I have been teaching mathematics in the Cambridge/Boston area for 35 years (Harvard, MIT, BU, Brandeis, Wellesley) at modest pay. Had I not bought a rent-producing three-family building before then, I seriously doubt whether I would have been able to continue teaching all these years. It also helps that I live simply with little extravagance and my mortgage is all paid off. I still enjoy what I do - especially when my students say such nice things at the end of each course. That's my real reward, but this wouldn't be possible if I had not made the right moves decades ago to be able to live my life this way.
Robert, you describe the passion myth/ethos well enough, and I think that can sustain us if our institutions value it, too. You're making a sacrifice, even if you enjoy the work. But I think there ought to be more burden on universities to pay a livable wage. You shouldn't have to subsidize the high-value services you're offering.
I completely agree. In fact, when I worked at Brandeis University, the department Chair apologized to me about it being inexcusable that for a college built on the idea of "justice" they were not able to offer me a fair wage. Fortunately, at that point I was just looking to keep the health insurance.
Many years ago I was an adjunct instructor at a local municipal college. Loved the work, loved the students, loved the professors who supervised me, and received high marks from the students in my evaluations - for the princely sum of $300 per semester (a two-credit sophomore class in education). Fortunately, my husband and I owned our own business, so I could make time for my class. After seven years, we decided we could not afford to continue to subside the college, which at the time had 30,000 undergraduates.
Obviously, the system is broken. My hat is off to the people who keep working in higher ed despite the financial burdens they and their families incur.
"After seven years, we decided we could not afford to continue to subsidize the college, which at the time had 30,000 undergraduates." This is it, exactly. I know of a graduate program nearby that relies upon some courses being taught pro bono by retired faculty. I believe a university should invest fully in a program and pay faculty fairly. Teachers should not have to subsidize their own work.
I live in San Diego which is damned expensive, and I live frugally. But the fact is that an academic job, at any salary, is the pearl of great price. I'd do it for minimum wage. The focal aim in life is to avoid boredom and maximize intellectual stimulation. Where else can I get that? And my humanities degree is worthless. I have no other viable options. Outside of academia it's secretarial work or uber.
You shouldn't have to do it for minimum wage, but many are. Universities exploit this sense of a calling unethically, in my view. There is no necessary dichotomy between intellectual hunger and fair pay.
I left academe in 2021 and am close to earning a comparable salary as a book coach and developmental editor, only with vastly more autonomy and flexibility. I've interviewed many former academics who have ditched their dead-end jobs for lucrative careers in industry research. If you have a Ph.D., it can be difficult to translate the value of it into industry terms, but it can be done.
I felt like you for many years, in part because I had earned tenure as a first-gen PhD, against significant odds. But I came to understand that I was much like the dwarves at the end of C.S. Lewis's "The Last Battle," who refuse to see beyond their expectations and thus remain blind to a much richer world of possibilities.
The transition is hard and often soul-crushing, but there is vastly more than secretarial work beyond academe. I invite you to explore my interview series on this theme.
I worked a temp office job for a day between MA and PhD in the human resources dept of a large firm. End of the day chatting with the director I asked him whether, since he was in human resources whether there were any jobs somebody like me, with an MA in philosophy could get in the real world that weren't strictly secretarial. He said there weren't. I had, he said, made my choice by majoring in philosophy.
First of all, though things have improved it's tougher for women. During my last sabbatical I asked one of our sometime adjuncts whether he'd like to pick up my two logic sections. No, he said. He'd been doing clerical work outside of academic and was DISCOVERED. One of the managers came into the copy room where he was xeroxing and asked him whether he wasn't bored doing it. Yes, adjunct said. Manager asked what his 'backround' was and adjunct told him he had an MA in philosophy. Manager then got him kicked upstairs to a manager-trainee job.
If the manager had seen me xeroxing he wouldn't have asked whether I was bored. It would have looked perfectly normal--just another secretary xeroxing. And the view generally is that women are just naturally suited to boredom. I wouldn't have been kicked upstairs.
