Well, no, not completely; I am not feeling that demoralized. Still, I think the opening paragraphs of this recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Next Budget Victim? Joy” kind of rings true:
Step away from that copy machine, and don’t even think about serving lunch at that next faculty meeting. Oh, and that class you love with 20 students? Double it. On second thought, couldn’t you just triple it?
Welcome to the world of higher education in the thick of an economic recession. While tenured faculty may feel more secure in their jobs than employees in more beleaguered industries, there’s little question that the quality of life many professors have come to expect is deteriorating at many institutions. Workloads are increasing while pay is stagnant or falling, and the threat of layoffs has brought an edginess to the Ivory Tower that some professors say hasn’t existed in decades.
All sorts of pressures– upping teaching loads, administrative creep, a general falling off of other benefits of being a professor– do make someone like me question if it’s worth it. Of course, in this economy, what else would I do? But it is true that it is less fun when these sorts of economic times to be a professor. Though most other jobs are probably less fun too.
The tragic state of affairs that the professor describes above has been the normal state of affairs at Eastern since I came here now coming on a decade ago–my classes are capped at 40 and I have never espied lunch served at a department meeting, only eaten them at the all-day event of the department retreat once a year. Indeed, the recession, in lessening the number of students who can afford college, has had one positive consequence in reducing the class size and enabling more attention on everyone’s part to the needs of individual students.
I think one of the differences between EMU and a lot of universities in the US is we’ve been experiencing recession conditions for a long time, pretty much ever since I got here in 1998. The auto economy in particular and the Michigan economy in general certainly didn’t tank overnight. Still, I’d rather have my no free lunch academic job than most “real” jobs.