The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, With a New Introduction

By Frank Donoghue

“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered.

In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter?

The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with the
humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.

Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them.

There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars
an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

First published in 2008, "The Last Professors" have largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial Preface that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823279142

Frank Donoghue

Frank Donoghue is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers.

Book preview

THE LAST PROFESSORS

Copyright © 2008, 2018 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donoghue, Frank, 1958–

The last professors : the twilight of the humanities in the corporate university / Frank Donoghue. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-2859-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8232-2860-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Universities and colleges—United States—Faculty. 2. College teachers—Professional relationships—United States. 3. College teachers—United States—Tenure. 4. Humanities—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. I. Title.

LB2331.72.D 2008

378.1′21—dc22

2008003062

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

First printing

To My Students in English 890

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Last Professors, Ten Years Later

Preface

1. Rhetoric, History, and the Problems of the Humanities

2. Competing in Academia

3. The Erosion of Tenure

4. Professors of the Future

5. Prestige and Prestige Envy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my longest-standing debt of gratitude to the Ohio State graduate students in various incarnations of my seminar on academic labor. They helped me to work out the ideas and arguments expressed here, and dedicating the book to them seems the least I can do to repay them for their interest and their effort. I don’t have space to name all of them, but Ken Petri, Chris Mannion, Sarah Adams, and Adrien Ardoin stayed interested and stayed in touch. My department chair, Valerie Lee, and College of Humanities Dean, John Roberts, came through with a crucial year of funding that allowed me to complete the book. Helen Tartar provided invaluable support for the project from the moment that I described it to her. The readers of the manuscript for Fordham University Press, in particular J. Hillis Miller, offered valuable advice, almost all of which I have taken. Thanks to Stanley Fish, who long ago introduced me to academic labor as a subject worth studying, and who still influences my standards for argument and my prose style. Thanks to W. B. Carnochan and Richard Ohmann for their helpful feedback on early versions of parts of the book. I’ve been especially fortunate to have so many generous colleagues at Ohio State. Jim Phelan and David Brewer offered insightful and supportive suggestions. Harvey Graff was an inexhaustible source of new ideas and references. Elizabeth Renker was the single most important influence on the shaping of this study. She was my first reader at every stage of composition and always struck the perfect balance between rigor and enthusiasm.

Two small sections of the book have previously appeared in print. Part of Chapter one appeared in the inaugural issue of American Academic, and I’m grateful to Larry Gold and the American Federation of Teachers for giving me access to an audience that I might otherwise not have reached. Part of Chapter five appeared in Profession 2006 and thus, for better or worse, has the imprimatur of the MLA.

INTRODUCTION

The Last Professors, Ten Years Later

When I wrote The Last Professors ten years ago, I worried at times that my very bleak diagnosis of the state of higher education might distract readers from my specific descriptions of its ailments. I feel that the tone of the book was unavoidable, but I’m grateful to Fordham University Press for giving me the opportunity to temper some of the pessimism and to focus instead on developments that I didn’t fully anticipate a decade ago. Generally speaking, while I would leave my historical narrative intact, I would revise and update some of my predictions about the future of the humanities in the ever-changing university.

No one should be surprised by the continued erosion of tenure, coupled with the gradual disappearance of entry-level tenure-track jobs in the humanities. Exactly how this acceleration is playing out, though, and the way that process is widely perceived both inside and outside the academy warrant further investigation. I believe that legislative attempts at a direct assault on tenure are bound to fail because they are, at least in recent instances, culturally motivated, and thus poorly suited for attacking professors. While bills in states such as Iowa (to abolish tenure) and Missouri (to phase it out) have alarmed many in academia, I don’t think they are cause for concern because their sponsors so misunderstand the current staffing situation of most universities. When Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin claims that tenure allows professors to write about political stuff … they shouldn’t be engaged in because, he says, their doing so is a waste of taxpayer money, he’s almost certainly unaware that more than 70 percent of college teaching is done by adjuncts who are so overworked that they don’t have time to devote to intense political activism and who are so poorly paid that they can hardly be accused of wasting taxpayer money.¹

