Adjuncts and the tenure track in sixteenth century Europe.

When academia chatters about itself today, it mostly complains about the death of the tenure track position and universities' increased reliance on contract adjuncts with high teaching loads and no time for research. The subtext, if one believes all this eulogizing of academia, is that there once was a golden age when professors were all well-paid, when scholarship was highly respected, when research dollars were plentiful and innovation unencumbered. 

It's too easy to point out the silliness in the parochial celebration of academia's alleged prior glory: which is worse, not allowing women or minority professors, or paying professors too little? It's not a useful question. 

So I was amused to read this passage yesterday about scholarship in the time of Martin Luther, Erasmus, and John Calvin. Apparently even in the sixteenth century scholars were complaining about having to teach too much, getting paid too little, and earning no respect:

The spotlight of historical study has been focused on the greatest of the new scholars, those who have been the first beneficiaries of this study and who attracted the most attention from princes. Remaining in the shadow are all those who made up the rank-and-file of the movements, the minor scholars whose work brought them only a poor living and who might bask for many years in their pride at having approached Erasmus during of his journeys, or met Colet or Fisher at Oxford, or received a letter from Bude or Gaguin. Those who kept up the continuous activity of these associations without financial endowments or paying pupils experienced anxiety and anguish that were all the harder to bear because books were expensive and they could not carry on their work without frequently purchasing them. If, in order to live, they became printing workers, for years at a time, they lost contact with the circles of new learning. More commonly, they preferred to teach, outside the traditional framework, as needy tutors instructing little groups of children in Greek and Latin: they were poorly paid, and persecuted by Church authorities when their illicit activities became known. It was for them that Philip Melanchthon wrote his De miseriis paedagogorum, in which he described the woes of these penniless scholars vegetating in petty teaching posts. 

[the book is called From Humanism to Science 1480 - 1700 and it's by Robert Mandrou]