Academia fucked up by copping an attitude toward the most important, but least glamorous, aspect of the job: teaching. In the 1960s, the U.S. had a strong resea

Academia fucked up by copping an attitude toward the most important, but least glamorous, aspect of the job: teaching. In the 1960s, the U.S. had a strong research culture. Unfortunately, the professoriate took the attitude that research was their real work and that teaching was just grunt work to be sloughed off to the people at the bottom of the heap (graduate students and juniors). Eventually, they turned that work over to low-paid adjunct faculty, occasionally taking on an upper-level undergraduate course. Teaching is important for a number of reasons, but it also functions as a sales front for research. Research is important, but only educated people can see its importance. If 40% of the next generation's leaders learn calculus and 5% learn complex analysis, then they'll have an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics and an understanding of its importance. However, if they're taught by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who've lost all enthusiasm for the subject, then the rising generation will lose sight of why the work is importat. This is, of course, bad for science but even worse for the humanities, where the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next (i.e. teaching) is almost the entire point, because commercial applications are nonexistent. I won't call most humanities research unimportant, because I don't understand most of it, but I will say that if you have a leadership class as ignorant of the humanities as the American upper and upper-middle classes are, you're going to have a hard time selling anyone on the importance of it. Most people are quick to decry what they don't understand as useless and unnecessary. When the research rock stars started de-emphasizing teaching and offloading the work, the rest of society (including university administrators) called their bluff. If they were so ready to slough off the teaching (which is what most of the world sees as the real work) to overworked adjuncts, then why have professors at all? Of course, a few politically adept stars (grant-writing rain-makers) managed to hold on... but the quiet researchers are done. The injustice of the tenure system is that the people to suffer for this attitude were the young-- not the entrenched tenured professors who created that culture. The jobs got taken away, but not from the people who copped that negative attitude toward teaching. It was the rising generation (from 1985-ish to today) that got fucked. At this point, you have a toxic culture of scarcity and the false poverty mentality (i.e. the "I'm 75% poorer than my friends, so I'm living a life of service and the rules don't apply to me" attitude).