Teaching Jobs Vanish of Their Own Will

There’s a problem with some of the language used to describe vanishing tenure-track and full-time jobs. Articles describing the problem, like today’s “The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job” at InsideHigherEd, tend to obscure the agency behind these “disappearing” jobs; for example, the author writes that new data shows “how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared.” Here’s another one: “tenured and tenure-track faculty members went from being a slight majority to less than 40 percent of faculty members.” In both cases tenured faculty who exist only in the realm of possibility will themselves into extinction.
        Then there are the damned statistics that make the subject of the article. Yes, the numbers in the article’s chart show an increase in faculty and a decrease in tenured faculty, but the percentage differences, a few percent here and there, do a poor job of illustrating the problem because there’s no indication of the dramatic increase in enrollments during the time period the chart covers. (Perhaps a better method would have presented the data in terms of student-teacher ratios.)
        In both cases the seeming objectivity masks a (willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting) political agenda. To address increasing enrollments might suggest that wider access to a bachelor’s degree is a problem. To describe the real agents behind those “disappearing jobs” would require pointing fingers at state and federal education policies, the colleges’ budget allocation decisions, and finally to the faculties who do or do not attempt to redress the problem of underpaid teachers with little job security and few, if any, benefits.
        These are issues that should be addressed.
        If you are a faculty member at an institution granting a PhD in English, how much do you think your PhD is worth? Is it worth the $28,000 a year one state university offers for a 4/4 one-year appointment that comes with no benefits? That institution specifies a PhD as a requirement. How many graduate students should you admit? How many can get a job that will pay the loans necessary to get that PhD? Is teaching a good way to learn to be a scholar? How much teaching?
        If you are admitting students for a undergraduate degree and charging them an ever-increasing tuition, what sort of quality of education should you offer them? How good a job can a person with 120 other composition students do? Would you expect that person to channel a large portion of their energy into finding a job that pays more than $28,000 a year?
        I’ve loaded these questions to carry just the sort of *bang* side-stepped by articles like “The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job.” They are tricky, even explosive, as my rhetoric suggests. There are many more questions, and there are many more ways to ask them. And any way would be better than pretending that faculties are throwing themselves off cliffs like so many lemmings. Rather, we would do well to remember that in one Disney nature film, the crew standing off-camera herded lemmings off a cliff to provide the illusion that lemmings are self-destructive.

Follow-up:
Greg Bales researched the numbers and compiled a chart which shows that non-tenure hires precisely track with increasing enrollments.