The Poverty of Professors

One of the more striking chapters in Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step is the seventy-seventh, "Damn the Faculty," where he declares that "[t]here are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid, overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank and file college teacher," and recounts their reports of their poverty. (Many of them, he makes clear, are materially worse off than when they were students--while it seems worth remarking that it is a sad situation indeed when professors cannot afford to buy books to read.)

As Sinclair makes clear, such things factor into the incentives to cowardice on the professors' part before the tyranny of their administrators, and in their corruption, as they fear losing what chance they may have to ascend the academic ladder to those posts in which, income-wise at least, life would be less unbearable.

Still, Sinclair makes clear that even at the absolute height of the field there is still extreme indignity, relating an anecdote in which the holders of a banquet invited both Albert Einstein, at a point in which he was already acclaimed by many the "greatest thinker of our time," and the Prince of Monaco. The Prince refused to be received at a function along with Einstein (making an excuse of his being "German"), and the compromise that promptly followed was that during the banquet "Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and not asked to speak."

Such was the true nature of this "meritocratic" society then. So does it remain today.