Democratic Institutions or Engines of Inequality? | Peer to Peer Review
Some Labor Day thoughts Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Sep 9, 2010I didn't have a chance to observe Labor Day in the traditional way. I was at work, as were many academic librarians. But it seemed a good time to reflect on a couple of blog posts about librarians' work at the Atlantic blog, The Daily Dish.
As a detour from a larger discussion about doing away with tenure at Slate, Chris Bodenner posted a cranky comment from a reader singling out librarians as being particularly undeserving. The anonymous critic wrote that librarians often have tenure with the same benefits and salaries as other faculty ("$75,000-$85,000 a year") and sabbaticals that send them on vacation for months ("with nothing to show for it when they come back"), though the writer claimed these sweet positions come without teaching duties, or in fact any duties at all. As he put it:
All this at a time when they are struggling to even be relevant and find something to do with their time in this Google age. Library budgets are cut, staff let go, materials and collections trimmed, but the overpaid librarian stays—to do what? Make lists, answer the occasional reference question, and attend meetings.
Not surprisingly, a number of librarians were quick to offer a rebuttal, pointing out that tenure is actually fairly rare for librarians, that they don't typically enjoy the working conditions or salaries that faculty in the disciplines have, and that they have more than enough work to do, much of it involving teaching in one form or another.
Laboring under a misperception
It made me think about a broader issue. In what ways might our work be undermined as the reputation of universities grows tarnished, college becomes viewed as a luxury good, students with limited resources piece together an education as their circumstances allow, and tenure becomes a rarity?
The public perception of the university is that professors make lots of money (why else does it cost so much?) to work a few hours a week (only teaching three or four classes? What do they do all day?) and indulge in obscure and pointless research. They think tenure is a racket, guaranteeing lifelong job security, rather than a means of protecting scholars who might follow research leads into controversial waters. There's very little sense that what happens on campus matters in the "real world," but there's a lot of resentment, largely triggered by the soaring cost of a degree and the debt that young graduates carry.
In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Chistopher Shea reviewed two recent books about the failures of higher education. Shea concludes that all of the complaints lodged against academia conceal a basic reality: public universities are being "gutted" as state support withers away, contributing to inequality among the institutions and the students who attend them. According to Shea, universities "are becoming engines of inequality."
At work in the engine room
What are the implications for libraries? The number of faculty who have full-time tenure track jobs is shrinking as schools find it cheaper and more convenient to hire instructors by the course. Currently, 70 percent of faculty are adjuncts. At the same time, the size of the non-instructional staff is growing. Federal statistics show that from 1999 to 2007, this group grew by 20 percent, with the largest gains in higher administration (36.6 percent increase) and in professional categories (44.2 percent increase). This isn't accidental; as fewer faculty are involved in the life of an institution—they're lucky if they get an office—others take their place in institutional governance.
The result is that the academic program is being decoupled from everything else that goes on at a college campus. It's no longer the driving force. And there's another casualty: the structural conditions for academic freedom protect less than a third of faculty. That freedom is important in the library, the lab, the classroom—and beyond.
Admittedly, "academic freedom" is a badly misunderstood term, and when it's used to cover behaviors that have nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge (e.g. "I shouldn't have to teach on Fridays" or "you can't make me come to department meetings"), it gives academic freedom a bad name. It's also confusingly extended by David Horowitz and others to cover students who they feel should have the right to insist that "the other side" be injected into syllabi, even when the professor believes "the other side" to be demonstrably false.
Academic freedom is an unusual social contract between institutions of higher learning and professors that provides security to study and teach controversial material—though not to teach things that are wildly out of keeping with disciplinary standards; that's not part of the deal. The underlying mechanism is to train faculty rigorously and put them through a demanding six-year probation. If passed successfully, faculty members can count on a steady position so long as they are doing their job and are not engaged in immoral or illegal behavior.
Tenure is not a guarantee of life-time employment. It's simply a barrier to dismissing a professor without due process. This social contract recognizes that scholars have an unusual position in society, pushing forward our knowledge into frontier areas, and that it's in society's interest to let them follow their inquiries where they lead without risking their livelihoods.
Looking at the fine print
Things have gotten a little weird lately. When the working conditions, salaries, and benefits for adjunct professors diverge enormously from those for tenure track faculty, a lot of understandable resentment builds up. Too often, tenure is a brass ring so valuable it prevents younger scholars from speaking up and inculcates in them a sense of self-preservation that is the opposite of what it's meant to encourage. The evaluation of these scholars' worth is weighted toward research, measured in quantity of publications, with publishers serving as the gatekeepers of quality.
Libraries are traditionally democratic institutions, dedicated to preserving knowledge and making it accessible to all, regardless of income or status. We work with faculty to help students learn the nuts and bolts of inquiry because we believe these skills are the tools of a free people. If faculty feel valued only for providing courses by the semester, like piecework, will they make the effort to help us build our collections and guide students in their use? Or are they likely to use the materials packaged with textbooks that help students and their professors bypass the library (though that bypass disappears within a matter of months)? If they feel the library is getting shortchanged in the institutional budgeting process, will they speak up? Will they even know? Will they play a role in shaping the future of access to knowledge, or will that be left up to administrators?
The bottom line is that we need to think about how the bottom line is affecting higher learning and what the implications are for our mission.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
