Failing Academic Infrastructure

While bemoaning the current state of the academic job market with some friends, it occurred to me that this market is exhibiting many of the same characteristics as urban areas in the US: it was built in the post-WWII boom, wasn't built for this many people, and is facing massive budget shortfalls for the foreseeable future.

Many cities in the US experienced a burst of infrastructure spending following the war as the US economy assumed the number one position in the world. As urban renewal spread throughout major urban centers, new roads, highways, public transit systems, water and utility provisions, and large scale engineering projects were funded by combinations of federal, state, and municipal funds. However, the explosive growth in the numbers of people moving to cities - not to mention who it was that was moving to and from cities (thus changing the tax structure of many municipalities) - has largely proven too much for an infrastructure unprepared for these influxes. Traffic nightmares, crumbling roads and bridges (especially you, Minneapolis!) and an inability to procure or use the right fixed equipment decreases the quality of life for many - though obviously not all - of those who inhabit or work in urban areas.

In the same way, a nascent US higher education system emerged from the post-WWII era. Strengthened by a burgeoning industrial-military-academic complex (Eisenhower included 'academic' in his original draft, but omitted it his speech), the GI Bill, and, in the 1960s and 70s, the Baby Boomer's entrance into college, higher education was extended in unprecedented and exciting ways. Many would would not have dreamed of a college education in the 1950s now consider it a right of passage - a necessity to participate in the professional job market. As the neo-liberal era winds down, without bringing any of the promised benefits to 90% of the US population, a tottering education complex appears, to those of us faced with the prospect of an academic career, on the verge of failure. Education, once a blessing, has become an albatross around our neck. All that had been promised to us as kids - get an education and you'll always be in demand - is now verifiably false. Urban life and academic life - both signs of booming prosperity - reveal the depth of the problem facing the US far better than Wall Street or the Dow Jones.

For many of us, we have too much education - as universities and colleges cut back on class sizes and tenure track positions, re-evaluating what is necessary when budges are taken up administering education, we find that competition for incredibly difficult and low wage work is fierce, to put it mildly. Too many people have entered this market but, because of the demands of student loans, rent and credit cards, we can't pull out. In an era of economic expansion, such as the 1950s and early 1960s, highly skilled or trained individuals such as ourselves would be in fine position to place ourselves in a good market or create new ones. As the economy contracts, and information is no longer as valuable a commodity as it was even ten years ago, we face an inhospitable future unless we - along with others whose economic outlook is similarly dire, make our own future: that is our only future now - to make it ourselves.