FAScinating!

Today's NYT includes an article by Patricia Cohen titled: "On Campus, the 60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire." Go read - it's fascinating (or, well, read on, because it turns out that I've excerpted huge chunks below). The title sums up the main point, but basically, Cohen argues for a significant shift in campus culture as Baby Boomers retire and are replaced by 30-something* faculty - faculty who weren't  yet born when the Baby Boomers were protesting and rioting on their own college campuses. Having been on at least one campus undergoing that shift, I think she gets a lot of things absolutely right. Some points that stuck out for me:

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

ABSOLUTELY. Though I'd say it's more like the last 30 years.

A new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

This actually raises one of my criticisms of the article - I'd be curious to know how such a study - and Cohen more generally - defined "liberal," because I don't think most of the faculty of my generation are actually any less liberal than Boomer faculty. I think the significant divide is really in the second set of statistics, the role of "activism." My sense is that for a lot of Boomer faculty, being an activist and being a professor are part of the same cloth, whereas this is much less the case for junior faculty. Which Cohen also acknowledges:

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

(I did not know Barack Obama said that, but despite supporting that Baby Boomer Hillary, I heart him for saying it.)

It also struck me that the "decline" of liberals falls along disciplinary lines, which Cohen notes as well:

Changes in institutions of higher education themselves are reinforcing the generational shuffle. Health sciences, computer science, engineering and business — fields that have tended to attract a somewhat greater proportion of moderates and conservatives — have grown in importance and size compared with the more liberal social sciences and humanities, where many of the bitterest fights over curriculum and theory occurred.

And the next important bits:

At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers....And with more women in the ranks (nearly 40 percent of the total in 2005 compared with 17.3 percent in 1969), different sorts of issues like family-friendly benefits have been brought to the table.

YES. I would say that fewer people in American society overall are as "activist" as the Baby Boomers were (not going to try to tackle reasons why since that's a huge sticky mess), so it makes sense that faculty from later generations are not as activist. I don't know whether academia has become disproportionately less attractive to academics or not, but once one has made the choice to enter academia, I don't think the pressures of the profession today make combining professoring and activism as manageable as was the case in the 60s and 70s.

Cohen goes on to look at the careers/life experiences of two U of Wisconsin faculty, one (Olneck) aged 62 and about to retire, and one (Goldrick-Rab) aged 31 who is seeking tenure.

Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research.

Goldrick-Rab falls into the latter school.

“Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.”

As for professional concerns, hers are closer to home:

When Ms. Goldrick-Rab speaks of added pressures on her generation, she talks about being pregnant or taking care of her 17-month-old while trying to earn tenure. The lack of paid leave for mothers is high on her list of complaints about university life.

You all know I'm not a parent, but that sounds spot-on to me, based on academic friends and colleagues of my generation. She's certainly not alone:

At a conference titled “Generational Shockwaves,” sponsored in November by the TIAA-CREF Institute, Joan Girgus, a special assistant to the dean of faculty at Princeton, underscored how these sorts of concerns were increasingly on the minds of younger faculty members. Universities need to focus more on the “life” side of the work-life balance “because faculties historically were almost entirely male and the wives took care of the family side,” Ms. Girgus said. “I don’t think we can do that anymore.”

EXACTLY. I'm not knocking the Boomer generation of faculty who were so activist in so many ways and so traditional in others, but I will point out that the vast majority of Boomer faculty I've known are married men, whose wives often didn't work outside of the home or were underemployed for their level of education. That's not meant as a criticism of them, but just an acknowledgment that if faculty private lives have changed significantly, it's not surprising that junior faculty attitudes to the profession are different from those of their Boomer colleagues.

The next bit I found absolutely fascinating:

Ask Ms. Goldrick-Rab if she believes there is a gap between her generation and the boomers, and she immediately answers yes.

Mr. Olneck and Mr. Wright are more cautious. “Some of my closest colleagues are 25 years younger than I am and I feel absolutely no barrier of sensibility,” Mr. Wright said.

