Every year or two, a promising major approaches me about going to graduate school in philosophy, and I invite the student to my office for what I call “the talk.” I tell my potential wisdom-seeker that I count myself as fortunate to be a teacher of young minds, that I find my research gratifying, that I savor the intellectual stimulation of my colleagues, and that, on balance, I wouldn’t trade jobs with anyone. But then I somberly caution that though her studies have filled her with love of wisdom, she should think very carefully before making the serious commitment to pursue an advanced degree in any humanistic discipline. I tell her that securing a tenure-track position is unlikely, because today well over half of those teaching college-level classes in the United States are part-time instructors, with no prospect of tenure. These positions provide an abundance of teaching, but come with low wages, no benefits, no job security, and, more often than not, no office space in which to meet students. Furthermore, adjuncts are typically deprived of any meaningful relationship with colleagues, they are provided no funding for conferences, and they are robbed of the time needed for research or any other kind of professional development. “You will in all likelihood be denigrated, exploited, impoverished, worked like a dog, and exiled,” I say sternly. “If you insist on doing this, adopt the attitude of a saint to be martyred and do it out of the blind faith of love, because there are no rational reasons to pursue an advanced degree in the humanities.”

Frank Donoghue makes the same grim point and more in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Fordham University Press, 2008, $65). Donoghue, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, focuses on the daunting challenges facing new humanities Ph.D.s in an increasingly corporatized academy. The Last Professors is only one of the more recent contributions to the growing literature on the crisis of the humanities in our universities, but Donoghue’s book is unique in three respects. The first is its focus on the figure of the professor as presently conceived—as an autonomous, tenured, accredited scholar afforded the time to research and write as well as teach— and how the dynamics of the corporate university is undermining this image. Second, Donoghue explicitly eschews the rhetoric of “crisis” because he contends that professors in the humanities—as defined above—have already lost the power to save themselves and are irreversibly on the road to extinction; hence, the “fate of the humanities” of his subtitle. And third, he documents the degree to which the humanities have been complicit in their own demise. These last two points make The Last Professors an especially sobering read.

Donoghue’s argument starts on familiar ground, where he traces out the history of capitalism’s ambivalent and at times openly hostile attitude toward the humanities’ place in higher education, starting with industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie, who denigrated the humanities as useless, and coming down to the Reagan era, when corporate America viewed the university as a vexing labor problem to be solved in the face of increasing college enrollments. In Donoghue’s account, the “casualization” of academic labor started at this point, which marks the beginning of the dismantling of the American professoriate. But Donoghue’s main focus in this history is on the constancy with which the techniques and vocabulary of business have been deployed to undermine the humanities, from the Gilded Age to the 1980s and beyond. Donoghue argues that the Tayloristic ideology of efficiency, productivity, and utility has come to figure prominently in academe and has driven the humanities into a permanently defensive stance. Relentlessly judged by a standard of “usefulness” defined in strictly economic terms, Donoghue claims that humanists have no ready answer to the question of, say, how the study of philosophy or literature could be considered “market-smart” in this new, corporatized environment. His worry is that in the absence of an adequate answer to this question, the humanities may be permanently put out to pasture across academe, as has already happened at for-profit entities like the University of Phoenix.

The second half of Donoghue’s argument rests on the notion that corporate values have been internalized by academics in the humanities: instead of traditional academic values like intelligence or erudition or originality, market values like productivity, efficiency, and competitive achievement have come to drive professional advancement in the modern academy. The irony here is that humanists have come to at least implicitly accept the very same values that have traditionally been used to attack them. This is because more and more graduate students are chasing fewer and fewer tenure-track slots, which turns young scholars into salespeople forced to feverishly sell themselves in a perennially weak humanities job market. This competition, for Donoghue, creates a need for uniform measures of academic achievement by which different kinds of intellectual work can be assessed against each other. These uniform measures, in turn, tend to produce uniform and mediocre scholarship. This dynamic generates further irony: the ostensibly “autonomous” scholar undermining the integrity of his or her own research through institutionalized conformity, for the sake of competing for the Holy Grail of academe—tenure—a practice that has become increasingly rare in the face of the rising numbers of nontenured, temporary faculty.

