- The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.
The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.
props to whomever came up with the term “The Gig Academy”
There's a few things going on here: 1) History has never not been controversial... except for that glorious shining 40 years between Watergate and 9-11 in which white people managed to convince other white people that racism had been solved. Even in the middle of that we had A People's History of the United States and Lies my Teacher Told me. During that period the party line on Reconstruction was "things were complicated but it all worked out fine, just fine" (it did not work out fine and "genocide is something Europeans used to do." 2) History has always been utilized to justify current politics. Edward Said's whole point was that Europeans only study other cultures to justify their sense of superiority and only apply the frames of other cultures for their "otherness." Wallerstein noted that in studying sociology or anthropology, the only cultures studied are "nulls" where the object under scrutiny is so primitive and disconnected from other cultures as to disregard all influence other than that of the researchers. First Gibbon then Toynbee then the Durants created a narrative that goes "Minoa, Greece, Rome, darkness, Enlightenment, culture" without noting that "Rome" decamped to Byzantium after Constantine, without noting that everything we know about the Romans and Greeks we know because the Arabs and Persians skipped that whole "darkness" bit and without noting that Sumeria predated Minoa by an easy thousand years. That's an uninterrupted stream of perspective from Gibbon's first publication in 1776 to the Durants' last in 1975. 3) Collegiate expenses suffered a historic expansion from 1992-2008 due to aggressive financialization and a glut of degree seekers from 2008 due to soft jobs conditions. They started experiencing historic contractions in 2017 when Trump came to office and forced out or discouraged foreign participation, the only demographic that pays full price in the US. Worthy of note - Zinn taught poly sci, not history. Loewen taught high school. From a position of pedigree, Bill O'Reilly has more business writing history (BA, Marist University) than Shelby Foote (dropout, UNC Chapel Hill) Nikole Hannah-Jones has no credentials in history, but then, the most important historical document of the past few years was in the paper, not academia. WEB DuBois had more historical cred than the rest of these people combined and he, too, had to write in the paper, not academia because, frankly, his writings didn't support the predominant narrative. Gibbon wrote about a Rome that was a thousand years dead and yet, over the past two hundred years, plenty of new perspectives have been shed. Paul Kriwaczek has shed new light on the Babylonians despite the fact that they've been gone for two thousand years. I think it's a decidedly "associate professor" take to presume that just because there are fewer tenure track history professorships available there will be less history studied. I think it's more accurate to say that there will be a less homogeneous narrative which, in my opinion, is a very good thing indeed.
As a professor's kid, I had to chuckle at this. I'm not saying it isn't worse now... just saying it wasn't glorious in the 70s and 80s for professors. We lived in a decent neighborhood and had food and shelter... but we weren't "middle class" until my mom had been working full time for a decade.Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives
I think there's "professors" and there's "professors." My mother taught at a handful of scattered community colleges and alternative medicine schools. She probably spent 3-4 hours a day on the road during the bad times. Even with my dad's cushy gig at the national lab there were always money fights. On the other hand, my brother in law is a tenured professor at a big NW college. Their house is substantially larger than mine. I mean yeah it's in the middle of nowhere but still.
At the university where I work, professors start on $160k ($190k if medically qualified) but that is assuming full-time. As I work in the medical area where government funding isn't ever really in doubt, most of them here are full-time, or supplement a part-time professor gig with clinical work elsewhere. Comfortably clearing $200k. Humanities though? Funding always in doubt, there are plenty of 0.2FTE professors rocking about trying to make ends meet, despite the lofty title. As you say, "professors" and "professors".
Well shit, were the salaries just bad? I grew up in the 90s and my dad was a STAH hubby, mum had a job working for the NZ govt and we were pretty comfortable. I think I just assumed money got you further 'back in the day' but hadn't considered people in tertiary education might have just been getting stiffed all along. I suspect I'm also forgetting that we lived rurally. A govt employee living in the wop-wops would get by pretty comfortably.
