A short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy(Duke UP).
For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.
Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards—time, salary, prestige, power—rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the twentieth century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments; to control institutional resources; shape the disciplinary agenda of the field; receive funding and media recognition, etc. Read more
A funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The one-time supporter of the only kind of national health insurance proven to work (single payer) rolled over for the insurance industry and adopted the single most ridiculous health care plan offered during the 2007-2008 Democratic primaries. Against all the evidence, candidate Obama asserted that “lowering costs” would lead to universal health coverage.All the evidence has it the other way around: universal coverage causes the lowering of costs. Most educators will understand this clearly, because it’s parallel to our situation. Most of the actual expense to be saved is in administrator bloat, the armies of staff to collect the bills and whole country clubs full of vice presidents to “manage the care,” ie, invent the hoops that separate physicians from patients.
When yours truly pointed this out across the Dem blogosphere, the responses ranged from the Insane Hero Worshipper position (Obama is my God and you shall have no other Gods before him!) to the Wisdom of the Political Insider, who argued that absurd as candidate Obama’s fake health plan appeared, after the election the political process would take over, and we’d get something better, perhaps even single payer. In other words: President Obama would not be wedded to the health care industry just because Candidate Obama let them get to third base at the drive-in.
That political process is happening now. Two-thirds of all Americans favor single payer. A massive national coalition supports that preference, comprising in addition to hundreds of student and citizen organizations, physicians, labor, and even a few legislators .
Nonetheless single-payer is all but off the table, with Kennedy and Baucus picking up where Obama left off at the drive-in, and The One’s mouthpiece yammering red, white, and blue nonsense. “What we need is an American solution to an American problem,” Kathleen Sebelius gabbled to NPR the other day.
FAIR blames the corporate media quarantine for consistently ignoring single-payer, or mentioning it only to describe it as impossible or unlikely. Bill Moyers agrees, saying that Obama’s White House and Congress “have kept the lid on.”
What can you do? Sign up with socialist Bernie Sanders, for starters.
In this week’s lead story at _The Chronicle of Higher Education,_ Robin Wilson has a spread of four pieces scoffing at the notion of a national problem with undergraduate debt: A Lifetime of Debt? Not Likely.Splashed above the fold on the front page — during Congressional hearings regarding major reforms in student lending — this story flies in the face of massive public and legislator concern about the funding of higher education, including a longrunning series of scandals in student lending: corruption among state and federal education officials, predatory lending, abusive collections, lax oversight, outrageous executive pay, perks, and bonuses.
While acknowledging that what she dubs a vocal minority of undergraduate borrowers have “very real” problems with the system of college financing, Wilson asserts that students in loan trouble are “more often” the victims of their own bad choices, especially those “determined to attend their dream college, no matter the cost.”
The hero of Wilson’s piece is a 2007 graduate of a Roman Catholic college who lives rent-free with her mother, foregoing “for now” such unrealistic expectations as her eventual plan to “live in an apartment in Boston with a friend.”
This young woman’s story, Wilson claims, is emblematic of a “silent majority” of borrowers paying off car-loan-sized debt “without much complaint.” For those who need more convincing, Wilson helpfully provides three more tales — all of young, married, well-employed couples with children making small middle-class sacrifices to pay down their debt. It’s all very Ozzie and Harriet, in low-cost-of-living locales like Iowa and West Virgina — the most coastal of the couples lives a 40-minute commute from Philadelphia.
Wilson seems particularly disturbed that the gullible folks at CNN, _USA Today,_ and The New York Times appear to have been taken in by these complaints (not to mention three or four years of scandal and public outcry). There’s “confusion” about the issue, Wilson says, because many people, like the founder of the Facebook page, are counting graduate-school debt.
So — to help us out with our confusion — Wilson artificially separates out the grad-school debt and then invites us to share her pose of mystification that so many people appear to be complaining angrily about what amounts to a new-car loan.
Among the many inconvenient facts that Wilson leaves out is that present trends suggest that 40 to 50 percent of all persons with bachelor’s degrees in 2009 will eventually go on to graduate or professional school.* Those debts can be enormous, and when one acknowledges the real chances that any individual with a B.A. will go on to grad school the “lifetime of debt” is indeed more “likely.”
(Even if we accepted Wilson’s rhetorical carving-off of undergraduate debt from other debt — and further accepted her definition of borrowers with real problems as in the range of 8 or 10 percent — that would still be many millions of people affected by the student loans carried by someone in their family — a spouse, parent, or child.)
Their parents are also borrowing more, and in some cases parents out of the workforce are going back to work primarily to help pay for tuition. (Fifteen percent of graduating seniors have parents that take PLUS loans; the average is approaching $20,000).
Students are working more too, and most of those who are employed are working longer hours than is compatible with academic success and persistence.
Equally relevant is the trajectory of debt — that many more people are borrowing, and borrowing much more; the average debts has recently doubled under Bush-era policies and without policy change may well double again.
Students with lower incomes borrow more and work more, and have less success. Does taking on larger and larger undergraduate debt provide a barrier to graduate school for persons of disadvantaged backgrounds?
The piece could have considered the consequences of education debt for those who don’t persist, or don’t go in the first place. It could have considered the rising default rate (or the lousy way we’ve been calculating default rates), or the different default rates for different kinds of schools, like the especially high default rates in the for-profit sector.
But even if we accept the focus on those who get degrees and find employment, and ignore what for many is the inevitability of grad-school debt, what about those in the current graduating class — who aren’t finding jobs with employers planning on hiring 20 percent fewer college grads and offering lower salaries to 20 percent of those they do hire? Even recent grads from good schools with econ degrees are going on food stamps. Hard stats on this are going to take a while, but one of the good indicators is this one from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (hat tip to Anya Kamenetz):
ACE’s 2009 Student Survey shows that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one. In comparison, 51 percent of those graduating in 2007 and 26 percent of those graduating in 2008 who had applied for a job had one in hand by the time of graduation.
For that matter, it would have been worthwhile to consider how the so-called going-to-college bonus in wages is:
1) more of a going-to-grad-school bonus, and
2) not so much a bonus as a penalty.
Yup, a penalty — for staying out of college. Since the 1970s, the gap between those with a sheepskin and those without has grown, but not because the wages of the B.A.-educated have risen.
Far from it. They’ve just stagnated less than the wages of those without a B.A., whose wages have been driven down in the era of Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes.
Absent from the piece are the voices of the indebted or their spokespeople, like Kamenetz, Tamara Draut, or Jeffrey Williams.
Also absent is any consideration of most of the core contemporary policy issues about student loans. Even _USA Today_ — under the subhead Helping Gamblers, Not Students — managed to explore the policy universe of student loans more thoughtfully, raising the issue of bankruptcy reform.
Loans aren’t the only thing that are broken about higher education, but an article like this one (”No problems here!”) does the conversation little good. Robin Wilson is entitled to her opinion, but this front-page lead story wasn’t presented as an editorial — and it lends credibility to Cat Warren’s concerns about fair coverage. I don’t mean to be a grouch here, and I know I’ve been a little tough on the higher-education press lately, but _The Chron_ loses credibility when it gets out-thought on student loan issues by _USA Today._
*Educational Attainment in the United States, 25 years and over: 2008, US Census (excel file)
This essay is drawn from the final issue of minnesota review to be edited by Jeffrey Williams, featuring a series of statements of professional commitment or belief–credos–by representative scholars. It’s a very special series of essays, and a worthy capstone to Williams’ extraordinary run as editor.
I’ll follow up with more about Williams’ accomplishments, and the future of the journal, which received several bids from institutions willing to step in where Carnegie Mellon stumbled. A letter of intent has been signed, and an orderly transfer to a great new editorial board is underway.
The issue also brings nearly to a close Williams’ spectacular series of in-depth interviews. Often twenty pages in print, these leisurely portrait-of-an-era conversations have been typically longer than the articles in the same issue. Despite Williams’ normally unerring judgment, the issue includes a talk with me,Higher Exploitation.
I once shocked a colleague by responding to one of those newspaper stories about a prof “caught” mowing his lawn on a Wednesday afternoon by saying that many tenured faculty were morally entitled to think of their salaries after tenure as something similar to a pension.
After all, in some fields, many folks will not receive tenure until they’ve been working for low wages for twenty years or more: a dozen years to get the degree, another three to four years serving contingently—and then, finally, a “probationary” appointment lasting seven years at wages commonly lower than those of a similarly-experienced bartender.
In the humanities, the journey to tenure is often a quarter of a century and rarely less than fifteen years: if you didn’t go to a top-five or top-ten graduate school in your field, you probably taught several classes a year as a graduate student, usually while researching, publishing, and doing substantial service to the profession—writing book reviews, supervising other faculty and students, serving on committees, etc.
Call it, charitably, a mean of twenty years in some fields. Averaging the probationary years, contingent/post-doc years, and graduate student years together, you get an average annual take in contemporary dollars of $25,000 or less. The low wage is only the beginning of the story. There’s the structural racism of the wealth gap, to which I’ll return, and the heartbreak and structural sexism for families trying to negotiate childrearing during that brutal two decades. In most fields, most of those who begin doctoral study with the intention of an academic career fall away long before grasping the brass ring.
So at the end of all that, you have a person who is earning within ten or fifteen thousand dollars of $70,000 and has perhaps fifteen or twenty years of career ahead of them.
All of the reasonable studies of faculty work suggest that this person will put in between 50 and 55 hours a week for most of those years, more or less voluntarily. There are plenty of enforcement mechanisms to make sure that most faculty will teach, serve, and do scholarship in some rough proportion to their abilities and inclination, but after a quarter-century of strict selection and socialization, it is rarely necessary to invoke them to get the faculty to do their jobs.
By comparison to the twenty-year probation leading to academic tenure, police officers, kindergarten teachers, and civil servants earn tenure or job security in a year or two, often less. During training, a high-school-educated police recruit in 2009 generally earns a salary of between thirty and forty thousand dollars, or about twice what a doctoral student earns during graduate school. Today’s starting salaries for 20- or 21-year old metropolitan police officers and state troopers are generally in the forties.
They receive bonuses for completing two- and four-year postsecondary degrees, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in supplemental pay for overtime and special duty. In Cincinnati, for example, a recruit will earn $31,000/year during a six-month training period, and then begin work at $46,000. Five years later—at age 26—they will expect to earn a base pay of $56,000, or about what junior faculty in many arts and sciences fields are being offered after their twenty-year apprenticeships, in their early forties.
The 26-year-old police officer earning about the same base pay as our 40-year-old assistant professor can expect to work as little as another fifteen or twenty years, keeping up with inflation whether or not promotions are awarded, collecting additional fair compensation in such forms, as the Cincinnati metro police site promises, “overtime earnings, court pay, certification pay, training allowance, and night differential pay.”
The Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund estimator estimates that in 2009 a 48-year-old retiree who had done nothing to save additionally and earned just under $70,000 in his final year as a 27-year veteran would receive a pension of about $42,000. That 48-year-old would then be free to work another job—a corporate security position, or a supervisory position overseeing poorly-paid retail guards, or real estate, or whatever, earning, say $60,000 a year, for a total annual income of six figures. Or the retired officer could work part time, twenty hours a week or so, and still pull in about $80,000 or $90,000—likely quite a bit more than our largely fictional time-serving 55-year-old associate prof is pulling in on the imaginary twenty-hour work week of just showing up to teach from old notes.
Pension benefits for military service and certain civil service positions are similar: your average worker aged 48 to 55 without too many promotions but with a quarter-century or more of service will be eligible for pensions of between thirty and sixty thousand dollars, or the equivalent of between about $800,000 and $1,500,000 in your Fidelity or TIAA-CREF accounts.
No matter how you slice it, most public servants earn a better return on education and effort over the course of a career than most faculty, including those on the tenure track. It’s hard to make a case that the rather unusual instances of lifetime associate profs who skate by on twenty- or thirty-hour work weeks are gaming the system.
Instead, they are the unusual few who have refused to allow the system to game them. Read more
On the same day, the University of Colorado AAUP chapter’ will push my kind of radicalism, putting Suzanne Hudson’s Instructor Tenure Proposal to a vote in the Faculty Assembly.
Image: Lenin Pointing the Way Forward! pose struck by Emile Bousquet, 13 mos. Sweater fashion by Jamie Owen Daniel, former Marxist Literary Group president, denied tenure by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish during his theatrical run as a “campus leader” at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
If you think I’ve been hard on Mark C. Taylor and the New York Times for their “hey! I went to graduate school, therefore” theories of higher education, you should consider that bad journalism and bad leadership have real consequences for people I care about, like Jamie Owen Daniel and the young fellow pictured above.In point of fact: I was rather tame by comparison to pretty much everyone else who actually knows anything about academic labor, especially the always-blistering Historiann and Jonathan Rees. Even the guy over at Savage Minds who wants to agree with Taylor admits, “this op-ed sucks.”
