July 26, 2015

Twilight of the professors

Michael Schwalb, Counterpunch - Twenty-eight years ago Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals that the post-WWII expansion of higher education in the U.S. absorbed a generation of radicals who opted to become professors rather than freelance intellectual troublemakers. The constraints and rewards of academic life, according to Jacoby, effectively depoliticized many professors of leftist inclinations. Instead of writing in the common tongue for the educated public, they were carrot and sticked into writing in jargon for tiny academic audiences. As a result, their political force was largely spent in the pursuit of academic careers.

Jacoby acknowledges that universities gave refuge to dissident thinkers who had few other ways to make a decent living. He also grants that careerism did not make it impossible to publish radical work or to teach students to think critically about capitalist society. The problem is that the demands of academic careers made it harder to reach the heights achieved by public intellectuals of the previous generation...

Since Jacoby’s book was published, things have gotten worse. There are still plenty of left-leaning professors in U.S. colleges and universities. But as an employment sector, higher education has changed. There are now powerful conservatizing trends afoot that will likely lead to the extinction of professors as a left force in U.S. society within a few decades.

One major change is that the expanding academic job market that Jacoby observed is now shrinking. When the market for professors was growing, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, radicals could get jobs in universities, earn tenure, and do critical intellectual work, even if it was often muted by a desire for conventional academic rewards. Today, tenure-track jobs are fewer and farther between. In response to reduced budgets and out of a desire for a more “flexible”—that is, cheap, pliable, and disposable—labor force, university administrators have cut tenure-track lines, preferring to hire faculty on a temporary, part-time, non-tenure-track basis... 

5 comments:

LarryC said...

The problem is not with establishment professors...it’s the insidious infection of the university by the ‘green eye shade bean counters’ as they were once called...now unemployable business types and their fellow travelers. Intellectuals from the sixties grew older, had families, and needed a means of support. With their academic credentials they were certainly suited for a career in academia, and with their experience along with their knowledge acquired through many years of school, no one was better for young students. Now they are reaching a point in their life where they are questioning whether it is worth fighting the battles any more. With the bloated endowments, the administrators now have the financial power to control the message by phasing out tenured professors with adjuncts with other full time jobs. They also control the new professors who want a career in teaching by subtly letting them know they have to be a ‘team player’ if they want tenure, and even then it’s not likely. And a universities board of governors is no better. The administration has strategically seated those who have contributed mega dollars to the endowment and have no inkling of what is going on. After all, this is a social position to them with only the pretense of furthering higher education.
The most devastating and insidious is the U.S. governments intervention. By providing billions of dollars in grants to colleges, the incentive is to smile and be a ‘team player’ with the government while shutting down any intellectual dissent. LBJ started that with his phobia of anyone in academia that dared to dissent. Each successive U.S. president has followed the same path, including the current ‘intellectual’ president...Obama. Throw tax money at colleges if they fall in line, and you silence the intellectual.
Twenty eight years after Jacoby’s book, things are worse but for different reasons. There are still intellectuals, but they are not willing to sacrifice themselves when no one in the university is interested in anything other than how to inflate their pay check. The students no longer have any incentive. There is no draft and companies are waiting for them. Forget those who don’t have those opportunities and their best bet is to enlist in a military that is the tool of an imperialistic government bent on world domination...called exceptionalism. There are great intellectual minds out there, brighter than those of the past, but they are staying in the background. Why should they risk their future for a country that is dumbing down. Go Team!

Anonymous said...

They are so full of their own BS and cross talk by the "acceptable to speak in media" intellectuals in essence collectively they have no real clue of what is going on...

A real dumb down is in effect...

Anonymous said...

The professors who matter teach history and law. Black history, behind Eric Foner, has done well. Recent history, as Oliver Stone shows, is still mythology, except for Mark Lane and others outside academia. Law professors support judicial supremacy, except for Kramer. Economists of the Chicago school align with military juntas, Michael Hudson and UMKC excepted. Scholarship has not served the nation, as it did with say Charles Sumner, Lincoln, FDR who kept the electorate well advised.

Colin Brace said...

Carrying the logic of this piece forward, maybe the next generation of radicals won't be co-opted by academia -- since the jobs aren't there any longer -- but will have no choice but to be "freelance intellectual troublemakers". A fanciful notion, to be sure, unless one thinks that radicals have simply become extinct anyway.

Maji said...

Carrying further, I have to acknowledge the impact of all of it at the level of Nature. that is to say, my understanding, inquiry, and research in science, namely Physics, (read understanding the nature of Nature)

The systematic suppression and repression of Liberty through passive-aggressive economic, media, political, and religious manipulation, spying,and militaristic activities has led to a systemic proliferation of the corruption that this phenomenon discussed here reflects very clearly. The pattern is revealing itself all over the place.

One quip comes to mind: "when you cut Nature down with a knife, She comes back at you with a fork."
:}

The next generation of Radicals are already here, and if you know their names, they aren't the ones.