A Parable on Justice and the Market Power of "Star" Academics

Jon Kvanvig (Philosophy, Missouri) writes:  "Below is something philosophers don't seem to have thought about very much, especially those who get offers to move from one institution to another.  The Pacific debacle made me think more about the conditions of those not as lucky as those who actually get offers from other institutions (though they are clearly not in as dire circumstances as the hotel workers, who's situation prompted my recent thinking about this), and that is what the following is about."  Here is Professor Kvanvig's parable:

There was once a lush tropical island whose economy was tourism-based. The natives worked in fancy resorts at different jobs: some busboys, some cooks, some waiters, some low-level managers. All made at least a living wage, so discontent was muted.

Competition between resorts grew. Since the pool of qualified workers was limited by the island population, workers would sometimes move their employment from one resort to another. Management began to look for workers who would give a competitive advantage. So some privileged workers were constantly receiving offers that would raise their salaries.

This practice left each resort with a management decision, whether to raise the salaries of valued employees preemptively, or whether to wait and counter offers when they arose. Since the top managers went to prestigious MBA programs, they universally favored the latter. The workers never objected to the practice, and those receiving offers would simply decide between staying and going based on what seemed to them the best given their overall situation.

Then one day, the workers received two books each from a wealthy philanthropist interested in political theory. One was John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and the other was Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. They organized study groups, and though there was some dissent, the majority seemed to favor something along the lines of Rawls’ theory.

As discussions progressed, the principles of the books came to be applied to specific institutional structures on the island. The workers considered the political system in place, the unemployment safety net, the old age benefits package, and many other institutions as well. Running out of applications, one of them suggested thinking about the institutional practice governing competition between resorts for employees. When they started thinking about freedom and uncoerced contractual arrangements as opposed to practices arranged to the benefit of the least advantaged, they came to the conclusion that their practice fit a Nozickian model much better than a Rawlsian model. For, they reasoned, if workers who received better offers from other resorts never allowed their present employer to raise their wages in response to a new offer, choosing only between their present conditions and the new offer, employers would have to raise salaries of any good employee in order to make it too costly for competitor resorts to offer them a higher salary. Moreover, it was obvious to the workers that the practice of never considering a counteroffer would be likely to produce higher salaries for all workers. They reasoned that management wouldn’t be able to wait to raise the salaries of only those who actually received offers, but would have to intervene preemptively on behalf of any employee they wished to retain, thereby benefitting even the least advantaged workers.

Several reactions ensued. Some felt duped and silly, for they had never considered the idea that management practices had the effect of keeping wages lower. Others felt ashamed, for the point was so obvious that they knew in their hearts that they had been deceiving themselves so as to benefit from the existing system. And some were proud, immensely pleased with the fit between their Nozickian leanings and the practices of the institution in which they spent their lives.

Then the realists spoke. "Yes, the system works to the disadvantage of the least advantaged, and the answer is collective action on our part. But short of true collective action, we have no alternative but to do the best we can for ourselves."

The prophet rose. "You can do something. You can tell your home resort that you’ll only take their counteroffer if they also help other workers at the resort. You can act symbolically by refusing to accept a counteroffer, even though it doesn’t maximize your own self-interest. You can do something." To which the jaded replied, "It won’t help. It won’t make the island a better place. The disadvantaged won’t be helped. Management will just call our bluff, and then where will we be? Short of true collective action, there is no stopgap measure." Saddened, the prophet quietly replied, "This is the inertial principle for injustice. It is how injustice is propagated from one moment of time to another. You can’t show a proper concern for justice if you will do nothing that costs you anything."

The Nozickians howled.

Comments are open; no anonymous postings.

Comments

[Stephen R. Marsh]

"You can’t show a proper concern for justice if you will do nothing that costs you anything."

I think that is the true ethical principal underneath the entire discussion. Setting aside all the other economics issues and the general defects some allege in the legal and philosophical reasoning, without a will to incur costs, there is no real concern.

I'm curious to read what your other readers post on this thread.

