Fireside this week! I am spinning up to write a Teaching Paradox series on Imperator later this week, but not quite ready to get started yet. I’m also thinking, perhaps before that, of doing a short post or set of posts on the organization of non-state ‘tribal’ societies in pre-Roman western Europe, looking at one set of ways people can organize themselves in the absence of states. Finally, I want to note that I haven’t decided quite yet, but I may end up pulling the trigger on taking a month off of the blog later this year (perhaps August?) to help me hit my goals in getting the book project done; I’ll keep you all informed of that as it goes.
For this week’s musing, I realize that of all of the ‘how does academia work’ explainers I’ve done, one topic I’ve never really dealt with except in passing is the structure of a normal academic department. This is one of those systems that is often invisible to undergraduate students (and is almost never explained) so it seems worth explaining the basics. As always with this explainers, this is particularly about how this works in the United States’ academic system; other countries often have their academia differently structured. Also, by necessity, I am writing this mostly from the perspective of the bottom of the hierarchy looking up, because that’s where I’ve always been.
The first thing to understand is that the structure of academic departments follow from the university’s original structure as a college – as in a body of colleagues – and so academic departments have almost guild-like organization, where there is a core membership which gets to make decisions and then many peripheral members who may or may not be part of the department, but often have little to no role in directing the department.
The core of any academic department are its tenure-track faculty. In American universities, these generally break up into three-and-a-half ranks: assistant professors are pre-tenure professors and in theory the most junior permanent faculty. After about half a decade they can be promoted to associate professor, the first post-tenure rank. An assistant professor denied tenure is effectively fired, whereas by contrast one can stay an associate professor effectively forever. However, by continuing to produce scholarly achievements – different schools will define this differently – associate professors can be promoted to ‘full’ professor. Finally, the ‘half’ rank on the topic are distinguished professors, who will often be the something-something chair of such-and-such; these are essentially full professors with an extra pay-bump.
As you might imagine, a crucial question of department governance is the decision to either promote or not promote at each of these stages. This is done by a ‘tenure committee,’ generally composed of roughly five members, all of whom are tenured, generally all from within the department in question, although in the case of interdisciplinary candidates and such there are sometimes one or two members from other departments. Universities have different rules for composition, but usually a set number of members (often two of five) are to be associate professors and the remainder to be full professors. Frequently, at least one member and the chair of the committee are selected by the Dean of the school in question. Technically, these committees do not make final decisions, but rather merely forward recommendations to the Dean of the school and the trustees or governing board of the university, which make final decisions. In practice, the recommendations of committees almost always hold. Note that departments do not have a single tenure committee, but rather compose a unique committee for each assistant professor going up for tenure.
The rest of the department governance is formed out of these tenure-line faculty, generally speaking. The most important role is department chair, also sometimes called a department head, who leads the department and acts as a bridge between it and upper-level university administration. In theory, the chair is the ‘boss’ of the department, but in practice the position is more administrative: the chair can’t really ‘fire’ anyone, after all – though through that administration it still wields a fair bit of power. That said, good department chairs generally function more like a ‘team captain’ than a boss. Department chairs are generally elected by the tenure-line faculty in the department, with only tenured members (or in some cases, only full professors) being eligible to run; they usually serve for several years. That said, because the job is quite onerous, in a lot of cases, faculty actively try to avoid it. While the department chair handles day-to-day questions of administration, larger decisions are often voted on by the department faculty (which is to say, tenure-line faculty).
On the other hand, a recent trend in university management is for the upper-level university administration to enforce ‘outside hires’ for department chairs, compelling departments to – rather than electing a new chair from within – conduct a full job search to hire an outside candidate. To be frank, it is hard not to conclude that the reason for this is that enforcing these sorts of hires breaks up faculty solidarity and renders departments more compliant to university administration policies. You will thus be unsurprised to learn that I think this is a bad, self-serving policy offered by university administrators which ought to be resisted by the faculty.
In addition to the department chair, the department selects, through various means (sometimes election, but frequently through rotation as these posts are often considered something of an imposition) a set of key department officers. The two most common are a Director of Graduate Studies (DGS, pronounced ‘dee-gee-ess’ – in places with graduate programs, of course) and a Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUGS, pronounced either ‘dee-you-gee-ess’ or simply ‘dugs’). The DUGS’ job is to make sure all of the undergraduate majors are proceeding towards completion and to act as a point-of-contact and advisor for undergraduates. The DGS acts as a sort of advisor-of-last-resort (particularly to field complaints) for graduate students, but also often has the job of assigning graduate teaching assistants and instructors. Both positions involve a lot of paper-work and time consuming administration, but often don’t come with the same extra-pay or course releases as department chair. The DGS is generally a senior faculty member,1 but sometimes the DUGS may be more junior. Large departments may also have an additional ‘undergraduate advisor‘ post to split the workload of the DUGS and this latter post is often given to quite junior faculty, including in some cases to teaching-track (permanent, non-tenure line) faculty, which rather speaks to how little most tenure-line faculty want to do it.
In addition to those standard department officers, you may see others. Large departments often have an ‘assistant’ or ‘associate’ chair who shares duties with the department chair. Departments with an active honors program typically have a faculty member who directs the honors program. The same is often true for departments that have attached centers or programs they run. You also see departments with a departmental officer in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion.2 My PhD department also had a ‘director of graduate placement’ whose job was to prepare graduate students for the academic job market, though my sense is that this isn’t typical.3
So you have the core of the department: an elected chair along with several department officers, including a DGS and DUGS, who handle the day-to-day operation of the department, in line with policy either handed down from the college or decided upon by the department (tenured) faculty collectively. So who else is in a department?
The first thing to note is department staff, the full-time administrators who handle the logistics of the department: scheduling courses, processing HR paperwork, booking rooms, accounting and so on. Smaller departments will often have only one of these (termed a ‘department manager’ or ‘business manager’) but in larger departments that department manager will have staff. Typically the first role split off is ‘student services’ which may in turn in very large departments be subdivided into a ‘graduate coordinator’ and an ‘undergraduate coordinator,’ staff who handle course-scheduling, major and graduation requirements, student questions and complaints and all the related paperwork. If you are a student learn who this is in your department, because departmental staff can be incredibly helpful in navigating the bureaucracy of the university. Also, the people who work in student services tend to do so because they like students, so they usually want to be helpful. Be nice to them – indeed, ‘be nice to all of the staff’ is probably the single best advice I could give to any student or faculty member.
In very large departments, you may also see ‘accounting’ split off as a separate role (at this point, the department manager is primarily doing management and HR). I’ve also seen departments where the chair has a dedicated administrative assistant or the staff collectively do (or both). Staff usually also includes a squad of ‘work studies‘ – undergraduates doing part-time work for the university to help defray the costs of their education. Work studies are thus undergraduates, but may do a lot of the less specialized work (copies, printing, manpower for event hosting, sorting, collating and so on). As a rule, staff do not have a de jure role in department governance, and instead carry out policy decided on by the faculty and chair. In practice, only a very foolish chair would not consult their staff on such decisions, since the staff will almost always have much deeper insight into the technical and administrative challenges plans may pose.
In addition to staff, we have non-tenure-line faculty, be they permanent non-tenure-line (‘teaching track’) faculty or non-permanent (‘adjunct’) faculty. By and large, these teachers are excluded from the governance of the department; they are not typically consulted about such decisions (unlike staff) and to be frank are often not even informed of such decisions. I don’t want to turn this post into one more discussion of the plight of the adjunct, but I will say that generally I have found that most departments largely exclude their adjunct instructors from the collegiality of the department, often to an almost baroque degree. This is bad, both from an ethical standpoint, but also for the department and its students and also for the faculty writ large, in the former case because it is harder for an adjunct barely integrated into a department to provide a gateway for enthusiastic students to become majors and in the latter case because it is impossible to build labor-solidarity in a field if two-thirds of it are treated as academic serfs.
More fully integrated are a department’s graduate students, if it has any, though the graduate student role in department governance is typically as observers rather than participants. Often, for instance, you might have a single graduate student on faculty committees acting as an observer. It is not unheard of, for instance, for there to be a graduate student member on hiring committees, though of course if they have a vote, they are often expected to defer to the faculty members and do so. A major distinction among the graduate students are funded vs. unfunded students. Many graduate programs admit graduate students with funding, where the graduate student acts as a research, lab or teaching assistant in exchange for tuition remission and a stipend; in this case such students are, in practice, employees of the department (albeit very junior ones), as much as students. The departments I have been in all tended to express some form of the moral vision that graduate students were ‘junior colleagues’ and thus ought to be involved in the department; it is striking how this attitude does not extend to adjuncts. Departments with large graduate programs often have some sort of association for the graduate students, with its own elected officers, which speaks for the graduate students collectively.
Then, of course, you have the undergraduate students, in particular the department’s majors (that is, students majoring in one of the department’s subjects). Like graduate students, majors tend to be viewed very much as part of the department community, though obviously they have no role in governance. As noted above, most departments will have departmental officers (the DUGS, etc.) whose role is to help shepherd undergraduate majors through the department. Departments, especially in the humanities, are also keenly aware that their continued existence depends on maintaining a certain number of majors4 and so undergraduate majors matter quite a bit.
In theory, I don’t think this structure is necessarily bad: it is actually rather fitting for a workplace team that is essentially a body of experts all working more or less independently. The obvious problem, however, is that this structure is not designed for a department with large numbers of non-tenure-track faculty. Having a significant chunk of the teaching faculty essentially excluded from department governance (and also paid less and kept precarious) breaks the fundamental strength of this organizational model. Alas, that is what is being done to our departments, to the disadvantage of professors, adjuncts and students all alike.
On to recommendations!
On a strategy and foreign policy note, I thought this latest Net Assessment podcast over at War on the Rocks on the nature of a US strategy of competition with China was useful and thought provoking. The Net Assessment group tends to be a lot more sharply critical of administration policy (as true of this one as the previous administration) than I might be, given the constraints, but I think that criticism has value in forcing us to think in the big picture – what are we doing here? – beyond this or that crisis or smaller-scale decision. For what it is worth, I favor an approach of what I might call ‘managed competition,’ where the key goal is avoiding an open conflict without surrendering the positions of key US allies in the Pacific, indefinitely if necessary.
Also over at War on the Rocks, Yaniv Voller writes on the likely role of hamulas or clans in the organization of post-war Gaza. I’ve been working on non-state systems of organization in pre-Roman Gaul and Spain (which are larger scale ‘tribal,’ rather than clan-based) so the assessment of modern systems of non-state organization is interesting to me. It’s a useful reminder that in much of the world, state institutions are weak or non-existent and non-state institutions fill that gap. For my own part, however, I question the capability of non-state institutions to sustain a population as large as Gaza in the long-term; there’s a reason urbanization and states tend to go together.
We also just got another edition of Pasts Imperfect, which is well worth your time, especially for both for the interesting discussion of eclipse prediction in the ancient world by Philip Thibodeau and the forward-looking glance at John Ma’s soon to appear new book on the Greek polis: Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. That book comes out next month and I confess I am giddy with excitement to read it.
For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to fudge my normal price limits and be honest with you that the book in question is expensive (around $80 US right now, so this might be one to get from the library), so with that caveat in advance, I’m going to recommend John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). I fudge my price rule because this is one of those books that, once recommended to me (at the start of my dissertation work), became foundational to my own thinking about the past. Essentially, Landers sets out to trace the creation of state and military power from their fundamental energy inputs. He thus begins with the two sources of energy available to pre-industrial societies: agriculture (the field) and burning fuel for heat (the forge), though of course the end-point of his analysis is the battlefield and the forge as a producer of military assets.
Landers opens (after his introduction, largely a matter of definitions) with a brief demographic primer, setting the ground for his main focus, which is how energy moves in these pre-industrial societies. As he notes, the vast majority of energy pre-industrial societies could use was ‘organic’ in nature, that is it was either grown in fields or produced from felled trees being burned as wood fuel. This ‘organic economy’ was the foundation of everything else and was typified by low productivity, which in turn conditions everything else. Once produced, energy – in the form of people, food, wood and so on – moves through a society not in terms of physical space but ‘demographic space,’ which is to say through the network of roads, trade relationships, shipping lanes and political channels: a human-created and ever-shifting terrain laid over the physical space.
That foundation laid, Landers moves to discuss military technology before getting on to his third part on state power and control. I should note that Landers’ examples and thinking here effectively begin with Roman Europe and run through the early modern period, but the early modern period is the focus. He does not stray much outside of Europe (as the title implies, though he does spend a fair amount of attention on the Byzantine Empire) but he also doesn’t dig into the pre-Roman period much. Landers’ story is essentially a story about states. His concern here is in how states harness the products of that organic economy in order to produce state power. Finally, Landers turns to the impacts of this system on military activity itself, on the way armies are raised, fed and supplied and how states manage those processes. The fundamental assumption behind the analysis, of course, is that while there are clear differences by era and system, the basic foundation of the organic economy changes only very slowly through this entire period (c. 150BC-1700AD is about how I’d define his range) meaning that all of these states and systems are built on the same basis.
I won’t bury the caveats: this is not a particularly easy book to read, though it is also not teeth-clenchingly hard. Landers can be quite clear and direct when dealing with concrete realities, but when he has to define abstract terms (like ‘demographic space’) sometimes struggles to do so very clearly. It’s not academic language that gets in the way, but the complexity of concepts. Still, this can be quite a dense book. Landers also assumes you already have a broad familiarity with with European history in the period; his examples are not generally given a lot of context. That said, if you are willing to accept that his examples show what he says, you can generally keep moving without becoming lost. If you want to look them up, he provides ample footnotes and the modern internet makes checking to find out what on earth an Emperor Maurice is relatively easy. But what I think will make this book valuable to some of you is twofold: first, it represents in some sense a graduation from one of our previous recommendations, P. Crone’s Pre-industrial Societies, with greater detail and granularity, and second because it draws the connection between production in the organic economy and military power much more clearly. Alas, that it is so expensive!
- It would be a substantial mistake to make an assistant professor DGS, since part of their job is fielding complaints against more senior professors, who an assistant professor would be loath to offend as they might sit on a tenure committee.
- I am, I confess, less familiar with what the precise duty of that position would be in most departments. I imagine it probably varies quite a bit based on university policy.
- That position has been held by the same faculty member, John W. Sweet – not that J. Sweet – since time immemorial, who conducts a really quite valuable series of seminars preparing graduate students for the job market. It’s a really useful departmental service that many departments do not do.
- I will note that I think enrollments, not majors, should be the criteria on which departmental teaching is judged, but university administrators already hostile to the humanities unsurprisingly select whatever metrics will justify doing what they already wanted to do, which is cut the humanities.
My academic career was mostly in medical schools. In general structure a med school department is similar to what you describe, but with some differences. The main difference is that the chair of a med school department is much more powerful. The Dept Chair always has an endowment that throws off a bunch of money that funds much of the function of department’s function. The Dept Chair controls these funds. It’s a permanent position, not a rotating one. In the departments I knew, the role of the departmental tenure committee you describe was entirely carried out by the Dept Chair. (I spent some time on our Institutional Promotion and Tenure Committee, so I’m familiar with how this worked.) We did not have adjuncts, but we did have a few untenured research-track profs. (They did no teaching — their responsibilities were mostly limited to research, for which they themselves had to generate the funding.)
The department chair could, in principle, be an autocrat. In practice, none I ever knew were like that. They saw and handled themselves mostly as “First among Equals”.
“First among Equals”
A princeps, in other words. So, an autocrat. :).
(It’s a blog with lots of Rome stuff, I am legally required to do that.)
This is also very common in STEM departments, especially in Engineering. The head of STEM departments is essentially a business manager, whose main job is to secure funding for the department.
In my experience, most of it long ago, the solicitude of departments to their undergraduate majors varies a lot with the size (and maybe precarity?) of the department. So in the late 70s at Yale, the classics department was very involved with its students, the economics department much less so.
My experience exactly regarding precarity. My undergraduate Physics department had serious concerns about major enrollment and retention, so they set things up very nice for us. We were overpaid to TA intro labs for med students, various professors would make up busy work research for undergrads, and overall classes and degree requirements were kept fair. We were also involved in governance to an unusual degree, and many of my colleagues and I became a kind of department patriot. I would say I have lower status as a grad student at my current school.
I strongly caution against generalizing from a few specific experiences or institutions. For example, the statement that “departments do not have a single tenure committee, but rather compose a unique committee for each assistant professor going up for tenure” is not universally true. For example, in some instances all tenured faculty in a unit (“department” is the most common unit but there are other units that perform similar functions e.g., schools, programs) vote on all tenure decisions.
I confess I’m somewhat dreading the discussion of what you call “non-state ‘tribal’ societies in pre-Roman western Europe”. As far as I can tell, we know almost nothing about them, and so much of what is claimed about “non-state” societies is just people projecting their own biases into the void left by our lack of knowledge.
I’m also curious whether by “pre-Roman” you mean before the classical period or just like, before the Romans conquered a given bit of it. In the latter case, I wonder if Gaul was really devoid of states prior to Caesar’s wars. Some Gallic population centers IIUC were pretty large, and as you say states and urbanization seem to go together.
He’s going to explain proto-state societies in good time.
This is an apt question. However, perhaps our question should be the other way round: when did Rome become a state? After all, if we take the Roman historians seriously, the Rome of the monarchy and early republic was a confederation of tribes and gens. The famous case of Gens Claudia going to war alone reflects this well, as well as the early Roman law.
So, a modern observer would probably term the old Roman monarchy not to have been a state, but a clan society with a priest-warchief king. This is not much different from the view we get of the Gaulish society of Caesar’s time. Perhaps we simply tend to think Rome as a state from ad urbe condita because we see it later as a full-fledged state, while it is, in fact, for hundreds of years, a society ordered on very different principles.
I think there’s quite a lot of information out there, just all very distributed through many media and very hard to synthesize. And. naturally, not to the degree of abundance that the survival of literary traditions would give us.
My main hesitation there is that I don’t really see the place for a “state”/”non-state” distinction in any substantial or even really very relevant capacity, unless you hollow out much of the spectrum and only compare pairs of far-opposed points.
More granular, gradualistic perspectives are spreading through analysis of history — in the discussion of Greek warfare, for instance — but I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Devereaux makes of it.
We have things like Julius Caesar’s account of the Druids — which is in a set-piece describing Gaulish society. When it comes to his account of the war, well, it’s hard to see how his description of them and their importance could be accurate when they simply do not appear in the events.
I’ve heard a theory (from Dan Carlin, but still) that one of reason that Rome conquered Gaul is that they “almost” become a state. That is, they’re starting to centralize, etc, ironically mostly because of Rome. Hence Rome “had to” conquer them first before they become a threat. Ironically a more centralized Gaul is easier to conquer in one swoop rather than a decentralized one, Rome is freaking good in destroying a state’s whole army in few open battles.
This applies to late Roman times – under pressure from Rome the Germanic and other groups formed stronger states (eg the Marcomanni that Marcus Aurlius tried to break up) – eventually the large confederations (Franks, Alamanni, Goths) proved too strong for the Western Empire.
Asking whether *Gaul* was or wasn’t a state, or was maybe “almost” a state, around the time the Romans conquered it, seems like the wrong question. It’s like asking “Was Greece a state when the Persians tried to conquer it?” At the time of the Greco-Persian wars, Greece wasn’t a single state, but I think most historians would say it *contained* states. What I wonder about certain groups in Gaul—particularly the larger urban centers—is whether they were *already* states, albeit ones not large enough to challenge Rome on an individual basis.
I’m reminded of ye olde “bands-tribes-chiefdoms-states” model. Which is wrong for all sorts of reasons but at least gestures towards the idea that there are a ton of non-state societies and that in some sense the border is a hazy one.
Asking you to report on what’s going on in other people’s heads may be a fool’s errand, but seriously what is going on with how universities treat their adjunct teaching staff? If you shot ’em up full of truth serum, what would tenured professors have to say on the subject?
I suspect it comes down to people jealously guarding their powers and privileges. We humans are spcial creatures. Since tune immemorial we have competed for mates and resources. In the past this was done through Mating displays and dominance battles. Nowadays this is through displays of rank and privilege. It is simply in our nature to want to secure as much rank and privilege for ourselves as possible while denying the same to others.
Think from the perspective of a tenure track professor deciding whether or not to bring in more people on the tenure track. Because the organization is internally somewhat democratic among tenure track professors, each new professor diluted the voting power of those already there. Moreover, the existence of more tenure track professors diluted the prestige of the position, makes it more common in both senses of the term. Having more adjunct results in the tenured professors being relatively more rare and special. It also creates a large population of, as our host called them, academic serfs for the tenured professors to lord over.
I doubt most people consciously realize that they are thinking in these terms. This is mostly a subconscious drive arising from the very basic impulses inherited from our animal ancestors.
That sounds a lot like how our host describes the behavior of the Spartiates.
It seems like that shouldn’t be a reason for the treatment. The adjuncts will never be a threat or competition to the professors. No matter how nicely you treat the adjuncts they will not gain prestige or reach tenure.
This feels more like an attempt to prevent PTSD by the professors. If you don’t make friends with the adjunct and treat them as subhumans it won’t feel as bad when you have to get rid of them, since that is likely to happen and it won’t their or your fault.
This is also indicated by the treatment of other groups, which could be considered lower rank than adjuncts. The permanent staff will likely remain unless they find a better job. When the students graduate and leave it is considered an accomplishment by all.
But with adjuncts the department needs a lot of them and it won’t be able to pay good wage, so they will have to be living under economic hardship. Most of them also won’t be able to be promoted or get tenure in another university. So the adjuncts will be there until they give up and leave in defeat.
Treating subordinates badly is a way to ensure they remember you’re on top and they’re on the bottom.
Also do not forget the pleasures of cruelty.
I think the simple answer is that for the most part we don’t expect part-time adjuncts to, well, be around in the long term or in a meaningful way, so don’t put effort into integrating them into the department.
