What Bible Translation Says about People Who Oppose Abortion

What surprises me about people who describe the Bible as “the word of God” is how blasé they seem to be about questions of translation.  Even a renowned scholar like Northrop Frye begins his book about the Bible, The Great Code, by glossing over the issue of translation quite glibly.  The translation process is always challenging and complicated.  It is very easy to translate inaccurately, to misconstrue meaning in the translation process, and very difficult to get a translation just right.  In fact, it is generally conceded that a perfect translation is an impossibility, some meaning is bound to be lost or changed as we move from one language and culture to another.  Even when the same word or expression exists in two different languages (which is not as common as you might think, and can create another problem called “false cognates”), the connotation of those words can be quite different in different cultures.  Apparently, describing someone as “a politician” in Mandarin is a complement, in North America, not so much.  As I learned living in Portugal, “ambitious” might be a compliment in English, but in Portuguese it almost invariably implies corrupt.  The ways to go wrong in the translation process are multiple; the ways to get it just right are slim to none.  If you are really unaware of the problems of translation you might consider this old joke (or maybe it’s a true story):  

A translation machine was used to translate the expression “out of sight, out of mind” from English to Cantonese.  The Cantonese translation was then fed back into the machine to translate back into English.  The result:  “invisible, insane.”

Of all the translation controversies, none have been greater than those surrounding translations of the Bible.  Just to review the basic (if approximate) facts:  the texts which eventually became the Old Testament were written in a dialect of Hebrew.  The New Testament was written largely in Greek.  Eventually, the 80 books of the Bible were translated into Latin.  Latin remained the principal language of the Bible for centuries, but the number of accepted books, the canon, was reduced to 66.  John Wycliff produced a hand-written version of the Bible in English in 1380.  Gutenberg produced the first printed version of the Latin Bible in 1450.  The Bible was subsequently reproduced, re-edited and re-translated into other editions in English and various other languages.  The first complete Bible (both Old and New Testaments) was produced in 1560, and is known as the Geneva Bible, and was the basis of most of the versions of the Bible which followed.  In 1605, King James of England commissioned a new edition/translation of the Bible and it was published in 1611.  Although hundreds of other versions of the Bible were/are available, the King James Bible has generally become the authoritative version of the Bible in English.

So, what about abortion?  Here’s what the King James Bible says about causing the death of a fetus:

22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

It seems quite clear to me that the author of this passage did not consider a fetus to be equivalent to a human life.  

On the other hand, according to the passage immediately preceding this one, if a man beats his servant or his maid to death, he should be punished but not for murder.  If the servant survives for a couple of days following the beating, then the master escapes any punishment:  “he shall not be punished: for he [the servant] is his [the master’s] money."

(If you find this last bit curious, you might want to have another look at Graeber’s Debt:  The First 5000 Years where he discusses how people, especially women [or “cumal”], were used as money.)

On the other hand (yeah, I’m running out of hands), to compare with the punishment for causing the death of a fetus, the punishment for cursing your parents is death:  “17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Not to lose the simple basic point, according to the King James Bible a fetus is not a human life nor is it equivalent to one.  The King James Bible does not support the basic foundation of the anti-abortion, pro-life movement. For people who might find the language of the King James a bit tough to follow, here is the New Revised Standard Bible’s version of the same passage which spells things out in more common English:

22 When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

And finally, I get to my point.  Here is the same passage as translated and adapted by a committee hired by Thomas Nelson Publishers to produce the New King James Bible in the 1970s:

22 “If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23 But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Notice how “miscarriage” and “her fruit depart from her” are now being translated as “she gives birth prematurely.”  There are lots of passages in the Bible that I don’t completely understand, but this time it seems obvious that we have gone from a fairly clear, coherent passage to a stretch that doesn’t make sense in a modern context and would have made even less sense at the time the Old Testament was being written.  Imagine you bump into a pregnant woman (today or thousands of years ago) and no “harm follows,” she gives birth to a healthy baby (even if premature).  Would there be any discussion of a crime, or penalty or punishment?  For what?  The Biblical passage only makes sense if what is at issue is a miscarriage.

People who claim that the Bible is sacred can’t have it both ways.  You cannot claim that the Bible is “the word of God” and then change those words to suit (or accept those changes which suit) the political agenda of the moment.

