The Last Professors We'll Ever See?

No, it's not an Indiana Jones movie. It's Stanley Fish essaying about the potential end of higher education as we know it and lamenting that a young Stanley Fish today would not be able to have the career that he has had. He's reviewing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” by Frank Donoghue.

Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.” Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”