I’ve been a full-time, permanent teaching faculty (in math) in two departments. In both departments I was pretty fully integrated into the department decision-making, to a much greater extent than our host suggests; in my first department they probably would have made me chair if they were allowed to, and in this department I was hired more or less explicitly to chair the undergraduate committee, and to understudy for the DU[G]S position.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a part-time faculty integrated in the department in the same way. To a large extent I think we assume they don’t _want_ to be integrated; it’s extra work and it’s annoying, and it’s work we’re specifically not paying them for. (My contract says that 33% of my time/energy/pay is supposed to go toward departmental service; if I were an adjunct hired to teach a single course that number would be zero.)
But also, if they’re truly temporary, they won’t be here next year, and so investment now has less returns down the line. Like, if you were going to put a bunch of effort into forming a relationship with someone, would you rather pick the person who will probably live in your neighborhood for the next twenty years, or the one you know is moving in six months?
And then all of that is self-reinforcing, because if you don’t think of them as being full members of the department you don’t put effort into including them, and then they’re not part of what’s going on, so you don’t think of them as full members of the department.
As a last note, I don’t think any actual faculty _want_ to hire adjuncts. (Outside of the “working lawyer teaching a single class in a specialty” situation, which is specific.) Everyone I know in every department I know would like to hire a bunch more tenure-track faculty; but that’s subject to administration-level budget decisions. And if they say “you can’t hire a new TT faculty, so you have to hire a part-time adjunct to cover those class sections”…well, we do in fact have to get those classes taught.
I am a full professor in a philosophy department. We would love to hire more TT faculty — hiring adjuncts is not good for us or for our students. The administration won’t fund TT lines. Adjuncts are much cheaper.
Not quite.
The spread of Adjuncts in teaching is something that resulted from school admins basically saying: “Tenured profs are expensive and pre tenured profs may be cheap but they want tenure for the advantages it brings them, including pay, and will not stick around if there is no chance for tenure. So Adjuncts are the solution since they can see it as a chance for “paid” experience but they only cost us about 10-20% of a tenured prof.”
So you end up with a pile of adjuncts, my dept has 1 full timer and 5 adjuncts (community college), which cost fractions of an actual professor. And this then becomes seen as a decision forced on the department from the disliked school administration so those part time teachers are not seen as part of the partnership. Combine it with a good helping of shrinking humanities depts, yes perceptions on “turf”, and the internal perception that adjuncts are unmotivated and lazy and we end up with the poop show outlined above.
Yaaaaayyyyyy….
Now each dept and school will be different in this regard so regard this as a broad weighted outline that may fit differently depending on the point of comparison. I will say for my school I made friends with the one full timer and we work very closely together to make sure everything works for us and the students.
But, your mileage may vary.
Exactly like the corporate world thinks of temps.
> what is going on with how universities treat their adjunct teaching staff?
Looking in from the outside, it appears to be a device for increasing the income and power of the tenure-track (and especially tenured) faculty. Generally, academia has always been a “low pay, high prestige” occupation, so there’s pressure on the people in power to figure out how to extract a disproportionate amount of the salary budget. The difficulty is how to get people to volunteer (!) to be the academic serfs. The solution to that seems to resemble sports, where serfs have some chance of winning the prize of moving into the upper class.
In this regard, Devereaux’ term “labor solidarity” is critical — *which* labor? The tenured faculty have a lot of solidarity, which they exercise against both the adjuncts and the administration. This resembles some early industrial unionization, in which particular classes of work in factories were organized into separate unions. In the US that seems to have been obsoleted by industry-wide unions (which maintained the occupational codification in their contracts), but that was aided by the possibility of organizing an entire industry, and thus pushing price increases onto the customers. In current academia, there’s no real hope of increasing the teaching budget, so intra-faculty power relations are critical.
One thing I would love for you to do sometime is discuss the logistics of migratory hordes like the Cimbri, Goths, Vandals, etc. Several of these numbered close to a hundred thousand counting women and children. If you believe Roman sources the Goths and the Cimbri may have numbered as high as 200,000 (though the former admittedly were starving). This has always confused me. How did this work given your great series on army logistics? Civilians don’t eat that much less than soldiers, while for some like the Lombards it was just a short hop, others wondered for a while. They weren’t nomads after all (other than the Alans who loved tagging along the Germanic hordes).
Yes, that would be very interesting. The Alexander series mentioned how his army was able to forage from the settlements along their way, and this presumably restricted Alexander’s choice of routes. Prior to him, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand fought their way out of the Persian empire without logistics support, by a similar sort of foraging (although without the conquest). The Dothraki series mentioned how the Mongol hordes had 5-8 horses per human, with some unknown (but probably shrinking) number of sheep too. The lens of “organic economy” seems like a good tool here: where did the energy for these groups come from?
https://acoup.blog/2020/12/11/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-ii-subsistence-on-the-hoof/
Are these sorts of migratory populations capable of feeding themselves without foraging stored food along the way? That is, by preying on sedentary farmers? How easy is it to capture herds of animals from more nomadic peoples? Should we see this type of migration as a form of predation on the stored wealth (food) of less mobile peoples? It’s possible for an area to be “foraged out”, after all.
If you’re talking about mass-migrations then there’s a social contagion effect; in any community that the ‘horde’ comes across, people living there who identify with the group of people will tend to pack up everything and join in the movement, and anything the new migrants can’t carry themselves will be up for grabs.
Count me very interested in the non-state societies option — I’m curious to see where it will meet up with or diverge from how we discussed the topic in my archaeology classes.
I think that Our Host’s summary pretty much matches my experience, but every department has its quirks.
I am a chemistry Ph.D., and most undergrads who take chemistry courses do so on compulsion. They want to be physicians, and organic chemistry is their pons asinorum. Teaching them is less fun than teaching majors. Organic chemistry is graded on a curve, and nobody wants to hand out the “C” grades that short-circuit a budding physician’s career. Chemistry departments therefore care less about their aggregate undergrad enrollments, and particularly cosset their majors.
I’m also a lawyer, and adjuncted for law schools. Most law school adjuncts are well-respected and well-compensated practitioners, who teach the kind of practical courses that modern law professors despise and–frankly–don’t understand. (“Secured transactions” is sooooo much less sexy than constitutional law.) They have no role in governance, but get treated reasonably well. Their pay is derisory, but they usually don’t need the money.
Yes, many critiques of contemporary academia which rely on numbers can give a seriously misleading impression by lumping together all “adjuncts,” when they should be considered in several different categories. First are the ones mentioned by Scrooge, professionals who teach a single course because they like young people, want to encourage interest in their field (law, accounting, whatever), want to give back to the community, think it may help in recruiting new employees, etc.. One of my law partners has taught a course at Fordham Law for many years. A second is those who, in return for teaching a course, receive free or reduced tuition. My wife, who had been a journalist, received at tuition at her law school in return for teaching undergraduates in the journalism, and my first year Spanish professor was a Puerto Rican law student. (My daughter’s Spanish teacher told her I spoke like a Puerto Rican.) Third is lecturers (not always called adjuncts) who commonly teach introductory language or math courses. My Swedish I course next semester is taught by one such. They have no tenure, but they have full-time jobs with decent pay and as much job security as most people in America. Finally, there are the oppressed minions like Bret, but I’m not sure what percentage of the total “adjunct” or “contingent” faculty they are.
There are other untenured faculty called “visiting assistant professors” or “VAPs”: I’m not sure how their departments typically treat them, but better than adjuncts, I think.
