One seldom hears the word professoriate, anymore. It reminds me a different, more radical time. (That time wasn’t as radical as people now recall; America twice elected Nixon.)
Tucker’s chapter on the professoriate describes where rent control flourishes: in upper middle class communities, usually among wealthy tenants. That seems perverse: advocates of rent control often tout the need to keep rents low for the poor. They may advocate for the poor — articulately — but they are hardly poor themselves.
Rent control measures often pass, as Tucker notes, (1) in wealthy college towns, (2) that are shifting from manufacturing to services and academia. (Through the advocacy of the well-heeled, and when academia became ascendant, was when rent control was first imposed on Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example.)
Tucker contends that in the history of rent control in America, one will find rent-control more commonly in wealthier communities, with disproportionate numbers of white collar professionals and academics. Doubt it? See if you can prove Tucker wrong — I’ll bet you can’t.
Why? Because the upper middle class can advocate persuasively. They wind up advocating, at bottom, for themselves.
We, of course, are not a wealthy community. Everyone who runs this town — every yammering defender of our supposed greatness — knows this. It’s indisputable. We do not have the rich, thick soil from which rent control typically grows.
We’re better off without rent control, but we’d be even better off without a mostly stagnant economy in a deep recession. Whitewater, home to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has a professoriate, too, but not a locally influential one.
Some academics live in the city, but many live in other places, and commit their after-work time to other communities. (I find nothing wrong in this; it’s just an observation.)
Our situation is far more acute than a typical town and gown conflict. Most problems in Whitewater are more acute than typical ones.
We are a particular community: often insular, narrow, closed, excuse-making, cheerleading. Whitewater would shrivel to nothing without her campus, yet neither locals nor academics act on the implications of this.
For locals, there’s a resistance to the campus that’s astonishing; a bit anti-intellectual, a bit paranoid, a lot self-destructive. There are some others who have great pride in our hometown campus, but one finds others, not so much different in class and background, who despise it.
For academics, it’s a mixed picture. To continue the theme of radical expressions, I am reminded of Marx’s distinction between a class in itself, and a class for itself. Whitewater’s university academics may be a class in themselves, but they’re sure not a class for themselves. Some play no community role (a fair choice anyone should be able to make), but others are satisfied playing roles as town dignitaries, grandees, whatever.
It’s too funny really; those academics who mingle (as people of importance) with the town clique do so while others in town are willing to kick students in the teeth at every opportunity. Marx was wrong about classes in themselves (as he was wrong about everything else): people sell out their own for all sorts of reasons, not the least of them for a little bit of recognition and self-importance.
Our academics may not be pushing rent control (and some would surely oppose it), but they’re not pushing much of anything else. We’ve no unified professoriate ready to storm the ramparts, or storm anything else.
Tucker’s remarks are useful for another reason: special pleaders use government to advance their own ends, even when they claim it’s for am altruistic purpose.
We just have a different set of special pleaders in Whitewater.