And, with How the University Works, he takes his place with Readings and Christopher Newfield Ivy and Industry, ; Unmaking the Public University, as one of the premier theorists of the contemporary corporate university.
Bousquet begins with a pointed rejection of the Lapsarian myth-making that typ- ically characterizes discussions about what has happened to the University in recent decades, a notion that due to pernicious external influence or betrayal from within the purity of the University has somehow been corrupted.
This corporatist ethos is not the fault of for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix, who still capture just a tiny portion of the market of education. These high levels of return on investment did not go unnoticed. Bloomberg News reported in July that donation to university endowment was actually becoming a new and highly lucrative investment strategy for rich alumni.
Harvard, which was the first university to receive IRS clearance to offer such an investment portfolio, had such trusts with a combined value of a billion dollars linked to its endowment in The university is an investment firm with a tax deduction.
And, like any investment firm, the university is now suffering badly in the mar- ket downturn caused by the credit crisis. Returns from college endowments were down These losses cut equally across cash-rich and cash-poor universities alike, with the Ivy Plus losses staggering in terms of raw numbers. Having become accustomed to tapping endowments, and now facing diminished support from both private donors and state legislatures, colleges are having difficulty making operating expenses; at both public and private universities, cuts are every- where: in departmental budgets, in building projects, in offered services, and in staff layoffs and faculty buyouts.
By the time their bill became law, however, UIUC grad employees had already ratified their first contract. In , they held a series of walkouts; in March , they occupied the UIUC campus administration building. Carefully planned and executed, the occupation was timed to coincide with a Board of Trustees meeting and the pres- ence of news media, and the administration gave in before the day was out.
The necessity for continuous organizing and mobilization for action is a lesson that the longest-running graduate-employee unions have fully absorbed over the years. The institutional history of the union at the University of Michigan, for instance, features a thirty-year string of near-continuous job actions, featuring at least one in every successful contract cycle.
These began with a series of strike votes during — that forced the university into recognizing the union, despite diffi- culties with the state public-employee relations board over the shape of the bargaining unit. With recognition, the union had to strike in Febru- ary and March to force the university to bargain seriously toward a first contract and then, even after contract ratification, was forced to continue the strike to gain assurance that there would be no reprisals.
Losing at every stage in Michigan admin- istrative hearings and appellate courts, the administration nonetheless protracted its appeal process for five years and was not compelled to sign the contract until Building solidarity through continuous organizing became a central commitment.
Yearly rallies on economic issues commenced, and contract negotiations involved strike authorizations, walkouts, or work stoppages in , , , , , and The result is one of the strongest graduate-employee contracts in the nation. By , employing militancy, inventive direct action, canny alliance, the principle of continuous organizing, and the will to make both law and lawmakers respect their workplace realities, U.
During this period, graduate employees formed unions at publicly funded universities in Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia, though these have yet to succeed in compelling recognition from the employer.
Occupying the national news in the s and well into the subse- quent decade was the efforts of graduate students in private universities, especially Yale and, subsequently, NYU.
Perhaps most importantly, the NYU ex- periences have underlined another key feature that private university or- ganizers share with their publicly funded colleagues: the overtly political nature of the struggle.
Spurred by the victories of their publicly employed counterparts, unionization efforts among graduate employees at private universities sharply accelerated throughout the s. In this decade, efforts began or renewed themselves on as many as two dozen privately funded cam- puses and resulted in nationally affiliated unions at Brandeis, Columbia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale, and elsewhere.
This point may seem obvious to an av- erage reader. However, in the early and mid s, a tenuous thread in NLRB case law had emerged in connection with exactly this claim—just as it had, during the same period, in a number of state boards, where it has consistently been eventually over- turned in court rulings sought by graduate employees.
The administrations of private universities across the country swarmed in support of the effort to breathe life into this particular legal fiction. The Employer has specific expectations of graduate assistants that are often spelled out in departmental or program handbooks, by job descriptions, or by NYU representatives. NYU representatives supervise the work of graduate as- sistants. The Employer provides the supplies and the place of work for the graduate assistants.
In the case of TAs, NYU provides extensive training as to the nature of the services to be provided, including train- ing on the application of NYU policies to the undergraduates. Finally, graduate assistants are subject to removal or transfer. Based on the foregoing, it is clear that the graduate assistants sought by the Petitioner meet the statutory definition of employee under Section 2 2 of the Act.