I was taught mostly by tenured faculty, but I had one assistant professor who came in to class one day thrilled to be a new associate professor. I had several “senior lecturers” but never an non senior lecturer, visiting or adjuncts. I couldn’t say whether that’s something my school even did.
My impression is that “VAP” is mostly used as a euphemism for “adjunct,” although that might vary a bit by field.
The problem is that any distinguishing term can be used as a euphemism to pretend something is on the better side of the division.
In math we often use VAP for our postdoc positions. We also use it for temporary but full-time teaching positions. (There’s potentially a fuzzy boundary between the two, since research requires time but not much in the way of concrete support, and conversely essentially everyone teaches; the difference between a fancy two-year postdoc and a two-year teaching post at a moderately good institution is whether you teach three courses per year, or six.)
I do tend to think the full-time teaching positions shouldn’t be called “adjuncts” per se. And our host did in fact distinguish them, reserving “adjunct” for the temporary faculty; in the departments I’ve interacted with I think it’s probably useful to restrict the term further, to part-timers.
I don’t think you’re wrong about this structure being unsuited to organizations with lots of adjuncts, but I’d argue it’s more fundamentally flawed than that because the role of college has changed since the historic colleges on which these structures are based. Once we had mass enrollment in higher education after World War II, the emphasis on the demand side shifted from colleges’ research mission to their instructional mission. I’m sure colleges and universities say research is still important. Probably most faculty prefer research. But that’s not the prevailing view outside the ivory tower. The ways we as a society treat higher education de facto prioritizes the instructional mission. Tuition is the largest revenue source (more than 1/4 of all funding for my state’s university system, state appropriations are second), capital projects are focused on student amenities (and sports) and everyday people have come to see college as just another step in the educational journey — coming after high school just like high school came after middle school and just like middle school came after elementary school. When people talk about college, by and large they’re talking about undergrad instruction. Colleges haven’t grappled with that reality from a structural standpoint. They’ve stuck with structures designed for what is now a minority of the work we expect our colleges and universities to do.
I’ve heard grousing from parents who object to paying tens of thousands in tuition for instruction from underpaid adjuncts. But I’d argue this misses the point: Even if colleges were using tenured faculty exclusively, why would you want them hiring instructors based on research proficiency instead of their instructional proficiency? Shouldn’t we have the best instructors for the scholars progressing furthers in their academic careers? I worry this will eventually create a misalignment between colleges and their funders (e.g. taxpayers and legislatures). We saw a similar misalignment with primary schools and reading instruction, when legislators in several states stepped in and mandated science of reading because schools failed to update their practices on their own as new evidence emerged. Yet for all those failings, at least K-12 teachers are steeped in pedagogy. Their professional development days all center on student instruction. It’s not a stretch to say we’re teaching the next generation of scholars with personnel who are experts in their discipline but amateur instructors.
One other thing, on bringing in someone from the outside: Yes, it could be a cynical play because they’re easier to control. However, I’ve seen real benefits in the business world from an outside perspective. They have a period of time when they can play dumb, ask why things are done a certain way without implicating anyone, and suggest approaches they used in previous roles. In the best case scenario, it can create a healthy exchange of new ideas. And in a strictly pragmatic sense, it is not unusual for people to listen to outsiders instead of longtime colleagues even though that outsider told them the exact same thing as their older colleagues. I mean, that’s one of the biggest jokes about consultants: They get paid the big bucks just to repeat what insiders had been saying all along. Even though that *shouldn’t* happen, the fact is that it *does* happen. Recognizing how to overcome people’s biases is part of being a good leader.
I started my professional life out as an academic (grad student in biology) and, after a wondong 20-year path, am now teaching secondary school. I am literally amazed by how hands-on and useful my teaching certification courses are. I was really expecting them to be BS theory-of-the-month educational philosophy, and there is a little bit of that, but there’s a lot of nuts-and-bolts educational research that just isn’t being passed along to college instructors (or corporate instructional designers, where I also spent some years). For instance, did you know that the most learning takes place when students get 80-85% right on a test? That’s hard enough that they’re being challenged, but not so hard that they’re not retaining anything. Did you know that providing outlines for students to take notes on significantly improves retention? I really wish we had gotten some of this as grad student TAs.
“I was really expecting them to be BS theory-of-the-month educational philosophy, and there is a little bit of that, but there’s a lot of nuts-and-bolts educational research”
How do you, the person being trained, distinguish between BS theory-of-the-month and nuts-and-bolts educational research?
Same way you distinguish between anything else you get taught (as an adult). What kind of evidence is provided? Can you look back at particularly good or bad education experiences of your own and say “Ah, now I realise why that was good/bad”? Can you apply what you’ve learnt and think it makes a difference?
I’ve had a similar experience to Dave. After a couple of decades of part time university lecturing/tutoring I got a trade certificate in workplace training & assessment. Turns out people in business/government/military often care about teaching their staff to be better, and are willing to pay for methods that can be shown to work. In some cases, such as working with dangerous industrial or medical or military devices that gets other people killed if they screw up, there is very serious research done on how to teach effectively.
While a university is a different environment, students are not actually a different species and learn a lot of subjects in similar ways. So there is enough overlap that I think it’s valuable, and feedback from students has been generally positive.
I know a retired high school teacher who said that the most useful course was one for teaching special needs children, because it carried over. For instance, when you really want your listeners to retain something, you say it, and pause, so they will repeat it mentally, thus helping retention.
I guess you were in a very good teaching certification program then, because much of what I hear about these programs is how useless they can be, being taught mostly by education academics with much more in the way of ideology than in the way of practical teaching experience. My students (future secondary mathematics teachers) do say that they learn a lot more from their professors who have actual experience as teachers than from those who don’t.
My experience is similar to yours, though diverges at some point: started out as an academic (grad student and postdoc in mathematics), then non-tenure track assistant professor for a few years, eventually joined an education department (teaching mathematics to future secondary mathematics teachers), and then was almost hired as professor of mathematics education. I’m not going to teach at the secondary level, but I would like to eventually do some mathematics education research, specifically about the mathematical training of future secondary mathematics teachers.
Regarding this claim that “most learning takes place when students get 80-85% right on a test”, is this related to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development? I’m not sure what to think about Vygotsky: on the one hand, he is championed by many education academics as the “inventor of socioconstructivism”, but on the other hand, I gather that his actual beliefs were not as ideological as some of his current champions’.
There is an argument to be made that for any classes beyond the “Major 101” and maybe “Major 102” benefit heavily from someone having a research background or someone that at least follows the latest research in the field. This is even truer for the classes in the later part of the undergraduate degree.
My experience (from STEM, though I am sure it also applies to humanities) is that these classes change substantially according to the latest research (especially the classes that are essentially pre-graduate classes).
Essentially, a class like Calculus 101 could probably use the same syllabus from 20 years ago. But, in the most extreme cases, some classes that are currently offered to undergraduates basically didn’t exist as a concept outside of research papers 20 years ago. Less extreme cases would make substantial parts of the syllabi outdated.
You couldn’t really teach an up to date course without at least keeping up with the research.
