Le Monde, 1 November 2010

American Campuses: French in decline (Original title: “You have been deactivated”)

Jean-Jacques Courtine, Professor of Anthropology, Université de Paris III; Emeritus Professor,

UC-Santa Barbara

Claudine Haroche, Director of Research, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique

You were thinking that formula was invented by George Orwell… Big mistake. It is the

administrative “newspeak” message, in all its laconic brutality, that the seven professors in the

French program at SUNY-Albany have just received from the President of their institution.

Notwithstanding that each of them has what is called, in the US, “tenure,” which, they

thought, gave them absolute job security. The oldest were advised to take early retirement;

the youngest, “to pursue their careers elsewhere.” In the case of both groups, they had been

reproached with no professional shortcoming. They were treated as cogs in a machine that, no

longer being profitable, had simply been disconnected. There is no “deactivation” without some

prior dehumanization. We are indeed in an Orwellian space.

What has just happened at Albany reveals, well beyond the human consequences to which no-

one can remain insensitive, certain extremely worrying general tendencies that are now having

profound effects on higher education in the US. In this respect, we in France toil under stubborn

illusions of perspective: we see only the overexposed window-dressing of centers of excellence

in Shanghai while ignoring the darker façade of a multitude of anonymous universities that are

nevertheless responsible for educating the overwhelming majority of the student population.

TWO HISTORIC ANOMALIES

This sector is seriously threatened today by a brutal economic and intellectual restructuring.

The “deactivations” put into effect at SUNY bear witness to the severity of budgetary reductions

that are liquidating domains judged least economically viable (beside the French program, those

in Italian, Russian, Theater and Classics were simultaneously wiped off the map), at the same

time rendering employment infinitely more precarious. There are currently only 35% tenured

or tenure track faculty in American universities, whereas there exists a large body of fragile and

nomad adjunct teachers, whose existence is played out, in the main, on the highways that convey

them from one university and one classroom to another. Thus, we should understand literally

the real sense of the advice dispensed by the administration of SUNY-Albany: “Go pursue your

career elsewhere,” that is behind the wheel of your car.

In the US, universities were remodeled, following the Second World War, according to the

norms of American enterprise, but they nevertheless preserved two historical “anomalies” that

were foreign to the culture of the enterprise, having inherited them from the European university

tradition: job security (tenure), and an important sector of intellectual activities that were

not directly oriented toward profit (the Humanities). Those two anomalies are in the process

of being “rectified” before our eyes. Job security is slowly but surely disappearing from the

American university as part of the generalized erosion of individual protections demanded today

by economic neo-liberalism. As for the fate of the Humanities, the brutality of the measures

adopted by the President of SUNY-Albany paradoxically offers a great advantage: that of

showing what can become a banal reality for universities where, from one day to the next, the

Humanities will no longer be taught. And where, along with them, the fiction imagined by

George Orwell will fall into oblivion…