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From the Editor: The Future of Higher Education
Cary Nelson, Guest Editor
Few if any faculty who are well informed about employment and funding trends in higher education are likely to be confident about the future. The slow and seemingly inexorable shift from full- to part-time instruction has simultaneously undercut faculty compensation and the faculty role in governance. Public education, meanwhile, despite recent campaign oratory, is under assault at both the state and the national levels. And Republican and Democratic politicians alike think the corporate takeover of higher education heralds a brave new world.
The articles published here are intended not only to heighten that sense of alarm but also to give it increased specificity. They will not, therefore, replace anxiety with optimism. Yet they do give us multiple grounds and methods for resistance, even for the most exploited and marginalized groups in academe. Faculty who organize and act collectively can make a difference. Taken together, these articles also reaffirm our warranted pride in the caliber of the people devoted to higher education. The intelligence, passion, and commitment people bring to higher education continue to be inspiring. Consider, for example, Lisa Kartus’s concise portrait of a dedicated temporary faculty member. Dramatically underpaid, she is nonetheless a compellingly effective teacher.
Not that full-time faculty everywhere are precisely living the life of Riley either. Mark Shechner’s witty but devastating account of a once-great and now increasingly dismantled state university could be redrawn for institutions all over the country. On the other hand, Thomas Mortenson shows how curtailed resources have seriously reduced access for our most needy students. Mortenson proves that higher education has actually lost ground over the past decade in its efforts to serve the poor. Historically expanded in part to compensate for unequal opportunity, higher education has recently become less available to students from low-income and minority families. I can think of no article that is more important than Mortenson’s for Academe’s audience to read and act on, for it shows that we are failing in our fundamental social mission.
Yet as I have said, it is possible to organize for change. We are offered qualified grounds for hope by Richard Moser’s report on the AAUP’s organizing efforts among part-time faculty in Boston. And Lisa Kartus tells the story of how a group of temporary faculty in Illinois mounted a successful collective bargaining drive. Unionization doubled their income; they went from an annual salary of $11,000 to one of $22,000. Yet $22,000 is still hardly an adequate income for a family. College teaching is now a low-paid, blue-collar job at many institutions.
Even individual departments can make a difference here, not only by improving working conditions for staff but also by thinking of themselves as a community with multiple shared responsibilities. The article that Barbara Lovitts and I wrote, for example, shows how graduate education can be made more humane and less wasteful. Half or more of the students in doctoral programs now leave without completing their degrees, not because they are less able but because their departments are often inhospitable. Similarly, it is often not limited resources that result in exploitation of part-time faculty but rather distorted institutional priorities and a lack of community responsibility. On all these points, the articles in this issue help give us the information we need and the news that it is time for change.
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