AAUP president Cary Nelson has just published a new book, No University Is an Island. In talking over its themes with the people at Inside Higher Ed, he offers some choice thoughts on why academics don't hold one another accountable and why that produces destructive, profession-destroying patterns (see my post yesterday). The rise of adjunct labor is his particular focus, but the patterns he notes affect far more than hiring trends, and are interesting to consider in light of the professoriate's broad problem with establishing and maintaining a professional culture centered around integrity and accountability:

Q: Many of the issues you discuss -- centralization of decision making, emphasis on non-academic values, increasing reliance on adjuncts -- aren't in fact brand new, but as you write have been growing over time. Why have so many faculty members -- even if they share your views -- not been more vocal about these trends?

A: I address this more-than-vexing question repeatedly in No University is an Island. There are several reasons. Two generations of faculty members have been socialized to concentrate on their careers and ignore their community responsibilities. Those who feel differently often feel their colleagues are indifferent and the cause hopeless. In the absence of effective local organizations, activism can seem futile, whereas individual teaching and research are often immensely gratifying. So people concentrate on what works. But a slew of familiar human capacities for hiding from reality play a role as well, from rationalization and denial to simple avoidance and fear.

But that's a strangely juvenile fantasy, locked in a time warp circa 40 years ago. The reality is that such group action--if it ever does happen, and it's far from certain that it will--will only represent a deepening of the real problem. As Neil Hamilton observes,

At a significant swath of institutions, the academic profession's defense of the social contract has focused on rights and job security. As Eliot Freidson in Professionalism: The Third Logic (University of Chicago Press, 2001) has observed, when the peer-review professions defend their social contracts, they typically rely on a rhetoric of rights, job security, and "good intentions, which [are] belied by the patently self-interested character of many of their activities. What they almost never do is spell out the principles underlying the institutions that organize and support the way they do their work and take active responsibility for [the realization of the principles]." They do not undertake responsibility for assuring the quality of their members' work. The academic profession's anemic defense of its social contract confirms Freidson's observation.

[...]

The academic profession must not resign itself to the current trend toward contingent faculty, but it cannot reverse the trends toward a higher proportion of contingent faculty and less occupational control over professional work by employing a rhetoric of rights, job security, and good intentions. ... professors cannot defend the social contract without both having the knowledge necessary to make the defense and actively meeting their duties under the social contract.

[...]

If the academic profession at many institutions does not undertake these responsibilities, then this crisis of ethic proportion will continue, and the trajectory for the academic profession for the next twenty years will, in all likelihood, look like the trajectory for the last thirty years. Members of the profession will continue a slow transformation toward employment as technical experts subject to the dominant market model of employer control over work.