My issue isn't some sense of 'calling' or that transition would be 'soul-crushing'. There weren't any other viable options. And anyone with a humanities degree who wants to get a decent job in the real world has to scrounge, hustle, and be 'creative'--and even then the odds are against us. You lucked out. Most of us don't.
Your example is a good one: gender expectations play an unfair role in some opportunities.
I can say, having started from scratch as a coach with no network except the one I have built painstakingly, that luck has little to do with it. I'm two years in, and nothing comes easily.
You're right that the job search is exhausting and long -- it seems to be that way for everyone now. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Bait and Switch" remains as germane as ever. I know from personal experience and from the testimony of dozens of recovering academics on LinkedIn that networking is the only lever that produces results, especially for anyone mid-career. Happy to talk more about that privately. A friend also runs a free (but invite-only) Slack community for just this purpose. The odds are definitely against people like us. That doesn't mean those odds can't be overcome.
I'm not in the market. I'm a tenured full professor, now on sabbatical, and happy as a pig in poop. I caught the (rare) brass ring. If I hadn't I would much MUCH rather retrain to learn a saleable technical skill--even one that didn't require a 4 year college degree--than go through this hustling, networking, and LinkedIn hooking up. And then get, after hustling, get something non-straightforward like being a 'book coach' whatever that may be or some sort of freelance hustling. If I hadn't caught the brass ring I'd want something straightforward and technical, where I could get hired on the basis of straightforward skills and do technical work.
As one of those poorly paid professors, I can confirm that this is all too true. And I am a tenured full professor. I am fortunate to live in a rural part of the country with low housing prices and cost of living; my salary would not suffice in an urban area. Even where I live, I need to teach large amounts of overload (i.e., overtime--additional teaching or administrative work beyond my full-time contractual obligations) in order to make ends meet. I think people holding the rather common stereotype of professors as people with cushy jobs and lots of time off would be taken aback by the hours I put in.
I hear you. Before I decided to focus on building my private practice, I spent a few months trying to translate my academic CV into an industry resume. The advice I kept getting was to leave a lot of it out. For instance, no industry employer would believe (or comprehend) the year I spent chairing the Faculty Steering Committee while also directing the first-year seminar -- all while teaching six courses and publishing peer-reviewed research.
This essay also does not mention the laughable raises that usually come with tenure and promotion. $500 for each, in my case.
College and university faculty should recognize themselves as workers, and be a lot more hardnosed about their organizing. They're the ones who produce value for these institutions that have been the beneficiaries of phenomenal floods of money, as represented by mind-boggling levels of student debt in the United States, and if anyone has the right to ask "Where did all that money go?", it's them. More luxury dorms, spa gyms, climbing walls, and lots of new administrators with vaguely defined jobs shouldn't be something that professors mildly deplore: they should consider them grounds for strikes. People who are willing to wait patiently with their hands out are lucky to end up with just that -- an occasional handout.
That said, it's difficult to have too much sympathy for people complaining about the results of their own poor career choices, especially since they're by definition people who should be smart enough to know better. Even if the money were more equitably distributed, I have serious doubts about the viability of the US private college network as currently structured. Of course I feel for the lady at Simpson College -- who wouldn't? All of the Professor Dolezal's anecdotes are on point and effective. But really, what did she expect of a job at a private college in a town of 16,000 people on a good day in south central Iowa? How much longer can such an institution even exist in 21st Century America, let alone provide a stable and prosperous work environment for college-level faculty?
Excellent point about organizing. Several faculties have done this with mixed results. The main problem is that the pay gap between faculty and admins (since the latter also enjoy additional resources from the Board of Trustees) means inequitable war chests for legal battles. But you're right that it is fast becoming a labor issue reminiscent of the 1920s.
The fact that 71% of instructional faculty in the U.S. are already non-tenure track shows that institutions have been slowly replacing faculty with actual agency with those who can be easily replaced. It's possible that the current oversupply of PhDs would need to dwindle for any kind of organized labor movement to move the needle.
Your last point stings a bit. Maybe it's fair, maybe not. Most people who choose teaching and research as careers do so out of a sense of calling. They are encouraged in this path as impressionable young people by mentors they admire, who sometimes give a false impression of what their future really holds. The intense internal competition at graduate programs and then for faculty jobs makes work feel like a prize. And tenure -- the lifetime contract -- feels like a way to flout the usual rules of the corporate 9-5. Sacrifice becomes a badge of honor.
