Schools Today: Fat Bureaucrats, Scraggy Teachers

by Alexander Cockburn

For a literary image of what higher education today resembles, Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" is a useful guide. At the bottom are the humble clerks, medieval equivalent of untenured junior faculty, teaching assistants and the lumpened reserve army of the semi-unemployed that service higher education in America today. From these clerks hobbling along in their rags, we move to the rich priors and monastic bureaucrats and ever upward to the plump bursars and swag-bellied abbots heading the cavalcade.

About half the teaching load in higher education is now carried by Chaucer's humble clerks, though in 20th-century academic argot, they could be termed "contingent instructors." The American Association of University Professors found recently that it's common for departments of modern languages, English and math to have part-time instructors handling 65 percent or more of the teaching load. Raymond Garcia, who teaches sociology at Michigan State in East Lansing and who reviews these trends in the current issue of CounterPunch, a newsletter co-edited by the present writer, reckons that "if we exclude senior level courses (which are rarely taught by contingent instructors, as they usually correspond to the research and professional interests of tenured faculty and are frequently the only classes they will teach), the percentage of non-senior-level courses taught by contingent instructors rises to an amazing 75 percent."

So, the ranks of tenured faculty shrivel. Academic temp workers hustle from gig to gig, while managerial levels grow, flush with the funds plundered from instruction budgets. The excuse often used by the administrators and bureaucrats in institutions of higher education is that there's a budget squeeze. It's true there were some lean years in the 1980s, but, as Garcia points out, over the 1990s, increases in state appropriations for higher education have held at the rate of inflation across the country, except for California, which has seen higher tuition increases.

Overall, the trends are similar from coast to coast. The cost of tuition is going up, and the quality of education is going down. Course offerings shrink, class sizes soar. The biggest single feature of the educational landscape is bureaucratic bloat. Garcia cites a recent study of the University of California system showing the ratio of spending on instruction to spending on administration dropped from $6 to $1 in 1966 to $3 to $1 in 1991. The same study also concludes that over 25 years, the number of administrative positions in the UC system increased at nearly twice the rate of teaching positions, at higher pay.

Every state offers the same sort of story, but let's stay with California and look at the Kern Community College District in the south-central part of the state, which has three campuses, in Porterville, Bakersfield and Ridgecrest. The district chancellor, James Young, earns more than $120,000 a year. On the other hand, the teachers rank bottom in pay in the state's 71 community college districts. Not so long ago, the districts administrators acted on the recommendations of outside consultants to award themselves handsome double-digit raises over four years. The teachers are now on the verge of a strike, as they face the adamant refusal of the district to award them anything more than 2 percent a year over four years. The teachers want 7 percent to bring them back into line. "Our chancellor is in the top third salary-wise," one teacher grumbled to me a few weeks ago, "and we're in the toilet." After 25 years as a full professor, he's earning just over $50,000.

As the third millennium approaches, it is not hard to discern the shape of things to come. Most of what passes for education will be imparted through on-line cyber-courses. Lavishly paid administrators will supervise these "virtual" universities, reliant on lumpen instructors to do the grunt work. A few tenured professors will remain available to whore for corporate funding, which will pay for the supercomputers.

As every generation of student radicals has discovered, high-minded talk about the disinterested pursuit of learning soon melts away under the klieg lights of reality. In part because of the end of ideological competition with the Soviet Union -- plus the unabashed, pre-millennial rhetoric of corporate triumph and dog-eat-doggery -- the function of higher education in capitalist society is now finding its corresponding form without a tincture of shame. What the denizens of Grub Street-in-Academe need to find, like any reserve army of the semi-employed, are the proper organizations for self-defense and resistance.