I answered most of the responses in the comments portion of the original post, such as where to find the data.
Among the excellent responses, I felt one deserved a post of its own. It went something like this: “well, if demand for education is rising, and tuition is soaring, where does the money go, if not to the faculty?”
For that, I promised to reprint this post from before I joined Brainstorm.
Who Benefits From the Tuition Gold Rush?
The logic of the HMO increasingly rules higher education. Management closely rations professor time. Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75% of all college teachers were tenurable. Only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time or nontenurable basis.
Today the Grey Lady lent the op-ed page to yet another Columbia prof with the same old faux “analysis” of graduate education.
Why golly, the problem with the university is that there aren’t enough teaching positions out there to employ all of our excess doctorates Mark C. Taylor says: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).” Because there are just too many folks with Ph.D.’s out there, “there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.”
Um, nope. Wrong. _The New York Times_ loves this bad theory and has been pushing it for decades, but the reality is clear.
In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the “excess doctorates” out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the “excess” doctorates in many fields.
The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of “demand” so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master’s or a B.A., or even by undergraduates. During the whole period of time that _The New York Times_ has been pimping junk analysis of graduate education (that there’s an “oversupply” of doctorates), the percentage of faculty with doctorates has been dropping, not rising.
The piece is hilariously out of touch — noting the rise of adjunct labor, the Columbia philosopher of religion and author of 20 books wrings his hands that per-course pay is “as low as” $5,000 dollars a class.
BWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Reality? Annual income for many adjuncts is about $5,000 dollars a year. On pay that can be lower than a grand per class.
But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will insure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.’s will be able to work for those wages.
Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.
How’s that working out? Well, gee, we’re graduating a very poor percentage of students. Various literacies are kinda low. We don’t have a racially diverse faculty, and women, especially women with children, are far more likely to have the low-paying low-status faculty jobs.
Nice! Let’s get more of that!
It’s not just his inadequate grasp of the facts. Taylor’s whole analysis is wrong. His idea is that higher education is too Fordist. (”Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning,” he intones.)
But higher education isn’t too Fordist — it’s actually the brilliant, innovative post-Fordist employer par excellence. Every other employer wants to employ its people on the model of the campus — to get people who work for love, as perpetual students, eagerly discounting their labor in hopes of a future reward that someone else will provide.
I dunno if we should end the university as _The New York Times_ or Mark C. Taylor claims to know it.
But we really oughta end the university as the rest of us know it — as not merely exploitative, but as a creatively super-exploitative employer.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
–from Carl Sandburg, “I am the People”
A few months ago, Eileen Schell wrote me along the lines of the Sandburg poem above. “We have a habit of reinventing ourselves” with respect to the academic labor issues that are so evident in rhetoric and composition, she said, “People wake up and start things, then they atrophy or people get burned out and do other things or opt out.”
I guess this is the typical nature of anything, but I’ve found it to be particularly true of labor issues in our field. It’s on people’s radar screen, they work on it for awhile, then they get on to other things , burn out, or just drift away. Some avoid labor issues like the plague! Most people don’t know the history of labor issues in our field/larger culture, either, and don’t seem to feel responsible for our complex labor history—it’s almost as if every time labor issues come up, it’s there for the first time because people are feeling it differently based on where they are and who they are and how much time they have to even get into any of this history when they are fighting to survive. Yet there is a basic level of literacy that [we] should have, I think. That’s why I get impatient…
The most popular interview on my YouTube channel is Play PhD Casino! with Monica Jacobe
Saturday’s report on academic employment by the New York Times hangs on the peg of a fact: in many fields, tenure track hiring will be down this year.
Accompanying the story by culture reporter Patricia Cohen is a photograph of a forlorn-looking UT-Austin doctoral candidate in sociology who “after two dozen applications” still “has no job offer.”
Zounds! Shocking! He cut and pasted the addresses of twenty-four search committees into a job letter, and the capable young fellow still doesn’t have a tenure track job?By jove, it must be “the bad economy” causing this sad state of affairs!
Indeed so, Cohen informs us, duly noting that half the candidate’s rejection letters mention the economy and that there were “300 applications” to some of the positions the young fellow found interesting.
Cohen’s piece goes on to acknowledge that tenure-track positions “have been hard to come by in recent decades.”
But that’s an interesting locution. She may as well have said “the United States has not had legal apartheid in recent decades” or “Harry Truman has not been president in recent decades.”
In point of fact, Cohen uses this locution as butt-cover because her analysis is dead wrong. To prop up her thesis (which makes the news peg the causal focus of the story) she uses inapplicable evidence, like the 300 applications (news? not!) and quotes inexpert “authorities” saying ridiculous things.
As a result the reporting in the lead paragraphs of the story is essentially puppetry: after the sad grad student she has NYU grad-union buster Catherine Stimpson pop up to prattle, “This is a year of no jobs!”
Um, no. It’s actually a year of maybe 25% fewer tenure-track jobs. That’s a modest cupful in the overflowing bucket of reasons for the disappointment and possibly nontenurable future of our young sociologist.
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.
Student Perma-Temping, Not “The Economy”
Why did campus employers substitute student workers for faculty and staff labor?
Because it’s cheaper in salary and benefits, and they prefer to use the money saved on salary to do different things–build business centers and stadiums, or go into venture capitalism by starting e-learning scams, trying to patent intellectual property, and so on.
That means that many campuses have undergraduate carpenters, truck loaders, nurses’ assistants, and nannies, and graduate students working as faculty.
At elite privates, the undergraduate truck loaders might come from the nearby public campus; at community colleges, the adjunct faculty might be graduate students who have gone non-status while hoping to finish their dissertation.
This isn’t good for anyone’s education: the only virtue of the arrangement is its cheapness, and that cheapness hasn’t lowered tuition; it’s simply served to provide money pots for high-rolling administrators to spend on favored projects and the expansion of the business curriculum. It’s also created a need to expand the ranks of management to train and supervise the constantly-churning mass of student and other casual workers.
Fixing this lousy arrangement could provide millions of jobs. Graduate students shouldn’t be teaching their asses off, and undergraduates should be working a lot less too. Many forms of this “work as financial aid” or extreme work-study are essentially using up and spitting out young people as disposable labor–costing them their chance at degrees, not enabling them.
It wouldn’t cost very much to support students on a kind of GI Bill.
And there sure are plenty of highly-qualified people eager to do the work that higher education employers have handed off to students and other casual employees.
That’s the issue, and it’s time we started holding the New York Times and its “cultural reporters” responsible for accurate analysis. Indeed, when Cohen reported on the dusty news of the Nixon tapes, recently, she put a lot more effort into getting the story straight, and when she still screwed up, editors at the paper complained about it. In public. In their paper.
Why don’t we hold her higher education reporting–which affects tens of millions of people right now–to the same standards that we hold her discussion of the Nixon tapes, which is at least moderately less urgent?
Ignoring Both Evidence and Testimony
It isn’t just the fact of four decades of student casualization that the piece fails to digest, or the fact that it misrepresents the hundreds of applications for a single position as a) news or b) having anything to do with the economy (unless “the economy” has been plotting against those students for over a decade, when they first went to grad school!).
Even Cohen’s inexpert sources are trying to tell Cohen the truth. She eventually quotes Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco on the gap between apprenticeship and “insecure laborers,” notes that half of all positions are part time, and pastes in several sentences from one of Bill Pannapacker’s “don’t go to grad school” op eds at the Chron. She even quotes Luke Menand, who like Delbanco is no expert on academic labor, saying that grad students spend too much time working.
However the analysis –or the germ of an analysis–implicit in these comments makes no dent on the piece’s cheerful need to hang on a news peg, ie, that “the economy” did it… in the stock market… with a brass endowment.
But the truth is that campus employers did it… in their administration of higher education seminars… with student labor… and the collaboration of tenure-stream faculty… who were just like most other U.S. senior workers, in collaborating with management to keep their good deal at the expense of young workers.
Was that so hard? Sure, it’s easier to play “the market” explains everything, but that kind of faux analysis is best left to Karl Rove and Fox News. And for crying out loud, journalists are living the same permatemping as the faculty, under the same quality management gutting the public sphere under both Republicans and Democrats–all you have to do is watch The Wire.
Dear Ms. Cohen
Yes, Catherine Stimpson and Luke Menand have graduate students, but they also have livers without therefore being expert gastroenterologists.
You didn’t have to call me individually, but you ought to have talked to someone at AAUP. Cary Nelson, Jane Buck or Gary Rhoades could have set you straight, or staffer Gwen Bradley, who specializes in permatemping. All of the academic unions have reams of data and good analysis of these issues–you didn’t talk to any of them? At your own paper, Stanley Fish’s obtuse and narcissistic mention of a recent book on the question by Frank Donoghue sold several hundred copies for its publisher, Fordham. Your readers clearly want a real explanation by folks actually thinking about the issue, not random bloviation.
Since you were featuring a grad student in sociology, you could have called one of the premier sociological thinkers in the country and experts in the crisis of higher education employment, Stanley Aronowitz. Or his colleague at the head of the CUNY union, Barbara Bowen.
You don’t like CUNY? Okay, at NYU you could have called Randy Martin or Andrew Ross. What about Joel Westheimer, who they illegally fired for supporting the grad student union, despite having the support of his entire discipline? Or any of the grad students themselves, who are doing better analysis of their employment than Stimpson.
Let’s do a better job next time, Ms. Cohen.
We expect more from the New York Times, and given the role that educators play in making that paper a leading national voice, we deserve better. Or else perhaps we should be looking for alternatives.
If modern man’s producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged. –Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)
Lately I’ve been fooling around with the hypothesis that there’s a growing split in the professional-managerial class.
On the one hand, there’s a strong movement to proletarianize professionals, conspicuously college faculty, but also physicians, lawyers and accountants. For more, read AAUP General Secretary Gary Rhoades on the concept of “managed professionalism.”
In this vein, “professionalism” is today more of an ideology than a lifeway. As an ideology useful to one’s employers, for instance, professionalism as devotion to one’s clients, the public good, and the culture of one’s field is clearly a vector for the super-exploitation of all kinds of other workers, from retail sales to schoolteachers.
Like professionals, millions of service-economy and clerical workers are now expected to donate hours of work off the clock, donating time to email and other employer-related communication, engaging in unpaid training and “keeping up,” etc. Throughout the economy, workers are urged to give freely of themselves–to serve–in exchange for psychic returns. All of this “acting professional,” however, doesn’t come with what used to be a professional’s paycheck.
On the other hand, management is increasingly professionalized, via the worldwide triumph of the business curriculum–the first true global monoculture, with the keywords and master concepts (excellence, quality, change, accountability, learning organization, eg.) framed by the “great authors” of our time: W. Edwards Deming, Peter Senge, etc. And yeah, the managers still get a professional’s paycheck and more. They get paid in close relation to their hypocrisy: the better they play “Ya Gotta Serve Somebody” and extract donated work-time from everyone else, the more dough they whack down in their own “pay for performance.”
(If I were writing a grant to study the patterns of Ritalin abuse on college campuses, I’d actually be very curious to see whether it’s higher in undergraduates self-identifying as pre-professional versus those with a business major.)
Anyway. One way of looking at certain trends in the mass culture of the professional managerial class (yeah, with 900 channels and a global audience, you can have multiple mass cultures) is in reaction to the proletarianization of the white collar worker, and the tension between the residual culture of professionals, the dominant culture of management, and the related management-engineered faux-professional cultures of other workers.
The recent “Retreat to Move Forward” episode of 30 Rock once again lampooning GE managment’s “Six Sigma” culture captures this neatly, but really the whole premise of the series is the running war between the workplace culture of entertainment professionals and the junk culture that GE management is trying to impose on them. The episode’s true-enough version of the six pillars of Sigma: “Teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, handshakefullness, and play hard.” (It falls into the not-really-a-joke category, though, when you think about how your university president got the job.)
AMC, the channel that butchers American Movie Classics to the standards of the 400 Club, has somehow tapped into this structure of feeling with two hit series. For viewers of, ahem, a certain age, it offers Mad Men, which radiates nostalgia for comfortable professionalism. For the rest of us it presents the highly-anticipated second season of Breaking Bad, premiering Sunday, March 8. (Missed season 1? Set your Tivo for a re-run of all seven episodes on Friday, March 6.)
The premise of BB is the murderous logic of putting profit-seeking dolts in charge of social goods, like health care and education (or fighting wars, or food security, for that matter). When diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, the scales fall from the eyes of high-school chemistry teacher Walter White, a role for which Bryan Cranston deservedly won an Emmy.
