The First of June, it turns out, was a transformational moment in my life, particularly in my work life. On that Monday I noticed that I no longer had access to the faculty web page or the faculty employment portal at the college at which I work.
There were, it is clear in retrospect, forebodings of redundancy several months back. Earlier this year, I received an update from my weak as water union that some adjuncts, of which I am one, were concerned that some of their fall 2021 classes were being "hidden" by the college administration. Today I learned that one of those classes being "held back" was one of my classes, an elective I teach periodically at the college.
The fact that one of my classes was being "held back" combined with the fact that I, for the first time that I can remember since 2010, the year I started working at the current college at which I teach, had no access to the faculty web page and the employment portal, made it crystal clear to me that I had been made redundant even though I had received no communique to that effect from anyone in the college administration or from my department.
To understand why I have been made redundant we need to understand the changing economics, politics, and culture of academia since Ronald Reagan. The American colleges and universities with hale and hearty liberal arts faculties I knew in my college youth are no more. They are no more for several reasons. College
costs, for instance, have risen consistently and dramatically since the neoliberal turn in the core nation
world beginning in the late 1970s. Some have argued that the reason for the increase
in the cost of college is due to decreased state support for once relatively
inexpensive state universities, some of which were even free. One study found that between 2008 and 2017 states
cut funding for state colleges and universities by 16% in real terms. In 2007
state appropriations for full-time students when adjusted for inflation was $8489
in 2007; in 2017 it was $7642. In 2007 students and parents paid about 33% of state
college and university operating budgets; they paid around 50% of state college
and university operating budgets in 2017.
Government
support for colleges and universities has decreased in other core countries across the world as well. For decades post-secondary
institutions in Canada received more than half of their income from federal and
provincial governments. However, according to Statistics Canada, it declined to
47 per cent in the 2017-18 academic year. Public funding of
colleges and universities in Canada peaked in 2010-11 at $22 billion. It fell
to $21 billion in 2016-17. Today the
Canadian federal government primarily supports research in its colleges and universities. As the twenty-first century began the bulk of Canadian college
and university support for operating and capital costs come from the
provinces but provincial support for Canadian colleges is now declining
as well. Between 2010 and 2020 provincial funding for colleges
and universities fell by about 15 per cent.
Not everyone has concurred with the proposition that state support for American colleges and universities has declined and led to periodic crises in higher educational organisations. In an
analysis of the data on spending on American state colleges and universities, Paul Campos found, or so he claimed, that state appropriations for state colleges and
universities had increased. Appropriations reached, Campos concluded,
when they are adjusted for inflation, a record high of $86.6 billion dollars in
2009. State support for colleges and universities, Campos notes, declined because of the Great Recession of 2008 but rose again after that recession to
$81 billion dollars, not quite at the level of state support for colleges in 2009 at least in absolute terms.
So, what, according to Campos, is really driving up the cost of an education at state colleges
and universities. It is, claims Campos, an increase in the number of administrative
personnel or bureaucrats at state universities. Department of Education data indicates
that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between
1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according
to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found
that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State
University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total
number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase.
The number
of bureaucrats and the increasing salaries they are paid has not only put a strain on American
higher education. One study found that in Australia the salaries
of vice-chancellors, the chairperson of the governing body of the
university, was 2.9 times that of lecturers at 37 of Australia’s public
universities—most of Australia’s universities are public—in 1975. By 2017 vice
chancellor salaries at Australia’s public universities were 16 times that of lecturers,
teachers of the second highest rank. The same study found that in the UK
vice-chancellors, the executive head of British universities, made 4.9 pounds
for every 1 pound a lecturer earned in 2007 and 5.7 pounds for every pound a
lecturer, teachers of the second highest rank, earned in 2015.
In the era of real or perceived decline of state support several things have happened in colleges and universities including an increase in student fees, the use of student fees to leverage deficit spending, and the increasing hiring of part-time faculty or adjuncts. According to one study the number of non-tenure track faculty at American universities has increased by between 45 percent and 62 percent at public bachelor's granting institutions, by 52 to 60 percent at private bachelor's degree granting colleges and universities, by 44 to 50 percent at public research universities, and by 80 to 83 percent in American community colleges. I give you the lumpen academitariat. I am one of these lumpen adjuncts or contingent faculty. I am one of these contingent faculty who can be hired and fired at will and who gets very limited support from the union of which I am a member despite their rhetoric that they are working heartily on our behalf.
It is not surprising that the neoliberal university run by neoliberal managerial types increasingly uses adjuncts as a cost cutting measure and a profit raising, in the form of administrative salaries, scheme. It is also not surprising that in periods of busts, which seem to be coming ever more faster and furious these days, contingent faculty are expendable. After all, those increasing number of administrative bureaucrats running America's increasingly corporate higher educational institutions aren't likely to cut their jobs even though many of them are simply doing the bullshit jobs of which David Graeber spoke and noted were a central component of managerial capitalism, a capitalism that would not need to be managed if Adam Smith was right.
So, what now? As I mentioned, I was offered one class by the department though I was "promised", if that is the word for it since administrative bureaucrats use every semantic trick in the book to make "promises" contingent particularly for contingent faculty and ultimately not promises at all, two classes. The bureaucrats never opened the 200 level second class, an elective, I was scheduled to teach and as a consequence I have no way of telling how many people would have signed up for this class even if they could have. Quite a slick neoliberal administrative trick, n'est-ce pas. What is crystal clear is that it is simply not feasible for me to drive three hours three times a week at around $40 to $50 dollars a gallon of petrol a week to teach one class. And by teaching only one class I will not meet the standard for health insurance. The bureaucrats, with the agreement of the union requires that I teach two classes to get health insurance. As I noted, I am a member of a union, United University Professors, UUP, so I
thought about filing an official complaint about how the suits treated
me recently but as I have learned many times previously doing anything
through the union is a waste of time since the union is united, well kind of, behind
full-time professors and is weak as water when it comes to those who
really run universities, administrative bureaucrats,
My only option seems to be to do what I have done: I have officially retired from the college and university system I have worked at since 2006. Both my pension and my health insurance are, thankfully at this point, "vested". The former may be only a pittance, but something is better than nothing as the proverb notes. As for the latter, I hope I can afford it. After all, we in the US have the most labyrinthian, bureaucratic, and bizarre health care system in the core Western world.
What is particularly interesting to me, as I end this post, is that nobody really seems to care that one of the things my college is not doing with the millions in aid it is receiving from the state and the federal government is helping me and others like me by making sure that we can teach two classes at meagre remuneration and benefits. Ain't that America? Ain't that neoliberalism? Ain't that neoliberal higher education with its vocational education for jobs and profits mantra and model? Ain't that education for economic, political, and cultural conformity? Amen.
revised July 2021
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