BY EVA SWIDLER
Although the media frenzy is already fading, public attention this spring was recently focused yet again in deeply unflattering ways on higher education as admissions scandals rocked elite universities in the US. Predictably, observers noted that, problematic though it might be to nakedly buy one’s way into competitive institutions with cash payments, American society actively colludes in similar but accepted processes that convert money and social class into “merit” via private schooling, tutoring, and test coaching.
But no one wondered why students (or their parents) were so desperate to get into these schools. I read nothing asking why the presumed high quality of education that everyone seemed to want at these prestigious institutions was an object of scarcity, rather than free accessibility. No one offered the idea of increasing the supply of high-quality public programs, and no one advocated for hiring wonderful professors and creating an abundance of great courses at open-door institutions as a solution to this out-of-control stampede to get through the narrow entryway into the “top” tier of schools. Perhaps this silence was because everyone knew on some deep level that what was really being grasped for in this commercial exercise in cynicism was not actually a stellar education. The object of desire was rather particular colleges’ names on a diploma or resume; these names mean what they do specifically because they are available to only the few, signal exclusivity, and depend on the creation and maintenance of scarcity.
And those students and parents are not wrong in their estimation of the power of a name. In my article “A Modest(y) Proposal” in the spring issue of Academe magazine, I review research that shows increasingly concentrated patterns of hiring in academia—patterns which award tenure-track jobs and opportunities for publication to graduates from an ever-shrinking number of elite programs, patterns which have less and less to do with any merit and more and more to do with professors-to-be trading on the cachet of their prestigious diplomas. Those other graduates unfortunate enough to have received their PhDs from the lower 90 percent of universities are largely destined to live out their academic lives gigging as the adjuncts, visiting professors, instructors, lecturers, and other contingent faculty that make up three-quarters of the professoriate.
The structure of academia is morphing to mirror the deferral to status, conspicuous consumption, increasing polarization, and degraded economic stability of society at large, and we don’t seem to be able to marshal the strength to advocate effectively for justice for the majority among us.
But even more distressingly, in my article I also review research that shows how the selective bestowal of professorships on graduates of elite institutions (and the concentration of the authorship of publications among the same group) is not just an issue of justice internal to academia, but is also a dynamic that powerfully shapes contemporary scholarly discourse. The intellectual ideas on public offer today strongly and increasingly reflect the ideas that emerge from and appeal to a small subset of the intelligentsia. In short, the status of academia as a public good is at risk. Instead of serving as a commons, higher education is becoming an enclosure, a private realm, an insiders’ club that reflects, benefits, and addresses a ruling elite increasingly remote from almost everyone in the country. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if populist rage sees no value in the academy.
We have so far failed to effectively stand together even on basic principles of fair pay and decent working conditions. Will we do better when we see the very raison d’ȇtre of the academy at stake? What can we do to defend the university as a scholarly collective, striving towards the common good?
Do we really think that academics can single-handedly counter boards of trustees filled with corporate executives preoccupied with branding their institutions? Can we resist the marketing pressure to display degrees from fancy universities on faculty web pages? Can we possibly believe that we can change the way name-checking administrators evaluate the CVs of potential hires; can we mandate an embrace of all good candidates? Do we actually hope to fundamentally alter the prestige-rewarding mechanisms that drive the realities of publication? Can we support meaningful opportunities for those with the dreaded moniker of “independent scholar”?
Maybe the political and economic forces at work on the academy today are too powerful to counter. Maybe we’ll fail at the entire agenda of re-centering our national intellectual life on the common weal. But if we don’t believe in the potential power of our raised voices to engage and to rouse and to sway and to hearten and to persuade, if we don’t believe that we can champion the public good, what are we doing working as academics?
Eva-Maria Swidler teaches environmental history and political economy at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.
Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.
