The Price of Complicity: From the AAUP--The State of the Profession Now Better Exposed

Gianni Pisani, Il guardiano della casa (1980) (Naples)

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has  distributed its 2020 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession recaps the key findings from the AAUP’s 2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey.  The Report expands on a general pessimism that has now become virtually impossible to ignore.  But more than that, it suggests the product of complicity.

For decades the American professorate (and their fellow travelers abroad) have rationalized the fundamental changes occurring in the academy. Among them, (1) the deprofessionalization of the faculty; (2) the rise of a professional administrator class that was first an aid and then the overlord of matters once left to the professional discretion of those involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge; (3) the change in the character of the institution arising from the general movement in American institutional culture towards risk avoidance and compliance mentalities which produced the sort of surveillance cultures necessarily overseen by an autonomous administrator class; (4) the commodification of education and its closer alignment with the needs of wage labor markets (and those with disproportionate influence over those markets); (5) the transformation of students into present values of income streams, and the provision of services into profit centers; (6) the rise of technology that transformed the way one valued the effectiveness (and objectives) of education; (7) the rise of educational servant classes (so-called contingent faculty) in a professorate already riddled with corrupting internal status hierarchies; (8) the reduction of knowledge production to quantifiable status markers which then drive a culture of producing knowledge to its markers (which can then be used to discipline production and manage academic freedom without the need to actually read and assess work); and (9) the move to online education the character of which is driven by administrative rather than faculty objectives and standards.

In the construction of each of these faculty has been complicit (in its ancient sense--from the Latin complicāre, “to fold together”).  Faculty become administrators, as assimilate into the logic of a culture that increasingly distinguishes itself from the faculty as both superior and managerial--that is faculty administrators take professionalization with them into administration and necessarily reduce its significance for those left behind.  But faculty has freely transferred administrative responsibility to others to make their lives easier, and to create more time for research and teaching (time made necessary in part because of the way that they have permitted administrators to develop accountability measures). Faculty have participated in the construction of compliance and accountability cultures without thinking about the way these operate as political elements of administration. Faculty have facilitated the commodification of education, both in terms of the production of knowledge and its dissemination; they have delegated not just administrative but also course and research work to "hired help" that then contributes to cultures of "high" and "low" learning, as well as the way one creates systems of valuing research (per unit of effort). Faculty has been led into leveraging operations that make them (per student) less necessary in part because of a willingness to accept the metrics of measuring student learning by those who now are more professionally capable then they were. And, indeed, the embrace of specific metrics by faculty have been instrumental in the transformation of its own character and the framework through which it is disciplined. More important, perhaps, has been the migration of the control and authentication of those metrics from faculty to administrators and to groups of autonomous "experts" (experts in the theories of metrics, in the simulacra of production and impact) from which these measures derive power now detached from those who produced the work judged. And so on.  

The results are becoming clearer in the wake of the pandemic.  The nature of the university has changed, as has its purpose.  The relationship between its stakeholders (students, faculty, administrators, and "staff") has changed in response to reflect both new power relationships and new expectations.  More fundamentally, the way that faculty are needed (in the production and dissemination of knowledge) to students or generally for the greater glory of the institutions who pay or fund them is also changing.  Increasingly faculty are useful for the production of facts that can be consumed by others.  They are even more useful for the construction and maintenance of simulated realities to be applied as directed by and for the benefit of others. Faculty, de-centered from the process of learning, now facilitate the transmission of knowledge that is as a general rule produced authoritatively by smaller and smaller of people. This is all reflected in the (re) organization of the university as an institution, and faculty, as a factor in the production of its welfare in relation to its key stakeholders--students, alumni, the state and labor markets.  This is a problem that is neither inherently American, nor only manifested within liberal democratic systems.

The Press Release follows (AAUP Report Identifies Key Factors to Watch following COVID-19 Pandemic), with links to the Annual Report .

With the COVID-19 pandemic currently raging through the country, higher education has entered grim and uncertain times. This year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession recaps the key findings from the AAUP’s 2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey, initially released in April, presenting salary data for full-time faculty members as well as information on gender inequities, retirement and medical benefits, part-time faculty pay and benefits, and administrator salaries. The report also highlights key data points related to the economy, institutional finances, enrollment, and the makeup of the academic workforce. The findings provide a snapshot of faculty compensation for the 2019–20 academic year, as the country was on the brink of what may be the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On average, salaries for full-time faculty members at US colleges and universities are 2.8 percent higher in 2019–20 than they were in the preceding academic year. With consumer prices growing by 2.3 percent during the year, the increase in real terms was 0.5 percent.

The 2019–20 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession discusses key data points relevant to monitoring the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education. Some areas of concern discussed in the report include the following:

• Full-time faculty salary growth has been flat for several years. Following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, nominal salary growth remained below consumer price growth until 2015–16, and real salary growth has remained flat ever since.
• Salary growth has varied by institution type. Average real salaries for full-time faculty members at doctoral institutions remained below prerecession levels until 2015–16 and have remained flat ever since. For master’s, baccalaureate, and associate’s institutions, average real salaries have yet to return to prerecession levels and have, in fact, declined over the last three years.
• Almost all full-time faculty members receive retirement benefits. Almost 97 percent of full-time faculty members earn additional compensation in the form of contributions by the institution or state or local government toward retirement plans, with an average expenditure of 10.7 percent of the average salary of faculty members who are covered.
• Most part-time faculty members do not receive benefits. Overall, 35 percent of reporting institutions contribute toward retirement plans for some or all part-time faculty members, and 33 percent contribute to premiums for medical insurance plans.
• Enrollment has steadily declined in recent years. After rising unemployment rates drove up enrollment in the wake of the Great Recession—particularly in community colleges—enrollment peaked at 13 million full-time-equivalent students (FTES) in 2010–11 but has since declined sharply to the prerecession level of about 11 million FTES.
• Funding for public institutions never recovered after the Great Recession.Appropriations for public institutions have declined 12 percent, after adjusting for inflation, from $8,100 per FTES in 2007–08 to $7,100 per FTES in 2017–18, and growth has been flat for several years. In addition, there is huge variation between states.
• Over two-thirds of faculty members are on contingent appointments. Over 50 percent of faculty members are employed part time overall. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty members in doctoral institutions decreased from 51 to 45 percent, and now more than half of faculty members in doctoral institutions are serving in either full-time (20.5 percent) or part-time (34.5 percent) contingent positions.

In addition, the report describes improvements that were made to the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey this year, including full-time faculty benefits data collection and the inclusion of regional price parities to account for cost-of-living differences between states and metro areas.

The US economy is facing a crisis that is unprecedented in recent memory, with an estimated unemployment rate higher than at any time since the Great Depression. The findings presented in the 2019–20 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession provide a snapshot of faculty compensation for the 2019–20 academic year. In the coming months and years of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis, the AAUP Research Office will study key data points related to the economy, institutional finances, enrollment, the academic workforce, and salaries.

AAUP Research Office