More Quad Panic

The only thing college professors and professor-wanna-bes (is professors-in-waiting the preferred nomenclature?) have to fear is one another. It wasn't the cruel vicissitudes of market funding for education that sacked Denis Rancourt for instance. I suspect it is the stultifying effect of tenure that increases unemployment in the Academy. Same way the UAW kills Detroit.

Anyway, prompted by a recent NYT piece on the impending doom of the humanities, I've grown more interested in market effects on academic employment. For one thing, I suspect (I keep saying this because I want to stress that I have no statistics for these theories) that the target of a manufactured panic about the future of the humanities is not the Provost, but the Department Chair.

I ignored this last time, but the Times' headline said it all. Disciplines must make themselves useful, say the disciples. The point is not to concoct a panic in order to force the Provost to pay attention to humanities when the budget ax falls; the point is to cram a utilitarian model onto disciplines that are ethical, in the sense that they help us determine what the good life is. Whether this is wise or pernicious depends I suppose on the degree to which a department is removed from the currents of History, and you'll pardon the archae-Marxist flavor there.

I suspect this, in part, because the crisis in academic hiring and promotion seems to have been ever thus. This is a 1977 American Philosophical Society statement on how to get young Philosophy grads into the Academy on a provisional, unpaid basis. The salient line, I think, is the first one: "The academic community has a responsibility to do what it can to help scholars who are suffering a period of academic unemployment because of the continuing academic job crisis."

Or, we could take for example the panic that created the Mellon Fellows program, without which, declining humanities enrollment would make, "entire academic departments an endangered species in 10 years." That was 1982. Clearly, there are complex threads here, and I don't know a lot about the 1977-1982 academic jobs panic. But I think I see a pattern.

It is possible to construct a story; in this story, humanities people expand their empire by threatening its demise, repeat, its utter nonexistence. As a good-faith gesture, Deans and Provosts give departments permission for new concentrations, then majors, then whole new departments. The exchange, I think, for this expansion/dilution of talent is a diminution of the importance of so-called pure study.

New departments -- like Cultural Studies, begat of English; or American Studies, begat of History -- then face a pressure to demonstrate the dollar-value of wealth created by their degrees; since there is no apparent academic justification for their existence, Why not major in English?, there must be a market-based one.

Tieing the existence of a department to the market is a mistake. When enrollments in your major decline, the budget declines and jobs disappear. Saying you need therefore to make your major more attractive is supply-side; it merely reinforces the justification-by-demand that doomed your major in the first place.

That's a thought anyway. Much much more to discover here, though. Peace
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