When the two strands of Donoghue’s argument come together, they point to a very dismal future for the humanities professor. As college credentials become more expensive and more explicitly tied to job preparation, the liberal arts curriculum will be viewed as a luxury item in a student’s education. In order to compete with the for-profit universities (the only growth sector in higher education, according to Donoghue) that have already done away with tenure and the liberal arts, a growing number of financially straitened traditional universities will have no choice but to adopt the only business model that will allow them to compete and survive—but at the expense of the humanities. In this hostile environment, the only place left for the humanities will be a dwindling number of elite institutions still dedicated to the liberal arts model, but even this sanctuary has been tainted by academe’s new culture of competition. These select universities chase prestige through rankings such as U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” issue, which assume that the prestige generated by any institution can be quantified and compared. Donoghue argues that in this environment the humanities, even in institutions still dedicated to the liberal arts model, have had to abandon the traditional rationales for their existence, such as intellectual self-improvement and preparation for responsible citizenship. These rationales are subordinated to the frenzied pursuit of commodified prestige, which undermines the humanities’ distinct contribution to higher learning.

One might be tempted to criticize The Last Professors for telling us much that we already know; a lot of this ground has already been covered in texts like Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008). But, to be fair, Donoghue freely acknowledges his debt to other authors on this topic, and he reframes this material in a distinctive way. A more valid criticism could be leveled against Donoghue’s final chapter on the pursuit of prestige, which is the least compelling part of the book. Since “prestige” is a rather amorphous concept (as Donoghue himself admits), it is not clear exactly how the race for prestige subverts the traditional mission of the humanities. Despite this shortcoming, however, the alarm that Donoghue raises in this book is one that should be heard and heeded, especially within the shrinking community of fully tenured professors.

I must admit that reading The Last Professors induced many pangs of survivor’s guilt in me, as a member of this dwindling community. I know that I am one of the fortunate few of my generation who was lucky enough to land a tenure-track position and earn tenure. I am fully aware that if fate had treated me differently, I could just as easily have been drafted into the reserve army of perpetually disposable adjunct instructors. Many friends from graduate school still labor in this army under intolerably unjust conditions, living tenuously from semester to semester as they help to cultivate young minds in the art of becoming more fully human, a calling university administrators praise to the skies as essential to their educational mission but who nevertheless cannot find it within themselves or their budgets to offer those who answer this call stable employment, or a salary they can live on, or a modicum of professional dignity. If we who have achieved tenure in the last two decades or so are at all honest with ourselves, we must admit we were fortunate to have scuttled up that ladder even as it was being pulled up after us.

Once secure in the warm bosom of tenure, a myopic complacency can set in, and I confess my shock at discovering that a sizable majority of those presently teaching college-level classes in this country are adjunct instructors; moreover, many of my tenured colleagues are equally surprised when I share this information with them. But assuming the tenured professoriate becomes sufficiently aware of the very dire straits it is in, what is to be done? Should it merely follow my example of passively warning off potential graduate students? Or does it have a more positive obligation to try to save itself for future generations of scholars and teachers? If the answer to this last question is “yes,” then we must next take up the question of what strategies to adopt in this fight.

Donoghue, despite his pessimistic stance, does point to instances of adjunct faculty successfully organizing on their own behalf, and he catalogs the serious accreditation, recruitment, and retention problems encountered by some of the for-profit universities, which are obviously vulnerabilities that could be exploited in this fight. And he ends The Last Professors with two items of very pointed advice for us tenured faculty: first, stop romanticizing a quaint image of “the professor” that is fast fading into oblivion and start paying closer attention to how the corporate university actually works; and second, begin a relentless challenge of these corporate assumptions before they become settled articles of faith within academe. Despite his earlier claim that the humanities are doomed, it seems to me that here Donoghue hits his strongest note, and in closing I would like to briefly amplify it.

How often has the bromide been heard that “if we just ran X like a business, all of its problems would be solved”? This has long been the dogma in our commercial culture, but it raises the problem of misapplied principles. Markets and businesses are designed to generate profit, generally considered a private good, whereas higher education is meant to generate competent professionals and (one hopes) well-rounded and informed citizens, who are regarded as public goods. Running a university like a business may have the benefit of introducing needed economic efficiencies to different aspects of the institution, but if this model is overapplied it risks making its public mission a slave to these efficiencies. For examples of what I’m talking about, one only has to look as far as our purportedly democratic system of government, which has been grotesquely distorted by profit, or our system of health care, which is enormously profitable but leaves at least one out of every six citizens vulnerable to catastrophic medical crises. More fundamentally, this dogma rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that businesses and markets have always proven successful. Economic history puts the lie to this claim, as it amply documents the instances where markets and businesses have gone awry and required intervention on the part of regulators, legislators, or prosecutors to put them right again. Again, bear witness to the recent implosions of our housing and financial markets, when some of our most accomplished businessmen could not manage to run even their businesses like businesses.

Karl Marx once declared that capitalism “has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” Donoghue’s warning is that unless we start challenging the assumptions underlying the corporate university—very quickly and with great urgency—the tenured humanities professor is well on its way to making this list.

D. R. Koukal is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit Mercy.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 1 (January 2010)