The problem can only be resolved if we do away with adjuncts entirely.
In February 2013, the City University of New York announced a hiring coup: It had managed to lure eminent Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman away from Princeton. According to the press release, Krugman’s appointment as distinguished professor in the Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center will begin in July 2014, and his faculty appointment will begin August 2015. He’ll continue to write for the Times.
As manifestations of the neoliberal university, the two institutions are the same, but polar opposites in terms of their history. Princeton is an Ivy League institution, while CUNY was, until 1999, an open-admission institution.
In March, Gawker’s J. K. Trotter ran what many saw as an exposé, but with a sharply misleading headline, “Income Inequality Institute Will Pay Paul Krugman $25,000 Per Month” (in fact, he’s being paid by the Graduate Center at CUNY). The story was picked up in several blogs and publications, and by and large the conversation has dwelt upon what many charge is the shocking idea that Krugman should be paid this amount at a public university. At the heart of the matter was the apparently outrageous idea that an institute devoted to the study of inequality would pay what many insisted was a salary out of bounds for a public university (Gawker has not corrected the misinformation).
The Krugman hire does raise issues about the ethics of faculty salaries at public and private universities, and it comes at a time when no one, unless they’ve lived in a cave for the last decade, is unaware of the seismic shifts in education, funding, and the neoliberal university. All of this coupled with the sharp rise in the use of contingent labour and organising amongst and between faculty, graduate students, and adjuncts has meant that even ordinary hires are likely to be scrutinised closely. Celebrity hires like that of Krugman are put under the microscope and evaluated in terms of fairness and scale.
But while there’s a longer conversation to be had about all of this in relation to Paul Krugman, it hasn’t really happened yet. Instead, so far, critiques of Krugman’s salary have failed to rise above petty carping disguised as systemic critique. Much has been made of the post-Occupy world, and many claim there is a general, heightened awareness about economic inequality; recent labour reporting (itself a beat that once was considered extinct) indicates this is true. There’s also strong evidence that the kind of organising happening at places like Walmart, once considered invulnerable to labour questions is, in fact on the rise, as evidenced by the work of Liza Featherstone. Over at In These Times and Dissent, Sarah Jaffe writes about the kind of grassroots work being done by teachers and workers across the board.
But university labour is a different matter altogether, and one of the biggest problems with organising campuses has been the refusal of academics to consider themselves workers. When my adjunct colleagues and I first began organising at the University of Illinois at Chicago a decade ago, an irate English Department instructor wrote huffily to the lecturer listserv, “Are you telling me that I’m just like a truck driver?” The short answer was yes, the longer answer was taken up by succeeding cohorts and, recently, even to my surprise, UIC faculty and adjuncts have recently forged a successful coalition.
Still, academia continues to nurture hopes and desires of social mobility, and it fosters the dream of a life that could theoretically include both teaching opportunities as well as the chance to spend years in long-term study and research. Even twenty-five years ago, you could graduate with a PhD in, say, English with a concentration in Literature or Composition, and be guaranteed a stable and relatively well-paid job for the rest of your life.
That kind of promise has been completely shattered now and nothing, not even a degree from, say, Princeton is a guarantee of anything.
Marc Bousquet and others have written at length about the neoliberal university, one of whose hallmarks has been the fattening of administrative salaries while tenure-track faculty lines have been cut and never renewed and student tuitions have risen. Along with this has come an increase in the use of part-time and contingent labour, including graduate students and adjunct faculty. Over the last decade or so, organising between and among these ranks has solidified and while the revolution may be a while arriving, discontent and anger are spreading rapidly. It’s impossible these days to be a student or faculty member at even a well-funded private university, presumably safe from the vagaries of budget cuts, and not be aware of these dramatic inequalities; you might choose not to take sides, but you’d be considered foolish if you didn’t demonstrate some knowledge of the issues.
But what does this heightened awareness inequality in academia really mean? Has it fostered a long-term systemic critique that might eventually change things for the better, or is the anger skin deep and more about a resentment on the part of many that the hoped-for idyllic dream of safety in academia simply isn’t working out for them?
The Occupy movement, now struggling to establish its relevance, came in the wake of the 2008 economic bubble bursting, and brought with a renewed sense of urgency and awareness of how badly we were being screwed. The best part of Occupy was that it spawned a series of pop-ed, grassroots-driven efforts to educate ourselves about this nightmare of neoliberalism whose spectre suddenly became visible over us. I remember giving a short presentation on the neoliberalism of the gay movement, on behalf of Gender JUST, to a crowd that was surprisingly receptive.