“I don’t think you’re wrong about this structure being unsuited to organizations with lots of adjuncts, but I’d argue it’s more fundamentally flawed than that because the role of college has changed since the historic colleges on which these structures are based. Once we had mass enrollment in higher education after World War II, the emphasis on the demand side shifted from colleges’ research mission to their instructional mission. I’m sure colleges and universities say research is still important. Probably most faculty prefer research. But that’s not the prevailing view outside the ivory tower. The ways we as a society treat higher education de facto prioritizes the instructional mission. Tuition is the largest revenue source (more than 1/4 of all funding for my state’s university system, state appropriations are second), capital projects are focused on student amenities (and sports) and everyday people have come to see college as just another step in the educational journey — coming after high school just like high school came after middle school and just like middle school came after elementary school. ”
When and how did the expectation of research mission develop the structure of universities?
Because the notion of university as primarily research organization was one pushed by Humboldt in Prussia, that seems to have spread to USA only in the end of 19th century.
> Once we had mass enrollment in higher education after World War II, the emphasis on the demand side shifted from colleges’ research mission to their instructional mission.
I agree that the vocational goal of college has increased tremendously in emphasis, but I don’t think it’s right to view research focus as the norm–it was the aberration. My alma mater, Johns Hopkins, was the first research-focused college in the US, and it was just seven decades old at the end of WWII.
Actually, the way colleges are treated are as diploma mills. Otherwise the discovery that most colleges were teaching many students NOTHING in the first two years would have resulted in uproar, followed by the dissolution of accrediting boards and of many colleges.
I’m curious how much the city and immediate territory of Rome itself could be described as a tribal society in the republican era. Reading about it as a non historian, I’ve been surprised how little Roman state power lined up with my expectations about government. The heavy weight on tradition, religion and consensus are how I would expect tribal societies to work. It would be perfectly in line for the senior shaman (aka consul) of a Roman gathering of elders (aka Senate) to turn to all the other priests (aka office holders) in the holy ground (aka temple they met in) and announce bad omens for a proposal which could be right out of something like Avatar. (Although perhaps pop culture has mislead me and this isn’t how tribal societies would function?) They have a formal justice system with little to any law enforcement system which seems tribal. All the men of society are expected to equip themselves for war and be trained by friends and family. Are these institutions that are very little changed since before the time of the monarchy?
I think a lot of what you’re calling tribal is more common than you think.
Religion permeated politics? Sure, because it permeated everything. Rome’s high priest was a political figure (though not the same guy as the consul). The Pharaoh was a high priest. So is the Emperor of Japan, and the King of England since Henry VIII. Iran, Afghanistan, and sort of Saudi Arabia are run by religious figures.
Tradition permeated politics? Sure, because it permeated everything. In the U.S., our constitution is a piece of paper that says “Constitution” at the top. But the U.K. doesn’t have that; their constitution is pretty much just tradition, with revisions made by Parliament.
No police? Police as we know them were invented in the 19th century.
The King of England is head of the Church, but that’s more an administrative role. He isn’t himself a priest, and doesn’t preside over religious ceremonies.
The British monarch is actually the Supreme *Governor* of the CoE, not the head (since Mary), precisely to make this clear (the Christian Bible calls Big J the head of the church so that’s pretty inconvenient if you’re trying to get your subjects on board).
“No police? Police as we know them were invented in the 19th century.”
In the imperial era, you have thousands of vigiles and urban cohorts to enforce the public peace. In the republic era the closest thing to that role is maybe a dozen minor officials with arrest power. There’s clearly a large difference.
I think you are mistaking ‘tribal’ government – or more correctly, non-state government – for merely what you deem to be ‘primitive’ government.
The state vs. non-state distinction is entirely about the institutionalization of power and the level of monopoly those institutions have over the legitimate use of force in a society.
Put another way: in Rome, there are two senior elected officials (the consuls) who have clear, legal authority to raise armies. Other Romans are not allowed to raise armies. There is a body, the Senate, with clear rules bounding its membership, which directs foreign policy. Other Romans are not supposed to conduct foreign policy.
In a ‘tribal’ system, there are many aristocrats with their own private armies. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes when the customary court of elders tries to charge one of them with a crime, he uses his private army of clients to disband the court. Sometimes, when the council of elders exiles a leader for trying to start a war, that leader instead goes and raises an army of his own, because that’s a normal, legitimate thing to do in this society.
Another way to put it is that non-state societies function the way Rome does during the civil wars, but they function that way *all the time* (because civil wars are failures of state institutions).
I agree with you that when we get to the part of history where we have somewhat proper records, i.e. Middle Republic, Rome is a state. However, AiryW’s points make some sense when we talk about the semi-legendary early republic and monarchy. I would like to note, though, that he tends to give a bit too much significance to the fact that Roman politicians were also priests. They were priests, yes, but this was not their main occupation. In fact, the fact that Roman religion was not a specialist job was a facet of a the earlier, more primitive phase of society. The point that there was no class of religious specialists is more typical of a non-state society than a state society.
However, I would note that Rome didn’t actually have a state monopoly of force. It did have judicial institutions, but even in rather late phase of Roman history, the actual enforcement of laws was the job of private persons. A civil suite ended with a decision that legalised the private enforcement by the winning party, and even the proscriptions of the civil wars were decisions that legalised private executions. The Roman law seemed to recognise also the idea that a gens could have its own, internal law, and we know how one gens waged its own war. And the Roman family law allowed the paterfamilias to kill any member of his family.
So, I think that Roman history actually gives us a rather interesting picture of how a non-state becomes a state, although its classical writers thought that Rome was a state from Romulus onwards. (Myself, I would say Rome slowly turns into a state somewhere between the first plebeian secession and the fall of Veii, i.e. in the 5th century BC.)
I was more intending to ask about how clear cut these differences were then say they didn’t exist. Like the consuls are formally the ones raising armies but sometimes the consuls are raising volunteer armies, there are non consular armies and there are armies that are in the field for years and presumably need reinforcements. Does this create a gray area where generals would be leaning on their personal social capital even in non civil war situations? Do we have a clear picture of the balance of importance between the authority of the state and the personal authority of the generals?
“Other Romans are not supposed to conduct foreign policy.”
How do the gray areas differ between tribal and non tribal societies here? Like for these two rogue general incidents, is the difference just in scale?
In 1754 AD, Iroquois commander Tanacharison’s proposal of war with the French is rejected by the Iroquois council so he murders a French prisoner to provoke a war.
In 90 BCE, Aquillius provokes a war with Mithridates against the wishes of the Senate.
Is the case of Aquillius unusual while the case of Tanacharison common? Is there a fundamental difference here besides the scale?
Interesting!
Would it be then correct to say that, after the decline of Rome’s state power in the west (the “fall of Rome”, to grossly oversimplify), the political landscape shifted (reverted?) to tribal / non-state societies, before being consolidated again? ‘Cause what you describe here, to me as a layperson, sounds a lot like the “feudal” system of (early) medieval Europe.
Just as a food for thought for your next post (or maybe as a continuation), it might be interesting to have a comparison between pre-Roman non-state actors and post-Roman (non-state?) societies (or, how the latter are *not* non state, if my understanding is incorrect), and how the latter shifted to “state societies” again….
A lot depends on how you read behind the labels. For instance, Brett says only consuls lead Roman armies and that’s true. But we read of Roman landowners leading gangs of their followers pursuing feuds in the countryside and of private ‘justice’ and Roman governors and tax-farmers having a fairly free hand. The Roman state may have claimed a monopoly on organized violence but never actually attained it. Early medieval states also claimed a monopoly but were often even less successful and stateless societies usually had a good idea of what constituted ‘lawful’ violence and what did not. The more we find out the less clear the division becomes.
