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Tuesday, September 14, 2004
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FULL TO BURSTING [The Slain Chronicle Essay]
I haven't told my department chair yet, but I don't want to be promoted to Full. I'm a tenured Associate Professor in the humanities at a good private university on the eastern seaboard; I publish; I'm reasonably well-known (I'm recently back from France, having been invited to be a visiting professor at a university there), get good teaching reviews, introduce a new course almost every year, and do my bit on university committees. In short, a pretty good candidate for promotion. So why don't I want it? Well, think about it. You've thought about tenure because of the perennial controversies over whether tenure should be abolished or reformed or ignored. And you've thought about non-tenured teaching because of the notorious ethical problems involving adjuncts. You've even begun thinking about post-tenure review, perhaps, because it's the latest fad and lots of people are talking about it. But I doubt you've thought much about promotion to Full. Why is that? "It means so little," said my husband, also a professor, when I mentioned the subject. "Why think about it? It doesn't amount to much." "Well, if it means so little and doesn't amount to much," I responded, "why does it exist?" "Um. People need incentives to be productive. And Full means more money and more prestige." "Full doesn't typically mean that significant a raise. Plus you can give people very good raises without changing their titles. And vanity is a motivation unworthy of scholars. If professors are primarily motivated by prestige, give every productive faculty member a Porsche." Of course I know the situation is more complicated than this. Americans are programmed to have unquenchable ambition. They are always restlessly seeking the next step on the ladder. The Chronicle's own Ms. Mentor, responding to a recent plaint from a bitter stuck-in-Associate professor, pointed out that "Academics are people who have been successes in school. They've followed a linear model of upward striving. They've aced tests, graced the honor roll, filled up the dean's lists. They've survived the graduate-school rite of passage, landed a job, and triumphed to tenure. Always, they've moved up to the next level. ...You must push onward and upward to the last stop, to the Mount Everest world of full professordom." Indeed, in the American academic hierarchy, "lifelong associate professor" and "junior senior" are among the most frightening phrases you can hear; they are uncomfortably close to the ultimate scare-quote: deadwood. And this sort of thing describes not just academics, but virtually all Americans, most academics being like everybody else. So then, problem solved: Once you promote your Associates to Full, they will be contentedly productive. But American appetites turn out never to be satisfied, even at the Full. Vladimir Nabokov once said, with evident satisfaction, "I've lived to become that appetizing thing, a Full Professor." But he was Russian. Among Americans, the idea is to keep filling until you're overfull. Full Professor, to take up Ms. Mentor's mountain climbing metaphor, isn't the last stop. It's more like Kangchenjunga than Everest - an impressive peak, no doubt, but there are always a few more meters up ahead. There's always - to paraphrase Arthur Miller - After the Full : named chairs, dual and triple appointments in different departments and universities, executive administrative positions. If there weren't many real-life models for Morris Zapp, the heavy-duty engine of David Lodge's academic satire, Changing Places , when that novel came out, today Zapp has plenty of company. The ranks of Full Professors are now full of people eyeing the extra-plus-fullness available to post-Full Fulls. More and more real-life people look like Harold Bloom, whose overloaded approach to academic life has so compromised his work that a New York Times book reviewer recently called his books "more K-Mart than Yale." A principle of inversion is at work here. The more pretentious your title and lengthy your booklist, the more full of it you look. Arrogance is always a target of satire, and the more saturated with arrogance academia becomes, the more absurd. We expect Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe to be arrogant, but many people think that for professors, as John Jeffries Martin points out in a recent article in Academe, "the primary motivation in academic life must be the sense that it is, indeed, one's calling" rather than one's ticket to riches and a title. "It is indeed odd to see this love of titles...growing up in a country of which the recognition of individuality...has so long been supposed to be the very soul," complained William James in 1903 as American academia began the process of aping the pompous European hierarchies. One hundred years later, Martin is still saying the same thing: "We needn't parade ourselves and our titles before the public or one another like the royalty of an imaginary kingdom. ... Our calling is to be rigorous about the intellectual life; our duty is to foster institutional structures that do not reduce the life of the mind." The survival of the sense - vestigial though it may be today - that the university is a constitutively different place from the corporation, that something called "the life of the mind" rather than the life of the market goes on there, and that professors embody values higher than those of the marketplace, explains why, as highlighted in a recent Chronicle article, professors in the humanities and social sciences are routinely outraged by the enormous salaries professors of finance, real estate, leisure studies, and hotel management earn at their institutions, salaries that dwarf their own. Non-vocational professors who teach things like moral philosophy, ancient history, and English literature wouldn't complain if they didn't somewhere in their mental makeup believe that a university shouldn't be an entirely market-driven, entirely vocational, sort of thing. The survival of this sense of the university's extra-market exceptionalism also explains some of academia's more arcane folkways, such as the practice among academic extra-wide-loads of making fun of themselves when they are introduced in public settings. While being announced, the over-named gaze downward with an effacing grin; when the drumroll of their titles has finally sounded, they mumble something self-ridiculing, and everyone chuckles. The apparatus of arrogance appears to have been thrust upon me, these professors seem to say, but this is none of my doing. I remain a modest seeker after truth, like you. One tends to understand why the adjuncts in the audiences of these performances feel a bit irritated. "At the conventions these days, resentment is palpable, as celebrities hold forth before colleagues frightened about their chances of getting a job or keeping the one they have," writes Andrew Delbanco. Indeed I've lately discovered, and read with fascination, a number of weblogs written by adjuncts who for various reasons left or are getting pushed out of academia. Some are leaving even as they blog, so