 

Addendum from

That's not what the Bible says

 

 

“Critical Thinking Skills” and “Family Values”

“Critical thinking skills” and “family values”:  these days it is typical to imagine that these concepts are dichotomous to one another.  In the binary thinking of those people who espouse strident opposition to binary thinking these expressions are in mutually-exclusive opposition to each other.  In other words, it is assumed that if you have any “critical thinking skills” you cannot believe in “family values.” What strikes me is how much these phrases have in common.

What these locutions share is the fact that their literal, obvious, word-for-word, face-value meanings are no longer what they mean.  “Family values” doesn’t mean that you value family.  "Critical thinking skills" as taught in most universities aren't skills and rarely show signs of clear thinking, though they are invariably critical.  In both cases, these expressions have taken on a level of meaning that the essayist Roland Barthes calls “mythology.”  In simpler terms, their connotations (what these phrases suggest) have become more important, more widely and significantly understood, than their denotations (the literal meanings of the words).  

These days the expression “family values” tends to suggest (more than anything else) the value system associated with the evangelical, religious right in the USA.  This domination and precedence of connotation over denotation is confirmation of the theory associated with Mikhail Bakhtin that how words are used over time affects their meaning as much as the dictionary definition.  In fact, how they are used eventually becomes the dictionary definition. What “family values” has come to mean is a result of the fact that the expression has historically been used to oppose family planning (at the turn of the 20th century it was a crime to send contractive devices through the mail, for example) and as justification for denying employment to women.  “Family values” was another, nicer way of saying “a woman’s place is in the home.”  “Family values” could be used as a basis to attack not only abortion, but homosexuality, lesbianism and various forms of non-procreational sex.

Just as the expression “family values” has come to signal an attitude more than what the words themselves mean, “critical thinking” has become code for left-wing, materialist, feminist thinking and attitudes.  As it happens, I have always been of the opinion that if you exercise critical thinking skills they will eventually lead you to left-wing, materialist, feminist thinking and attitudes.  The problem, of course, is that if I as a professor profess my left-wing, materialist, feminist leanings and conclusions to my students and they follow along and agree with me, at no point are they actually exercising their own critical thinking skills.  I am understating the case.  In fact, university students are measured by the degree to which they reject and rebel against right-wing ideologies, patriarchy and idealism or dualism.  The problem isn’t with the conclusions, but with the process, which is basically that they are being taught a series of opinions as if they were religious dogma.  Having absorbed this teaching, students are encouraged to expect good marks for having the “right” opinions without having demonstrated the logical reasoning skills which led them to these conclusions.

The causes of this malaise are not abstract or purely academic.  The demise of what “critical thinking” should be was provoked by the rise of deconstruction and the concomitant, haphazard decline of university departments of philosophy.   Most of the theory which paraded under the banner of deconstruction was nonsensical.  I saw Jacques Derrida being interviewed on French television a couple of years before his death, and he seemed honestly embarrassed to be the father of deconstruction.  He insisted that it was not a theory of any importance, not even a theory, not even a word that he used anymore.  However, in true Derridean, deconstructionist fashion he subsequently used the word at least a half dozen times in answering the final question of the interview.  I came to understand what “deconstruction” was (and more importantly what it wasn’t) by reading John Ellis’s succinct monograph Against Deconstruction, published in 1989. 

As Ellis points out, when the promoters attempted to define it, they typically defined deconstruction as a attack on or opposition to “logocentrism.”   The challenge then became to try and understand what “logocentrism” was; only to discover that deconstructionists were as foggy and obscure about defining logocentrism as they were about deconstruction itself.  Here is Derrida’s comment on logocentrism from the opening sentence of his seminal work, Of Grammatology. 

[ . . .]  “le logocentrisme  : métaphysique de l’écriture phonétique (par exemple de l’alphabet) qui n’a été en son fond -- pour des raisons énigmatiques mais essentielles et inaccessibles à un simple relativisme historique -- que l’ethnocentrisme le plus original et le plus puissant, [. . .].”

In English, without the multiple parentheses:  “logocentrism:  the metaphysics of phonetic writing [ . . .] which was at its base [ . . .] not but the most original [meaning earliest] and most powerful ethnocentrism [ . . .].

