Revolt on the Campus

Are the tumbrils rolling at your community college? Keep an eye out. It’s only a matter of time. The Jacobins these days are the professors, not the students, and their radicalism will only intensify, getting worse before it gets better. 

Alienated intellectuals love to identify with the downtrodden and oppressed, and now, it seems, in some ways their interests might in fact be aligning. Colleges and universities are depending more and more on non-tenured professors, and compensation for those who do the bulk of the teaching is tanking. 

Twenty-five percent of “contingent faculty”—part-time instructors and non-tenure track professors—“rely on some form of public assistance,” a Central College English professor writes in Persuasion. More than two thirds of lecturers, instructors, and adjuncts “earn less than $50,000 per year.” This “precariat,” as it has been dubbed, “now accounts for more than 71% of all college instructors in the United States,” and it is “not uncommon to hear stories about professors who are homeless.”

With more than $8 billion in total assets and a $3.5 billion endowment, Boston University relies for nearly 80 percent of its instructional staff on adjunct or non-tenure track faculty “with little job security from one year to the next.” At Penn State, where half of the teaching is done by contingent faculty, annual pay begins at $35,000. 

As our so-called institutions of higher learning are under mounting pressure to prepare students to make enough money to pay off their student loans, instructors are in the understandably painful position of helping their young charges make more money than they ever will. We’ve succeeded in convincing Americans that everyone needs and deserves a “college education,” and the dispensers of increasingly questionable degrees are coming to resemble extremely costly fast-food franchises more than ivied Groves of Academe.

That being the case, it is no surprise that “an internal crisis” is building. “I’m one of the many faculty who gave up tenure during the Great Resignation, in part because I felt that corporate influences had taken over the profession I loved,” Persuasion’s aggrieved contributor writes, “but also because the more I was asked to prioritize good jobs for my students, the crummier my own job looked by comparison.” 

On top of which, it must be cold comfort to be raising up a generation of young men whose politics—judging from the results of November’s election—are far to the right of yours. This is especially the case when the lads in the lecture hall are seen as budding fascists.

There’s trouble brewing, and you’d have to be pretty cold not to feel sympathy for people who have devoted their lives to what was once a profession that was respected and reasonably—if not grandly—compensated. When college faculty see themselves as mere “content providers,” in the words of a professor friend of mine, it is entirely predictable that they have begun to see themselves, as Persuasion’s contributor puts it, as “exploited labor.” 

This isn’t what M. Stanton Evans was referring to when he wrote Revolt on the Campus, but members of the professoriate are getting madder, and we can’t claim we have not been warned. 

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