Date:         Wed, 23 Oct 96 07:40:50 EDT
From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Organization: Central Michigan University
Subject:      marginalized work in academe (fwd)
To: GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SOCIOLOGY <SOCGRAD@CSF.COLORADO.EDU>
Message-Id:   <961023.074336.EDT.34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
There is a continuing discussion on the Progressive Sociologists'
Network on part-time teaching...I thought member of Socgrad might like
to glance at this post...
                                                       T.R.
                             *********
From: "FASENFEST.DAVID" <fasenfest@sozwi.sozialwiss.uni-hamburg.de>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: marginalized work in academe

Follwoing on the recent posts on academia and the job market,
and trying to put those comments into some context...there has been a
several trends in the academy with interconnected threads:

1) Administrative expenses have risen while the education related
expenses have fallen, and the two have reversed positions with the
latter lower than the former;

2) Increasingly graduate students contribute from 30% to as high as
75% of the undergraduate contact hours of instruction but rarely cost
a department more than about 10% of its budget;

3) Casualized employment (at the top end one-year or multiple-year
term contracts with full benefits...at the bottom payment per course
taught with no benefits) are on the rise, and the literature now
speaks of 'liberating' people who opt out (presumably by taking these
so-called non-pressured jobs, see a recent book by Gappa) from the
tyranny of the tenure review;

4) State legislators and as a consequence university officials
increasingly talk about value added, the student consumer, the
implicit hourly wage of academics (counting as work only time in the
classroom), and the need to raise the productivity as measured by
through put of students and tuition/salary ratios;

5) Increasingly as a result of demographic trends departments are
ossifying with lots of tenured faculty who are in the middle years
with no likelihood of retirement, but whose scholarship and teaching
skills leave much to be desired, and whose tenure leave little room
for meaningful discussions about improving education or research;

6) For the past several decades enrollment driving faculty lines has
meant that departments recruit students at both grad and undergrad
levels with no clear idea what to do with them (that is, councel and
follow up on the job market) other than to produce degrees and justify
faculty FTEs;

7) As institutions, Univesities are on the front line in
marginalizing and assaulting workers at the bottom (whether they are
maintenance staff or casual instructors), often under the guise of
poverty and higher missions which require lower costs even when those
demands are unwarranted by the financial standing of the
institutions.

And the list goes on.  The result is the current initiative at Univ
of Minnesota which started out as an inquiry into how to review
tenured faculty and has turned into a wholesale assault on tenure.
In turn, tenure has not been all that it was meant to be, with a
somewhat capricious system dependent more and more on the particular
composition of a committee and not on a standard of teaching or
scholarship (and who is not from a university where the common
wisdom always seems to be win a teaching award and one's tenure
chances decline noticeably!).  And as a result in almost all fields
the newer and more interesting scholars are, for the most part,
frozen out of jobs or participate in a revolving job market where
the only chair they can aspire to has wheels and rotates.

When I last taught intro, about 10 years ago, there was an article I
assigned which compared the 'should' goals of a university with the
actual goals as practices dictated.  There was a clear divergence
between the should of maintaining an institution of higher education
and research, and the actuality of doing what ever was needed to
promote the institution and increase its net worth.

Perhaps, in light of the recent posts, a more explicit political
economy of academe needs to be undertaken, one which includes its
role and function in society as well as its internal operations.
Only then can we fully see how the structural transformation of the
academy coincides with the increasing intrusion of capitalist
markets on the production of culture and knowledge into (and as part
and parcel with) the very location which has stood for the
production of culture and knowledge in society.  The shock, I think,
is that until about 20 years ago the University was the preerve of
class privilege and prestige--and once that slipped away all else
becomes grist for the profit mills.

But that means we have to look carefully into the jaws of the beast
which feed and protect most of us--however much that protection and
nurturance is shrinking.  This, I am afraid, will ultimately be too
daunting a task for insiders, and too impossible for outsiders.

David Fasenfest