@katliamom if I accept your premise, which I’m not sure that it’s true, it’s not my point.
Even in an anti intellectual focused nation as you suggest, why would that have an impact on the very places devoted to intellectualism. It’s their raison d’etre. It’s illogical.
Yes there may be some doing what you suggest.
But that doesn’t explain how college campuses, which cannot be credibly said to be part of this movement, - or it would be tantamount to career fratricide - are doing what is suggested in the thread as part of an anti intellectual movement.
It has to be something else. Perhaps the growth of the bureaucratic class at institutions.
Why is it a surprise that academia is a multi-tier job market? So is the market for many other professions. You can graduate with a degree in finance from Wharton and end up as a middle market commercial lender for a regional bank, or end up doing M&A at Goldman Sachs. One out-earns the other by several multiples. You can go pro in baseball and spend your career making the rounds of the farm teams, regional feeders, never quite breaking out, or go directly to the majors. Guess which path out-earns the other. I have a cousin who was a dancer in a regional company - very prestigious-- with zero job security (akin to being an adjunct at a U since you need to cobble together several jobs to keep a roof over your head). An injury sidelined her career which makes her story more similar to that of a minor league ball player than an adjunct professor of history. Same story for musicians, conductors, and even physicians- dermatologist vs. pediatrician. Personal injury lawyer with an asbestos class action practice vs. an immigration attorney in any big city (and to add insult to injury- the immigration attorneys are often graduates of the big time prestigious law schools).
Most of the talent markets are multi tier. I’m not getting why academia is so different from violinists. Know any professional violinists? I do. They piece together a living, and other than the absolute top tier, they know they are one weak fundraising season at their “orchestra” away from being someone who teaches violin vs. someone who is a violinist.
And met any voice actors? Juliana Margulies can sign one contract with a credit card company and retire-- forever. Meanwhile, hundreds of union members can work 10 and 12 hour days on radio spots for your local Toyota dealer, etc. and qualify for food stamps.
We can not only eliminate the political albatross of tenured faculty, but cease public funding for all faculty. Just have teachers (the least hypocritical, and most palatable to the public) record their lectures, and then turn off the lights on their way out the door. Create on-line classes that can be machine graded, and we no longer need either TAs or adjuncts. And we can close all the graduate programs. Why should the public fund faculty or institutions in which they see no value, and sometimes judge a detriment to society.
I still don’t see the point here. The initial OP raised a concern about how colleges - themselves - are handling these issues.
Why make it about the broader public who actually probably do not care in the least about how tenure is awarded. Actually, not “probably“ don’t care. Most wouldn’t even be aware of the process to care.
It seems counterintuitive to say that the public is the reason colleges themselves are anti intellectual.
This is about process and prestige at colleges and universities as determined by said colleges and universities.
Not the elimination of an intellectual class by forces in society or some public policy or laws. The latter is not happening and seems to move blame away from the real decision makers to the uneducated masses as a bogeyman.
Has it always been? I don’t know. I never intended to teach with my PhD (from an ordinary school). My S is starting a humanities PhD program this fall and told us something like 80% of tenure track positions across the nation will go to graduates from the top ten schools for his major. He didn’t apply to lower but good schools because he felt his odds of landing a teaching job would be low. He’s aware of the long shot but loves his field and really hopes to teach.
Any performing arts (music, dance, pro sports, etc.) as a primary career job is elitist, since the general public tends to be attracted only to performances by “the very best” (even if they cannot tell the difference in performance quality between “the very best” and one just below, or if the determination of “the very best” by industry insiders is somehow flawed).
This is not true for most STEM faculty posts at state schools, though it may be true at medical schools. Search committees cast a wide net and focus on research quality and productivity (publications) regardless of where the research took place.
“Elitist” implies unfair discrimination, when in fact most hiring decisions and promotions are highly quantitative based on productivity in teaching, research and other metrics. Decisions are vetted through departments and several administrative committees. Everything must be documented and justified, with members of committees designated to ensure compliance with affirmative action criteria. It’s hard to imagine a more egalitarian process than selection of tenure track faculty.
The lower “tiers” are primarily teaching positions because the demand for teaching far exceeds the supply of TT faculty able to do the work. This has been the case for decades. The use of student to faculty ratios to rank campus quality has put pressure on schools to hire more instructors, often at the non tenure track tier.