I have done my best not to play games with the translation.  It is clear that “logocentrism” is like “ethnocentrism” and, therefore, to people like me who live in and admire multicultural society, logocentrism must be something bad.  The single sentence from which I have taken this quotation runs for 400 words.  (Okay, I only counted the first 175 and estimated the rest.)  No, I still don’t know what logocentrism is, but I do know that “logos” is the Greek word for “reason” and “logic,”  and that in the opening sentence of Of Grammatology, as run-on and gobbledygook-ish as it is, Derrida, by attacking reason and writing as Western prejudice, digs himself a hole that neither he nor anyone else can dig out of.

At exactly the same moment, that Derrida was turning logic, reason and clear writing into an object of suspicion, universities were following the established business model and downsizing the study of philosophy on the grounds of a lack of sex appeal.  Logic and reason, of which departments of philosophy were the crucibles, were being hammered from both sides.  The remnants of the collision are the glib or purple descriptions of “critical reasoning skills” on university web sites which bury logic and reason somewhere in the hinterland of a third paragraph or fourth priority.

When Should You Repay Your Student Loan? How about . . . Never!

  To Owe Is to Own

Do you remember this line:  “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title.”?  “Owes” used to mean “owns.”? 

I’ve been reading David Graeber’s book Debt:  The First 5000 Years.  It begins with the American proverb:  “If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you.  If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank.”  I can remember my father telling me this.  I thought he made it up.  

Avoiding Debt

I’ve always had an aversion to debt.  I think it has something to do with when I was five and my mother, as she was leaving to go to work, telling me, “If there is a knock at the door, just sit on the floor and be quiet.  Don’t answer the door; they might be bailiffs.”  Of course, like everyone else, I’ve understood that it is impossible to get on in the world without a car loan, a mortgage, a credit card and a line of credit.  Nonetheless, I’ve always been fairly obsessive about paying my debts and as soon as possible.  You too I imagine.

Why Must Debts Be Paid?

Graeber is an anthropologist and he must have been a good teacher because the book is full of those “dumb questions” that a student might ask which turn out to be really profound, epiphanic, inspiring and unanswerable.  For example:  “Why should we pay our debts?”  And the corollary:  “Why are we so absolutely convinced that we should pay our debts?” Or, “What is money?” 

Is Barter Really the Root of Economics?

Graeber’s ambition in the book is to dispel all those preconceived notions that come to us through the study of economics--that discipline created by Adam Smith in 1776 at the University of Glasgow--like that “barter,” people exchanging one commodity or service for another, is a primordial, primeval human activity as well as the historical basis of economics, and that we are morally obliged to pay debts.  It intrigued and amused me to learn that economists (and anthropologists) are unable to trace the historical origins of money or agree upon a definition of what it is.  The camps divide into those who think of money as a commodity (meaning that it is worth something, like gold and silver coins) and those who think money is an IOU (a way to contract and measure debt).  These days it seems obvious that money is either paper or pixels, and not worth anything in itself.  Graeber argues that money and debt are pretty much the same things:  money is a measuring system (like meters and feet) and debt is what money measures.  If you have a twenty-dollar bill on you, it means that the government of the country that issued it owes you twenty dollars worth of something.  The problem these days is “of what?”  

The "Yellow-Brick Road":  The Gold Standard

In the old days, the government was supposed to have enough gold in storage so that all the money it issued could, in theory if not practice, be exchanged for gold--what was known as the “the gold standard.”  It was interesting for me (I’m a lit prof remember) to discover that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was an allegory in opposition to the gold standard.  Farmers in Kansas needed government loans, but the treasury refused them because the USA didn’t have sufficient gold reserves.   The “yellow-brick road” was the illusion of the gold standard leading to a fraud, the Wizard of Oz, who was just an ordinary old man (Oz is the abbreviation for ounce, the typical way gold was measured).  The gold standard came to an absolute end in the USA in 1971 when Richard Nixon announced that American dollars could no longer be redeemed for gold.  

Money Is a Debt that Can Never Be Paid

Even today there are people who believe that gold is the only real money.  However, according to a CBC documentary I watched not so long ago, a lot of individuals and countries hold papers that say they own gold, but the gold doesn’t actually exist. So if you have an American twenty, the American government owes you twenty dollars worth of something, but not gold.  No need to worry about gold, because it is fairly obvious that the American government has no intention of paying its IOUs period.  Economics really does become the purview of literary critics, I mean people skilled in analyzing works of fantasy and imagination, when you consider that the USA currently has a debt of over 17 and a half-trillion dollars.  That’s American dollars, so it owes trillions of its own IOUs.  

You Can Create Your Own Money

Think about it.  You’re out having a beer with your friend George and he runs out of money.  You pay the bar bill and George gives you an IOU.  The same thing happens a week later and the week after that.  Instead of getting George to pay, when you go out to dinner with Rosemary, you pay your half of the bill by giving her a couple of George’s IOUs.  George keeps writing IOUs and pretty soon everyone in your and George’s circle of friends has George’s IOUs.  When does it end?  It would end when people start refusing to accept George’s IOUs, but why would they?  If they keep getting what they want (beer and meals; maybe they can even get the bar and restaurant owners to start using George IOUs), what motivation is there to stop accepting George’s IOUs?  At a certain point, everyone knows that George is never going to pay off all his IOUs, but it is in everyone’s interest to pretend that he can and will.  It will all end when George has given out so many IOUs (like say 17 trillion) that people can no longer pretend to believe in them or George himself refuses to write any more IOUs, even though he is only being asked to write IOUs to pay a debt that he owes in his own IOUs (because at a certain point George began to receive and repay in his own IOUs).

USA:  The Most Indebted Country in the World

Both of these scenarios have taken place in the US government recently.  The USA has the biggest debt in the world at 17 and a half-trillion dollars, or over $55,000 per citizen, but every single country in the world is doing the same thing and is in debt.  The only debate is about those countries that we know will never be able to pay off their debts. Even in these cases, it seems like they "own” the banks and the countries that they owe money to, and we hear constantly that they can’t be allowed to go bankrupt.  Governments are considered conservative and fiscally responsible if they announce the intention to balance their budgets and eliminate deficits, meaning to stop going further into debt, some year in the future.

Canadian and Québécois Debt Levels

In this context, should a recent university graduate pay back her student loan?  Jeez, I don’t know!  But here are some of the facts of the Canadian/Quebec case.  The Canadian debt is currently approaching 700 billion, which means we each (every man, woman and child) owe over 20,000.  (Yep, if you were born yesterday, you are already in hock for $20,000.)  The Quebec debt is at 265 billion.

History of Non-repayment of Canadian Student Loans

Beginning in the 1990s Canadian students started to borrow a lot more money and were having increasing difficulty in paying back their loans when they graduated.  In 1980 around 9% of graduates were unable to repay their student loans; by 1990 the level of non-payment was at 17%.  By 1997, non-payment of student loans reached a total of 70 million dollars.  The federal government passed a law making it illegal for a student to declare bankruptcy until 10 years after graduation.  The Canadian Federation of Students took the government to court claiming discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights but lost the case on the grounds that student borrowers were not considered a social group.  The government later reduced the length of time before a student could declare bankruptcy to 7 years (thereby falling into line with what Graeber identifies as the ancient Judaic tradition of forgiving loans after the sabbath--or seventh--year).  

In 2003-2004 Canadian student loans amounted to $1.63 billion.  The same year, 28% of student borrowers (43,600 former students) defaulted on their loans totaling 331 million dollars. The government’s solution to the student debt crisis has been to create a Repayment Assistance Plan whereby students’ loan payments will be tapered to a maximum of 20% of their gross family income and the maximum repayment period will be 15 years.  For 15 years (or until the loan is paid) you will have to fill out a form every 6 months requesting permission to only pay one-fifth of your gross family income toward your student loan.  I’m not sure that I would find myself jumping for joy at these conditions, and it seems clear that the real objective is to ensure that the government gets its money back (or at least more than it was getting when 28% of former students were defaulting).

Canadian Student Debt Is Equivalent to a Small Country

The Federation of Canadian Students has begun to maintain its own “debt clock” showing how much Canadian students owe in Canada Student Loans.  The amount is now over 15 billion.  If they keep going, eventually they will be able to declare themselves a country (they are currently between Jamaica and Guatemala in debt size), or maybe the Federation will come to the realization that it’s members own this one.

What Is the Relationship Between University Education and Employment?

