NYT and higher ed

If you've read last Friday's New York Times article Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times, follow up with Marc Bousquet's Junk Analysis of Higher Ed by the Times. The Times:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever.

As Bousquet points out, it's not "the economy":

Most of the people who won't get tenure track jobs this year, like last year, and every year since 1968 (that’s all four "recent decades," but who's counting?), won't get them because universities have substituted casual student labor for full-time faculty and staff positions.

And then of course there are adjunct positions. As Frank Donoghue notes in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), tenured and tenure-track professors now compose only 35% of college teaching personnel in the United States, and that percentage is dropping.

[Update: The American Association of University Professors released new figures yesterday. In 2007, tenured and tenure-track professors composed 31.2% of college teaching personnel.]