I think it’s advisable for society to give scholars the security to go deeply into their area without having to show short-term results. Researchers into Arab youth culture would probably have been cut under what you propose if the decision had been made on September 10th 2001. If we cut Russian departments because of lack of student enrolment, what do we do when theres a military coup in Moscow?…

[T]here seems to be an air of self-denunciation among the gloomy (ex)academic bloggers, aimed at “bourgeois specialists” who dont obey the Market.

So writes Gabriel, in a comment to my last post. I’ll answer these in reverse order.

I think most post-academic bloggers try not to sound gloomy either about the life of the mind, or about not being academics. Certainly I don’t mean to be: I’ve found that my academic training has been very useful in my work as a futurist, and that being outside the academic world has given me access to people and problems I wouldn’t have known about were I a professor. We’re talking about difficult choices, though, which we’ve often made after years of hard and reluctant deliberation; so sometimes we’re going to sound serious.

I don’t think scholars be denied “the security to go deeply into their area without having to show short-term results,” if that means doing something like completely eliminating tenure. More corporatization of the scholarly job market, I suspect, wouldn’t produce a better or more equitable system than the perfect storm of self-interest and penury that’s led to the academy’s current addiction to adjuncts. The question is not whether university faculties ought to reflect the wider world, and in so doing support both work that has an apparent immediate relevance and work whose larger value is indeterminate; the question is what formula you use to determine the mix.

It’s also worth noting that arguments for relevance and short-term results aren’t automatically associated with advocacy of corporatization. Politically progressive academic programs, like women’s studies and science studies, have been very comfortable using a language of relevance to justify their existence.

Invisible Adjunct has great readers; they’re constant commenters on her posts, including this one on the corporatization of the university, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. I added one myself, which I expand on slightly here….

Having gone to college and graduate school at just the period when this issue was taking off, I’ve long been interested in it, and have had the vague sense that the encroachment of the marketplace- and in particular, of the commercial culture of chain stores and logic of economic maximization- didn’t enhance my academic experience. But “corporatization” means a lot of different things- outsourcing of non-core functions, the use of economies of scale, preference for flexible labor arrangements, and lots of other stuff. What we’ve seen in the university several overlapping kinds of corporatization, but I’d argue that the term doesn’t apply so well to what’s happened with academic jobs.

The purest examples of academic corporatization are things like the contracting of bookstores out to Barnes and Noble and Follets, or the contracting of food services to whoever is big in the food service industry, or outsoucing janitorial services. These are pretty straightforward money-saving measures, and can be defended on the grounds that they’re not part of the university’s core mission, and can be done better and more cheaply by companies that focus specifically on them.

More complex is the phenomenon of academic-industry partnerships that take the form of “lablets,” the attempts by universities to monetize their patent portfolios, encourage faculty to do startups, etc.. Some of this behavior is entrepreneurial rather than corporate (an important distinction); some of it represents an attempt to leverage IP that would make any pharmaceutical company proud; and some of it is just a new version of age-old scramble for money.

What’s happened with the academic job market, it seems to me, is something different. It’s better thought of as a bad outcome of a conspiracy of the narrow interests of administrators and permanent faculty. Why do I say this? Look at the kinds of courses that are taught by adjuncts: introductory lecture courses, surveys, service-intensive courses like English comp. This isn’t because administrators or department heads have tried to create a more rational market, or to match teaching supply and course demand more effectively, but one driven more by convenience and hierarchy: it’s a way for administrators to cut costs, and for senior faculty to focus greater love and attention on their graduate students, enrich the collective intellectual life of their institutions, etc.

If you believed that this was happening because of a macroeconomic logic, you’d conclude that universities were operating under the assumption that it was impossible to know, semester to semester, whether there would be enough demand for Western Civ or differential calculus to have anyone permanently hired to teach it; but that it absolutely essential to have lifetime 24/7 access to specialists in [insert favorite absurd example of something]. What SHOULD be happening is the opposite. Since academic fashions change as quickly as any others, but the need for students who can write a decent paragraph and compute the area under a curve does not, universities should have spent the last two decades outsourcing their high-level, theoretical work, and investing resources in a permanent cadre of teachers.

If only….