As I’ve suggested in the past, a much more powerful challenge is the argument that tenure is a labor problem for those who currently employ tenured and tenure-track faculty. It is much cheaper to replace such workers with contingent instructors, ideally hired on a part-time basis. Not only does this practice, by now the new normal, save money in a variety of ways, but it also makes for a more nimble, on-demand teaching workforce. This trend should be familiar to many working outside academia, as it has become the basis on which people in a wide spectrum of jobs, particularly in the service industry, are now employed. What could stop its inexorable progress in academia? The ever-expanding population of college students would have to start asking, Am I getting the maximum benefit from my education if many of the people teaching me, however committed and talented they might be, are being paid poorly and subjected to very difficult working conditions, making it impossible for them to teach as effectively as they could if their working situations were better? Why aren’t these questions being posed by undergraduates to admissions officers, academic advisors, deans, and provosts? There is, I believe, an unfortunate list of answers. First, despite a steady flow of information over the past decade exposing the shameful working conditions of contingent faculty, there is still a surprising lack of awareness about the magnitude of the problem. This is because the information flows in narrow channels and doesn’t reach undergraduates or their parents. Monographs, collections of essays, even the Facebook page Con Job, which raises awareness about the obstacles facing contingent teachers are written and read by adjunct instructors, with occasional participation from activist tenured professors, most notably Marc Bousquet, who meaningfully expands on an exposé begun by Paul Lauter nearly forty years ago. Undergraduates, I suspect, have no awareness of these conversations.²

Nor, if my impression of the discipline of English is any indication, do most tenured professors in the humanities. I can’t help being disappointed that critical university studies (as it’s currently called), despite its intellectual vibrancy and polemical sharpness, has never risen above the status of a cottage industry. I would have had a more obvious, though by no means guaranteed, path toward professional advancement had I continued publishing about eighteenth-century British literature than I did by spending the past ten years publishing and speaking about academic labor. Writing about the texts we study is readily classifiable by our profession; writing about what we do for a living is not.

Of course, there’s one final problem: What if students, their parents, and their legislators don’t care if the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the humanities, in particular, continues to diminish, and with it that population of teachers loyal to one institution and conversant with their role in that institution, familiar with the kinds of people they teach, and, one hopes, devoted to ongoing pedagogical innovation? What if they don’t care if their general education courses in the humanities are taught by adjuncts working at multiple institutions, sometimes teaching five courses a term for near–minimum wage (the average adjunct English instructor is paid $2,987 per course).³ So long as the students get the course credit, what does it matter? If these questions are being posed and the priorities are being set accordingly—and in some circles they might be—then that’s the fault of professors. From the point at which adjunct labor began to be the norm more than thirty years ago until now, we few remaining professors have had ample time to fashion a compelling argument about why it’s a bad idea to let this new model of instruction in the liberal arts continue. I find the standard justifications of the liberal arts to be a collage of platitudes. Critical thinking is frequently referenced but rarely explained. The notion that the liberal arts provide preparation for an informed democratic citizenry is absurd. Goebbels wrote an apparently brilliant Ph.D. thesis on nineteenth-century German drama. He was still Goebbels. Studying the liberal arts can make students smarter, but it can’t reset their moral compasses. So we didn’t make a very good case for ourselves because we confused ethical with intellectual training, and now I fear that the time is too late for us to do it.

