Twilight of the Professors (The Neoliberal War on Higher Education)

[marmar]

from CounterPunch:


The Neoliberal War on Higher Education
Twilight of the Professors

by MICHAEL SCHWALBE


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. We thus ended up with, to paraphrase Jacoby, a thousand leftist sociologists but no C. Wright Mills.

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. ...................(more)

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/05/twilight-of-the-professors/

[cyberswede]

1. Depressing

Sad to think we peaked as an intellectual society and are now on the downward side.

[yurbud]

2. this is my life.

[MisterP]

3. thanks to Reagan's financial revolution everything's a portfolio

who'da thunk that when the yuppies took over it might mean the end of human life?!