. I don't think I even own a snifter.) What is starting to come to light now is what many faculty have known for years: universities don't have more overhead these days because of growth in the faculty ranks, but because of explosive growth of administrations and administrator salaries. Given their spending priorities, it seems like these new administrative behemoths are badly out of step with the mission and purpose of the university--at the expense of those most vital to the university's existence: faculty and students.

When confronted about the large sums paid out to high-level administrators, boards of trustees and PR departments always say the same thing: if you want to get the "best people" for the job, you have to pay out. It seems to me that there are two problems with this logic. First, this implies that the "best people" for the job of running a university are also the kind of people who will pursue the biggest pay-day, or who at the very least wouldn't consider doing the job for less than half a million dollars a year (before bonuses and other perks). Maybe this is crazy, but I'm not sure someone looking to get rich running a non-profit really understands what non-profit work is about. The fundamental mission of the university is about service: students and faculty come together to learn and to produce new knowledge for the benefit of our local, national, and global societies. While I won't pretend to understand everything that goes into running a university, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the "best people" for the job would have a deep understanding of and appreciation for this kind of service, and who would therefore be happy to be paid less for the opportunity to help such a beneficial institution thrive. Faculty, after all, have made just this sacrifice. We say all the time, "I didn't go into this for the money." Relative to our educations, most of us are underpaid--the majority of us radically so. But for the minority of us who are getting paid a livable wage, we think the lower salary is okay because we believe in the work we do. My goal isn't to make a lot of money, but to make a difference in the lives of my students, so as long as I make enough to live and to get some modest enjoyment out of life, I'm happy to be paid less than my "worth" to be able to do what I love. Dedication to the mission of the university should matter more than making a lot of money. That should be at least as true at the top as it is at the bottom.

But we can turn this logic around, too, and find a second problem in the "you get what you pay for" justification. I might be willing to accept the argument that universities looking for top talent to run their schools need to be willing to pay top-dollar, if that argument were also applied to the people who actually execute the mission of the university: the faculty. The faculty are the ones who teach students--which is ostensibly why tuition-paying students attend university in the first place--and we are the ones contributing to the production of knowledge in our fields. If salaries were determined by a motivation to get the best people to help the university thrive, then every institution should be in a salary-war with every other to get and retain the best faculty they can find. If you get what you pay for, and if universities are interested in providing a top-quality education to students, faculty salaries should be inflating at the same rate as administrative salaries. Instead, the opposite has happened. Among tenure-stream faculty, salaries have stagnated, with last year being the first year in the last 5 in which average faculty raises have outpaced the rate of inflation. More importantly, university administrations are paying considerably less on average per faculty member than they used to, because, instead of responding to increased student enrollments with a proportional rise in the number of tenure-track faculty lines, they have instead opted to have classes taught by part-time faculty getting paid poverty-level wages. Nowhere is this more true than at universities with the highest-paid presidents.

I am of course oversimplifying somewhat, ignoring "market realities" that drive down faculty salaries because of the large numbers of PhDs looking for faculty positions. But it's one thing to say that a university can hire an excellent professor of Latin literature at $59k per year, and another thing entirely to suppose that you can get the same quality instruction paying someone with the same credentials $3k per course, which is what happens when administrators look to free up some cash and "create flexibility" by hiring more and more part-time, contingent faculty. This is not to say that adjuncts are worse teachers than tenure-track faculty--they aren't, due to the extreme dedication and benevolence of educators--but that the university can't really expect to hire and retain "the best" faculty if they're going to pay them poverty-level wages. Yet this is what they do to half of their faculty.

So it seems like there are conflicting logics at work. On the one hand, we're told that universities need to pay upper-level administrators very large sums of money in order to attract the best people to do the work of maintaining and finding ways to improve the university. On the other, these "best people" turn around and hire faculty as cheaply as they can possibly manage. So when students come in, apparently they are getting top-rate administrators, but bargain-basement faculty. Which might be okay, if the students were coming to our institutions for the administrators. But they're not: they're coming here to get an education, which comes from the faculty. And most of our student are paying a lot of money--and going into a lot of debt--to do so. How is this model of paying administrators as much as possible and faculty as little as possible a responsible allocation of funds?

