<< It would be rational to leave
academe: I left the private sector to return to academe
at a 40% pay cut, and I think that the abolition of
tenure would not only diminish the pool of candidates
for jobs, but have a tendency to push salaries up. You get what you pay for. If the job is to be made subject
to easy dismissal, like the private sector, then you
have to compete with private sector wages.
Greg<
AMEN, AMEN - I did the same thing (and took more than a 60% pay cut). The point is that the ratio of intro-level teaching salaries/private sector employment has probably been widening (more so as you age the cohort). More to the point - there is a lot of "deadwood" that may/may not have gotten tenure, or there would be a lot of "well published" faculty with A LOT of dissaffected students - why teach when all that counts is publishing!!!
The other question is whether there is a social
interest in the accumulation of intellectual capital.
If you are to stimulate individuals to acquire
extensive knowledge about obscure topics, whether
viruses, foreign countries, or what have you, it has to
be with the reasonable expectation that this capital
will not have been created in vain. Tenure is the
guarantee that it is economically rational to
accumulate what may or may not prove to be socially
useful capital. You may not need an Iranian
specialist until after the country has a revolution,
but then you want one in a hurry, and it takes ten
years to get there. No one told me, in 1983, when I
was studying French use of alcohol fuels in the 1920s
that alcohol fuels would be a major component of air
quality strategies in Los Angeles in 1989 and later. A
molecular biologist with an odd theory such as prions
takes at least a decade to make and his utility is
discovered only ex-post, when you have people with
pudding brains from eating beef. It is admittedly the
case that many academic specialties appear to have no
possible utility, but I won't name my suspicions for
fear of bringing them down on my head. In any case it
goes without saying that if you are investing in
creating intellectual capital in areas which
necessarily you cannot anticipate need until years
after the fact, it goes without saying that much
intellectual capital developed in the form of a
professor, like many patented machines, go forever
unused as a "practical" matter. But if you don't
provide some protection against the evaluation of
intellectual expertise on purely market criteria--which
is what tenure does--then you create a broad
disincentive for the creation of specialized
intellectual capital generally.
But that's the whole point of the irrationality of the system. Look, I worked in a "Corporate Research" dept for a number of years, and we increasingly had to justify our work based on "value added" criteria. Nobody could exactly pin down what this was, other than when ever we got a call about "how many tractor trailer suppliers in North Dakota," we always seemed to be able to dig around and find a lot of obscure facts.
Smart people would be
better off learning law or finance where the
intellectual capital is more immediately mobilized and
marketed, and the skill set is in fact designed to be
applicable across a wide range of situations.
This is increasingly becoming problematic. I think companies are looking for people who can "think," though they use certain majors (e.g. accounting) as a screen.
In any case, I think part of the explanation of who and
what professors do is that they are, as a class,
trained to develop a reasonably unique pool of
intellectual capital and their incentive to do so is
that they get protected from market forces in return,
and compensated with a reduced but nonetheless OK wage
in comparison to similarly educated professionals in
other fields (e.g., medical doctors). It is NOT so
much that there is an emphasis on conformity--this is
strong, but I'm not sure it's stronger than in other
walks of life--as the fact that individualistic act of
developing, marketing (to other academics) and
maintaining this intellectual capital is a highly
ego-centric, or should I say self-isolating, activity,
and that since the total body of potential intellectual
capital is infinite, the professor always feels
inwardly inadequate to the task, even if the outward
image is I-know-more-than-you-do. Regardless of
whether the field of specialization is cell biology or
Marxist theories of imperialism the fundamental
imperative of developing intellectual capital
determines the "corporate activity" of the academic.
It creates people who have a lot to say but are not
necessarily particularly useful. In this sense,
leftist activists who turn to academe as a resource for
ideas find the same thing that capitalists do: some of
the intellectual capitals amassed in the university
environment are useful for "practical applications,"
but the vast majority are not. It is no more
surprising that only 1 in 100 leftist academics are
"useful" to a "movement" than it is surprsing that only
1 in 100 molecular biologists are "useful" to a given
pharmaceutical company with a given emphasis on this or
that kind of drug. Many of them will be working on
esoterica--e.g. nervous system biochemical reactions in
earthworms--and others, even if doing work with
"practical implications", may be pointed at someone
else's bag of practical applications. And sometimes
the one person who comes up with a useful idea has done
so only because of the previous time spent reading
other people's useless ideas.
In actual fact the real functional purpose of
universities may be a kind of institutionalized
"venture capital" to mobilize, at relatively low cost,
a diversified portfolio of capabilities in stuff
society may or may not want. The overall cost is made
still cheaper by wedding to the research function the
teaching function, which is performed with varying
degrees of success depending on the complex interaction
of student and teacher capabilities, commitment, and
resources. The teaching function is further
economized by melding the teaching-for-research
fuinction with the
teaching-for-general-life-certification function which
is what the undergraduate degree usually really is.
It may not be the case, therefore, that in a capitalist
society which prizes itself on organizational
efficiency that academe is inefficient. It is
efficient but not organized on market principles, in a
manner different from, but parallel to, the armed
forces, which in their own way are wasteful at some
things and efficient at others, but in any case not
organized on market principles. The durability of the
academic structure may be that it is remarkably well
adapted and fulfilling the multiple functions which it
has been assigned: general training, an environment for
adolescents in transition, specific research and
professional training, development of highly
specialized pools of intellectual capital and
expertise as a speculative venture, and to do all this
at wage levels that are below private sector
equivalents, trading job security for cost.
And once you have all that in front of you, you can see
why, that in spite of the high degree of autonomy and
intellectual independence accorded professors (a
function of pushing them to develop diversified
intellectual capital pools), the actual "radicalness"
of the university in American society is roughly
equivalent to the "radicalness" of General Motors.
And I would bet, that if you did a survey of political
views, particularly on issues rather than code words
(not, are you a Marxist, but do you think everyone
should have health care, do you think the rich ought to
pay more in taxes, etc.), that you would find as many
"radicals" in the various levels of a corporation like
General Motors as you would at a university.
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