Academia, Then And Now

When the AAUP’s longtime leader began his career, public higher education was on a roll. Since then, diminished resources have reduced its intellectual quality as well as its students’ opportunities.

By Ernst Benjamin

I think of myself as on the cusp of the generations, born between the 1930s and 1940s, and educated between the 1950s and 1960s: generations recurrently balanced between fear and hope. I greatly enjoyed the intellectual challenges of my undergraduate experience in the mid-1950s, which I found a liberating contrast to the boredom of a mediocre high school. The faculty at my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University, were excited by their scholarly concerns and eager to share their questions and insights with any responsive student. I benefited from small classes and from interaction with scholars committed to their subjects as well as their students. I benefited also from the expanding opportunities of that time, such as the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program, and subsequent fellowships, which enabled me to discover graduate education and continue my studies at the University of Chicago and beyond.

I approached my education, even my graduate and post-graduate education (at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California and at the University of Ghana), rather impractically. I focused less on preparation for a professional career in research or teaching than on the immediate experience of working and living in community with others engaged in a thought-provoking and intellectually liberating life. I believe that this underlying enjoyment of learning and the community of learning frequently energizes the commitment to scholarship and the effective conduct of teaching and research essential to the profession and to higher education.

The opportunity to engage in a lifetime of learning depends, of course, not only on the public funding and private philanthropy that enabled the expansion of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, but also on the understanding and support of policy makers and educational leaders. Conversely, it is recurrently threatened not only by those who fail to support it, but also by those who fail to under-stand it: those who would substitute training for education, testing for understanding, and product development for research.

In this context, the commitment to academic freedom, which brings us together in the AAUP, protects more than the essential right to a diversity of professional opinions; it protects the fundamental freedom to inquire and explore rather than to teach a prefabricated curriculum or conduct managerially assigned research. Whatever endangers the opportunity for inquiry and innovation threatens to make education dull and stultifying. There are many such dangers—some of which I will review later. But those who choose a life of inquiry, who truly make their profession a vocation, find this life in many ways its own reward. Thus we are resilient and able to overcome substantial adversity. I point to obstacles not because I believe them inevitable, but because I believe they can and should be overcome.

Curtailed Opportunities

So I left a graduate department of political science in a college of liberal arts to teach in Wayne’s interdisciplinary Monteith College, which offered an undergraduate program based on the University of Chicago’s and which was open to any Wayne undergraduate. I also became deeply involved, often with students, in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and emerging feminist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Then, in the early 1970s, the war economy ended the national commitment to domestic economic and social reform embodied in Great Society programs, including serious efforts to expand the quality, as distinct from the quantity, of opportunities in public higher education. The fiscal crisis that began in the 1970s not only curtailed public higher education at that time, as exemplified in the cutbacks at public universities in New York, but also led to structural changes that continue to affect students’ opportunities. Since the mid-1970s, students have increasingly been tracked into less expensive, vocationally oriented community colleges rather than encouraged to enter four-year colleges and universities. As tuition and fees have increased, students have depended more on out-side earnings to fund their education. Part-time faculty and graduate assistants have replaced full-time faculty in many undergraduate classrooms, and tenure hurdles have risen as tenure lines have diminished.

These constraints were reflected in diminishing student outcomes that were apparent to, if not fully understood by, business leaders and policy makers, who began to complain less that students were studying humanities rather than business and more that students lacked communication skills, judgment, and initiative. Consequently, faculty, although increasingly pressured to publish, were chastised for doing so at the alleged expense of their students.

As Wayne State offered a window on the expansion of educational opportunities and controversies of the 1960s, so it also served as a microcosm of the changes that emerged in the 1970s, especially economically driven contraction and the emergence of faculty collective bargaining. Contraction included declining enrollment as a result of dramatic tuition increases, notices of nonrenewal for all nontenured faculty members just before Christmas one year (a wonderful gift to our nascent collective bargaining efforts), and the financially driven elimination of Monteith College and other such investments in undergraduate education. Many students responded by giving up educational exploration for highly focused vocationalism, and many faculty, myself included, focused increasingly on professional concerns.

At Wayne, as at many other institutions, publication became a condition of job security as well as advancement, and faculty organizing became essential to protect the quality of professional life and, indeed, of education. It is important to understand, as most policy makers and educational reformers apparently do not, that insofar as the emphasis on teaching and learning diminished at this time, it did so not because of lack of commitment among individual faculty members and students, or as a result of an erroneous educational philosophy in need of reform, but because of broad changes in national priorities that diminished relative investment in the public sector.

Faculty in community colleges, in tuition-driven private colleges, and in urban and regional public universities responded to these economic constraints, personnel pressures, and curtailments of educational programs with concerted action and collective bargaining. Bargaining offered faculty a new way to defend professional opportunities and standards. While at Wayne, I served as negotiator for our AAUP chapter and as president and chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress. On our campus, we developed procedures for awarding tenure that afforded due process protections for junior faculty (many nonbargaining campuses still lack adequate procedures in this area). We fashioned selective salary systems responsive to merit and market and equity concerns. We negotiated protections and enhancements for the faculty role in departmental and university governance. We secured equitable medical and retirement policies for women. But we were not able to prevent the increasing corporatization of the university, which manifested itself in excessive vocationalism, increasing use of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty, increasingly product-oriented research, and the consequent constraints on teaching and learning.