Smart people get into bad marriages. Smart people enlist in the military and get deployed to wars that make no sense. I think it's not quite as simple as expecting a young person who feels like she's winning at her discipline to game out the financial realities for decades to come. But that is part of what this article aims to do.
My last point may be somewhat overstated for effect, but any sting is inherent in the situation -- and that people choose to put themselves into it. I regret the decline of small, local colleges in the same way that I regret the decline of small, local newspapers. I feel equally frustrated to be powerless to reverse either, but reality is real.
You're right about the PhD glut and the effects of oversupply. It works to the Administration's advantage, so they'll never do anything about it. Perhaps it up to the Professoriate, not to try to form a closed guild, but at least to be MUCH more honest with aspiring grad students that they're not just entering an "intense" competition, they're entering a lottery, with lottery-style chances of winning.
Yes, honesty is part of it -- and that includes acknowledging that jobs are not prizes, and that even if you win the lottery and the Holy Grail of tenure, you might still earn less than a living wage. That's the sobering truth I meant to convey. If I were a college president, I would see my institution's long-term survival as contingent on solving the compensation problem, because no college can survive with tanking morale. Somehow small private colleges were affordable when I was a student in the 90s, and all of my professors from that era have retired comfortably enough. I think it could still be done.
You are so right. Small colleges are having trouble surviving, and even big "name" colleges are unaffordable for large swathes of the middle class. I credit the mismanagement of student loans for much of it. The destructive effect of all that expensive (for them) money on students is well known, but the effect of that same cheap (for them) money on the colleges, specifically in encouraging the tuition hikes, the overbuilding and yes, the shortchanging of instruction that it permitted, is little appreciated.
I'm considerably older than you are (Georgetown '73). The other day, my old roommate commented to me, "We were lucky -- we probably wouldn't even be accepted now." I responded, "Oh, we'd be accepted, but we wouldn't be able to afford attending." My father was an engineer; his father owned his own business. Our mothers worked at home, and raised large families, six in my family's case, five in his. We were both able to graduate on a combination financial aid, Summer jobs, and loans that were even small by the standards of those times, and easily paid off. Our situation was normal at the time, not extraordinary.
Not long ago, some of my nieces and nephews managed to do the same thing, and graduate basically debt-free. But they spent their first two years in community college, then transferred to a state university -- a good school, but certainly not the system flagship --and worked part-time all year. I'm very proud of them, but their accomplishment IS extraordinary. The stress they experienced in having to watch every credit-hour and every dollar for four years was one I was spared, and they should have been as well.
You’re leaving out the fact that math and literature are not popular subjects. The professors aren’t paid very much because nobody wants to take their courses. If it weren’t for subjects like CS, Economics, and pre-med, how much enrollment would there be in universities? I’m willing to bet a lot lot less than there is today. What’s the value of spending obscene amounts of money on something that provides zero value in getting a job? Universities are no longer finishing schools for the very wealthy. Some level of job preparation is expected.
With that frame in mind, you could say the opposite: high paid professors (and sports programs) are subsidizing the humanities. Without them, English professors wouldn’t just be underpaid, they’d have no job.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, mind you. But the only solution seems to be for these departments to attract more students. Personally, I think everyone should minor in (analytic) philosophy, but that’s a hard sell. The more likely outcome is a steady shrinking of the humanities as tenured professors retire, until they are tiny fractions of their former selves.
A tired old argument. There is enormous value in the traditional liberal arts for leadership, entrepreneurship, and a host of other fields. I'm discovering this now in private practice. Watch "The Carousel" scene in "Mad Men" for an example of elite creativity. The problem for the corporatized university is that it cannot guarantee or predict such value and thereby deems it worthless. The extreme cost of higher ed has contributed to this problem by making the choice of major an extremely high stakes financial decision. I understand the need for more predictable ROI in that climate, but nearly all of this would look much different if college were actually affordable -- as it was for my in the late 90s.