Of course, the ones who decide how to allocate funds are themselves administrators (with a certain amount of oversight from boards of trustees--boards which too often have no faculty on them and which tend to be well-connected with administration). Since apparently we believe in hiring administrators who want to make a lot of money, it's perhaps unsurprising that administrators give themselves the largest raises. But these spending priorities aren't simply a matter of greed: they reflect the tendency among administrations to treat themselves as more important to the existence of the university than faculty. At one of the institutions I've worked at, the school once hit a "crisis" of unexpectedly low enrollments that led to a substantial budget shortfall. The administration's response was to freeze all faculty hiring, which seemed reasonable enough; but at the same time they created three or four more administrative positions to "help deal with the crisis." That institution is hardly the only university where this happens. The administrator-brain thinks that the solution to a problem of enrollment is less (comparatively inexpensive) faculty and more (comparatively expensive) administrators: this tells us what we need to know about their priorities, and what personnel they deem most important to the continued existence of the university. And therein lies the real problem.

Parents and students should be angry about this, because outrageous administrative salaries correlate with the rise in student debt. Thanks to increasing media coverage of this correlation, perhaps the anger will come, and universities will be pressured into administrative reform (at least at public institutions). But at the end of the day, the money is one symptom of a larger problem, which is that the people running our institutions of higher education don't prioritize education--quality education, not "how many kids can we get to pay to sit in one classroom and how little can we pay the instructor who stands in front of them?" When I once described to a friend outside the academy my frustration at my administration's refusal to involve faculty in important decisions, my friend connected administrative attitudes to the general tendency in the U.S. to paint educators as lazy and incompetent. "It must be hard," she said, "when your own bosses treat you like that." Well, yes, actually, it is. As faculty, we work hard to create environments in which students can learn at a high level, and to participate actively in our fields so that we are able to provide our students with cutting-edge information and insights. When our work is devalued, not just by our social world, but by our own employers, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep working hard. We keep going because we care about our students and about our fields; it would be nice if our administrators shared that dedication with us.

Blue Collar Academia

The reality of working in the academic world these days is that, more often than not, the rumors and announcements trickling out of administration buildings are bad news. Budget cuts, enrollment drops, hiring and salary freezes--I've been in my current position only 4 years, and it seems like the sky is falling more often than not. Last week was no different: a significant drop in freshman deposits from the previous year, and with it the usual rumblings of Bad Things to come. It used to be that these announcements filled me with terror and dread. What kind of job did I have, and what kind of institution did I work at, that the winds of change could shake us so terribly?  Do I need to look for another job? At my previous job, I was always looking for higher ground, because it seemed to me that the position I occupied would soon fall out from under me (not, as it turned out, an irrational fear--my previous employer just announced a bunch of tenure-track firings, including 11 in the division I used to work in). I went on the market every year in search of an elusive "good job." When my present institution offered me a position, I took it because, though I wasn't sure if it was a "good job," I was fairly certain that it was a "better job." But soon after, the intimations of dark days ahead began again. Initially, it panicked me: I'd moved to higher ground, but maybe it wasn't high enough? As time has gone on, however, I've started to recognize that my expectations for academic work simply didn't match the reality. The "good job" wasn't elusive: it was illusory. What I wanted for a job simply didn't exist anymore (if it ever did). More importantly, I realized that what I wanted was ultimately not very desirable in the first place--in fact, the illusion may be contributing to the worst of the problems in higher education.

As a graduate student setting out for the wasteland of the job market for the first time, my image of what it meant to be a professor was fairly narrow. I assumed that being a professor meant teaching your classes (in your field, of your own design) and doing your research. The proportion of time dedicated to each pursuit would differ based on the institution, and at some places there would be more or less funding for research support, and more or less "service" teaching, more or less release time from teaching obligations, etc.; but basically I would be able to do the same things I'd done in graduate school--which is to say that I'd be able to do my own thing. While I had a vague understanding that I would also have service responsibilities, my sense was that these were just an undesirable side-effect of the profession, obligations no one really wanted to do but that simply came with the job. I wasn't averse to the idea of service; I just didn't understand it as a real part of the job. The job--the real job--was engaging with the world of ideas with students and, via research, with colleagues. Like a lot of academics, particularly in the humanities, I was attracted to the job partly because of the independence it offered: I would be master of my classroom, and I would direct my own research, and--outside of scheduled teaching time--I would dictate my own hours. If I could get work as a professor, I would be an island, entire of myself. And if I could just get to tenure, no one would ever be able to take that away from me.

