On alienation and faculty life

In his blog "Reality Check"John Lombardi, one of the academic bloggers who writes regularly for Inside Higher Ed, has an extremely smart piece called Deconstructing Faculty Work on the major changes that have occurred in academic life and the ways the institutions are measuring our "productivity." He shows how the life of the tenured professor has been reconceived around the metrics of the faculty activity report, and how this has changed relationship between tenured faculty and non-tenured, or contingent, faculty. I think he is absolutely right about how this change is redefining our entire enterprise, affecting the way we teach, the way we conduct research, and how the institution is forcing us to comply. What he doesn't mention is the toll this taking on the mental and physical health of people who have made a lifetime commitment to the academic life under an older model, one which we internalized in order to achieve success in a highly competitive and insecure world.
Yesterday I had an argument with colleagues about how the College was dictating the content and standards of our first year language courses, how the fear of bad student evaluations has warped the way our non-tenured track faculty teach, and the impact this has had on the quality of the preparation of our students.
If the College wants us to dumb down our language courses so the non-majors who are only taking the language to satisfy their language requirements don't get mad, if our third-year students are being taught by instructors who are afraid to hold them to higher standards because they'll get dinged on evaluations, and if our faculty are so unaware of this dynamic that they think they can redesign the curriculum AS IF our students were of the same quality as our aspirational peers (those institutions where we got our degrees) then the experience of teaching our under-prepared students is going to be extremely frustrating.
I highly recommend reading it to understand the disconnect between what most of us were trained to expect and what our jobs really are. We will either take this change into account as we plan our curriculum and think about our work, or we will be buffeted by these winds.

For the institutions, however, the deconstruction of faculty work offered a great incentive to reduce their commitment to an inflexible work force of tenured faculty and increase their investment in short-term, highly efficient faculty dedicated to specific purposes for specific periods of time and whose productivity and performance could be reliably maintained. The argument about whether it’s better to have part-time or full-time contingent faculty is surely important, but it may obscure the remarkable transformation of much academic commitment from an investment in a person who produces many products over a lifetime to the investment in specific products that ensure the competitive position of the employing institution.