He puts the energy he formerly dedicated to the idealistic service of others into providing security for his family. He becomes a manager, taking over a former student’s small-time meth business, re-structuring the operation to maximize profits. (And before you complain about it exploiting the scourge of methamphetamine to capture the crisis of the PMC, consider that Ritalin and meth are close chemical cognates, frequently taken for similar purposes.)
White’s turn into ruthlessness–he abruptly “breaks bad”–resolving overnight to become the exploiter rather than the exploited, is what separates the show from Showtime’s Weeds, which features a soccer mom dealing pot to keep up her sense of entitlement.
BB is more like the Sopranos, where half-smart gangsters in McMansions allegorize the organized criminals actually running the country, or The Wire, where the actually-existing thuggery of management theory in public service is continuously thematized.
All three of these shows repudiate the soggy liberalism and nostalgia of Weeds or Mad Men. They feature what to me is a welcome populist strain of literary naturalism and proletarian sensibility, a hint that we might be returning to an awareness of Jack London’s sense of the eat or be eaten ferocity of the class war from above on the rest of us. I hope so, anyway.
At the dinner party where London’s hero calls the capitalist class on their mismanagement of the vast productive powers at our disposal, they finally reveal the inner Dick Cheney:
“We have no words to waste on you…. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.”
If your only experience of Jack London is Call of the Wild and White Fang, do yourself a favor and read The Iron Heel or The Abyss.
I always ask my students to consider the question London poses in the epigraph: with the technological resources to feed, clothe and provide health care for everyone, why don’t we?
With what used to be called “labor-saving devices,” why do we all work so hard?
Still damned good questions a century later.
Even if, like Marx himself, you’re inclined to give capitalism credit for innovation, it’s hard at the present moment not to grant London’s point: the capitalist class and their generously-paid servants have spectacularly, gloriously, world-historically mismanaged the powers they helped to unleash. The pursuit of profit isn’t a big part of most areas of most people’s lives, and those areas have generally been degraded, not enhanced, by the brutal, forced introduction of the profit motive.
Future global humanity may or may not find a role for those who actually enjoy spending their one trip on this planet compulsively rooting around after spare change to enlarge the money mountain.
And there are probably circumstances where we can make good use of anti-social jerks with unusually acquisitive and unusually competitive natures–just as one can find a dog’s ferocity occasionally useful. But I think we might agree to keep these folks on a much shorter leash.
One way of doing that is to take professionalism back from the managers–to create a world in which Walter White’s idealistic service of others is rewarded with the modest things he expects, like health care.
Hundreds of students showed up to support the approximately 80 students occupying an NYU cafeteria last week. Organized by the TakeBackNYU coalition of dozens of student organizations, the occupying students asked for increased campus democracy, transparency in operations, and accountability from the administration to faculty and students. Specific demands included tuition stabilization, collective bargaining with student employees, socially responsible investing, fair labor practice on offshore NYU campuses, and thirteen scholarships for students displaced by the bombing of Gaza.
The occupation followed on the heels of a similar occupation at the New School that won concessions from that school’s administration including amnesty for participants and a student voice in campus building, administrative search, and investment policy. Militant students there are still organizing to force the resignations of top campus administrators.
Several of those in the loud but evidently non-violent NYU crowd Thursday night were clubbed and maced by a police line surrounding the building.
Apparently determined to close down the occupation without making the sort of concessions forced from the New School, NYU administrators lured student leaders from the building with the promise of face-to-face negotiations, then detained and isolated them, seizing their cell phones. Security personnel then rushed in, physically overpowering the remaining students, who believed their leaders were engaged in settlement negotiations.
NYU ordered suspension of eighteen student activists, including barring them from their campus residences. They were photographed and handed previously-prepared letters declaring them persona non grata and evicted on the spot. (Education institutions are apparently exempt from NYC’s fairly strict eviction proceedings that protect tenants from arbitrary actions by landlords.)
GSOC-UAW’s Rana Jaleel, who has discussed the emerging coalition of movements at NYU before in this column issued a statement calling NYU’s actions “abhorrent,” and demanding that “protesters who have been evicted from campus housing immediately be given full access to their homes.”
Academic freedom is the subject of three major conferences and at least two substantial journal issues this season, and they’ll all get a fair amount of ink and electrons when Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado commences next month in Denver. Churchill’s campus process was wrongly decided in the fallout of a political witch hunt, featuring a faculty committee that generated spurious charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct” that will not bear the scrutiny of history (nor, one hopes, the district court).
You can read Churchill’s essay on the case in a massive, just-released special issue of Works and Days, guest-edited by Edward Carvalho and available for just $12 by emailing Tracy Lassiter (t.j.lassiter@iup.edu) or David Downing (downing@iup.edu).
The issue includes important work by a huge lineup: Derrick Bell, Joe Berry, Michael Bérubé, Eric Cheyfitz, Noam Chomsky, Grant Farred, Norman Finkelstein, Henry Giroux, Sophia McClennen, Randy Martin, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Cary Nelson, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Susan Searls Giroux, Cornel West, and Jeffrey Williams, and many others, including yours truly. It’s the best value in academic freedom short of joining the AAUP.
Following the Works & Days release and just two weeks in advance of the scheduled start of the lawsuit, Churchill will speak at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), Downing’s home campus about an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh.
From the reports I’ve seen, a few complaints have been registered with the IUP administration, but nothing with the hysteria and virulent hatred stirred up by the Churchill case in the past. The event also features appearances by Nelson, McClellan, and Williams; if you’ll be in western Pennsylvania on February 23, it’s worth making the drive.
The chance to attend the linked conference at the Cornell Africana Studies and Research Center during surprisingly balmy February weather has already passed you by, but watch this space for news of a South Atlantic Quarterly special issue on related topics, prepared by Grant Farred with guest editor Evan Watkins.
On April 3, the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center in New York will host a conference about the threat to those freedoms represented by corporatization, including such topics as the rise of the business curriculum and the permatemping of the faculty.By far the most common curtailments and violation of academic freedom are experienced by faculty serving contingently, as I’ve pointed out recently.
My son turned one this weekend, and so far, as I’ve said, I can’t see that Obama’s plans to stimulate higher ed will make much difference to Emile’s first year on campus, now just 17 years from today.
For the most part, the federal money will replace some state funds.
That’s what happened in the first round of federal “public works spending” under Hoover and FDR — weak efforts that merely replaced a percentage of state-level cuts, with no net gain in spending until the more ambitious “Second New Deal.”
Obama’s gotten a free ride from students and faculty so far. And replacing the state aid was the right move. But to win the Lincoln plus FDR rep he craves, he’s going to have to do a lot better than wish for the easy sellouts that history handed Clinton.
Unlike Clinton, Obama has no choice but to face up to four decades of higher education’s “innovation” of the lousy forms of employment and super-exploitation that have gutted the econony.
That means restrictions on student labor and full employment for the faculty. That’s at least four million jobs right there. Plus some actual education, which would be nice.
18 years from now originally posted February 19, 2008
My son Emile Amitai arrived on Valentine’s Day at 5 a.m. To the best of my knowledge based on our brief acquaintance, he is healthy, intelligent, big-boned and good looking. If all goes as planned, 18 years from now he’ll be a big man on campus somewhere.
But what will that campus look like?
If current trends continue, that campus will closely resemble another American institution — an upscale suburban shopping mall, with highly standardized “products,” a student work force, degraded floor managers wearing pocket protectors, an expensive yet disposable physical plant, and corporate executives designing everyone else’s work process at a great distance from the shop floor.
The “faculty” will be 87 percent contingent and upper-division undergraduates will do much of the teaching of lower-division students.
Tenure and curriculum will be the privilege of administrators.
At most institutions, whole fields of the liberal arts — philosophy, history, music, literature — will no longer be represented by departments.
Basketball coaches will earn as much as $10-million a year, and teaching eight classes a year as a “part-timer” will pay less than the minimum wage.
Ten percent of undergraduates will not be working at all, but the remaining 90 percent serving their lattes, correcting their papers, and doing their laundry and nails will be working 40 hours a week while in school.
A variety of assessment instruments will have been developed and imposed upon traditional institutions, permitting the for-profit education industry to make the claim that they are providing “exactly the same education” as Cal Poly or the University of Virginia.
But not at all trends are in the direction of such cretinous, self-serving “quality” on the part of administrators and the investor class they so cheerfully serve.
If current trends continue, graduate-student employees will have successfully unionized at 60 percent of public and private institutions (this assumes the reversal of the travesties perpetrated under a Bush-packed National Labor Relations Board).
There will be large undergraduate union locals in various stages of organization in New York, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, including a couple of dozen with contracts.
Contingent faculty unionization likewise will have reached perhaps 40 percent, and the demand for pay parity will have been taken up in earnest by the major faculty unions.
Contingent faculty will be the union leadership at half a dozen major faculty unions and have bargained actual pay parity in a few noteworthy cases.
Full-time and part-time contingent faculty alike will have attained steadily increasing degrees of employment security, in many cases representing fairer and more rational systems of employment security than the tenure system.
In short, if current trends continue — and there is little reason to suppose otherwise in the national political agenda — things will get much worse on campus before Emile arrives.
On the other hand, Emile may arrive at a moment when undergraduates are at the heart of a revived American labor movement, an American labor movement with the kind of ambitions it hasn’t had since long before either of his parents were undergraduates.
In short, it probably still won’t be a great time to be on the faculty. But it’s sure to be one heck of an interesting time to be a smart, committed student interested in taking back the public sphere from the hacks, sleaze artists, and greed peddlers who’ve been running the show for the past 30 years.
Take students out of the workforce and create real jobs for educators.
This week, lawmakers will meet to forge a compromise between the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill. The likely consequence will be something similar to the Senate version, which targeted education funds for aggressive reductions—chopping an average almost $1 billion per state in funds that would largely have gone to help meet payroll for teachers.
In the absence of the state aid, hundreds of thousands of education jobs could be lost.
Boy, is that going in the wrong direction. As I’ve been grumpily pointing out since before the election (in company with the likes of Paul Krugman), we aren’t in New Deal territory yet. Far, far from it: as Krugman emphasizes, the New Deal itself was hardly enough of a commitment to public works to do the trick.
The correct historical parallel for Obama’s current stimulus efforts remains to be seen. It could easily be Hoover, who tried to be all bipartisan and moderate and compromising in his very insufficient stimulus efforts. And as a recent Chronicle contributor notes, even FDR, who campaigned against Hoover’s deficit spending and finance-industry bailouts, didn’t begin to accomplish much of anything until late in his first term, as growing militance from below demanded a much larger vision.
What is actually needed?
If things get worse, as seems likely, and if—as seems possible—education labor gets its act together, what is actually needed will become clear: full employment for educators and restrictions on student labor.
As anyone who’s attended a faculty meeting in the past two decades will have observed: higher education is a lead “innovator” of the lousy forms of employment that have gutted the economy—permatemping of the faculty, outsourcing the staff, and myriad ways of extracting un- and under- compensated labor from students: internships, assistantships, financial aid, partnerships with local employers, service learning, etc, etc, etc. Thanks to quality management, it’s Nickel and Dimed everywhere you look–but especially on campus.
On campus and throughout the economy, un- and under- compensated student labor has been aggressively substituted for permanent waged positions with benefits. That’s millions of real jobs, cut into pieces and parceled out as low-wage positions for students, many of whom take on between two and five “part-time” positions annually in order not to get whacked upside the head with debt.
Eighty percent of college students work an average of 30 hours a week, triple the figure most studies say is appropriate for optimal learning. This inappropriate workload bears directly on absurdly low persistence and graduation rates.
It also bears on the immiseration of the American workforce, on campus and off.
Graduate students can’t get jobs as faculty after studying for a dozen years—because all of the positions they have “prepared” for are being filled by other students, or former students working on a part-time basis.
Similarly, undergraduates are now doing journalism as service learning—replacing paid positions for staff reporters—and many will find that the jobs they want upon graduation have been converted to “internship opportunities.”
Stabilize the faculty now!
There are several hundred thousand educators working part time or contingently filling permanent staffing needs who would prefer to working full-time and securely. Most of them are employed at a discount, and many of them do not have the terminal degrees in their fields. There is high turnover among these educators, because the pay is generally poor, status is low, and there is no rational path for recognition or promotion, no reward for better work, etc.
The tenure system is certainly imperfect. However, the lousily-credentialed, low-oversight, haphazard system of casual employment that managers have substituted for it is a sick joke. It will be the end of the world’s envy of American higher ed when the truth of it is appreciated. The majority permatemping of the faculty is a cancer on our last brag on the world stage.
