Retrenchment—What the Managers Are Doing

When part of this article was first written in 1974, large-scale retrenchment of college faculty was a relatively new phenomenon. To be sure, there had been occasional layoffs when an institution threatened to go broke, and the 1940 AAUP statement on tenure provided that it could be nullified for reasons of “financial exigency.” But such cutbacks were infrequent and unusual, the exceptions that proved the solidity of college job security. What was new in the early 1970s was the invocation of retrenchment processes not necessarily because a college was edging toward bankruptcy but because it wanted to change its programs, its “product.” That seemed to many of us an outrageous violation of collegiate norms. Many faculty had been led into teaching precisely because of its stability and its insulation from market forces. Now the market in all its worst forms was invading the campus. Furthermore, we believed, decisions about what could be taught were being removed from the hands of their proper judges, the faculty, and appropriated by a fleet of increasingly remote administrators. No one's work was safe! The essential quality of the academic community was at stake! Thus, when colleagues in History or English or Education received pink slips, we bitterly protested. But it rapidly became clear that protest was not enough, that the new breed of collegiate managers, whose skills had been honed by the student activism of the previous decade, were not going to be impressed with impassioned speeches at faculty Senate meetings or with letters to the student newspaper—or, indeed, to the New York Times. Nor were faculty unions— such as they then were—going to be much help; indeed, our union president shrugged that “you can't force Ford to keep making Edsels forever”—a remark which hardly endeared him to laid-off historians. We found that we had to understand this new phenomenon better if we were to have any chance to organize against it. Why was retrenchment coming upon faculties at this historical moment? How valid were the arguments of declining enrollments and needed flexibility being made by college managers?