In 2008 I devoted considerable attention to for-profit higher education. I still think for-profits give us the best insights into the most common business models for future universities. Specifically, I believe that, going forward, we can best gauge the impact of the erosion of tenure by redrawing the map of online higher education, for that is where we find the heaviest concentration of tenure-ineligible instructors and the most institution-friendly legal climate. That arena has changed considerably since I wrote about it and continues to develop in ways that affect everything from pedagogical practice to intellectual-property conflicts. By studying these aspects of online learning, we can gain a detailed understanding of the kinds of workers who will ultimately succeed professors. Online higher education as we currently recognize it was first widely adapted by for-profit universities, pioneered by John Sperling’s Apollo Group, and its flagship, the University of Phoenix. After that institution began offering a varied menu of online courses, many other for-profits followed suit. In 1999, Jones International University became the first university to offer accredited undergraduate degrees entirely online; even earlier, in 1995, Walden University became the first institution to offer graduate degrees entirely online.⁴

These two developments—the further erosion of tenure coupled with the expansion of online education, where tenure is rarely part of faculty compensation—mark the beginnings of the latest transformation of the landscape of higher education. For-profit universities, still flourishing in 2008, have retrenched significantly. Apollo Group, which still operates the University of Phoenix, was taken private in 2016. Strayer University is both smaller and poorer after having had to pay millions in fines and legal settlements for deceptive recruiting practices. Corinthian Colleges went out of business in 2014 for the same reason, as did the even larger ITT Tech in 2016.⁵ The heyday of MOOCs (Massive Open Enrollment Online courses) proved to be extremely short-lived, with Sebastian Thrun’s much-publicized pivot away from the higher-education market sending a telling message to universities, such as those in the California State system, which sought to form business partnerships with MOOCs.⁶ On the rise now are hybrid institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University and Indiana Wesleyan University, which have expanded rapidly in the past decade and a half, primarily by buying cash-strapped small colleges and vocational schools and, more significantly, growing their online offerings.⁷ IWU’s enrollment currently stands at nearly 16,000, SNHU’s at 60,000, all but 3,100 of whom study entirely online.⁸ They resemble for-profits in several important ways: They are expensive compared with public universities with similar curricula, they predominantly operate online, they spend a large percentage of their revenue on advertising, and very few of their faculty are eligible for tenure. Then there is the unique case of Purdue University, which in April 2017 finalized a deal to buy the for-profit Kaplan University. From a certain perspective, the purchase makes a great deal of sense. No doubt feeling pressure to expand online course offerings, Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, a man with no academic experience but with a résumé that includes high-ranking positions with Eli Lilly, a position as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration, and the governorship of Indiana, saw the chance to expand Purdue’s audience in short order by making an acquisition, so he did. Kaplan brings Purdue nearly 16,000 online students who are accustomed to that method of learning, as well as a large faculty of its own familiar with online teaching. Whether a for-profit institution can exist under the umbrella of a land-grant university in the face of opposition from current Purdue faculty remains to be seen.⁹ Despite all the similarities between hybrid institutions and for-profits, especially the advertising budget and the absence of tenure, the critical difference that SNHU and IWU (and soon, I predict, more like them) and the original for-profits is that they are answerable not to shareholders but to students, and that’s significant. This difference goes a long way toward legitimizing them as venues of higher education and makes them likely candidates to be the universities of the future. As we enter a post-professorial higher-education world, my central question of ten years ago becomes more focused.

Then, I predicted that professors would be absorbed into the general class of service- and low-level professional workers. Now I think it’s possible to see more clearly what those future workers will look like. A detailed and well-conceived survey by Steve Street, Maria Maisto, Esther Merves, and Gary Rhoades published as a policy report, Who is Professor ‘Staff’? And how can this person teach so many classes?" is a useful starting point on the important topics of hiring practices and working conditions.¹⁰ The profile of the typical contingent faculty member is, according to their essay, grimmer than it was when I researched The Last Professors. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed reported that they taught part-time, raising obvious questions about eligibility for health insurance and benefits, which the report doesn’t directly address. Fifty-four percent teach at more than one institution; 11 percent teach at three universities; 6 percent teach at four (4).

