What Academics Do--And What Americans Don't Understand About It

“You have a job?” I still remember this question from a neighbor, back in the year 2000. For several years, my family and I had lived in a pleasant, quiet Maryland suburb of Washington DC. I was teaching in Baltimore at the time and had a long commute by car: an hour each way, stretching to an hour and a half in rush hour. But in 2000, my spouse landed a job in Baltimore as well, and we started to prepare for a move. Seeing my neighbor in the street, I told her the news. “Do you think you’ll like living in Baltimore?” she asked. “Well,” I replied, “it will be nice to be closer to my job.” At which point she asked the question,

I could understand her puzzlement. As a history professor, I only needed to be on campus three days a week or so, and only during term. Most of the rest of the time, I worked at home and often saw my neighbor during the day when I popped out to do an errand, or putter in the yard. I didn’t know her very well, and we had never talked about careers (she looked in her seventies; I assumed she was retired). And I now realized that for several years, she had assumed I was an unemployed lay-about.

This little incident still resonates with me as an example of the gap that divides academics—especially those in the humanities and social sciences—from most Americans. Even Americans who have graduated from four-year colleges, taking courses from professors with active research programs, often have very little sense of how academics spend their time, or what academic research entails. And now that the Trump administration and its allies are taking a sledgehammer to the universities, proposing savage cuts to federal research spending and punitive tax rates on endowment returns, the gap is proving deadly. It has been all too easy to portray all academics as lay-abouts and worse: as fraudsters and as political malcontents who spend all their time attacking America. “The left, not the right, picked this fight,” Megan McArdle wrote last week in a particularly ill-informed column about academia for the once-proud Washington Post. Or, as JD Vance put it a few years ago, quoting Richard Nixon: “the professors are the enemy.”

McArdle and Vance are not wrong about everything. For instance, not only does academia skew heavily Democratic; many academics genuinely believe that the United States has been a force for great ill in the world, and say so in the classroom. When accused of politicized instruction, they sometimes retort that academia has always, everywhere been inherently political, and mostly in the service of white, male, heterosexual elites. Meanwhile, fraud does seem to be on the rise in the academic world. And, yes, the formal work obligations for most academics, especially in the social sciences and humanities at elite universities, are not onerous. At a place like Princeton, the number of hours that tenured historians are formally required to work, including classroom teaching, office hours, undergraduate advising, grading, and committees, probably totals no more than 400 per year (I will immediately add that every one of my colleagues works far more than this). At most other institutions, the formal requirements are heavier, but still light in comparison with full-time non-academic jobs.

And that’s part of the problem. At least before COVID, most Americans assumed a full-time job meant traveling to a workplace for forty hours or more a week. Most Americans also work under far more strict supervision than academics, have far less job security, and know they could be fired for bringing politics into the workplace. From their perspective, academics—at least the most visible ones, which is to say tenured professors at elite universities—look perilously close to being on permanent vacation. Members of my own extended family, who have known me my whole adult life, still joke about how I get three-month summer and year-long sabbatical “vacations.” When I tell them I am doing research on Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, they sometimes ask: “is there really anything new to be found out about that?”

The fact is that academia operates on a very different wavelength from most other sectors of American society. First of all, it depends to a huge extent on willing unpaid or badly paid labor: advising and mentoring students; writing endless letters of recommendation; serving on committees; holding administrative positions; reviewing article and book manuscripts; etc. etc. etc. For reviewing a book manuscript, a task that might easily consume 20 to 30 hours, a university press may offer a fee as low as $150. Readiness to do this labor usually factors into salary review, but the raise secured for extraordinary service almost never compensates for the time involved. At research universities, faculty are expected to devote half their effort or more to research, but without much formal monitoring, if any, by superiors, of either its quantity or quality—at least, after tenure. The system can certainly be abused, but in my experience not many faculty do so.

