Except for perhaps a brief period in the early 1970s, American universities have always sucked in terms of upholding any sort of genuine academic freedom. Just read Thorstein Veblen on the subject from almost a century ago.
*The higher learning in America*.
http://books.google.com/books?id=u-otAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=veblen+higher
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Michael McIntyre <morbidsymptoms at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] judge rules against ward churchill Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 22:40:45 -0500
Point taken, but I'd say that in some ways universities were riding high with the very large expansion of postwar funding, something that ground to a halt in the early 1970s. There was a time, I'm told, when multiple job offers were the norm, most faculty were tenured or tenure-track, faculty governance wasn't entirely a joke, and both salaries and operating budgets were expanding. Today anyone considers herself lucky to have an offer, most faculty are adjuncts, faculty governance institutions are entirely supine, and salaries for even the favored few are flat or declining. (Salary compression or even inversion is a huge issue on most campuses). Aside from atrocities like the Finkelstein firing (and who knows how many others that never make headlines), one finds manifest the wholesale buying and selling of academic programs. My institution, DePaul, in return for $10 million from the Hilton family, is starting up an MBA in "hospitality leadership". It gets a laugh when I say they should have held out for an extra $5 million to endow the Paris Hilton Chair in Escort Services, but these people have no shame.
I sometimes comfort myself with a well-known quote from Max Weber:
"Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says, give up any hope. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: 'Of course, I live only for my "calling.' Yet, I have found that only a few persons could endure this situation without coming to grief."
MM
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