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From the Editor: Money and Other Matters
Ellen Schrecker
This issue of Academe has no theme. Normally, we focus on one or another of the major issues college teachers face: technology, governance, affirmative action, collective bargaining, sexual harassment, citizenship, medical education, tenure, or academic freedom in a religious school-there is no dearth of such topics. Some have always been around, but others are new to higher education. Whether these new issues will become perennial or vanish by next semester is hard to tell. Will the virtual classroom replace the material one, or will it go the way of its dot.com cousins? Will graduate student unions survive, or will administrations stall negotiations until the current activists get their degrees and let the organizations they founded fade away? Will tenure disappear as institutions continue to replace retiring professors with part-time and temporary teachers? While Academe certainly can't supply the answers, we can at least identify the questions and find knowledgeable people to write about them.
Obviously, with only five issues a year (not counting the annual salary survey), we must be selective about which problems to address. Sometimes, however, we receive articles that we publish as stand-alone pieces, especially when they come in after we've already devoted an issue to a similar topic. Thus, for example, our issue on religion (January-February 2001) would have included Mark Harmon's tongue-in-cheek essay about Jesus as an undergraduate had it arrived in time, just as we would have published Paul Rogat Loeb's article about encouraging student activism in last year's (July-August 2000) issue on civic engagement. In order to accommodate such pieces, this issue of Academe is a miscellany that, perhaps more accurately than our regular issues, reflects the diversity of academic life.
Still, if any theme runs through the magazine, it's probably that of money. It's hard to think about adjuncts, pay equity, or retirement without confronting matters of dollars and cents. As Ronald Ehrenberg points out, the financial structure of an institution's retirement policies often determines when and how a professor decides to give up teaching. Some plans encourage early retirement, while others let faculty members work part time for a few years before they finally quit. Money also matters when, as Donna Euben reveals, male faculty members are still getting more of it than their females colleagues. On many campuses, practices such as tying salaries to market demands, skewing merit raises, and promoting women more slowly than men, while not overtly discriminatory, do produce real gaps in pay.
Of course, money isn't everything. Anne Cassebaum, who tried to imagine living as an adjunct, worried about health insurance and car payments, but considered the insensitivity of her colleagues just as debilitating. She also fretted about the constraints on academic freedom that the insecurity of part-time and temporary positions imposes. But even tenured professors encounter censorship. When Michael Ferber put together an anthology of William Blake's poems for children, his publisher tried to delete some of them. While Ferber found the experience more amusing than threatening, it does remind us that the pressures the AAUP was organized to resist are still very much with us.
No longer, however, do those pressures come only from authoritarian administrators and boards of trustees. The marketplace, not to mention our own students and colleagues, also limits academic freedom. Future issues of Academe will explore some of those restrictions. We'll be looking at corporations, litigation, and the ethical dilemmas that bedevil American higher education. But since the magazine exists to serve AAUP members, we'd also like to know what problems you think Academe should investigate. While we don't publish all the unsolicited articles we receive, our door is always open.
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