Are the tumbrils rolling at your community college? Keep an eye out. It’s only a matter of time. The Jacobins these days are the professors, not the students, and their radicalism will only intensify, getting worse before it gets better.
Alienated intellectuals love to identify with the downtrodden and oppressed, and now, it seems, in some ways their interests might in fact be aligning. Colleges and universities are depending more and more on non-tenured professors, and compensation for those who do the bulk of the teaching is tanking.
Twenty-five percent of “contingent faculty”—part-time instructors and non-tenure track professors—“rely on some form of public assistance,” a Central College English professor writes in Persuasion. More than two thirds of lecturers, instructors, and adjuncts “earn less than $50,000 per year.” This “precariat,”…
