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.
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