[Mark van Roojen]

I've actually had thoughts of this sort myself, though one thing complicates matters. In the service employees example the worst off are likely to be among the service employees themselves. By contrast for us, the professors, many of our students are apt to be worse off than any of us. So the issue of justice (if you have Rawlsian sympathies) is what system would have the greatest benefit for those students (and others who benefit from our work) who are in the bottom representative group. That may or may not line up with helping the lowest representative group of professors. On the other hand, I think that it also would not line up with current practice, as Professor Kvanvig rightly suggests.

[Robert Allen]

"The disadvantaged won’t be helped. Management will just call our bluff, and then where will we be? Short of true collective action, there is no stopgap measure."

Believe me, the vast majority of adjuncts have virtually nothing to lose and would welcome the opportunity to walk picket lines with their full-time colleagues. Together, we could bring the capitalist bastards running our colleges and universities to their knees. There is, thus, no good reason for not taking militant action here.

[Stephen R. Marsh]

This thread has suddenly become a lot more topical, as the following article reflects. It makes one wonder about the application of ethics to both the use of adjuncts and the continuation of programs in law or philosophy that are not in the top half. I don't have answers, but I enjoy seeing the questions.

________________

Yale, Columbia Graduate Students Strike
The Associated Press
04-19-2005

Hundreds of graduate students at Yale and Columbia kicked off a five-day teaching strike Monday, a coordinated movement that organizers hope will force Ivy League administrators to recognize them as a union.

Organizers have found Ivy League campuses the ideal backdrop for a national drive to bring grad students under the union umbrella. But Monday's strike represented a new tactic: Rather than fighting individual administrators, unions hope coordinated efforts will force a sea change in the Ivy League.

[Allan Hazlett]

"Organizers have found Ivy League campuses the ideal backdrop for a national drive to bring grad students under the union umbrella."

This is interesting given that our effort at Brown to bring ourselves under the union umbrella was a monumental failure; the Brown Daily Herald notes apropos the recent strike:

"The strikes come after a National Labor Relations Board ruling in July, in a case brought by the Brown University administration, that Brown graduate students are not University employees and do not have the right to unionize."

Perhaps Prof. Kvanvig's proposal for full-time professors - don't accept counteroffers - might have some impact on the salaries of other full-time professors, but it seems right that "short of collective action" there's no hope for adjuncts, grad students, etc.

Doesn't it seem, also, that we're in a bit of a different boat than the islanders? On Kvanvig's island "the pool of qualified workers was limited by the island population," but there is a nearly endless stream of (as far as I can tell) competent-to-great-quality teachers being produced. If professors refuse to accept counteroffers, won't Universities just dip into the vast and teeming pool of waiting and willing up-and-comers (as opposed to freaking out and raising everyone's wages)?

[jon kvanvig]

I agree with Mark's point about enlarging the application of the parable to include graduate assistants as well as professors. It would be disappointing to me, though, if discussion of the immediate and obvious things recipients of offers can do were pushed to the side in favor of discussion of the value of unionization. I'm all for collective action, but philosophers and other academics need to think more about what kinds of actions to undertake in the meantime. I'll support picket lines and whatever, but the challenge of the parable is about how to care about the right things prior to the point at which collective action has been undertaken, and surely the answer to that is not only to begin the attempt to generate collective action.

[jon kvanvig]

Allen, two quick answers to your last question. First, no department wanting to remain in the elite group on Brian's report can undertake your strategy. Second, there are other strategies besides not entertaining counteroffers. How about entertaining only those counteroffers that build in benefits for the least advantaged? Or decide that one has enough money already and ask that the difference between one's present salary and the counteroffer be put toward raising the salaries of others.

The idea of never entertaining counteroffers would work, I think, only at a more collective level; but that leaves open lots of options at the individual level.

[Brendan]

So in the US TA's are not part of a union? Wow, here in Canada we are all unionized.

If student at Brown are not university employees, then exactly who are they employees of?