I'm curious as to your take - my understanding was that New Zealand had a lot more socialist tendencies than Australia or England already and the 1996 election reforms pushed things even further left. By way of contrast, the United States has been pushing aggressively to the right since the Nixon Shock or before and things like "paying for teachers" have been severely deprecated ever since the first 'boomer got to vote.
I wrote all of that out at work during a down period, and realised you were in fact talking about education/teachers. My bad. From a recent chat with a friend of mine who is currently a teacher, he was explaining that the salaries go up slightly every year or so, not usually in line with inflation but a boost nonetheless. Looks like the base rate for a fresh primary school teacher in NZ is: 2019 = 48k 2020 = 49k 2021 = 51k Secondary starts slightly higher, but taps out similarly at 90k even with an MA/PhD - so you're left having to tack things on like being a Director or Principal to have extra allowance. As to the government involvement in pushing for higher pay in any kind of educational institute? I think we're often left bouncing between Labour and National - one will stay in power for one, two or three terms (National managed 2008 - 2017 before Jacinda kicked the fuckin' door in). But eventually a switch happens and the first year or two is spent either undoing or repealing whatever they can of the previous administration. As a result, I can't recall much effort being expended to really make education a lucrative and enticing career. People seem to do it because they really want to be teachers, or lecturers. Shit I was going to go back to uni to be a teacher, I'm young and male, they'd snap me up. But if you were to ask people off the street who the most underpaid people are in the country, it's a tie between nurses and teachers. Both are undervalued, both have been at breaking point through the pandemic, and very few people want to fill the gaps. At the uni I work at, I don't know if this is common elsewhere, the academics are expected to operate on a 40/40/20 split. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. That 40% research is where everyone higher up wants you to focus, as it brings in the moolah. So teaching becomes a necessary evil to get access to research time, so you can pump out publications which you can attach to your performance review, for the upcoming year. Apologies if I'm waxing lyrical about shit you already know, just trying to paint the picture of the NZ education world, you could be quite familiar with how it all looks. In the end though, people are underpaid, overworked, and NZ ain't cheap to live in so many educators feel they are working almost out of the good of their hearts. Eventually many fuck off to Australia for more money and opportunities. Brain drain is real!
I was talking in general, actually, so I welcome both perspectives. It seems I'm not wrong about my understanding of New Zealand, which is always pleasant to discover. It is a part of my personal cosmology that unfucking your elections in 1992 has led to governance that more closely matches the makeup of the country than does our United States. I will say this: there was a girl in my Humanities class in high school who was one of the three of us graduating on the half-year. Me and this other girl piled up classes to graduate a semester early, the girl in my Humanities class was graduating a semester late. I didn't know why at the time but when I ended up dating her for a while, fifteen hundred miles away and six years later, she told me that Christchurch Grade 13 did not meet the graduation requirements for 49th-in-the-nation New Mexico Public Schools standards thus she was basically required to repeat everything. That would have been 1991, in the opinion of some of the worst schools in the world, and I think says more about different approaches to education than it does about educational rigor. After all, we also made these sons and daughters of Nobel-winning scientists take a four-hour course on the history of Conquistador New Mexico, including the future president of Croatia.
As much as politics frustrates and fascinates me, I enjoy our current election system. It does allow for a more accurate reflection and some smaller parties being able to swing some weight around, like the Greens. A more flexible and reflective power structure has had plenty of positive effects - I learned to count in Māori before English, but, gun to their heads, my parents could maybe manage 'hello' and 'goodbye' in Māori. So yeah, definitely on the right track, largely for the reasons you suspected. We do seem to be engulfed in that "American" style of politics from time to time though. There's a better descriptor I'm sure, and I doubt it's a strictly American thing, but it's all I could land on at the moment given how much American media we consume here. Divisive. Aggressive. Attack plans, but offer nothing of your own. Change topic before you can be adequately questioned. Right now the 'Opposition' doesn't need a plan, they can operate on just being 'not Labour' and it can get them votes. However, those voters are quick to forget that John Key campaigned in 2007 on fixing the housing crisis, and upon getting into power in 2008-onwards referred to the prices as a 'challenge'. In 2021 we bought our 1940 era house for just under $600k. Sorry, I'm wanking on. I agree with your assessment, and I think we're in a better place than most!