Enormous resources are wasted in constantly hiring, re-hiring, training, evaluating, and supervising this quickly churning labor pool. Much of the ballooning corps of administrators exist to service this wasteful arrangement.
Now is the time for an FDR type to step forward and say, “We’ve screwed up. One reason we have community colleges with single-digit graduation rates and major metropolitan universities who can’t graduate 30% of their first-year students six years later is because we have been trying to teach them with a drive-by faculty.”
It might cost a few tens of billions, but federal aid could easily be dispensed with the aim of creating good full-time jobs out of the part-time work of higher education. In return, part-timers without the terminal degree could be financially encouraged to complete doctorates (yup, creating a market for more graduate education), creating a better-prepared, more up-to-date, stable, available, and motivated faculty.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs could be created—practically overnight.
Save our students while creating millions of jobs!
Tuition at public institutions should be made free, or at least nominal, and students who meet reasonable progress toward degrees should receive a living stipend, with strict limits on the number of hours worked—no more than ten hours per week—closely tied to future goals.
The tuition would cost several tens of billions, but less than $100 billion certainly, and the stipend could be another couple hundred billion.
What would we gain for that? Well, lots more students would be both educated and graduated. That’s a good thing.
And millions of them would be withdrawn from the low-wage labor market created by law and policy over the past several decades—Clinton helped just as much as Reagan; read Nickel and Dimed if you’re foolish enough to be nostaligic for a Clinton-style “good economy.”
That would create the need for millions of non-student workers, in positions that we could help re-imagine as quality jobs, not piecework.
There might have to be some assistance to the employers who have grown structurally reliant on youth labor, and regulation of the positions created, but it could be done. (Perhaps something to occupy the time of administrators displaced from their positions supporting permatemped faculty?)
Call it another trillion if you must—none of it for more building on college campuses: administrations have been gutting the faculty to build business centers, chapels, and stadiums for decades.
Millions of jobs, fast and cheap
Anyone who wants Obama to be the next FDR will have to recognize that higher ed has been an engine of so much that’s wrong with the “new economy,” especially the low-wage nightmare of students and teachers.
Let’s stabilize the crumbling faculty infrastructure and give college students something like the G.I. Bill. That’s a good three, four million jobs right there. Cheaper than any of the goofy spending we’ve already done.
Maria Doe is a former NIH-sponsored researcher who struggles with chronic mental illness, tumbling from the tenure stream into contingent appointments and the prospect of homelessness.
MB: When did you first begin serving contingently?
MD: My first adjunct position was in my own graduate department. The faculty member who was scheduled to teach that class was awarded a large grant to work on an international research committee and plan an international meeting. The university gave him a course release, and the granting agency matched the university in funding an adjunct. I was very well paid at the time, $4000, for the class. I did a horrible job, but I learned a lot about teaching.
The next time I adjuncted, I was in my NIH fellowship. I taught for a smaller private school, and I did a much better job. I don’t remember how much I earned, but I got excellent student evaluations. Another university in the area asked me to teach a course, but my postdoc mentor told me not to. I was struggling with my mood, and having trouble keeping up with both teaching and my training program. He was right.
Just before I took a tenure track position at a small liberal arts college, I taught a course for a small university. I made $1300.
MB: Where did you hope it would lead?
MD: What did I want from adjuncting? The first time, I wanted the money and the experience. I got both. The other times, I wanted the experience. I wanted good teaching evaluations, I wanted something to put on my CV, and I wanted professional contacts and references. As a fellow in my PhD program, I was not required to TA or teach in any way.
MB: What did you imagine professorial work was like?
MD: My dream was to be a scholar.
I cannot tell you how much I loved the exchange and development of ideas, and I was oh, so good at it. I became an expert social theorist, easily crossing disciplinary lines. That’s what I thought I’d do. That I’d have mentors, and that I would mentor others the way I had been mentored. I thought I would spend my working life immersed in the discipline that I loved.
Okay, academia is not paradise. Like all professions, it has its share of bs. But Marc, I’ve had the jobs from hell, I’ve cleaned my share of toilets, emptied garbage, dealt with pissy customers, gotten poison ivy working landscaping—in the end, no matter what, I’ll take the life of ideas. All my working life, I felt I was working towards something, a life of scholarship, a life of the mind, in a discipline that I loved. It was the discovery and the synthesis I loved.
Along the way I did publish, and I started working on grant proposals. I was on my way to being funded.
MB: What was your path into the tenure stream?
MD: My first job out of my NIH fellowship was not tenure track. I landed a year-by-year instructor position at a large, urban, R1 institution, in my specialty. I was very happy there. I had a 2/2 load, and was working with the program director and another anthropologist on a grant proposal. I submitted it, and it was rejected, but I was invited to revise and submit to another program. I was also working with another faculty member on another potential project. I was awarded a small university faculty development grant. I enjoyed my students, for the most part, especially the majors and the grad students. The program had a strong relationship with the School of Nursing, and another program that studied aging. I taught a methods class to nurses, and we had nursing Phd students in our program. My teaching evaluations were excellent.
I enjoyed what I was doing and where I was living. I was getting involved in some community organizations, singing in a choir, etc. I had access to an academic library, which was delicious.
“Democracy in the workplace is still basic to a democratic society, and collective bargaining is still basic to a fair economy,” says Wilma Liebman.
Last week’s appointment of Wilma Liebman to chair the NLRB is extremely welcome news to graduate employees and other academic workers.
The author of a scathing dissent to the Bush mob’s truculent Brown decision, Liebman adds serious credibility to hopeful interpretations of the Cabinet-level nomination of Hilda Solis.
Obama will not fix academic labor’s problems from above, but he will ensure that labor has the chance to exercise workplace rights. (Though the choice to practice workplace democracy, as those with experience will attest, is just the beginning of a long and arduous road!)
Liebman’s acceptance of the position is particularly heartening:
Democracy in the workplace is still basic to a democratic society, and collective bargaining is still basic to a fair economy. The statute we administer is the foundation of America’s commitment to human rights recognized around the world.
You can view my interviews with NYU and Chicago grad employees on this YouTuibe playlist. Graduate employee unionization in the U.S. is more advanced at public institutions, and organizing at private schools stalled for a while in the aftermath of the reversal of the NYU decision in the Brown case, but there has been a resurgence of militancy among grad employees at private institutions.
GSU and GSOC-UAW are at very different stages of the organizing process. The interview with members of Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago is a snapshot of an emerging union drive at a private institution. They reflect on the benefits of organizing, whether unionism is an end in itself, and on the nature, purpose, and extent of democracy in higher education.
The activists from GSOC-UAW at NYU are at an entirely different point in their experience. They reflect on a successful organizing drive and first contract, setbacks with the NLRB, a failed strike, the strategy of continuous organizing, the administration’s response, and other topics. Their struggle represents some of the greatest successes and also some of the greatest setbacks in graduate employee labor organizing so far, and as such is especially worthy of detailed study.
The folks of GSOC argue that politics, politicians, and legislation follow activism and self-organization. As they point out in the clip above (part 3 of 4) the TRACBRA legislation that would ensure bargaining rights for teaching and research assistants — that’s a gesture, a drop in the bucket. It’s important, but nowhere near as important as self-organization.
Carter has written an especially good assessment of the core point made by the GSOC folks in this video–the crucial role of campus alliances, in his just-released Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton, 2008). Chapter 4, “The Student as Organic Intellectual,” tracks the importance of undergraduate USAS activists in GSOC’s successful first round of bargaining.
At the annual convention of the Modern Language Association last month, David Horowitz once more shared a panel with AAUP President Cary Nelson, who has previously replied to Horowitz’s exaggerated claims of bias in the classroom. As Chronicle Review editor Liz McMillen’s coverage pointed out, there wasn’t much actual debate in this over-hyped appearance, which featured almost as many security guards as audience members.
The real draw was the more timely panel featuring Stanley Fish debating critics of his notion that faculty should shut up and “do their jobs.” (Staging a meeting between Horowitz and an articulate critic has been done before.)
As many others have pointed out, where students have been given the chance to protest grades based on faculty political bias, they rarely do so. The few complaints made are even more rarely upheld, and are just as likely to be claims of right-wing bias.
In my view, Horowitz is manufacturing a problem in order to push a real agenda: ie, by making exaggerated and often simply ridiculous claims about left-wing bias in classroom instruction and the “danger” that faculty political beliefs represent to student learning, he wishes to sweepingly institute affirmative action for right-wing scholars in hiring, and employ “intellectual diversity” as a wedge to force conservative ideas onto curricula.
The author of The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win, Horowitz has openly identified himself as a partisan political operative, receives substantial right-wing foundation funding, but wishes to represent himself as casually thrown up by a grassroots student movement.
On the other hand, faculty and graduate students are finding that their academic freedom is under actual, sustained and intensifying assault.
This is most obvious among the faculty serving nontenurably, now the overwhelming majority of college faculty. Not counting graduate students, or factoring for widespread administrative under-reporting, in 2005 at least 70% of all U.S. faculty served on nontenurable appointments.
Nontenurabililty is the norm of academic employment; therefore it is now simply normal for college faculty to enjoy little to no protection of their academic freedoms, as Cary Nelson makes clear in one of the more popular videos in our series. The precariousness of their employment means that most can be retaliated against for almost any speech or action, without the administration engaging in due process (or even giving a reason) by the simple expedient of non-reappointment.
As reported in this month’s Academe, in one particularly egregious case investigated by AAUP’s Committee A, a North Idaho faculty member serving contingently was retaliated against by an administration that had a beef with her tenured spouse.
The report concludes:
The case of Jessica Bryan exemplifies the plight of many contingent faculty members: vulnerable and insecure no matter how long and how well they might have served their institution. An experienced, highly regarded parttime English instructor with thirteen uninterrupted semesters of teaching at North Idaho College, Ms. Bryan was informed by e-mail on the last day of the fall 2007 semester that the administration would not offer her any courses to teach in the spring (or any time thereafter, it would appear) despite the fact that other part-time instructors junior to her in years of service were being assigned courses she had taught for more than six years and the administration engaged new instructors to teach some of those courses in fall 2008. When she asked for a substantive explanation for its decision not to reappoint her, the administration, through college counsel, declined to do so. When she requested an opportunity for faculty review of her claim that inadequate consideration had been given to her qualifications and that the decision resulted in significant measure from impermissible considerations, the administration, again through college counsel, told her that the contract governing her temporary appointment afforded her no such rights.
So far from the intellectual “threats” and “dangers” that Horowitz imagines, most faculty are in fact reticent and easily intimidated, living perpetually “30 seconds from humiliation,” just as Anonymous describes.
The report goes on to suggest the “chilling effect” that the absence of protections has on the contingent faculty majority. They might well have added to that the chilling effect that the ability to do this to one’s spouse or partner has on many of the tenured–some estimates calculate that at least a third of all faculty partners are other faculty.
Dangerous? One can only wish that every campus had a handful of faculty who were half the threat that Horowitz imagines.
Coming attractions: new video featuring Paul Lauter and Gary Rhoades, among many others….
“We’re in the business of education,” Arne Duncan says.
The market worshipers have marched out of the building; hurray! Wait–who’s that tall basketball-playing fellow getting ready to sit in the Education seat?
As superintendent of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan has given us a fair preview of his vision. It’s “a business-minded, market-driven model for education,” concludes Andy Kroll for the Nation Institute’s tomdispatch.com. “His style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.” Input from community leaders, faculty, and parents’ organizations “regularly fell on deaf ears.”
As Kroll points out, privatizing Chicago’s schools was the centerpiece of Duncan’s vigorously-resisted “Renaissance 2010″ proposals, pushing to close existing institutions and replace them with charter and “entrepreneurial” schools run by for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs).
Even in the runaway financial climate of the early millenium, the EMO sector radically outperformed most other industries in terms of fiscal return on investment. Not content to pay management for test scores, Duncan has just rolled out a program to pay students for grades–dropping a Jackson on students for every C and fifty bucks for every A.
While Duncan brags about raising test scores, critics point out these come at the expense of a stripped-down curriculum targeting the test rather than actual learning (and, not incidentally, in the context of lowered statewide testing standards, like paying bonuses for hitting the bulls-eye more often after moving the target closer).
Obama gives us a look at his own priorities for education when he praises Duncan’s “results” as skills development–giving children “what they need to compete with any worker in the world for any job.” Yay, John Dewey would be proud. Citizenship? Music? Wellness? You gotta be kidding. That would be in a co-operative world and what we have here is as much competition as possible– in the same old “quality” formula. Take money from the testing “losers” and give it to the testing “winners.”
What goes well with endless competition in every corner of your existence? Discipline.