Um, yeah. Do you think the fact that Boomer faculty are evaluating the 30-something faculty might have something to do with that? I don't mean to accuse Boomers of being obtuse or complacent, but in the relationship between tenured Boomers and untenured 30-somethings, the balance of power isn't equal. Goldrick-Rab pointed it out earlier: senior faculty evaluate junior faculty. I'm not suggesting that senior faculty consciously set out to make junior faculty conform to their standards, nor that senior faculty aren't capable of recognizing a junior faculty member's own goals and standards for their work and evaluating that work accordingly. Of course Boomers and 30-somethings can genuinely be close friends. But I'd also argue that the Boomers have the luxury of overlooking the gap in a way that junior faculty can't.

That said, Wright has an important point:

For him, the institutional shifts outweigh any others: “I don’t think the big things have anything to do with generational change, but with financial pressures on education,” he said.

He's absolutely correct that when Boomer faculty entered academia, its economic situations/structures were very different than they are today. Boomer faculty have seen the erosion of tenure-track lines in favor of adjunct positions, for instance; 30-something faculty have always lived with this. My sense of the state institutions in which I've worked is that there was a time (early 80s-ish?) when they were flush with money, and those days have fallen away. (Conversely, some of the private institutions I've worked in struggled through those years and have only now managed to build up a significant financial cushion, often through making connections with non-academic institutions and individuals, and/or the growth of their technology/business side.) That said, I don't think that you can separate the generational gap from those changing economic pressures on education, as each generation is shaped by the economy they experience.

So, while I do wonder how exactly Cohen defines "liberal," I nonetheless think that she does a decent job of highlighting many of the differences between these two academic generations. What I also think is fascinating is that the article makes no mention of associate professors, that generation between the Boomers and the 30-somethings (who might not all be associates, of course, but it's the simplest label). When quoting the study of faculty political affiliations mentioned above, Cohen ignores the 35-50-year-olds between the new faculty and the old. I suppose this isn't all that surprising because in my experience, there seem to be far fewer of them - that academic lost generation of the lucky few who got jobs in the 80s and early 90s when, filled with academics from the late 60s and early 70s, few universities were hiring. On the one hand, this middle generation probably presents less of a stark contrast to either the Boomers or the 30-somethings, and thus makes for a much less interesting article. On the other hand, I'd argue that if my experience is at all typical - if it is the case that there are many fewer 35-50-year-old profs than <35- or >50-year-olds - then the generation gap between the Boomers and the 30-somethings really is the one that most affects todays campuses.

Anyway. What do you think? Does the generation gap that Cohen describes make sense to you, or has your experience been different?

*I'm ducking the whole Gen-X/Y/Millenial brouhaha by labeling this generation "30-something," even though yes, there are 20-somethings on the tenure-track, though probably not many true Millenials out there yet. I have no problem with the Gen-X label myself, but such labels carry baggage. Of course, so too does "Baby Boomer," but that label's been around much longer, so I'm going to use it regardless.

Comments

[PhilosopherP]

Like many other things, I think the generational divide between the Boomers and those of us younger folks is coming to a head in academia.

The thing is, the boomers are so accustomed to being the majority that when another group actually gains some voice, they are more than a little disturbed.

Of course, I saw the Obama/Clinton conflicts as a generational thing as well...

[servetus]

well, you know for boomers, anyone who is not out on the barricades is not really a liberal. if you don't protest, you're not left enough.

Sound bitter much? I am so sick of how the boomers make Generation X/Y out to be politically inert. Give me a break.

[Matt Gabriele]

Thanks for bringing this article up, New Kid. It's actually quite insightful, I think, given the little experience I've had on campus (and anecdotes from friends elsewhere).

It also, I think, tangentially, ties into a discussion we're having at Modern Medieval about "applied medievalism." Although we're talking about "outreach" there, that's a part of "activism" more generally.

