This is a copy of my comment on INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION, referring to an MLA report on tenure

THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER

The MLA is composed of very smart people, making a sincere attempt to deal with the dysfunction and bias that plague academic hirings, promotion, and tenure. But as both Stanley Aronowitz, and the late Bill Readings have noted in their substantive books, the problem is bigger than tenure procedures and starts earlier.

Both Aronowitz and Readings write about the corporate university, where students are processed like so many "widgets" (Theda Shapiro's term). In such an environment, faculty are becoming increasinlgly positioned as "seasonal workers" (Aronowitz's term), and so tenure is in fact disappearing as academics are separated into workers and a much smaller cadre of "managers". If you think about it, this is indeed happening at many colleges and universities.

This state of affairs places grad students and recent PHD's in the position of being almost like migrant workers, and THIS, I would argue is a problem that departments and graduate programs need to look at very seriously. What can be the intellectual and ethical justification, for recruiting people to work as our assistants, all the while training for them for jobs that do not exist?

Should we downsize voluntarily and/or should we radically rethink what the Masters and Doctorate degrees signify?

How can we educate those who want to pursue higher degrees, and at the same time be honest with these students about their "professional" future?

And finally, how can we rethink and resist the corporatization of the university from within it? These are, in my estimation, some of the questions we need to be asking.