CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Professor as Featherbedder
WITH OUT MAJOR CHANGES IN POLICY, college and university professors are likely to become an endangered species in the decades ahead—and unionization and political lobbying are unlikely to help any more than they have helped to protect the anthracite coal mines or the railroads.
In their own self-interest, faculty members need radically new policy in three areas. They need an effective substitute for a self-defeating tenure policy. They need systematic personnel development to enable them to benefit from future opportunities. And they need organized placement of the middle-aged, average professor in work and careers outside of academe. But, above all, faculty members need management—either self-imposed management or management by administrators.
The one change in status that professors are likely to resist the most strenuously is any change in the tenure system. But tenure will increasingly become a threat—even to tenured faculty members. Rather than protect professors against change, it will entrap them. Without changes in tenure policy, colleges will soon be unable to bring in new people. That, in turn, can only accelerate the decline in graduate enrollment, thus creating greater pressures to cut both faculty size and faculty salaries. But at the same time, for twenty or more years ahead, college faculties will be aging—and any group unable to renew itself becomes stagnant, stale; ultimately, it putrifies. The present tenure policy condemns higher education to becoming a declining industry and eventually a dying industry. Colleges are likely to become the railroads of the knowledge industry.
Tenure in its present form does not even protect faculty members who possess it. If there is no way to adjust faculty assignments to changes in enrollment and revenue—and this is what present tenure policy implies—then there are only three ways to go.
One is to continue the downward pressure on salaries, and especially on the salaries of the great majority—the merely competent professors of forty-five or fifty. It is self-delusion to believe that political or union pressure on legislatures can even slow the erosion of faculty incomes; there would be mighty little political sympathy for the professor, nor indeed would the professor deserve more than any other featherbedder.
A second way would be for college administrators to close down entire departments and areas of study. A college may have enough students for a fine arts department of three or four faculty members. But if the department has nine professors, all of them tenured, then the only way to adjust is to drop the fine arts department. And if the courts rule that this violates tenure, that tenure gives a right to a job, then we may see the wholesale closing of a number of institutions—and by no means only small ones.
The third way would be to give professors a series of contracts—maybe three-three-five-five-five years, with an automatic extension for one year in case the contract is not renewed, thus giving the faculty member ample time to look around. The decision to grant a contract would have to be made with due process, which would imply not only faculty participation but also outside participation by distinguished and respected members of the faculties of other institutions, and preferably of other disciplines as well, and probably also of laymen, particularly alumni. Only after a person had held five or six contracts—by which time he or she would probably be past fifty—would tenure be in order.
College faculty members also need organized personnel development. They need to prepare themselves for the opportunities ahead. For we can expect to see substantial growth of college enrollments in two areas: in the continuing education, both professional and general, of already highly schooled adults and in the community college. But young academicians today are not encouraged to make themselves employable in respect to these opportunities. Anyone who has worked in continuing-education programs for adults, whether in advanced management programs or in programs in the humanities (and I have done both) knows that the great majority of faculty members, even able ones, cannot do the work, fail, and have to be removed. They do not know how to teach, especially how to teach adults. They are so narrowly specialized as to appear virtually illiterate to mature, experienced men and women. In the community college the ability to relate subject matter to experience, to application, to learning—though at a much lower level—is equally needed.
The system of rewards and incentives in higher education promotes specialization and isolation. Although this may be the right direction today for an individual faculty member at the start, it will increasingly be the wrong direction, considering the opportunities of tomorrow, for his development and employability. To get ahead, to get promoted, to get more pay, the academic will have to be employable where the opportunities will be—that is in advanced and continuing education of adults or in the community college.
There is need, in other words, for systematic development of faculty personnel. There is need for doing in academic life what is now standard practice in all other areas of employment in the knowledge industries: systematic self-development of the professional, in view of his or her own desires and abilities and in view of the needs and opportunities of profession, employer, market, and society. Concretely, this means exposing younger academicians to the challenges of teaching and research work outside of their own specialties; to teaching and research with different kinds of students; and to opportunities for learning, especially for learning a bit about teaching.
If there is no organized self-development of the individual in academe, we are likely to see imposed efficiency and compulsory conformity, as opportunities for employment, advancement, and income change. Instead of looking at individuals and asking, “What are their strengths and desires, their greatest opportunities, their greatest needs?” we may well rush into a standardized training program. It is precisely because the strength of higher education lies in diversity and in individual and highly specific contributions that faculty members need an organized and directed development effort, an effort focused both on the strengths and desires of the individual faculty member and on the opportunities in higher education.
Finally, academe needs organized placement—as much as any other group in the knowledge fields, if not more so. It needs such efforts, above all, for the middle-aged, mid-career faculty member, the man or woman of forty-five whose own self-interest in a great many cases demands placement outside of academe and in other work.
By the time faculty members reach their early or mid-forties, they typically have been in academic life for twenty years—and typically have not worked in any other environment. Most faculty members, by that time, have done all the research and have written all the books they will ever write. Beyond that age only a very small number of first-rate people remain productive. To be sure, these scholars and teachers who continue to produce are the people of whom everybody thinks when talking of historians, anthropologists, or metallurgists—but their number is very small indeed. The rest have, in effect, retired into boredom. They know their stuff, but they are no longer excited by it. They need a different environment, a different challenge, a different career. They need to be “repotted.”
This middle-aged faculty member is far from being burned out. But he is bored. And the common remedies—to get a divorce and take up with a nineteen-year-old undergraduate; to take to the bottle; to take to the psychoanalyst’s couch—don’t cure the disease. And unless this competent but bored person finds a new challenge, a new environment, and different work and different colleagues, irreversible deterioration soon sets in.
Professors need organized placement efforts which find the outside opportunities, whether in government, in industry, or in professional practice, and which help the individual to move to them. And this is also the one best way to restore higher education’s ability to attract young people at a time of shrinking enrollments and budgets.
Other professions have long ago recognized that they have to place people. The young lawyers, accountants, or management consultants, no matter how well they perform, will be placed elsewhere by their fi rm if, around age thirty-fi ve, they do not look like the right people for a partnership, that is if they lack the ability to conduct an assignment for a client or to bring in new clients. Ten years later, senior members of these professional practices look again at their partners and place elsewhere those who are not going to become senior partners. While not a contractual obligation, the placement efforts of the accounting fi rm or management consulting fi rm guarantee the associate an attractive job that fi ts the individual’s abilities, needs, and the stage of his or her personal life cycle.
Faculty members have these needs too. Yet such solutions do not fit in easily with the traditional concept of the scholar—whether the German Herr Professor or the English don. But American college and university faculty members today no longer fit those European models. Jobs for 500,000 or so faculty members exist only because higher education has become an employment—a very large employment. But even though higher education has become mass education and big business, we must do the things that will save the essence of the scholar: freedom, self-direction, leadership role. Otherwise, college and university faculty members in twenty years will have become just employees—junior high school teachers with inflated degrees and deflated pay—in their standing, their self-respect, their influence, and their role in society.
(1979)