That’s long been the goal - gut the professoriate, put in easily replaceable contingent workers, and then you can put money into football and MBA programs… Then a liberal arts education can once again be reserved for the elite white class who can afford it rather than being part of a democratic society with actual social mobility and equity. Contingent instructors who can’t afford to teach less than a half dozen classes a semester doesn’t have time to produce much worthwhile scholarship that helps to improve society. And of course many students have come out of their public school K-12 education with a sense of hostility to their educators and carry that into college. Plus, they are being told that education is a “commodity” that they (or their parents) are paying for, and that we, as college instructors, simply exist to give them grades. We’ve become service sector workers who are not here to produce knowledge, but to help students get jobs.
So, I guess now we’re also expected to read our entire syllabus to our classes, word for word, or we’re “not doing our job properly”…
TLDR, we’re all fucked - and not just us useless college professors, either… I mean all of us. Because if the only people who can produce knowledge are the elite class, then nothing will ever change.
