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The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities

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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.

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.

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.

Too many books about the plight of academia seem compelled, as Donoghue explains, both to describe the situation today as a "crisis" and then to offer nostrums to return our universities to health. "The Last Professors," as its title indicates, is having none of that sunny optimism. Essentially he sees universities as not so much in "crisis," as suffering from a long, and likely irreversible decline at the end of which the utilitarian values of the corporation will emerge triumphant. Perhaps only a handful of wealthy elite institutions -- the Harvards and Amhersts -- will remain as places where fields like Classics and Philosophy, once cornerstones of a liberal arts eduction, are studied and supported.

Donoghue's well researched argument is compelling. He traces the history of the modern university, the rise of for-profit post-secondary education, the pressure that online education exerts toward mass production of degrees, the effect of public funding on higher education (especially in a recessionary environment), and the commodification of prestige through the US News rankings and similar services. All of these factors have created a breach between the university and the business corporation that have allowed the values of the latter to flood the higher education scene. With increasing force and speed, the values of the corporation are swamping the traditional values of academe, and many schools that previously taught a traditional liberal arts curriculum, heavy on the humanities, are replacing that curriculum with one focused on the bottom line and preparation for vocations.

Simultaneously, the working conditions for professors in those traditional fields are falling to pieces. For a lucky few, life goes on as usual, with academic freedom protected by tenure. But a larger and larger percentage of the professoriate now hold contingent jobs, contracted by the course, and paid ridiculously low salaries (as low as $1,000 per course without benefits). This is a scandal in the profession -- and the reason that Donoghue and others are more and more advising young people not to enter the teaching profession in the humanities.

Why should the average person care? Donoghue is so overcome with pessimism he doesn't really offer a reason, though he does say by the end of the book that the humanities cannot find redemption by borrowing corporate terms and trying to defend themselves on the basis of their utility: "rather than merely opposing the corporate assumptions that threaten their disciplines, humanists must challenge those assumptions along different lines" (135). He goes on to show that even utilitarian, quasi-vocational education is not very effective at improving the material conditions of those who attend universities. But what ARE the values of the humanities? That is not something this book addresses, and yet I think it is central to the debate about the future of the university, no matter what side you are on.

The author makes a good analysis from the perspective of the endangered but still committed liberal-arts humanities professor. As a lover of Classics and Philosophy, though not a professional academic, I empathize. I also find the general trajectory toward business and efficiency values dominating our culture worrisome.

However, rather than seeing this conventionally as a left-right, liberal-conservative fight, I think there is a more complex dynamic at work. The philosopher Witold Gombrowicz says of leftists that 'they do not understand that they are aristocrats'. While many left-leaning professors likely see the trend discussed by Donoghue as an encroachment on 'the people' by corporate interests, they would be mistaken not to realize, as Gombrowicz wisely warned, that what they are really fighting for is to keep alive the tradition of allowing a certain 'life of leisure' to the highly educated for the sake of pursing intellectual interests freely, unfettered by the demands of physical or utilitarian labors. This is what, at the dawn of Western civilization and 'the academy', Aristotle argued was required for one to attain the most important insights in philosophy.

The situation is complicated by the culture wars and postmodernism debate of recent decades. While cultural conservatives often unfortunately turn against higher education because of perceived domination by the left, the left is to some degree guilty of the charge of over-politicizing the classroom, often degrading the mind expanding potential of speculative thinking in the liberal arts to mere political agenda pushing. It's a sad situation. A tragedy. My hope would be that a less politicized conception of the liberal arts could bring the cultural conservatives and cultural progressives together in defense of humanities education.

Unfortunately both cultural conservatives and cultural progressives are losing together to the encroachment of utilitarian business values upon the university.

Donoghue's subject is the corporatization of the university and the effects of that phenomenon on faculty in the humanities. The forecast is dark: we have moved past crisis to inevitability. The current situation will not be reversed. A few elite institutions will continue to offer education in the liberal arts (although even those institutions are now marked by careerist materialism). Utility and efficiency (as understood by the corporate world) will continue to expand their rule; for-profit education will increase its already dramatic market share; adjuncts will continue to replace tenure-track faculty (particularly in the humanities) and academic life as we fondly remember it will never return.

