The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities [Paperback]

Frank Donoghue (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0823228606 | ISBN-13: 978-0823228607 | Publication Date: April 30, 2008 | Edition: 3

"What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?" asked Columbia's Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. There is more and more reason to think: less and less, he answered. In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces-social, political, and institutional-dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts -with the humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today's market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other crises,Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education-the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s -that threaten the survival of professors as we've known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholarsan essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

How is it that the number of students attending American universities has surged in recent decades, but the number of professors—especially humanities professors—has dwindled? The perplexing institutional dynamics of the modern university come in for penetrating scrutiny here. Donoghue, an Ohio State English professor, sees a troubling new conception of higher education emerging among administrators whose thinking reflects the bottom-line calculations of business executives, not the intellectual ideals of liberal-arts scholars. Inclined to view traditional professors as a costly anachronism, such administrators have been hiring low-pay adjunct instructors to replace them—and restricting their educational task to that of teaching employment skills. Even in the elite Ivy League, the humanities professors now must justify their work as a way of enhancing a school’s marketable prestige. Beleaguered professors face a dire situation in burgeoning state universities, where institutional accountants assess their research using simplistic ranking systems akin to those applied to football teams. A sobering analysis, sure to attract serious readers on and off campus. --Bryce Christensen --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

. . . focuses on the daunting challenges facing new humanities Ph.D.s in an increasingly corporatized academy.-D.R. Koukal

Donoghue says that in our time the corporate university will end professors as we have come to know them.-Leonard R. N. Ashley

. . . Donoghue writes that tenure-track and tenured professors now make up only 35 percent of college facutly, and that number is steadily falling.-Valerie Saturen

"Donoghue does what few other critics of higher education have been able to do - present a balanced look at a complex issue within the university and college system."-Teaching Theology and Religion

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 172 pages
• Publisher: Fordham University Press; 3 edition (April 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823228606
• ISBN-13: 978-0823228607
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, the Humanities!, December 24, 2009

By 

Valerie J. Saturen (Tacoma, WA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Paperback)

Higher education commentators have pointed to budget cuts, waning student interest, and dwindling tenure-track positions as evidence of a crisis in the liberal arts and humanities. Donoghue argues that the situation is worse than a crisis. His hard-hitting book examines how a decades-long economic squeeze and the growing influence of corporate culture have adversely affected higher education, threatening to drive the traditional professor extinct.

Donoghue traces the current dilemma to the late 19th century, when the corporate values of efficiency and "usefulness" (in the most narrowly practical sense of the word) gained considerable influence in education. A corporate disdain for the humanities is exemplified by quotes from Andrew Carnegie and Richard Teller Crane. Carnegie advised colleges to imitate "a good manufacturer," and Crane famously asserted that no man who has "a taste for literature has the right to be happy" because "the only men entitled to happiness in this world are those who are useful." Beginning in the 1970s, the resurgence of a profit-and-efficiency driven ideology has lent new popularity to these sentiments.

One of the key threats to the professoriate is the replacement of the full-time tenured professor with the easily exploitable and economically expedient part-time adjunct. Currently, fewer than 30 percent of college and university faculty are tenured or on tenure tracks, and the number is decreasing. Adjuncts often commute between institutions while facing meager pay and no job security. Taking into account her commute, one adjunct converted her salary into an hourly wage of $2.12, without benefits.

This is just one piece of a larger puzzle in which higher education is increasingly focused on efficiency and the bottom line. A number of converging forces have led to an escalation in the competitiveness and pressure placed upon graduate students and untenured professors. Following the business model, institutions pressure faculty to increase their productivity, which is measured by the frequency of publication. The desperate career situation has fueled escalating pressures to publish early and often, yet as university presses and libraries struggle, the market for academic monographs has shrunk.

Donoghue draws attention to the plight of humanities grad students, whose numbers far exceed the academic positions available to them upon completion. Eager for the cheap labor they provide, institutions gladly take them on and often paint an overly rosy picture of their future prospects. Many end up spending a good part of a decade accumulating enormous debt, only to enter the job market late with little hope of obtaining the job they trained for.