What Is the Relationship Between University Education and Employment?  The official answer is always absolute:  you need the diploma to get a decent job.  At ground level the answer is a matter of degree--in both senses of the word.  With some degrees the answer is redundant:  you get an accounting degree to become an account, a medical degree to become a doctor, an engineering degree to become an engineer.  More or less. To be honest most of the engineers I know work in sales.  Outside the obvious cases, the relationship between a particular degree and employment is a matter of debate.  On the other hand, if a graduate from a BA in English becomes a news broadcaster on local TV, you can be sure that “television journalist” will be added to the list of employment outcomes for that degree in the university calendar and on the web site.

Inside humanities programs the answer is adamant that a university degree is not job training.  It’s hard not to angle your nose toward the sky while saying this.  Holding a university degree proves that you know how to learn, not that you have learned any particular X or Y.  The average person will hold seven different jobs during a working career.  The degree has to transcend the specifics of any one job.

I don’t remember where the “seven different jobs” claim comes from, but I can remember using it fairly frequently.  And I believe that the degree should prove that you know how to learn, but how is it possible for a professor to know that a student knows how to learn without confirming that the student has learned a particular X or Y? We claim that our students learn “critical thinking skills” but how can we verify those “critical thinking skills”?  Do we ask the student to write an essay to demonstrate critical thinking skills?  If the student mimics the critical thinking skills the professor has demonstrated, does she get an A?  Or should she fail because she didn’t disagree with the professor and thereby failed to be critical?  I have found answers to these rhetorical questions in my own teaching but I have no idea how other professors dealt with them.  In my entire university career, not once did I address these questions with a colleague, or in a department or faculty meeting.  Pedagogy is just not one of the subjects that university professors talk about.

Early in my career at the University I was associated with a BA in Professional Writing.  I taught a few courses on writing and applied grammar, and was part of the committee to evaluate the program with external experts and business people.  This was a program closely aligned, at least in theory, with employment opportunities and the business community.  Students in the program went on paid internships during their studies, and the most typical reason that students didn’t graduate was that employers offered them jobs before they were finished the degree.  On an ongoing basis we had twice as many available internships as students.  However, we were never able to attract enough students to justify the program’s existence.  The experience taught me that “a job” was not the most  profound attraction when students were choosing their undergraduate field of studies.  The cache, the possibilities, however unlikely, that a degree suggested were far more attracting than the guarantee of work.

My colleagues who didn’t teach writing made it very clear to me both directly and indirectly, that a degree in Professional Writing was something to be looked down upon.  Teaching writing skills was the bottom of the prestige ladder at universities, something to be assigned to the least qualified, non-ascending personnel.  Students were supposed to learn how to write in high school.  Writing skills were simply below the level of university education.  These colleagues had a point, except that they were the first people to complain bitterly about their own students’ lack of writing skills.  It seemed inappropriate to me to denigrate the courses and the people who were trying to solve the problem, but that is what happened.

Professional Writing had another strike against it within the academy.  Whether it was right-wing snobbery or left-wing ideology didn’t matter, it was clear that a degree that kowtowed to business and/or that was closely tied to students’ getting jobs was considered beneath the ethos of university studies.  I was susceptible to these pressures and prejudices, and as time wore on I came to teach, almost exclusively, the more prestigiously-viewed literature courses (which were of course disparaged by the faculties teaching the professions) while remaining nostalgic for my old writing and grammar courses.  My dilemma was solved when the University closed down Professional Writing because of low enrollment.

On the other hand, I came to understand the shortcomings of attempting to tie a university degree with a particular form of employment and the business community in general when I served on the committee to evaluate our Professional Writing program.  I remember one internet entrepreneur being very insistent that a professional writer should know at least three computer coding languages.  Outside the university, Professional Writing tended to mean Technical Writing, which implied a degree in science and engineering prior to the writer honing his writing skills. This example, notwithstanding, the general rule is that a university education has to supply a much greater knowledge base than any entry level work position will require, but it also has to be a guarantee that a graduate has full control of a portfolio of requisite skills.

