A bit of cultural theory
This post picks up where my last post left off (“The Secret Lives of College Professors,” 27 September 2023). In that post, I explained the hierarchical order of academic positions, from mighty Full Professor all the way down to lowly Adjunct. I also described the three-legged stool of academic job performance—Service, Scholarship, Teaching—and how a professor (lucky enough even to get hired into a tenure-track position) has to demonstrate considerable ability in all three areas in order to be awarded the grand academic prize: TENURE.
In this post, I’ll flesh out that framework by offering some of my own lived experience as I negotiated the academic maze and climbed the college ladder. Obviously, what follows is nothing more than my encounter with that world and viewpoints I formed as a result. Other academics have anywhere from similar to far different encounters and viewpoints than mine. There’s no lack of opinion and analysis of the Academy out there to be read. Please dive in. I am but one peddler in the Marketplace of Ideas.
So here’s what I’m selling.
Literally, the term Alma Mater means “nourishing or bounteous mother.” That’s a really interesting way to be encouraged to refer to and to think about the college or university one attends. At this stage of the discussion, let’s just stick a pin in that expression by asking a simple question of it: Oh, yeah?
Now to add a bit of theory. And who better than Foucault? Specifically, we’ll take into consideration his idea of Pastoral Power. In a previous post (“School Maze,” 30 August 2023), we explored how, according to Foucault, modern power operates on the principle of improvisation-within-constraints. That is, one of the key techniques of modern disciplinary power is to make available to individuals a carefully demarcated range of behavioral options from which to choose. For examples: a choice of different classes you can take to fulfill your college requirements; any number of jobs or careers you can pursue within the capitalist economic system. Thus, at the micro level, we’re granted a semblance of individual agency; however, at the macro level, those limited choices serve to prod us into accepting certain predetermined actions and attitudes devised by those in power.
Pastoral Power is an extension and a deepening of this modern power technique. Here’s how it works.
Foucault notes how the concept of a Christian pastor invests that person with a very special form of power, one distinct from the concept of sovereign power that originated in the ancient world. Whereas sovereign power is only interested in a subject’s political behavior while on earth (namely: Obey), the ultimate aim of Christian pastoral power is the subject’s individual salvation in the next world (namely: Heaven). This very different goal, asserts Foucault, requires a very different type of power. A power that:
...cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. (“The Subject and Power,” 1982, see here)
Foucault theorizes that, from roughly the 18th century onward, the modern state—in its long process of innovating techniques of power divergent from those of the medieval state—adopted this modus operandi of pastoral power. That is, like the Christian pastor, modern power very much wants to get inside our heads in order to shape us—not for salvation in the next world—but for our useful existence in this world—as citizens of the modern state. In this way, secular pastoral aims take the place of religious pastoral aims. We are placed into what Foucault calls “a modern matrix of individualization” designed to churn out correctly thinking and duly productive devotees of the pastoral authority that formed them.
Moreover, in order to put into practice this secular pastoral power, as the modern state developed all types of pastorally empowered state officials came into being: judges, police officers, civil servants, social workers, doctors, teachers, and more. Likewise, an array of pastorally oriented practices and institutions evolved as well: the nuclear family, civil administration, a standing military, employers, medicine, psychiatry, schools, and so on. All of these experts and structures are designed to shepherd modern “individuals” into embracing the same sanctioned set of actions and values in order to create a kind of worldly “salvation.”
Well, a salvation that blesses those in power, at any rate, with very fat bank accounts.
Just wondering out loud here: might the Alma Mater and especially the hunt for Tenure be among, just maybe, these instruments of Pastoral Power?
Here’s my pitch.
Applying this bit of cultural theory
My Service experience: For the most part, I witnessed the work required of faculty on any number of standing committees or special panels or official boards to be a means of extracting free labor. And while a good deal of service can be practical and necessary to the purposes of the college, equally a good deal turns into being frustrating exercises in wasting faculty time. Before I got tenure, I did enough committee work to satisfy expectations—but no more. I had to concentrate on my teaching and on getting published. Those two areas are where tenure is won or lost. Not sitting in a drab meeting room hoping someone brings cookies. Plus, with three young children at home and a partner just starting out her academic career, family life was FAR more important to me than “service to the college.” Many young faculty find themselves in this pinch.