Oh, I do agree that the lines are blurry. However, I do think that the focus here should be more on how the society formally approaches this topic and less on whether it can actually fully achieve the approach. I mean, even the modern states don’t have a 100% monopoly on organized violence all the time (again, gangs for instance), but they most certainly have a claim to be state actors.
I guess my question, as you put it, is to what extent did the “early medieval states also claim[] a monopoly”, really. At some point, sure, but the more I read about these topics in the last years, the more of an impression I had that this is more of a high and late middle ages and even early modern period thing. Subject to earlier exceptions, even in the west (like Charlemagne), of course.
I think for Rome especially we get a weird thing because “tribe” is of course a *roman* concept. But we’re using it in a very different sense.
If I were interested in energy flows I’d make a careful distinction between territories where woodland can provide energy indefinitely (e.g. the coppicing of broadleaf trees in Britain) and woodland where once you have felled the tree it is dead (I gather this is largely true of North American trees) so that either the flow of energy stops or you have to wait for new trees to grow from seed.
Is there in Europe a sharp distinction between such territories? Whether sharp or gradual, how did it effect history?
I think the decision to coppice trees or cut them down comes down to how many trees per person you have, rather than any natural difference in the trees or soil.
Also, speaking from personal experience, it can be remarkably difficult to kill a broadleaf tree, even after you’ve cut it down. And this was in North America.
Britain was the first country to turn to coal as a fuel source, which it did starting in Elizabethan times (beginning in London, the US was chiefly colonized from still wood-burning areas), so I’d be wary of talking of how renewable it was in Britain.
Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman. Great book.
One notes that once wood was no longer widely used as a fuel, it was directed into other useful things, like furnishings.
I was what I think you are calling a “funded graduate student”. I certainly felt very much like a student and not at all like an employee or junior colleague.
Hola! Not a comment per se, just another note to say that something remains amiss with Acoup or Patreon or something, because I never receive email alerts anymore about new posts. Or amici emails. I’ve re-“subscribed” numerous times recently and contribute as a Patreon supporter but something is going wrong. I must not be the only one so affected. The mailing lists function is broken.
Several people have noticed this is happening.
Is ANYONE getting notifications?
Last acoup.blog email notification I got was 05 April 2024.
I got one May 31, and have been getting them weekly for many months.
I don’t recall ever doing anything to subscribe beyond whatever the minimum is to post a comment, but I am a patron supporter.
I receive the WordPress emails about new posts but am not receiving them about comments even when I subscribe. It’s probably something on WordPress’s end.
I get email notifications for new posts, but I haven’t gotten any email notifications for new comments, even though I always check that box when I comment.
Likening academic departments to guilds made me chuckle a little. By the early modern period most of them were characterised by a small, largely hereditary caste of masters who monopolised governance, and a mass of journeymen and apprentices with no hope of advancement. Unsurprisingly, their abolition was one of the earliest demands of the French Revolution.
At least the link you gave to the work on adjuncts identifies the typical institutions you are speaking about. Big state universities. Through their total size, overwhelming Ivy League and small colleges.
But as an outsider looking in – what is the typical size of the departments you are talking of? As in, range of number of the member tenured professors (full and associate) in a guild?
The various arrangements introduced about tenure decisions include a tenure committee of 5 tenured members put together for the individual tenure decisions; a powerful department head entitled to grant tenure; or tenure decisions made by full body of tenured guild members. The department guild is described as holding some autonomy from the university level external powers, but with rights of interference: university administration reserves right to confirm tenure decisions but rarely interferes, whereas interference to force external department head is frequent (though the department is then allowed to choose which external head).
How are the decisions about guild size made? As in, number of tenured/tenure track position vs. adjunct workload? Does the guild have any say about its own size?
In every situation I’m familiar with, the department needs approval from the university or provost or otherwise higher-up administration to hire anyone. A department can almost always not-hire people; if you don’t wanna run a job search they mostly can’t make you. But every department I know of would like to hire as many people as they’ll be allowed to.
In some larger institutions this might be different, if the department gets to, like, manage its own hiring budget. But if that happens it’s quite uncommon.
Re clans: Voller skips over the era of clan governance for Arab-Israelis too quickly when he says,
A fuller history of this is that after the 1948 war, the state put most Arabs who remained in the country under martial law, with movement restrictions and a regime of favors (for example, all construction in the Arab sector was illegal, so the favor would be refraining from demolition). The state chose the clan as the basic unit of governance: clan patriarchs were given absolute power over their extended families, and were made responsible for their extended families’ behavior.
The satellite list system was that every clan was told who to vote for: Mapai, or one of several satellite lists, and all members were also told how to fold the ballot paper, so that the state could check on them. (This was never absolute and there was always the escape path of voting for the communist party instead; Mapai did not consider Maki to be legitimate to go into coalition with but was never going to repress it, and to this day, the attempts at banning Arab parties focus on Balad, not Hadash.)
This didn’t end in the 1980s, but in the 1960s. By the 1950s already, there was no real security threat, and Ben-Gurion used the satellite lists purely as a vote bank; Menachem Begin, otherwise much more anti-Arab than the left, opposed the martial law system. Once Ben-Gurion was out, it loosened, until it was formally abolished in 1966.
The upshot is that this system also led to social de-development, because the clan patriarchs’ empowerment was at the expense of social mobility and women’s rights. For example, Arab birth rates actually increased in the 1950s and 60s, and then fell when the system ended. It was very much a colonial rule system, which is why we’re seeing the Gazan clans oppose it and demand a state or state-like polity (like the Palestinian Authority) instead, and we’re also seeing the Israeli peace camp make the same demand.
To your point about urbanization: I don’t think that’s the stumbling block in Gaza. Gaza is very densely populated, but it’s not one big city. It’s best viewed as a few small cities surrounded by giant refugee camps; refugee camps in general get very dense without being urban in the senses of job specialization, formal governance, or social mobility. In other circumstances, we see similar informal structures arise in other refugee camps, like the Rohingya ones in Cox’s Bazar – those camps have a problem of religious extremists pushing women out of the public spheres more than clans, but they’ve also only existed for a few years, and unlike in Gaza, there was no preexisting Rohingya elite in Cox’s Bazar. Clan governance is also common in the criminal world, which by definition is not governed by a state, as in the case of Italian mafia families, which are run on a clan basis even in true cities like New York (because social mobility takes people out of mob dependence and into the state)
You suggest the structure of a department is like a medieval guild. That seems quite true.
– There are a few masters (full professors). Lead the guild/department, very few of them and promotion is gated quite severely.
– More journeymen (associate professors). Again, promotion is gated. Guilds were pretty explicit about keeping supply limited and prices high.
– A lot of apprentices (lecturers and graduate students).
I was thinking that a lecturer has already shown willing to put up with a lot to stay in the field, while many graduate students are still deciding whether a university is the place for them. Many graduate students are also paying to be there (net of scholarships etc.), while lecturers are paid (poorly).
There’s a joke about a dead fellow in heaven who visits hell, is treated well, and decides to move there. He’s treated poorly, and when he complains is told “Before, you were a tourist. Now, you’re an immigrant.”
Perhaps this accounts for some of the difference in treatment.
Dang — as a former graduate program coordinator, I wrote a substantial comment about the experience but the comment failed “verification” or some such error message I received. It’s all gone now. Maybe this won’t post either. Along with the mailing list not working for me, something is very much amiss on the site lately.
Is there any practical difference between a university with a ‘College of History’ and a college(university?) with a ‘Department of History’?