My misgiving concerns the growing tendency that I have witnessed in universities to abandon any responsibility for skills training and only minimal concern for exactly what knowledge a student is acquiring.  I have witnessed and been a participant in the lengthy processes involved in attempting to develop a program of studies for both undergraduate and graduate studies.  However, once a program exists, an entirely different level of forces comes into play which will determine exactly what any individual student is going to study and learn in a particular program:  

• the popularity of certain courses (students do get to “choose” courses, but the truth is in any given semester the choices are likely to be very limited; courses and programs that don’t attract students get cancelled), 
• budgets (courses that require extra funds or have low enrolments get cancelled), 
• available teaching personnel (as lecturers unionize they have collective agreements which give them priority to teach courses that have been assigned to them in the past. If a particular lecturer is deemed not up to the job, the easiest and perhaps only solution is to cancel the course. Courses are cancelled when no-one can be found deemed qualified.) 
• what tenured faculty feel like teaching (Tenured faculty have a very strong if not absolute influence on the courses they themselves teach. A professor might, for example, insist on only teaching courses directly related to his research--and be accommodated.  The most heated conflict I ever witnessed first-hand was between two professors over which would teach graduate seminars).  

Programs do, of course, specify “required” and “optional” courses, but these requirements tend to be very flexible.  Professors, administrators, and students themselves can get around requirements with equivalences, reading courses, and exemptions according to the exigencies of the moment.   In the end, what an individual student ends up studying (within the very loose confines a program's design) is left to the student’s inclinations and to chance.  As a professor and even as a program director I never once sat down with a student’s complete transcript at the end of her degree to consider if the courses a particular student had actually done, as a whole, made sense.  There was never any discussion of what a student had actually done, how it related to the designed objectives of the program or how it might relate to employability.  This situation, which verges on haphazard, is celebrate in university calendars as students' being able to “customize their undergraduate studies.”

How Universities Have Promoted the Unemployment Crisis

Some examples of how universities have promoted an unemployment crisis are already well known.  The faculties of education in Ontario producing thousands more  teachers than the school system can absorb is an egregious example.  Universities are also responsible for the glut of PhDs on the market because universities have a vertical monopoly, being both the exclusive producers and major employers of PhDs.  It is hard to argue that the universities have handled their monopoly in a more enlightened fashion than the robber barons of the past.

It is worth stopping to consider what it takes to get a PhD.  Steps one and two are a four-year BA and a two-year MA in order to apply for admission to a PhD.  Universities have lots of strategies on the books to shorten or even eliminate the MA, but most students go through the MA process and take longer than the two years suggested in university calendars--six years is a conservative estimate of how long you need to study just to apply to a PhD program.  Once you have been accepted into a PhD program, there is a better than 50% possibility that you won’t finish. If you do finish, the average length of time the PhD takes is seven years, the mode (the number which occurs most frequently) is ten years.  If you are part of that happy minority that actually finishes the PhD, there is a better than 50% chance that you won’t get the tenure-track university teaching position which was your original purpose in starting the PhD in the first place.  If you are part of that lucky minority that finished the degree and got a tenure-track position, chances are you are in your late thirties.  The people you went to high school with have been working for twenty years by the time you have nailed down your first permanent, full-time job.  If you happened to have gone to school with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who both dropped out as undergrads), you will probably have noticed that the time it took you to do your PhD was about as long as it took them to develop Apple and Microsoft respectively.

Who would choose to do graduate studies under these conditions?  Well . . . someone like me, slightly idealistic, overly optimistic and drawn to the intellectual environment  of the university, in part because it was secure and comfortable.  The university offered the comforting illusion that I was heading somewhere and improving myself.  In keeping with the boy scout (and girl guide) motto, I was getting prepared, even though I didn’t know for what.  The hardcore facts were that I wasn’t turning down any solid job offers in order to continue studying.  I viewed language teaching as a stop-gap measure.  It took me ten years to accept that teaching was my profession.  My alternative to a PhD was working as a waiter in LA while I tried to flog film scripts.  Studying was my only percentage option even if it  might turn out to be no more than a hobby while I earned a living as a language teacher.  And if you are really lucky--as I was--it’s hard to imagine a better job than teaching in a university.

