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The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
"What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?" asked Columbia's Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. There is more and more reason to less and less,he answered. In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of
higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces-social, political, and institutional-dismantling the
professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor,
Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts -with thehumanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet
in today's market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.Bypassing the
distractions of the culture wars and other crises,Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education-the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s -that threaten the
survival of professors as we've known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholarsan essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.
higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces-social, political, and institutional-dismantling the
professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor,
Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts -with thehumanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet
in today's market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.Bypassing the
distractions of the culture wars and other crises,Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education-the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s -that threaten the
survival of professors as we've known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholarsan essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.
172 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 17, 2018
This is a deeply depressing book for humanities professors to read. It's now ten years old and the patterns and trends he identifies are only worsening: the erosion of tenure through the rising replacement of tt faculty with adjuncts, the horrible working conditions for state university faculty whose work lives are pressured by the combination of "prestige envy" and "efficiency-first industrial logic"; the general hostility of the public to the humanities; the impact of the myth of meritocracy on the lives of graduate students and job-seeking PhDs who go through emotional hell because they blame themselves for failing at a job market that is more a lottery than a market in any meaningful sense. What it adds to the existing laments found in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. and Inside Higher Ed is a turning of the frames for some of the more ubiquitous debates about tenure and romanticism about the humanities. He also provides historical and contemporary economic context for these discussions, including detailed analysis of for-profit online universities, and the impact on professorial status of corporate course-management as well as changes in academic publishing.
August 8, 2008
This is not for the faint of heart--especially if those faint-hearted prospective readers teach English at the university level. Donoghue's well-written and tightly focussed story of the many and ineluctable threats posed to the liberal arts in today's universities is a depressing, but as is so often the case with texts that lead away from ignorance and bliss, enlightening.
Donoghue repudiates the widespread notion that the liberal arts are today in a "crisis" and supports his revisionism with evidence that this crisis is not only extremely venerable (it began way before the 1970s, in the 19th *century*) and permanent. Under threat from the corporatization of the university, the devaluation of the "useless" liberal (and fine) arts, the rise of for-profit education and IT-facilitated distance-education, the figure of the professor is going the way of the dodo bird, which as we know, means a way of no return. Their functions as educators and researchers are being permanently redefined, and the new definition is in the favour of administrators, and the bottom line.
Donoghue acknowledges the much wider and deeper treatments of related topics (sociological and philosophical primarily) while keeping his focus tightly on the role of professors in this wide-spread changes. Depressing as this forcast is, it is presented not without a garnish of wit, driving home the final and most forceful raison d'etre of the liberal and fine arts, which makes them both essential but inefficient at waging contemporary institutional and intellectual wars: the pleasure of the text. The turn of phrase, the stroke of brush, helpless and hopeless carriers of pleasure.
Donoghue repudiates the widespread notion that the liberal arts are today in a "crisis" and supports his revisionism with evidence that this crisis is not only extremely venerable (it began way before the 1970s, in the 19th *century*) and permanent. Under threat from the corporatization of the university, the devaluation of the "useless" liberal (and fine) arts, the rise of for-profit education and IT-facilitated distance-education, the figure of the professor is going the way of the dodo bird, which as we know, means a way of no return. Their functions as educators and researchers are being permanently redefined, and the new definition is in the favour of administrators, and the bottom line.
Donoghue acknowledges the much wider and deeper treatments of related topics (sociological and philosophical primarily) while keeping his focus tightly on the role of professors in this wide-spread changes. Depressing as this forcast is, it is presented not without a garnish of wit, driving home the final and most forceful raison d'etre of the liberal and fine arts, which makes them both essential but inefficient at waging contemporary institutional and intellectual wars: the pleasure of the text. The turn of phrase, the stroke of brush, helpless and hopeless carriers of pleasure.
July 8, 2009
This book was like passing a 30 car pile-up on the 405. No, it was like being in the pile-up while watching it simultaneously on TV. For anyone who loves the humanities (and especially for adjunct teachers in the humanities) this book is gory -- blood and guts everywhere.
Donoghue talks about the very old tension that has existed between academic and business philosophies. The basic question: is education worth it just because we learn cool stuff, or is education only a good idea if we we can make use of what we learn? It's the big smackdown between the utilitarians and proponents of value ethics: Dickens' left-brained Gragrind versus George Eliot's idealist Dorthea. Who will win the match? Donoghue proposes that the Gragrinds of the world won a long time ago -- and that we're now seeing the effects. Universities are cutting costs and outsourcing, like corporations do. Professors (especially those who teach in the humanities) are valued less. He cites the now common practice of having courses taught with contingent, part-time faculty who often take two or three jobs to cobble together a living. He also talks about the dismantling of tenure and the creepy practices of for-profit universities like University of Phoenix. The humanities, he predicts, will soon be only for the class of student who can afford to buy an ivy league education, someone with more than one home and summers in the Hamptons.