Thus when I was lucky enough to land my first tenure-track job, I was distressed to discover how deeply endangered this way of life had become, and how intent administrations seemed to be on hunting the tenured professor to extinction. At the time I was unaware of the statistics--that, for instance, nation-wide only about one-third of faculty are tenure-track--but it was clear to me that, at least at the kind of tuition-dependent private university I found myself at, administrators had no interest in the world of ideas, and were determined to make their faculty do as much teaching and service as possible with as little salary and research time possible. I realized quickly that the freedom I'd expected to enjoy was extremely precarious, that administration could change the terms of my employment at pretty much any time (indeed, I found out later that I'd come very close to losing my job when then 2008 crash happened and admin seized the opportunity to take some faculty lines back from the liberal arts). All of this indicated to me that I had landed in a "bad job"--though I recognized that there were worse out there--and that I needed to start looking for something better. What I discovered when I changed jobs, however, was  that even "better" schools face many of the same challenges (this is admini-speak) as the less well-ranked. Dependence on tuition for revenue meant our fortunes would rise and fall with enrollments; and, as I spoke to colleagues at other schools and read more about the state of the academy in the U.S., I learned that the tendency toward administrative bloat, which tilts university budgets away from instruction-related spending (i.e., away from spending on faculty and academic departments), is a national problem that the majority of universities are facing. The threat of salary freezes, of increased teaching loads, of diminished department and program budgets, of shrinking tenure-track lines and increased casualization: these are the daily reality for American university faculty.

What I wanted was to find a job where I didn't have to worry about my position, where I could simply focus on my teaching and research and not worry about how the money was managed or where the students would come from (isn't that what administration is for?). What I found was that everything I want to do, as a scholar and as a teacher, is under attack pretty much everywhere, due in large part to the unsustainable structure of modern higher education. There are no places (or very few) at which I would be "safe" just to do my own thing. But as I came to this realization, slowly another started to emerge, as well: that finding a "safe" position was the wrong thing to want. That, if quality teaching and scholarship are under attack at the American university, then part of my job should be to defend those things, to work to make the university--or at the very least my university--a place where those things are supported. Furthermore, if the causes of these attacks on quality teaching and research are administrative bloat combined with (and intimately connected with) the increasing corporatization of the university models that treats students as customers to be bilked of their funds (with the collusion of the government student loan system), then no one--not me nor my senior colleagues nor the new faculty majority working on contignent, mostly part-time contracts--will be "safe" unless all of us work to reverse these trends.

The problem with my original concept of the profession, I realized, was that no part of it was devoted to "defending the guild," as my spouse likes to say. I expected that "the university"--a vague entity given life by my naive faith in its "higher purpose"--would simply make a space for me to work, that I could study literature and help other people do the same, without me ever needing to participate in the actual functioning of that entity, without me needing to take responsibility for keeping it alive. I expected the university simply to function the way I thought it should work, without me or my colleagues having to do much to make it work that way. This isn't just a bad way to think of a job: it's a way of thinking that, if it's widespread, perhaps accounts for why American universities have fallen on such hard times. If we don't think it's part of the job of a professor to fight for the university--the university as a place for education, exchange of ideas, production of new ones, and participation with others across a range of interests and backgrounds in whatever projects we can imagine--then it's perhaps unsurprising that people with other ideas about what the university should be (specifically people who see it as a business) have taken over.

Part of what caused me to rethink my notion of what it means to be a professor has been my increased involvement in what had always seemed like the throw-away part of my job: service to the campus community. The experience of this kind of work is very different from what I trained to believe. When I was a graduate student, my mentors rarely talked about service as part of faculty life, and, when they did, it was overwhelmingly in a negative context. When I was new faculty member, my senior colleagues represented service in the same light. Bitching about committee work is a surer mark of the (tenure-track) professoriate than corduroy jackets and glasses. To an extent, the bitching is justified: much committee work is inefficient, and sometimes by design--administrations seem to love forming committees just to be able to ignore their recommendations. But even in our way of describing service work--that is, as "service"--our profession seems to denigrate participation in the administrative side of academic life. Teaching serves students; research serves our larger community of scholars. Yet participation in the decision-making processes of our institutions is singled out as "service," as if this were the menial, laboring part of our job, compared to the more noble activities of teaching and scholarship (we even call the teaching we don't like to do "service teaching"). I remember, as I was heading off to my first department meeting as a tenure-track professor, senior colleagues rolling their eyes at me: "Now you get to see the fun part of the job," one commented sarcastically. What they didn't understand, however, was that I was excited to be at a department meeting, because it was the first time I would have a voice in deciding how things would work in my workplace--at least in the limited context of the department. I've seen this scene repeated every time a new faculty member arrives (and I may, I'll admit, have been guilty of playing the role of the jaded senior colleague once or twice myself). Worse, I've seen tenured faculty members telling non-tenure-track members of the department that they're lucky they don't have to--or can't--go to meetings, as if it's a privilege to be entirely disenfranchised in one's workplace. (We should start calling service the "tenured-professor's burden.") The overwhelming tendency among tenure-stream faculty, at least in my experience, is to treat service as a waste of our time and "beneath" us. The prevailing attitude is that this is not our real work.