I tried to be upfront with my own graduate students about the prospects, but I kept hearing and I keep hearing that demographics will solve the problem soon.  Nonetheless, let’s consider a few stats.  According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Almanac  there were 41,934 University Teachers in Canada in 2010.  Let’s imagine the number is 50,000 now.  In 2011, Canadian universities gave out  5,736 PhDs.  Let’s round that number down to 5,000 to simplify the math.  If we produce 5000 PhDs every year, within 10 years we will have produced enough new candidates to fill all of the 50,000 university teaching positions which now exist.  The idea that the entire university teaching core would replace itself every 10 years isn’t part of anyone’s rosiest daydreams.  It’s not happening, and it’s not going to happen.  Of course, the problem would be solved (in Canada) if the number of university teaching positions increased every year by 10%.  We know that hasn’t happened and isn’t going to happen either.   So what is happening?

University professors, who could, aren’t retiring.  According to the CAUT Almanac:    “As mandatory retirement laws have been rescinded in a number of provinces in recent years, the proportion of full-time university teachers in Canada, employed as teachers beyond the common retirement age of 65, more than quadrupled between 2001 and 2011.”  A few weeks ago there was a PBS documentary on exactly this subject:  university professors refusing to retire. The theme which ran through various professors’ explanations of why they were staying on was that occupying their university positions made them feel good.  The purpose of a university is not to make university professors feel better about themselves, and it is astounding that it should be necessary to say so.

However, the number of positions occupied by professors over 65 is probably a drop in the bucket.  According to a Services Canada report on future employment as a university teacher in the province of Quebec “the number of university professors is forecasted to rise slightly over the next few years.”  Three causes of this increase, according to the report,  (which all sound questionable to me) are:  the expansion of universities, professors' leaving to pursue other careers, and retirements.  According to the report:

 “Openings will arise first from the need to replace university professors, a relatively large number of whom will be retiring. In fact, the average age of these professors is considerably higher than in the work force as a whole. The proportion of university professors aged 55 and over in 2006 was much higher than that of all occupations (32% compared with 15%, according to census data)." 

This is a claim that I have repeated to my graduate students over the years.  However, as I read this report which is based on information from MELS (the French-language acronym for the Quebec ministry of education, recreation--"loisir" in French--and sport) which in turn comes from Quebec universities themselves, I am struck by how a fairly negative situation (from the point of view of Canadian /Quebec job seekers to whom the report is addressed) is given a hyperbolically positive spin.

For example, the report claims:  “This occupation [university professor] posts serious shortages in certain disciplines, including engineering, computer science and medicine.” “Including” is the tricky word in this sentence.  In common discourse what usually follows the word “including” is either a fairly comprehensive list or, in the other direction, some surprising inclusion.  We all know that engineers, computer scientists and doctors are in demand.  The sentence (and the report as a whole) encourages us to believe  that “university professor” is an in-demand category of profession in all areas and that there is a huge shortage of Canadian PhDs.  The report avoids any mention of the “certain disciplines” where there are no shortages and, in fact, there is an over supply. 

Rather than addressing the issue of over-supply, the report focusses on the causes of the shortage of university professors:  “competition from universities in the United States [and . . . ] competition from the rest of the labour market, which often pays these highly qualified professionals better.”  Anyone who holds a PhD and has been unable to get a tenure-track university teaching position will interpret the basic facts of the report in direct opposition to the report’s tenor and conclusions.

For example, the report notes that “only 37% of employed PhDs were working in universities in 2006.”  The report’s interpretation of this fact is, as we have seen, that PhDs are being lured to the USA and/or the private sector.  The interpretation for those people holding a PhD in the Humanities and Social Sciences (the area which accounts for more than two thirds of all university students and graduates) is that there are no university positions available in their fields and they have been forced to look elsewhere to earn a living.

Continuing on the theme that there is a shortage of PhDs in Quebec, the report announces the good news that “the doctoral student body jumped by close to 60% between 2000-2001 and 2009-2010. This labour pool is expected to increase 3,1% [3.1%] per year during our forecast period (2012-2016), according to Quebec Department of Education, Recreation and Sport's [sic] (MELS).”  Once again, if you happen to hold a PhD right now and are looking for work, this “good news” is really bad news for you because the supply of PhDs has increased in recent years and is going to keep increasing in the years ahead.  

This report which is supposed to be informing Canadians looking for work on their job prospects continues to emphasis the shortage of qualified candidates by noting that “30% of university professors in 2006 had received their degrees abroad” and that “in 2006, the percentage of immigrants in this occupation was three times higher than in all occupations (33% compared with 12%).”  There is nothing untoward in this information, except if you happen to be a Canadian with a PhD from a Canadian university unable to get a job.