After I got tenure, I did somewhat more service, mainly out of a feeling of obligation. But I only undertook committee work that didn’t interfere with my kiddos’ activities—especially my coaching their sports teams. Priorities, baby. As the kiddos got older and eventually went off to college, though, I got deeper into the service scene. Among other things, at different times I was chairperson for three different academic departments, I worked closely with the Athletic Department, and I completed a frenzied three-year term on the Performance Review Board—the one I talked about in the opening of my last post. So, yes, in an instance of coming full academic circle, I became one of those six senior professors who had sat in judgment of me. Our job was to evaluate all faculty coming up for tenure and promotion, then issue a recommendation to the President and the Board of Trustees, who held sole decision-making power in the matter. All of these service activities were intense and time-consuming—but they allowed me to see deep into the pastoral workings of the college.
For example, as a department chair, I was expected to be “an extension of the Provost’s Office.” That is, I was there to pass along dictates from on high—from the President and, on their ethereal plane, the Board of Trustees—and to keep in line any unruly members of the department. Well, my approach to the job was screw that. I tried to be what rank-and-file faculty lack most on a campus: an advocate. Someone dedicated to being on their side. Most of the other chairpersons I knew approached the job in the same way. I was under no illusion, of course, that any of my actions as a chair would—or could—accomplish something like lasting good. But I might offset for a time, at least, some of the immediate bad.
Overall, my take-away verdict on service is that it’s a way of giving faculty the impression of having a say in the running of the college—when in fact we don’t. All the important decisions belong to the Administration and to the Board of Trustees. At best, faculty are para-managerial employees. We get to call a few of the shots within the academic gearwheels of the college (our opportunity for Foucaultian improvisation), but when it comes to stewardship of the institution—the finances, the hiring and firing decisions, the long-range planning—we have no say at all (our capitulation to Foucaultian constraints).
My Scholarship experience: I won’t go into detail about the kind of scholarship I produce. The only thing to note is that it rubbed most of the people in my department the wrong way. I was hired at a time when my college was trying to improve its research profile—that is, increase the scholarly productivity of its faculty. This meant that newly hired Assistant Professors were expected—indeed, required—to become educators who could not only teach wonderfully, but produce as well high-quality published scholarship. In the case of my department, this mandate set me up as an instant outsider.
When I arrived, most of the senior faculty in my department, many of whom had been there for decades, were not active scholars. To earn their tenure, they had done enough to meet the previously quite low expectations for scholarship. Then they’d stopped. The dominant ethos of the department, then, was to concentrate solely on teaching. In fact, pursuing scholarship was seen as a betrayal of that sacred mission.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve always seen teaching as my primary mission as a professor. However, in no way do I regard the pursuit of scholarship as antithetical to my teaching. In fact, just the opposite. Being an active scholar means that you keep current in your discipline. It enables you to bring fresh ideas and new approaches into your classroom. My scholarship informed deeply my teaching. And my teaching informed deeply my scholarship. Being a teacher-scholar is a two-way street.
Moreover, even though I had settled on the teacher-scholar model as the best way to do my job, I never expected everyone else in the department to approach their teaching in this way. Such uniformity should not be the point of a college. The point should be live and let academically live.
Unfortunately, many senior members of the department did not share this attitude. And these people were going to be the ones writing detailed job performance evaluations of me. The threat was palpable. But being, fundamentally, both stubborn and a basketball player, I wasn’t about to back down. I set about meeting and exceeding the job parameters and expectations for a junior professor as stated in the Faculty Handbook. Every college and university has (or should have) a Faculty Handbook that serves, more or less, as a contract for one’s employment at the institution. I would abide by its standards for my job performance—not by the unwritten predilections of my department.
