Adjuncts and the university- a growing trend

By Joseph Reed Petticrew

This is the first part of an article outlining the use of adjunct professors in many American universities, and its historical development as a means to control, intimidate and render powerless a growing militancy among American academics.

For many years, a trend in the administration of American universities has been to think of the university itself as a type of corporation. One reason for this is obvious: the gradual and unchallenged encroachment of corporations into the finances and daily activities of most of our institutions of higher learning.

This incursion was established during the Second World War, and grew in strength during the long history of the Cold War. There were agenda to be pushed and money to be made.

Many universities were more than willing to redesign themselves to fit the needs of an emerging military-industrial complex; such restructuring was often couched in terms of a patriotic duty ... we had, after all, to "compete" with the Soviet Union in the proliferation of "science" and technological advancement. And of course, there was the money!

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing up to the present, the "hard" sciences have dominated the campus scene. And science, for the most part, has maintained its prestige and glamour on most university campuses for the same reason that well-established sports programs have: They "bring home the bacon."

The humanities have often been seen, at best, as a nice but extraneous activity to give "polish" to the university experience and at worst, "outdated" and completely foreign to the needs of the average American student.

In the 1960s students clamored for "relevance" and many universities, most conspicuously the University of California under S.I. Hayakawa, used their protests as an excuse to start dismantling many programs in the humanities.

The art of language became the science of linguistics, etc. and most of the classic humanities followed suit, taking the lead of the "social sciences," to legitimate themselves in the eyes of the administration and an increasingly obsessed public. Seemingly gone forever were the days of "art for art's sake," now seen as a quaint holdover from a musty Victorian past.

In the wake of this sea change there were, of course, benefits to a student's curriculum. The most notable example was the development, on many campuses, of strong African-American studies programs and other courses revolving around long-forgotten aspects of American culture and politics.

The evolution of history as a science (which began, effectively, with Karl Marx) helped to reshape attitudes, long in place, on the character of American civilization. And when the "science" of economics, as developed by a European bourgeois elite, was held up in comparison to the hard sciences, some of its more egregious errors and mystifications were exposed by the discipline of the scientific method.

Economics and sociology both took on strong Marxist concepts and benefited enormously from them. A mainstream book like Eugene Genovese's The Political Economy of Slavery would have been inconceivable in an earlier epoch of higher education.

At the same time the winds of liberalism were ridding academia of its cobwebs, there was emerging an almost unnoticed revolution of a different sort, a revolution of boardrooms, corporate and academic.

Through long association with a corporate elite - mainly through the funding of special research for the military-industrial complex - the administrations of many large American universities began to embrace the paradigm of the American corporation and took to heart its "lessons" for "good" administration. Of course, there was always a tie-in from the association with various alumni groups, the leading members of which usually representing the thoughts and wishes of a larger business community.

Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s there was a glut of trained academicians in every field. In spite of the fact that there were "projects" heavily funded by the military and corporate worlds, most in academe felt the crunch of an encroaching insecurity in their professional lives; there were simply too many PhDs for the increasingly fewer faculty positions available. Many universities began to extend the tenure of their graduate students, offering them certain employment as teaching assistants rather than "forcing" them to graduate and enter a decidedly uncertain job market. Thus began the trend of marginalizing a highly trained and educated job force.

At the same time the nature and conditions of academic tenure were being revolutionized by increasingly cost-conscious college administrators. Why, after all, pay for a tenured faculty when their place in the university was being filled "successfully" by low-paid graduate students and, increasingly, by part-time instructors. These administrators had learned well their first lesson from their corporate sponsors ... how to cry poor mouth to defend "cost-effective" cuts in employment and university programs.

The cultural ethos of American life began to change dramatically during the waning years of the 1970s. There arose a militant attitude not favorably disposed to the welfare state, the plight of the poor, to "parasitic" abuses of individuals and institutions.

The rise of this attitude was fostered by an emergent corporate elite who turned to Madison Avenue to help build an image of themselves as efficient and expert managers of just about any enterprise, and a corresponding image of "government" as "wasteful" and fiscally capricious. (And the fact that they were successful in this pursuit goes far to explain why Ronald Reagan, in his turn, finally succeeded in his bid for the presidency; he was the perfect pitchman for a new attitude.)

Businesses of all sizes were seized with a mania for downsizing and "lean" operations; there were many lay-offs and, in the case of higher-ranking management, buy-outs of stock options and other mechanisms which assured the elite of their financial rewards. But the message was out: cut back or die. Advertising firms were busy night and day devising ways to sell this strategy to the American public, and there were many who believed the company line: "this is a temporary but necessary effect of our move to become healthier, more competitive." (When one looks at the old commercials from this time, it is amazing how many of them used some sort of health metaphor to characterize the actions of corporations.)

At first the ties between college administrations and corporate boardrooms were not easily discernible; those who ran colleges still had a patina of prestige which insulated them and their decisions from the appearance of using the cut-throat policies of the corporate world. But as the prestige of business rose as a result of costly "image" advertisements, those who ran our colleges and universities began more and more to compare themselves and their institutions to the workings of the American corporation. The same language was employed and they, too, began to justify themselves and their actions according to the dictate of a corporate "bottom line."

In the 1980s, during the two administrations of Ronald Reagan, the American business community came into its own. Aging resentments directed against a business elite, stemming from common experiences of the American public during the Great Depression, began to erode, to evaporate.

Aided by an enormous public-image campaign, and the propitious collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the decade, the American corporation sought to consolidate its gains by political means. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the structure of American universities.

Joseph Reed Petticrew is a staff member of the People's Weekly World.