On Wisconsin! (A Drama in Three Acts)

Act I: On October 8, 1971, Governor Patrick Lucy signed into law a bill that merged the University of Wisconsin at Madison with the several branches of the Wisconsin State University system. Two years later, the governance structure of the reorganized system was codified in state statute, and the specific role of the faculty was defined as follows:

With this last sentence, the legislature ascribed to the faculty principal jurisdiction over affairs pertaining to its domains of professional competence, but left unclear what it intended by rendering the exercise of that capacity “subject to the responsibilities and powers” assigned to the governing board and its executive appointees.

Act II: In 1992, a suit concerning the respective roles of the governing board, administrators, and faculty in fashioning a plan to allocate salary increases required the Dane County Circuit Court to clear up the ambiguity left unresolved by the legislature two decades prior. Ruling in favor of faculty and union plaintiffs, in Spoto v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, the court concluded:

On this basis, the court held that the board and its agents had overstepped the limits prescribed by law when they unilaterally imposed a salary plan on faculty, but, at the same time, that any proposal advanced by the faculty was subject to veto by the board or administrators. Doing so, this ruling effectively concluded that adherence to the principle of shared governance implies that no affirmative course of action can be undertaken on matters for which the faculty has “primary responsibility” absent the negotiated concurrence of all three participants.

Act III: Two decades later, in 2013, the Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly charged a working group with recommending reforms aimed at re-structuring the “balance of power” among the several parties to university governance in order to enhance its “operational efficiency.” ^{Footnote 3} Left unmodified, the report’s authors contended, faculty members will continue to affirm their statutorily-guaranteed “primary responsibility for academic and educational activities,” as ratified in Spoto, and, in doing so, render the system unable to shift “from an emphasis in a liberal arts education towards an educational background that better prepares them [students] for the job marketplace and utilizes vocational training.” ^{Footnote 4}

Acting on the working group’s recommendations, the legislature approved a bill that was signed into law by Governor Scott Walker on July 12, 2015. Aside from replacing gender-specific language, this statute retains a section of the 1973 law that reads as follows:

The new law, however, eliminated the structure of overlapping jurisdiction inherent in its 1973 predecessor by inserting the phrase “for advising the chancellor regarding” into the passage that had previously ascribed to the faculty “primary responsibility for academic and educational activities and faculty personnel matters.” And, in order to lay the specter of Spoto forever to rest, the statute provides that the phrase “subject to the responsibilities and powers” of the governing board, the president, and the chancellor shall henceforth be construed as “subordinate to.” ^{Footnote 6} What was once the practice of shared governance at Wisconsin is thereby supplanted by an order that reduces the faculty to the status of an advisor whose counsel in all matters, including those for which it is most expert, bears only as much force as its superiors will countenance.

That recent events in Wisconsin are emblematic of a phenomenon extending well beyond its borders is implicit in the title of Larry Gerber’s Reference Gerber2014 book, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University. This work offers the best history of faculty participation in the governance of higher education within the United States now available, and the story Gerber relates is one we should all come to know. My concern here is not with that story’s particulars, but, rather, with the account Gerber offers for the faculty’s shifting fortunes, which, were he to address it, would no doubt include the dissolution of shared governance in Wisconsin. As its title intimates, for Gerber the professionalization of the professoriate accounts for the rise of faculty governance and de-professionalization accounts for its decline; and the phenomenon of de-professionalization he explains in turn by invoking the category of corporatization. In sum: “In recent years the greatest threat to the practice of shared governance has come from those administrators, governing board members, and public officials who seek to corporatize American higher education,” and essential to that enterprise is the move to “deprofessionalize the professoriate.” ^{Footnote 7}

While I do not consider this explanation entirely misguided, I do want to perplex it. To foreshadow this complication, consider Gerber’s contention that professionalism is an “ideal premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to achieve the common good.” ^{Footnote 8} The contrary argument I develop in this essay was anticipated by Sheldon Wolin more than thirty-five years ago:

Whereas Gerber contends that the professoriate qua profession has been corrupted in recent decades by the forces of “corporatization,” I argue that the project of modern professionalism since its inception has been deeply political not merely in the sense that it is affected by, but also in the sense that it is thoroughly implicated in the generation and legitimation of specific configurations of power. To say this is not to deny that the faculty’s capacity to exercise some measure of collective self-governance as well as to determine the trajectory of the colleges and universities that employ them is today under sustained assault. But it is to say that we will not understand what has happened at Wisconsin so long as we remain captivated by an ideal that deflects attention from the key role played by the professional professoriate in assimilating the modern American research university within the regime of liberal and, more recently, neoliberal capitalism. ^{Footnote 10}

The Modern Professional Ideal

In the United States, the ideal of modern professionalism is a creature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more specifically, of the Progressive movement. ^{Footnote 11} To furnish an adequate historical context for this movement and so this ideal would require an account of the displacement of an agricultural by an industrializing economy, the replacement of competitive by corporate capitalism geared to mass production, the proliferation of bureaucratic administrative agencies at all levels of government, etc. For present purposes, suffice it to say that each of these developments played a part in opening up new occupational opportunities for those, especially in the urban centers of the Northeast, who aspired to an economic standing between wealthy elites and poor workers. The emerging professions afforded a path to middle-class status, and the Progressive movement gave voice to their ambitions.

Articulation of the modern professional ideal turns on two central principles, both of which are presupposed by Gerber’s characterization of it through reference to the deployment of “expertise in a disinterested way to achieve the common good.” First, modern professionalism affirms that its claim to expertise is grounded in the form of reason that is modern science; and, second, modern professionalism affirms that its practice constitutes a vocation. Woven together, the authority of modern professionalism turns on its construction as an occupational sphere that rises above the fray of politics because its conduct is rooted in knowledge that is not implicated in power and directed toward goals that are not partisan.

Prior to the twentieth century, the term “expert” was employed in vernacular reference to someone whose skill was rooted in extensive experience within any given domain. (This is the sense that informs the question of a soldier who, in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, inquires about a captain’s reputation for “valour, honesty, and expertness in wars.”) ^{Footnote 12} What distinguishes the specifically modern expert is the grounding of skilled practice in the reason of modern science. Granted, during the half-century following the Civil War, what counted as modern science in the United States was defined more by what it was not than by what it was. For example, the inquiry claiming this mantle, whether taking shape as the disciplines that gradually emancipated themselves from the once-comprehensive category of “natural philosophy” or those that emerged from “history” and “political economy” as the several social sciences, was distinguished from the deductive moral and metaphysical systems that were quickly losing their cultural cachet. Moreover, incessant invocation of the “experimental method” made clear that modern science was something other than a mere extension of antebellum empiricism, which was chiefly characterized by Baconian induction that generated taxonomic classifications of observed phenomena. Rhetorically speaking, the affirmative sense of the appeal to modern science at the turn of the twentieth century is well-understood as a distinctively American articulation of the Enlightenment conviction that the progress of civilization is inseparable from the advance of a form of reason whose aspirations are indicated by a cluster of proto-positivist terms including “objective,” “neutral,” “disinterested,” “facts,” and the like.

Appropriation of the ascending authority of scientific reason by the emerging professions was key to affirming their work’s superiority over that performed by other occupations. At its most elemental, this was a matter of securing an invidious distinction between professional work and inexpert manual labor. But it was also a matter of distinguishing such work from semi-skilled and subdivided industrial labor (think of the eighteen distinct operations involved in making Adam Smith’s pins) as well as the specialized but un-subdivided labor of skilled artisans (think of early modern mechanical watch-makers). More generally, mastery of bodies of knowledge that cannot be acquired via empirical experience, no matter how extensive, became key to differentiating professionals from amateurs, whether they be licensed physicians as opposed to snake oil salesmen, certified lawyers as opposed to unscrupulous pettifoggers, or examined civil servants as opposed to corrupt party bosses.

The second defining ingredient of the modern professional ideal is its enactment as a vocation. To provide an adequate account of this element would require a careful tracing of the slow secularization of the Christian representation of clerical work. For present purposes, suffice it to say that Max Weber essentially got matters right when he explained how the Puritans, extrapolating the Calvinist idea of a “calling,” came to conclude that one’s earthly career constitutes the fulfillment of one’s spiritual occupation. ^{Footnote 13}

This construction sustains the characterization of modern professional work as the performance of a service on behalf of others. However, an orientation to useful service in and of itself is insufficient to differentiate modern professionals from others who also serve, whether they be merchants who supply goods to customers or politicians who furnish favors to constituents. What renders professional work of elevated status is its conduct on behalf of ends, like those conferred by its ministerial precursors, that transcend those regarded as base. These are the inherently valuable ends—e.g., justice, truth, goodness, well-being—that are essential to human flourishing. To affirm that these ends are universal or “common,” to employ Gerber’s term, is to insist that they promote the true interests of all, and that is so even though they may not always be embraced as such by their beneficiaries.

The foundation of the distinctively modern professions in the reason of modern science grounds their claim to cognitive superiority over other occupations, and their standing as vocations devoted to transcendent ends establishes their complementary claim to moral superiority. Because their practice is regulated by the highest form of worldly knowledge and subordinated to humanity’s most noble goods, the temptations that might otherwise incline the professional toward the partial interests of the self are effectively checked. It is the self-disciplined asceticism of modern professionalism in turn that grounds its claim to special stature when invidiously compared to conduct that pursues mere pecuniary gain or that is immersed in the unsavory machinations of political power.

The Professional Professoriate

The birth of the modern professoriate in the United States is appropriately situated within the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century context adumbrated above. Specifically, it is but one of several occupations that seek to take advantage of newly-materializing opportunities for middle-class employment and so to achieve a class position that is distinguished from wealthy elites as well as manual laborers. Key to this effort is the struggle to secure recognition of its status as a modern profession.

As Gerber reminds us, for two and a half centuries following the founding of Harvard in 1636, the power of rule in American colleges was “largely in the hands of presidents, who more often than not came from the ministry, and of lay governing boards.” ^{Footnote 14} Leaving aside a few elite institutions, most instructors prior to the late nineteenth century were poorly compensated, of indifferent status, and but modestly prepared for their work as agents of moral uplift and mental discipline. Retained as what the law would eventually come to categorize as “at-will” employees, they had little basis for challenging the presidents who hired and fired them with or without cause and still less claim to participate in institutional governance.

Some of the features that unevenly materialize in the late nineteenth century and that in time come to define the professional professoriate include the expectation that employment in higher education will assume the form of a full-time salaried career characterized by upward mobility through academic ranks on the basis of merit; the expectation that research, in addition to teaching, will be part of that career; the presumption that graduate training and receipt of a doctoral degree are generally anticipated qualifications for faculty appointment; and the emergence of trans-institutional disciplines as well as the associations that represent them.

These articulations of the modern professorial ideal cannot be understood apart from invention of the modern research university whose origins are conventionally identified with the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876, whose numbers increased dramatically between 1890 and 1920, and whose collective identity was cemented via formation of the American Association of Universities in 1900. For present purposes, what is most significant about the modern American university is its critical role in consolidating the professoriate’s standing as what, given the German institutions from which it drew its primary inspiration, we might call the “uber-profession.” In his history of U.S. higher education, Roger Geiger notes that “professional education, with the partial exception of theology, grew progressively estranged from the college during most of the nineteenth century and similarly distanced from the frontiers of knowledge.” ^{Footnote 15} One of the principal victories of the modern American university was its reversal of this trajectory by securing effective jurisdiction over professional education. It did so principally by creating graduate programs that successfully claimed a monopoly over the specialized training that defined the practice of other professions and, more specifically, by securing exclusive authority to grant the degrees that attest to mastery of all other forms of vocational expertise. Doing so, the emerging modern professoriate joined forces with, for example, the elite cohort of attorneys who in the late nineteenth century sought to disqualify the law offices that provided apprenticeships in civil law to those with no post-secondary education. So, too, did many proprietary teaching hospitals affiliate with research universities in an effort to discredit nineteenth-century spiritualists, railway surgeons, and others who competed for business in ministering to the woes of the body. ^{Footnote 16}

In sum, the general ideal of modern professionalism provides the foundation for the specific ideal of the professional professoriate. What both share is a claim to cognitively-based expertise that cannot be acquired via ordinary experience, no matter how extensive, and whose work in the world assumes the form of a secular vocation. What renders the professoriate the most special profession is its institutionally-secured and state-sanctioned status as the sole authorized provider and certifier of the education necessary to practice not just the academic calling, but all other distinctively modern expert vocations as well.

Professioral Prerogatives

The unique nature of the academic calling provides the ground for justifying the workplace prerogatives that distinguish the professoriate from non-professional occupations and, in certain instances, other professions as well. The lead agent in promoting these prerogatives was another Progressive era invention, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Mimicking a strategy employed by the nascent legal and medical professions via formation of the American Bar Association in 1878 and the American Medical Association in 1897, the AAUP’s establishment in 1915 encouraged faculty members to envisage a form of collective identity and hence the sharing of interests that transcended their status as employees of specific colleges and universities.

However inchoate, this identity enhanced the professional professoriate’s struggle to affirm its status vis à vis occupations that could claim neither the mantle of modern science nor a vocational character. Staking his position in a controversy that would vex the Association for the next half century, in his 1919 presidential address, Arthur Lovejoy insisted that the relationship of faculty to their employers was essentially different “from that of the wage-earner bargaining with the private capitalist over the division of the profits of industry,” ^{Footnote 17} and hence that the AAUP should not be confused with trade unions since the latter are focused exclusively on their members’ economic well-being. Arguably, this same pejorative construction informed the AAUP’s seminal “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which insisted on a categorical distinction between the purpose of a university and that of “an ordinary business venture.” The unique purpose of “the academic calling,” stated the Declaration, is to secure the “progress in scientific knowledge” that is “essential to civilization.” An essential purpose of the AAUP, accordingly, is to “enhance the dignity of the scholar’s profession” and, more particularly, to ensure that faculty possess the freedom that enable them “to perform honestly and according to their own consciences the distinctive and important function which the nature of the profession lays upon them.” ^{Footnote 18} In other words, and recapitulating the general logic of modern professionalism, the professoriate masters bodies of knowledge that are distinguishable in kind from that possessed by even the most skilled non-professional workers because they can only be acquired through “prolonged and specialized technical training;” and, furthermore, it employs that knowledge, “exempt from any pecuniary motive,” in the service of ends that transcend those rooted in self-interest even when, as in the case of unions, that interest is common to many.

It is only because the essential purpose of the academy transcends the parochialism of class interest that the professional professoriate can lay claim to workplace prerogatives unavailable to those employed in non-professional occupations. One such prerogative concerns the faculty’s title to take part in governing the institutions by which it is employed. This claim derives principally but not exclusively from its specialized expertise in matters educational. To illustrate, however halting and partial, if an early faculty accomplishment in securing control over its work consisted of exerting authority over course offerings, later accomplishments are well-understood as efforts to extend that governance role to domains that bear on the curriculum. (For the culmination of this process, recall the broad language of the 1973 Wisconsin statute, which vested in the faculty “primary responsibility for academic and educational activities.”) It is on these grounds that faculties during the twentieth century justified their right to determine, for example, graduation requirements, to participate in formulating annual budgets, to have a voice in the selection of presidents, chief academic officers, and department chairs, and so forth.

A second workplace prerogative also turns on the faculty’s claim to expertise, but is more especially reliant for its rhetorical force on the vocational dimension of the professorial ideal. This privilege consists of the claim to immunity from disciplinary interventions that would compromise the faculty’s duty to fulfill its unique mission, whether that take the form of advancing knowledge via research or disseminating knowledge via teaching. This threat arises because the practice of the professoriate, as is true of all vocational professions, must ultimately be governed by the true needs of those whom it serves and from whom it anticipates deference in virtue of its specialized expertise. And yet such deference can never be taken for granted because the goods advanced by the professions may sometimes be unrecognized, unvalued, or even rejected by their beneficiaries. Should that occur, to quote the 1915 AAUP declaration, “society at large” will fail “to get from its scholars, in an unadulterated form, the peculiar and necessary service which it is the office of the professional scholar to furnish.” ^{Footnote 19} Accordingly, some measure of occupational autonomy is the sine qua non of the faculty’s capacity to pursue knowledge for its own sake, independent of all class interest, including its own, and so discharge the duty that only it can accomplish.

As the AAUP effectively acknowledged when it worried about the “tyranny of public opinion,” ^{Footnote 20} and as recent events in Wisconsin confirm, professorial autonomy is jeopardized in a distinctive way within a capitalist democracy. No matter how great the gap between theory and practice, modern political democracies are predicated on the ideal of popular sovereignty; and the doctrine of popular sovereignty presupposes that individual citizens and their elected representatives are the best judges of their own interests. By the same token, in principle, a capitalist economy is predicated on the ideal of consumer sovereignty, which is premised on a similarly egalitarian conviction about individual rationality expressed not in the polling place but in the marketplace. Accordingly, inherited forms of privilege are suspect in a capitalist democracy, whether based in birth, wealth, or any other ascriptive foundation. And so too are all other affirmations of elite status including those based in claims to cognitive superiority, that contravene a culture wedded to a myth of the self-governing individual.

The AAUP’s earliest response to this danger relies on the logic of apolitical professionalism, but, intriguingly, draws on an analogy taken from the sphere of politics. Quoting again from its 1915 declaration, the AAUP affirms that professional academics, unlike other workers, “are the appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees” of the institutions that hire them. Likening them to judges who are selected and confirmed by politicians but who are neither required nor expected to do their bidding in the act of adjudicating, professional academics are obligated to perform duties that may sometimes bring them into conflict with the lay governing boards to whom they are ultimately subject as well as the administrators who rule in their name:

To say this is not to deny that the professional academic is required to perform the tasks outlined in a contract specifying the terms of employment and the compensation to be paid for services rendered. Nor is it to say that the professional academic is immune from discipline for incompetence, refusal, or failure to satisfy these terms. But it is to insist that the terms of employment are not exhaustive of the academic’s obligations as a professional, for these are owed to ends that transcend the walls of any specific college or university. And it is to insist that the professional academic should be immune from regulation and sanction when engaged in work conducted in accordance with professional norms even should that constraint be imposed by or at the behest of the public.

To safeguard this autonomy, the AAUP campaigned for specific practices aimed at securing some measure of protection from the harsh logic of capitalist employment to which the vast majority of workers are subject. Certain of these practices are generally consistent with those affirmed by other modern professions. For example, the principle of collective self-regulation manifest in the practice of academic peer review is embraced by the medical and legal professions insofar as they affirm their authority, subject ultimately to state jurisdiction, to define the standards by which their members are to be evaluated and to ensure that judgments of competence are entrusted to those qualified to make them. The practices of academic freedom and tenure, however, are specific to the modern professoriate, and that renders them simultaneously remarkable and vulnerable. They are remarkable insofar as they testify to the unique prestige of education within American democratic culture. There, the fulfillment of individual talent is rendered possible for everyone, at least in principle, via equal access to schooling; and such talent is the only unproblematic foundation for inequalities of status. But these practices are also vulnerable because tenure and academic freedom afford exclusive workplace privileges to those whose vocational expertise entitles them, at least in principle, to acquiescence on the part of all who lack professional stature. In short, if higher education is taken to be a key to meritocracy’s fulfillment in the United States, we should not be surprised to find the professional professoriate held in high esteem. But no amount of esteem is sufficient to quell entirely the resentment engendered by workplace perquisites that shelter the professoriate from the indignities to which ordinary workers are so often subject.

In sum, what the AAUP championed in its early years were the terms of a fragile compromise delineating the situation of the professional professoriate within a liberal capitalist regime. As Clyde Barrow taught us a quarter century ago, that settlement did nothing to challenge the formal legal control over, and indeed ownership of, the academy by governing boards whose members at the turn of the twentieth century were ever more drawn from corporate boardrooms rather than the pulpit or state and local governing bodies. But, by representing the academy not as a “private propriertorship” but as a “public trust” invested with a unique cultural mission, and the professional faculty as the privileged guardians of that mission, the AAUP was able to inaugurate modest but not insignificant impediments—most notably the adequate cause and due process provisions that define tenure—to the otherwise unchecked operation of at-will employment. While this “accommodationist strategy,” ^{Footnote 22} to quote Barrow, did help to secure for faculty the esteem it considered its due, it remained vulnerable to populist revolts from below as well as assaults initiated by political and economic elites who had little patience for academic conceits regarding, for example, the best form of college or university governance.

The Politics of the Professional Professoriate

Were Gerber to draw a graph in order to depict the overall arc of the argument advanced in The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance, I suspect he would place on the horizontal axis a timeline that begins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and extends through the early decades of the twenty-first. On the vertical axis, in order to explain why by the 1960s “the general principle of shared governance had become a widely accepted norm in higher education,” ^{Footnote 23} Gerber would draw a line whose upward slope represents the uneven but more or less steady trajectory of professorial professionalization. Sometime in the early 1970s, that line would begin to tail downward depicting the faculty’s de-professionalization, which in turn explains the decline of shared governance that culminates in Wisconsin. Finally, at the apex of this parabola, Gerber would inscribe the explanatory epithet “corporatization.”

There is no denying that the character of academic labor has undergone a major transformation since the 1970s; nor is there any doubt that this transformation has undercut faculty participation in the governance of higher education. Manifestations of the de-vitalization cited by Gerber include the characterization of departments as revenue production units and cost centers, which renders them subject to reduction or discontinuation based on non-academic considerations; the creation of distance learning programs and especially online courses that bypass conventional curricular approval processes; the proliferation of for-profit institutions whose “faculty,” as at-will employees only minimally protected against arbitrary dismissal, are ill-positioned to exercise any substantive control over academic programs; the “unbundling” of instruction as its once more or less unified elements are sub-contracted to discrete providers, including “course development specialists,” “web managers,” “student learning assistants,” and the employees honorifically dubbed “professors” but whose educational role is restricted to on-camera lectures; the use of market-based metrics for assessing the “performance” of faculty members, which undermines peer review by shifting authority from colleagues to managerial personnel; and, to return to the scene of our opening tragedy, the calls issued by officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere for removal of all impediments, including faculty participation in governance as well as tenure, that hinder the transformation of higher education into a more efficient locus of worker training.

The question I raise in this section is not whether these changes have occurred, but, instead, whether they are adequately understood through appeal to a category of “de-professionalization” that is itself parasitic on an ideal of professionalism “premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to achieve the common good.” From this depoliticized perspective, should the professoriate become implicated in political power, that can only be explained through reference to its illegitimate subordination to partisan purposes. On this construction, that possibility will remain foreclosed so long as professional expertise remains true to the universal ends that sustain its vocational character. Should these ends be violated, however, that must be explained either through reference to individual neglect of occupational obligations, i.e., the professorial equivalent of malpractice, or alternatively, through reference to corruption of these ends by what Gerber labels, the pervasive influence of a market-based culture in which “all incentives are defined solely by the pursuit of self-interest and the laws of supply and demand.” ^{Footnote 24}

Better, I argue, to acknowledge that the project of the professional professoriate in U.S. higher education is and always has been a political enterprise whose claim to authority depends in large measure on disguising that character. The distinctive part played by the professoriate in reproducing the larger order within which it is situated is principally a function of its monopolistic authority over the issuance of degrees certifying formal educational accomplishment. This is a role that neither state nor corporation can meet (although the proliferation of corporate “universities” as well as competence-based certification programs signals erosion of that monopoly). Engaged in this task, the work of the professoriate is political insofar as it reinforces the status hierarchies that define the professional ideal, whether they turn on the disparagement of inexpert work or conduct oriented to self-interested gain. This work is political insofar as it installs higher education faculty as the gate-keepers who determine who will and who will not gain admission to and, once inside, be certified as masters of the esoteric forms of knowledge that yield the privileges of professional occupation outside the academy. And this work is political insofar as its most esteemed occupational residence, the modern research university, is deeply enmeshed in the constitution of a regime that yokes state power to a capitalist economy. The question, then, is not when the professional professoriate was deflected from its true end, but, rather, how the form of its entanglement has changed over time.

I cannot provide that history here. But, to intimate what it should include, let me suggest that the “Wisconsin Idea” in its early years exemplifies one of its key moments. Although its intellectual antecedents can be located in the writings of John Bascom, Richard T. Ely, and John R. Commons, invention of the Wisconsin Idea is typically ascribed to University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise and Governor Robert La Follette. The cornerstone of this quintessentially Progressive endeavor is this:

As David Hoeveler explains, this appeal to “serve the state” is well-read as a secularized rendition of the Social Gospel’s call to realize the will of God on earth via the university’s performance of a mission in the guise of a vocation. Anticipating Gerber’s representation of professionalism, the Wisconsin Idea promised to replace the competitive, partisan, and ineffectual intrigues of politics with the principles of “scientific management.” Whether applied to government or any other domain of collective life, reform based in these principles augured the dispassionate triumph of instrumental efficiency, enlightened transparency, and democratic accountability.

The specific character of the professional professoriate’s simultaneous autonomy from and yet implication in this regime can be metaphorically illustrated by considering the mile-long stretch of road that is State Street in Madison, which separates but also joins the capitol at one end and the university at the other. The purpose of the Wisconsin Idea, as first advanced, was not to collapse the distance between capitol and university, but, to quote from an official history, to facilitate their “partnership” in diverse exchanges:

If the first form of exchange referenced here consisted of programs whereby faculty offered technical expertise to laborers outside the academy, the second consisted of expert counsel provided to legislators involved in crafting remedies to problems stemming, in large part, from the advance of capitalist industrialization—e.g., urban poverty, corporate monopolies, hazardous consumer products, unsafe labor practices, etc. This mutation of the university’s “public trust” into work performed at the behest of state elites acting in the name of the people was anticipated by the AAUP when, in its 1915 declaration, it insisted that the “training” of experts equipped to address the “complexities” of modern life has “become an important part of the work of the universities; and in almost every one of our institutions of learning the professors of the economic, social, and political sciences have been drafted to an increasing extent into more or less unofficial participation in the public service.” ^{Footnote 27}

We are thus invited to imagine State Street as the materialization of a hyphenated relationship whose participants require one another, but who remain sufficiently independent to render the professional ideal not entirely fanciful. It would be a mistake, however, to construe this “partnership” between state and university as one of egalitarian reciprocity. Indeed, as early as 1858, prefiguring the report submitted by the Wisconsin Assembly’s shared governance working group in 2013, a legislative committee declared that its citizens have “a right to ask that the bequest of the government [to the university] shall aide them in securing to themselves and their posterity, such educational advantages as shall fit them for their pursuits in life, and which, by an infusion of intelligence and power, shall elevate those pursuits to a dignity commensurate with their value.” ^{Footnote 28}

On the face of it, the state’s demand that the university be harnessed to the improvement of ordinary occupations and, in doing so, render their work worthy of respect it cannot otherwise command makes this a profoundly political enterprise. The professional professorial ideal, however, requires that this representation be denied so that it can sustain the characterization of its work as the apolitical provision of specialized vocational expertise. But, as we have seen, a constitutive feature of such expertise is the ethical orientation as well as the cognitive foundation that renders it superior to unskilled, semi-skilled or even skilled labor. That labor remains inferior so long as it is merely a matter of earning a wage and so long as its conduct is ungrounded in forms of knowledge that are “theoretical” in the sense that they are abstracted from empirical practice. This affirmation of professional authority over ordinary work becomes self-reinforcing when insistence on the apolitical character of academic expertise serves as an essential prop for the faculty’s justification of the practices, including tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance, that demonstrate the elite nature, of its work relative to those who remain subject to the routine degradations of non-academic employment.

“We should seek to withdraw as many questions of statesmanship and social science as we can from the sphere of party politics, and hand them over to the investigation and experiments of our scholars.” ^{Footnote 29} The excision of scientifically-informed administration from the political domain was institutionally consolidated via creation of the U.S. Civil Service in 1871, and that agency was defined by its commitment to the meritocratic appointment of public servants on the basis of technical competence acquired through university education and demonstrated by competitive examination. And yet the anti-political ideal symbolized by the Civil Service is itself deeply political insofar as it gestures toward a rationalized utopia ruled by experts in which, to quote once more from the AAUP’s 1915 declaration, the “hasty and unconsidered impulses of popular feeling” are rendered “more self-critical and more circumspect” by the discipline of “scientific method.” ^{Footnote 30} As the major universities during this period quickly pivot toward meeting the burgeoning demand for technically-trained labor power, exemplified by their rapid incorporation of agricultural and mechanical institutes within doctoral programs in engineering, the leading edge of the professional professoriate helps to ensure that the contradictions and excesses of capitalism will be managed rather than overcome, and that the reality of bureaucratic domination will be hidden beneath a veneer of non-partisan administration.

Were I to recount adequately the changing character of the research university’s political implication over the course of the twentieth century, I would discuss with some care the reconstitution of the professionalized professoriate as the United States shifted from the competitive capitalism that defined the Progressive era to the state-managed capitalism that defined the Cold War. Although anticipated as early as 1916 via creation of the National Research Council, for present purposes, suffice it to say that this era was defined by a more complete integration of the research university within the nation state, as the power exercised by economic and political elites was jointly directed toward the achievement of post-war global supremacy. This integration was accomplished in large part through massive infusions of federal funding supporting scientific research, much of which was not immediately subordinated to the imperatives of technological pay-off or commercial value. Although the growing financial dependence of the research university on state funding certainly eroded the professional professorial ideal, that work’s characterization as “basic” rendered not entirely incredible the representation of faculty inquiry as disinterested expertise governed by vocational norms.

The state-managed capitalism of the Cold War era required extensive public expenditures not just in defense, but also in health care, education, and other social welfare plans necessary to secure a productive workforce. With these investments came rapid expansion of the professions in general, as scientific knowledge was declared essential to the conduct of virtually all spheres of collective life. More comprehensively realizing the utopia imagined by Progressive era reformers, the authority of expertise insinuated itself within, for example, the managerial and accounting practices of corporate capitalism, the demographic initiatives undertaken by governmental agencies, and even the nuclear family as child-rearing came to be seen as a practice whose success turns on its conformity to medical and, later, psychological prescription. The enhanced prestige afforded to the reason of modern science redounded to the benefit of a professionalized professoriate not merely in virtue of its standing as privileged generator of the knowledge that grounds expert practice, but also because, as the uber-profession, it monopolized the right to confer the post-secondary degrees that certify competence exercised in all other domains. In addition, given that the general project of modern professionalism is inseparable from the economic aspirations of its participants, and given that the professionalization of the professoriate has always been a class project as well, it is not surprising to learn that the Cold War era saw considerable augmentation of the material benefits that follow from this inflation of academic status.

Under these circumstances, it is also not surprising to learn that the three decades following the end of World War II represent the heyday of faculty participation in college and university governance as well as consolidation of the workplace prerogatives that distinguish the academic career from other occupations, non-professional as well as professional. Gerber depicts the relationship between the faculty’s more extensive participation in institutional rule and its Cold War context as co-constitutive:

A skeptical interpretation of this relationship might ask whether the professoriate’s empowerment during this era was chiefly enabled by considerable excess demand for academic expertise and hence vigorous competition among colleges and universities for its labor. This reading might also ask whether the “substantial professional autonomy” cited by Gerber was tolerated not so much because the ideal of the professional professoriate was universally endorsed, but because the secular work ethic of the self-disciplined vocational subject required only modest supplementation by external controls or, more probably, because the exercise of workplace prerogatives within the academy posed no real challenge to the advance of American hegemony.

The Oxymoron of Neoliberal Professionalism

For Gerber, the sorry fate of shared governance in the post-Cold War era is a function of higher education’s hostile takeover by the agencies of “corporatization.” This story takes on a different complexion when told from the vantage point of “neoliberalization.” No matter how one tells the history of neoliberalism, as it has unfolded over the course of the past four decades or so, it seems clear that it has involved a more thoroughgoing incorporation of the modern research university within the political economy of the United States. That in turn has entailed a radical reconfiguration of the academic workforce, one whose specifically political import cannot be adequately conceptualized via a category that effectively reduces to professionalization thrown into reverse.

One element of the university’s structural transformation is captured by what Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades label the “shift from a public good knowledge/learning regime to an academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime.” ^{Footnote 32} Their analysis of this regime’s consolidation since the 1970s calls attention to the active engagement of many faculty in fostering revenue-generating collaborations between corporations and the academy as well as the state’s participation in legally structuring these affiliations via, for example, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act as well as later copyright and patent legislation. Within this university, in contrast to that of the Progressive era, we can no longer speak uncritically of neutral experts traversing the length of State Street in order to offer dispassionate counsel to the occupants of political office. Nor, in contrast to the university of the Cold War era, can we speak artlessly of disinterested researchers whose objective discoveries are fashioned by governmental agencies into instrumentalities of state power. In a neoliberal regime, the distinction between neutrality and partisanship as well as that between basic and applied mischaracterize the work performed by that sizeable segment of the contemporary professoriate whose entrepreneurial endeavors generate forms of cognitive capital that are smoothly integrated into the global circuits of production, accumulation, and exchange as these are hard wired by the state.

To illustrate, consider a contemporary incarnation of the Wisconsin Idea. According to its website, University Research Park (URP) in Madison “is an internationally recognized research and technology park that supports early-stage, and growth-oriented businesses in a range of sectors, including engineering, computational and life sciences.” ^{Footnote 33} Situated at neither end of State Street, this complex does not entirely dissolve the distinction between government, economy, and university, but it commingles their energies and resources in ways that render it practically impossible to tell where one begins and the others leave off. The irrelevance of the AAUP’s 1915 account of the university’s unique vocation, let alone the affirmations of academic freedom and shared governance that turn on that account, is revealed by URP’s strategic plan, which offers this statement of its “mission:” “To encourage technology development and commercialization that advances the economy and benefits research and related educational programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and serve as UW-Madison’s primary real estate development arm, providing facilities and entrepreneurial real estate development service.” ^{Footnote 34} On this account, the public good served by the university is conflated with increase in the value of its real estate holdings, construed as investments that enhance its constitution as something not unlike a private equity firm.

No understanding of the professoriate’s neoliberalization will prove adequate, however, if its focuses only on its esteemed commercial and technology vanguards and so disregards its neglected remainder. That these are flip sides of the same neoliberal coin is indicated by erosion of the middle class status to which early modern professionals aspired, as the academic labor force ever more recapitulates the yawning inequalities that now stratify American labor more generally. This is most strikingly disclosed by modification of the contractual terms of academic employment during the several decades defined by aggressive adoption of neoliberal strategies aimed at reducing labor costs. In 1969, to be specific, over three-quarters of instructional appointments in American higher education were to full-time tenure-track positions whereas, today, 70 percent of faculty members are employed in contingent positions, and over half of those appointments are part-time. ^{Footnote 35}

As a result, the instructional workforce is now bifurcated into a privileged minority and what we might euphemistically call an “under-privileged” majority, but which is perhaps better characterized as a reservoir of surplus and hence disposable labor. A 2014 report issued by Democratic staff members of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce described this segmentation as follows:

In this universe, what may once have qualified as a more or less cohesive profession is now divided between, on the one hand, the few who are compensated well, who are covered by institutional health care and pension policies, who enjoy the relative security of tenure and academic freedom, who experience some measure of autonomy and control over their work, and who are afforded significant prestige as well as the obeisance that accompanies it, and, on the other hand, everyone else. Here I acknowledge that this undifferentiated category occludes multiple sources of stratification internal to it, including but not limited to that between part-time workers paid on a piecework basis and those who are full-time and who are sometimes fortunate enough to be granted multi-year contracts. Even so, under these circumstances, especially when neither teaching nor research is a necessary condition of membership, it is not clear what it means to place all postsecondary “instructional” employees in the same occupational category.

Students of contemporary work have invented terms like “casualization” and “precarity” to name the neoliberal strategies deployed in order to exercise greater control over labor by exposing it to the vagaries of capitalist unemployment and, when working, by subjecting it to intrusive (although often invisible) technologies of discipline. True, the exact form assumed by these strategies may differ in the specifically academic workplace, but what, we should ask, is the difference in kind between the modes of surveillance to which most “non-professional” labor is now subject and their kinder and gentler appearance in the assessment metrics that monitor faculty work in the name of greater efficiency? And what is the difference in kind between poorly-compensated on-demand work performed by “independent contractors” in a “gig economy” and instructional work paid on a per course basis by part-time instructors on short-term contracts subject to renewal or non-renewal with little if any notice? And what is the difference in kind between the out-sourcing of those elements of production that can be accomplished by unskilled manual labor and the unbundling of faculty work that enables those tasks that require little or no skill to be delegated to wage-earners who receive none of the perquisites of professionalism? And, finally, what is the difference in kind between the lived experience of at-will service workers employed by vertically-organized capitalist corporations and that of contingent instructors subject to the authority of administrative personnel schooled in managerial techniques that are anathema to the norms of a self-governing community of scholars?

The relative ease with which elite as well as non-elite segments of the academic workforce in the United States have been reconstituted in accordance with neoliberal imperatives testifies at least in part to the failure of the historical project of academic professionalization. “Professionalism may be said to exist,” writes Eliot Freidson, “when an organized occupation gains the power to determine who is qualified to perform a defined set of tasks, to prevent all others from performing that work, and to control the criteria by which to evaluate performance.” ^{Footnote 37} If an indispensable marker of a profession’s reality is creation of an effective labor market shelter, as Freidson suggests, then the project of the modern professoriate succeeded insofar as the universities founded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did secure a reasonably firm monopoly over the authority to certify professional competence in multiple occupations, including its own, via the granting of post-secondary degrees.

In most other ways, however, this project has proven weak and thus vulnerable. Its relative impotence is apparent in the academic profession’s inability to summon governmental muscle to discipline unqualified practitioners (unlike the legal and medical professions, which can still call on state power to sanction those who practice absent appropriate credentials and to revoke the licenses of those deemed incompetent). It is apparent in the inability of the supra-professional association that is the AAUP to do more than chastise institutions that violate key markers of professional status, including academic freedom, peer review, and shared governance, as well as its inability to enforce a code of ethics whose very existence appears unknown to most. It is apparent in the professoriate’s inability, if not to restrict the production of doctorates and so ensure the scarcity that is a key condition of labor market power, then at least to thwart the indiscriminate replacement of tenure-track with contingent positions. And, finally, it is apparent in the professoriate’s incapacity to curb the proliferation of competitors, most notably for-profit enterprises, to provide the good that defined the public trust it alone was once deemed qualified to fulfill.

This final example is telling because it indicates how neoliberal colonization of the university undoes the professoriate’s organizational integrity as a profession, but also, and perhaps equally important, compromises the very ideal that once sustained it. It does so by rendering the fruits of academic labor a utilitarian good, which, like all other commodities in a service economy, is sold by profit-minded merchants of skill and purchased by buyers well-advised to heed the motto “caveat emptor.” On one construction, the neoliberal imaginary seeks to disembed and so free market rationality from associational forms, including the traditional academy, that constrain its unfettered operation. On a more ambitious construction, the neoliberal imaginary seeks to extend market rationality into all forms of collective association predicated on non-capitalist logics, whether that be family, church, or academy. On its most radical construction, however, the neoliberal imaginary seeks to rid the world of all contrary rationalities whose persistence might provide the basis for contesting its hegemony. This, I take it, is what Wendy Brown is getting at when she writes:

As neoliberal rationality vanquishes older imaginaries, the university and hence the professoriate are ever more pressed to justify their existence not via recourse to the tattered ideals of self-cultivation, citizenship, or the progress of civilization, but via an appeal to their efficient contribution to goods framed exclusively in economistic terms. Just how pervasive this logic has already become is indicated by the desperate effort to affirm the relevance of a liberal arts education by representing it as an investment that will pay off in the long run by equipping students with the skills they require in order to succeed in the multiple jobs they will hold within an economic order whose ceaseless disruptions demand continuous occupational retraining and so a talent for “lifelong learning.” For much the same reason, in time, we should anticipate that the lexicon of professionalism, with its melancholy appeals to “self-sacrifice,” “the public good,” and “impartial expertise,” will be evacuated of substantive sense. No doubt, these terms will still be pressed into service to rally the troops when, for example, the next legislature seeks to gut faculty participation in institutional governance. But, in the long run, these relics are likely to collapse under the weight of neoliberal cynicism regarding all verbiage that pretends to mask the omnipresent promptings of unvarnished self-interest.

On Wisconsin? (A Tragedy in One Act)

However lamentable if not deplorable, the fate of the American professoriate should not surprise us all that much when we consider its status within a neoliberal regime that yokes the research university to a political economy geared to capital accumulation within interdependent globalized markets that show little respect for national borders. Nor should we be overly surprised by the fate of the anachronistic traditions of shared governance when we recall that this regime’s bottom line turns in large measure on marginalization or elimination of unrationalized practices that restrain the rapid circulation of capital as well as the mobile reallocation of labor. Stripped of the patina of professionalism, much like occupational safety regulations, faculty participation in university and college governance, like tenure, is at best an expensive luxury and at worst an impediment that compromises the academy’s capacity to inculcate the flexible skills required of malleable human capital.

Given this bleak conclusion, as academic norms prescribe, perhaps I should end by asking what is to be done. But, aside from urging that analyses of the plight of the professoriate appreciate its political dimensions, I have no answer to that question. Rather than pretending to know what I do not, I want to close by asking what we stand to lose if we relinquish the ideal of the professional professoriate inherited from the Progressive era; and then I want to ask what costs we may incur if, instead, we cling to an ideal that compromises our ability to grasp the faculty’s present situation.

If we concede that the vision of professionalism informing Gerber’s narrative is a relic whose day has come and gone, there is indeed much we must surrender. The presuppositions inherent in the ideal of disinterested expertise exercised on behalf of the common good enable and invite certain kinds of criticisms that we will no longer be able to advance in good faith. No longer, for example, can we claim that academic work is “corrupted” when bought and sold like any other commodity in a capitalist economy. Nor can we claim that our labor is “deformed” when subordinated to bureaucratic managerial norms, including that of efficiency or, when inflected by market rationality, cost-effectiveness. Nor can we claim that the fruits of scholarly endeavor are “degraded” when twisted to the ends of state power. Each of these expressions of outrage is tacitly informed by representation of the professional professoriate as an agent of vocational expertise whose service is subject to compromise or conquest by that which is fundamentally alien. True, we may still choose to affirm the faculty’s “autonomy” as well as the institutional conditions that render it real. But, if we do so, we must acknowledge that the sense of this term is necessarily constituted by what it is not, just as the terms “day” and “night” each derive sense from their implicit reference to the other, and so we must regard the achievement of autonomy as a heteronomous and fragile accomplishment whose political character we deny at our peril.

And yet if we jettison the conception of autonomy that depends for its coherence on the professional ideal, arguably, we lose the familiar conceptual underpinnings, which, since the founding of the AAUP, have informed and justified much that we hold dear, including tenure, academic freedom, and the faculty’s title to participate in institutional governance. Today, after Foucault, that ideal’s representation of knowledge as apolitical appears naïve in its failure to acknowledge the necessary inter-implication of truth and power. And today, after Weber, that ideal’s representation of work as a calling appears implausible given rationalization’s relentless disenchantment of once-sacred values. If these are the essential normative ingredients of modern professionalism, but we no longer find them credible, either we must abandon the practices justified in the name of professionalism or find some other way to defend them.

Given these very real perils, it is tempting to do what we can to prop up the ideal of the professional professoriate even at the risk of hypocrisy. To see why this strategy is so seductive, recall that this ideal is deeply implicated in status differentials, and, in particular, with the self-identity of academics as something other than mere employees in a capitalist economy. Precisely that point was made by the AAUP in 1915 when, to extend a quotation cited earlier, it declared that any representation of the university “as an ordinary business venture, and of academic teaching as a purely private employment, manifests . . . a radical failure to apprehend the nature of the social function discharged by the professional scholar.” ^{Footnote 39} Here, the term “professional” references a specific occupation whose members, like lawyers and doctors, do or at least should enjoy considerable autonomy and authority in the workplace in virtue of their recognized vocational expertise.

How, though, might the sense as well as the work accomplished by this term mutate when the material conditions of that autonomy and authority are shredded and this occupation’s members are ever more regarded as and treated like mere job-holders? Under those circumstances, might it seem all the more urgent to affirm professional status, but now as a compensatory category whose avowal cloaks the fact that, for most, the lived reality of academic work no longer secures its relative prestige? Indeed, is it possible that it was Marco Rubio’s failure to demonstrate the respect due to professionals that explains, at least in part, the indignation expressed in Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere when, not long ago, he insisted that what the world needs now are fewer philosophers and more welders? ^{Footnote 40}

Affirmation of a status common to all faculty will merely obfuscate, however, if it occludes the stratifications internal to the contemporary academic workforce. As illustrated, for example, by the AAUP’s “one faculty” campaign, ^{Footnote 41} announcement of interests shared by all academics, however unintended, may mask the structural conflicts that render those at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum within higher education more foe than friend.

The import of these conflicts can be suggested by returning one last time to Wisconsin. In addition to rendering faculty members mere consultants in matters of institutional governance, the 2015 statute significantly eroded the tenure provisions previously embedded in state law by authorizing the Board of Regents to “lay off or terminate any faculty member when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring a program change.” ^{Footnote 42} Like Act 10, which four years earlier hobbled the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions in Wisconsin, ^{Footnote 43} this provision is but one more tactic within a comprehensive neoliberal campaign designed to remove constraints on the unfettered exercise of employer prerogative. Not surprisingly, the amended tenure provisions provoked a vigorous campaign to persuade the board to adopt policies aimed at reinstating the due process protections now stripped from state law. Yet even were this campaign to succeed, this victory would only advantage a privileged minority whose members already derive significant benefit from the offloading of undesirable tasks, such as grading undergraduate work, to those least able to object. I am not quite ready to conclude that this is a battle to be forsaken, but I do worry that a fixation on tenure may discourage us from imagining alternative strategies aimed at securing for all faculty members freedom from the exploitation inherent in at-will employment as well as that measure of workplace autonomy that is essential to good teaching and research. ^{Footnote 44}

Whether we are likely to prove able to think our way beyond the invidious distinctions that divide us within a neoliberal age is a question posed by Wendy Brown when she writes:

This is no doubt so, but, as presented here, this claim fails to acknowledge the meritocratic presuppositions, which, especially when afforded a neoliberal spin, explain why the contemporary drama of faculty within U.S. higher education is perhaps best framed as a tragedy.

Max Weber taught us that the project of modern professionalism is a key element within the more comprehensive dynamic of rationalization. As such, modern professionalism is committed to filling occupational positions not on the basis of charisma, tradition, or wealth, but on the basis of demonstrated cognitive accomplishment. There are no good reasons for thinking that the uber-profession that is the modern professoriate should or will remain immune to this meritocratic ideal, especially since this ideal draws much of its force from vocationalism’s assurance that hard work performed as an ascetic duty will be rewarded in this world. Indeed, given the indispensable role played by formal education in perpetuating the conviction that rewards are rationally distributed to those most deserving, we should be surprised if we were to learn that faculty members in the United States are not deeply invested in this individualizing fiction.

The neoliberal intensification of the myth of meritocracy, sometimes dubbed “responsibilization,” ^{Footnote 46} is manifest in the self-congratulatory confidence on the part of tenure-track and tenured faculty that they earned their positions and, although seldom uttered aloud, that those who fail in the so-called “job market” deserve their fate as well. Internalization of this central pillar of professional self-identity is yet another reason to suspect that Wolin was right to note the “reluctance of academics to admit that there are political stakes and determinants in matters of knowledge.” And that reluctance in turn is one more reason to dread the denouement foreshadowed by Gerber’s lament: “The ideal and practices of shared governance are not yet altogether dead.” ^{Footnote 47}