I don't know that Donoghue makes a perfect argument. He doesn't, for example, make a case for the humanities as an integral part of culture or critical thinking. He focuses almost exclusively on the classics, and he doesn't describe why vocational training alone isn't enough for students. I don't think he's writing for Gragrind, though. He's writing to Dorthea, who already values the humanities and who, after all, is the most likely to be that "scholar gypsy" (Donoghue) who teaches five classes and still can't afford a visit to the doctor.
I love my work beyond measure, but since I'm in the adjunct, part-time pool, I couldn't help but take all this at least a bit personally. Despite the gore, I kept reading, half to be reassured that it's not just me struggling over here, and half hoping for some magic idea from Donoghue, some glimpse into a beautiful future, where adjunct teachers everywhere, like all baristas or Barnes & Noble booksellers, can have health insurance and wages for every hour we work.
Donoghue talks about the very old tension that has existed between academic and business philosophies. The basic question: is education worth it just because we learn cool stuff, or is education only a good idea if we we can make use of what we learn? It's the big smackdown between the utilitarians and proponents of value ethics: Dickens' left-brained Gragrind versus George Eliot's idealist Dorthea. Who will win the match? Donoghue proposes that the Gragrinds of the world won a long time ago -- and that we're now seeing the effects. Universities are cutting costs and outsourcing, like corporations do. Professors (especially those who teach in the humanities) are valued less. He cites the now common practice of having courses taught with contingent, part-time faculty who often take two or three jobs to cobble together a living. He also talks about the dismantling of tenure and the creepy practices of for-profit universities like University of Phoenix. The humanities, he predicts, will soon be only for the class of student who can afford to buy an ivy league education, someone with more than one home and summers in the Hamptons.
I don't know that Donoghue makes a perfect argument. He doesn't, for example, make a case for the humanities as an integral part of culture or critical thinking. He focuses almost exclusively on the classics, and he doesn't describe why vocational training alone isn't enough for students. I don't think he's writing for Gragrind, though. He's writing to Dorthea, who already values the humanities and who, after all, is the most likely to be that "scholar gypsy" (Donoghue) who teaches five classes and still can't afford a visit to the doctor.
I love my work beyond measure, but since I'm in the adjunct, part-time pool, I couldn't help but take all this at least a bit personally. Despite the gore, I kept reading, half to be reassured that it's not just me struggling over here, and half hoping for some magic idea from Donoghue, some glimpse into a beautiful future, where adjunct teachers everywhere, like all baristas or Barnes & Noble booksellers, can have health insurance and wages for every hour we work.
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January 19, 2021In general, I find this book to be an accurate assessment of what is happening at the U.S. University. I taught in the humanities for many years, and watched as our administrators were shipped off to administrator schools, watched as former faculty members drank the koolaid when they moved from teaching into management and watched as the current business "pop-method of the month" was inevitably introduced to transform the University to a user-friendly, customer based corporation. We became the gas-jockeys pumping the education fuel into our student consumers. It is clear to me that the idea that the University should provide people with "skills" that can be assessed quantitatively rather than knowledge and the ability to think has negatively affected our current society and that a course in ethics and philosophy (as well as history) should be required of all (and not in High school, because I don't think the human brain is really quite ready at that point in time.) If we cannot talk to people who hold different opinions than ours and empathize, if we do not ever consider what it means to be human and how that binds us together, we are doomed as a society. Donoghue says this is not a good enough message to use to promote the humanities, but we know how good corporations are at engineering needs in their consumers, so they will want to purchase their products, and in my opinion, the corporatized University could just as well promote the humanities as the natural sciences or professional degrees. (My guess is they don't because they don't want people to see through their methods).
Anyway, although I don't agree with everything Donoghue says, I believe his argument is logical and he makes his case well. Although this book was published in 2008, it is very pertinent to present times
Anyway, although I don't agree with everything Donoghue says, I believe his argument is logical and he makes his case well. Although this book was published in 2008, it is very pertinent to present times
May 20, 2015
This book was one of the most depressing and scary books I've read in a while. It was not enjoyable to read, but rather quite bleak. Yet, that is part of why I believe it is such an important book. Higher education in the US is facing many changes, many of which impact the lives of everyone in our country, even those with no interest in ever attending college. Academic quality and rigor is decreasing, largely as driven by the market, corporate influence, and the bad-players of the for-profit education world. Greater awareness about this issue is needed.
The weakness of this book is that it provides very few answers. It mostly says, "here is reality" and then does not offer much as far as possible directions to respond to this significant problem. It is the burden of the reader to begin developing these answers.
The weakness of this book is that it provides very few answers. It mostly says, "here is reality" and then does not offer much as far as possible directions to respond to this significant problem. It is the burden of the reader to begin developing these answers.
