--- On Tue, 7/7/09, Michael McIntyre <morbidsymptoms at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
[WS:] Let's face it, most university positions are sinecures that add little or no value to society. Their main function is to provide income to the segment of the middle class known as the intelligentsia, and thus keeping them pacified and away from challenging the status quo. In a way, academic positions are akin to the eunuch position in the imperial China.
Knowing that is useful for those occupying these positions, because it leads to more realistic expectations.
Wojtek