French Philosopher Louis Althusser argued the way individuals understand the world and their role in it is profoundly shaped by an assortment of institutions, which he dubbed Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). ISAs — like the school, the government, organized religion, cultural practices and rituals, and of course, the media — define the world, for better, and often, for worse.

Althusser’s point was not that individuals are marionettes, with the State gleefully pulling the strings, but rather, that most belief systems taken to be natural are, in reality, wholly constructed. Althusser argues that these belief systems are a “pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence.”

The danger, then, is that the ideological messages generated by ISA are understood to be “just the way things are” or “common sense,” when they are anything but.

But here’s the rub. More often than not these ISAs promote a belief system, an ideology, that works to uphold the status quo. They urge individuals to do and act and say things in a manner that allows systems of power to operate with ease.

Althusser’s argument is that ISAs grease the metaphorical wheels of society. And this is the problem with the image of labor and productivity that TV — one of Althusser’s primary ISAs — presents.

The televised American labor force is filled with professions that dovetail with deeply held American belief systems regarding labor and productivity:

• medicine (General Hospital, ER, Grey’s Anatomy),
• law (LA Law, Law & Order, Damages, Ally McBeal),
• law enforcement (The Wire, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, The Shield), and
• politics (The West Wing, The Good Wife, Scandal, Veep).

Althusser writes that “ideology has no history, which emphatically does not mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary, for it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history) but that it has no history of its own.” Ideology is historyless because it is a construct, and also loosely tied to the “concrete history of concrete material individuals.”

In the case of American ideologies regarding the moral value of labor, this concrete history can be traced back to Protestantism.

In 1904, German sociologist Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a series of essays connecting “the spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism” (27). In America, Weber explains, labor was a form of grace, and wealth was, in turn, a materialization of this grace, a sign that one’s labor was significantly diligent and useful.

American television, too, makes a virtue of hard work, deferred gratification and discipline. The flatfoot hitting the pavement until he catches the criminal, the exhausted waitress counting tips in the break room, or the brilliant doctor who finally perfects a vaccine that stops the plague — all reflect the myths America tells itself about itself.

These labors have value — as American TV demonstrates — because they are visibly productive.

This is, perhaps, because the actual work of being a professor — serving on committees, grading papers and tests and lab reports, responding to emails, conducting research, planning lessons and assignment, writing and revising, and, most recently, engaging in the byzantine process of program assessment — doesn’t always resemble “work.”

In fact, much of the professor’s labor resembles what others do in their leisure time: staring at a blinking cursor in their pajamas, reading and scribbling, chatting with students. Labor that cannot be assessed or monetized cannot be a form of grace.

The labor performed by the TV professor is considerably harder to depict in a visually satisfying manner. Other than the rare physics professor who gets caught in a nuclear explosion, turning him into one half the metahuman known as Firestorm (aka, The Flash’s Professor Martin Stein [Victor Garber]) or the math savant who solves crimes for the FBI (aka, Numb3rs’ Professor Charlie Eppes [David Krumholtz]) the life of the mind seldom makes for exciting television.

Occasionally we meet the TV professor en media res, reciting the final lines of a lecture before glancing worriedly at the clock and declaring, “That’s all the time we have for today, class. Don’t forget your exam is Friday!” Then the show’s protagonists, the Buffys and the Felcitys and the Zach Morrises, exit the classroom, en route to a more interesting plotline.

The difficulty of visualizing “the life of the mind,” of translating it into the American language of labor and productivity, may explain why the professor is so frequently accused of being unproductive by other concrete material individuals.

For example, just last year Governor Scott Walker proposed $300 million in budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin system and urged professors there to “work harder.” This image is strongly tied to the idea of tenure, with major publications, from The New York Times to the Washington Post to The Atlantic, debating its value.

Wall Street Journal editorialist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, recently published a book on the subject entitled The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For, in which she argues that “the tenure process…is what is eroding American higher education from the inside out” (8).

Despite Riley’s concerns about faculty who lounge, today, tenure is the exception rather than the norm. In the last 38 years the number of tenure track positions has been cut in half, replaced by positions that go by a variety of names: adjunct, fixed-term, contingent, and part-time faculty.

That’s not all: at the same time as professor workloads and class sizes are increasing, salaries are dropping or stagnating. Professors, worried about keeping a job they are unlikely to replace, increasingly find themselves staying silent rather than critiquing the choices of administration.

And even tenure doesn’t seem to protect that freedom anymore, as the recent Mount St. Mary’s case frighteningly illustrates. Increasingly, when professors speak up in defense of their students, they find themselves fired or publicly disgraced.

It’s tempting to attribute everything that happens on television to economics and audience taste. Medical dramas are popular, for example, because the labor of saving (and losing) human lives is the very stuff of drama, just as police procedurals are popular because the labor of investigating and arresting criminals is inherently dynamic.

But it’s important not to allow the seeming frivolity and raw consumerism of television to mask the ideology they transport into American homes, like a Trojan Horse.

Media images conceal as much as they reveal. They direct the audience’s attention to one problem, thus allowing the audience to ignore another. Indeed, the drive to make professor labor knowable — visible and quantifiable as data points on a graph — is wreaking havoc on the American university system.