Harsh discipline, in fact. The job that many of the 91% non-white “customers” of the Chicago Public Schools are being trained for is service in the U.S. military.
A big part of Arne Duncan’s “success” as chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools was in whacking down big grants from the Department of Defense to create the most militarized public school system in the country: five military academies and over fifty junior ROTC programs, most of them feeding primarily lower-income and minority youth into the nation’s war machine.
I came across Kroll’s piece courtesy of John Hess on ADJ-L. On the same forum faculty activist Joe Berry, after reading the piece, observed, “As a Chicago resident from 99-2007, all of this is true. His appointment, if not a disaster, is a bad omen at the least.”
Faculty Self-Help
Over at the New York Times, Stanley Fish gave former student Frank Donoghue’s “The Last Professors” a nice mention. It’s a bit surprising, though, that Fish claims to have needed _The Last Professors_ to inform him about the perma-temping of the academy.
As a former dean at a public institution using an extremely high percentage of adjunct and graduate student employees to “deliver instruction,” Fish oversaw budgets dictating the hiring of plenty of cheap teachers.
Indeed, Fish heard many detailed critiques of the academic labor system from unionizing graduate employees and from at least one brilliant, accomplished faculty activist of my acquaintance.
His response? “Save the world on your own time.” If you’ve read Fish’s attack on “ideology”in education (something evidently only other people have), you know his charming mantra to faculty: “just do your job.”
Except for professionals, “doing one’s job” implies responsibilities to the profession, to other professionals, and the public. That is, as most faculty and other professionals agree, “saving the world” is part of the job description.
What Fish seems to have missed about Donoghue’s book is that he repeatedly, consistently, uncompromisingly holds the tenure-stream faculty responsible for falling down on the job as professionals in their silent acquiescence to the super-exploitation of faculty serving contingently and graduate students.
If Donoghue is right in his indictment, it suggests that Fish is the one who hasn’t been “doing his job” with respect to safeguarding the profession for future students and future colleagues.
Fish’s response to Donoghue’s claim that a whole profession is on the verge of extinction? “I have timed it just right,” Fish says of his career–”Just lucky, I guess.” Wow, what an eloquent and considered reflection on an individual’s relationship to, and responsibility for, the profession. Thanks, Stanley. Glad you enjoyed your ride.
As I wrote back in April 2008, the caveat I have with respect to Donoghue’s book regards the general probem of using “vanishing” tropes. As many have observed, the “vanishing Indian” didn’t actually disappear, but moved to degraded circumstances with a limited purchase on the public sphere. We might say the same for the faculty.
Since future higher education won’t be “professorless,” but filled with faculty — research professors of retail marketing, distinguished chairs in business ethics, but $1000-per-course lecturers in Homer — there will remain opportunities for resistance, for political action, especially by way of activist unions of the faculty serving contingently, including those faculty who serve contingently as graduate employees.
And–if you’re still parsing Obama’s cabinet choices–that’s the likely meaning of his far more welcome appointment of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor. A leading proponent of the Employee Free Choice Act, and the only member of Congress to serve on the board of American Rights at Work, her appointment virtually guarantees that it will be much easier for workers–including higher education workers–to exercise their rights to workplace association and collective bargaining.
My reading of the cabinet choices is this: we aren’t going to get any higher-education full-employment act or other great “change” in the academic labor system from above during this administration. But we can organize to make change ourselves. Of course, by “ourselves” I mean the majority of faculty–the teachers serving contingently who have appeared while the traditional professoriate “vanishes.”
Sure, it would be nice if Obama fixed our problems from above. I personally made much more satisfactory recommendations for Education Secretary than Arne Duncan.*
But as I recall, the chant was “yes we can.”
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*Just in case Arne Duncan leaves the cabinet, here are my recommendations for his replacement. I can’t, however vouch for their utility on the White House basketball team.
Jonathan Kozol. A Rhoades scholar who was fired from the Boston Public Schools for teaching a Langston Hughes poem, Kozol has for decades described the way that class war from above maintains savagely unequal public schools–what he’s recently called the “restoration of apartheid” in the U.S.
Angela Davis. Of course Bill Ayers was the obvious choice, but Davis is herself a veteran of the presidential trail–having shared the Communist party ticket with Gus Hall. These days she identifies as a democratic socialist–so she should fit right in, according to the McCain camp.
Barbara Ehrenreich. She was my top pick for secretary of labor, her or Stanley Aronowitz, but since Solis filled that job nicely, Ehrenreich will do splendidly in Education. Look for strict limits on youth labor and socialization of college tuition, a la Adolph Reed’s “Free Higher Education” proposal.
Zeke M. Vanderhoek. Not a household name, but he gets my vote. Obama, sadly, loves charter schools, and Vanderhoek started the one charter school I like–a Harlem school where the starting wage for teachers is $125,000. The principal’s wage? Just $90,000. You want to reduce costs in higher education–there’s all the budget planning you need.
Seems I attract the Czars of Obsession, even when I’m not pasting Che posters to the Temple of the Free Market (People, However, Chained to Their Desks).
My fairly light-hearted post on early learning, for instance, sparked a little rage: “It’s All Fun and Games, Pal, until Someone’s Child Injects Themselves with Autism!” and “How Dare you JOKE about Penises!”
So I hesitate to admit that last night I stumbled upon The United States of Tara, the latest venture by Diablo Cody (Juno), and found it hilarious and moving. Produced by Steven Spielberg for Showtime, the show takes a Kansas woman’s struggles with dissociative identity disorder (DID) as the premise of a half-hour comic drama.
While there are many broad (and implausible) strokes about living with mental illness here, the show charms by emphasizing authentic emotions in a family and high-school web of relationships reminiscent of Judd Apatow’s brilliant-but-cancelled high-school-in-1980 comedy-drama Freaks and Geeks (1999). Read more
One of the things that child-rearing has taught H. and myself is that parenting is the new mystical Belief System in Many Flavors. Like the old belief systems still causing wars around the planet, Parenting Choices (PC) are not really suitable dinner conversation.
Those whose children are older don’t fight with each other about these issues, but put a wild-eyed First-Time Parent at the table, all hopped up on hormones, sleep deprivation and a bookshelf of contradictory advice and you’re guaranteed a sectarian conflict. The first-timers can’t keep their matches away from the conversational gasoline. Read more
Unless you’re currently afflicted by the GI bug that my family just survived, you’ll want to play this shockwave data visualization of, as LumpenProf puts it, “how quickly the Wal-Mart pandemic has spread from a single outbreak in Arkansas in 1962.”
I think it captures more than one “side” of the Wal-mart debate: on the one hand, the bacterial blooming represents the chain’s proponents’ sense that the spread of their corporate presence is organic and therefore natural, even inevitable.
On the other hand, it captures the hesitation felt by many, even Wal-mart shoppers and employees, that the spread is also potentially toxic. Whatever “innovation” might exist in that corporate culture needs to be separated from the toxic strains growing alongside it.
While the bacterial bloom is certainly faint praise, I wouldn’t underestimate the (likely unintentional) favor a representation like this does Wal-mart–by giving the corporation’s spread an Andromeda-strain sort of inevitability, it pushes along the tired old line of history is dead, take your soma and sleep. Don’t worry; be happy. Resistance to the corporate Borg is futile.
Though we seem to have begun upchucking that particular pablum… so we’ll see.
Overall, nice work by flowingdata.com, which has nominated the “Five Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year.” Well worth a look, and thanks to the Tenured Prole for the nod.
Bonus, courtesy of the intrepid expatriate Wayne Ross and Roedy Green of Canadian Mind Products, an advance look at Bush 43’s vita. Because, you know, this is a country where rivers of meretricious prattle about excellence, merit, and quality flow downward from this pinnacle of accomplishment and accountability:
# I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.
# I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history. Read more
I suppose part of the reason why I never considered a career in academia is that I am the child of an adjunct. My father was teaching at three different institutions when I was small, and later, as he gained more seniority, he was able to teach at just one. He teaches at a community college, and he was *finally* made a full-timer this year, at the age of 63, thanks to the union. The only reason we had (barely) enough money or health insurance growing up is that my mother taught in the local public schools. And funny enough, my mother is the one who went to a state school and my dad is the one who went to the Ivy. Dad’s employer, and lots of others are making more and more use of adjuncts and driving wages down to a despicable level. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
You can say that again. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
Thank you.
If you’re at the MLA annual convention in San Francisco and feeling, well, precarious, the discussion group for faculty serving contingently invites you to a guerilla happy hour at the Hilton’s Urban Tavern, Monday, December 29, beginning 4:30 pm. I’ll be there with young Emile, who may literally have bells on.
There are several new confirmed appearances for the spring. Some of these events are free and open to the public. With the exception of possible appearances in Southern California (Occidental College and/or Cal State San Marcos), I think I’m pretty much as booked as I can handle until very late in 2009.
“Social Media and Social Reality.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. December 29, 2008.
“The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. December 30, 2008.
Featured Speaker, “Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up.” South Atlantic Quarterly conference on Academic Freedom, Cornell University. February 6-7, 2009.
“Job Security for Contingent Faculty.” Adjuncts & Allies Workshop, CCCC, San Francisco. March 11, 2009: 3 pm.
Featured Speaker, Art Institute of Chicago, March 18, 2009
Keynote Speaker, NC-AAUP Annual Conference, UNC-Chapel Hill. March 20, 2009.
Featured Speaker, Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center at New York University, April 3, 2009.
Featured Speaker, Initiative on Labor and Culture at Yale University: April 6, 2009.
Featured Speaker, “American Studies/American Universities,” Eighth Annual University of Florida Americanist symposium: April 10, 2009.
Featured Speaker, Cultural Studies Association Annual Meeting. Kansas City: April 16-18, 2009.
AAUP Council Meeting, 95th Annual Meeting of the AAUP, Washington DC: June 11-14, 2009.
Keynote Address. “Labor in Higher Education.” Sponsored by the Association for Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty. Slippery Rock, PA: October 2009.
AAUP Council Meeting, Washington DC: November 21-22, 2009.
There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.
All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate exercise of institutional authority.”
The effective compromise between these positions is the committee’s endorsement of rights and privileges for the nontenurable that are as similar as possible to those of the tenured. (Elsewhere, I’ve written about this kind of compromise under the heading of “the intricate evasions of as.”)
I don’t think this tension would have been magically resolved by having nontenurable faculty on the committee—I co-chair AAUP’s committee on faculty serving contingently, and can say that most welcome just about any melioration of their condition, but not the patronizing apologetics that usually accompany the fairly pervasive intrusions on their academic freedom, sense of professional belonging, personal dignity, workplace rights, and economic security—often by tenure-stream faculty serving as their immediate supervisors, union reps, and department chairs.
But I do think representation on this kind of committee should map closely onto the profession—with graduate students, faculty serving contingently, and tenured faculty with a track record on the issues in reasonable proportion. (On the AAUP committee, I’m the only tenured member, and serve as co-chair over my own repeated objection.) Many of the facts and lived realities that caught the MLA staff and some of its committee members by surprise are decades-old news to the majority of college faculty.
For me, the single most troubling line of apologetic pursued by the report is its discussion of the “freeway flyer” stereotype of faculty serving contingently.
Who’s not a Freeway Flier?
On page 13, the committee suggests that freeway fliers are only those persons who report a household income of less than $25,000, calculating by this arbitrary and whimsical standard that the group comprises less than twenty percent of all those serving contingently. By contrast, the authors note,
as we know from anecdote and experience, some part-time non-tenure track faculty members are also spouses or partners tenured and tenure-track faculty members; others have full-time jobs elsewhere, or want to maintain contact with the university but prefer not to be subjected to the conditions—especially the publication requirements—of a tenure-track appointment.
Hm. Really not good. Is the report saying that someone teaching on multiple campuses and unable to get degree-appropriate tenure-track work isn’t a “freeway flier” or distressed member of the academic community because they are either a) spouses or partners of tenure-track faculty members or b) married to someone else with a decent income? Isn’t it a problem for this largely female workforce regardless of their marital or cohabitation choices? Given the gendered division of labor here, isn’t this veering into sexism?
Few faculty serving contingently would support this definition, which arbitrarily excludes most freeway flyers from their own lived experience and self-definition and imposes the skeptical ignorance of the dominant gaze. Kinda like: “Well, gee, you don’t look gay.”
What’s the big deal? Well, it both excludes and diminishes the experience of Anonymous, who has lived her career, as she says, “thirty seconds from humiliation,” has a spouse with a decent income, but nonetheless works in the field for which she trained because she needs the money. What about Monica Jacobe, who has been an adjunct on multiple campuses for the better part of a decade and has never made $30,000 in a year? Because they are married to men with doctorates earning more than $50,000 and less than $100,000, the household income of both women is in the upper 20 or 25% of all part-time faculty in English: woo-hoo! Nothing to look at here, folks. These ladies are rolling in it.
