Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

The latent dysfunction of this corporate model is that it has robbed funds and resources from academic faculties and has created a new and dangerous profile for the American brain trust. The plurality of postsecondary teachers in the national aggregate is without adequate salaries, health benefits, retirement funds, office space, laboratory and equipment access, travel funding for national and international conferencing with colleagues in the various disciplines, and other resources. The American profession of “professor,” has become, in the main, a sweatshop affair in both private and public Academe, with postsecondary teachers being paid by the piece – by the semester, by the year, by the course, or even by how many butts are in the seats in the classroom.

A recent figure generated by the American Association of University Professors from an analysis of federal records put the American sweatshop professoriate at 70%. This analysis is a little like number-crunching rape statistics from federal records. At the end of the day, much goes under-reported. The actual number of sweatshop professors likely rises higher nationwide from one semester/term to the next because of the usage of semester/term contracts and the shifting whim of college and university administrators from one semester/term to the next. And, when university administrators can get away with it, to get “more bang for their buck,” they pay graduate students and upper-level undergraduates even worse starvation wages to teach college courses.

What all of this means is that less than 30% of college teachers in the national aggregate have the “right stuff” to make innovations to keep the United States among the core in the world system of societies. The rest are kept on short pay, short rations, short of benefits, and the promise of shortened lives living out their years not unlike migrant farmworkers before the advent of César Chavez. With professors so devalued, it is little wonder that they are not heard when they speak to policymakers. The disaster of New Orleans is a graphic example of professors and scientists being ignored.

What began as a kind of emergency measure in the post-Apollo years has become a way of using postsecondary funds for other things than teaching America’s students, like constructing steepening tiers of administrators, building college presidential “legacy” edifices on campuses, and expanding personal empires. The already rigid Medieval Era military-like ranking system of tenured assistant, associate, and full professors has been made more rigid with a division between small have and large have-not castes, those who can access the ranking system and those who don’t have a prayer – not because the latter are “bad professor” material, but because of the sheer structural violence of the situation.

The 2005-convened Commission for the Future of Higher Education within the U.S. Department of Education “blamed the victim” by claiming that professors spend more time on research than on inventing innovative new teaching techniques. This “finding” is less of a finding than a regurgitation of an anecdotally-based ultra-conservative theme in journalist Charles J. Sykes’ 1989 book, ProfScam:Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. In return, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) complained that “Excessive use of, and inadequate compensation and professional support for, such contingent faculty exploits these colleagues and undermines academic freedom, academic quality, and professional standards.” That is a much-too-polite way of saying that the majority of the American brain trust is being robbed of job security, adequate wages, access to offices, laboratories, and libraries.

The AAUP has yet to paint the picture concerning what kind of damage that is doing so that the public and politicians can understand it. The AAUP language is geared toward their erudite membership. As a former academic scientist who holds a public office, I am speaking from experience when I say that most American politicians don’t know what terms like “academic freedom” mean and what the consequences are when it is undermined.

The Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs

Somehow, the message needs to be sent to leaders in words that they can understand. Academic administrators like the ease of hiring, firing, and changing course offerings on a whim that heavy teaching cadres of non-tenured faculty allow. They will not readily give this power up without stringent state and federal intervention. Politicians will understand the issue in the parlance of “term limits.” Increasingly more, state legislatures have come to see how term limits kill institutional memory and experience in state governments. The non-tenured American professoriate, in the main, variously have “term limits” of about four and a half months, nine months, and three years if they are lucky. Sometimes, those term limits are even shorter, as when non-tenured professors run afoul of administrators for things as trivial as a disagreement over grading policy. Academic term limits are killing the knowledge bank upon which the nation and the world depend. In plain-speak, post-Apollo academic governance practices are “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

Just how important is that goose? The American postsecondary education system is the place where deficiencies in poor K-12 training are remediated. It reproduces the American knowledge base (that goes on to benefit the world and the United States’ place in it). It creates “first-tier” innovation in American science, technology, and values. The venues that receive postsecondary graduates – for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, government laboratories, etc. – are “second-tier” innovators that expect to be continuously fed by an Academe they presume to be sophisticated and reliable.

However, thirty-plus years of the post-Apollo corporate model of American Academe has been the thing that has dragged down America’s innovation production machinery, not professors focusing too much on research rather than their teaching. If anything, Academe can’t hire up every sufficiently credentialed scholar, scientist, and engineer fast enough to do all the research that they can and also to teach, and state and federal governments can’t step in quickly enough with the funds, resources, and oversight to make sure that those academicians are secure in their livings and have adequate access to resources to do their jobs.

On a related note, it will take laser-like oversight to end wide-scale age discrimination in Academe that is shamelessly practiced in order to hire less costly, less expertise-laden “junior” professors into most academic positions, and that admits mostly young people into doctoral programs who are less experienced and who are less trouble for elite tenured professors to mold into their own images. These discriminatory practices keep those scholars, scientists, and engineers with two- and three-generation-depth innovation expertise levels from passing on their knowledge to young people and enhancing academic environments. This is the way knowledge is lost. And, in a world becoming more severe, we cannot afford to lose knowledge. The challenges are very great. The responses to these challenges will come from insights that can only derive from a humanity that extends itself into new frontiers, which comes up with workable new ideas that derive from the cross-pollination across multiple disciplines working the problems of being on those new frontiers. The existing brainpower must be channeled properly in order to engage the “big science, great policy” projects that face humanity.

This brings me to the end of Part II of “Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation.” In the parts of the series that follow, I discuss in more depth the root cause of the United States’ slide from the core of world societies on a globally warming planet, touched by disaster, and on the decline side of oil.

For part one of this series, click here.

Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D is a multidisciplinary scientist. She currently is the CEO of OPS-Alaska, (OPS: Oceanic, Polar, Space) a think tank based in Petaluma, where she manages projects over a range of disciplines. She frequently co-authors and speaks with OPS-Alaska’s Executive Director, Thomas Gangale, on a variety of topics including climate change and the need for social investment.