Permanent universities, temporary teachers

The people who do most of the teaching are the ones least able to speak.

Universities are built to look permanent. There is a foundation stone, usually unveiled by someone important, and a name in brass above the gate. The buildings are expected to outlast everyone inside them. What nobody unveils is the arrangement under which the teaching gets done, which has been designed, with equal care, to be temporary.
Walk the corridor of almost any department at the start of a semester and you can read that arrangement without asking a question. One door carries a row of nameplates: professor, chairperson, convener of this committee, director of that centre, and beneath them the line that has become a genre in itself, “additional charge”. Another room has no door at all, only a shared table and a young person with a register who will teach four sections this term and be told in January whether there will be a fifth. The first holds power and teaches little. The second teaches a great deal and holds none.
The second person is called visiting faculty. The phrase once meant something dignified: a judge, a journalist, a practising translator coming in from outside to give students what no syllabus can, which is the knowledge of practice. Many universities have kept the phrase and reversed the substance. In more departments than anyone likes to admit, the visitor is now the home team: a graduate of the same department, a year or two out, who has never taught and sometimes never worked in the field. There was no advertisement. No panel of subject specialists met. There was a recommendation, a phone call, a head of department who remembered a pleasant student. I am not saying this happens everywhere. I am saying the complaint reaches us from too many campuses, in too similar a voice, to be filed under coincidence.
Why is it done? Rarely from villainy. A head of department with unchecked power over hiring will drift towards people he knows, as water drifts downhill, and will find a respectable reason for each choice. But the arrangement has its own logic, and it is worth stating plainly. An experienced practitioner has views on how a course should be run, conditions under which she will work, and the one freedom a manager finds most inconvenient, which is the freedom to refuse. A fresh graduate has none of these. She is cheap because she has no market to measure herself against. She is agreeable because she has just been chosen. And she is grateful, which is the hardest currency an institution can hold, for it does not depreciate and nobody audits it. A right can be claimed. A favour can only be repaid.
Repayment comes in many denominations. Administrative work that appears in no contract. Errands that sit somewhere between courtesy and service. Loyalty when loyalty is useful, silence when silence is. Where the person who grants the favour also holds every other kind of power over the person who owes it, the price can climb beyond anything a decent institution should permit, and it climbs fastest for women. A young woman whose next contract depends on one man’s approval has little room to refuse, and nowhere obvious to take a complaint when the person she would complain to is the person she would complain about. I can say no more than I can prove. I cannot, in conscience, leave the sentence out.
Now follow the teaching upward, or rather watch it leave. As scholars rise, their classes thin out and their titles thicken. Each committee carries a little status, often a little allowance, and always a reason to be elsewhere at ten on a Tuesday. Some of that work is real, and someone has to do it. But the teaching does not vanish. It travels down the ranks like a bucket along a fire line until it comes to rest with whoever is cheapest, least experienced and least protected. The result is an inverted pyramid: those who know the most teach the least, and those who know the least teach the most.
The bill goes to a father who paid the full fee believing he was buying the best minds the university had. What his daughter often receives is its cheapest labour. Nobody lied to him. The fee receipt simply says a little less than it implies.
For the lecturer there is a second pressure, and it deserves its modern name. Like any gig worker she is judged twice: once by a pay slip that cannot be relied upon, and again by ratings that can end it. Her renewal turns, in some measure, on how students score her and how her head regards her. Unlike the driver’s app, this algorithm has a human face and no appeals procedure. The effects are easy to predict and hard to prove, which is how self-censorship works. Marks drift upward. Hard questions soften. The subjects that most needed an honest teacher, gender, religion, language, the contested corners of history, migrate to the margins of the course outline. Nobody orders silence. A censor is unnecessary where a renewal letter does his work.
Fairness requires the other side. Not every senior professor is in love with committees; some are buried under them. Not every young hire is a weak teacher, and a few bring a freshness their elders have lost. Permanent faculty are not free either, exposed as they are to pressure of their own, to appointments that follow factions, to questions that are dangerous for them too. None of this exonerates the arrangement. It sharpens the charge. Courage is already unevenly distributed in the university, and insecurity levies a tax on it, paid hardest by those with least to pay it with. The fault lies neither in youth nor in seniority. It lies in discretion without accountability: the power to hire, renew and withhold, vested in one person who answers to no one.
The remedies cost less than the problem. Every visiting post advertised openly. A panel of subject specialists to choose. Published criteria. Committee work tied to teaching, so that the senior scholar is first in the classroom and not last. Renewal decided by peers rather than by one person’s mood. A written annual contract, with a route for complaint that does not run through the person being complained about. Paid vacations and a real path to permanent appointment will cost money and can follow. The rest costs nothing but will, and could begin on Monday.
A university is supposed to be the one institution that treats questions as its business. What does it teach when its own teachers dare not ask them? That advancement comes through proximity. That those who can give are not to be questioned. That a job is a favour, and so, in time, is knowledge. The gate will keep its brass name for a century. The harder question is whether anyone inside will still be free enough to say what the name stands for.