The Worlds of the Professors
Professors at four-year colleges and universities live, as employees, simultaneously in three distinct but interwoven worlds. These worlds are profession, politics, and credentials. The professional world consists of the academic discipline in which the faculty member took his or her advanced degree. The profession includes a professional society, a peer group including peers at other institutions, and acknowledged standards and ethics. The political world is complicated. It includes organized competition and conflict for all the usual rewards in all the faculty member's activities as an employee and as a professional. The credential world is the world of (largely) unquestioned authority held by the professor. For most professors, the credentialed world of authority is limited to the classroom and students; for a few professors, it also includes a public arena, where professional expertise receives public recognition.
These three worlds are intimately involved with the Leftist orientation of many professors today, especially those working in the social sciences and humanities. It will take a while to explain this thesis. We will begin by discussing each of the worlds separately, beginning with the political world.
Colleges and universities are the most completely politicized institutions in America. The extent of this politicization is largely unappreciated outside the universities and by students inside the universities. It is, indeed, unimaginable by outsiders. Politicization derives from the important role college teachers and professors have collectively (that is, by voting) in personnel matters, curriculum, and resource allocation.*
In other institutions in American life, such as industrial corporations, law and medical partnerships, governmental agencies, the military, employee unions, and k-12 public schools, for instance, the structure of bureaucratic administration severely limits political activity by employees. Department heads, branch managers, corporate officers have so much authority and control over employees, and employees so little input in operations, that politics are rare. To be sure, there are partnership fights between law partners or physician partners in which some partners leave; there are corporate struggles in the board rooms, in which high corporate officers might be removed; there are political struggles between governmental entities and the public, such as schools when curriculum is shifted. But these instances of politics are intermittent and notable when they happen; they are not the employee's working world. For the college teacher and professor, however, ongoing, frequently vicious, politics is their daily, working institutional environment.
The political struggles in universities are seldom about personal pay. As has famously been said, academic politics are so vicious because so little is at stake. Rather, the politics are about power - power over which discipline or field is most important, appointment and advancement, curriculum, allocation of funds to programs, departments, and institutes, educational ideology, and sometimes, usually indirectly, political ideology. In our next article, we will examine the structure of personnel systems of the professoriat, which - to a certain extent - structures political debate and conflict.
* The larger the role of the faculty, the more extensive the politics. At small, private colleges, where the philosophy of the school is well defined by mandate, where administrators hold significant authority, and where faculty collectively organized, as in departments, have little decision-making role, there would be less politics.
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