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?
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