Last year at the OAH Annual Meeting, Ellen Schrecker participated in a special graduate student panel addressing the many challenges facing higher education. A longtime OAH member, professor of history at Yeshiva University, and author of the recent Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, she had just become the editor of Academe, the flagship publication of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). There were many troubling issues on her mind that day, and she shared her unique perspective with an anxious crowd of aspiring young scholars and concerned faculty. She made such an impression that we invited her to continue the conversation with Stanley N. Katz, OAH past president and former president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Katz conducted the interview at the Princeton Club last September. --Eds.

Stanley Katz:
How did you become the editor of Academe? Was there anything in your previous career that influenced you in this direction?

Ellen Schrecker:
When I finished my most recent book about the McCarthy era, Many Are the Crimes, I had been working on McCarthyism for more than twenty years and I felt ready to move on. Since I wasn't sure exactly what my next scholarly project might be, I was looking for something to do before jumping into a major piece of research. The position with Academe was ideal. I was a member of the AAUP and knew the organization well. In fact, when I was working on my earlier book about the impact of McCarthyism on the academic community, I became the first outside scholar to use the organization's archives. Also, I always considered myself as much a writer as a historian (I taught freshman composition for eight years at Harvard after I finished my Ph.D. dissertation in European diplomatic history and later on I served as chair of the New York local of the National Writers Union), and I had always wanted to edit a magazine for a general audience of intellectuals. Academe, as I see it, is a bully pulpit for airing issues of importance to the academic profession and helping its members understand and deal with the problems they face today.

S.K.: What do you think of the new trend toward distance learning?

E.S.: My first impression was that it was a gimmick universities used to save money, but I've since learned that it is a very mixed phenomenon. It has been useful, for example, at smaller schools where collaboration with other institutions allows them to offer the specialized courses in subjects like upper level languages that they could not otherwise provide. One of the difficulties is that distance learning is, well, distant; and a teacher on a big television screen is just not as effective as one in the same classroom as her students. It is also incredibly expensive to equip a distance learning classroom in a proper manner--as much as $100,000 for a twenty-student classroom. And we're not even talking about technical glitches and system breakdowns.

But there are also real academic freedom issues here. I first encountered them at an AAUP chapter meeting at my school where we decided to use the school's distance learning technology to let faculty members at one of our school's two campuses participate in the meeting on the other campus. We soon realized that there was absolutely no guarantee of security for the meeting, and so decided to shut down the transmission because we didn't like the possibility that an unfriendly administrator might be privy to our discussions. As a teacher in a virtual classroom, you can never be sure if you are really in control of your class. Your classroom can always be monitored by the administration. Indeed, a friend of mine once got a call from an official complaining about something he said in class, demonstrating, of course, that the official had actually been listening in.

Another threat--and a more common one--is that distance learning technology will be used to make money and will end up exploiting the faculty. Using the new technology is quite time-consuming, especially the first time you put a class together. If schools get more involved with distance education, they will have to compensate teachers for the enormous amount of time it requires. Moreover, once the course exists, it can be easily reproduced and there is no guarantee that universities, which are becoming more and more entrepreneurial with regard to their faculty's intellectual output, will not appropriate the course from its creator without offering adequate compensation. In addition, because distance learning could become an academic cash cow, there may be pressure to make what the teacher is doing consumer-friendly. There could be subtle pressures toward grade inflation, toward stressing things that do not reflect your own intellectual priorities or trivializing the material in order to make the course more salable.

S.K.: Besides distance learning, what other threats do you see to academic freedom?

E.S.: Professors may be losing their ability and willingness to speak out on issues outside the classroom. Because of the job crunch, junior faculty are so insecure that they cannot now openly take political positions as they did in the 1960s. Junior faculty--and this, of course, would apply to adjuncts as well--are deprived of the opportunity to act in their capacity as citizens. If, for instance, America was to enter another Vietnam War, would faculty members express themselves as freely as we did in the 1960s? I think not. This timidity, the caution junior people feel they have to exercise before tenure, becomes ingrained. If academics don't exercise their right to speak out, it atrophies. Pressures are strong to concern oneself primarily with one's career and to succumb to greater-than-ever pressure to publish. Somehow, if the academic profession is to remain, as it has been for generations, the most important source of new social and political ideas, there needs to be more space and time for academics in their dual capacities as teachers and scholars to sit back and think about tough or unpopular issues.

