Punishment for Professors

In his book The Goose-Step Upton Sinclair discussed among a great many of the other evils of American higher education in his time the surveillance of professors on and off the job by forces not only inside but outside their institutions. The surveillance, if attentive to anything unseemly in said professors' private lives (like the slightest whiff of a male professor's involvement with a woman not his wife), was mainly political in nature--and misstep followed by retribution.

Said retribution was not always official. As Sinclair notes, the professor who fell afoul of the administration might find pay rises and promotions withheld (with all that means given the lousiness of the pay to begin with). They might find their room assignments constantly changed. And, to quote Sinclair, the professor might find themselves "teach[ing] large classes of freshmen, over and over again the same weary routine," perhaps "for the rest of [their] life."

Those aware of the conditions under which adjunct instructors work will, of course, note that what the full-time faculty got as punishment--the lack of pay rises and promotions, the instability of assignments, the duty of teaching those grinding first-year classes--is the adjunct's lot as a matter of course, in the absence of even the thought that they had transgressed.

Consider that.