Workplace Blog

Inside Higher Ed: ‘The Last Professors’

Two much-discussed trends in academe — the adoption of corporate values and the decline in the percentage of faculty jobs that are on the tenure track — are closely linked and require joint examination. That is the thesis of a new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, just published by Fordham University Press. Frank Donoghue, the author, is associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Donoghue recently responded to e-mail questions about the themes of his book.

Q: What prompted you to write this book? Does your career fit these trends?

A: More than any other factor, the career decision that prompted me to write The Last Professors was my move to Ohio State in 1989. I’d spent my prior academic life (undergrad, graduate school, my first teaching job) at elite private universities. Coming to a public, land grant university meant working at an institution that has no vast endowment, that is often strongly affected by the state’s economy and politics, and that is frequently forced to make very tough financial decisions. This new climate gave me an unmediated look at “how the university works,” to borrow the title phrase of Marc Bousquet’s new book. I reacted by reading everything I could find on the topic of academic labor (not much in 1990, other than Richard Ohmann’s English in America and Evan Watkins’ Work Time), and then began teaching courses on the subject. The book really grew out of those graduate seminars on academic labor, and I’m deeply grateful to the students who took them.