But there were also signs, literal and metaphorical, that the anger was less on a widespread level and more at the fact that the system had failed to work for those who had spent years propping it up. At one rally, a woman spoke about having become homeless and, her voice rising in anger, described how the banks had failed her and her sense of frustration. At the end, she said words to this effect, “I’m not like that bum on the street. I’m a good citizen, I went to college, I got an education; I don’t deserve this.”
“I don’t deserve this.” This was what I heard over and over and saw on various signs: “Bring back the middle class.” “I got a degree, for this?” Over and over, the sense of resentment underscored what looked like a groundswell movement against an oppressive and brutal system.
That sense of resentment is evident in much of the discourse around academic organising. It’s a resentment that swells up on several occasions and in interpersonal conversations, a deep-seated anger that, surely, years of working on a degree should at least guarantee a tenure-track job instead of the demeaning and cut-piece life of ricocheting between several part-time gigs to cobble together what is ultimately, for many, barely a livelihood. This isn’t to say that what we see today in places like UIC is in any way false, and we could argue that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether people show up on an organising line because they’re angry only about their individual situations or have a systemic critique.
The problem, though, that it does matter, in the long run. There’s a difference between organising against an exploitative system because it’s fundamentally unfair and flawed and organising against it because one would like to be reinstated in that system.
In that sense, the responses, to date, about Krugman’s salary claim to criticise his purportedly high salary on the grounds of what it reveals about an unfair system. They do, to an extent, but in the end they fail to engage a larger, systemic critique by ignoring crucial facts and blowing up the more irrelevant ones.
Take, for instance, Sean Kennedy’s piece, where he makes the inevitable comparison which surely had to be on people’s minds, between Krugman and General David Petraeus, who was appointed as an adjunct in 2013 after resigning in disgrace as head of the CIA. Petraeus was offered the astronomical sum of $200,000 for teaching two courses a year. CUNY students, adjuncts, and faculty burst into outrage and literally hounded the general, calling him a war criminal and fiercely protesting his appointment until he finally said he would only take a dollar year for his work.
Kennedy writes approvingly of Petraeus’s final deal, quoting his representative: “Once controversy arose about the amount he was being paid, he decided it was much more important to keep the focus on the students, on the school and on the teaching, and not have it be about the money.” Kennedy asks, “Considering the above, is Krugman more or less ethical than Petraeus?” clearly implying that Petraeus’s was a noble gesture made after the general recognised the ethical issues with his salary.
This version of what happened with Petraeus is, of course, complete bollocks.
The controversy wasn’t just about what Petraeus was being paid, but that he, someone referred to often as a war criminal, was teaching at all (for a fuller account, see Corey Robin’s blog). Furthermore, Petraeus’s appointment as an adjunct was in fact a direct insult to CUNY’s adjuncts, who are underpaid and overworked. Eventually, Petraeus decided to teach the course for $1, but under duress and to save face, having already lost so much of it after the almost comical revelations about his extramarital affairs. His friends can take comfort in the fact that he will not be penniless as a result: He’s still “teaching” at Harvard, as a “non-resident senior fellow” and at Exeter College as an Honorary Visiting Professor, and no doubt drawing substantial salaries for both appointments.
Krugman, in contrast will be a full-time faculty member at CUNY’s Graduate Center in Economics starting in August 2015.
This brings us then to the central facts of Krugman’s appointment, most of which have been misrepresented in fact or form. In a correction to an Inside Higher Ed piece by James Hoff, Tanya Domi, director of Media Relations at CUNY wrote that Krugman will join the LIS Center (Luxembourg Income Study Center) at the Graduate Center in July 2014 as a Distinguished Scholar and that “he will receive no compensation from the Graduate Center during 2014-15 academic year, but will remain on the Princeton University faculty. He will work, on this uncompensated basis, closely with the leadership of the LIS Center; interact with faculty, students, and other scholars associated with LIS; contribute to published analyses about empirical research on inequalities; and participate in LIS-sponsored events.”
According to Domi, Krugman “will join the faculty of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Economics. As such, he will continue his work at the LIS center. And in addition to fulfilling those responsibilities, he will take on new ones: a combination of researching, publishing, collaborating with colleagues and students and participating in department activities and public programs” and “will begin classroom teaching as in 2016 as well.”
Krugman’s salary is hardly disproportionate to what he might be paid at Princeton (he is probably taking a cut). It’s also worth noting that Krugman has not set about enabling the physical and economic devastation of entire populations.
Krugman’s response to CUNY’s offer states that he was pleasantly surprised by its offer: “My biggest concern is time, not money.”
