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| Graduate Education Is Losing Moral Base | The depressed state of the academic job market is hardly news, but tenured faculty members show little inclination to confront its implications. As far as the only people prepared to take drastic action are job seekers themselves.
Tenure-track jobs in English regularly receive 800 to 1,000 applications. Still the most accomplished young scholars and teachers often remain unemployed.
What's more, several factors suggest that the academic job market will remain depressed for at least the next decade. The end of the cold war removes one of the major anxieties fueling political support for higher education. Academic programs, not just those in the sciences, benefited from the post-Sputnik panic that fostered the growth of research universities and led to such programs as the National Defense Education Act's humanities fellowships. The postwar enthusiasm for higher education now appears to have been a brief aberration in American cultural politics. Elementary and secondary schools, which are facing complex new social responsibilities (and are in a state of near-collapse in many locations), will absorb most of the public money available for education.
Other economic and social needs, such as health care and the decay of roads and public facilities, have more visibility and more politically effective constituencies.
Continuing public attacks on higher education have discouraged many legislators from allocating new money to colleges - or from even sustaining current levels of support. Sparked by supposed "scandals" over teaching loads, misused research funds, tenured radicals, and by controversies over "hate speech" and sexual harassment, these attacks have stimulated taxpayers' anger and galvanized resistance to tuition increases.
Therefore, college and university budgets can often be cut without political cost. Although tenured faculty members have rarely displayed real outrage about retrenchment, primarily because it does not usually put their own careers in jeopardy. Certainly, faculty members have yet to acknowledge the real victims of the fiscal crisis: new seeking jobs.
Thanks to the dramatic collapse in the humanities job market, for example, many graduate students teach more than 30 different courses at two or three institutions and publish articles in refereed journals, before they earn a tenure-track position, if they do so at all. Frankly speaking, it‘s time to name the consequence: Graduate education is losing its moral foundation.
Years ago, graduate students served not only as colleagues of lesser status but also as apprentices. The underpaying tradition and overworking apprentices is older than capitalism itself. But all the way through its historical transformations, apprenticeship typically held out eventual full-time employment and better working conditions as delayed compensation.
Yet at institutions with large graduate programs, all faculty members benefit from the work that graduate students do. Lots of faculty members are free either from teaching or from grading in introductory courses. At other institutions, hundreds of sections of such courses - from basic language instruction to introductory calculus, from composition to introductory logic, depend on graduate-student labor. These supposed teaching assistants may have as much responsibility for these courses as would any tenured professor.
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