On the Lack of Academic Solidarity

Robert Kuttner notes that academics complaining about the decline of tenure would have more of a ground to stand on if they had cared about the adjunctification of the academy.

In 1915, the modern tenure system was codified by the American Association of University Professors, and gradually adopted by nearly all universities. One key argument was that since college teachers were not as well paid as counterparts in the private sector with comparable credentials, they would at least get job security and academic freedom.

Fast-forward a century. Tenure is not doing a great job of protecting academic freedom, because increasingly scholars of heterodox views never get tenure in the first place. This leads to insidious pressure on young academics to pull their punches and accommodate to the orthodoxy, some of which cries out for dissent.

Meanwhile, the percentage of college professors who are in tenure-track jobs has steadily fallen, in favor of lowly adjuncts. Between 1987 and 2021, according to the AAUP, the number of university teachers with contingent jobs rose from 47 to 68 percent. By definition, adjuncts have neither job security, decent pay, nor academic freedom. They are on short-term contracts that are subject to nonrenewal. Counting prep time, they earn about minimum wage.

Academia, like so much of American society, has divided into a nicely compensated dwindling elite, and an army of serfs who are so harried that they lack the time to be first-class instructors, much less researchers. The AAUP, representing the elite, has issued reports and statements of outrage about the state efforts to abolish or weaken tenure. They would have more credibility if they put as much effort into resisting the plague of contingent teachers.

This is fine as far as it goes. It is absolutely true that tenured academics faced the rise of contingency with a combination of indifference, putting heads in sands, and resignation.

But I don’t see how this could have gone any different.

The reason for this is simple–academics are the worst.

The concept of solidarity is basically unknown in academia, even in those places, like my own, that have a strong union. There are so many problems here that get in way of academics coming together in solidarity with contingents and it all stems from the fact that they treat each other like complete garbage. Here’s a quick list of issues:

1. Faculty holding grudges against other faculty for years or even decades
2. The belief that you got your tenure-track job because you are better than everyone else at what you do
3. The atmosphere created in elite graduate schools, both in terms of a lack of respect for others and a lack of respect for colleagues from less elite institutions
4. Departments believing other departments should not exist (many engineers and more than a few scientists and business professors would happily eliminate all the humanities and social sciences and will flat out say so)
5. Pay divisions between departments that are strongly defending by the professional programs making more money, to the point of, say, voting against a union contract because it gives slightly higher raises by percentage to lower paid faculty even if the overall numerical total is higher for the professional professors
6. The complete lack of reasonable social skills endemic to many, though most certainly not all, faculty
7. The sheer loneliness of academia in many fields that are not collaborative creates isolation and indifference toward others
8. The lack of wanting to do committee work that creates unequal work loads across the university
9. Or, on the other hand, the ways that faculty who do not do research anymore (which is at least half of tenured faculty, to be honest, throw themselves into committee work in order to justify their existence on campus and then blame research-productive faculty for not being on board with whatever the dean’s new thing is
10. Faculty who think administration is their friends because administration largely came out of faculty and those friendships endure, thus creating an atmosphere in which whatever faculty trying to organize and start something within their unions say, it always gets back to administration in about 5 minutes.
11. Faculty who are justifying their lack of research/overcome their boredom with teaching/wanting more money by desperately wanting to become administration and thus allying with the administration on whatever to serve their own interests

I am sure all of you can come up with more problems with organizing faculty across class lines.

So the idea of faculty coming together to work with adjuncts and fight for all together may in fact not be totally impossible–and Rutgers has done more than probably any other school on this–but there are huge barriers to any kind of meaningful organizing on campuses because, to be blunt, as a class, faculty suck. I can tell you with absolute truth that faculty unions spend much more time trying to adjudicate issues between faculty who hate each other for vague reasons than they do fighting the administration.