Writing about this particular sentence, Hoff misses the point when he writes that Krugman is only “interested in doing as little work as possible.” Huff also goes to state that, “Krugman does not need a university affiliation to do the work he is already doing. In fact, Krugman, who has a current net worth of $2.5 million, whose books sell in the hundreds of thousands, and who is paid quite well by The New York Times, has no need for money to fund his continued research and public advocacy.”
Hoff’s solution is that Krugman “should donate $100,000 a year, to a scholarship fund for students or the Professional Staff Congress welfare fund, which provides much-needed health care benefits and emergency assistance for CUNY adjuncts.” Kennedy chimes in on his blog that Krugman should be earning $36,000 a year, if not the same $1 that Petraeus is making.
All of this states simply that Krugman has no right to be making this kind of money. It ignores several facts.
The first is that Krugman is entering as a Distinguished Professor, a status accorded to those who have spent a good portion of their academic lives producing and compiling work. Krugman is 61, and if 40 is the new 20, it’s arguable that he is only just beginning a new leg of his career.
Yet, Krugman has over forty books, some co-authored or edited, and several articles to his credit. He has also been one of the few notable columnists in the Times. Admittedly, he’s in terrible company: His cohort includes the sanctimonious Nicholas Kristof, the plagiaristic Maureen Dowd,the bullishly annoying Thomas Friedman who appears to have never read a word of Krugman, and the mystifyingly obtuse David Brooks, who should probably never be allowed to read Krugman article for fear that he might turn into one of his weird analogies.
But while it’s no great achievement to be the best in this crowd, he is, nonetheless, on the masthead of one of the leading papers on the planet, regardless of what you think of him, and he has commanded that piece of real estate with an intellectual generosity and grace that many fellow academics, who have a nasty habit of pretending they invent every idea, would do well to match. He can write well, he has a clear mind, and he’s willing to change it when required.
And he has a Nobel Prize. Again, admittedly, it’s in Economics, and I’m among those who doesn’t think highly of either the Nobels or the field, which struggles for legitimacy (and gets too much) despite having been singularly useless in actually preventing any major economic collapse.
But, still, look, he has a Nobel Prize. It’s true he will be the highest paid distinguished professor at CUNY, and you could argue, as some have, that the study of inequality does not merit this kind of pay. But surely, we could actually argue the opposite: That the study of inequality needs to be done well, and that in fact the inequality comes about precisely because of the fact that fewer people are paid well for their time and labour.
It’s here that both Kennedy and Hoff demonstrate the logic that breaks down and they also demonstrate central fallacies apparent both in adjunct organising (some of it) and in the logic of the “99%”, the term so popular among any number of people to express their sense of inequality.
For starters, both Kennedy and Hoff are in fact asking Krugman to scab his labour and simultaneously denigrating the value of his labour. I’ve written about the effects of writers as scabs, and about what happens when writers write for places that could pay but won’t. If Krugman were to take a salary of $36,000, it will mean no systemic change at all and will, in fact, make matters worse. There’s a ripple effect that comes about when professors decide to take less than they could just because they can: They’re scabbing labour and they’re making it easier for everyone, including adjuncts and tenured faculty, to be told, “If you don’t do this, we will just find someone else because, look, we can even get Paul Krugman to work for practically nothing.”
Hoff in particular makes a telling remark when he insists that Krugman “has no need for money to fund his continued research and public advocacy.”
It’s extraordinarily worrisome that anyone in any field would ever say that someone “has no need for money,” but it’s particularly so for an academic who would presumably want to see academic work well paid, to insist that, somehow, Krugman has no need for money. It’s especially disconcerting that someone like Hoff, who “teaches writing and literature,” should sniff that Krugman’s work “requires no special laboratories or equipment to perform.” Neither do writing and literature and, as literature and writing professors and writers know too well, our inability to demonstrate that our work requires particular tools is often what leads to the devaluation of our labour.
Research and public advocacy are in fact acts of labour, as are writing and the teaching of composition and literature, and they deserve to be paid, and paid well. We can debate the value of such, and we can argue about what makes for a more or less fair dollar value, but to say that an academic “has no need for money” is to fly in the face of what both Kennedy and Huff present as some kind of critique of academic exploitation; in fact, to decide that someone who has produced as much work as Krugman has should now sit back and lead an uncompensated research and work life is illogical.
More importantly, this kind of analysis is based on a simplistic idea of a static workplace, where there is no forward movement, regardless of what one does. It’s not as if Krugman was hired at this position with no experience. Surely, there ought to be a reward for a lifetime of work like his and surely, even a unionised workplace can provide such rewards.