[Nick]

Brendan, in response to your question: they are not employees of anyone since they are not employees. They are students who receive funding for their studies and in return, as part of that education, teach undergraduates. This was the view that I supported during the union drive Allan Hazlett mentioned a few posts back, anyways. I thought this made sense given that here at Brown Ph.D candidates typically:

1. are given TAships based on academic merit, rather than skill at teaching.
2. receive twice as much, or more, per course as what they could get teaching courses at other local schools, and have pretty light workloads (in philosophy, anyways)
3. receive TAships as part of a pretty good funding package that includes lots of fellowships

I also supported this model because I think that if an PhD candidate is not receiving enough for TAing to support herself and her research adequately, she should be able to petition the university for adequate support. Personally, I don't feel that most (at Brown, anyways) could ask for anything more _qua employee_. But they probably all could, or could a couple of years ago, _qua student_.

It might seem that someone is automatically an employee if they are receiving money in return for labor, but I'm not sure that is right, at least in an interesting sense of employee. A father might give his daughter an allowance in return for mowing the lawn, but generally this is as part of a nurturing relationship rather than as a business decision. I think universities should strive for the same thing with their graduate students (here at Brown, at least in the philosophy department, it seems to be like this).

By the way, are you sure that in Canada "all TAs" are unionized? I don't recall that being the case at Queen's when I was there as an undergraduate, but things might have changed.

[Avery Kolers]

Here at Louisville, we keep getting across-the-board faculty raises (though according to the current issue of Academe, U of L assistant profs are still in the lowest percentile of assistant profs' pay nationwide) on grounds that this is the only way to retain star faculty. I find this quite bizarre. If I get an offer from Princeton, a 2.5% raise at Louisville -- for myself or my colleagues -- is not going to be what keeps me here. Even a 10% raise wouldn't be what kept me here. The whole idea that spiralling raises are the real currency attracting stars presupposes so many other things -- comparable prestige, research support, quality of life, etc.

To the contrary, these minor across-the-board raises are used to "justify" annual double-digit tuition increases for students and the steady erosion of permanent faculty lines in favor of PTLs. Students are told, "we have to raise your tuition to pay the faculty." But this is a divide-and-rule tactic; students then have to work more and take out bigger loans at increasingly higher interest rates, so they grumble about faculty raises, and the faculty grumble about students who don't do the reading because they work third shift at UPS. (Try doing a grade strike when the students resent your pay raises.) Meanwhile, the business school dean's "compensation package" is over $300K and the coaches pull down millions. And tenure requirements are anyone's guess.

I fear that the "Rawlsian" resort strategy of pushing for across-the-board faculty raises even without being organized will inevitably have this kind of result. We need unions if we're going to save, or rather rebuild, any remnant of democratized higher education -- tenure, affordable tuition, academic freedom, social mobility, whatever. To my mind, that's why the Pacific APA fiasco, in addition to being immoral, was tragic.

[Eugene Kim]

I'm amazed that no one has explicitly addressed the problem of FINANCING. Where will the money for the salary increases come from? Is there a money tree that I don't know about? Spending a bigger portion of the school budget on faculty pay implies spending a smaller portion on everything else. What budgets do we cut? Avery Kolers suggested that we take money away from the business school or the sports program. Is this the kind of financing that everyone else has in mind?

[Ken]

What the employer said in his own defense:

You don't seem to understand the mechanism of price. I'm willing to pay you twice what I pay other workers. I'm willing to do so because you are twice as productive as your co-workers. Others recognize your productivity and are willing to compete for your services. The price on your labor carries information about the value of your labor. You seem to want me to raise the price of all workers, independently of their productivity, in order to retain your services. So you're suggesting that because you are twice as productive as the next guy, I should reward the next guy who is half as productive as you. In effect, you want me to introduce a great deal of noise into the pricing system. That will make the entire system a great deal less efficient at the very least.

Now you say that I should do this "out of a sense of justice." But I don't see why it's unjust that increased productivity should be translated into increased wages. This seems to me especially true in a society like ours, to follow out the beginning of this discussion -- where institutions outside the labor market work to lessen the impact of inequality. I mean we have a social insurance system that provides adequate retirements for all. We have a national health insurance system that ensures equal access to quality medical care for all. We have terrific public schools that really do leave no child behind. I endorse all that as well and good. We even have a labor law that allows some workers in some industries to translate increased "collective" productivity into increased wages collectively -- even when that increased productivity is due to the employers investment in certain technologies. If we didn't have those things, I'd be right along with you fighting for them.

But here's the thing, in your particular line of work, I'm afraid, productivity is highly variable from individual to individual. I'm not really presented with a workforce that functions more or less as a whole. You are a scribbler. And some scribblers just scribble more and do more high quality scribbling than others. What exactly is so unjust about my paying someone who scribbles twice as much at twice the quality, more, possibly significantly more, than someone who scribbles half as much at half the quality? Do you think there should be no rewards for more productive scribbling or that that every scribbler should be rewarded when one person scribbles more productively than the rest? How much should the employer have to pay for an extra unit of fine scribbling? Perhaps you just don't like competing with your fellow scribblers. I know they don't like competing with you, because you are so much more productive. But I want more scribblers like you, not fewer. Your idea seems a recipe for producing fewer rather than more good scribblers. Why should I do that?

[jon kvanvig]

Ken, if what you put in the mouth of the employer is correct, I acquiesce. If there really are quality and quantity differences that justify the differential rewards in our discipline, then I have no complaint. I expect you don't think the empirical claim is true, however.

For Eugene and Avery: one shouldn't think that only a global strategy is available. And nothing I wrote was meant to imply that one shouldn't take an offer from Princeton (though, if Leiter is to be believed, you should set your sights higher!). One can at least think local: there's the three adjuncts down the hall who are really good; there's the associate professors who look at the disparities in salary and grow discouraged because they can't be justified; etc.

Here's a defense I'm happy with: there are many worse things in the world than the injustices found in philosophy departments. I prefer to work on behalf of world hunger, the plight of the homeless, etc. And when I get an offer that gives me more resources, these tragedies require my attention first. My only reply to this defense is whether one could *also* do something within one's own discipline and department, and there I expect the answer is "yes". Star power in any discipline can be leveraged beyond simply raising one's own salary, reducing one's teaching load, etc.

[Chris]

Jon Kvanvig wrote: "If there really are quality and quantity differences that justify the differential rewards in our discipline, then I have no complaint. I expect you don't think the empirical claim is true, however."

I remain agnostic on what Ken took to be the moral implications of the empirical claim, but surely one cannot doubt the claim itself! Philosophers come in varying quality and surely finacially generous job offers from top departments *tend* to reflect that variation. I'm puzzled as to why Jon is skeptical of this claim. Some clarification would be appreciated.

Interestingly, philosophy *teachers* also come in varying quality, though I'm more skeptical that financially generous job offers reflect that.

[Robert Allen]

"Here's a defense I'm happy with: there are many worse things in the world than the injustices found in philosophy departments. I prefer to work on behalf of world hunger, the plight of the homeless, etc. And when I get an offer that gives me more resources, these tragedies require my attention first. My only reply to this defense is whether one could *also* do something within one's own discipline and department, and there I expect the answer is "yes". Star power in any discipline can be leveraged beyond simply raising one's own salary, reducing one's teaching load, etc."

Of course, one could also do something about the injustices found in academia. But that would be much, much riskier and much more time consuming than sending a check to Oxfam or Habitat for Humanity. The question is, are academic stars willing to inconvenience themselves and jeapordize their careers to advance the cause of their less fortunate but no less deserving colleagues?

[Robert Allen]

"I remain agnostic on what Ken took to be the moral implications of the empirical claim, but surely one cannot doubt the claim itself! Philosophers come in varying quality and surely finacially generous job offers from top departments *tend* to reflect that variation. I'm puzzled as to why Jon is skeptical of this claim. Some clarification would be appreciated.

Interestingly, philosophy *teachers* also come in varying quality, though I'm more skeptical that financially generous job offers reflect that."

This is a red herring. The fact is, there are many, many talented but grossly underpaid adjunct philosophy professors. One need not be an egalitarian to champion their cause. Indeed, it is the fact that salary differences do NOT "reflect ... variation(s)" in ability that entails the injustice here.