[kfluff]

NK---you wrote a post about the generational divide maybe a year ago? Two years ago? It was the first thing I'd read that spoke to my experiences as a new faculty member. Things haven't changed at my campus---if anything, they're worse as more new faculty members are hired. I'd like to see someone discuss the role of administration here as well, as I think it's a crucial unacknowledged part of the "psychodrama" going on at many institutions. My sense is that the Boomers had contentious relationships with admin, and were required to do a good deal of organizing to address their concerns. There can be a sense of suspicion that remains and colors interactions btw. faculty and admin. 30-somethings may not have the same relationship to the administration at all, whether because of the changing structure of higher ed (hello, assessment!), or economics, etc. In my experience, to acknowledge any possible logic in the admin position is to be perceived as a complacent tool.

Sorry for the long-windedness here!!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

kfluff, I think that's absolutely right! At least at one of my previous jobs, "governance" was a sacred cow for sr faculty that it just wasn't for jr faculty, for whom "governance" often meant doing a lot of extra work in areas in which we had no training. And yeah, seeing logic in any admin positions was suspect, definitely.

[maggiemay]

I think this article is so interesting, and definitely resonates with my own experiences in academia... I think it's particularly acute in women's studies programs, where one is dealing with Boomer vs. Gen X/Y feminists.

Thanks for posting and writing about this.

[Susan]

Just wonder (as someone who is a boomer) whether there is a gender dimension? I.e. female boomers have a somewhat different take than do male boomers?

I also think that commitment to governance comes with time -- you begin to see where the corporate university would take us, and faculty governance seems more important.

I certainly have had colleagues who saw administration as "the enemy", but I tend to just think there are structural roles that administrators have that necessarily are different from faculty roles. And we each need to do our bit.

[Janice]

NK, I read the article and thought it was very interesting but more than a bit clueless about how campus environments have changed over the last forty years (and, to be honest, that's the time frame we're talking about going from 60s grad student days to retired professors today).

The demographics have changed, the expectations for hiring and tenure have changed, the society has changed -- to expect today's new hires to look like or react like those people hired in the 60s would be strange. And I don't think that the approaches of the 60s and 70s are necessarily the best for today: whether in seeking social justice or performing our academic duties.

[lettriste]

NK, so glad you posted about this!

Given the sheer difficulty of GETTING a tt-job, GenX faculty might indeed refrain from storming the barricades. Perhaps, as you point out, this reflects the influx of women in the academy; i.e., when you're pregnant, have a 17 month old, receive no paid leave, and havelooming tenure requirements, you don't have a lot of energy leftover for public demonstrating.

I think also that, having been an adjunct, I fear that my so far untenured job could be taken away at any time. The academy looks ENTIRELY different now than it did when Boomers first got their jobs. Protesting Walgreen's (as the article points out some tenured Boomers did) struck me as an activity available only to those with time and tenure.

The other thing, though, and this is just my frustration generally with demography, is that a lot of Boomer "protesting" (while accomplishing great things) also made a rather large and self-indulgent social and institutional mess. Some of that angry energy could have been, could still be, focused towards issues of contingent labor. And maybe we'd all be in a different boat, now.

[Dr. Crazy]

To some extent I think there's a gender dimension, but I don't think that it's radically different for male and female 30-somethings in the professoriate , whereas I do think that there is a radical difference generationally. The reality is that the ramped up tenure requirements are the same for everyone, the extended period of apprenticeship is extended for everyone (whether through post-docs or adjuncting), and the house prices are higher for everyone - whether one is single/partnered, male or female. I've got colleagues who've been at my institution for 20 years who got hired without publications, who got tenure without publications, who were able to buy a house in moderately desirable areas without an influx of cash from parents or a spouse in a high-earning field without living like they were in graduate school for years in order to save for a down payment. The material reality of the profession - both economic and in terms of job expectations - is just a lot different now than what it was even in the 80s, let alone in the 60s.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I agree, Dr. Crazy, but I'm sure there are/were significant differences between the experiences of Baby Boomer male and female faculty. For one thing, I think there are many more female faculty now than among the Boomers, which probably made it harder for Boomer women than 30-somethings, in some respects. For instance, I know many more Boomer women faculty who decided not to have kids because they didn't feel they could do kids and a career, than I do 30-somethings (most of whom want both), or than male Boomers, many of whom had kids because they had SAH-wives. That doesn't always make for a simple relationship between 30-somethings and Boomer women, of course - I also take Maggie's point about the difference between Boomer and 30-something feminisms - I've definitely seen that.

