Some of you may (or may not) have heard of this, but Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at the University of Reading, sent out an email a week or two ago soliciting responses to the problem of the ratio of PhDs to full-time academic jobs — a problem related to the treatment of adjuncts, which Moti recently discussed here.
Anyway, Dickey has now compiled another survey of the various responses she received here, and is asking people to fill the questionnaire out, indicating which of the proposed solutions they favor/prefer. I would certainly encourage everyone to take part (note: the survey says it will be kept confidential).
Here, though, is one thing about the new questionnaire that puzzles me. Most of the proposals contained within it concern informational disclosure (being clear to incoming PhD students about the unlikelihood of obtaining full-time academic work), lobbying for better working conditions for part-time faculty (better pay, benefits), and stuff like that. Although I am all in favor of many of these proposals, one proposal that wasn't listed — and which really surprised me by being absent — was lobbying to reduce the amount of university resources devoted to the ever-expanding university administration.
It is not as though universities lack enough resources to hire far more full-time faculty members, after all. Universities have plenty of money to go around, and they would be better universities — with better educators and researchers — if they, you know, actually spent money on hiring more full-time faculty members and less on high-salaried administrators and luxury dorms and tennis courts. Look, I do not mean to slight administrators. I have a great Dean, and indeed, the central administration at my university does, I think, a great job. The problem is the administrative bloat elsewhere. For instance, why in the world should a university have a "writing center" (with dozens of highly paid people without PhDs)? What we need is not more people who have never taken a philosophy class trying to teach students how to write philosophy papers. We need more philosophy professors to teach students how to write philosophy papers.
In other words, to follow Moti's discussion, the problem isn't just that we have too many PhDs and not enough jobs. The real problem is why we don't have enough jobs. It's not because universities don't have enough money. It's because not enough pressure is put upon universities to spend their money in the right places. The faculty should be the heart of any university, and clearly, all of the research shows that they increasingly are not.
Or so say I. What say you?
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