Myths and Realities for Today's College Professors; or, Et in Arcadia Ego

     A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde longe ygo.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe, and therto sobrely.
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy,
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office.

—Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Incipit Vita Nova

Teachers: Are they still absolutely required in the twenty-first-century classroom? Regrettably, at present the answer remains yes. Penny-pinching administrators and grade-grubbing students presumably consider the professor a quaint relic or maybe a necessary evil, but though great strides in distance learning, outsourcing, and interactive computer games promise to render teachers "redundant" (i.e., expendable) before too long, today they still play a considerable role on campus. Yet that role, perforce, is changing. No longer are they prophets of wisdom, preservers of a great tradition (let alone canon). No longer do they advance an Arnoldian project, learning and propagating the best that is known and thought in the world. (Not coincidentally, Matthew Arnold wrote "The Scholar Gypsy," a pastoral poem about an "Oxford scholar poor" of "quick inventive brain, / Who tired of knocking at preferment's door" wanders the countryside.) For since universities have sold out to become incubators of technologized market society with its corporation mindset, teachers have other primary duties. It is those newfangled duties and the moments of conflict arising from these fraught transitions during this period of flux that I wish to explore. The encroachment of bottom-line thinking into domains of inquiry and reflection inimical to business parameters manifests itself in various ways; here I will concentrate on teaching and grading.¹ As is well known, rationalized hiring practices at the financially strapped, McDonaldized university have shifted away from tenure-stream positions toward unsecured part-time lecturers and adjuncts, a reallocation of human and other resources that carries weighty ramifications. Because a lot of mystifying rhetoric surrounds these ongoing changes, my intervention is offered both as a deconstruction and a guide to the perplexed.

The following remarks and observations about current educational praxis, though I hope relevant to many, are directed specifically to recent doctorates entering the job market, in particular those bright, hard-working souls who are trying to forge a career in America's institutions of higher learning. You will have risen to the top of the heap by demonstrating fierce intellect, great dedication, and an ability to carry out original research. You might then be excused for privileging that sort of commitment, those sorts of vocational qualities. Let me caution you: when you take on the humble mantle of assistant professor or even lowly adjunct lecturer, your students (whose parents may be paying a $100,000-plus diploma fee for their dear offspring, money that pays your slave wages) are not awaiting the chance to hear that they're C+ writers. Nor, if you chance to be hired somewhere less prestigious than a Carnegie Research I university, are the tenured professors who were so assiduously wooing you just months ago eagerly anticipating your postcolonial rereading of text x, to see how it compares to (a) their one article published before you were born, or (b) their nonexistent publication record. Rather, they all devoutly wish that you will prove your collegiality and institutional fit by keeping the customers happy.

Let me register some caveats before proceeding any further with my dissection: different schools are slipping at different rates, and perchance a tiny minority (a half dozen?) with historical reputations, A+ applicant pools, favorable locations, and billion-dollar endowments have managed to hold out, like remote monasteries fortified against the lewd unlearned in the Dark Ages. Nor should generic differences between big universities and liberal arts colleges be discounted. The "universality" of expertise often makes the former more intellectually vibrant, while smaller classes and a tighter, more "collegial" sense of community do count for something at the latter. I want to suggest, however, that invidious changes have affected all types of schools, from...