I've written about much of this at more length, including this reflection on why young people from rural areas are perhaps justified in bypassing college:
Universities should not be finishing schools for corporations, but that is what they have become. I think we will have to learn the value of the humanities by their absence. When universities were healthier, they embraced a sense of shared purpose and unity, not a petty breakdown of cost/loss. If Economics departments cannot see that their value is greater when allied with robust programs in literature, philosophy, religion, and the modern languages, then they have an impoverished view, indeed.
The article is rather shallow and describes mere symptoms of deeper problems. To use a fashionable phrase, over the past a few decades, there has been a build-up of an educational-industrial complex. The quality of educational experience has gone down, the costs have gone up, both by a lot. It's similar to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the 2000s. There are a lot of bad loans out there and the reckoning is coming. The professors won't be paid better, bankrupcy is more likely.
Your point rather forcibly proves my thesis, which is that advanced degrees increasingly look like a fool's errand. Many underpaid professors have been making this very case against administrative bloat and other unnecessary drivers of soaring tuition for years. It's also quite complex, because there are different tiers involved. The most elite are doing quite well (Scott Galloway compares them to cartels), but that still is no guarantee of fair pay.
There is a persistent myth that athletics will save struggling institutions, but those high-stakes gambles on new facilities and other sunk costs often come at the price of academic programs. It is a wonder to me that Penn State, my local institution, is one of only 25 universities to turn a sizable profit on its athletic programs, yet still relies on contingent faculty for 50% of its instructional needs. Despite the football team's incredible success this year, plans are underway to shutter nearly all of the branch campuses.
I write more about these upside down priorities, including a preposterous example at the University of Colorado:
Yes, the seeds of this decline were already there when I was an undergraduate in the 90s, but the corporate takeover in the last twenty years has wrought fatal damage.
I wrote about this a while back, comparing Barbara Ehrenreich's takedown of brightsiding in business to the rise of a similar cult of positive thinking in academe.
I have been teaching mathematics in the Cambridge/Boston area for 35 years (Harvard, MIT, BU, Brandeis, Wellesley) at modest pay. Had I not bought a rent-producing three-family building before then, I seriously doubt whether I would have been able to continue teaching all these years. It also helps that I live simply with little extravagance and my mortgage is all paid off. I still enjoy what I do - especially when my students say such nice things at the end of each course. That's my real reward, but this wouldn't be possible if I had not made the right moves decades ago to be able to live my life this way.
Robert, you describe the passion myth/ethos well enough, and I think that can sustain us if our institutions value it, too. You're making a sacrifice, even if you enjoy the work. But I think there ought to be more burden on universities to pay a livable wage. You shouldn't have to subsidize the high-value services you're offering.
I completely agree. In fact, when I worked at Brandeis University, the department Chair apologized to me about it being inexcusable that for a college built on the idea of "justice" they were not able to offer me a fair wage. Fortunately, at that point I was just looking to keep the health insurance.
Many years ago I was an adjunct instructor at a local municipal college. Loved the work, loved the students, loved the professors who supervised me, and received high marks from the students in my evaluations - for the princely sum of $300 per semester (a two-credit sophomore class in education). Fortunately, my husband and I owned our own business, so I could make time for my class. After seven years, we decided we could not afford to continue to subside the college, which at the time had 30,000 undergraduates.
Obviously, the system is broken. My hat is off to the people who keep working in higher ed despite the financial burdens they and their families incur.
"After seven years, we decided we could not afford to continue to subsidize the college, which at the time had 30,000 undergraduates." This is it, exactly. I know of a graduate program nearby that relies upon some courses being taught pro bono by retired faculty. I believe a university should invest fully in a program and pay faculty fairly. Teachers should not have to subsidize their own work.
I live in San Diego which is damned expensive, and I live frugally. But the fact is that an academic job, at any salary, is the pearl of great price. I'd do it for minimum wage. The focal aim in life is to avoid boredom and maximize intellectual stimulation. Where else can I get that? And my humanities degree is worthless. I have no other viable options. Outside of academia it's secretarial work or uber.