That is very definitely not true. Most of the decisions are made on the basis of very non-quantitative factors. For most search committees, factors like “fit” and “potential” far outweigh anything that is even somewhat quantitative, like grants amounts and number of publications. That is why many “elite” colleges will interview and hire a graduate from an Ivy who hasn’t published, or even defended their thesis yet, over a person from a program with less prestige who has a PhD, and has a number of publications in top journals. The reason that is almost invariably given is that the former “has potential”.
Sometimes it is reverse elitism. Many “lower tier” universities will toss applicants who graduated from an “elite” program, since they do not feel that the candidate will fit, or they feel that the candidate is using the positions as a stepping-stone, and will leave. This is not an entirely baseless fear, though.
Also, many universities in the South will prefer hiring people who have their PhDs from universities in the South, because of “fit”, or often personal preference. There are people who prefer graduates of their program, and people who prefer PhDs whose adviser was a Big Name.
The Search Committee makes recommendations based on factors which are mostly non-quantitative, and the department votes based on whatever they feel like. Then the Dean or Provost may decide to override the department’s choice, and hire based on personal reasons.
Academic hiring is very far from Quantitative.
So is, in fact, tenure. First, because most of the quantitative measures are not quantitative. Publications and conference presentations are not all created equal, and different sub-fields have different funding rates and different funding amounts. That is only 1/3-45% of the tenure portfolio. The rest is “student evaluations” for which the only known ways of trying to quantify this are known to be biased against women, minorities, is also strongly related to physical appearances. The last third or so is “collegiality” which doesn’t even pretend to be quantitative.
Hiring and awarding tenure by committee is a terrible way to do things. Unfortunately, to paraphrase what Churchill said about democracy - every other way is even worse.
This is less true in the engineering departments I’m familiar with. Research dollars, publications, and student evaluations determine tenure in that order.
The way I have always heard of how college prestige matters in faculty hiring is that the prestige of one’s PhD department (rather than the college overall) and one’s PhD supervisor is the prestige factor that matters.
@ProfSD - a few of the PhDs I knew who switched to administrative positions were not tenured. They were going from institution to institution as non-tenured or adjuncts, and it was causing issues with their spouse’s career, their kid’s school continuity, and making ties to the community. They wanted employment in their field but there were no tenure track positions, so they were seeking employment wherever they could, and it was impacting their families/home life.
Exactly, which makes discussion of the topic in general terms difficult. My experience in life science research at large state schools (none considered ‘elite’) is that hiring and retention of faculty is merit based, with little consideration given to personal factors that could be viewed as discriminatory. All search committee notes and correspondence are documented and decisions must be justified based on the academic qualifications of the applicant. Perhaps things are different at elite private schools, but transparency is required at the state schools where I have knowledge of the search process.
In general, you are right, and engineering is a lot less prestige-ridden overall. Or, more correctly, prestige is generally earned by the more recent accomplishments of a program, rather than by a history of rich and powerful people having attended the program. That is also how engineers are - they like seeing proof. The reputation of MIT among engineers is high because of its actual accomplishments.
The flip side is that engineers tend to be conservative, and for many, departments which have innovative ways of education or of developing new ways of looking at engineering solutions can lower the prestige of a program in the eyes of many of the older, more established engineering faculty.
That being said, even in engineering departments, there is no set formula for tenure - there are general expectations which are flexible. So they may look mostly at grants, publications and student reviews, but the T&P committee and the voting faculty may decide that what is “enough” for one tenure candidate is not enough for another.
There is also a wide streak of misogyny in many engineering departments, and there have been a number of cases in which what was considered “enough” for men was often not considered “enough” for women.
That depends on who is doing the hiring and the field. larger universities, in which the departments cover many subfields, and the subfields do the hiring generally follow that rule. So at a university with an ecology & evolution department, that department will hire faculty based on the program. However, if there is just a medium size biology department, which has a search committee made up of people who are not in ecology, will hire based on the general prestige of the biological sciences or the university itself.
LACs in general hire based on the prestige of the university from which they are hiring, rather than the program or the adviser. That is because a large part of their advertising includes the universities from which their faculty received their PhDs. The vast majority of parents have no knowledge of the nuances of program-level reputation, and only really are impressed by the “prestige” of the universities from which the faculty received their PhDs.