Even a board member who had dissented in the precedent-setting case in- volving residents and interns at Boston Medical Center joined this rul- ing. Thus, I regard [them] as employees who should have the right to bargain collectively. They negotiated an extremely favorable first contract at that institution, one of the best graduate-employee contracts ever negotiated. Grad employees at Tem- ple organized a first contract and subsequently a second and third.
Or- ganizing on private campuses across the country shot into high gear. Supreme Court. In the first six years of domination by Bush appointees, the NLRB overturned a series of key advances made by labor during the Clinton administration, including restrictions on threatening speech by employ- ers, the rights of workers employed by temp agencies to organize, and the rights of all workers to representation in disciplinary hearings.
As professional unionists and commentators digested this political re- ality, the drive to organize private universities began to sputter, antici- pating the likelihood that university employers would take the political recomposition of the board as an opportunity to revisit NYU. The board quickly indicated its intention to do so in the case of Brown Uni- versity. Once more, graduate-employee labor relations at all private uni- versities presented itself with one neck.
This was perhaps a final oppor- tunity. If the administrations could not win in a Bush-appointed venue, they were unlikely to win anywhere. If degree holders were doing the teaching, there would be far too few of them. The intervening official knowledge, informed by liberal economic determinism, works to conceal the operation of a pol- icy universe social, legal, institutional that shapes academic working conditions—a policy universe that organized graduate employees and contingent faculty understand they can and must transform.
Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime. Graduate employees un- derstand that the system of cheap teaching hurts everyone, not just the persons who teach cheaply. The cheapness of their labor holds down salaries in the ladder ranks: professorial salaries have stagnated against per capita gains since and have stagnated most in the disciplines that rely primarily on graduate employee labor.
The cheapness and dis- organization of flexible labor supports speedup throughout the system: assistant and associate professors teach more, serve more, and publish more in return for lower compensation than any previous generation of faculty. You have to look pretty hard to find avenues of employment where sixty-year-old persons who have distinguished themselves at their work get paid less than college faculty.
In the most casualized disci- plines, such as English, this means that a sixty-year-old distinguished scholar with a national reputation and three books and three children in college earns a salary similar to that of junior faculty in many other disciplines.
She earns about as much as either a good accountant with two or three years of experience or a twenty-five-year-old district attor- ney. At the end of a career covered with distinction, she earns about half of what moderately accomplished professionals in law and medicine earn at the beginning of their careers. She frequently earns less than a secondary-school teacher, civil servant, factory employee, or bartender with the same term of service.
The system of graduate education has also radically altered the expe- rience of general education for nearly all undergraduate students.
And she will answer: Heck, no, it is just a system that teaches cheaply. Accomplishing its marvelous cheapness by allocating an ever-larger section of the curricu- lum to flexible instructors who typically have between zero and four years of teaching experience, or who have brought their graduate stud- ies to early termination, the system of disposable faculty continuously replaces its most experienced and accomplished teachers with persons who are less accomplished and less experienced.
In English departments, it is now typical for students to take nearly all first-year, many lower-division, and some advanced topics courses from nondegreed persons who are imperfectly attuned to disciplinary knowledge and who may or may not have an active research agenda or a future in the profession.
The whole zone of general education—that is, the education that most people who go to college have in common with each other — has been radically evacuated. The proletarianized teachers who will be the only experience that most students have of a language department are commonly deprived of such necessities as of- fices, telephones, and photocopying privileges—much less the protec- tions of due process that guarantee academic freedom. It is usual prac- tice for administrations to simply dispense with the services of flexible teachers who exercise academic freedom: those who teach controversial material, of course, but also those who generate student complaints by teaching difficult material.
Flexible teachers cannot afford to provide an obstacle to the advancing administrative ideal of an ultimately edu- cation-free transfer of cash for course credits. Introduction 43 To paraphrase Emma Goldman: Cheap teaching is a social crime and failure. This is true even if the injuries to all persons who teach are ex- cluded from the equation.
Even the persons who seemingly benefit from the labor savings—students and the public they serve and also become — are substantially injured. Nor is it just a matter of teaching. The whole complex of research production is diminished by the elimination of tenurable faculty positions. Casualization is an issue of racial, gendered, and class justice. Surely one reason the neoliberal second-wave knowledge took such hold of the academy during the s and s is the degree to which academic casualiza- tion has increasingly closed the profession to people who rely on waged work to live—and replaced them with individuals for whom teaching figures as a secondary income.
If it typically requires family support to become a teacher, how do factors such as class and the racialized wealth gap affect the composi- tion of the professoriate? The CGEU Casual Nation report headlines the fact that women take about 40 percent of the doctorates, but they represent about 58 percent of the full-time temporary instructors and only 25 percent of se- nior professors.