While I am on this theme, the report on “Imbalances Between Labour Demand and Supply - 2011-2020”  published online by Employment and Social Development Canada offers these project shortages and surpluses  (among many others):

Shortages are projected over the next 10 years in some high-skilled occupations

• Skill Types

• Business, Finance and Administration Occupations

• Occupations in Shortage

• Human Resources and Business Service Professionals (NOC 112), Administrative and Regulatory Occupations (NOC 122)

• Skill Types

• Natural and Applied Sciences and Related Occupations

• Occupations in Shortage

• Other Engineers (NOC 214), Architects, Urban Planners and Land Surveyors (NOC 215), Mathematicians, Statisticians and Actuaries (NOC 216)

• Skill Types

• Health Occupations

• Occupations in Shortage

• Managers in Health, Education, Social and Community Services (NOC 031), Physicians, Dentists and Veterinarians (NOC 311), Optometrists, Chiropractors and Other Health Diagnosing and Treating Professionals (312), Therapy and Assessment Professionals (NOC 314), Nurse Supervisors and Registered Nurses (NOC 315), Medical Technologists and Technicians (NOC 321), Assisting Occupations in Support of Health Services (NOC 341)

• Skill Types

• Occupations in Social Science, Education, Government Service and Religion

• Occupations in Shortage

• Managers in Health, Education, Social and Community Services (NOC 041), Judges, Lawyers and Quebec Notaries (NOC 411), College and Other vocational Instructors (NOC 413), Policy and Program Officers, Researchers and Consultants (NOC 416)

Surpluses over the next 10 years are projected in low-skilled occupations, manufacturing and in trades and transportation

• Skill Types

• Business, Finance and Administration Occupations

• Occupations in Excess Supply

• Managers in Communication (NOC 013), Secretaries, Recorders and Transcriptionists (NOC 124), Clerical Occupations, General Office Skills (NOC 141), Office Equipment Operators (NOC 142), Library, Correspondence and Related Information Clerks (NOC 145), Recording, Scheduling and Distributing Occupations (NOC 147)

• Skill Types

• Natural and Applied Sciences and Related Occupations

• Occupations in Excess Supply

• Computer and Information Systems Professionals (NOC 217), Technical Occupations in Physical Sciences (NOC 221)

• Skill Types

• Occupations in Art, Culture, Recreation and Sport

• Occupations in Excess Supply

• Managers in Art, Culture, Recreation and Sport (NOC 051), Technical Occupations in Libraries, Archives, Museums and Arts Galleries (NOC 521), Athletes, Coaches, Referees and Related Occupations (NOC 525)

Take note of what you will from these predictions but I noticed the need for college and vocational teachers--yes--but university professors--no!  Did you notice in the Job Futures report that Quebec will need more professors of computer science?  Did you also notice the prediction (above) that we on the verge of an over supply of “Computer and Information Systems Professionals”?

How have universities promoted the unemployment crisis?  Thus far, the summary answer to the question is:  1) little effort is being made to tie university programs to the employment market (more on this question in a future posting), 2) universities are simply not being straightforward with students on what the employment possibilities are for the degrees they are pursuing, 3) universities are knowingly producing more PhDs (and other degrees) in certain fields than the employment market can absorb, 4) professors are no longer being required or encouraged to retire, 5) Canadian universities are not hiring the PhDs that they themselves produce.

All of this is a partial, fragmentary answer to the question but the global answer is that universities have been increasing compelled and have, with varying degrees of willingness, embraced a vision of themselves as independent businesses.  The basic business model is that you make a profit by keeping your labour costs low.  Like the robber barons of the past, universities have taken advantage of their monopoly on PhD production in order to create a surplus of labour and a shortage of tenure-track university  teaching positions.  The result is a cheap labour force of part-time, occasional and sessional lecturers and adjunct faculty which does most of the actual university teaching in Quebec, in Canada and in North America.  The upshot works on the balance sheet but it doesn’t work where it really matters, in the lives of PhD graduates who merit tenure-track university teaching positions, and it doesn't work for students who deserve access to professors fully committed to teaching in their fields.