The Academic Generation Gap

The gap between full and assistant professors is more important than any generational difference.

By Anna Dronzek

When I think about the generation gap in academe, two words come to mind: dinner meetings.

I used to work at a small school where my small department met weekly, and every other week we met over dinner. For the senior faculty (all of whom were full professors), I believe, the dinner meetings were a sign of civility and gracious living. They meant that we, as a department, were so collegial that we could mix business and pleasure in this way. We could leaven the burden of departmental administration by breaking bread together. Dining together provided the opportunity for companionship and pleasant conversation and for the resolution of departmental business in a leisurely, genteel fashion. After all, academia isn’t a corporation; why should we have to conduct our business in the same way that corporations conducted theirs?

Junior faculty—if I may speak for those of us in the department at the time—saw the dinners differently. Only recently having moved from graduate student poverty to assistant professor salaries, not all of us wanted to spend the money to eat out every other week. Dinner meetings invariably went over the hour normally allotted to department meetings, and those of us offering new or revised course preps that semester often agonized over the lectures yet to be written, classes yet to be planned, or papers yet to be graded that awaited our return. But perhaps most of all, we didn’t want companionship and good conversation; or, more accurately, we didn’t not want those things, but more, we wanted efficiency. We wanted a meeting to achieve what it was held to achieve, and expeditiously, so we could return to what felt like our never-ending work.

Now, I’m overstating the case somewhat. I liked my colleagues and enjoyed their company, so dinners were often perfectly lovely. And I’m sure there were days when my senior colleagues dreaded going to another meeting, even over dinner, as much as I did. Nonetheless, the different ways that senior and junior faculty viewed dinner meetings encapsulates for me some of the central tensions at the heart of the current academic generation gap.

Defining the Gap

First of all, I should make explicit that when I talk about a generation gap, I’m really thinking of the chasm that can yawn between full professors and assistant professors. This formulation essentially ignores associate professors, which does them a grave disservice—and, in fact, an important consequence of the current generation gap may be precisely that it leads people to ignore associate professors, who don’t fit neatly into the dichotomy of old and new in the way that full and assistant professors do.

While as a medievalist I’m well aware that oldsters have been complaining about those young whippersnappers, and vice versa, for thousands of years, the current generation gap in academia is different— fundamentally shaped by the structural problems of academic employment. In my forays on the job market, when looking at small departments where I might potentially be employed, I frequently saw the ravages of the academic job crisis in departmental demographics. I commonly found, for example, that in a department of ten people, eight might be full professors, with one associate and one assistant. It was easy to read in these departmental rosters the fact that many departments had regularly appointed new faculty members through the early seventies and then may not have appointed anyone else for the next fifteen or twenty years. Being the first or second person appointed to a tenure-track position in a department for fifteen or twenty years inevitably creates a difficult adjustment for both senior and junior faculty, given the long fallow periods of no turnover and thus no new blood and new ideas—regardless of how eager the senior faculty are to embrace the new people and how eager the new people are to fit into their new department. It has nothing to do with malice and everything to do with the fact that the profession in which the senior faculty were trained looks very little like the profession in which the junior faculty were trained.

The job market has especially exacerbated tensions between senior and junior faculty by ratcheting up expectations and requirements at every stage of the academic career. The disparities have been mentioned often enough to achieve the status of cliché, but I’ll state them again: in an era in which even undergraduates are expected to have presented and, in many fields, published papers in order simply to gain admittance to graduate school, the publishing expectations for junior faculty are higher than they were for senior faculty at the same stage of their careers. Some junior faculty have more publications when they are appointed than the full professors in their departments had when they received tenure, and those juniors will need to generate more before those same full professors will review their cases for tenure. Moreover, to some junior faculty it feels like the process that they endured to get an academic job was much more difficult than what their senior colleagues faced; while this is by no means universally true, there are still senior faculty who got jobs because their advisers made a few phone calls—the simplest of paths, and one closed to junior faculty today.

My point in raising these differences is not to award brownie points to junior faculty or to criticize the senior, or vice versa. Neither senior nor junior faculty can be blamed if mission creep, as well as the glut of the job market, means that schools formerly focused exclusively on teaching have decided now that they want their professors to do research as well. More importantly, because junior faculty face higher research expectations does not mean that they necessarily work harder than senior faculty; they just work differently. I think it’s important for junior faculty to remember that if they publish more than their senior colleagues (which is by no means always the case), it doesn’t mean that those full professors have spent their careers lounging on divans nibbling bonbons.

Nonetheless, differences in junior and senior faculty experiences are undeniable. And out of these differences conflicts seem to arise most strongly around three issues: loyalty, community, and identity.

Loyalty

Last fall, on various academic blogs that I read, discussion arose about the practice of junior faculty in tenure-track jobs going on the job market. Many people saw this practice as acceptable and even ordinary, but many others did not. This discussion quickly polarized around the issue of loyalty, and the two sides came to be associated with academic generations—those who felt it was acceptable to look for new positions were identified as junior faculty, and those who did not were identified as senior (whether or not those labels actually fit their professional status). And again, these labels seemed really to be code for assistant professors and full professors, leaving associates with the choice of joining one alliance or the other, or vanishing in the gap between them.

The disagreement at the heart of this debate: to whom does a member of the faculty owe greatest loyalty? The “senior” faculty in this debate accused job seekers of disloyalty—to their institutions, to their students, and to their departmental colleagues, upon whom would fall the dismal task of replacing departing assistant professors. Such discussions painted job seekers as fundamentally selfish, as rejecting the selflessness expected of a true academic.