There is a sharp generational break: women who joined the faculty during — were much less likely to join the faculty as members of the ladder ranks than were women who joined the fac- ulty in earlier cohorts.
The only fields in which women have achieved near parity in numbers with male faculty in the upper ranks are the most ill-paid fields, primarily lan- guage, literature, and writing instruction. The sectors in which women outnumber men in the academy are uni- formly the worst paid, frequently involving lessened autonomy—as in writing instruction, where the largely female staff is generally not re- warded for research, usually excluded from governance and even union representation, and frequently barred even from such basic expressions of academic discretion as choosing course texts, syllabus, requirements, and pedagogy see chapter 5.
The flexible faculty are just one di- mension of an informationalized higher ed—the transformation of the university into an efficient and thoroughly accountable environment through which streaming education can be made available in the way that information is delivered: just in time, on demand, in spasms syn- chronized to the work rhythm of student labor on the shop floor.
Everyone with an interest in transforming that system will inevi- tably attempt to share into, or even ventriloquize, that knowledge. I had no idea this problem was an issue. I talked about it with my student council president. She had no idea. We students rely on teachers. We rely on them being there. We rely on their service — and they provide it!
They put in more hours than they ever get paid for. Twelve—thou- sand—dollars makes me sick! Teachers going from one campus to the other? Four and five different colleges? What is this country coming to? We can, we can start a trend for other schools. We can make a difference. I go by many names. Acting at the level of system means acting as graduate employees have acted—writing their knowledge into law and policy at every level of social organization, from the campus and community to state and federal statute, and developing linkages to labor on a global scale.
Against the dominative totality of higher ed marketization—the flexible dictatorship of univer- sity administration—the possibility of antagonism at the same level of systemic totality is emergent in the GEU and contingent-faculty move- ments. Solving your problem is solving my problem. The articulation of the GEU movement to other proletarian movements could take place on a more horizontal plane, the shared consciousness of contingency.
The surge in graduate-employee organizing in the s was accom- panied by a growing interest in the major academic unions in organiz- ing contingent faculty, who have become the majority workforce.
This is the full cookbook. Unless you can handle the truth. Political Science. Aronowitz, Stanley. Boston: Beacon. Caughie, Pamela L. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Heilman, Robert Bechtold.
The Professor and the Profession. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Woodring, Carl. Literature:An Embattled Profession. NewYork: Columbia University Press. I first decided to write this essay late last spring when I opened the pages of The Nation and read that Stanley Aronowitz had become Ayn Rand, according to Berkeley education professor David L. In a review of The Knowledge Factory widely republished on the world-wide web, Kirp claims that Aronowitz deplores mass higher education and looks to install himself as a kind of Napoleon of the curriculum, ultimately seeking the revival o Our basic claim is this: Though institutions are certainly power ful, they are not monoliths; they are rhetorically constructed human designs whose power is reinforced by buildings, laws, traditions, and knowledge-making practices and Our basic claim is this: Though institutions are certainly power ful, they are not monoliths; they are rhetorically constructed human designs whose power is reinforced by buildings, laws, traditions, and knowledge-making practices and so are change able.
Institutions R Us. Further, for those of you who think such optimism is politically naive and hopelessly liberal and romantic, we believe that we and you, too have to commit to this hypothesis anyway, the alternative?
Publication Date: Higher Education and Management Science. Any participation builds the brand. It is true that some forms of participation can be destructive of community or corrosive to its prestige. At schools like Emory, students donate to campus prestige capital with their postgraduate achievements. They likewise contribute value with accomplishments before they even arrive, in the form of their test scores, high- school rank, and arts prizes and athletic victories.
Blogging and Facebook time adds value. At certain kinds of schools, value to the brand is added by the time spent by students in gyms and tanning salons, photographing each other at parties, and publishing and circulating those photos. Are we fairly attending to the needs of undergraduate students when we allocate resources via models that over- emphasize certain kinds of easily measured revenue productivity, such as grants in certain disciplines or professional- school tuition?
The justification for the student- as- consumer approach to quality management is, broadly speaking, a variant on the old saw that the customer is king, and there are certainly many ways this philosophy has benefited students and increased student power.
But at too many institutions, it has too often increased the power of students according to their spending power, giving full- pay students admissions benefits and better food, better accommodations, and so forth. In some ways, the quality management of student as consumer has returned many institutions of higher education to the nineteenth century, in which the scholarship students shined the shoes of the full- paying leisure class.
By understanding that students are producers as well as consumers, we are asking for a better accounting of the gifts of time and talent made by so many.
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