Comments on: Professors’ status loss http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/07/professors-status-loss/ critical anthropology of academic culture Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:34:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: eli http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/07/professors-status-loss/comment-page-1/#comment-2779 eli Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:21:20 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1523#comment-2779 Hi R, No doubt you're right that some administrators are hostile to the faculty and vice versa (and that relationship is likely to be worse for contingent faculty and teachers at for-profit schools) but I don't think there is any danger of outright abolishing the faculty in any of the countries I know about (eg, USA, France, Denmark, UK...). The question for faculty, vis-a-vis university administrations, seems to me much more a question of what their material, intellectual, and institutional conditions will be in the future; a lot of academic work seems to be becoming more contingent, precarious. There's lots to say about university administrations, their ideologies, the pressures under which they operate, the way they're hired and evaluated, etc, but I guess it's maybe worth pointing out that here in this post I was mainly interested in talking about the public social status of professors, which seems to me somewhat distinct from their actual institutional conditions. You know? Hi R,
No doubt you’re right that some administrators are hostile to the faculty and vice versa (and that relationship is likely to be worse for contingent faculty and teachers at for-profit schools) but I don’t think there is any danger of outright abolishing the faculty in any of the countries I know about (eg, USA, France, Denmark, UK…). The question for faculty, vis-a-vis university administrations, seems to me much more a question of what their material, intellectual, and institutional conditions will be in the future; a lot of academic work seems to be becoming more contingent, precarious.

There’s lots to say about university administrations, their ideologies, the pressures under which they operate, the way they’re hired and evaluated, etc, but I guess it’s maybe worth pointing out that here in this post I was mainly interested in talking about the public social status of professors, which seems to me somewhat distinct from their actual institutional conditions. You know?

]]> By: R Rogers http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/07/professors-status-loss/comment-page-1/#comment-2774 R Rogers Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:32:03 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1523#comment-2774 You are probably correct in this assessment, but the bigger threat is university administrators, some of whom now hold the position that faculty are a nuisance. I have heard of some administrators (and know one personally) who claims that s/he could run the university without full-time faculty. You are probably correct in this assessment, but the bigger threat is university administrators, some of whom now hold the position that faculty are a nuisance. I have heard of some administrators (and know one personally) who claims that s/he could run the university without full-time faculty.

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