It’s hard to understand the point of this particular observation except as apologism or an inept swipe at the Cary Nelson crowd. It’s not as bad as those agitators and malcontents are saying. The adjuncts I know always seem pretty happy when they come to dinner with their spouse. Why, if you look at the numbers, lots of these adjuncts are happy and doing pretty well–some of them are married to millionaires!
A better way to get at this issue would be to track the role of gender, and the role of restructured academic employment in how individuals got into these positions. Instead of implying that everything’s peachy if you’re married to a professor (just ask Melanie Hubbard or the blogger Adjunct Whore), and hinting that they don’t really want to publish, why not ask faculty serving contingently if they’re doing so involuntarily because their spouse’s employer doesn’t have a rational spousal hiring policy? Or because the employer doesn’t make reasonable accommodations for childrearing?
Even the discussion of those who “prefer” part-time employment is problematic. It’s not as if preferring part-time employment means that the individual endorses the conditions under which they serve.
Why not ask if the person would prefer secure “fractional employment” over freeway flying?
Why not ask faculty with children if they’d prefer to be able to move from part-time fractional (and teaching intensive) employment to full-time and/or research-intensive at other points in their careers? That would be actual flexibility, by the way, not the cheap administrator tyranny we have at present.
There are other complaints and cavils to make. The report addresses gender, however imperfectly, but not class and race, or the intersection of class and race in the “wealth gap.”
The committee takes the step of recommending a set ratio of full-time and tenured to part-time faculty to graduate students, but doesn’t explain how it got to the different percentages, or justifying those percentages in the context of other recommendations.
Even as it recommends more tenure in the “lower division,” the report privileges the “upper division,” as if it is necessarily worse to have adjuncts in the upper division. Perhaps the resources of full-time tenure-track faculty are best deployed in the “lower” division—as some recent research suggests.
The report talks about graduate employees as instructors of record but bypasses the issue of their workload, their prospects in the profession and—again–the role of class and the ethnic/racial wealth gap in relentlessly influencing who is eligible to make the economically irrational “choice” to even think about the undergraduate major and the graduate education that fifteen years or more down the road will allow them to join the professoriate.
MLA staff need to much more comprehensively engage the scholarship of higher education employment, and should make a much larger effort to bring the majority faculty serving contingently into active membership and leadership.
In general, this report is a very welcome contribution and significant departure from some of MLA’s bad old ways in the bad old days. Many faculty serving contingently will nonetheless feel that some of its compromise moments represent mis-steps.
These mostly have to do with the managerial orientation of the committee’s chair and–column for another time–the administrative bias in the organization of MLA itself, which caters to department chairs in the ADE/ADFL arrangement, and as a result has steadily privileged the dilemma of the person who “doesn’t have enough resources to staff the department’s offerings” over the situation of the person being pushed into one of the scheduler’s McJobs.
I’ll be saying more about this report in my two appearances at MLA, as will Paul Lauter, one of the committee’s authors. (Which, together with our interview, will be an opportunity to correct any errors on my part!) I’d be glad to see you there.
Literally a decimation. And so many women faculty, toiling out of the tenure stream for incredibly low wages.
Part 1: Key facts and kudos
Part 2: Complaints and concerns
Part 3: Interview with Paul Lauter
Most of my blogging between now and early January will relate to the worst-timed gathering in the profession, the Modern Language Assocation annual convention Dec 27-30, with a strong bias toward faculty in English studies.
Feel free to tune out if you don’t care about what happens to one of the largest teaching faculties in the country, encountering nearly every student—including disproportionate encounters with those who don’t earn degrees or never make it out of the first year.
I wouldn’t blame you for not caring much about these teachers—the Modern Language Association has only recently taken real notice of them, having abandoned meaningful consideration of lower-division disciplinary issues to NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. Ditto for workplace matters, which the late Phyllis Franklin once announced to me was “really AAUP’s job.” English studies is still reaping the fruits of Franklin’s leadership today—a rich, briskly efficient disciplinary association that can’t quite bring itself to reach into the crapper where the discipline’s most immiserated faculty desperately swirl….
On the one hand, I’m happy and relieved to see some of the major recommendations in this report, and think it takes a number of critical, long-awaited steps in data gathering, angle of analysis, policy thought, and disciplinary self-reflection. It’s the first time I can say that the MLA has made a thoroughgoing effort to describe how faculty are really employed in English, and make recommendations based on that reality. It’s a must-read for anyone in the field.
On the other hand, despite welcoming most of the recommendations, graduate employees and faculty serving contingently—not to mention quite a few of us writing on these issues—can be forgiven their disappointment that it’s taken MLA so long to act on observations and demands that have been made with perfect clarity over the past quarter-century, since the events leading to the landmark Wyoming Conference Resolution. (In one of the interviews she gave about the report, Franklin’s successor Rosemary Feal claims that the shift to a nontenurable faculty has been “rapid and largely unnoticed.” Um, not really.)
It’s a long report, and I have a lot to say about it, plus—I hope—an interview with Paul Lauter, one of the report’s authors, and one of the earliest and best analysts of the role that permatemping began to play in English by the early 1970s. A couple of key facts in this post; more key facts and kudos in the next; complaints, concerns and interview with Paul to follow.
Key Facts
+ Between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole. In terms of raw numbers, however, most disciplines actually gained tenure track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5% new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43%.
English, however, lost over 3000 tenure track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than 1 in every 10 tenurable position in English—literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued—and all indications are that it has–by early next year we will have shed another 1500 lines.
+ Rewards in English are profoundly stratified by gender. While men hold the majority of tenure-track lines in Carnegie Research and Master’s institutions, women hold a substantial majority of tenurable lines at the less prestigious baccalaureate and two-year schools.
Only a third of tenurable positions in community college English departments are held by men. Additionally, women continue to substantially outnumber men in nontenurable positions—both full and part-time at every institution type.
Part 1, with more key facts and kudos regarding some of the recommendations, will continue….
Look, there’s no way to confront how the gated-community crowd has stunk up the economy without core legislation addressing higher education, health care, gender equality and workplace association as human rights. While the five million top consumers were out getting boob jobs, BMWs and blood diamonds, the rest of us were grading their kids’ papers, scrubbing their toilets and doing their nails. (The chance to “choose” paper-grading instead of other things has a lot to do with the racial division of wealth.)
Here are five key pieces of legislation for The One to jump on–like, yesterday– if he wants future historians to give him the “FDR meets Lincoln” treatment he craves. As I’ve previously written, Obama doesn’t have the luxury of hedging his bets, robbing Peter to pay Paul the way Clinton did. He has to go all in and actually accomplish things.
First, he’s got to work for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The Reagan-Bush mob has used the law and regulatory power dishonestly, as a bludgeon to deprive U.S. workers, including faculty and staff, of internationally-acknowledged rights to organize. 60 million Americans would join unions tomorrow–if there were real protections for human rights in the workplace.
Second, he’s got to stop fooling around with the tissue-paper health care “proposals” he had stuck to his shoes throughout the campaign. He needs to get behind something like Rep. John Conyers’ HR 676 Medicare for All single-payer plan. Watch the news in early January for the 20 (yep, 20) major labor organizations launching the “Labor for Single Payer” campaign.
Third, women on average lose half a million dollars over the course of a lifetime due to the gender wage gap–and that’s just comparing full-time to full-time. Add in the ways that “part-time” employees are ripped off–especially in higher ed–and it’s a boatload more. So it’s time to strengthen the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which passed the House last year, to include 100% equal pay for equal work for part-time employees and then get it past the Senate.
Fourth, as long as we’re on the MomsRising.org agenda, Obama had best pass unemployment modernization–and also strengthen that bill to include provisions specific to faculty serving contingently.
Fifth, back when higher education provided real opportunity and not free job training for corporations, it was free or nearly so. Every state that actually spends money on higher education has slashed that spending over that past four decades: time to put real Federal billions on the table as matching funds with one string for the states accepting it–make public higher education free, period. Cost: $25-40 billion federal, similar in the states–an amount that Adolph Reed presciently said in our interview over a year ago, “that Congress passes out as a tip in corporate welfare.”
Redistribute the wealth? You betcha. Special thanks to Maria Maisto of adj-l for links provided in this piece.
Whether you dropped half a million in your TIAA-CREF or are standing in line for free cheese this holiday season, you may be looking for ways to cut back on your dispensation of holiday cheer, while still letting your friends and colleagues know that you’re thinking about them.
Enter Shite Gifts for Academics, my new favorite Facebook app. Devised by someone named “Michael,” you can choose from a wide array of thoroughly appropriate virtual gifts, from an “overbearing, maladjusted colleague” to a “crappy office chair,” a “vengeful student evaluation,” an “idiot chairperson,” “condescending IT guy,” “colleague who knows Robert’s Rules of Order by heart,” a “4-4 load,” or a “windowless office.”
You do have to be on Facebook to use the app. Your students can use the app to send you gifts as well. You can create your own gift app, or use some of the other great gift apps out there. (Yes, Virginia, two of my faves are the “Send Che” and “Send Power to the People” apps. As your holiday gift to me, we’ll pretend you already made your “if wishing made it so” joke.) There’s already a gift app tailored to a particular academic discipline: “Shite Gifts for Computer Scientists.”
Not all are flavored with irony, outrage, or weary amusement at our collective folly–you can also send an earnest “enthralled class.” Which, whether you’re on Facebook or not, is my holiday wish for you. Solidarity, M
Without federal leadership, the crumbling faculty infrastructure will remain disproportionately white and male in the best-paying and most secure positions.
With everyone else getting bailed out, higher education is at an absolutely critical juncture, with profound implications for academic actors at all institution types, and their ambitions to serve racial and economic justice.
On the one hand, yesterday’s major AFT report on the permatemping of the faculty urges the necessity of reversing course on academic staffing. That would imply a greater investment in higher education, almost certainly including substantial federal leadership and funding. Most of the public don’t have any idea how many of the faculty are untenured, and are shocked–not in the Casablanca sense–to learn how much they’re paid. When they are given the true picture, every ordinary taxpayer gets it: something’s wrong when faculty earn less than bartenders; nobody would trust an accountant earning less than a living wage, etc.
On the other hand, as education “leaders” across the country have already made clear, their intentions aren’t really to get together and demand a “bailout” or a “new New Deal for higher ed,” etc. Why not? Instead they seem all too ready with even more grandiose plans for austerity.
That’s because administrations have found four decades of austerity useful to establish greater “productivity” (more work for less pay) and more “responsiveness to mission,” which is to say, more control over curriculum, research, and every dimension of teaching, from class size to pedagogy.
They anticipate the coming years will be even more of an opportunity in this respect. In addition to massive world-historical spending on the military, police, and prison sectors, the diversion of public funds to the financial and industrial sector gives the rhetoric and tactics of austerity a needed shot in the arm: just when we were about to stop falling for the “oh, this year it’s austerity again” rhetoric and demand restoration of public funds to a public good, we have the whole government standing in front of flags with their empty pockets turned out.
Yeah, I’m saying what you think I’m saying.
Many administrators welcome austerity
It’s what they live for. It’s what they know how to do; it’s their whole culture, the reason for their existence, the justification for their salary and perks, the core criteria for their bonuses–the quality way, 5% or 10% cheaper (or 5-10% more entrepreneurial revenue) every year.
Ya gotta be a good earner or pay the price, as quality-manager Tony Soprano liked to say. Toyota plus yakuza, what we used to call “Japanese management theory,” but which now has the unique American flavor of super-casualization and astonishingly crude, hostile anti-labor legislation. (Because we have capital’s gangsters serving in both parties across the nation.)
Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re sweating the serfs in a pretty old-fashioned way: I don’t care how ya do it, ya gotta get me another ten percent next year, or you can “choose” whether you teach more classes or close your department. And they get direct seigneurial rewards–box seats at the jousting, the best cuts of the roast animal, jets and suites for their trysts.
Those of us on the ground in higher education will wonder how much more “productivity” is in fact possible, given that “leaders” have been taking advantage of the rhetoric of crisis for forty years to wring more “productivity”–faculty today teach more students more cheaply than at any point in the history of higher education.
Most of that cheapness has been established by the abuse of the apprentice system–substituting student labor for faculty labor, including increasingly undergraduate labor–or by abusing the notion of “flexibility” to establish a permanently “temporary” faculty working for peanuts. As I’ve been warning for fifteen years, the academy is moving toward realizing a sick ideal: reserving tenure for those who self-fund (by grants doled out by corporations) and those who administer a 100% casual labor force.