There are also issues of intellectual freedom with regard to the Internet. One could call this "virtual McCarthyism." One recent case in Virginia, fortunately decided in favor of the academics involved, would have made it impossible for state employees, including professors, to obtain sexually explicit material over the Internet. Other situations have involved invading the e-mail of professors, especially that of people charged with sexual harassment.

Actually, careless charges of sexual harassment may well be today's greatest threat to academic freedom, inflicting serious damage on the careers of people who may have simply been crude rather than intentionally abusive.

S.K.: Can you think of an example?

E.S.: Not many that have a name attached. This stuff gets hushed up, for both good and bad reasons. Some of the cases involve gays and women rather than what we think of as the traditional perpetrator of sexual harassment, the senior male professor. In other cases, because of the alleged delicacy of the proceedings, there are a lot of procedural abuses. In some ways, it's almost like the McCarthy era, where people are losing their jobs or being forced to resign without being able to confront their accusers.

S.K.: How do you think the contemporary corporate world might shape the profession? How has it shaped it already?

E.S.: In the broadest sense, the corporatization of contemporary culture is behind almost everything that is happening in the university: the emphasis on the bottom line, the decline of the humanities, the careerism of our students, and so on. In a narrower sense, corporate pressures have not affected historians yet, but they certainly have scientists. When corporations fund a faculty member's research, they often not only own the rights to the commercial exploitation of that research, but they can restrict its scholarly dissemination as well. As historians do more in the field of public history, they might encounter the same kind of corporate restrictions. This could happen, for example, with some of the exciting web-based projects that many historians are beginning to work on. We can access them for free now, but in the future, who knows.

Historical documentaries are another area where corporate pressures may change things. As NEH funding declines and these films become more and more commercialized on the Arts and Entertainment channel or the History Channel, say, they lose touch with the mainstream of contemporary historical scholarship. The focus of such commercial outlets is on biography and military history. I worked on a Truman biography, which was a documentary film, and in the end the filmmakers cut out almost everything but military events and human interest stories. This distorts the view of history presented to the general public. Some documentaries can certainly be made in a respectable and respectful and interesting way. Think, for instance, of women's history, where the wonderful film made from Laurel Ulrich's The Midwife's Tale showed that the details of ordinary people's lives are eminently suitable to film making.

S.K.: How hard is it to get published these days?

E.S.: Real hard, if you're writing a monograph in a small field like Medieval History. The standard monograph is on the way out. Libraries can't buy them because the rise in the prices of serials in the sciences (some cost thousands of dollars a year) forces libraries to cut back on book purchases, most of which are in the humanities. But it is also true that academics are--for a variety of economic and professional reasons--no longer buying books like they once did. Scholarly books that had some general interest used to be published by commercial publishers. But no more. Most commercial houses are increasingly unwilling to handle the so-called "mid-list" books that sell around 10-20,000 copies. So, those books are now published by the high-end academic presses, which in turn puts a squeeze on monographs in more specialized fields. While electronic publishing may change things in the future, at the moment, the situation looks pretty grim. Still, given the academic labor market, it may be easier for a young historian to publish a book than to get a full-time, tenure-track job.

S.K.: What changes do you anticipate in the universities as a result of some of these market forces?

E.S.: We are certainly seeing downsizing, in the replacement of full-time tenure-track positions with part-time and off-the-ladder appointments. We are also seeing the tiering of the universities. At the top of the academic food chain faculty enjoy support for research, lower teaching loads, higher salaries, better offices and libraries, more up-to-date computers, and well-prepared students who have time to study and full access to resources like computers and databases, for instance. Working conditions are much worse at lower-level schools. Faculty members at those schools, many of them graduates of top-tier Ph.D. programs, can no longer expect to do traditional scholarship. They won't have access to good libraries, fellowship opportunities, and to the other things that make continuing scholarship possible.

I can imagine that as the market expands and the public sphere shrinks, this tiering within higher education will intensify. Public education has been taking the main hits. As in the rest of society, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The prestige of the credential one earns determines one's future economic and social status. Education is now becoming a commodity and universities are competing for customers by offering what students want, not what educators think they should learn--well-equipped athletic centers rather than library books. As a result, except at the top tier schools whose prestige allows them to replicate the traditional elite forms of education, colleges are becoming increasingly more vocational, consumer- oriented, and much weaker in the traditional liberal arts. And, of course, they are hiring more and more adjuncts.

S.K.: Has any ground been gained on the culture wars front?

