On the statement, “American academia is entering a period of even more uncertainty”

The above sentence was written by sociologist Philip Cohen. I guess his statement about American academia is literally true, but the “even more” part seems misleading to me. My take on American academia is that it has been one of the economically cosseted islands of the American economy (along with the health care and police/military/security industries) within the sea of uncertainty, at-will employment, etc.

Academia, health, and security are three areas of the economy that have had atypically low uncertainty over the past few decades: they’ve been close to recession-proof and, yes, there is always belt-tightening but not a lot of people actually getting fired. One exception to this is the replacement of full-time teaching positions with adjuncts, but that seems different from the issues discussed in your above post.

I guess what I’m saying here is . . . ummm, I’m not saying that everyone in academia has it easy, just because I have it easy, having been lucky enough to step on the escalator at the right time (if maybe not as lucky as the lazybones discussed here). Rather, given all the uncertainty in the economy in the U.S. and the world during the past twenty years, I wouldn’t say it would hard to believe this would come to academia also. Especially given that there have been direct political efforts to attack academia. Even beyond that, though, it’s hard for any institution to hold out against the tide.

A relevant analogy here might be the police. When people talk about cutting the budget for the police or reducing the autonomy of police officers, police departments fight back, often pretty loudly. The police are like the university in that both are valued because: (1) they provide a necessary function for society, a function for which there is always a demand for more, and (2) they are highly politicized and active in politics (academia on the left and police on the right). The health-care industry is different. It satisfies property #1 but not property #2: the health-care industry is not associated with either side politically. Although that seems to be changing, with doctors and nurses moving toward the Democrats and the Republican party working pretty hard to antagonize them.