[I’ll save a full-fledged discussion of “technology” as a magic productivity bullet for another day, but David Noble and I agree, and most technology vendors admit, that courseware “productivity” gains are all about justifying larger class sizes, greater standardization, and the use of cheap nonfaculty, parafaculty, or student labor. There are good uses of classroom technology, and they all involve more, not less, faculty labor time. Where courseware does sometimes “improve teaching,” it’s generally because the teaching methods had already eroded to “information download” in the first place, typically in huge lecture halls followed by course-content testing.]
This is not a partisan political issue–as I’ve said before, Clinton and Gore via “quality in governance” are just as responsible for “increasing productivity” (but gutting education) by permatemping and extracting donated labor via “service,” “interns” (make your own joke here–I’m not in the mood today), and the like.
Republicans and Democrats share the wrong idea that squeezing the faculty has been to “control costs,” when in fact it’s just been to accumulate pots of either money (to spend on administrator perks, salaries, and sponsored projects or favored activities, especially big-time sports or, at religious institutions, social engineering) or capital (buildings, endowments, media infrastructure, investment in ventures and partnerships).
As a result of bipartisan belief in the fiction of benevolent austerity, the faculty infrastructure has crumbled. Most nontenurable faculty don’t do service; the remaining tenurable minority have seen their service loads double and triple, in addition to increased research expectations, larger classes, greater assessment burdens, longer terms in administration, and so on.
Even among the few tenurable faculty that won’t serve in some administrative capacity or as grant-getters, most have shouldered the permanent, career-long burden of participating in the perma-temp/apprenticeship system: admitting, training, supervising & evaluating grad student employees and/or hiring, training, and supervising the permanently temporary. The majority of both groups leave within a few years, creating a constant cycle of hire-train-supervise-evaluate, and then hire again.
Faculty senates have become in most cases all but toothless–administrations actively encourage and preserve them as a useful “garbage can” for faculty opinion, an “energy sink” for troublemakers, as any higher-ed organizational theorist will tell you. Many faculty unions just preserve the interests of the tenured minority at the expense of student and casual faculty labor. Shared governance is in disarray–at most institutions, the administration has near-total control of the faculty: certainly of the nontenurable majority, but also of the tenurable, because their numbers are so small, or because they are married to a vulnerable nontenurable person, or because they have become acculturated to act self-interestedly, chase corporate dollars, etc.
After four decades, the results of this near-total administrative control and a cheap, “highly productive” faculty workforce are clear: it stinks. Student success rates by any measure are a racist, class-specific national embarrassment. White men have the highest paying jobs in higher education; women work disproportionately in insecure positions and poorly paid fields, and higher education as “job training” reproduces similar trends in the larger economy.
Consequences for Diversifying the Faculty
Faculty identifying themselves as of Hispanic or African heritage comprise about 9% of the faculty, at a rate of about one-third of the percentage of persons similarly identifying themselves in the general population (less if one includes those identifying as multiracial).
This substantial disproportion is the more noteworthy considering that rectifying the disproportion has for some time represented an area of substantial agreement between most faculty and administrators, as well as substantial external actors in legislatures, foundations, corporate philanthropists, etc etc. , and that numerous initiatives have been in place to address it for decades.
Some of the reasons for this have to do with what Kozol dubs the “savage inequalities” of K-12 education and the larger society, including the wealth gap. Non-Hispanic white households are on average seven times wealthier than African-American and Hispanic households: impoverishing the public sphere, including education and higher education, disadvantages the poor and therefore disproportionately disadvantages African-Americans and Hispanics.
Higher-ed quality management has radically increased that disadvantage. By relying on the “psychic wage” to push actual compensation for faculty work lower and lower, so that the majority work for what used to be called pin money, with much of the same gendered implications, they’ve turned faculty work into an “irrational” economic decision–a luxury lifestyle choice that persons from wealthier circumstances are far more likely to make than those from modest circumstances.
Since non-Hispanic white households are wealthier, they’re on average more “free” to make this choice than others.
The unfreedom to choose faculty life runs all the way down a decades-long series of decisions about one’s education–where one goes to school and feels comfortable in school, where one majors and where one’s peers are majoring, whether one can choose graduate school and in what field, and how one feels about the way graduate school is funded, etc. It is a structural and cultural reality, with structural inequalities influencing cultural values, norms, and fields of individual perception and actual possibility.
As today’s Chronicle reports, stark disparity persists in the number of minority students earning doctorates despite three three decades of concerted federal, administrative, and foundation efforts. A Council of Graduate Schools study has concluded that diversifying doctoral programs rests on fundamentally improving “the academic climate for all of their students.”
The same is true for diversifying the faculty. No true diversification of the faculty can occur as long as the majority of teaching is done as lightly-paid volunteerism by those who can afford it as a lifestyle choice.
We cannot afford to let Obama take the austerity bait and “make college more affordable” by further eroding the faculty infrastructure, substituting online test modules and undergraduate tutors for faculty interaction. This will only compound the train wreck of the past four decades.
AFT is right. To diversify the faculty, improve learning outcomes and make higher education a place where the ethnically and economically subordinated can once more enjoy freedom, Obama must provide leadership on “reversing course” in academic staffing.
He can make college more affordable while reversing austerity in staffing by investing in it, and “incentivizing” states to invest in it, especially by demanding high ratios of full-time tenurable faculty–including tenure for those who primarily teach, and are vetted for good teaching by other good teachers by reasonable, sound holistic measures, not fake quickie metrics. He can provide leadership by demanding accountability from management.
Obama is a poker player. That’s a good thing–poker’s not gambling; it’s a game of political skill, nerve, daring, and ambition.
He has no choice but to call the bet handed him by the economic situation, but the right play is to raise the stakes, as FDR was eventually forced to do: “I call your several trillion and raise you a couple more!”
Having the courage to raise the stakes will separate Obama from Clinton for the history books in the way we hope and need. Clinton guarded his chips. Obama will have to go all in.
Turkey at the top is always intensely competitive. This year’s contenders included first runner-up Robert Felner, the U of Louisville dean indicted for conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in what the feds allege are repeated acts of embezzlement of grant monies amounting to over $2 million. Not content with these escapades, Felner racked up 31 grievances and complaints in his 5 years at the “U of L” but was consistently backed against the faculty by upper administration, especially Provost Shirley Willihnganz and President James Ramsey, who spent extravagantly on lawyers and consultants to prop up his administration despite what numerous accounts (including this one and others that I’ve privately confirmed) termed an “onslaught” of complaints from faculty, staff and students alleging “unsavory behavior, ranging from sexual harassment to workplace intimidation.” This pair continued the authoritarian regime of wall-to-wall administrative solidarity and secrecy established by their high-living predecessors, former provost Carol Garrison and former president John Shumaker–later found sharing lavish hotel rooms and limousines at public expense, while jetting to trysts in the University of Tennessee’s private plane.
But every year only one can win. This year’s award goes to the chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, Charlie Manning, for his new business model for higher ed in his Appalachian state. Over the past couple of decades, the great state of Tennessee has burned millions of education dollars on executive compensation, sports facilities, and miles of orange carpet–while leading the country in squeezing its faculty.
Of course the “new” business model isn’t new at all–it’s just Chuck Manning refusing to let a good crisis go to waste. It’s the same tired Toyota-management theory from the 80s, with wide-eyed managers and credulous politicians swapping bromides (crisis=danger + opportunity) of doubtful validity, linguistic or otherwise.
In the big picture of capital, Chuck Manning is just a low-level squeezer–the higher-ed equivalent of a regional manager for PepsiCo. The first half of the “opportunity” for higher-level squeezers and shareholders has already been realized, in the stabilization of finance-industry holdings and incomes. Chuck’s job is to realize the other half of the opportunity–squeezing a few more nickels and dimes out of his already-on-food-stamps faculty, and further watering down the thin gruel he passes off as “higher education.”
In the business curriculum, squeezing nickels and dimes until your workers are living on food stamps, loans, or gifts from relatives is called “long term productivity enhancement.” Manning’s ideas for good squeezing include:
+ Requiring students to take a certain number of online courses en route to their bachelor’s and associate’s degrees.
+ Turning online learning into an entirely automated experience “with no direct support from a faculty member except oversight of testing and grading,” and providing financial incentives for students to voluntarily accept teacherless education-as-testing.
+ Use even more adjuncts and convert the remaining tenure-stream faculty into their direct supervisors, “formalizing” that arrangement. (Can you hear me screaming “I told you so”?)
+Use “advanced students” to teach “beginning students” and build that requirement into curriculum and financial aid packages. (Again, I’m screaming. You should be screaming too.)
+Increase faculty workload, initiating a “students-taught” metric to supersede courseload, and “revise” summer compensation.
+Austerity for the poor–cutting athletics at community colleges, eg–but rewards for privatization and revenue-producing programs, etc etc.
Reading all this life-in-wartime austerity of fake correspondence learning, students as teachers, faculty as supervisors, and a standing army of temps, you’d think there was actual fat to be trimmed (other than in the administration).
But the reality is that if you’re really experienced and qualified, teaching 10 courses a year for Chuck Manning nets you about 15 grand without benefits, or less than you’d make at Wal-mart. That’s quite a bit less than half the $33, 960 that the extremely useful Living Wage Calculator says is necessary to support one adult and one child in Knox County.
This has been going on for quite some time, as the hero of our Faculty on Food Stamps video series, Andy Smith can tell you. Since starring in the series, Andy has learned another hard lesson about Chuck Manning: asking politely for a raise gets you a) strung along with months and years of “we’re considering that” and b) turned down flat when they run out of string.
When higher ed administration has left you jaded–when blood from a stone doesn’t thrill you any more–call Charlie Manning, this year’s Turkey at the Top. He’ll squeeze you a faculty smoothie and slip you a side of diploma mill, and do it with a smile.
PS–Next, I’ll tell you what I think Tennessee faculty and students ought to do, just IMHO, of course.
PPS–Oh, and Obama watchers? This kind of quality-management nickel-and-diming employees literally to death is the hallmark of the Clinton economy and Clinton-Gore approach to the public good. The next few weeks will tell if Obama thinks labor will fall for the quality scam again (doubtful), while he sells out our dreams, cozying up to folks like Manning and Michelle Rhee. You want to know what higher education will look like if Clinton-Gore principles are put to work? Just look at Charlie Manning’s work in Gore’s home state.
Colbert tells like it is: “Let’s just classify belief in the free market as a religion.”
Hint: drag cursor to 4:40
I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for help with dislodging the market fetish, whether I’m talking to undergraduates or economists. Some regular Brainstorm contributors have all been expending a ton of energy on recent posts like this one and this one trying to get finance prof “James” to loosen a white-knuckled grip on his Ronald Reagan prayer shawl. Without much success.So this one’s for valiant Brainstorm regular commenters Lucky Jim, drj50, Unemployed Academic, Joe Erwin, George Karnezis, Maria, “me,” “k,” angry, Annie, Henry C. Frick, Amanda Huggenkiss, David Yamada, and the rest. You know who you are.
Tonight we’ll let Colbert take a shot at explaining the relationship between voodoo and the business curriculum.
The relevant portion begins at 4:40; the rest is set-up. Elaborately inserting tongue in cheek, he begins:
“We’re in a bit of an economic pickle here, but one thing we can’t blame is the free market. Systems governed by self interest will always keep us safe–that’s why I’ve never understood traffic lights. Self-interest would obviously keep America’s four-way intersections accident-free. And I’m not the only one who thinks the free market is not to blame here. CLIP: BUSH 43…So there’s no need to start regulating and turn ourselves into Europe. CLIP: SARKOZY: “The idea that markets are always right is a crazy idea.”
With the set-up out of the way, he quotes the DSM IV on diagnosing delusion: “If a belief is accepted by other members of a person’s culture or subculture, it is not a delusion.”
What this means, Colbert explains:
is that our collective cultural belief that the free market will take care of us is not delusional. No, it is actually a religion. …On judgment day, Ronald Reagan will return on a cloud of glory to take us up to money heaven–that’s what I think will happen if we just believe in the “free market” hard enough. And I can’t possibly be deluding myself–when so many others agree with me.
In connection with the Chronicle’s Executive Compensation supplement, Sandy Ungar of Goucher College and I just appeared on NPR–and we agreed on most things. Sandy for instance described faculty compensation as “appalling,” and concurred regarding our over-reliance on contingent appointments. I argued that we needed to rebuild our crumbling faculty infrastructure, and that presidents should be held responsible for staffing arrangements that lead to scandalously low graduation rates.
I’ll write more about this later, but for now you can listen to the interview and read our commentary.