Critics charge that a salary of this sort is against what CUNY stands for. Hoff insists that Krugman’s salary indicates a “a clear abandonment of CUNY’s founding mission to educate the children of the poor and working classes of New York City and represents a serious misapplication of priorities.”
In 2000, I began teaching at UIC, a university with a history much like CUNY’s. Like CUNY it began as an institution meant to serve working class and immigrant students and I went there from Purdue which, while also a state institution, served a vastly different population of middle to upper class students whose parents had been able to pay for private schools or locate them in neighbourhoods with excellent public schools. When I moved to UIC, I began to hear phrases like “the poor and working class students,” phrases that prefaced statements in which (many, not all) faculty, graduate students, and adjuncts made it clear that we were to neither expect too much from our students nor expect them to achieve too much. I learnt very quickly that such phrases often what, of all people, George Bush, called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (coined by speechwriter Micahel Gerson and used, ironically, to further a right-wing education agenda): The idea that non-white and working class students should not have too many expectations of them. Inevitably, as I’ve pointed out previously, this also becomes a way for mostly white and comfortably classed professors and instructors to abdicate their own responsibilities in crafting and teaching from challenging syllabi.
To be fair to UIC, it has changed a great deal since, and while some of what people describe as its turning away from its mission has been for the worse, there’s also in many ways a greater commitment to ensuring that all students achieve their goals. Similarly, the CUNY of today bears testimony to its storied history, and hiring Krugman at this salary is not an abandonment of its commitment to its students. What is an abandonment of its commitment are the issues that Hoff and Kennedy also raise, rightly, of high tuition fees and the relentless adjunctification of academic labour such that students are not guaranteed a stable, well-paid cadre of instructors but are taught by people whose lives exist in a constant state of precacity and impending disaster.
Which brings us, then, to the issue of what, exactly, would benefit CUNY’s students. I don’t dismiss the question of Krugman’s salary out of hand; I think it’s worth asking, as many do, why an institution that won’t pay its adjuncts and graduate students well or even on time finds it worthwhile to pay relatively high salaries to some. But Krugman’s salary cannot be compared to that of adjuncts; it has to be compared to that of other distinguished professors at CUNY and elsewhere. And, if we are to actually push for greater equity amongst faculty, we arrive at a conclusion that’s not likely to make anyone happy.
To start with, if the problem is with Krugman earning this salary as a Distinguished Professor, the matter cannot be resolved by taking away his salary; it can only be resolved by doing away with the post entirely and that would mean, in effect, eliminating all these scholars’ positions. As of February 1, 2014, CUNY has over 152 such academics. Distinguished Professors at CUNY don’t come out of a system that circumvents the process at a unionised institution; according to its website, “the number is limited to 175 across the University under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement with the Professional Staff Congress.”
If we are to consider Krugman’s salary in relation to that of the average adjunct, the solution becomes a lot more sticky. Adjunct organising has become a vanguard movement in academia, and there is every reason to fight the exploitation of this class of instructor. But such work ignores and perhaps is even based on a central contradiction: The problem with the persistence of the adjunctification of academia cannot be resolved by making conditions better for adjuncts.
The problem can only be resolved if we do away with adjuncts entirely.
It’s the existence of this conundrum which explains why the critiques of Krugman’s salary ultimately fail. It’s this conundrum which explains why, for instance, Kennedy completely misreads Petraeus’s flailing around to save face as the magnanimity of the general when a better resolution to the whole affair would have been CUNY agreeing that it had been wrong to hire him in the first place. Trotter points out that Krugman’s salary is quadruple that of the median New York city income of $50,000, but Trotter also fails to register that $50,000 is barely scraping by in one of the country’s most expensive cities.
Which is to say, the fact that $250,000 is four times the median income in the city doesn’t say as much as it does about the unfairness of Krugman’s salary as it does about the larger gaping inequality faced by a large swath of the population of a city where rent is, on average, over $36,000 a year and where, if we are to be honest, $250,000 at a public university is about on par with what someone hired away from Princeton might want to make.
The Krugman controversy also indicates the disproportionate interest paid to academic salaries, an interest always framed in the idea that somehow it’s the amount of money they’re paid which is part of the problem. Asking Krugman to don a hairshirt won’t solve anything, and neither will any kind faux populism masquerading as a cry on behalf of the 99%. In fact, it’s the context of the neoliberal university that should remain the center of our analysis and critique. Taking that context into account would entail a far more radical solution, one which not only does away with income inequality but eliminates the very positions, like those of adjuncts, which reinforce and perpetuate it.
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