The “junior” faculty in this fight, in turn, argued the need to be loyal to their own interests. Because, they claimed, institutions will always place their own needs before those of an individual, the only person on whom one can rely is oneself. These voices  argued that it should be possible to contribute fully to an institution, to students, and to a department without damaging one’s own interests, and that, in fact, a faculty member who always puts his or her own interests last was probably not going to be very effective at helping anyone else at all.

Changes in family life also complicate the issue of loyalty. Many senior faculty have stay-at-home spouses, or spouses willing to accept underemployment, enabling those faculty members to give undivided loyalty to their institutions. More often, junior faculty are paired with other academics (after all, whom else does one meet in graduate school?), or at least with other professionals, who want employment that makes use of their training and skills. Loyalty to their partners requires that junior faculty consider their partners’ professional interests as well as their own, something that further divides their interests from those of their institutions and further encourages accusations of disloyalty from faculty labeled as senior.

It’s worth restating, however, that the opposing sides in this debate weren’t necessarily junior and senior faculty; everyone involved just talked as if they were. This seems to imply two things: first, that there are stereotypes of “junior” and “senior” faculty attitudes about loyalty, and that participants in this debate, at least, agreed on what junior faculty would think versus what senior faculty would think. And second, such stereotypes, like all other stereotypes, do more harm than good. It might mitigate the generation gap if people stopped labeling opposing sides of an argument as junior or senior and found better ways to describe the differences of opinion between them.

Community

Faculty on opposing sides of the generation gap, particularly in small schools, also seem to define differently the communities to which they belong. At least in my own discipline—and my sense is that this holds true for academia more generally—research in the last thirty years has grown ever more specialized. Such specialization encourages identification within one’s field, rather than in a discipline more broadly. This identification is made possible by the revolution of the information age—in the era of the Internet, scholars can collaborate regardless of whether they work in the same institution, in the same state, or on the same continent. Junior faculty trained and hired in the age of the World Wide Web, email, instant messaging, text messages, and the like can maintain connections with scholars outside of their home institutions much more easily than their senior colleagues could at the same stage of their careers. Digitization of records frequently allows research materials to come to us, instead of requiring us to travel to them.

Thus, while some senior faculty, especially at small or isolated schools, may have dedicated themselves to their local campus communities almost by default, their junior colleagues may not feel the same way. And while both groups devote a great deal of energy to their chosen communities, those energies are not necessarily going to be directed toward to the same place. In the same way as conflicts over loyalty, conflicts over community are really about where one’s priorities should lie.

Identity

A departmental assistant once told me that junior faculty had careers, while senior faculty had vocations. Herself around the age of most junior faculty, she made her observation not to flatter senior faculty; her comment said more about who in the department made her job easier or more difficult than anything else. Nonetheless, her distinction has stuck with me and seems to hold a grain of truth—and again, we can blame the job market. In their attempts to get jobs, thirty-something faculty have had to professionalize or die—go to conferences earlier, publish papers earlier, and develop the arts of schmoozing and self-promotion earlier. As many have pointed out, these presentations and publications have not always added greatly to the field of knowledge. What they have created, however, is a different sense of self for junior faculty from that of their full professor colleagues—a sense of oneself as a professional in a profession that, especially perhaps in the view of senior faculty, has begun to adopt the values of a corporation rather than the altruism of a vocation.

I don’t think the differences between senior and junior conceptions of loyalty, community, and identity are likely to go away; I’d just urge that each side think about the fact that these differences aren’t about right or wrong as much as they’re about different priorities. Junior faculty aren’t disloyal; they’re loyal to different principles. Senior faculty aren’t disconnected from their fields of specialization; they’re more heavily invested in a different kind of community.

Perhaps my biggest concern about the academic generation gap is simply that it’s going to replicate itself over the next twenty to thirty years. Those departments I used to find peopled by eight full professors, one associate, and one assistant? By now, seven years after I first began applying for jobs, many of them have turned upside-down: their members may include one full professor and two or three associates, with the remainder in assistant professor positions. I’ve seen a startling number of small departments in which assistant professors are serving as chair. It may be that the modern pattern of employment outside of academia, in which people change careers far more frequently than their parents did, will trickle into academia as well, and that the majority of assistant professors will change careers frequently enough that these departments will experience greater turnover in this generation than in the previous one, but that remains to be seen. Otherwise, however, departments currently filled with assistant professors are going to turn around in twenty to thirty years and find themselves poised to recreate the current generation gap.

Anna Dronzek has taught medieval history at the University of Minnesota–Morris, Rhodes College, and the University of Denver.

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Comments

Excellent article – describes much of what I feel – and is written in a very diplomatic way that diplomatically accommodates both sides.

With my current experiences as an Assistant Professor in the biomedical field I wouldn’t have been able to abstain from an additional portion of cynicism with regards to the trend in the academic system.

What is left out is the aspect that Senior Professors are tenured while Assistant Professors are struggling to get tenured in a funding environment that is bad and often controlled by senior Professors who wield powers as experts in study sections of funding agencies.

Also important (and probably linked to the lack of state funding) is the trend that Universities become more and more dependent on funds from corporate entities that will slowly make Universities Tax payer funded sites for private profit oriented research.  It is the younger faculty that will particularly depend on these additional funding sources to justify their existence as money makers for their Universities.

Stephan S

 Very interesting essay on Jr./Sr. faculty.  I think it is spot on,  though it does not represent Sr. women faculty as well as older men, do  you think?  The former did not get the home support or the institutional  pals-call-pals placement services as readily as did men.  I suspect this  whole dichotomy is coming to an end, anyway, thank
heavens.
 
Barbara

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