It was certainly a risk, and likely a foolish one, for me to take a path of defiance. By no means do such gambles always pay off in academia. This departmental antipathy toward scholarship had a chilling effect on many of the junior faculty hired into—and subsequently leaving—the department. A revolving door of Assistant Professors became the norm for a number of years. During this time, I applied to jobs at other colleges comparable to my own. But in an ever-tight academic job market, few such positions come open and, when they do, lots of people apply. Equally, as the years went by, uprooting the family became less and less of an good idea. As a result, I spent several decades not constructively collaborating with departmental colleagues, as I hoped my professional life might be, but tolerating a tense and hostile work environment.
My sob story is not unique.
My Teaching experience: Of course, this same departmental conflict happened with my teaching. Like my scholarship, how I taught my classes rubbed many senior people in my department the wrong way. At the heart of their objections was my teaching to students what this Substack newsletter is all about: the types and possible applications of cultural and critical theories. Many senior colleagues adhered to older methods of reading and teaching literature, practices I’d been subjected to decades before as an undergraduate English major. What is more, these methods wanted no truck with such new theories and approaches to our field. And that’s fine. Live and let academically live. At that time what might be called Theory Wars was raging in our discipline—a pitched battle of old school versus new school. Such conflicts happen periodically in academia, and they tend to be generational. If you care to read an insightful account of this clash, I recommend Gerald Graff’s 1986 essay, “Taking Cover in Coverage” (see here).
The problem, however, is that I wasn’t being allowed academically to live. Within the parameters of reasonable and responsible teaching (and scholarship) in my field, I was being pastored away from pursuing the topics and using the analytical tools that I—as a trained professional—judged yielded positive outcomes for my students (and publication in high-quality academic journals and scholarly presses). These innovative approaches to literature and culture represented exciting new developments in our discipline. They have since become fundamental to our field, with more theoretical revolutions always underway. This broadened range of theories offers not just a Marketplace of Ideas, but a Marketplace of How to Formulate Ideas. Exciting developments, to be sure, that I thought important and necessary to introduce to students in a systematic way.
In my professional view, then, it would have been irresponsible not to bring students up to date on these game-changing developments, especially our students interested in going on to graduate school. In my teaching experience, I saw how students were excited by these theories and approaches; understanding and applying them gave students agency and a way to fashion and articulate their own analyses of a text. No longer were they just being told—whether bluntly or by gentle nudge—what a text means. Instead, students became active participants in creating knowledge, not passive receptacles of knowledge.
So, as with my scholarship, I didn’t back down with my teaching. I not only taught in the manner I found to be the most effective—again, as all faculty have the right to do—but I argued in department meetings for including an Introduction to Theory course in our curriculum, ideally as a required course in the major—as all faculty have the right to debate matters of curriculum. My actions, of course, only angered my senior colleagues all the more. Which is fine. Discussion. Deliberation. The vigorous exchange of viewpoints. All good academic fare.
But where’s that line between healthy debate and unhealthy pressurizing—especially within the unequal power relationship between tenured senior faculty (with job security) and untenured junior faculty (without job security)?
Pressure to conform came at me in two ways. One, in the chilling atmosphere of the department—which is likely unavoidable and so fine. It comes with the territory. I doubt anyone is always comfortable at their place of work. Two, in the adverse commentary made against me in the official evaluations of my job performance submitted to the Administration by senior members of my department. Of my scholarship, for example, opinions were offered that my main research topic (at that point, early modern British satire) was “stupid,” “trivial,” and “unworthy of serious study.” Of my teaching, opinions were offered that my using and teaching theory in my classes was “a capital mistake” and “wholly wrongheaded.” Others felt that cultural and critical theory, as academic material, was “too difficult” for undergraduate students to grasp and so “more properly belonged in graduate school teaching.”
All fine and valid opinions to hold. But were they pertinent to assessing my meeting or not meeting the standards for scholarly achievement (for which I was specifically hired) and teaching success as described in the Faculty Handbook? No, not really. Why? Because as the tenure clock ticked and I got closer and closer to the big decision, my actual job performance—again, by the standards stipulated in the Faculty Handbook—was always as follows:
Service: no problems at all with the kind or the amount.
Scholarship: a strong record of publication in my field.