I will say that fewer of the women Boomers I've known have touted the importance of ACTIVISM!!! than the men. But when I think about it, in my experience I've seen a difference between women Boomers at big research places and those at small schools, maybe due to a focus on research rather than on the school community as a whole?

Janice, I don't think the point of the article was to address all those things - but I guess the reason why it resonated with me is that of course all those changes have taken place, but nonetheless, at least in some places, the Boomer faculty have dominated despite those changes. So therefore while the 30-somethings are kind of the product of a whole series of changes, I still think there is (or can be) a stark difference between Boomer/30-something faculty, without implying that campus hasn't changed since the Boomers. I didn't take it as suggesting new faculty should be like the Boomers. (Yeah, something more in-depth would have addressed the changes you mention, but I was just so struck that an article addresses the generation gap at all!)

Lettriste, the protesting Walgreens kind of got me, too. And I agree about the issue of contingent labor.

Susan, I agree that commitment to governance comes over time - especially because in some institutions, jr faculty don't really have any opportunity to participate until tenured anyway (I've been at a place like that, and I've been at a place where all faculty contributed equally from the start, except on things like T&P, that is). But I do think that sometimes sr Boomer faculty commitment to governance takes on a "you can't trust the establishment" stance that 30-somethings just don't feel, since we (like many of our students) are pretty good with the establishment (though this varies, I think, with institutional culture. Rural Utopia is EXTREMELY invested in faculty governance, which is overall a good thing, but the problem is that it's such an understaffed institution that governance becomes a way to work the faculty even harder. But it's an institution in which I have a hard time seeing faculty governance really being overthrown, for a whole range of cultural reasons, despite sr faculty concerns about the "apathy" of jr faculty. Conversely, governance at Former College was extremely top down, so whatever your commitment to governance, it was hard to do much about anything anyway. But then, I don't think most of the Boomers at Former College were out protesting in the 60s, anyway - it wasn't that kind of place!)

[Susan]

My favorite line in the article was this one: "In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce." That scarcity of info didn't stop a whole lot of speculating based on the one survey, and I thought the comparison of the two sociologists was interesting--definitely most interesting on the gender/family issues--but also somewhat limited. There are plenty of younger sociologists at the two schools I have recently taught at doing qualitative studies much like the research the older sociologist does.

I do think there have been some huge, huge changes in universities that shape the ways faculty experience their careers, but the political ideology seems to explain only a small part of that. I wish the article had done some of the work that so many of the comments here are doing in terms of the gender analysis.

[Winifred]

My graduate department has been ripped apart by conflicts between Boomer faculty and those from this missing middle generation (faculty in their 40s). Many of the social, academic, and cultural issues at play during this division resemble the ones discussed in this article. Indeed, faculty members that grew up in the 70s seemed to have less patience/more annoyance with the Boomers.

[Neogrammarian]

I note acidly that, in classic NYT fashion, this article ignores entirely the fact that this issue has already been raised, in exploring the rift between 2nd and 3rd Wave feminists. 2nd Wavers claim that we aren't activist, 3rd Wavers claim right back that the landscape has changed, and that we work towards different issues, using different methods.

It's a lovely, ready-made analogy that has its own developing critical literature, and Cohen couldn't be bothered to read it..oh, wait, because it would argue against her thesis that Xer profs are apolitical or moderate.

Sorry. The NYT often irritates me.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

This is a typically great post, NK -- I think my comment will be long, though, because I'm both a Boomer (just) AND junior faculty, so I think maybe the weirdness of some of my experiences can be partly explained by some of the things you've mentioned here...