In addition to very low pay, which forces full-time contingent faculty in the arts and sciences to adapt to a life of self-exploitation, a just-in-time managerial approach has spread aggressively from the corporate sector to higher education. Driven by a priority list that places efficiency in staffing above all else, this managerial style has created a condition that Street et al. term double contingency (7). Because the enrollments in the general education courses that so many contingent faculty teach are unpredictable, with sections filling up at the last minute, cost-conscious administrators often also wait until the last minute to assign courses. They defend this practice by citing the need for flexibility, and, of course, they can impose this practice only on contingent faculty.

The survey that yielded Who is Professor ‘Staff’? asked pointed, practical questions about what just-in-time course preparation means for teachers and students. Almost two-thirds reported receiving three weeks or less notice to prepare for their class (5–6). For some, the timeline was even shorter: I was told the week classes start, reported one; another responded, I teach several courses online … and those courses typically give me about a three-day notice (6). The secondary effect of giving contingent faculty such short notice of their teaching schedules is easy to predict. As one respondent notes: By not giving me the time and materials I need to be prepared, my department is, in effect, limiting my ability to be successful in the classroom (7).

The problems only escalate from there. Because contingent faculty are so often assigned courses on the fly, they frequently find themselves jerry-rigging syllabi and teaching from textbooks that become available to them only days before classes begin. Moreover, 94 percent of the survey respondents received no departmental or institutional campus orientation. One respondent draws the obvious conclusion: It certainly does not benefit my students that I have no information on the department’s curriculum guidelines (9). Finally, contingent faculty, because of their just-in-time patchwork schedules, often don’t know one another. Says one, I’ve … never met any of the other instructors teaching this course. This means it will be impossible for me to do collaborative activities with my colleagues (9). Those of us who study academia would no doubt answer several of Street et al.’s basic questions fairly accurately: The estimates about limited access to copying services, library privileges, and office space, for example, are discouraging but not surprising. Where the authors excel, however, is in connecting the dots between instructors and students, in showing concretely that the casualization of academic labor both demoralizes teachers and undermines their effectiveness in the classroom. This in turn shortchanges students’ learning experiences because, no matter how talented and committed their instructors are, they cannot do their best work in the face of such roadblocks.

If we push further and ask how these demoralizing working conditions and systemic disaggregation shape the professional personae of the workers who will eventually completely succeed professors, we find even more troubling results. In 2008, I cited an important article by Micki McGee, Hooked on Education and Other Tales from Adjunct Faculty Organizers, about her stint as an adjunct at New York University. The piece still resonates. She touches on the cultural and social capital of being able to say to those unfamiliar with academic hierarchy that she taught at a prestigious university. To insiders, however, her most shocking claims come from an NYU handbook for adjuncts. The handbook expressly forbids contingent faculty from discussing their employment status with students. The rationale, though not articulated, is nonetheless straightforward: If undergraduates and their parents are spending a small fortune on tuition, it would be awkward for them to discover that many of the school’s instructors are compensated so wretchedly.¹¹

What I assumed then to be a top-down mandate—don’t talk about your status or working conditions—however, turns out to be a more complex phenomenon. Many contingent faculty seem to internalize this very message, making their relationship to their jobs opaque and confusing students’ understanding of their learning environment. Street et al. make the point that contingent instructors’ decision not to talk about their working conditions can serve an important tactical purpose. Their point: A desire to keep working conditions invisible to students is understandable; if students are unhappy with class resources, the faculty member is punished by poor student evaluations, which could lead to job loss (13). Yet the responses from those polled seem more ambivalent. One worries, I am concerned that my adjunct status and relative lack of job security conveys to students that I am not a significant member of the university faculty, a second-class citizen, if you will (13). Two other respondents spoke more confessionally: My personal experience has had no effect on my students as most are not aware of the contingent nature of my work and I don’t let it show (13). I don’t allow my personal experiences to impact my teaching behavior (13). Anecdotal information gathered on condition of anonymity from students pursuing degrees entirely online, and thus taught exclusively by contingent faculty, yielded two intriguing common denominators. First, in their introductory posts, instructors almost always asked to be addressed by their first names, or by Doctor if they have a Ph.D. (a title that is a credential but that doesn’t denote a rank or status at an institution). Second, and more tellingly, instructors never corrected students about the title by which they were addressed. That is, if a student addressed an instructor with an M.A. as professor in an online discussion post, that student was not informed of the instructor’s actual status.¹² Though the information we have about how contingent faculty think of their working conditions and their status is fragmented, it is imperative that the professors among us try to draw conclusions from it. Contingent faculty now constitute a significant majority of the postsecondary teaching workforce and will eventually replace traditional professors at all but a handful of very expensive private institutions.

