'Faculty are the least important people on a campus,' but don't worry; administrators will be all right

Adaptation of Joe Loong via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

A recent item in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), excerpted by Paul Caron on TaxProf Blog, well captures what it feels like to be a professor in American higher ed nowadays.

The Chronicle item, by Beckie Supiano, talks about tenured and tenure-track professors leaving the "dream job" of academia. Author and consultant Karen Kelsky founded a private Facebook group, now counting 33,000 members, as a virtual home for the disillusioned: "The Professor is Out."

Supiano quoted Kelsky:

"The faculty are the least important people on a campus right now," Kelsky says. If colleges valued their work, she says, they wouldn't have allowed "adjunctification" to happen in the first place. The current wave of faculty departures—which colleges don't even seem to have acknowledged—is simply the latest twist in a decades-long deterioration.

"Institutions' indifference to faculty leaving," she says, "is a reflection of their indifference to faculty's being there."

To some professors, the job they've worked so hard for feels untenable. And that's particularly true for those who ... pour themselves into their positions and strive to connect with students on a personal level. That's something that colleges sell to students, but it's not something they seem actually willing to invest in.

Right: especially that first line about faculty being the least important people on campus. Though "right now" might erroneously suggest a new condition. Rather, this lament is the familiar theme of the widely referenced book by Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in 2011, when the data already were ample.

Despite Ginsberg calling out the trend more than a decade ago, nothing has changed. Faculty governance is practically a dead letter. Faculty work not only for provosts and chancellors, but for every support service office on campus, such as information technology and human resources. We're told when and where, and increasingly how and what to show up and teach. Worse, we're loaded down with hamster-wheeling administrative work. It seems that every new administrator means more work for me, too. I feel ever more like Lucy on the assembly line.

This state of affairs was a refrain at last week's Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing (more to come about the conference here at The Savory Tort). In the same vein, I heard mounting faculty anxiety over AI. If universities, as the bottom-line businesses they've become, care about the delivery of services almost to the exclusion of quality, then they will gravitate to the worker that never sleeps and never whines about the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and college for our own kids.

In my workplace, "adjunctification," as Kelsky put it, manifests as noncompetitive compensation for both part-time and full-time faculty. A first-year attorney in Big Law makes substantially more than any of the teaching faculty at the law school where I work—

—excluding deans. A university's priorities ring clear when one compares the qualifications and salaries of teaching faculty with salaries in the bureaucracy. Judge my shop for yourself with a recent top-100 round-up at South Coast Today (or look up anyone in the Massachusetts public sector). Be wary of listed titles. At no. 32, I'm the top paid, still serving, and exclusively teaching "professor." Other "professors" at nos. 5-30 had or have admin roles that fattened the bankroll. The money is in admin and overhead, even while students strain to see the return on that investment.

Indeed, as Kelsky suggests, most of us, teaching faculty, still "strive to connect with students on a personal level," despite lack of incentives to do so. That's probably because it's the character flaw of human compassion that draws us to teaching. I'm working on it: trying to be a good worker by caring less and keeping the assembly line moving. "Speed it up a little!" Maybe, for students' sake, AI will meet us halfway in the humanity game.