Reader Mark Spahn sent a link to this post by Maverick Philosopher, which contains a further link to this article by a professor named Robert Paul Wolff, who has a blog called The Philosopher’s Stone. He talks about the secret of his success, which as he acknowledges was basically coming along at the right time. He compares it to a story of two cockroaches who fall off a wagon but have different fates. One lands in a pile of dung and becomes fat and happy, while the other lands in a storm drain and nearly drowns. When the second cockroach eventually saves himself and finds the first one, he asks how he managed to get fat, and the first one says, “Brains, and hard work.”
This is meant to be a metaphor of the differences between life in academia back in the 1950s and 1960s, and what it is like today. Back then, it was easy to get a job. My father-in-law, for example, had a few different jobs before ending up at the University of Akron, where he taught history. Before accepting that job, he had accepted another job, but then skipped out on them, something that is unimaginable today. (Do I begrudge him his luck? Not at all, because during WWII he fought at Omaha Beach and in the Battle of the Bulge. If anyone deserved the academic high life, he did.)
Today, it is different. It is true that my wife was offered two tenure-track jobs which she turned down. But here’s the difference between then and now. These jobs were clearly worthless jobs, and she was right to turn them down, despite the flak she got from her friends. We could easily see that they were going to work her to death and then deny her tenure. One institution called her three or four times to entice her to come, but what was telling was the way they did it because each time they called they added some more duties. This really isn’t the way to bargain with people, but they counted on people today being so desperate that they would be willing to accept the extra duties. My wife said she’d rather be at Burger King than to do all that.
Anyway, in that far-off time when it was so easy to get an academic job, those offering jobs didn’t care very much about where the candidate was from. As Maverick Philosopher notes, one person, who was hired sight unseen, couldn’t even speak English.
But once the tide changed and jobs became scarce, everything changed. Neither writer notes this, but what happened was a steady upward progression in the class background of those hired. This was because once jobs became scarce and the supply of candidates correspondingly became large, colleges and universities realized they could get the best of the best: people from Harvard and Yale. And such people were more likely than not to have come from wealthy backgrounds.
This has been going on for some time now, and naturally many places realize they can’t always get people from Harvard and Yale. Sometimes they find that those people leave after a year or two for someplace better. Sometimes they want a certain specialty and have to settle for people from lesser places. Sometimes they want someone who can do two types of thing and have to settle for people like my wife, who can teach both Western and Asian art history but who went to the University of Kansas.
Nevertheless, the basic trend has survived, and if you come out of an ordinary midwestern university, you’d better be prepared for life teaching at a community college because that’s where you may end up.
I have to say that I never thought much about class as a grad student. Some of my professors had been to elite schools, and some hadn’t. It didn’t occur to me to notice till later that it was the older ones who had gone to the non-elite schools, while the younger ones had come from the elite places. That trend has continued; there just seem to be a lot more people in academia these days who come from wealth. They come here and they already have a fancy car. When we arrived here, we had an old beater that was so rusty someone asked us if we were intending to make a political statement. No, we were just poor.
Now what’s interesting politically about all this is that most of these wealthier people are progressives, yet it never seemed to occur to them that the system that gave them jobs was monstrously unfair to poorer people. Instead, they participated in the rise of postmodernism, an intellectual movement that pretends to be liberatory and accordingly progressive, but which is almost completely worthless for actually helping liberate people. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s basically nothing but a safe hobby for wealthy academics who don’t really want to know about what is happening to, say, the adjuncts around them.
This is meant to be a metaphor of the differences between life in academia back in the 1950s and 1960s, and what it is like today. Back then, it was easy to get a job. My father-in-law, for example, had a few different jobs before ending up at the University of Akron, where he taught history. Before accepting that job, he had accepted another job, but then skipped out on them, something that is unimaginable today. (Do I begrudge him his luck? Not at all, because during WWII he fought at Omaha Beach and in the Battle of the Bulge. If anyone deserved the academic high life, he did.)
Today, it is different. It is true that my wife was offered two tenure-track jobs which she turned down. But here’s the difference between then and now. These jobs were clearly worthless jobs, and she was right to turn them down, despite the flak she got from her friends. We could easily see that they were going to work her to death and then deny her tenure. One institution called her three or four times to entice her to come, but what was telling was the way they did it because each time they called they added some more duties. This really isn’t the way to bargain with people, but they counted on people today being so desperate that they would be willing to accept the extra duties. My wife said she’d rather be at Burger King than to do all that.
Anyway, in that far-off time when it was so easy to get an academic job, those offering jobs didn’t care very much about where the candidate was from. As Maverick Philosopher notes, one person, who was hired sight unseen, couldn’t even speak English.
But once the tide changed and jobs became scarce, everything changed. Neither writer notes this, but what happened was a steady upward progression in the class background of those hired. This was because once jobs became scarce and the supply of candidates correspondingly became large, colleges and universities realized they could get the best of the best: people from Harvard and Yale. And such people were more likely than not to have come from wealthy backgrounds.
This has been going on for some time now, and naturally many places realize they can’t always get people from Harvard and Yale. Sometimes they find that those people leave after a year or two for someplace better. Sometimes they want a certain specialty and have to settle for people from lesser places. Sometimes they want someone who can do two types of thing and have to settle for people like my wife, who can teach both Western and Asian art history but who went to the University of Kansas.
Nevertheless, the basic trend has survived, and if you come out of an ordinary midwestern university, you’d better be prepared for life teaching at a community college because that’s where you may end up.
I have to say that I never thought much about class as a grad student. Some of my professors had been to elite schools, and some hadn’t. It didn’t occur to me to notice till later that it was the older ones who had gone to the non-elite schools, while the younger ones had come from the elite places. That trend has continued; there just seem to be a lot more people in academia these days who come from wealth. They come here and they already have a fancy car. When we arrived here, we had an old beater that was so rusty someone asked us if we were intending to make a political statement. No, we were just poor.
Now what’s interesting politically about all this is that most of these wealthier people are progressives, yet it never seemed to occur to them that the system that gave them jobs was monstrously unfair to poorer people. Instead, they participated in the rise of postmodernism, an intellectual movement that pretends to be liberatory and accordingly progressive, but which is almost completely worthless for actually helping liberate people. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s basically nothing but a safe hobby for wealthy academics who don’t really want to know about what is happening to, say, the adjuncts around them.
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