More Money Than Brains (15 page)

It is unlikely that its administrators will raze the toniest suburbs of the bloated, sprawling metropolis that is the contemporary university. I have no doubt that they will do the exact opposite and continue to generate more anti-academic, anti-intellectual job-training departments. We might as well just hang up big signs that say “Boss Studies” or “I Love Kids” or “E-Z Computer Jobs Here” and make things totally student-centred. Moneyed entities will continue to endow chairs in however they made their fortunes so that franchising and hawking take their places of honour beside the shrivelled husks of philosophy and history.

Administrators aren’t going to turn down donations or fees to preserve the tiny, quaint town squares that spawned the university, the places that look backwards and hold on to
the old. No dean or recruiter will ever encourage students who signed up for job training and got English lit and Rocks for Jocks to go elsewhere, to where their aspirations and talents might be better served.

Students are also subject to another pernicious bait-and-switch. The university sells teachers, but it hires researchers and then pushes them to produce, which means they spend less time teaching. Enter the grad students, part-timers, and assorted adjuncts who do most of the teaching, particularly in those first few sink-or-swim years of study. In the U.S., for example,

There aren’t any comparable recent Canadian numbers. The last time StatsCan counted, back in 1998, there were 28,000 part-time profs and 34,000 with tenure. But Canadian universities have since persuaded the federal bean-counters that it’s too dang hard to keep track of the adjuncts who come and go.

Does any school really want to ‘fess up and let parents and students know how many of their costly classes will be
conducted by greenhorn grad students and “roads scholars” or “freeway flyers,” who teach a bunch of different courses on different campuses to cobble together a meagre living? Teaching matters sooo much to deans and admincritters that they are willing to pay someone approximately one tuition fee – if they are lucky – per class per term. Some U.S. schools pay as little as $1,000 per class per term. If there are thirty students in that class, they should receive approximately $33.33 worth of expert attention apiece. Surely the business types would approve of such an efficient apportionment of teacher attention. But do you think Any University U.S.A. will include that figure in their promotional brochures and web pages?

It’s easy to see the values of the contemporary university. Just take a stroll through your friendly local campus and look at the buildings. There’s always cash for a new dorm or a new stadium, since benefactors like to slap their names on those. Mall-ish food courts are common. I’ve never set foot in a business building that wasn’t state of the art, from the floors to the chairs to the classroom tech. Conversely, I have taken and taught liberal arts classes in mouldy rooms strewn with trash in the wings of the university that nobody bothers to maintain, since nobody wants to donate a Bigwig Memorial Mop-and-Paint Job.

All the angry talk about elite institutions existing at a luxurious remove from the “real world” is risible. Does a tenured prof at Yale or U of T have a sweet ride? Sure. But they are at the tippy-tippy top of their fields, and investment bankers of like rank would laugh at the paltry sums nerds consider good money. Moreover, the really high salaries at
universities go to non-academic types such as management and athletic coaches.

Most college and university instructors in North America are harried, underpaid contract or part-time workers, just like many of their students. Both groups are short on money and time, busting their humps in pursuit of a promotion that may never arrive. Ivory tower, my arse! This sounds exactly like the mercenary shit-show that the commonsensical call the “real world.”

Universities hire more contingent workers because they’re cheaper and because they can, as there are more Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s than there are real jobs, particularly in the humanities. Some boomers are finally aging out of the profession, as promised throughout the 1990s, but they aren’t going to retire as quickly as people think. Just look at the way they’ve prolonged Rolling Stones tours and their erections beyond all seemliness. Even when they do retire or die on the job, their exodus is often seen as a great opportunity to convert costly tenured positions into cheap part-time work and to recruit the starriest research stars to fill the few spots that remain.

The starrier the stars, the less likely students are to see them, as they must maintain their school’s place in the firmament. These stars may well be great teachers too, but they will likely spend more of their time on the road or in the lab than with students. Research hauls in money – private and public – and prestige. There is not much room on the tenure track for people who prefer teaching and would rather spend their time working with students than proving themselves to their peers. Hiring committees do consider teaching philosophies
and student evaluations, but there is always the suspicion that someone might garner high ratings from the students for the wrong reasons, like being a snappy dresser or an easy grader.

The number of books and papers published and grants successfully snared are more reliable, objective indicators. “Publish or perish” is evidence of the quantitative mania at work in the humanities. Hiring committees hardly have time to read all those articles candidates list in their
CVS
. They are doing more administrative work, thanks to the university’s increased dependence on part-timers, and they have to write their own articles and books for people to not read so they too can level up.

The teaching that most prospective students and parents think they are paying for just doesn’t pay. Part-timers who focus on teaching do so at their own peril. And the perverse economy of the university too often rewards profs who think they are too good to teach, who would rather impress their guild than help their students.

I’m not impugning academic research
tout court
, but the fact that it is a must – the only road out of adjunct serfdom – means there are a whack of forced and futile verbiage and stacks of stupid studies out there. And those heaps of rarely read journals and books only confirm the use-minded’s dismissive preconceptions about the liberal arts even as they strain to conform to their quantitative standards.