Furthermore, academic research does not, by its nature, generally yield an immediate material payoff. This is most obviously true in the humanities. But even in fields where research is justified by its contribution to technological innovation, or improved government policies, much of it may only have a highly indirect, general relation to the stated goals. Many lines of research inescapably run into dead ends: you often can’t know if a hypothesis is correct until you try it out. But research also serves the indirect purpose of showing future professors and professionals how knowledge actually advances. Its greatest benefit is sometimes the experience gained by the researcher. Many historians do relatively little research after getting tenure, but the experience of having done it at the doctoral level matters enormously to their effectiveness as university instructors. Among other things, it makes them see, viscerally, that history is not just a collection of unchanging facts, but an ever-evolving dialogue between past and present.

Measuring productivity, or how much work academics actually do, is impossible by the more obvious metrics. A friend of mine who was working on a Ph.D. in theoretical physics once told me that he did his most important work in the shower. I tend to think out the structure of essays and book chapters while going on long walks in Central Park. I rework my ideas while having coffee or drinks with colleagues. Is that “work time”?

It is easy enough to decry much academic work, especially in the humanities, as politically tendentious, “woke.” But the fact that authors have political agendas does not by itself discredit their work. To say this would be to equate entire fields (African-American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, etc.) with political propaganda—which, of course, MAGA critics do. But work only becomes tendentious when the political agenda dictates the results, in defiance of accepted standards of evidence and analysis. This happens, yes. It has happened more in recent years. But have accepted standards been abandoned wholesale? It is all too easy to dismiss work that challenges one’s own convictions, work that is unsettling, work that undermines cherished myths, as tendentiously “political.” All the more reason to let academic debate about the value of this work play out, rather than trying to respond to the challenges with the heavy hand of the state. Back in the 1990’s, an earlier generation of conservative critics, up in arms about the academy’s “political correctness,” warned that literary studies had been taken over by deconstructionism and other versions of “French theory” that supposedly undermined the very concept of truth. Thirty years later, the influence of this theory has faded sharply, and the reason is not that the government purged all the critics who cited Jacques Derrida in their footnotes. The field moved on, as it does.

There are plenty of reasons to be sharply critical of elite American universities today. For decades, a largely pointless arms race over rankings has encouraged them to spend huge sums on expensive (and expensive to maintain) infrastructure, including luxury dorms, athletic facilities and student centers. The proliferation of student services, combined with the need to comply with ever-expanding regulations, and the use of unnecessarily complex corporate financial and information systems, have all contributed to massive administrative bloat. To pay for all of this, including inflated salaries for top administrators, tuition has skyrocketed—except that because of the competition for high-scoring students (rankings again!), a high proportion of families pay much less than list price. So, instead, the universities have cut exactly where they shouldn’t: in instruction. True, the extent of “adjunctification” can be exaggerated, since surveys tend to count every instructor not on the tenure track as “adjuncts” (including teaching assistants, language instructors, and the entire faculty of professional and for-profit degree programs staffed by full-time practitioners of the fields in question). Still, many universities find it all too convenient to have courses taught by adjuncts effectively making less than minimum wage, even as their own Ph.D. graduates face a catastrophically poor academic job market.

I could imagine carefully crafted policies that might address these problems. For instance, raise the tax on endowment returns, but allow universities fully to deduct what they spend directly on instruction, as opposed to on a high salary for a new assistant deputy vice-provost, or on a new Olympic swimming pool, or on purchasing a wildly expensive system upgrade from Oracle or SAP. Introduce more careful monitoring of “indirect costs” paid on top of federal research grants, to ensure that these funds directly support the research enterprise.

But, of course, these are not the sort of reforms the Trump administration is proposing. They just want to slash and burn. And because so few Americans understand sufficiently what academic work consists of, they are all too ready to accept the claims by Trump, Musk and Vance that academics are nothing but lazy, corrupt, political malcontents. To answer my neighbor’s question: yes, I have a job. So do my academic colleagues. But if the administration has its way, many of us may soon be out of a job.