Sultans of academe - media coverage of higher education - Column

Progressive, The, June, 1997 by Susan Douglas

Ah, springtime. When the journalistic heart turns to themes du printemps, like golf (I AM TIGER WOODS); graduation (How Colleges are Gouging U); and foaling (Big Questions as Woman Gives Birth at 63). Meanwhile, new dad Tony Randall, seventy-seven, is the darling of the talk-show circuit.

College graduation and golf may not have much in common, except that the former can lead, all too tragically, to the latter. But the recent coverage of Tiger Woods and higher education is a prime example of go-with-the-flow pack journalism. Let's review.

First, I have the cushiest job in America. What's my line? Why, I'm a college professor. You know what that means. We work only six hours a week. We have all our summers off. We get to indoctrinate our students with politically correct, Marxist-feminist dogma, much of which we transmit through films and videos so we don't have to teach. And we get paid $120,000 a year. Not bad.

This portrait of those of us who teach in the country's colleges and universities gained currency during the Bush Administration when Newsweek featured a cover story about us with the headline, Thought Police. The ever-delightful conservative pundit Mona Charen wrote a nationally syndicated column about "academic bullies" entitled Lunatics are running the Asylum. The ideological assault on higher education was on. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone has bought into it.

With Clinton now going around the country waving his own "Yo, Education" pennant, the status -- and value -- of higher education is once again in the news. Hence, the Time story on Gouging U. The author, Erik Larson, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, returned to his alma mater to learn why tuition costs have soared over the past twenty years.

Posing as a "special investigation," this is little more than a multi-page spleen-venting screed, filled with conspiracy theories and faculty-bashing that would make any self-respecting state legislator or member of Congress vote an enthusiastic "thumbs down" on future funding for higher education.

In his first paragraphs, Larson tells us that Penn's wallet-busting tuition ($21,130 -- without room, board, books, or No-doze) "helps cover the annual deficit at its faculty club" and also goes toward "the average $121,000 in compensation that Penn pays its professors."

Huh? Tell that to the junior faculty in the humanities who, even at an Ivy League School like Penn, earn one-third of that. Elsewhere -- e.g., at most schools -- they earn in the low-to-mid-thirties. Raises are small and infrequent. Not until nine pages into Larson's piece do we learn he meant full professors, and was including all benefits, even a college-tuition reimbursement program that not all faculty' use. We don't hear about full professors at other institutions, many of whom have been teaching for twenty years and earn less than their graduating seniors will make within a year.

Professors, Larson says, find "teaching undergraduates and serving as advisers" to be "loathsome tasks." A few pages later we are reminded again of "the few hours a professor actually spends in class." And no deplorable social trend can be noted without blaming the 1960s. Students of this generation also drove up the price of admission because they demanded "more amenities, including comfy dorms, indoor tennis courts, and pools." So that's what Kent State was all about.

In fact, downsizing is paralyzing much of higher education. All too many faculty members are overworked and underpaid, putting in sixty-hour work weeks and constantly battling their administrators' efforts to cut the library budget, cut financial aid. and freeze faculty and staff positions. Yet if you talk to most professors about their work, they speak animatedly about teaching, about developing new courses, about nurturing their students.

Are there overpaid, irresponsible, tenured faculty at every institution of higher learning? You bet, and we can all name names. But they aren't the norm, and anyway, the sensationalized media coverage won't hurt them.

But it will hurt those who hope to get an education. The image of the lounging sultans of academe is a highly effective weapon in a class-and-race-based war over who will and who will not have access to a B.A. in the first place. Rich, private universities, like Harvard and Stanford, are barely affected by this discourse about an academy full of lay-about teachers, expensive tennis courts, and faculty clubs that resemble Blenheim Castle.

But instate after state, legislatures looking for budget cuts have targeted higher education. They are raising tuition and fees, freezing salaries, cutting operating budgets, and slashing student loans. It is people from lower- and middle-income families, single parents, returning students who have to work, and many people of color who will have to sacrifice more, work harder, or just not go to college at all.

But that's OK -- they can take up golf. As ABC news reminded us over and over, the lesson from Tiger Woods's victory is "that anyone can make it to the top." Woods was immediately canonized by every news outlet in the land as a breakthrough, transracial saint, an agent of integration and goodwill. The newscasters genuflected. Once again, the future of western civilization was freighted onto the shoulders of the latest guy who can throw/hit/kick a ball.