[Brian Leiter]

The correlation between compensation and skill or competence is very imperfect, and almost non-existent except at the extremes (the highly paid Jerry Fodor really is a better philosopher, etc.). The primary reasons for that, it seems to me, are (1) certain sub-fields are more highly valued than others (and thus philosophers in those fields command higher salaries), but those valuations themselves can not really be rationalized as meritorious; and (2) lack of publicity about compensation, even at most state universities, means that for any individual or department it is hard, to impossible, to assess accurately how one's compensation compares to that of others in one's "philosophical merit" class elsewhere. Accumulated anecdotal evidence strongly suggests to me that many philosophers would be unpleasantly surprised were these facts more widely known, and that it would put to rest, rather quickly, the idea that philosophical merit is driving compensation.

[Robert Allen]

"The primary reasons for (the imperfect correlation between compensation and skill or competence), it seems to me, are (1) certain sub-fields are more highly valued than others (and thus philosophers in those fields command higher salaries), but those valuations themselves can not really be rationalized as meritorious; and (2) lack of publicity about compensation, even at most state universities, means that for any individual or department it is hard, to impossible, to assess accurately how one's compensation compares to that of others in one's "philosophical merit" class elsewhere."

This is probably true in the case of full-time professors. But adjuncts are grossly underpaid simply because the shallow-minded, greedy parasites running today's colleges and universities have no qualms about screwing people, especially eggheads like us.

[chris]

"The correlation between compensation and skill or competence is very imperfect,"

Fair enough. I have no insider information regarding promotion practices of philosophy departments (nor academia in general). This is, after all, an empirical issue, and I myself have no empirical evidence either way; perhaps I was naively optimistic about the correlation of compensation to skill. I wonder what Ken would have to say about this; after all, I assume he does have significant first-hand knowledge of how well comensation tends to track skill.

[Robert Allen]

For a broader perspective on this issue see:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sustar04222005.html.

An excerpt: "The economic reality for U.S. workers today bears increasing similarities to their counterparts in less developed countries: a small and shrinking sector of better-paid workers amid a sea of low-paid and often temporary labor, a country where unions are weak and any economic gains for workers are under constant threat, and where the state has abandoned almost all pretence of a social safety net."

[jon kvanvig]

I agree with Brian's point that salary information is not widely known. Here's some interesting information I gathered for a review of our department this spring. The information is gathered from major state university departments; private schools were excluded. Average salaries by rank:
Full 87-96K
Assc 61-65K
Asst 50-52K

Average graduate assistant compensation was:
12-13K.

These are average ranges across geographic regions, with the lowest number being the average in the Midwest and the highest including the entire country. Data was used from the following schools: Ohio State, Wisconsin, Maryland, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, Ill-Chic., Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, Davis, Santa Barbara, Irvine, and San Diego. Not all schools responded, and in some cases I used public information sources for data. Schools one would expect to be among the lowest in terms of salary were more likely not to respond, so there is little reason to wonder if the data is skewed to the high side.

[jon kvanvig]

As a postscript to my last comment, I'd be happy to update my data with information from other schools. All I need is average (mean) salary by rank at your institution, and I'll include it with my data and make the summary data available to any who wish to see it. That is, I will not reveal the numbers from specific institutions (I don't have permission to do that), but I can give summary data. My email is my last name followed by first initial at missouri dot edu.

[jon kvanvig]

Correction to the last note: all is need is mean salary by rank *in philosophy* at your institution.

[Robert Allen]

The adjuncts at the schools at which I teach earn from 1800 to 3000 dollars per course. They, of course, have no health care benefits or pensions.

[Orly Lobel]

This is a great thread, and it just goes to show how bizarre and problematic is the pedagogical distinction in American law schools between employment law and labor law. There is currently a study being conducted about the decline of labor law scholars, the move to teaching employment law instead, and (in my view) worse yet, the move in some schools from teaching employment law to only teaching "employment discrimination" as if Title VII now occupies the entire field of work relations in the U.S.
There are many forms of market-based collective action today that do not fall neatly into the framework of the NLRA, but are yet to be theorized by us scholars.