I am often guilty of trying to compare the NZ political spectrum to the US. If I compare the two, we're heavily left leaning overall. I suspect the only party in our current parliament makeup that would be considered clearly right in the US frame, would be the ACT party. Everyone listed here. Even then, they're an interesting group. They would like to see less restrictive firearm regulation, but voted in favour of allowing same-sex marriage. They want to be tougher on crime, but don't want our ACC setup abolished (honestly any party that seriously campaigns on getting rid of ACC, wouldn't last long. It's 'death by a thousand cuts' like the NHS, or it's here to stay). Not that these are related items, but they have some left-leaning tendencies, and some right-leaning, but for our spectrum, they're pretty right-wing. Education wise? I'm not particularly clued up on the system, but I am a little anti the current setup for secondary education. We use NCEA and from my own experience + conversations with current teachers I know, all it does is churn out students who can answer questions when the information has been drilled into them. I remember Year 13 Geography (12th grade for USA students?) we were all told "this will be one of the exam questions, if you memorise an essay to answer this, you will pass" and so we practiced writing a single essay and sure enough it was on the exam. I know the schools used the design of NCEA as a way to pump out high numbers of students passing, but it left us with a pretty shoddy education IMO. I work in the tertiary sector and see plenty of things that I like, but also things that confuse me. Sorry I realised while writing this out you likely just meant in general. It feels like we're swinging slowly from left to right, currently. But I hope it's more down to how vocal those on the right are these days. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a chamber. I know the Labour party wanted to implement a lot, but personally I feel they tried to implement too many things at once, and have had to pull back and focus on the big tasks. Overall - we enjoy universal healthcare, ACC takes care of a lot of litigation when an accident occurs, our student loans don't incur interest ($2k to go on mine, huzzah). For the most part, nobody really wants to interfere with that, outside of a vocal minority wanting tax cuts alongside decreased government spending and oversight , but of course, a mysterious increase in quality. Somehow they can reconcile those in their minds. There's a pretty clear split in how the country tends to vote - sorry, I've tried to imbed it as an image to save you having to bounce between it, but it's not quite working. Red = Left, Blue = Right-ish. - You can see the red patches in the south island are the city centres, or low socio-economic spots who tend to vote Labour/left-leaning. Right down the bottom of the island, in the sea of blue, is the red patch of Dunedin - a University city, nestled amongst the rural sector. - The blue in the south are the rural sectors where farmers are plentiful and they tend to vote National/right-leaning. They make good money until they don't, at which point they need help and National typically ask less of them regulations-wise. - This is similar to the north island, there is the east coast which trends towards low socio-economic, and the centre of the north island is where the excellent farming land is, and thus the farmers. Wellington and Palmy North are heavily Labour, whereas Tauranga has been a stronghold for National for some time. A lot of wealthy retirees or up and coming business folks. - Auckland is it's own special case - you can see in the top left image. South and west Auckland? Labour/left-leaning, and they're the poorer areas. North Auckland? National/right-leaning, where the richer and whiter folk live. - There's a further special case in Auckland, where Chloe Swarbrick successfully campaigned for Greens (hard left) and won the electoral seat for Auckland Central, that tiny, bright green spot. She's great. I have a lot of time for her. So that is how it's been for a while, with the occasional area flipping. But for the most part, we lean pretty left as a people as far as healthcare and welfare goes; in that most tend to agree we need it, and we'd like it to be funded better. City centres tend to vote left, rural tend to vote right. People are exhausted, increasingly stretched for money, housing is fucked and also crashing; so I expect National to waltz into power this upcoming election because people want some kind of change, but I don't think it will signify too great a political shift for NZ, and Labour will be back in contention next time.
I feel this parallels with things like disease research; there's a shitload of money available for anyone that can insert the word "cancer" into their disease research, but very little for someone researching Bell's Palsy, or other less-well-known diseases. The business drives which research pays the best. And academics need to buy Ramen noodles, too, so they go where the funding is. Chicken or egg?