American Institutions The Professor As Commodity

...This applied to the factory worker in Marx's time, it did not apply to the scholar...

...The worker therefore feels at home only during his leisure, whereas at work he feels homeless...

...Brilliance, if unaccompanied by the accepted evidence of his usefulness in increasing the prestige of the department, can become a threat to his colleagues: "By suggesting that prestige without production is possible, he introduces alien criteria...

...To close a survey of this nature with some innocuous recommendations about more orderly assignments of teaching loads, regularized procedures for promotion and the like, reveals a failure of the critical intelligence as well as of the moral imagination...

...Or: "He had to have a good background...

...262 pp...

...Mucis OF WHAT I have summarized so far seems clearly in accord with what we all know about contemporary academic life...

...In this respect things have hardly changed...

...Personality has high market value in the academy...

...BasicBooks...

...Because these books have been done as academic studies, they have not received as much attention as they should...

...in fact, an overemphasis that has become a kind of academic disease...

...The university, as distinct from the college, has traditionally been considered an institution where research as well as teaching are to be part of the scholar's task...

...tives of pecuniary emulation (to use Veblen's apt phrase) are often as dominant as in other American institutions...

...They came upon some wondrous explanations: "He played the recorder...

...New York...

...A commodity needs to circulate in order to accrue in exchange value...

...Prestige...

...4.95...

...Interviewer: "Because he played the recorder...

...Publication and research—I am still summarizing the conclusions of our authors—are of the essence here, not teaching...

...The book has a strenuously academic quality in that it adheres most scrupulously to the criteria of academic compartmentalizaiton...

...The authors have accomplished their assigned task in a superb manner— we have been able to mention here only a very few of their startling findings—yet, as Jacques Barzun remarks in his foreword, they have been unwilling to discuss the cultural con• ditions in which the academy functions today, and they have thereby kept themselves from assuming the role and responsibility of the critic...

...That they don't ask themselves what consequences this is likely to have for the general state of our mental life seems as disturbing as—indeed a symptom of—the phenomena they describe...

...First that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery not of well-being, does not de velop freely a physical and mental energy, but is physically exhausted and mentally debased...

...Hence the paradox that "although in most occupations men are judged by how well they perform their normal duties, the academic man is judged almost exclusively by his performance in a kind of part-time voluntary job which he creates for himself...

...This book documents something much more perturbing: the self-rationalization, the self-commercialization of the academic man...

...In his classic description of aliena tion Marx wrote: "In what does this alienation of labor consist...

...They found that in the hiring process, given the gap between officially stated qualifications and criteria of evaluation actually applied, all sorts of extraneous, often quite whimsical reasons, finally decide the . outcome...

...Below we bring together three brief notices of valuable studies of American society...

...In most occupations a person's devotion and loyalty to the institution in which he serves is likely to bring him prestige and esteem...

...it is, of course, the standing of the incumbents in point of common notoriety that must chiefly be had in view in any strict valuation of them for purposes of academic prestige...

...That was the reason we hired him," says one respondent...

...1958...

...In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study,* the academician tends increasingly to be treated as a commodity sold on the market—not this alone, to be sure, but still a commodity sold after much haggling and with impressive ceremonial and ritual accomplishments, though not necessarily in accordance with its use value...

...There were some others in the same period, but their direction of thought was forward, not back, and they'll run into the modern period where everyone has plenty of people...

...For the university is, or should be, a center of learning as well as of teaching...

...you Iet some shit in, or someone with marital problems, Christ knows what will happen...

...But Veblen could still ascribe the vices of the academy to the domination of businessmen over universities and their staff of scholars...

...The change is a striking one...

...Writing and research are not merely "private professional interests" (to use the phrase of Caplow and McGee) but an integral part, at least in terms of formal claims, of university life...

...To say this, of course, is not to deny the fact that there has recently been a severe overemphasis upon publishing...

...The authors studied the procedures for terminations and replacements of faculty members in the liberal arts, in nine major private and public universities, and they interviewed depart...

...We hope that these pieces will persuade some of our readers to turn to these books which offer important material for an intelligent and critical understanding of American life today...

...but some of it is a little overdrawn...

...In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity...

...Academicians of the past would have been repelled by the very title of this book, but few today would even understand the reasons for such a response...

...The orgmen are sometimes condescendingly studied by the academicians, but in the meantime their standards have invaded the academy...

...MUCH of WHAT this volume documents in precise detail Veblen already knew some fifty years ago when he wrote in The Higher Learning in America: "Common notoriety is the due test of eminence which the competitive university must apply in the selection of its notables...

...the num• ber of publications rather than the quality, as well as the departments in which the applicant was trained and in which he has subsequently taught, are decisive...

...Too deep an involvement with the institution in which he teaches is likely to alienate a man from his professional discipline and its decisive coteries...

...is not a direct measure of productivity but a composite of subjective opinion...

...he must publish or he will perish...

...A career within one institution is likely to impede future mobility, hence to decrease the market value of the academician...

...Prestige is measured, in part, by the number of citations one receives from the authors, yet the number of citations is in part a consequence of high prestige—and such prestige is likely to come to those who are constantly in the eyes of their colleagues on the national marketplace...

...In our next issue, Maurice Stein will discuss another work of this kind, Vidich and Bensman's Small Town in Mass Society.—En...

...What is important is what others in the discipline think of him, since that is, in large part, how good he is...

...What matters is not the way a man teaches, but his reputation among the cliques that determine marketability of particular individuals within a particular academic discipline...

...Teaching experience, difficult to assess in any case, is given most limited consideration...

...It is a mistake, therefore, to apply standards appropriate to colleges in a study where the sampling of institutions investigated by the authors comes primarily from major universities...

...And this, surely, is one reason for the fact that much being published today by American professors is written not because of a genuine concern with an intellectual or scholarly problem but because of the need to further academic careers...

...A personable man with many publications and the right affiliations is well nigh irresistible as a market leader...

...This is not so in major American universities...

...Caplow and McGee go astray, for example, in their counterposing of teaching and research...

...Yes, we thought that would be nice...

...The successful man must constantly be on display in the market place...

...Those last two are important...

...Or: "He started in the Eighteenth century and was working backwards...

...By some self-denying ordinance the authors have avoided any critical comments about the cultural and institutional context...

...It is only a slight exaggeration to say that academic success is likely to come to the man who has learned to neglect his assigned duties in order to have more time and energy to pursue his private professional interests...

...The authors have shown that by now the process of alienation has penetrated even those spiritual sanctuaries in which spontaneous and joyful productivity, though not it alone, was valued...

...Good social person, nice person, happily married...

...There is very little point," write Caplow and McGee, "in trying to determine how good the man really is [when a professor is being considered for appointment...

...The exchange value of the professor is established not through on-thejob performance, through his contributions to the educational life of the university...

...ment chairmen and members of departments in all the ranks...

...Much more than ever in the past, if we may trust the evidence accumulated by Caplow and McGee, the academy has become a marketplace in which the mo * The Academic Marketplace, by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee...