Bag of Worms Yet Words

University Lights (3)

Optimism and Desperation in the Professoriat

Referring only to professors on the tenure ladder, we can look at university personnel systems from two points of view. One point of view is the system of official administrative regulations for merit-based appointment, advancement, and promotion on a scale of titles and salaries. This system is pretty much what anyone would expect in a highly legalistic civil service bureaucracy. We are not going to review it, because it is not the source of the dynamism that shapes and distorts the personnel decision making.

The dynamism of professorial appointments comes from a class system created by academic competition. The competitive class system provides the second point of view on professors' lives as employees. This class system is primarily responsible for the viciousness of academic life. Its effect on creating acrimony has been reinforced by affirmative action, which will be the subject of a later article in this series. The class system is also intimately involved with the disproportionate influence of Marxism, radical feminism, and post-modernism in the social sciences and humanities, as we shall discuss in another article.

There are two classes of professors: stars and craftsmen (craftspersons, of course). Stars are professors who are competitive in the hiring competitions between universities. Craftsmen are not competitive. To be a top research university, a school must have a strong percentage of stars on its faculty. Whether they remain at one school or hop around from school to school, trying to trade up, stars advance by reason of being competitive. An offer for appointment trumps the administrative personnel system. In contrast, craftsmen almost never advance because they receive an offer from another school; they must advance within the administrative personnel system.

The two classes have different psychological and professional dynamics. Stars look up; craftsmen look down. You know the old saying about employment in private industry - you start at the bottom and rise to the level of your incompetence. There is converse saying for academe - you start at the top and fall to the level of your competence. A few top research universities train the majority of doctorate scholars and scientists. Almost without exception, these top institutions will not hire their own graduates. (A few graduates become stars and may trade up to their doctorate institution.) Consequently, faculty members start out life with the prestige by association of their doctorate training school, but, not being good enough to be hired there, they are hired by schools lower on the prestige scale. As a result, the general professional direction of most faculty members is downward. Only the few, who become stars, can reverse that direction. If aspiration drives stars with upward academic mobility, desperation drives craftsmen with downward academic mobility.

Why are some professors stars and other craftsmen? Stars are professors whose intellectual work sets research agendas. Top research universities compete among themselves to establish the leading problems and solutions in academic disciplines, to house the great breakthroughs in science and scholarship that get recognition, such as Nobel Prizes. It really does take intellectual brilliance to make a contribution of such magnitude; stars, by and large, are brilliant.

Craftsmen, on the other hand, are not brilliant. They usually are of middling intelligence. They do not have original ideas. Their doctoral work usually applies the insights of their supervising graduate professor to some aspect of a problem s/he developed. They never publish a major new work after publishing their revised dissertation. They never develop insights of their own. They are just skilled craftsmen; they learned the intellectual skills of an academic trade in graduate school, which they apply in similar fashion in a series of set-piece problems for their entire career. Such work cannot make them stars. Often, it does not even make them outstanding members of their home faculties.

To assist their advance within the noncompetitive administrative personnel systems, craftsmen naturally turn to two techniques. They form voting alliances with other craftsmen to obtain recommendations for advancement. And they supplement their income with minor administrative appointments, such as assistant dean or director of a specialty program (e.g., "women's studies interdisciplinary major") or institute. To accrue resources for programs, voting alliances are also crucial.* It is the politics involved in creating voting alliances that engenders viciousness in faculty relations. Voting alliances only work when dissenting opinion is suppressed. Suppression of dissent requires as ruthless pressure, intimidation, and personal destruction as anyone could imagine short of criminality** - false accusation and phony charges, anonymous and not-anonymous threats, manipulation of personnel files, misrepresentation of accomplishments, character assassination, whispering campaigns, and social ostracism. This vicious conniving is the politics of desperation.

* This craftsman strategy is to be contrasted to resource aggregation by stars. Stars are rainmakers; they obtain extramural funds from federal granting agencies, such as NIH and NSF, foundations, and medical research charities. They increase the pot of money available for research and programs, thereby decreasing the political struggle in the University.

** Short of criminality? Consider: slashed car tires, smashed front car wind shield, rocks thrown at home front window, phone threats of beatings, phone death threats ("Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.").

Revised January 15, 2005.

University Lights (2)

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.

University Lights (1)

Shining the Light on Power

Among the sectors of American society left behind by Nine-Eleven, America's First Rate Universities stand out. Even more than the determined refusal of the Democratic Party and the Major Standard Media to enter the new world, which are merely embarrassments, the refusal of University faculties to adjust their Left ideology to reality is a scandal. Faculties have dug in their heels. They have increased the level of invective and hyperbole in their public debate. They have thrown arrogant nonsense - they are Democrats because they are bright - at their critics. What they have not done is to face the intellectual corruption at the center of the Left academic ideologies.

The critique of the Left-Liberalism of the First Rate Universities has gathered such momentum and accumulated such punch in the past two years, we need only to reference it here. Rather than add to the evidence, which is not needed, in this series of brief articles, we shall examine the relationship between how university faculties work and their commitment to fallacious philosophies and false ideologies. Under the banner of collectivist ideology, after their long march out of the 1960s, the Left, Feminist, and Post-Modernist professorial ideologues obtained political and administrative power in America's universities in the early 1990s. At the moment of their triumph, their political model of collectivism failed with the collapse with Soviet Union. A decade later - but a brief breath of history - the notion that collectivism was, ontologically, the Fundamental Moral Good received its final rebuttal. Islamic terrorists attacked American cities. History refuted the ideologies upon which the new power elite of America's universities justified their reign. They had just settled into wielding power; much to their consternation, history threatened to snatch it away.

We start by elaborating on the distinction implicit in the borrowed British naval term, First Rate. Not all America's colleges and universities were or are Left-Liberal, because not all of them are First Rate. The Ivy League schools, top non-Ivy private research universities, and some top public research universities, like the University of California, are Left-Liberal. But there are hundreds of Second Rate and Third Rate colleges where the faculties are politically divided more along national political lines. There are hundreds of religiously affiliated colleges in which conservatives are more prominent. There are thousands of community colleges and vocational institutions where faculty are more conservative than Left. We shall see that the connection between being First Rate and espousing Leftist ideology has to do which how research agendas are set.

The second distinction concerns what we refer to when we say "university." Modern universities are enormous, complex institutions, the size of small cities, with distinctive faculties (i.e., peer-review units - a distinction of which we shall make more in a later article). Some faculties are primarily undergraduate; some primarily graduate. Law school, business school, medical school, humanities' graduate school, science graduate school, social science graduate school, music school, engineering school - all these schools have institutionally different faculties with different requirements for professional appointment and advancement, and different temperaments, intelligences, levels of social involvement and political activism, and - importantly - salaries. Most of the attention and consternation over the Left orientation of professors pertains to the faculties of the social sciences and humanities departments.

The clustering of Left ideologues in the social sciences and humanities is significant, because these disciplines are dominated by Marxism, theoretical Feminism, and Post-modernism (philosophies/ideologies that are not intellectually compatible with each other, by the way, but more about this, also, in a later article). The faculties of the sciences give the faculties of social sciences and humanities wide political berth. Most scientists are outraged at the Post-modernist attack on science. Scientists might be Democrats, but they are not joining their Leftist-Feminist-Post-Modernist colleagues on the political barricades. Leftist philosophies are utter nonsense for most scientists. This is significant when we wish to characterize American First Rate Universities, because the sciences (including in this category the medical faculties) are their core. The social sciences and humanities, by contrast, are subsidized fringe undertakings. The sciences and medicine are the university's bright lights; the social sciences and humanities are just dim bulbs.