Can't Even Afford a Tweed Jacket

What do you think of when you hear the word “professor”? An old man with glasses and a tweed jacket? That image is typically what the mainstream media would have us believe. The typical professor is someone like Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World: smart, kind, tough, and old (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAOTiQ86BgM ). Or maybe the image of the typical professor is more generic and not a specific character. However, the same characteristics still apply. The professor is always an older gentleman with a jacket, tie, and glasses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaADQTeZRCY ). Even Gina Barreca comments in her personal history Babes in Boyland that the tweed jacket seemed to be a standard issue among the mostly male professors of the classes she attended at Dartmouth. As images of professors have become gendered, so has the compensation through the universities and colleges that are increasingly falling under corporation-type management.

A shocking quote that is used in the book How the University Works by Marc Bousquet in chapter three “The Faculty Organize, But Management Enjoys Solidarity” is from New York University’s Dean Ann Marcus: “We need people we can abuse, exploit, and then turn loose” (95). As universities are consumed by the drive to make a profit, the faculty and staff are financially neglected: “It is obvious today that managerial values interpellate the faculty…” (Bousquet 93). Unfortunately, as can be seen from Dean Marcus’s candid statement, these “managerial values” have been internalized and remain unquestioned by those that benefit: “…tenured faculty, even unionized tenured faculty, accept the managerial accounts of “necessity” in the exploitation of part-time faculty, graduate students, and the outsourcing of staff” (Bousquet 93). It seems as though the university is beginning to be transformed into a university industrial complex, where the drive to retain money trumps the concerns of individual faculty and staff.

In regards to gender, women faculty are the most disadvantaged concerning monetary compensation from their places of employment: “…women faculty teach for as little as a few hundred dollars per course, frequently earning less than $16,000 for teaching eight courses a year, without benefits. Even in the full-time nontenurable positions, women with doctorates, averaging as much as ten years of post-baccalaureate study, commonly earn under $30,000, often without benefits” (Bousquet 91). The exploitation of female professors and faculty are defended by the adoption of a corporate mindset when running a university. Numerous tenured professors or well-paid faculty with sufficient benefits is not cost-effective. It is clear what a university’s priorities are when sports coaches are receiving several times what faculty are. Unfortunately this reality is even more severe for female faculty: “The economic and social violence experienced by…the majority of women faculty working in undervalued disciplines and in nontenurable positions, is experienced…and is sustained by a network of beliefs and institutions “outside” the relationship between administration and employee” (Bousquet 91).The university has changed significantly from the days of kindly old male professors in tweed jackets. The good news is: women have been accepted as instructors in institutions of higher education for year. The bad news: their labor is being exploited.