Here’s another one from Inside Higher Ed that I missed until just now: “The Last Professors,” an email Q&A with Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. I’ll save some of the punchier comments for interested readers, but here’s one example:
Q: What are the main reasons for the erosion of the tenure-track career?
A: I believe that tenure and the kind of career it makes possible are disappearing largely for financial reasons. Opponents of tenure are less likely to make political arguments against it — except in very inflammatory cases like Ward Churchill’s — but instead are now inclined to argue that professors’ labor costs too much. The casualization of labor is the global norm, practiced by employers everywhere. Academia is one of the last workplaces to come almost completely under this management philosophy, where payment by the job replaces the traditional salary, benefits and, in the case of professors, job security. Medicine and the law are currently engaged in less acute versions of this transition from one management system to another. Among the professions, only the clergy and the officer ranks of the military seem to be immune to the erosion of tenure or its equivalent.
I dunno. I think the system of tenure that exists at elite institutions is probably gone, but I think some sort of tenure or “tenure-like” system is not going away entirely in my lifetime, and probably not at unionized shops like EMU. But there’s a lot of commentary on Donoghue’s provocative points here.
