I just came across an article, written some time ago, by my friend Stanley Katz, “What Has Happened to the Professoriate?” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B8) and want to make a few comments. To begin with, I think that Katz is wise to point out how variegated the professoriate has become, consisting of quite a number of subclasses that barely resemble each other and certainly have little to do with each other. I also deplore, as he emphatically does, the much lessened stress on teaching and the much reduced loyalty of professors to their institutions. If once upon the time, being a professor was a calling, the role has largely become a job—either a very good one if you belong to the elite segment or an overworked and poorly paid one, if you are a member of the squadron of lecturers who do so much of the teaching.
In the face of this situation, Katz twice invokes John Dewey (writing in 1915), who was instrumental in the creation of the American Association of University Professors, “But have we not come to a time when more can be achieved by taking thought together?” and asking that that happen again today.
I agree it should, but how will it happen, if it happens at all? The agency will not be the AAUP, which has become a union of the “haves” professors, caring not much for the have-nots and less for the professoriate as a company that serves. Twice, Katz mildly disparages the role of deans: “Deans by themselves cannot create educational change.” Professors must become more self-reflective, but “Again, this is the business of professors, not deans.”
Taken literally, I agree with these quotes, but they do not say enough. Professors, especially now in their splintered condition, will not by themselves initiate the discussions that will lead to much needed reforms. Perhaps because I was a dean (at Northwestern, for thirteen years), I am impressed by how necessary it is for someone like a dean to press a button, to initiate. And that is not simply a matter of speaking out, but calls for the use of incentives, positive and negative, to get a train out of the station and moving toward an envisaged goal. (To shift more of the teaching burden back to what used to be the professoriate will cost money and will deprive those bonzes of some of their privileges.)
If, recently, Harvard administrators had not been so inept, they might have served as a model (for curricular reform, anyway) for the rest of the country. When Henry Rosovsky initiated such reform in the seventies, Harvard’s efforts—in my view not at all impressive, but they were efforts—made the front page of the New York Times and became an inspiration, of sorts, for other institutions.
In short (if it’s not too late for that phrase), Katz has valuable things to say concerning the diagnosis of our ailments and he is right that how faculties reform themselves and their curricula must be determined by those faculties. But whether they do any of the above will depend on forceful pushes by academic administrators.
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2 comments:
Well, as usual, I agree with Rudy. I should have said that "we cannot rely solely upon administrators," I suppose. But the important point Rudy makes is that there are few fora in which faculty can take thought together these days. Indeed not the AAUP. Not in most of the professional disciplinary associations. The AAHE has gone out of business. The AAC&U seems the only higher ed organization focused on academic substance, but it has its own liberal education agenda. So where to turn? Damned if I know. Over to you, Rudy.
The dilemma--better,impasse--is well stated and I certainly don't have a formula for success. One thought, however: prestige counts for something, and sometimes a lot, in US higher education. If Stan's important topic were taken up by the AAU (Association of American Universities) and if that bunch came out with some resounding ideas for reform, it could have an effect on the profession.
I have not interacted with Bob Berdahl, the current president of the AAU, in a great many years. But when I knew him, way back when, I think he would have been open to a discussion of Stan's central topic, What is the Professoriate Today? or How Can We Reconstitute a Professoriate Today? Whether his constituent institutions would follow him is a BIG second question.
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