You shouldn't have to do it for minimum wage, but many are. Universities exploit this sense of a calling unethically, in my view. There is no necessary dichotomy between intellectual hunger and fair pay.
I left academe in 2021 and am close to earning a comparable salary as a book coach and developmental editor, only with vastly more autonomy and flexibility. I've interviewed many former academics who have ditched their dead-end jobs for lucrative careers in industry research. If you have a Ph.D., it can be difficult to translate the value of it into industry terms, but it can be done.
I felt like you for many years, in part because I had earned tenure as a first-gen PhD, against significant odds. But I came to understand that I was much like the dwarves at the end of C.S. Lewis's "The Last Battle," who refuse to see beyond their expectations and thus remain blind to a much richer world of possibilities.
The transition is hard and often soul-crushing, but there is vastly more than secretarial work beyond academe. I invite you to explore my interview series on this theme.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/t/academe-to-industry
I worked a temp office job for a day between MA and PhD in the human resources dept of a large firm. End of the day chatting with the director I asked him whether, since he was in human resources whether there were any jobs somebody like me, with an MA in philosophy could get in the real world that weren't strictly secretarial. He said there weren't. I had, he said, made my choice by majoring in philosophy.
First of all, though things have improved it's tougher for women. During my last sabbatical I asked one of our sometime adjuncts whether he'd like to pick up my two logic sections. No, he said. He'd been doing clerical work outside of academic and was DISCOVERED. One of the managers came into the copy room where he was xeroxing and asked him whether he wasn't bored doing it. Yes, adjunct said. Manager asked what his 'backround' was and adjunct told him he had an MA in philosophy. Manager then got him kicked upstairs to a manager-trainee job.
If the manager had seen me xeroxing he wouldn't have asked whether I was bored. It would have looked perfectly normal--just another secretary xeroxing. And the view generally is that women are just naturally suited to boredom. I wouldn't have been kicked upstairs.
My issue isn't some sense of 'calling' or that transition would be 'soul-crushing'. There weren't any other viable options. And anyone with a humanities degree who wants to get a decent job in the real world has to scrounge, hustle, and be 'creative'--and even then the odds are against us. You lucked out. Most of us don't.
Your example is a good one: gender expectations play an unfair role in some opportunities.
I can say, having started from scratch as a coach with no network except the one I have built painstakingly, that luck has little to do with it. I'm two years in, and nothing comes easily.
You're right that the job search is exhausting and long -- it seems to be that way for everyone now. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Bait and Switch" remains as germane as ever. I know from personal experience and from the testimony of dozens of recovering academics on LinkedIn that networking is the only lever that produces results, especially for anyone mid-career. Happy to talk more about that privately. A friend also runs a free (but invite-only) Slack community for just this purpose. The odds are definitely against people like us. That doesn't mean those odds can't be overcome.
I'm not in the market. I'm a tenured full professor, now on sabbatical, and happy as a pig in poop. I caught the (rare) brass ring. If I hadn't I would much MUCH rather retrain to learn a saleable technical skill--even one that didn't require a 4 year college degree--than go through this hustling, networking, and LinkedIn hooking up. And then get, after hustling, get something non-straightforward like being a 'book coach' whatever that may be or some sort of freelance hustling. If I hadn't caught the brass ring I'd want something straightforward and technical, where I could get hired on the basis of straightforward skills and do technical work.
As one of those poorly paid professors, I can confirm that this is all too true. And I am a tenured full professor. I am fortunate to live in a rural part of the country with low housing prices and cost of living; my salary would not suffice in an urban area. Even where I live, I need to teach large amounts of overload (i.e., overtime--additional teaching or administrative work beyond my full-time contractual obligations) in order to make ends meet. I think people holding the rather common stereotype of professors as people with cushy jobs and lots of time off would be taken aback by the hours I put in.
I hear you. Before I decided to focus on building my private practice, I spent a few months trying to translate my academic CV into an industry resume. The advice I kept getting was to leave a lot of it out. For instance, no industry employer would believe (or comprehend) the year I spent chairing the Faculty Steering Committee while also directing the first-year seminar -- all while teaching six courses and publishing peer-reviewed research.
