The Adjunct Crisis: How Academic Leftists Have Destroyed 150 Years of Leftism

I’ve been talking about the adjunct crisis (in which part-time professors at our colleges and universities are exploited) ever since I began blogging. As the title of this post indicates, I talk about it because it is such a momentous episode in leftism. It is as momentous as the exploitation of factory workers back in the Industrial Revolution of two hundred years ago. This isn't because the numbers of exploited are comparable, but because of where it is happening: in that bastion of leftism, academia. Academic leftists are inadvertently participating in the refutation of so much of what they and other leftists have been trying to promote for so many years. Let me enumerate the ways in which they are destroying themselves, at least as far as economic policy is concerned.

1. There is no reason to hate profits. Since the exploitation of adjuncts is happening in non-profit institutions, there is no more reason to hate profits. Profits were hated because they represented money stolen from the exploited workers, but in this case there are no profits, yet the exploitation is happening anyway.

2. There is no reason to think that non-profits are morally superior to profit-making enterprises. By extension from (1).

3. There is no reason to like the government. Since the exploitation is happening in institutions some of which are run by the government, then there is no more reason to think that government is the solution.

4. There is no reason to hate corporations. Since the exploitation is not happening in a corporation, there is no more reason to hate them or to think of them as the locus of exploitation. Yes, one can complain about how a corporate atmosphere is somehow infecting academia, maybe because all the administrators are right-wing, but a story at this link – hat tip: Steve Burri – tells of Professor M, who was being treated badly by not just a dean, but also by her department chair, who is presumably on the left. Nor is this the only such example. I myself have witnessed examples of left-leaning professors behaving badly, plus a friend mentioned a Marxist professor who as chair had been happy to dump an adjunct for a grad student, “because they’re cheaper.”

The skeptics on the left will say that this is anecdotal evidence. But so is the claim that all administrators are right-wing. (Most may become right-wing when they become administrators, but that is a different thing.) What can’t be denied, however, is the near-total lack of action on the part of tenured liberals and leftists. When the situation first became bad, twenty years ago, I expected a flurry of activity on their part. I expected that papers discussing solutions would be given at conferences. I expected entire sessions of conferences devoted to the problem. I expected entire conferences devoted to the problem. I expected articles in journals on the situation (especially those like Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs and also leftist journals like Radical Philosophy). I expected entire issues of journals to be devoted to the problem. But what happened instead? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever happened.

By 1996 Cary Nelson had written Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, complaining about the lack of action, but that still didn’t change much of anything. Now, more than twenty years into the crisis, nothing much has changed. Letters to the editor in the Chronicle of Higher Education from fifteen years ago make the same complaints that adjuncts today make. So, let me repeat what I said a sentence ago: nothing much has changed.

Pick out your favorite leftist academic, and it’s a good bet they have nothing to say on the situation. Noam Chomsky? Martha Nussbaum? No one who is prominent has weighed in and offered a solution. And it is not as though they don’t have the time. They have plenty of time to talk about and rail against American foreign policy. Every tenured leftist does. Yet, they somehow don’t have time to deal with a situation that is closer to home and makes them look bad.

5. There is no reason to hate capitalism. Since this is happening in academia and not the usual venues of capitalism (in small businesses, in corporations, and on Wall Street), there just isn’t any reason to hate capitalism anymore. Exploitation can take place whether capitalism is present or not. In fact, this exploitation could have happened prior to the rise of capitalism, since universities go back to the medieval period, while capitalism doesn’t. The fact that it happened after capitalism arose means nothing.

6. There is no reason to hate free-market solutions. Since by their inaction, academic liberals and leftists have chosen a free-market solution to the adjunct crisis, then why hate them? My own solution, which I have offered a number of times on these pages, is for a voluntary redistribution from tenured liberals and leftists to the adjuncts. The fact that no one on the left has offered this is not to their credit. Moreover, the occasional suggestion (from adjuncts, I am sorry to say, who ought to have thought things through better than this) that people from outside should have to pay more into academia in order to help is totally worthless. Why should those from outside have to help when it is not their problem? Anyway, there is plenty of money sloshing around in academia, as the gigantic endowment of Harvard shows. The money is simply maldistributed.

7. There is no reason to like socialism. As I said in my previous point, my preferred solution is a voluntary redistribution, but no tenured leftist has adopted this. In fact, no academic leftist seems to want socialism within academia. This is a strange position to adopt, to say the least. If you like a system, and you have a chance to implement it, why not then do it? The preponderance of liberals and leftists in academia means that now is the right time to do it, since conservative opposition will be weak. In addition, doing it and doing it successfully would show the rest of the world how wonderful socialism is. Yet, there are no calls to “socialize academia.” Why? Is it because academia is some special realm in which socialism ought not to be imposed? Is it because socialism really needs to be done at the government level and won’t work at any lesser level? All of these need to be argued for, but all we are getting from tenured leftists is silence.

8. There is no reason to like the left and to hate the right. Since it is leftists who are doing this, or at least acquiescing in it, why like the left? The situation described by Nelson in the aforementioned book, in which some tenured leftists stomped on a grad student union at Yale, says it all:

Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own courses, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the union's] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades.... Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given.... (page 143).

Since the right isn’t doing this, why hate them?

What, then, is left for the left? Oh, I know perfectly well that phrases like “people before profits” and disparaging comments on “corporate interests” may be around for decades. But for anyone who has half a brain, the adjunct crisis, and more specifically the left’s failure to respond to it, represent the death of leftism insofar as it is concerned with the poor. What’s left? Identity politics and environmentalism.

What, then, should the right be doing? Mentioning the adjunct situation as often as possible.

Comments

[Borepatch]

Well said.