PRODUCTIVITY FOLLIES. A senior professor writes an Inside Higher Ed column in which he sees the injustice in higher education's increased reliance on cheap and contingent labor, particularly for the core courses.

As everyone in academe now knows, the professoriate has experienced a radical transformation over the past few decades. These enormous changes have occurred so gradually, however, that they are only now beginning to receive attention. The general public has remained largely unaware of the staffing crisis in higher education. As contingent colleagues around the country came to outnumber the tenured faculty and as they were assigned an ever larger share of the curriculum, they became an inescapable fact of academic departmental life.

An elaboration of great length turns into a call for action. What's missing in his call is an analysis of the competitive conditions in the academic market.

It is time that more tenured faculty woke up to the fact that their entire professional existence, replete with their comfortable incomes, their fascinating research, their coveted sabbaticals, their agreeable teaching loads of less labor-intensive and more satisfying courses — all this is made possible by the indispensable efforts of a million ad-cons doing so much more for so much less. Equitable compensation, health and retirement benefits, opportunities for advancement and professional development: all these should be available for everyone in higher education and are long overdue. Since teachers’ working conditions equal students’ learning conditions, it is a truly deplorable message we are sending our students! With more than 70 percent of our college teachers lacking any kind of job security, academic freedom has largely disappeared from our colleges, drastically lowering the overall educational quality.

What lowers overall educational quality is the failure of the institutions perceived as second- or third-tier to systematically work on improving their competitive positions. Administrators and far too many faculty members accept that their institution will never be as well regarded as Harvard or Wisconsin or what have you and simply surrender, never mind that the willingness of those highly regarded institutions to reject lots of students in order to appear more selective creates a ready pool of students who deserve to be challenged by their second-choice, or their safety, universities. There's a Crooked Timber post (via 11-D, also worth a look) that raises the possibility the status quo in higher education leaves all sorts of inefficiencies.

[T]here is more market pressure these days than there used to be on institutions which are non-elite and non-selective: they increasingly have to compete with providers (like the University of Phoenix) which have low costs, high quality control, and are concerned with meeting the demands of workers who have particular learning needs (and, as they don’t point out, while this might have good effects on the quality of teaching it might have not so good effects on exactly what gets taught). But selective, elite institutions (especially the 140 or so colleges and Universities that are most selective) are really selling a credential, not the learning that comes along with it.

The lost opportunity: the competition for the non-elite and non-selective ought not be with Phoenix and the like, the competition ought to be to provide a respectable alternative to the allegedly selective schools, with better working conditions for faculty to boot.