“organization of non-state ‘tribal’ societies in pre-Roman western Europe”
Oh absolutely yes please.
Just graduated yesterday, this clears up some things! My major is an interdisciplinary one that was only founded in my second year. When I took the intro class for it, it was taught by the two professors who created the major, each a chair of their respective departments. Wow! I thought. I’m getting taught by chairs, this is amazing!
Then I TA’d for them and learned one only took the position because the university offered him a year of paid sabbatical afterward. Still great professors. Also, since we didn’t have a big stock of grad students yet, it was the DUGS who was sourcing TAs from among the students, the DGS was off doing something else entirely. We wound up teaching students just a year younger, taking the class at the same time in their progression that we did. It was all a bit haphazard in retrospect.
At my university, a professor ran (among others) 2 courses, where one was the optional-advanced-followup-to-the-one-you-followed-the-previous-year one.
I had registered for the second course, and saw a request for TAs for the first course. I interviewed and was hired by the professor, who recognized me from other courses.
Now, I had actually failed the first course, by virtue of failing to hand in the programming assignment, and the first course was naturally a prerequisite both for attending the second course, and for TAing the first one.
The former issue was a minor one, these things were rarely checked, and at most resulted in not receiving credits for a course until you fulfilled the prerequisites. But the latter could have turned into a problem.
When I checked the exam system later, I found that I had passed both courses, with the dates of entry being identical. I guess the professor assumed that my lack of grade for the first course was a clerical error, and ‘corrected’ it, knowing that I did in fact know all the relevant materials.
I also TA’d a programming course in Delphi once. At that point I knew quite a number of languages, about half of which due to the courses I had followed, but Delphi or other Pascal-based languages were not among them. My preparations consisted of installing the relevant software. Actually learning the language happened in class, during the 30 minutes when the students were installing the software.
My experience from the other side is not that different. The TAs know the course, and can answer your questions, but aren’t actually all that far ahead of you. This can be a good thing, as this makes it easier for the TA to follow the student’s though process.
I often think this was the basis of my whole professional career. I could quickly learn enough to be half-assed at lots of computer things of the era, which put me well above the quarter-assed abilities of other people in the organization.
Eventually when I realized that many of those people had gotten well ahead of me, so I decided it was time to retire.
On the recommendations count: ‘…Landers opens (after his introduction, largely a matter of definitions) with a brief demographic primer, setting the ground for his main focus, which is how energy moves in these pre-industrial societies. As he notes, the vast majority of energy pre-industrial societies could use was ‘organic’ in nature, that is it was either grown in fields or produced from felled trees being burned as wood fuel. …’
Does ‘Landers’ acknowledge the existence of wind- and water-mills, or is that ignored as not fitting whatever theory Landers is pushing? I’m fairly sure that there are references to plenty of water-mills in the UK in the 11th century Domesday Book survey, said mills tapping hydropower as an energy source for the purpose of carrying out tasks such as grinding wheat to make flour.
I suspect they are ignored because they make up a relatively low percent of medieval society’s energy consumption. The operation of a water mill is a seasonal activity, and is done by one family in a village (or group of villages even). Compare this to cooking which every single family is doing every single day.
Considered (p. 50-52). Relatively small part of the overall energy mixture, c. 15% for watermills and c. 5% for windmills in the 1700s and less in previous centuries. Sure, you have thousands of these mills (c3,000 windmills and 9,000 watermills in England by 1300), but you also have huge numbers of draft animals which make up the largest source of energy inputs (c. 10m horsepower compared to watermills c. 1.5-3m and windmills 0.4-1m). Wood burning estimated at 4-5m horsepower equivalent, but that’s mostly fuel for metalworking.
Also, if I may, leading in with “fitting whatever theory Landers is pushing” when you don’t know if he’s addressed your complaint or if your point actually undermines his argument (yes and no, respectively) is a bit sharp.
I’d be more inclined to take your arguments charitably if you were more inclined to deal charitably with the arguments of others.
Meh. General Election stress and madness at the moment here in the UK, plus I actually *care* and worry about the fact that Putin has basically won the war in Ukraine as things stand right now (as far as the media tells me) unless Xi pulls the plug on him, with everything that *that* is going to entail. (But beyond as an extenuating grouchiness-contributing circumstance, that’s really not an issue for discussion in this place or at least not the comments section of this Fireside.)
And I did dial back the sharpness, several times, from the initial draft…
Okay: pages 50-52 (I would check them at this point but my local lending library does not have the book on the catalogue) so it sounds to me as if Landers glances at the topic long enough for an academic aside.
I’ll note that mills do not need winter feed and can be worked for longer (assuming wind/water supply is good) and harder than draft animals (possible implications here for non-grinding related land-drainage use) which seems to me so obvious that presumably Landers has noted it also.
Too stressed and tired (and too short of the book to argue from what it actually says) to push this further at this time.
Thank you for the information. I have no idea if I have an open-to-the-public university library with the book in my vicinity.
Well, one advantage to recommending an expensive but really interesting book: I’ve discovered a nearby university lets students from my community college borrow books from their library, and field & the forge is in that university’s collection. So, I got free access to a great book and also a new library card!
Well done! Many university libraries also offer borrower’s cards for a small fee to the local public, though access to the collection may be limited (particularly, it may not be possible to access electronic collections, due to the licensing on them).
If you are close enough you can usually just use the local PCs however. But yes I rue the day my wife jumped from Associate professor to government scientist no more free riding off of her electronic access.
As a practical matter, my father was a professor and drilled into my head to always treat the department secretaries well and respectfully — because they were the ones that *actually* held the keys to the kingdom, but were often treated as inferiors by everybody else in the department. (I use the terminology of a few decades ago, when I was a student. The titles have changed but I expect the reality is still the same.)
Experience confirmed this. In one instance, for various chaotic reasons, just after the end of a term, a fellow graduate student thought it would be advantageous *to have registered for the term that had just ended*. The department graduate secretary made a call to a friend in the Registrar’s Office and could have arranged for a back-dated registration, but the grad student’s situation turned out not to be favorable for that.
Good administrative staff are just valued in Research only track environments -STEM. People who know exactly what box need to checked or how short somebodies boiler plate addition to a grant submission has to be or that it needs to have number lines while everyone is running about trying to finish their text are golden.
On Landis. Reminded me of one the more interesting things I found in the the recent book by Ben Akrigg on Athens. Everyone always talks about Athens importing wood for ships but he the first person I recall to point out the massive demand for timber/wood as fuel that the mining must have been to keep running at the scale Athens was mining and minting in the 5th and than later 4th century BC.
Despite how obdurate academic organization seems, it feels downright transparent compared to the corporate side of things. Sure it’s kabuki theatre but at least you can learn the script. Whereas for corporate knowledge workers it’s not even a matter of management lying to them as management not knowing the ever changing nature of their organization.
The arcane nature of the organizations we work for is probably a part of why people yearn for an unrealistic past. Sure things might have sucked back then but at least you knew who your tyrant was! I find myself yearning for my startup days sometimes even though I know first hand that startups are worse pay for more work under worse conditions; at least at the end of the day it was a person with a face who screwed me over and there was no organization for them to hide behind.
This is a very informative post. I was a bit confused though by the talk of “tenure-line faculty” which in context seems to be the same thing as tenure track?
“Tenure-track” generally means a position without tenure which is tenure eligible – it is the period before one gets tenure. “Tenure-line” encompasses both tenure-track and tenured professors.