October 16, 2023
Reading this succinct, bleak text 15 years after its publication just drives home how prescient the author's warnings were (though the writing was already clearly on the wall, in 30-point bold font when, he wrote this in 2008), and just how much worse things have gotten for instructors working in higher education in the US, especially those teaching the liberal arts. The book reads like a relatively pacey master's thesis on the topic - it's even divided into five clear chapters, in which Donoghue explains the problems involved and why they're not likely to go away (at least not until liberal arts universities themselves do, something which is very much in the offing). A combination of a clinging to anachronistic notions of "The Academy" by those involved, a "publish or perish" mindset on behalf of both the teachers and the institutions that would hire them, the complete disappearance of tenured positions, the rise of for-profit (and online) education, and a general trending away from college majors which are not at least, theoretically, preparing the student for a specific field in the workforce (as opposed to the quixotic, antiquated idea of college "creating better citizens") have all colluded to make a system in which any sensible person would not seek out work. Unfortunately, I've already been in the field for two decades, and at this point, I don't know that there's any turning back, or any easy off-ramp. My OnlyFans page isn't bringing in as much as I'd hoped it would.
The book closes with two "suggestions" for those involved in the teaching of liberal arts that are so unhelpful (the hope that "people predicting that university courses will always lead to jobs don't know the future either" and the warning that "you have to understand your history and your place in the educational landscape to better prepare for the future"), I had to read the last few pages of the book twice to make sure I hadn't misread them, and even now, I kind of think/hope that he was just joking. Dark times ahead, indeed, for those who would hope to be able to forge a career teaching anything in the humanities in this country.
The book closes with two "suggestions" for those involved in the teaching of liberal arts that are so unhelpful (the hope that "people predicting that university courses will always lead to jobs don't know the future either" and the warning that "you have to understand your history and your place in the educational landscape to better prepare for the future"), I had to read the last few pages of the book twice to make sure I hadn't misread them, and even now, I kind of think/hope that he was just joking. Dark times ahead, indeed, for those who would hope to be able to forge a career teaching anything in the humanities in this country.
September 25, 2017
Thought-provoking piece that is well-communicated while also maintaining a degree of academic rigour.
May 6, 2022
Pretty good critique of academia! But it was def written by an academic and was less readable than perhaps it could have been. Eyeopening in lots of ways.
February 8, 2009
In this book Donoghue argues that the corporatization of higher education spells doom for the humanities as they exist today. Within the humanities--a term he never defines--the future future looks bleak for current and future PhD students in these fields. Tenure positions are disappearing only to be replaced with associate positions which offer less money, time for work, and prestige. Departments are letting in too many students and then falsely raising the hopes and expectations of current students that as soon as they graduate they will stumble into a tenure track position themselves. In later chapters he argues that for profit schools are further competing with non-profit and public schools by offering more "practical" courses in fields that translate directly into jobs.
While thought provoking and definitely worth reading if you are considering a career in academia the book has many, many flaws and leaves many questions unanswered. If tenure positions are dead in the humanities, how do they fair elsewhere in the university? Are the humanities even necessary in the schools of the future, and if they aren't why not? He also seems to suggest that just because students are no longer majoring in the humanities in the same numbers that they will have no importance in universities of the future. What about the students who are doing coursework in the humanities to help them out in other fields. Most disappointingly he never asks or answers the question of why the humanities are worth saving.
While thought provoking and definitely worth reading if you are considering a career in academia the book has many, many flaws and leaves many questions unanswered. If tenure positions are dead in the humanities, how do they fair elsewhere in the university? Are the humanities even necessary in the schools of the future, and if they aren't why not? He also seems to suggest that just because students are no longer majoring in the humanities in the same numbers that they will have no importance in universities of the future. What about the students who are doing coursework in the humanities to help them out in other fields. Most disappointingly he never asks or answers the question of why the humanities are worth saving.
March 19, 2012
Having lived through the experience Donoghue gives account of, and found my redemption from the broken university, there is not a false note in the book. The humanities -- critical reflection on literature, history, and philosophy -- has no future in the university. Properly speaking, it has no past, either. Humanities professors -- tenured and autonomous -- were a fleeting experiment of the mid-20th century. I am sorry to see them go. But going they are, and they are powerless to "resist" (perhaps that's why "resistance" is their last ditch effort at claiming value: the image of the legendary "tank man" comes vividly to mind).
February 3, 2009
Not necessarily new if you're involved with academia, but nice as a repackaging, reinvestigation of old laments, particularly on the issue of the newer "corporate universities" like the University of Phoenix. Depressing is a useful way.
May 10, 2013
A very important book! Those of us who've experienced first-hand the horrific changes in higher education need to speak out. Further comments at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
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June 8, 2015Read by ACRL Member of the Week Marc Gartler. Learn more about Marc on the ACRL Insider blog.
June 23, 2011
This book should be required reading for anyone considering graduate school, enrolled in graduate school, or anyway involved in the academy.
May 9, 2013
This book is probably best summed up in two words from one of the back-cover third-party blurbs:
"bleakly comprehensive"
"bleakly comprehensive"
September 15, 2013
I think I'm gonna write him a letter.
September 3, 2015
A terrifying outlook on working in academia.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews