Back in September 2020, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Irene Mulvey, reported that since the start of the pandemic, membership in the professional organization, dedicated to protecting academic freedom and supporting faculty governance, had grown and that the AAUP had added or reactivated twenty-five chapters. To that index of resurging faculty interest in core university principles, we must add the as-yet-unquantified levels of activism that have sprung up on college campuses in recent months, in response to the pandemic as well as to the violence against African Americans that plagues the United States. For many of us in the profession who have long-standing interests in reflecting on the ills and promises of the university as an institution, hope at this moment has alternated with dread, solidarity with isolation. Perhaps it is already a commonplace to say that the disasters of the pandemic and racial violence share at least one thing: they have shined a bright light on the stark, at times infuriating distance between universities’ discourses on care and community, on the one hand, and, on the other, their concrete actions.

At my own university, that discourse was effusive even as the administration, through a subcontractor, laid off vulnerable food workers, mostly black and brown people, jettisoned and then rehired library staff members as if to make the point of labor's precarity, and suspended contributions to retirement accounts without even thinking to consult affected faculty members. When in November 2020 a local business paper interviewed our president concerning the unexpected budget surplus that Northwestern had seen during the pandemic and asked whether the university would rehire staff members, he simply could not answer in the vocabulary of care and concern. Wrong question but, more important, wrong audience. Instead of the language of care, he employed the jargon of corporate management to praise the “efficiency” that the pandemic had taught us (Marek), invoking a term that Bill Readings in The University in Ruins long ago understood as of a piece with that other keyword of the corporate university, excellence (21).

Universities’ handling of the COVID-19 emergency is not dissimilar, at the level of obfuscating language, to how they have addressed endemic racism. The confluence of the language of care and community with actions that create greater precarity and further strip authority from faculty members has only increased in the wake of national tragedies consequent to police violence. Again as in the case of COVID-19, activism by both faculty members and students has denounced the hollowness of this language since the beginning of the pandemic. On my own campus, students protested daily for weeks demanding that the university's police force be abolished (Sarraf and Schatsky). I have lost track of the number of departments and programs that have called out the inaction of our central administration—apart from the plentiful e-mails on official letterhead on the subject—with respect to institutional racism. An open letter condemning the university's inaction and demanding change was signed by over two hundred university faculty members (“Letter”).

What do universities’ inabilities to address structural racism and their management of the pandemic response have in common? Both point to a culture of administration that cannot deal with crisis in a way that puts the mission of education first and foremost. We have seen administrations prioritize their schools’ endowments, branding, and profits as if these took precedence over the university's educational mission. There has been no shortage of diagnoses of these ills, most recently in periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, certainly not known for anticorporate screeds. The Journal's prediction that in a decade tenure-line faculty could drop to as little as ten percent of the professoriat—from the already abysmal thirty percent today—should have all of us concerned about education in the research university (Belkin).

It has also been a moment during which the obstacles to faculty organizing and unity have become more visible, though I would argue that they have been plain for the eye to see for some time. After all, just like the administration, faculty members have been shaped by the last decades of austerity and underfunding of universities, which a group of specialists recently determined to have begun in 1978, and the economic downturn of that decade (Sommers et al.). The faculty culture of our particular moment, call it late capitalism, neoliberalism, or something else, is one of the chief obstacles to faculty members’ active and productive engagement in the future of the university, in favor of education and research. Far too many faculty members have understood themselves through a logic that our universities excel at disseminating. That logic rewards and seeks to reproduce research professors as mini start-ups—that is, professionals who build their brands through publishing articles and accruing accolades. Even when universities don't provide the support that allows their professors to do so, the ideal persists. At least in my own experience, and happily with notable exceptions, I have found that this is precisely the sort of professor least willing to speak up about the problems in the university's governance and culture.

So at this heady and also heartbreaking moment of activism around university campuses, it strikes me that the critical spirit that fuels it has to be brought to bear on how we as faculty members behave in and inhabit the university. When I think about activism in this context, I don't think of anything as radical or necessary as, say, protesting late into the night on the university president's front lawn, as students at my institution recently did. No, when I think about faculty members, and in particular those afforded the protections of tenure, I think much more of activism in terms of assuming responsibility for the university. I hope it's not a surprise that teaching is central to that responsibility, because, in my view, it is not simply another task we perform in universities. It is the university.

I've been thinking hard about the culture of the most privileged denizens of the American research university and thus of our profession: tenured faculty members, those fixtures against which the ills of precarity are most starkly visible. I must add a disclaimer: by no means do I think this culture is the driver of the corporatization at our institutions. It is merely a product of it. But it has shaped not just how many, not all, such faculty members relate to the university but also how they relate to others—tenured and untenured colleagues, non-tenure-line faculty members, students, and staff members—in ways that undermine the sorts of activism we're living. I focus on the culture of tenured faculty members then in the spirit of self-critique, toward thinking how that shrinking yet powerful group of professors might assume responsibilities that it has flouted in the last many years, much to the detriment of education.

My thinking on this topic has been shaped mostly by being in the bowels of the beast, as the great Cuban thinker José Martí would have said about another leviathan. For the past few years, I've been involved in organizing a chapter of the AAUP at my institution. For much longer than that, I've assumed administrative roles that have involved marshaling resources to teach literature and language, mostly to undergraduates but also to graduate students. What I've noticed is that while the institution insists that courses be “covered,” there is little directive on the need for those courses to be taught by a particular set of faculty members. While there are plenty of tenure-line faculty members who are deeply committed to teaching undergraduates, the institutional context tends to push them toward the courses that will most increase their productivity—that is, those that coincide with or at least naturally relate to areas of scholarly specialization. There are of course tenured faculty members who view graduate teaching as the only sort of pedagogy that they should be involved in, but they are few and far between. Whatever the attitude of individual faculty members, within the culture of the research university there is often a structural disconnect between most teaching and the notion of scholarship. I'm tempted to read the recent emphasis on undergraduate research at many institutions as a symptom of rather than a salve for this disconnect, insofar as it attempts to bring the sort of specialization that is typical of graduate school into the sphere of liberal arts curricula. At any rate, this disconnect is a naturalized, lived reality for many faculty members like me. It determines the very core of what we are professionally.

In view of this, the complaint that teaching is somehow detrimental or anathema to the “real” work of tenure-line faculty members does not originate in the delusions of grandeur we might less-than-generously impute to our colleagues. Unfortunately, I believe a reasonable analysis would conclude that, for example, a course introducing students to modern Latin American literature will likely slow a colleague's progress toward the publications necessary for tenure and promotion. A graduate course on the topic of that colleague's book might not. The leap from this circumstance to characterizing most teaching as an onerous professional hindrance is not very great. As a first step, then, tenured and tenure-line faculty members might simply identify as a problem that today teaching is more or less roundly deemphasized as a site for our professional development, despite often florid institutional assurances to the contrary. In ways that are at times flagrant, the culture of the research university encourages tenure-line faculty members to consider teaching as secondary, a task that must be attended to (but avoided if at all possible). I would bet that this readership is well aware of how the national media has transformed this culture, which ultimately is only a lived reality for very few faculty members, into a caricature of what we do in universities by bemoaning our cushy jobs and insignificant hours of work. Just as the response to right-wing media portrayals of freeloading professors should be based on an identification of the privatization-minded policies that usually animate them, so too should the estrangement of research and teaching be addressed through an understanding of the value and place assigned to each in the university's structure and culture. As that estrangement and the reasons for it become more visible, it is my hunch that it will become possible to understand not only how much a part of the problem we are but also how much a part of the solution we may be.

Working in administration, I began to realize that any solution to the problem I've described—but not only that one—lies in the transformation of tenure-line faculty members’ relationship to the university. I don't think it too grandiose an evocation to recall the Humboldtian ideal of the university professor who, besides embodying the union of teaching and research, also organized the university. While some of us have had the good fortune to work in positions that facilitate some part of that ideal, it is a far smaller proportion of the faculty than was the norm some fifty years ago. We all know how sharply the number of professional administrators has grown on our campuses of late. Let me hastily add that I understand that I run the risk of eliding the colossal differences between the nineteenth-century institution that Wilhelm von Humboldt imagined and the versions of it that we (I mean the people likely to read PMLA) dwell in today. If I invoke that ideal it is not to insist arbitrarily on the mere authority of research professors in their oversight of the university. Rather, it is to stress how such a figure's responsibility nowadays continues to lie in custodianship—that is, in proactively imagining how, despite corporatization, the ideal of the university might be reinvigorated for the present day.

The culture of teaching is a better place to start than most. Its hypotrophy as a core part of the tenure-line profile has been made possible by a set of complex circumstances and factors facing us as a profession. They are intimately tied to the working conditions of all faculty members—not just tenure-line—in the university. I signal four that have a direct impact on teaching and much more:

1. 1. the underfunding of public universities, and the concomitant shrinking of the tenure-line faculty corps (Belkin);

2. 2. the corporatization of both public and private universities, a dire consequence of which is the undermining or marginalization of faculty bodies of governance that could make decisions about the fates of these institutions;

3. 3. the overproduction of PhDs and the flooding of the market with labor ready-made for precarity; and

4. 4. the explosion, especially at the undergraduate level, of courses taught by non-tenure-line faculty members.

Points 3 and 4 are of course directly related to and feed into the reorganization of the university around lower-cost labor that nevertheless continues to deliver a very expensive product. It is a secret to no one that as faculty members have been allocated fewer resources, the cost of tuition has continued to rise. It seems at least plausible that many tenure-line faculty members at PhD-producing research universities have not fully thought through the implications of seeking to maintain or increase funding for graduate studies in the current climate. It is time that, as a group of university workers rather than as individual and individualized professors, we began to consider this. The surplus of humanities PhDs that graduate teaching and training help produce not only facilitates a labor pool with few prospects of achieving anything like fully funded tenure-track positions in a research university or college, it also contributes to the circumstances that allow undergraduate teaching to be cheaply replaced and thus, again, for research to be valued as the profession's highest goal. With so few tenure-line positions available and labor subsequently becoming even more precarious, the current pandemic has only made this reality starker.

Thinking in terms of points 1 and 2—that is, the neoliberalization of the university and the corporate dynamics centered on “flexibility,” “efficiency,” and “the brand” that now dictate much of what we ultimately are able to do in our schools (not to mention the many insidious ways in which corporatization has bled into the professoriat, including an emphasis on ever-increasing productivity)—it would seem incumbent upon us to revision ourselves not simply as scholars or teachers, or as scholar-teachers. It turns out that the ideal of bringing research faculty members into the classroom necessitates that those same faculty members also administer and organize the university. Ultimately, the urgency of the situation requires us to become, more than scholars who teach, producers of the university itself.

That challenge is less grandiose, and its solution much closer at hand, than it sounds. To administer and organize our institutions means, first and foremost, that research faculty members must insist on their activities within their classrooms as the core of the institution itself. No longer can we think of the formative function of the university vis-à-vis our students as secondary or onerous service. As a group of workers and humanists we've been too ready to understand our labor primarily in terms of textual authorship, rather than in terms of being producers of the university. Too much text, not enough institution. More subtly, we have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which research now does not return to revitalize teaching and has been severed in practical ways from its intimate ties to the classroom and pedagogy. A colleague of mine once confessed to dreaming of taking a position in which no teaching would be involved. But if that came to pass, wouldn't we become ghosts that haunt the ruins of the university?

Research is more often thought of as the luster of the brand of individual professors and by extension of their universities. It is an error to equate research with the university. The two are not equivalent, and their tacit conflation for the last many years in the minds of tenure-line faculty members has helped lead to our acquiescence to the current state of affairs, to our disengagement from governance and especially from a collective oversight of the political positionings, meanings, and impacts of the university in the broader society. The professor of Latin American literature and AAUP chapter officer Leslie Bary put it this way:

Bary's assessment is grim only if one ignores the call for a political and collective collegiality that is implicit in it.

In the case of my own efforts to shape my corner of the university, I'm teaching Latin American literature in the full light of the need to reconcile my privilege as a tenured professor with an awareness of my and our responsibilities to the institutions that still embody other possibilities for education and research than the ones we are currently living. At some point, maybe around the late 1970s or early 1980s, we were somehow hoodwinked into accepting that the university's intimate functionings were anathema to the paths of our research and teaching. We were persuaded either that administration should be entrusted to a cadre of professional administrators because professors simply didn't have the requisite skills and besides are otherwise engaged, or that those of us who did cross over to administer or even organize outside the administration were abandoning or betraying the research mission. Nothing could be further from the truth. The skill set needed to administer universities now should exactly not be the one that has led to co-optation by corporate logics, the proletarianization of most professorial labor, ballooning debt burdens among undergraduates, and contingency of non-tenure-track labor. The twin pandemics that we are living through have made it a simple thing to understand that the current organization and direction of the university must be made anew.