"Fondly" is meant in the 18th-century sense. Our memories may be sweet and loving but they are essentially delusional. "Fond" means "foolish" in the 18th century. We are delusional because the corporate attacks on the liberal arts (and particularly on the arts and humanities) are deeply rooted in our history and were already formidable in the late 19th century.

The principal foci of Donoghue's argument are, in his words, the hyperprofessionalization of academic careers, the rapid erosion of tenure, the rise of for-profit higher education and the prestige race. He makes a strong, if dispiriting case for the future of the humanities. The degree to which he will be proven correct will turn on the ability of academic humanists to alter their current practices.

For example, he notes, as many others have, that academic monographs now sell approximately 250 copies, where they once sold 1000. Actually, many sold more copies than that as recently as the early 1970's. There are many reasons for this: the erosion or removal of university press subsidies, the crowding of monograph budgets by serials budgets (particularly serials published by for-profit corporations), the reduction of library acquisition budgets (and, one should add, the eclipse of library budgets by information technology budgets). The problem also results, however, from the expansion of the humanities. Where English departments once offered approximately 10 specialty areas they now offer approximately 30. When the discipline becomes fragmented it becomes impossible for university presses to develop the number of lists commensurate with that number of `fields'. If the departments recalibrated and reconstituted themselves there would be a larger number of potential consumers per field and university presses could sell more books and lower their prices rather than pitch their prices exclusively to (shrinking) library budgets.

What I am saying is that steps could be taken to ameliorate the current condition. Whether they will or not will depend on the degree of desperation which faculty finally confront (or are forced to confront).

The book is excellent in its facts, its details, its lucidity and in the coherence of its core arguments. It does not, however, address other possible futures. For example, the dramatic growth of adjunct faculty is in part made possible by the belief on the part of many of those adjuncts that brighter days will come for all and tenure-track positions will come for them individually. If that was finally proven to be utterly delusional and the future all-but-completely hopeless, how would behavior be affected? How many would go to graduate school? Who would universities hire if the pool of ABD's and those aspiring to the tenure track largely disappeared?

Donoghue essentially expects a continuation of current patterns and he is not necessarily wrong to do so, for the current situation has persisted for decades. One might, however, argue that tipping points have not yet been reached and that currently-unforeseen adaptations might occur. In the meantime, his account is sobering and worthy of serious attention.

Good Book! Would be especially great for those outside academia who are ignorant on the history of the university and professoriate.

honestly shows the result of past decades when full time tenured professors have been replaced largely nationwide by part time temporary instructors...with no health care, no benefits, no career or tenure path. Your college age children are the losers !

Brand new book which was promptly delivered. Very satisfied with the product and the service.

I feel compelled to comment upon what I feel is a bad analogy between corporations and universities. In this text and others (see "How the University Works") the author bemoans what he sees as the decline of the university into a exploitative profit-machine run by shadowy administrators in dark, distant buildings. The quality of education is on the way down, but profit margins are up! Graduate students and idealistic faculty are like workers in a company town, forced to buy from the company store.

Please! There is nothing "corporate" about the university at all. The state university is a quasi-public entity without shareholders, and often without serious oversight. Higher education is run like a government protected "cartel." Mid-level administrators and most faculty are basically "civil servants" (the lazy guy working the desk at the DMV waiting for his pension comes to mind). The university does not have "customers" in the traditional sense. State schools do not go out of business when enrollments fall and money becomes hard to come by. The state government simply raises taxes and steers more students in its direction through scholarships and handouts. Even private schools are recipients of public funding and are subject to regulation and "accredidation."

The evil capitalist in the dark building is the same "progressive" liberal with his Ivy-League Ph.D. we see running graduate seminars in the history building. The author would have us believe Rush Limbaugh is running Cornell--when the guy running the show looks a lot more like Noam Chomsky.

Are we supposed to feel bad about progressive on progressive crime?

That being said, the author does show us the sorry state of academia, and many of the issues he expounds upon are important to consider.

But please leave the bad analogy at the door. If universities really were corporations, they couldn't be any worse than they are now!