The profile that emerges is deeply conflicted. On the one hand, contingent faculty acknowledge that their working conditions, particularly the practice of just-in-time staff management, hinder their ability to be effective in the classroom. On the other hand, they feel the need to conceal their professional obstacles and hardships from their students. I would argue that it is impossible either to criticize or to defend this kind of compartmentalization unless one has actually worked as an adjunct and has first-hand knowledge of what’s at stake rhetorically. The second common thread—not admitting to adjunct status because it implies that one is a second-rate citizen in one’s department, not correcting students who address you by the wrong title—seem more psychologically difficult. Both moves strike me as attempts to cling to a job description that is no longer relevant at many universities and that is steadily disappearing at many others. Contingent faculty are not second-class citizens in the academy; for the most part, they are the faculty and will be almost exclusively so as higher education continues to develop along its current path. As such, there should be no stigma attached to the status of adjunct and no reason for instructors to mystify their status by introducing themselves by their first names only, or by not correcting students who address them as professor. To do so is to miss an opportunity to enlighten students about the makeup of present-day academia, most importantly to dispel the myth that all teaching is done by traditional professors, something that hasn’t been true of most institutions for more than thirty years.

One of the best answers to the question of how the redefinition of teaching will change the arts and sciences is, I believe, provided by the economist Caroline M. Hoxby in a recent white paper, The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education.¹³ Hoxby is at her best when analyzing inequalities in American higher education, and this paper reveals a stark division in the educational experiences among the country’s college students. An earlier important study by Hoxby revealed, in effect, a class inequality in higher education generally: Graduates of highly selective universities earn twice as much over their lifetimes as graduates of nonselective universities.¹⁴ This newest study retains the same categories but focuses on the scholarly credentials of faculty and the place of research more broadly, and the pedagogical practices typically employed at each kind of school. Her findings are thus more germane to the overview of the rapidly transforming university that I wish to sketch here. For nonselective postsecondary institutions (and many of the latter are predominantly online) Hoxby uses four-year and two-year colleges and universities that require only a high school diploma or GED for admission—in other words, open enrollment institutions. For highly selective postsecondary education she uses institutions in Barron’s most competitive category, schools whose students’ median SAT or ACT scores were at or above the 95th percentile (3–4). The differences she found are striking. Course material is fairly standard at nonselective institutions: 36 percent of courses cover basic or general material that is contained in standard textbooks (5). Multiple-choice and other easily graded assignments are a primary basis for assessment (5). She specifies: 70 percent of courses use multiple-choice examinations which are often supplied with the textbook. [Thirty-six] percent of courses require students to grade one another’s work in class—a procedure that is only possible when problems and answers are straightforward. Only 5 percent of students write term or research papers that are graded by the instructor (5). Given these standard pedagogical practices, it is not surprising, Hoxby notes, that, however charismatic and articulate an instructor at a nonselective institution may be, he or she evidently does not need to be a cutting-edge researcher to explain the material. She backs this speculation up: The average instructor at a nonselective college or university has 0.2 recent refereed publications.… Only 12 percent … have a Ph.D., and only 6 percent … have