The Faculty Organize, but Management Enjoys Solidarity

The salary of an annual appointee at the start should be low, —about the amount needed by a young unmarried man for comfortable support in the university's city or village. . . . He should receive, as assistant professor, a salary which will enable him to support a wife and two or three children comfortably. . . . [A]pproaching forty years of age [and] ready for a full professorship [the salary] may easily be four times the sum which the young man received at his first annual appointment.

—Charles Eliot¹

Teaching here is like being in a bad marriage that looks good to outsiders. I'm the wife whose husband slaps her around but who, nonetheless, smiles gamely, maintaining the relationship for the sake of the kids.

—"Lucy Snowe"²

Eliot's "University Administration" portrait of faculty life radiates a confident paternalism that remains viable in many ways today. Despite sporadic press coverage of the term faculty and graduate employees who do 75% of the teaching in higher education, the public image of the professoriate remains that of Stanley Aronowitz's "last good job in America," tweedy eggheads effortlessly interpellated in a system of rational, meritocratic reward, administered on a generous scale by a trusteeship of honorable men. Indeed for faculty in certain overwhelmingly male-dominated disciplines, Eliot's picture is accurate enough. In engineering or business, at a research institution, the phenomenon of a generously-compensated young male wage-earner on a track to a quadruple family wage (say, $140,000) by the age of forty is quite common.

For most others, and especially the majority of women faculty, like "Lucy Snowe" working off the tenure track in the feminized liberal arts, the wages are similar to those of the women who stitched and laundered Eliot's shirt. (The author's use of the educator-heroine of Bronte's Villette refers to the condition of nineteenth-century schoolteachers, who often compared their compensation unfavorably to that of needleworkers, whose circumstances were then, as now, a byword for extreme exploitation.) In every region of the United States, women faculty teach for as little as a few hundred dollars per course, frequently earning less than $16,000 for teaching 8 courses a year, without benefits. Even in the full-time nontenurable positions, women with doctorates, averaging as much as ten years of post-baccalaureate study, commonly earn under $30,000, often without benefits.³

A chief component of Snowe's oppression is the very idea that this arrangement is fair or rational, the inevitable—and impersonal —consequence of some such guarantor of the public good as a "market" in the wages of women (and the men who do such "women's work" as writing instruction in higher education). She characterizes her injuries in the terms employed by survivors of domestic violence with the intention of underscoring the systematic solidarity of the oppressor's logic, the web of beliefs, loyalties, privileges and institutions composing the patriarchy itself, not just the individual abuser. She is especially attuned to the way the solidarity of the oppressor calls forth the participation of the victim, encompassing such diverse motivations as the opinion of outsiders (feeling the desire to show herself in a situation that "looks good") or caretaker obligations, the fear that exposure of the violent nature of the relationship will harm "the kids." The economic and social violence experienced by most faculty in their working lives, especially the majority of women faculty working in undervalued disciplines and in nontenurable positions, is experienced bodily, like a blow, and is sustained by a network of beliefs and institutions "outside" the relationship between administration and employee. The patriarchal web includes other women, including many academic and professional women who identify with the feminist movement, in the sort of crypto-machismo of Ann Marcus's adjunct hiring policy at New York University: "we need people we can abuse, exploit and turn loose" (Westheimer 2002, 2). Even leaving out notions overtly associated with gender, relevant beliefs shaping the gendered relations of work in higher education include those regarding "the position of the United States in a global...