The massification of higher education has not only had demographic implications. It has led to a certain trivialization of university faculty’s social position in developed countries — it is no longer rare to be an academic. At the same time, it is no longer rare to be a university graduate. This trend should increase in the years to come, in spite of the stagnation of demographic growth in developed countries as enrollments among 18- to 25-year-olds, by cohort [classe d’âge], tend to plateau or even decline. But official policies in most developed countries, as we enter the third millennium, nonetheless aim to increase access to higher education. In France, the objective of the post-2007 government, like that of its predecessor, is to bring 50% of each age class to bachelor’s [license] level. The idea is to facilitate underprivileged or underrepresented populations’ access to education, to encourage the pursuit of studies through graduation, to encourage further studies and teaching all throughout the life course. One should not thus expect a decrease in the population of university teachers in the years to come; one should expect growth, aimed at accommodating students with more and more diversified profiles in terms of age, sociological composition, motivation, etc.

These developments are often described as one of the signs of contemporary societies’ transition towards “knowledge societies” [sociétés de connaissance] one of whose notable characteristics is a break with the concentration of knowledges [savoirs] within a handful of heads. University faculty, as they become more numerous and come to play a central role in this process, will be less and less able to maintain the quasi-monopoly of knowledge [connaissance] expertise that they have held in the past.

The progressive loss of social prestige should thus continue — at least for the larger part of the professoriate, who won’t be in the avant-garde of scientific production, but will rather primarily contribute to the transmission of knowledge and the training of highly qualified personnel. This evolution has already been in progress for a long time and can be measured in particular by looking at salaries. University faculty salaries have evolved less favorably than those of professionals with the same level of education working outside academia (for France, see Bouzidi, Jaaidane and Gary-Bobo [2007]). This trend goes for most of the university models concerned [here in this study], whether quasi-completely public as in Europe or partly private as in North America, whether the academics are state functionaries or have private-sector contracts.

(Musselin, Les universitaires, 2006, pp. 25-26, my translation.)

My sense is that academics’ “status loss” is somewhat more complex than this, since, if you believe what you read on academic blogs, most American college students can’t tell the difference between an adjunct with really low institutional status and salary and a tenured professor. So on the level of everyday phenomenology of professional life, Musselin’s description seems a little hasty. But there is certainly a sort of myth, at the very least, that (American) faculty used to get more respect than they do now; and it may well be the case that students, on the whole, demonstrate less exaggerated obsequiousness than they once did. And it’s hard not to agree with Musselin that this shift likely is deeply related to  the massification of higher education: as if the more people go to college, the less prestige they gain from it – and the less prestige their teachers garner from teaching them. As if there was a kind of prestige mimesis, such that the lower status of today’s less elite student populations was contagious. Some longer meditations on the relation between prestige and scarcity may be in order here: Graeber’s, for example…

In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible manner is liable to be condemned as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, ‘a mere journalist.’ Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly use, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable. The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a ‘scientist.’… It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not. It has become a convention–those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval.

…Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle–but one out of which any scholar can easily break.

…To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

….Most ‘socspeak’ [that is, sociology speak] is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used–I think almost entirely–to establish academic claims for one’s self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): ‘I know something that is so difficult that you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of undeveloped type.’

…..The line between profundity and verbiage is often delicate, even perilous.

There are, of course, other explanations besides status for academic writing being unintelligible to the uninitiated. For instance, jargon could be one response to outside political pressure — one can imagine academic radicals like Hardt and Negri burying their politics in the grave of their prose. As people like David Graeber have argued, academics are permitted to espouse the most radical politics they can imagine, just so long as their audience is massively restricted by the social barriers embodied in their writing style. And as Mills also indicates, academic style is often something less than a means of attaining status; it can function simply as a condition of disciplinary belonging or group membership.

Alas, I don’t have time to give a good analysis of the politics of academic style, one more contextually specific than this one. But I like the idea that style is the vehicle for academics’ self-undermining desires, for a “vicious circle” of unrealized status or political involvement. Academic writing is an object of attachment and not just a communication medium. “Pose” not only “prose,” as Mills puts it. And a “pose” based on the logical fallacy that Mills points out: that readability is superficiality. My experience is that Graeber’s plain-spoken academic language is admired for that very reason (like in his book on value), and total incomprehensibility is generally scorned, but there is also prejudice, I think, against academics who are always too plain-spoken and seem not to “get” the subtlety of more baroque arguments. This points to a further contradiction in academic writing, which Mills knew but didn’t exactly say: academic writing becomes the vehicle for contradictory social dynamics; that is, our desire to communicate and our desire to produce community (or distinction) are often at odds with each other when we evaluate academic writing.

Finally, I note for further thought Mills’ hypothesis that, by becoming an academic, one is not just sacrificing income, but also the dominant values of the society that one is in a way rejecting, by opting out of (what’s ludicrously called) the “real world.”