there is an emotional immediacy to their sadness, sense of failure, whatever, about leaving, and a financial urgency about finding a job. Others left long ago and may have gone on to lucrative careers, but they still feel sadness, a sense of failure, about having left or having been pushed out. Most of these people are or were in the humanities: history, literature, philosophy. Their comment lists typically feature posters who seem to be in the same or a similar situation. Every now and then a tenured professor in the humanities - someone like Timothy Burke, a professor at Swarthmore who has his own very thoughtful website - drops into these conversations, but it's rare. Academia described from this perspective - a backward, or almost-backward look, featuring what you might call the clarity of pathos - looks pretty accurate to me from my secure and fortunate berth within it. Bitterness and defensiveness are certainly there in the bloggers' descriptions, but these emotions don't seem to me to have distorted the picture the bloggers draw of the typical American humanities department. With the freedom to speak their minds and the intelligence that got them their degrees, they describe a cadre of senior professors willing themselves into a denial of reality profound enough to make Blanche Dubois look like Descartes. Blanche Dubois, though, had a sense of the tragic nature of life. Some of the professors evoked in these blogs look more like Amanda Wingfield, sure that any day now their graduate students will start receiving tenure-track gentleman callers. Still others look like Scarlet O'Hara: faced with graduate programs that haven't placed anyone in a respectable job in years, they say "Fiddledeedee. We'll think about that tomorrow." They are so busy thinking about the next job offer or administrative stint that will enable them to raise their salary and title demands at their home institution that they have not noticed the erosion of their own tenured ranks in American academia and the replacement of these ranks by huge numbers of untenurable and undercompensated instructors. "Tenured faculty, the aristocracy of the university, have been disgracefully complicit in the creation of an academic helot class to subsidize their own upper-middle-class salaries," writes Jack Miles, "but the helots are progressively replacing the aristocrats as the latter retire and are replaced by helots rather than by other aristocrats. What is being phased out, in short, is the very career which tenured faculty once enjoyed and to which new Ph.D.s still vainly aspire." Full professors are the aristocracy of the aristocrats, and that much more disgraceful. This situation, this vast disparity between the restive bottom and the fatuous top of our profession, and the evolution of the professoriate away from a model based upon a calling and toward a model indistinguishable from market greed and vanity, has gradually become morally nauseating to me, and I now see a version of the Ben and Jerry solution as one way to begin setting things right, before large chunks of English departments are run by truckers' unions. For many years (no longer, alas) the ice cream makers imposed a salary cap in their organization: the top executives' salary could be no more than seven times the salary of the lowest-ranking employee. However this played out fiscally, everyone recognized that its most important aspect was symbolic: it symbolized a certain humility, a sense of proportion, decency, and justice, on the part of top management. It said: Way up here at the top, we're making plenty of money, more money than we know what to do with. The disparities are demoralizing and humiliating to other people who make important contributions to our endeavor. I'm not proposing salary caps among the professoriate; I'm proposing that we aristocrats voluntarily restrain our greed and vanity rather than wait for the market to guillotine us; I am proposing that we affirm our shared commitment to something that transcends money and titles. Like money, the apparatus of arrogance is not something that is thrust upon you. It is something you can accept or reject. In an effort to slow the escalating and destructive absurdities of the full/fuller/fullest hierarchies in American academia, John Jeffries Martin argues that we should, among other things, move toward the "elimination of the distinction between associate and full professor." I agree, which is why I don't want the promotion. Lawrence Poston says that "the theory of tenure is based on the burden-of-proof principle. [D]uring the probationary period, the burden of proof is on the individual to demonstrate competence at the level required to achieve tenure at a particular institution. After the award of tenure, however, the burden of proof for his or her discontinuance rests on the institution." If Poston, a dean, is right, then tenure should mean promotion simply to "professor." Not Associate, not Full - just Professor. The elimination of invidious and empty titular distinctions like these would help free many professors to think like thinkers rather than jockeys; it would encourage them to, in Martin's words, "be more at home in [their] chosen vocation." This vocation is one which "depends to a remarkable degree, as [Max] Weber stressed, on inspiration, on intuition, on the accidents of discovery, and on a willingness (always a hazard from the vantage point of the modern bureaucracy) to venture outside one's area of expertise and to risk failure, when it is, generally speaking, the experts who are rewarded." We do not expect the Professor of Real Estate or the Professor of Renal Dysfunction or the Professor of Lobbying to be an intellectual venturing outside of the theory of lending rates or the techniques of dialysis or the modes of influence peddling, in order to generate new ideas. Rather than resenting the huge money they make, we should understand that they are technical instructors with a narrow and highly rewarded expertise, and that for whatever reasons they have been historically misplaced, in our country, in institutions of higher learning, rather than in the vocational schools and apprentice settings where they belong. Most of them are entirely worldly, and titles along with money are an extremely big part of their lives. That's why our universities have to pay them so much to keep them. The overtaking of the American university by such people is too large a problem for us to do anything about at the moment. What we can do, as true scholars, is everything in our power to mark the sharpest distinction possible between our commitment to the life of the mind and their commitment to money and titles. In the matter of money, we should use our years of reflection upon how to live a meaningful life in order to generate a sense of what a decent salary for people like us would be, and then, once we've reached sufficiency, we should stop thinking about our salary. This will, among other things, free us to think about more important things, among them the salaries of our adjuncts. In the matter of titles, we should display indifference toward the puffery of distinctions. We should scrap the pomposity of Full Professor and understand ourselves as professors, pure and simple. |