This essay also does not mention the laughable raises that usually come with tenure and promotion. $500 for each, in my case.
College and university faculty should recognize themselves as workers, and be a lot more hardnosed about their organizing. They're the ones who produce value for these institutions that have been the beneficiaries of phenomenal floods of money, as represented by mind-boggling levels of student debt in the United States, and if anyone has the right to ask "Where did all that money go?", it's them. More luxury dorms, spa gyms, climbing walls, and lots of new administrators with vaguely defined jobs shouldn't be something that professors mildly deplore: they should consider them grounds for strikes. People who are willing to wait patiently with their hands out are lucky to end up with just that -- an occasional handout.
That said, it's difficult to have too much sympathy for people complaining about the results of their own poor career choices, especially since they're by definition people who should be smart enough to know better. Even if the money were more equitably distributed, I have serious doubts about the viability of the US private college network as currently structured. Of course I feel for the lady at Simpson College -- who wouldn't? All of the Professor Dolezal's anecdotes are on point and effective. But really, what did she expect of a job at a private college in a town of 16,000 people on a good day in south central Iowa? How much longer can such an institution even exist in 21st Century America, let alone provide a stable and prosperous work environment for college-level faculty?
Excellent point about organizing. Several faculties have done this with mixed results. The main problem is that the pay gap between faculty and admins (since the latter also enjoy additional resources from the Board of Trustees) means inequitable war chests for legal battles. But you're right that it is fast becoming a labor issue reminiscent of the 1920s.
The fact that 71% of instructional faculty in the U.S. are already non-tenure track shows that institutions have been slowly replacing faculty with actual agency with those who can be easily replaced. It's possible that the current oversupply of PhDs would need to dwindle for any kind of organized labor movement to move the needle.
Your last point stings a bit. Maybe it's fair, maybe not. Most people who choose teaching and research as careers do so out of a sense of calling. They are encouraged in this path as impressionable young people by mentors they admire, who sometimes give a false impression of what their future really holds. The intense internal competition at graduate programs and then for faculty jobs makes work feel like a prize. And tenure -- the lifetime contract -- feels like a way to flout the usual rules of the corporate 9-5. Sacrifice becomes a badge of honor.
Smart people get into bad marriages. Smart people enlist in the military and get deployed to wars that make no sense. I think it's not quite as simple as expecting a young person who feels like she's winning at her discipline to game out the financial realities for decades to come. But that is part of what this article aims to do.
My last point may be somewhat overstated for effect, but any sting is inherent in the situation -- and that people choose to put themselves into it. I regret the decline of small, local colleges in the same way that I regret the decline of small, local newspapers. I feel equally frustrated to be powerless to reverse either, but reality is real.
You're right about the PhD glut and the effects of oversupply. It works to the Administration's advantage, so they'll never do anything about it. Perhaps it up to the Professoriate, not to try to form a closed guild, but at least to be MUCH more honest with aspiring grad students that they're not just entering an "intense" competition, they're entering a lottery, with lottery-style chances of winning.
Yes, honesty is part of it -- and that includes acknowledging that jobs are not prizes, and that even if you win the lottery and the Holy Grail of tenure, you might still earn less than a living wage. That's the sobering truth I meant to convey. If I were a college president, I would see my institution's long-term survival as contingent on solving the compensation problem, because no college can survive with tanking morale. Somehow small private colleges were affordable when I was a student in the 90s, and all of my professors from that era have retired comfortably enough. I think it could still be done.
You are so right. Small colleges are having trouble surviving, and even big "name" colleges are unaffordable for large swathes of the middle class. I credit the mismanagement of student loans for much of it. The destructive effect of all that expensive (for them) money on students is well known, but the effect of that same cheap (for them) money on the colleges, specifically in encouraging the tuition hikes, the overbuilding and yes, the shortchanging of instruction that it permitted, is little appreciated.
I'm considerably older than you are (Georgetown '73). The other day, my old roommate commented to me, "We were lucky -- we probably wouldn't even be accepted now." I responded, "Oh, we'd be accepted, but we wouldn't be able to afford attending." My father was an engineer; his father owned his own business. Our mothers worked at home, and raised large families, six in my family's case, five in his. We were both able to graduate on a combination financial aid, Summer jobs, and loans that were even small by the standards of those times, and easily paid off. Our situation was normal at the time, not extraordinary.
