So here I explain, as promised, why Scott Walker’s reform scheme for higher education would contribute tp the proletarization of professors without containing costs. Contrary to most of the experts, I really think that the emerging division of labor on campuses between the self-defined cognitive elite of administrators (and foundations, technocrats, consultants, branders, accreditors, bureaucrats, and so forth) and the instructors reduced to “knowledge workers” teaching from scripts according to best practices and deploying the latest technology is an important cause of the undeniable and rather shameless fact that tuition and such are rising much more rapidly than the rate of inflation. I would actually be for “disruptive innovation” that would return higher education to its core mission and nothing more. I even agree that some professors (and governors) are lazy and incompetent, but many more of them than Walker suspects (especially at four-year and community colleges) just want to be rescued from having to swim against the current in a sea of nonsense to do their jobs.

Literally hundreds of conservatives in various places on the “social media” have taken time to explain to me that – even if liberal education is a good thing – it’s not occurring much of anywhere on our campuses anyway. It’s the job of the Republican governor to break the hold of self-indulgent leftism on our campuses, as much as it’s his job to break the holds of unions over public-sector employment. Some have said that I’m just defending my “class interest” as part of a so-called “vocation” that enjoys unearned privileges without taking seriously the corresponding responsibilities. Many of these criticisms have been biting, others eloquent, and some biting and eloquent. I will answer some of them eventually. Glad to hear them all, though.

My support has come from the more traditional conservatives, such as the “American conservatives” Rod Dreher and Sam Goldman and a good number of in-the-trenches professors of philosophy and politics. Sam makes the excellent point that Walker’s shot against lazy professors was made in ignorance of the actual working conditions (not to mention compensation) of the overwhelming majority of those who “generate” our credit hours, but it does make sense to say that the very light teaching loads enjoyed by too many professors at research universities should be regarded as unsustainable. Walker’s shot at the search for truth for its own sake could be understood as directed at the undeserved privileges granted to trivial pursuits.

I’ve also gotten a little support from Democratic blogs and “reform conservatives.”

For the record: The teaching load at my colleges is seven three-hour courses a year. I get a course off as a professor with a chair. But this semester (for example) I’m teaching three different classes that have little to do with each other. Each has lots of written assignments. I grade them all by myself. Each is text-based, and I actually do all the reading for each class every time I teach it, even those boring Court opinions. I don’t have any lecture notes or PowerPoint gizmos. Not only that, I’m teaching on the side for no additional compensation a partly “independent study” course for five students on Christian political thought that meets every week and includes text-based weekly papers. That is, quite apart from everything else, more than a nine-to-five job. (And I do lots of other stuff, as you know.)

But you get the summer off, someone might say! That’s true enough, but I don’t get paid for the summer. Moving away from me for the moment: Young faculty in most places don’t have the option of tubing down the lazy river all summer. They have to publish to keep their jobs. And they have to earn “extra” money (please Google their average salaries at un-elite places) to feed their kids. So faculty at regional state colleges, small private colleges, and community colleges often teach summer school and more.

I’m not denying that there’s a kind of self-indulgence that goes with the job. You’re typically on your own to teach what you want the way you want. That doesn’t mean at a four-year college you can just whimsically pick stuff to teach. It means that you get to figure out on your own how to teach what you’ve been given to teach. Within definite limits, you’re your own boss. That’s the kind of freedom that’s under attack — maybe as an inexorable result of the progress of the division of labor — in the “average is over” environment in many sectors of our economy today. In some cases, the result is more efficiency and productivity, as at Amazon. But it’s not, on balance, making higher education better or even cheaper.

One more point: Some people actually think I’ve been roused into action to scuttle Walker’s increasingly promising campaign for the presidential nomination. Well, that’s not true. (It’s flattering — well, vain self-deception — to think my opinion can make any difference.) Nobody should choose a candidate based on higher-education policy. And for now I have to say I don’t have enough of a sense of the man Walker to be either for or against him. The Republicans have that “deep bench” of capable young candidates, and so they actually need the long “vetting process” of debates and primaries and caucuses to figure out which of these relatively inexperienced and somewhat unknown people has the right stuff.

I will say this. If the winnowing process leaves us with Paul, Cruz, and Walker, then Walker will surely be my choice. What about Bush? Well, I’m starting to agree with the experts who say that he might well fall by the wayside soon after Iowa. He’s certainly not getting the role unless he kills his screen test. What about Christie? Rubio? We’ll see.