Honest Doubt by Amanda Cross

rarely know enough.”
    â€œTrue. But I think in this case, with murder a possibility, a fresh look and new impressions might be worth a lot—and you can always get the fruits of my long experience here when you feel need of them. Your perceptions of these people and what they’re like—that’s what you ought to be going along with, for a while at least.” She seemed to reflect on her words.
    â€œNonetheless,” she went on, “there is some information that might be worth having before you talk to the personnel and gain impressions of the scene. That is, the background of the academic situation you’ll be observing and how it came about—in a very general sort of way, of course. When my generation of professors was getting tenure, the academic picture was a lot rosier than it is today. Never mind the reasons for the change—there’s some disagreement about that— but no one debates the effect: there is too little money for faculty, too few positions for the generation of new Ph.D.’s coming along. There’s a general exploitation of new Ph.D.’s, hiring them part-time and as adjuncts, where they make too little money with no benefits and no real part to play in the department.”
    â€œWhy do the departments keep turning out Ph.D.’s if there are no jobs?” I asked. “Or is that one of those questions for which there is an obvious answer I’m not bright enough to see?”
    â€œOn the contrary. I’m telling you all this because the real answer is not widely admitted. Why do the major universities, and even the second-rank universities, continue to turn out Ph.D.’s? The university wants the money, they want the population so that they can keep their place in the world, and the professors prefer teaching graduate students, who are self-selected for literary studies and smart, to teaching college-age kids whose desire to learn is hardly passionate; they’re inspired by quite different passions in those years. But above all, the senior professors want graduate students to teach the introductory courses, like literature surveys and composition, so that they don’t have to teach them themselves. As it happens, the graduate students make very good teachers; they’re enthusiastic, new to teaching experience, excited to be in the life they’ve always dreamed about. But that’s hardly permanent; once they’ve done their stint, they’re on their own with no jobs in sight, or very few.”
    â€œDon’t professors like teaching?” I asked. “Isn’t that why they’re professors?”
    â€œPossibly that’s why they wanted to be professors. Some of them are great teachers, but that isn’t how you get ahead in the academic world—not even in a small college like Clifton. You’re supposed to publish. No one will read what you’ve published. No one is really interested most of the time—but if you haven’t published you’re not a respected academic. So what every professor wants is time to research and write a book—any book. For an assistant professor today to be promoted to associate professor, they are often expected to have published more than any of the established professors of my generation or older have published in their whole lives.”
    â€œThis is a joke, right?”
    â€œNo joke. Also, teaching gets tiresome. The students have read less and less, often can’t write worth a damn, even in graduate school—I’d hate to tell you how many dangling modifiers I’ve corrected in my time! And the time off professors get— sabbaticals and summers—are the highly sought rewards of the profession.”
    I nodded, trying not to let my expression reveal that I didn’t know what a dangling modifier was. It sounded vaguely improper.
    â€œTeaching’s not what it is about,” Kate continued, speaking I thought more to