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The Knowledge Industry's Brave New World
Paul Murphy In the Fall 1995 American Prospect, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, drawing on a study of the practices of over 2,600 companies, outlined new models of "contingent employment" that are taking form in America today. The greater use of part-time workers, independent contractors, and temps characterizes even growing companies, and contingent employment is most fully developed in high-tech and high-wage sectors of the new information economy, such as the software industry. The knowledge industry's brave new world is one in which employment security will be replaced by "employability security." Software professionals are becoming more like free agents in sports: they identify with the industry, not a particular company; they shift from company to company as projects arise; and their job security rests on their own human and social capital--skills, reputation, and networks of contacts. The advantage of contingent employment is greater flexibility--the ability, often, to work from home and to negotiate varying work schedules, such as three-day or four-day work weeks. The disadvantages include long hours and intense competition. Current hiring trends in colleges and universities parallel this larger pattern of contingent employment. After all, the university is the degree-granting engine of the knowledge industry. The development is ominous for historians and other professors in the humanities, for one's success in this world of flex-work and independent contracting depends, of course, on the market value of one's skills. The current market value for a trained expert in teaching college-level history is between $1,500 and $2,000. This is true, at least, for the Indianapolis area, where I live and am currently pursuing this type of contingency employment. It is a wage level that makes it difficult to pay the bills at times, but, more importantly, it is one that makes it almost impossible to carry on the life of the mind. The market-driven ethic of the knowledge industry is anathema to the idea of the university. Furthermore, there is no reason why this trend will not continue. A two-tiered professorate is emerging in the United States, divided between a well-paid and tenured elite and a much larger pool of low-paid, piece-rate instructors. As this emerging model of flex-time employment has hit the universities in full force, it should be becoming clear to all academic historians that it is not to their advantage. I can speak to the experience of new instructors intending to make a career in academia in this market. This is my second year as a part-time adjunct college history instructor. Last year, while working to complete my Ph.D. in American history, I taught at four area universities: Indiana University at Bloomington (where I am a graduate student), the Purdue University Extension Program at Anderson University, Butler University, and Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). My pay ranged from a low of $1335 per course at IUPUI to a high of $5100 at IU in Bloomington. (The latter salary is quite high and such positions are usually reserved for IU's own ABDs. By comparison, history department graduate associate instructors earn $2430.) I taught six classes (including US to 1865, two sections of US since 1865, and introductory course in US social and cultural history, and two sections of an advanced course in recent US) for a total annual pay of $12,840. I did all the grading myself and created each of the four different courses from scratch. As a new teacher, my work weeks were usually 60 to 65 hours, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, including time spent researching and writing lectures, preparing discussions, grading papers and exams, teaching class, holding office hours, and commuting back and forth. From talking with friends and colleagues in similar situations, my experience was not unlike those of many first-year college professors: little time; the pressures of preparing new lectures daily; a work schedule stretching from early in the morning until late in the evening; the compound challenges of learning to run effective discussions, deal with the problems of students, and keep the courses interesting; and the insecurities entailed in facing students who sometimes are, shall we say, reticent in displaying any enthusiasm for your work. I feel I had the same experience as some of my tenure-track colleagues, only at about 40 percent of the pay, no benefits, no insurance, no job security, and no research support. I had some, but not much, time for my own work. I learned that a contingent history instructor is dependent, above all, on his or her own resources, financially and emotionally. The wages are enough to support one person modestly but inadequate if one is responsible for the livelihood of a family. I earned lower salaries at each institution I taught because of my lack of a Ph.D., but the salaries, even with the degree, are still very low (at IUPUI this fall, the ABD/Ph.D. salary differential is $405). Furthermore, while I have found most every full-time faculty member encouraging wherever I have taught, what is most lacking for the part-timer is the sense of belonging. Academic life is by its nature attenuated; much of the work is done in solitude, whether one is working with sources, composing a paper, or reading books. But the life of the mind must, at some point, be social, taking place through conversation and as a member of a community. As solicitous as my full-time colleagues can be, I do not 'belong' to their university in the fullest sense. The nature of contingency employment is to sever this sense of belonging from the employment contract. My employment is defined by the marketplace. I am being paid for a specific service and my future employment will depend on how well I provide that service and whether it is, in fact, needed. I am not being paid to write, do research, or be a part of the university's intellectual community. Without money from some other source, a contingent academic worker cannot easily do any of these things. As an independent college history course contractor, so to speak, I discovered that my product is just not worth very much. I estimate that I earned between $6 and $7 per hour last year. The greatest pitfall of contingency employment for a humanities professor is, however, independent of the pay. I entered graduate school to live the good life of the mind, but this cannot be done on a part-time basis. Insofar as our university system is converted into another element in the knowledge industry, its employment patterns will reflect those of the larger industry; the ability to pursue the intellectual life will increasingly become the province of the well-paid elite at the major private and research universities. Perhaps it is at risk even for them. The historical profession should resist its reduction into a piece-rate knowledge industry. At the least, part-time workers should organize to increase wages; part-time teachers deserve a year's pay for a year's work. They should be paid at a per-course rate which reflects what junior faculty members make. If, for example, a first-year instructor is expected to teach six courses, a part-timer should earn one-sixth of the beginning instructor's salary for each course. Part-timers should also have insurance and pension benefits, which amount to anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 in addition to annual compensation for full-time faculty. Most importantly, academic historians must take notice of larger employment trends and the value society places on their work. Like so many of our social and cultural institutions, the academy has been subsumed by large-scale market forces. Academics would do well to resist shedding the last vestiges of a non-market ethos from the system of higher education in America. It is ironic that one of the legacies of the 'baby-boomer' generation of historians, many of whom transformed the teaching and writing of American history with their insistent attention to race, class, and gender, will be a university characterized by an especially rigid class structure, one divided between a well-paid elite of tenured faculty and a larger number of low-paid knowledge service piece-workers. The irony is not that this has happened--for the university has been historically subject to market forces and a tendency towards elitism--but that this generation has done so little to resist it.
Paul Murphy is a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington. |
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