He also discusses the growing popularity of for-profit, online-driven colleges, which candidly refer to students as "consumers"--an approach that has caught on outside the for-profit sphere. While many institutions must compete with the for-profits by emulating their "jobs, jobs, jobs" credo, those that cannot fit this mold compete by marketing themselves as vehicles for prestige. Prestige is almost exclusively measured by rankings in the all-powerful U.S. News & World Report, and the most important component is selectiveness. Thus, colleges must accept an ever-shrinking portion of their applicant pools, rendering them increasingly elite and exclusive. Public universities, caught between the "jobs" model and the "prestige" model, have had to rely even more upon the productivity of their faculty to prove their worth, squeezing them even harder.

Donoghue's outlook is thoroughly pessimistic. However, he concludes with a call to action by arguing that professors should fight the "jobs" model by challenging the tenet that vocational training equals a secure job. It seems, though, that academics would be better served by organizing for better conditions. Granted, this is easier said than done. Donoghue points out that many academics are reluctant to organize both because they don't view themselves as "workers" and because they are willing to accept non-monetary rewards alone, including prestige and personal fulfillment. Further, the competitive nature of academia is not conducive to the solidarity required of an organized movement. Perhaps most importantly, graduate assistants and adjuncts often endure exploitation out of faith that their hard work will eventually pay off. Donoghue does a great service by exposing the reality behind this belief.

All of these factors particularly affect professors in the liberal arts and humanities, which have the hardest time quantifying their "usefulness" and receive little government or private funding. The implications of this book are critical not only for professors, but for students and for a well-rounded society and healthy democracy. If these trends continue, higher education will become more starkly divided between elite institutions and ones exclusively focused on job training, thus widening the gap in knowledge and power.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Careers in Vocational Humanities Revisited, January 29, 2010

By 

Jose Hanson (Edina, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Paperback)

Since the book came out, way back in late 2008, our financial system has crumbled, GM has gone bankrupt, one out of five Americans is out of work, retailers and restaurants have closed, millions of homes have gone into foreclosure, and half the class of '09 is still unemployed. Having lived through that, you probably can handle bad news from the tenure front without your hair standing on end.

Nonetheless, if you're really concerned about the Crisis in Higher Education, Donoghue puts that worry right to bed. A crisis, he explains, is a sudden event that calls for a dramatic, immediate response, whereas the American academic collapse began over 100 years ago. There can be no quick fix now, and the author has no hope the humanities can survive in the new corporate university.

Anyone looking at this review probably isn't fooled by what's going on at the graduate-level in liberal arts departments, but if you're still considering Ivory Tower employment, it's a good idea to read this book, digest the facts and numbers, and see them assembled by someone who knows first-hand what he's talking about. No surprise that lots of humanities doctoral candidates drop out before taking a Ph.D. No surprise either that the dropouts are often the smartest, have the best undergraduate records and the highest GRE scores.

The industrialization of education has been brutal, and Donoghue is surely right in predicting it's only going to get worse. As far back as forever, the functionally illiterate have held book-learning to be detrimental to making a living, and the succinct humanist reply remains always unintelligible to chuckleheads.

As Donoghue points out, for the humanities to survive at a scholarly level there needs to be a steady supply of Ph.D. candidates for tenured faculty to teach, and if no tenure-track jobs are waiting at graduation, the student pool will evaporate, humanities departments will have to close up shop, and even well-published professors could perish.

But wait a minute, can the health of any art, liberal or otherwise, be measured by the number of grad students it sustains?

And the irony, of course, is this argument sees graduate school as essentially vocational. It trains for professorships.

Still, for anyone considering a career in the cruel humanities, this a book to read, especially if the goal is a snug berth in academia. Don't let it dissuade you, but before you set out you want to know exactly what you're heading into.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The days of the tenured professor are looking grim as the world changes too fast, July 9, 2008

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Paperback)

Today's world is full of corporations where engineering and business sense are the top values in employees. Higher Education, as such, has turned to teaching these aspects. "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities" is a look at the victims of this turn, the college professors. With the fall of the liberal arts and modern emphasis on efficiency, the days of the tenured professor are looking grim as the world changes too fast for a long term career as a college level instructor to be a viable option. "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities" is a scholarly examination of a serious academic shift, highly recommended for community and college library social issues collections.