Enhancing life isn't a joke, but neither is it the absolute "other" of the economic engine of our time, biopower. "Making life better" is the registered-trademark slogan of my university....

A syllogism, of sorts: Post-Fordist economics is culture. Culture is the Humanities. The Humanities are central to Post-Fordist economics? Or, maybe more directly, the argument is that cultural capital is *real* (just ask anyone who says "ax" when they mean "ask," and they'll tell you what cultural capital is worth in business). Hasn't this been what brand names like "Harvard" and "Princeton" were about from the get-go, the amassing of cultural capital (rather than vocational knowledge -- which one can get at those places that advertise during the 3am reruns of _Gomer Pyle_)? How have we let this debate get away from us? These days, even what vocational schools teach is exactly what we do -- how to learn, because if you learn only the skills necessary to fix X computer or system, you're screwed when version 2.0 comes out 6 months later. Remember Robert Reich's "flexibly specialized symbolic analysts"? That's us, people, and that's what we teach. Which is to agree with Protevi (and with Fish) that we cede far too much ideological ground when we defend what we do as useless (life-enhancing, citizen-making, good for you like castor oil) to the larger economic spheres in which we currently live. As much as one likes something like Nussbaum's new book, it does allow both sides of the debate to agree that the Humanities are useless -- only question then left is whether we should laud them because of this fact, or close them down. Once you agree they're utterly useless economically, tho, I can't see how you don't come to the "close them down" conclusion.

I'd guess the incentive is the next university president (provost, or dean) gig, which every current administrator is auditioning for. Cutting the budget helps your stock price if you're a CEO, but it doesn't necessarily help your university attract customers (err, students), so not sure it helps university presidents increase their stock price on the open market. Admin's increasingly a permanent career track, like a swanky Roach Motel -- you can check in, but can't check out. If you return to the teaching ranks, that suggests you did something "wrong," a frightening development. But if the admin herd-think follows what happens at the top of the industry, it's hard to see the logic driving the downsizing mania everywhere else -- armies of part-time labor is not why Harvard is Harvard, or Princeton is Princeton. And no donor every gave money to a university because he or she fondly remembered a Dean or an Associate Vice Provost -- it's the tenure-line faculty they remember, the connection to the alma mater.

Check, point taken -- uphill battle, but I think one worth fighting. And I don't think it's against the interest of administrators to hire tenure-line faculty over armies of part-timers: the only product you have is a luxury brand (at least in the US, numbers stubbornly hover around 20% college grads since the 1950s), and you run down the value of that product considerably if you hire armies of transient, part-time help -- at least past a certain threhsold. As Protevi sez, question is where that threshold is. As there are no shareholders to feed, not sure where why the profit motive model should drive academic administrators -- they have a brand to protect, rather than a dividend to pay out.

I'm with ya, right up to the last sentence of the initial post: "The profession is producing too many PhDs so that employers can afford to exploit." This a very popular line of reasoning, and the line run by Mark C Taylor, in the New York Times no less, just last weekend: because there are no jobs, there should be fewer PhDs. And, it's implied (by the sentence structure above: "The profession is producing too many PhDs, *so*....") that the faculty are the *cause* of the problem here (they *require* fawning grad students to pick up their dry cleaning and hunt down articles for them). So when someone says, "trim the PhDs" you're satisfying both ends of the resentment formula -- trimming the ranks of the cause (fewer people on the tenure line), as well as leading to a solution (fewer people vying for those scarce jobs). But of course there's a missing term here -- administration. There's no "natural" shortage of jobs, and no iexorable reason that administrators have to follow the idiotic logic of research-faculty downsizing that they read about in _Dean Today_ magazine. Which is to say, I don't see any reason why we should accept the premise that there "are no" tenure-line jobs for us to train students for -- there are plenty of jobs, plenty of work to do as more and more people look for credentials in a bad job market; but they're crappy jobs. This is the problem, and it's "caused" not by too many PhDs in the present and future, but by a calculated (and I'd argue deadly) set of administrative decisions that we should marshal against rather than accept as inevitable. Hate it (as most people do) or love it, it's simply a fact the tenure-track American style research university remains a kind of gold standard, the one remaining global industry where the US model can confidently still chant, "We're #1." And the administration of that research university is killing it off, slowly but surely. As brand managers, they're doing a shitty job. So what can we do? Maybe for a start, consider this simple beginning action plan: When your Dean generously "offers" your department 2 post-doc lines or 3 lecturers to do the work of two retired tenure-line faculty, just say "no." Everybody.