In Need of Remedial Economics?

Nothing is quite so predictable as liberal/left responses to employment statistics. It's always a failure in political policy, not a matter of economics. For instance, in UC Berkeley's report on the declining number of women on university faculty, the last question to occur was the one should strike a serious analyst first. Why do an increasing number of female professors, like male undergraduates, find it unprofitable to be at university? Instead, Berkeley's queries are the usual litany, quoting from the report :

"• to analyze the salaries and the proportion of other university resources provided to women faculty;

• to work toward a faculty that reflects the diversity of the student body;

• to reconvene in about a year 'to share the specific initiatives we have undertaken to achieve these objectives;'

• to 'recognize that this challenge will require significant review of, and potentially significant change in, the procedures within each university, and within the scientific and engineering establishments as a whole.'"

In other words, it's a diversity issue, not one of profitability, monetary or otherwise, for women who might have worked at Berkeley or at any other university. As 55-60% of undergraduates in most universities are female, does this mean that 55-60% of the faculty should be women? And is the absence of that ratio why women are increasingly looking elsewhere for work? Or might it have something to do with a totally different economic issue?

For instance, the contracts that tenured full-timers in universities hold make it nearly impossible for universities to hire new faculty except as adjuncts. Why is that? The contracts of tenured full-time faculty restrict teaching hours, and uphold rates per-credit-hour-taught at double or triple what adjuncts can expect in a free market. Not surprisingly, university hiring is no different from anybody else's. If courses in Greek or introductory calculus can be taught by an adjunct for $3,000 per term, what sane personnel director would hire a full-timer at $60,000 + benefits a year? A consequence of this is that the male/female ratio of tenured faculty of thirty years ago has scarcely changed. To truly address male/female equity, in fact, both tenure and contracted employment of university professors would have to end, with adjuncts filling out the entire schedule.

Actually, at New York University, which is not untypical, this is close to being so now. At last reports, 90% of the faculty taught as adjuncts. It is likely that as full-timers retire at NYU, that ratio will approach 100%, with only the rare "star" professor awarded a contract. One result of that is that the UAW has organized adjuncts at NYU!

The only lesson that professors ought to learn is from basic economics, one that Mark Twain understood as he observed the astonishing decline in salary for riverboat pilots after the Civil War. He had been paid close to $20,000 a year, a perfectly fabulous sum in the late 1850s, when he was active as a riverboat pilot, because there was no competition. When shippers colluded with Congress to sponsor railroads parallelling the Mississippi, riverboat pilot salaries shrank to little more than those of freight handlers. Similarly, with the vast oversupply of professorial candidates, it should be no surprise that many would find the reduced status and wealth from university teaching sufficient cause to seek careers elsewhere.

Luther