E.S.: I don't think the culture wars are completely over. The criticism directed against scholars who work in supposedly esoteric areas or on "politically correct" subjects is taking its toll by delegitimizing the mainstream of academic scholarship in history as in other fields. This criticism --part of a broader right-wing campaign designed to make universities look radical, out-of-touch, and elitist and thus discredit the academy as a source of social and political criticism--has come to dominate popular thinking about the academic profession. Even the most traditional type of scholarship can come under attack. Look at the Enola Gay flap of several years ago which targeted that most traditional of all fields--military history.

Sure, there are problems with trendiness and overspecialization. I was on the OAH program committee a few years ago. We had lots of proposals in hot fields like cultural history and almost none in the more traditional ones like military or diplomatic history, though we were desperate for them. But even in the trendier fields, I think many historians are consciously trying to make their work accessible to the general public. Still, when one of my best students told me he wants to go to graduate school in history and then says he doesn't like reading history books, what's a historian to do?

S.K.: How are women historians faring in the academy?

E.S.: The good news is the larger numbers of women involved. But they still aren't advancing at the same rate as men. In a recent study of gender differences within the professions, Virginia Valian shows that men are still perceived to be more competent than women with identical qualifications (even by women!) and that, tiny as those gender advantages may be, they add up enough to keep professional women from reaching the same level as men. How many women are in a pool is also important. If the percentage is low, gender considerations intervene and women tend to be downgraded. That may be why many of the most successful women historians are in women's history and fields with more women in them. But, though things are improving, the disproportionate numbers of women in the lower ranks or with non-tenure track jobs show that full equality still does not exist.

S.K.: Why should members of the history profession join the AAUP?

E.S.: No other organization speaks for the academic profession as a whole or has as its central mission the maintenance of professional standards. Historians face the same kinds of problems as the rest of the academic profession. But our disciplinary organizations, even ones as alert to professional issues as the OAH, are not in a position to deal with them, nor should they. That's the AAUP's job. It is the traditional guardian of academic freedom with a strong professional and legal staff and the institutional know-how to defend individual faculty members when they get into trouble. Just recently, for example, the AAUP's intervention in the case of Kate Bronfenbrenner-- a labor relations scholar at Cornell who was being sued for libel by a nursing home corporation--helped her get the company to drop its suit and its even more damaging attempt to subpoena all her research notes.

The AAUP has standing as the voice of the academic profession, access to the media, and good contacts on Capitol Hill. It can create the kinds of broad coalitions necessary for dealing with issues like the use of adjuncts that concern all academics. At the moment, for example, the Association is working on an innovative pilot program that seeks to organize adjuncts who have been traditionally hard to reach because they teach at several different schools. Based initially in Boston, but obviously replicable elsewhere, this project is abandoning the traditional disciplinary or institution-by-institution approach and, instead, is working on bringing the area's part-time teachers together into a multi-campus or metropolitan movement.

The AAUP is equally concerned about graduate students who are, after all, the future of our profession. It seeks to alert faculty members to the excessive teaching and laboratory work that turns too many TAs into part-time students. Reducing their teaching loads will, the AAUP believes, enable graduate students to complete their Ph.D. in a reasonable amount of time. And just this past November, the Association's Council adopted a resolution supporting the collective bargaining rights of graduate students, part-time teachers, and all academic employees.

Such a step is hardly surprising for the AAUP, many of whose members are already in collective bargaining units. Especially at lower-tier schools, an AAUP union enables faculty to enforce rules and grievance procedures. It can also create the possibility of faculty governance where it does not otherwise exist by making it a subject of collective bargaining and can put language guaranteeing academic freedom into its contracts.

What I've learned from working with the AAUP is how vulnerable the exploitation of part-timers and graduate students is making the rest of the academic profession. Putting underpaid, overworked, and powerless men and women in college classrooms--no matter how it may be rationalized in terms of flexibility or efficiency--demeans higher education. In a society increasingly dominated by marketplace values, it sends the message that teaching doesn't matter, learning doesn't matter, and that the life of the mind doesn't matter either.

If we are to meet the threat of corporatization, downsizing, and the growing attack on the legitimacy of what we do, we will have to adopt a less careerist point of view. Somehow, we are going to have to reach out to a broader public to convince them that the academic community offers something more than an economically necessary credential, that higher education is not just a matter of dollars and cents but a preparation for active engagement as citizens in the world. What I'm talking about here, and there are a lot of very smart people out there making more or less the same argument (including the sociologist Robert Bellah in the current issue of Academe), is the need to reassert the civic function of our profession and to convince ourselves and others that our most important task may be to create the informed and responsible citizens a democratic society requires.

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Stanley N. Katz is OAH past president and former president of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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