Universities are cutting their library book budgets in favour of more tech, which means fewer guaranteed university press sales and more people trying to cram their tricked-out dissertations through an increasingly narrow bottleneck.
Lindsay Waters, the former humanities editor of Harvard University Press, argues that the publish-or-perish model is bad for books and the humanities. He writes, “there is a causal connection between the corporatist demand for increased productivity and the draining from all publications of any significance other than as a number. The humanities are in a crisis now because many of the presuppositions about what counts are absolutely inimical to the humanities.”
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The useless studies have a hard time measuring up to the standards of the useful studies because they have different ends and advantages, ones the use-minded dismiss as imaginary or irrelevant.

Training is wrecking teaching. Budding nerds have been overrun by people who are in college so they can be somewhere else. We’ve poured a bucket of water into a bowl of soup, so neither constituency gets the nourishment it needs. Or, to put this in more dramatic terms, the humanities are occupied territory, ruled by hostile foreign powers that have run them off their own native turf. If we can’t measure “humanity” in the same way that standardized tests assess intellect or M.B.A.-lings measure profits, then it is a meaningless category, one unworthy of sustained inquiry. People should sort out what being humane means on their own time and their own dime.

I could monetize this argument and point to the scores of liberal arts graduates who eventually do well, or contend that culture is a powerful economic engine. But I don’t want to make this case on Gradgrindist grounds, to twist things around and insist that useless school can turn out to be really useful after all. That is true, but it is not my point.

The useful studies – because they are nothing more than useful – are pale shadows of their elderly relatives in the useless studies. The useful studies are puffed-up training programs, job descriptions masquerading as academic disciplines. The more the merely useful encroaches on the university, the harder it gets for the seemingly useless to survive there. And where else is all that useless beauty supposed to live? I suspect the answer to this question, for many cost-cutters and real-worlders, is another question:
who cares?
If there is no more market for ancient Greek, there should be no more ancient Greek. If there are no jobs for historians, there should be no history. If there is no money in brains, there should be no brains – except for the brains that make money.

W
hen Barack Obama won the 2008 U.S. election, many pundits argued that his victory was a repudiation of the incompetence and anti-intellectualism of the Bush years, a sign that the public longed for smart leadership. “Brains are back!” declared Michael Hirsh,
Newsweek’s
Washington correspondent. Obama’s
victory marked a return to rationality and pragmatism. Hirsh reported: “Sun Belt politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism – ‘has for the moment played itself out,’ says presidential historian Robert Dallek.”
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Hirsh’s column ran in November, right after the election, when the world entire was abubble with hope. In the intervening months, we have all learned just how stubborn the politics of rigidity, zealotry, and anti-intellectualism really are. Republicans may be in the political minority, but rump status has only made the right’s remnants louder and crazier, more strident and emotive.

Throughout 2009, Fox News bloviators, gaggles of disgruntled crackers, and a handful of Republican politicos gathered for “teabagging” parties where they protested the taxation and tyranny of the new administration. Some even went so far as to don Glenn Beckian Founding Fathers drag, while others mailed teabags to their representatives or dumped tea in local bodies of water, a gesture that shows their lack of respect for all things public, including historical accuracy.

Throughout the summer of 2009, when members of Congress and senators held town hall meetings to discuss the administration’s proposed health-care reform plans, the question-and-answer sessions degenerated into hooting and hollering, boos and bellowing. Prune-faced honkies and fresh-faced LaRouchies eschewed questions in favour of conspiratorial nonsense and paranoid fear-mongering, baying that health care was un-American, likening the President to a Nazi, a commie, and a fascist.

In his August 2009 town hall, John McCain was asked the following by a member of Arizona’s considerable old-bag constituency: “I would like to know how the President’s getting by … with all this money … it’s against the Constitution. Doesn’t he know it’s against the Constitution?” This indignant mess was greeted with many cheers. When McCain replied, “I’m sure that he does … I’m serious. I’m sure that he respects the Constitution of the United States,” he was rewarded with yowls and jeers.
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As many of you are doubtless already aware, before he started his career in politics, Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade. Dude has forgotten more about the Constitution than these anti-government grumpuses will ever know. I’m no constitutional scholar, but I do know that the preamble says the government has a duty to “promote the general Welfare.” The very first power of Congress is to collect taxes to ensure a common defence and, again, the “general Welfare.” Moreover, wing-nut favourites like the army and the navy appear near the bottom of Congress’s list of powers, below nerdy priorities such as promoting the “progress of Science and useful Arts” through copyright law.

Here’s another significant passage of the Constitution, one that the right has flouted shamelessly for as long as I can remember: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Of course, given that these chuckleheads can’t tell the difference between Nazism, communism, and liberal democracy, things that the Constitution actually says are beside the
point. None of the protestors, to my knowledge, ever specified which parts of the Constitution Obama was traducing. The rhetoric of the right-wing protests bore little resemblance to the legal, procedural language of the Constitution, sounding a lot more like the fiery fuck-the-King polemics of the Declaration of Independence. The pseudo-populist right are sore losers and drama queens who think the other side’s winning a majority and trying to fulfil a central campaign promise is exactly like the “long train of abuses and usurpations” meted out by a distant foreign tyrant.