ECONOMICS IS NOT BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.  Regular readers understand that some cost-cutting measures are false economies, particularly those measures that destroy institutional memory or drive business away.  That holds for higher education, in which there are market tests, even if business-faddish administrators and transgressive faculty don't want to recognize them.

A young friend of ours recently visited a public college which we at Tenured Radical have admired for years.  S/he reported conversations with undergraduates about the effects of the persistent defunding of higher ed in that state, and the ways in which defunding has diminished a quality liberal arts education that people with very little money still have access to.  A prominent problem, in the view of students there, was incessant faculty turnover due to low salaries, poorly maintained library collections and the erosion of benefits. In turn, the constant loss of faculty  made it difficult to establish mentoring relationships, get recommendations for graduate school, or do senior honors work with faculty who had helped them develop the research and had planned to advise it.

If the merit-pay policy of an organization is "we might match a better offer" the managers (or administrators or undersecretaries) have created a situation in which the organization's best people already have one foot out the door.  In higher education, where the excess demand is for credentials from serious institutions, the students recognize the consequences of the perpetual cost-cutting, and in time, cost-cutting will lead to falling enrollments leading to further cost cutting.  The sequence converges to zero.

It's useful, however, to distinguish pro-management or pro-business policies from pro-market policies.

The notion that college teachers are as interchangeable as hamburger flippers at Wendy's follows, of course, on the neoliberal notion that secondary school teachers are also interchangeable.  Furthermore, on no evidence, free marketeers have sold the notion that college professors will continue to work cheerfully, and to a high standard, for as little salary and as few benefits as colleges and universities choose to pay us.

Cheap and incompetent business gurus might be able to push the merits of speed-up to the management, but that advocacy denies the logic of a competitive market, which functions to identify and act on gains from trade. We speak of a law of supply and demand accordingly.

The only teachers you really want at your school, the logic goes, have the personalities of 18th century Franciscan missionaries in the New World, willing to sign on to thankless, ill-paid labor purely out of love for those to whom they will minister. Although this theory goes unspoken in an increasingly adjunctified world of private higher education, attacks on educational employees in New Jersey, California and Wisconsin seem to be giving new energy to strategies for disempowering and intimidating teachers at all levels.  This is particularly heartbreaking in states that seem to want to break with a long history of providing quality, public higher education to ambitious students with little money.

Never underestimate the power of a market test. In Wisconsin, there are rumblings of people turning down contracts when headquarters unilaterally changes the terms.  Eighteenth century Franciscan missionaries didn't have a Protestant Ethic or Adam Smith's society of perfect liberty as intellectual ammunition to question their lot.

One problem with free market theories for reorganizing education is that they lead to a free market in educators.  This, in turn tends not to be conducive to what administrators need to deliver a quality education to students:  faculties who commit to a particular school, and create a culture of excellence, over the long term. 

Never underestimate the power of a market test.  A free market in educators will not be conducive to administrators who dream of protecting that culture of excellence, over the long term, on the cheap.  On the other hand, those administrators who recognize that excellence over the long term cannot be obtained by a sequence of short-term downsizings and restructurings, will harvest the gains from trade that markets make possible, by offering precisely the pay packages and job descriptions that reward, rather than punish, commitment.

Policy makers who believe that free market competition creates better education for the most people have, frankly, never been in a classroom beyond their three-year hitch at Teach for America. While I don't know anyone in teaching who wouldn't consider voluntarily sacrificing money and prestige to make and keep a desired life as a college professor, I also don't know a single college professor who, on balance, believes that year to year contracts, no job security, diminishing benefits and the lowest possible pay are the basis for building a career in education.

That's called a compensating differential.  Tenure, research time during the summer, and some freedom to choose class offerings and hours the classes meet compensate for compressed salaries and short promotion ladders.  Reduce the features of the job description that compensate for, while making less attractive the features that have to be compensated for, and see how long the workforce stays.