Yet this is precisely the work that is most important for faculty members to engage in at this point in the history of the American university. By now it should be obvious that we cannot leave the running of our universities to administrators, boards of trustees, or legislatures. If we want the university to be a place we want to work, we are the ones who have to make that happen. The good news is that, if we change our attitude about this kind of work, we are more than up to the task. What I've discovered from committee work is that, while sometimes time is wasted and solutions are poorly implemented (or just ignored), generally speaking when you put a bunch of smart people in a room to figure something out, they are in fact capable of figuring it out. And I expect that we'd get better at it with practice (and perhaps by using our well-developed research and learning skills to find out and teach ourselves a bit about negotiating, collective decision-making, and administration). This is work we can do, rather than letting those with a more business-like model of the university do it for us.

This is also work that requires us to understand ourselves not as little islands of intellectual productivity and contemplation, but as part of a larger community working together for the benefit of students and of our social world. This means developing a sense of solidarity with the others working towards the same goal--which includes not just tenured or tenure-track faculty, but also students, adjunct faculty, our administrative assistants (who often do most of the meaningful work of keeping our departments running), librarians, janitorial staff--everyone who does the work on the ground of helping students to learn more about their world and of supporting the production of knowledge. Having this sense of solidarity means getting away from the notion that some of the activities of the university are "beneath" us. I have known tenured faculty who could not be bothered to copy their own syllabi or to fill out their own post-conference paperwork, who expected others to take care of these things so that they could focus on more "important" work. This is the ivory-tower mentality. I used to think that this generalization about the profession was bullshit (I function very well in the "real world" despite having a Ph.D., thank you very much), but as I've come to understand why the university system is in so much trouble, I've also noticed that we tenure-stream faculty tend to avoid grappling with the reality of our own working conditions. Our ivory towers don't keep us separate from the rest of the world; we locked ourselves in these towers to avoid dealing with the rest of our own institutions, leaving it to the people in the castle below us to make sure that the towers didn't crumble. When we hold ourselves apart from all the non-academic activities of the university in this way, we both let others suffer for our sakes (for instance, allowing an army of precarious, contingent faculty into the servants' quarters to do our "service" teaching), and we failed to guard the gate against those who wanted to raze the castle and build an industrial park in its place. If we want to start to undo the damage and rebuild, we have to come down from these decaying towers, roll up our sleeves, and stand shoulder to shoulder with everyone else toiling in the day-to-day of our institution's functioning.

My point here is not that we tenure-stream faculty need to involve ourselves in more committee work, though committee work can be worthwhile to the extent that committees are empowered to make and implement decisions. We might instead look to the example of adjuncts, who have taken it upon themselves through unionization and information campaigns to fight the casualization of our profession. We can also look to the examples set by many students, such as those at the University of Southern Maine, who have likewise organized themselves and taken their complaints to administration and to the trustees with enough noise and enough numbers that they cannot be ignored. It takes very little searching to find examples of university members banding together to create positive change within their campus communities, whether it's students uniting against a commencement speaker or faculty uniting against the unilateral decision of a board of trustees. The important thing is that we be willing to do the work, and that we be willing to do it together.

If being a tenured professor ever meant living a life of leisure, it certainly can't any more. There is work to be done--a lot of it--to save American universities from attacks on education and the production of knowledge. Instead of being tower-dwellers within the university community, we need a more blue-collar ethic, one that doesn't disdain the kinds of work necessary to take back our universities and then to run them the way they should be run, and one that recognizes our place in a community and our solidarity with those community members. As I start to recognize this fact, and as I look around at all the people already engaged in the fight to take back campuses for the purposes of education and knowledge production, I find that I'm must less anxious about the future than I was when I spent all my energies trying to scramble for higher ground (without stopping to think what would happen to the people on the ledges below); and I realize it's because, by recognizing my solidarity with others, I find I'm not alone. For years, I made the mistake of thinking that getting a "good" job meant getting a position that would leave me alone to do my own thing. What I've learned is being alone is precarious, and that a good workplace isn't simply something that will be given to me: it's something we have to fight for, to create, together.