Despite all these problems, this period had its positive aspects. The egalitarian movements of the 1960s continued as more women entered the academy and began to reshape their departments and disciplines, and minorities had programmatic successes, although their numbers remain little improved in the face of rising economic constraints. The commercial need for vocational training and continuing education and the institutional need for tuition revenues in a period of shrinking budgets led to more outreach to working adults. Many of these new students were quite serious about their education and sought, in a practical way, the educational relevance that had been a catchword in the 1960s. So the growth of higher education continued, and the social reforms some of us sought in the 1960s continued to reshape higher education. I participated in these changes at Wayne State as a coordinator of labor studies, director of a weekend college program, and interim dean of lifelong learning.

AAUP Years

Fortunately, a shared recognition of new opportunities for and threats to the profession provided the common ground on which we were able to reunite the AAUP and to halt our membership decline. We have found allies in administrative associations in defending affirmative action, securing the continuance of tenure despite the elimination of mandatory retirement, and engaging in a principled defense of academic freedom.

Together, we turned aside the direct attacks on academic freedom arising from the assault on the arts, the exchange of accusations associated with "political correctness," the various denunciations of "tenured radicals," and the intrusions of "accuracy in academia." We worked independently to resist the advocates of "strategic management" who used erroneous predictions of institutional bankruptcies and declining enrollment to justify curtailment of academic programs. We also overcame the prescriptions of a succession of managerial reformers, including the Minnesota regents, who found tenure and professional autonomy obstacles to "a proper attitude of industry and cooperation"; the roundtable sponsored by the Pew Foundation, whose members urged faculty to give up "a portion of their independence and ability to define their own tasks and performance standards" in the name of economy and efficiency; and the many others who have sought to increase the quantity rather than the quality of instruction or to standardize teaching and learning through various assessment schemes.

Although we have largely succeeded in withstanding direct assaults on tenure and professional standards, the increasing emphasis on financial and managerial priorities continues to erode tenure and requires our resistance. In the early 1990s, recession limited academic budgets and spurred the already excessive reliance on part-time faculty. We responded by publicizing how fiscal constraints were damaging the academy and the profession: that the vast majority of students depend on public higher education, and that these students suffer as the quality of educational opportunity shrinks. At the same time, the budget problems discouraged students from entering the profession and made it increasingly difficult to recruit a new generation of faculty. We also drew attention to the exploitation of part-time faculty and the educational consequences of their misuse. In addition, we began to document and critique the accelerating reliance on non-tenure-track, full-time faculty. And we started to work through our committees, chapters, and conferences, and with other associations, to correct these abuses.

In 1995 I relinquished the office of general secretary and became the Association’s director of research. Since then, I have had a renewed opportunity to be a student and a teacher, at times even a teacher of teachers. I confess, however, that I have viewed my responsibility for managing the AAUP salary survey in much the same way that I looked on taking exams as a student, grading papers as a faculty member, and reprising every Association decision at least three times as general secretary. What I have most valued are the opportunities to work with colleagues in the Association and in other organizations, including the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), disciplinary associations (especially the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association), and TIAA-CREF, on a variety of inquiries and reports.

Drawing on these resources, I have tried not merely to document the continued inadequacy of faculty salaries but also to assist efforts to document, publicize, and reverse the continuing erosion of professional opportunities arising from the excessive reliance upon part-time and non-tenure-track positions and the exploitation of graduate assistants. This article is not the place to rehearse numbers, but I will mention, as an example, preliminary (not yet fully verified) data from an NCES survey to which I contributed questions: it found that 75 percent of Ph.D. candidates work (two-thirds as graduate assistants) an average of thirty-one hours a week. I have documented how the erosion of professional standards represented by such trends has damaged the prospects of the many women and the inadequate numbers of minorities who are newly entering the profession.

But I have sought even more to call attention to how this erosion has undercut opportunities for the vast majority of students—especially those in the first two years of under-graduate education. Despite the conventional wisdom, educational research shows that students’ future earnings and accomplishments are only modestly affected by the specific college or university from which they obtain their degrees. But this research also finds that degree completion, which varies widely, has a major impact on students’ future success. And it is the students in the community colleges and in large public universities who have substantially lower completion rates. These students lack the opportunity for full-time study with fully trained, fully supported, and fully committed full-time, tenure-track faculty. That is why we do not need more managerial and corporate reforms, but rather a renewed national commitment to ensure that our colleges and universities offer students not only the greatest possible access but the highest possible quality of educational opportunity.

During the many years I staffed the AAUP’s committee on retirement, I enthusiastically advocated phased retirement. I appreciate the opportunity the Association has given me to enjoy it. So, for at least two more years, I will continue to work with the AAUP to advance the standards, ideals, and welfare of our profession and, thereby, of our students and society. I will do so with confidence, because I know that despite their shared concern about our common problems, the vast majority of faculty are proud of our profession and our contribution to society. And, above all, I know it is the nature of our profession to attract students in love with learning who, with the assistance of our Association, will defend and maintain the opportunity to freely teach and freely learn.

Ernst Benjamin is senior AAUP consultant and former general secretary and research director of the Association.

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