Back to Brainstorm, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs:
Marc Bousquet challenges Robert B. Townsend’s depressing news about tenure-track employment in the field of history. He accuses Townsend of engaging in “discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.” He writes:
Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don’t hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it’s pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, i.e., that the issue needs to be addressed from the “demand side.” There’s no real oversupply of folks holding the Ph.D. because what’s happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators — in many fields, work that used to be done by persons holding the Ph.D. and on the tenure track is now done by persons without the terminal degree and contingently. Increasingly, even undergraduates are playing a role in this restructured “demand” for faculty work, participating in the instruction of other undergraduates.
This kind of stuff is way over my head and I am ill-equipped to comment on it. But it sure is interesting.
The production of history is cartelized. Operating like a union, historians with tenure enrich themselves at the expense of non-tenured professors, adjuncts, and graduate assistants. Restricting the supply of tenured positions increases the value of those positions. The end result: a distinct class division between the tenured haves and the untenured have-nots.