Not long ago, some of my nieces and nephews managed to do the same thing, and graduate basically debt-free. But they spent their first two years in community college, then transferred to a state university -- a good school, but certainly not the system flagship --and worked part-time all year. I'm very proud of them, but their accomplishment IS extraordinary. The stress they experienced in having to watch every credit-hour and every dollar for four years was one I was spared, and they should have been as well.
You’re leaving out the fact that math and literature are not popular subjects. The professors aren’t paid very much because nobody wants to take their courses. If it weren’t for subjects like CS, Economics, and pre-med, how much enrollment would there be in universities? I’m willing to bet a lot lot less than there is today. What’s the value of spending obscene amounts of money on something that provides zero value in getting a job? Universities are no longer finishing schools for the very wealthy. Some level of job preparation is expected.
With that frame in mind, you could say the opposite: high paid professors (and sports programs) are subsidizing the humanities. Without them, English professors wouldn’t just be underpaid, they’d have no job.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, mind you. But the only solution seems to be for these departments to attract more students. Personally, I think everyone should minor in (analytic) philosophy, but that’s a hard sell. The more likely outcome is a steady shrinking of the humanities as tenured professors retire, until they are tiny fractions of their former selves.
A tired old argument. There is enormous value in the traditional liberal arts for leadership, entrepreneurship, and a host of other fields. I'm discovering this now in private practice. Watch "The Carousel" scene in "Mad Men" for an example of elite creativity. The problem for the corporatized university is that it cannot guarantee or predict such value and thereby deems it worthless. The extreme cost of higher ed has contributed to this problem by making the choice of major an extremely high stakes financial decision. I understand the need for more predictable ROI in that climate, but nearly all of this would look much different if college were actually affordable -- as it was for my in the late 90s.
I've written about much of this at more length, including this reflection on why young people from rural areas are perhaps justified in bypassing college:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/rural-americans-arent-going-to-college
Universities should not be finishing schools for corporations, but that is what they have become. I think we will have to learn the value of the humanities by their absence. When universities were healthier, they embraced a sense of shared purpose and unity, not a petty breakdown of cost/loss. If Economics departments cannot see that their value is greater when allied with robust programs in literature, philosophy, religion, and the modern languages, then they have an impoverished view, indeed.
The article is rather shallow and describes mere symptoms of deeper problems. To use a fashionable phrase, over the past a few decades, there has been a build-up of an educational-industrial complex. The quality of educational experience has gone down, the costs have gone up, both by a lot. It's similar to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the 2000s. There are a lot of bad loans out there and the reckoning is coming. The professors won't be paid better, bankrupcy is more likely.
Your point rather forcibly proves my thesis, which is that advanced degrees increasingly look like a fool's errand. Many underpaid professors have been making this very case against administrative bloat and other unnecessary drivers of soaring tuition for years. It's also quite complex, because there are different tiers involved. The most elite are doing quite well (Scott Galloway compares them to cartels), but that still is no guarantee of fair pay.
There is a persistent myth that athletics will save struggling institutions, but those high-stakes gambles on new facilities and other sunk costs often come at the price of academic programs. It is a wonder to me that Penn State, my local institution, is one of only 25 universities to turn a sizable profit on its athletic programs, yet still relies on contingent faculty for 50% of its instructional needs. Despite the football team's incredible success this year, plans are underway to shutter nearly all of the branch campuses.
I write more about these upside down priorities, including a preposterous example at the University of Colorado:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/the-sports-boom-will-bust-universities
Ah... but the New Dean jobs opening in the top tier schools this year generally pay over $600,000 a year, no teaching required. Check it out.
Yes, the seeds of this decline were already there when I was an undergraduate in the 90s, but the corporate takeover in the last twenty years has wrought fatal damage.
I wrote about this a while back, comparing Barbara Ehrenreich's takedown of brightsiding in business to the rise of a similar cult of positive thinking in academe.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-positive-thinking-comes