Teaching: excellent course and instructor evaluations from students in all of my classes—from First-Year Studies to Senior Seminar.
So what?
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) defines Academic Freedom as this:
Academic freedom is the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and to teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors, or other entities. Academic freedom also protects the right of a faculty member to speak freely when participating in institutional governance, as well as to speak freely as a citizen.
Cited as some main elements of Academic Freedom are these:
Teaching: freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom;
Research: freedom to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression and to publish the results of such work;
Intramural speech: freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as participants in the governance of an educational institution.
(For these AAUP guidelines, see here; for an informative article defining Academic Freedom, published in the journal Inside Higher Ed, see here.)
By these standards issued by the AAUP, a reasonable case could be made that my academic freedom was being, at the least, dissuaded if not somewhat curtailed by my department. A more extreme case could be made, plausibly, that my academic freedom was being actively violated as I progressed along the tenure track. But my point in writing this post is not to claim either position. Nor am I trying to evoke your pity and terror by weaving a harrowing tale of my heroic struggle against Dark Forces. Any of that is beside the point.
The point is that my experience is entirely commonplace within the Academy.
When, as a senior professor, I served on that Performance Review Board, I saw case after case where this dynamic was at work in academic departments across campus. That is, junior faculty were being evaluated not on the basis of their tangible job performance but for their “likeability” among students or for how well (meaning, always, how poorly) they “fit into the department.”
As I said in my previous post, faculty tend to socially reproduce themselves. And here we arrive back at Pastoral Power.
If the principle purpose of granting tenure is to safeguard academic freedom, is that professional right in fact being given to professors?
To apply Foucault’s theory: Do senior faculty have the potential to be pastorally empowered college officials? Do academic departments have the potential to be pastorally oriented institutions? Does the tenure-track review process have the potential be a pastorally oriented practice? Do all of these powers work to get inside the mind of a junior professor? To explore her academic soul? To make her reveal her innermost academic secrets? To gain knowledge of her academic conscience and, thereby, the ability to direct her toward academic salvation?
The tenure track might be seen as the primary academic matrix of individualization. The tenure track might be seen as shepherding academic individuals into embracing (counterproductively) the same sanctioned set of academic actions and values. Tenure might be seen not as a guarantee of Academic Freedom, but as a shaping of professors for their useful existence as citizens of the modern Academy.
We’re seeing what the eradication of Academic Freedom in higher education looks like in Florida. Other states are doing the same, limiting what professors can teach as well as seeking to eliminate tenure altogether (for example, see here, here, and here). These measures might be thought of as instances of Pastoral Power From Hell. They are intended to destroy higher education, reducing it instead to propaganda. Yet such ham-fisted assaults on academia should not be our only concern when it comes to the state of American colleges and universities.
An equal, perhaps greater, and surely more subtle threat to U.S. higher education is what might be called Creeping Neoliberalism.
As our dominant national ideology for quite some time, the mindset of Market-Über-Alles inevitably has wormed its way into the operation of colleges and universities. This circumstance gives rise to an effect on the lives of junior professors far more chilling than having to appease grumpy senior colleagues. Namely, the Administration making “likeability” a primary yardstick for a professor’s teaching performance. That is to say, “likeability” under the rubric of the student-customer is always right.
I’ve experienced first-hand a college President tell me, in on off-hand manner, that “likeability” will and must figure crucially in the future hiring decisions of a college. Upon hearing this pronouncement, I had a shiver literally run down my spine. It strikes me that, like for-profit news coverage, for-profit education is a very bad idea for maintaining a democracy.
Every bit as much as a rightwing hostile takeover, Creeping Neoliberalism destroys higher education, reducing it instead to branding. Don’t teach the problems. Don’t challenge conventional thinking. Don’t make students intellectually uncomfortable. Instead, promise a rosy future career.
Careerism certainly sells better—especially to parents footing the bill. But given the current state of our world, what kind of college graduate is needed more? A pastorally pliant employee and consumer? Or a critically savvy agent of change?
Alma Mater: nourishing Mother...or devouring Beast?