Using one form or another of peer comparison, many administrators can easily show that they should earn 20 or 30 percent more than their current salary. But that relatively modest underpayment pales beside the perennial exploitation of adjunct faculty members. At least 70 percent of today’s faculty members serve contingently, and those who serve part-time at community colleges can teach eight or 10 courses a year for less than $20,000, without health or retirement benefits. Faculty members in such conditions can easily argue that they should earn 200 percent to 300 percent of their current salaries, suggesting an underpayment 10 times as extreme as that of most administrators….. Tying executives’ pay ceilings to workers’ salary floor is an internationally established principle of fairness. In private enterprise, recent events have renewed calls to limit the executive multiple to 25 (a figure that the late management guru Peter Drucker once proposed). Typically the multiples for nonprofit groups’ executives are much lower: Military and civil-service pay scales are long-established examples of fairness. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns only about five times what any college-educated commissioned officer earns. Most state governors are paid less than five times what their college-educated employees earn.
College tuition is free; and executive salaries capped at 15 times the minimum wage.
The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of the New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.
It captures the gap between what is needed–what we hope and long for–and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.
Of additional interest to Chronicle of Higher Ed readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all executive salaries at 15 times the minimum wage. This means that in a society paying a floor of $10/hour, executives could still earn $300,000.
As I point out in my forthcoming column in the compensation issue, though, public interest pay grades (military and civil service, eg) tend to keep the pay maximum closer to a multiple of 5.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and most state governors earn only about 5 times the wage of the lowest-paid college graduate in their service, generally not more than 8 times the earnings of the lowest-paid 18-year old without any college at all.
In Reality, However
Meanwhile the real NY Times pimps one of the sleaziest Sophie’s Choice deals ever concocted by quality management (you know, the same people who have sold you the idea that you’re “participating” in management by getting to decide whether to take on more work or accept less pay).
Obama’s favorite schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, is trying to break the union and teacher tenure in the public schools by offering a $40,000 raise to any teacher who will give up tenure. What they’re proposing is a dual compensation scheme: a $40,000 raise for those on the new “green” track, and squat for those on the tenured “red” track.
So the same people who turned teaching into a crap job–a job that qualified, motivated people can’t accept because of the low pay, low workplace autonomy, and continuous, compulsory teaching to high-stakes tests, now can find money and space for creativity?
Sure, that’s just what we need. School administrators with even more control of teachers than they have now. Because they’ve done such a great job with the curriculum–no music, no art, no sports, no thinking, no citizenship.
Rhee (and her fans) don’t think of teaching as a profession at all. It’s something that wealthy and privileged people do as volunteerism, as the NYT eventually, reluctantly, gets around to observing:
Ms. Rhee’s attitudes about teaching were forged in the 1990s in Baltimore, where she taught in an elementary school as a member of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools, after which many leave for jobs in other professions.
“Michelle does not view teaching as a career,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “She sees it as temporary, something a lot of newbies will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned.” Teachers first won tenure rights across much of the United States early in the 20th century as a safeguard against patronage firings in big cities and interference by narrow-minded school boards in small towns, said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan. “And the historical rationale remains good,” Dr. Mirel said, pointing to the case of a renowned high school biology teacher in Kansas who was forced to retire nine years ago because he refused to teach creationism. “Without tenure,” Dr. Mirel said, “teachers can still face arbitrary firing because of religious views, or simply because of the highly politicized nature of American society.”
The Contingent Majority
Speaking of management getting exactly what they want and crushing tenure, we already have that in higher education as Gwen Bradley, lead AAUP staffer on contingent faculty issues, has long been pointing out.
She’s just released a special issue of Academe devoted entirely to the problem of nontenurable appointments in higher education, including an article by Audrey Jaeger, whose recent series of studies has added to the mounting evidence that management’s victory over tenure has harmed students.
And Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has just released a special issue on the problem of mental labor: why do smart people do dumb things?
He texted. He Twittered. YouTube visitors played his official campaign videos for almost 15 million hours. But what impact will social media have on his governing?
We now know that a first-term U.S. Senator overcame two of the most successful political machines in recent history — the Clinton network and the Republican 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation — with his expertise as a community organizer.
In some ways he was wet behind those trademark ears in the matter of presidential campaigns — at one point asking advisers if he could plan to spend weekends at home with his young daughters. But as an organizer, he knew what he was doing.
The numbers are astonishing. In battleground states, uncountable, unplanned-for busloads of volunteers showed up to knock on doors for weeks before polls opened. On election day alone: one million doors in Ohio, almost two million in Pennsylvania, where there were 500 staging locations for canvassers. In one Virginia county of 72,000 voters, two thousand volunteers poured in, many from neighboring states. Enough volunteers to push every wheelchair, call every number, knock on every single door.
He did it with shoe leather, with face time, with tight neighborhood team leadership, organizations built to last — just as in his own first years in Chicago.
But he brought the shoe leather together using new media. Howard Dean may have pioneered the Internet campaign, but Obama was the first to win the presidency with it. Above all, it was the fund raising — the army of small donors that gave up their email addresses and cell phone numbers to volunteers, and especially the self-selecting 3.2 million people who Googled his name, visited the campaign Web site, and typed in their credit-card numbers. Donors under $200 accounted for almost half his record-shattering $650-million war chest.
Information Week claims that Obama has captured the title of the first Internet president, perhaps “ending the era of the television presidency that began with JFK.” He dominated social media — accounting for 70 percent of the 1.7 million users of the nonpartisan Facebook get-out-the-vote utility. His 3.4 million Facebook and MySpace friends quadrupled McCain’s tally.
YouTube visitors played his official campaign videos for almost 15 million hours — not counting many millions of hours spent on the “Obama Girl” series, the Brave New Films clips exposing McCain, and hundreds of other contributors of Obama-themed content.
He texted. He Twittered. He had custom social media designed to connect supporters to his message, to donate spare cash and spare time, to meet up.
The pundits are already asking, “Will he govern this way?” Perhaps. We’ll see.
For me the real question is whether we will govern this way.
Obama doesn’t have a health-care plan worthy of the name. He likes charter schools and high-stakes testing. Sooner or later we’ll figure out that going back to the Clinton economy is hardly the answer (see _Nickel and Dimed_).
And who reading this doesn’t know how “affordability” in college education and health care is achieved under Clinton-style quality management? Oh yeah, and he thinks marriage is between a man and a woman — a conviction leading to a little ballot measure that folks in my neck of the woods call Prop Hate.
He may or may not be ready to face the opportunity that war, crisis, and a fed-up electorate have given him, to junk the campaign’s billion-dollar struggle for a few million votes at the center and go all in. “Okay, you present me with a bill for several trillion? I’ll raise you another two trillion to make it the new New Deal, with real jobs in higher education, health care, energy, and infrastructure.”
What he risks is trying to turn the clock back and get some quick good metrics by stealing from the Clinton austerity playbook.
To give President Obama the chance to become another FDR, we’ll have to take a lesson from candidate Obama — and organize him into being.
At 12:01 am on election day, thousands of younger voters and activists will simultaneously reset their Facebook pages to display a get-out-the-vote message–using a new application that allows users to “donate” their status lines to a third party.
The application allows users to specify whether they want to get out the vote for a particular candidate or on a non-partisan basis. With a single click, users can solicit all of their friends to donate their status lines as well.
When I started writing this post, the number of users “donating” their status lines to the message was 45,304. By the time I posted, the number had risen to 47,108.
Given the historic level of interest in this election–interest in bringing to an end the three-decade Era of Reaction–the only limit to the spread of this particular application is that only Facebook users signed up for causes can use it.
This may or may not have an impact on the election–it’s just one strand in a vast web of social media and other new-media contributions to this campaign season, including the Democratic candidate’s Obama Girl on YouTube and some spectacular small-donor fundraising.
I suppose this particular app could be a social-media version of a yellow “Live Strong” wrist band, a fashion statement without any real impact on youth turnout. (Some of the reports on early voting in Florida suggests that nursing-home voters in wheelchairs are more likely to endure long lines at the polls than college students.)
On the other hand, the University of Minnesota nearly quadrupled the world record for single-day flu shots by using a similar Facebook invitation. So I guess we’ll see.
By the way, one of my recent posts (Ink for Obama) was probably fairly criticized for a version of early celebration–what Michael Moore is calling “dancing on the 5-yard line.” For the record: get thee to the polls!
The top 10% of American households represent over 70% of U.S. net worth (and 80% of stock ownership).
The bottom 90% splits the rest.
By the way: ever ask yourself how the degree-inappropriate salaries of higher education shape the racial composition of the professoriate? The chart below contains all the information you need to figure it out for yourself. Which group is best positioned to subsidize not just graduate school but a lifetime of low wages?
Median net worth by race, 2004
White: $140,700
African-American: $20,600
Hispanic: $18,600
source: extremeinequality.org
It’s nice to see the electorate finally rejecting the same old Raw Deal.
On the other hand, we’re pretty far away from a new New Deal, except for bankers. In fact, we could be in for a long tour of Hooverville.
I know, that’s not what you want to hear about The One.
He’s pretty. Like Kennedy, only moral, and he writes most of his own stuff, which is nice. Daddy didn’t fund his political career.
But his policies on education (charter schools: yum!) and health care (buy your own!) are miles away from the “socialism” that Dumb and Dumber have labelled them.
Sad to say, but if you’re inclined to view the moment through the lens of a potential Second Great Depression, then Obama’s positioned a heck of lot more like Hoover than FDR.
Hoover was a moderate, progressive, market regulationist–like Obama, who invokes Chicago-school praise for markets with the idea that they occasionally need to be managed lightly. The New York Times, unsurprisingly, thinks Obama’s market allegiance is just dandy; Naomi Klein, however, warns in the Nation that Obama’s Chicago Boys represent “the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right.”
This center-right posture invokes as its happy horizon the good metrics but growing desperation of the quality-managed Clinton economy (yay Wal-mart!). Oh boy, can’t wait to get back to the world of Nickel and Dimed! No kidding: the 37-year-old head of Obama’s economic policy team is an avid Wal-mart apologist, who thinks the problem isn’t Wal-mart, it’s the pesky unions and such trying to raise wages.
Any guesses how this will translate into Obama’s quality management promise to “lower costs” in higher education and health care?
You guessed it–adjuncts, more adjuncts, student labor, independent contractors galore!
There’s no New Deal in the Obama platform.
His yakity-yak about affordability is really more of the same “quality” crap already slung down your gullet by fellow technocrats Clinton and Gore.
You’ve lived Obama’s ambition already: gutting the professions, hiring students to take on debt–no bailout for them!–and while in school work longer and longer hours at positions that used to be careers, then–voila! no jobs for the student when they graduate, ’cause the work is being done by those who haven’t graduated yet.
Or by the retired, the undocumented, the independently contracting, or those working off the books for the contractors, those who dropped out of the hilarious web of lies relating higher education to work in this country.
All Obama wants is to restore the lousy Clinton economy. You remember, the one that institutionalized permanent retrenchment, deregulation of work rules to free up management for “flexiblity,” permatemping, and the like.
Unless…
Unless we stop him.
Here’s the thing. FDR didn’t campaign on New Deal legislation: he campaigned on curbing Hoover’s wasteful spending.
Circumstances handed FDR the opportunity to be a whole heck of a lot better, smarter, more heroic, brilliant and charming than his campaign promised. He had the wits to seize the chance. And–this being the era of the CIO, the CP-USA, and reds in breadlines and classrooms everywhere–we had the wits and organization to push him.
The same could happen to Obama. At least the circumstances could happen. But will we push him to be better, the way we pushed FDR?
Here’s my point, folks. We can’t sit on our tushies and wait for “The One,” with his warmed-over Clintonism and his Wal-mart loving economic advisors to fix our problems, in Kennedy’s words, “with a stroke of a pen.”
Those are the words that Handsome Jack used in shopping himself to the civil rights movement: he’d end discrimination in federally-funded housing, he promised, with a pen-stroke. Just as soon as he was elected, I’ll get ‘er done. First hundred days. You wait and see.
They waited. And found that getting her done–one little piece of civil rights, a gesture, really, a stroke of the executive pen–required activists to embarass the heck out of ol’ Jack.
Kennedy signed only after being targeted with an “Ink for Jack” campaign: thousands of pens mailed to the White House by civil rights for activists. Just to get him to live up to the fairly small steps he’d promised.
So we can have the Obama of the campaign or, likely, quite a bit less: a Hoover, a Clinton, a Kennedy–who required Johnson to make his promises true post-mortem. In his soul, Obama’s like Clinton and Hoover, a charming moderate technocrat, a friendly tinkerer and fixer.
Or we can make him into our FDR. He may not go willingly. But it’s our choice. We can drag him into greatness. We can make him spend a few hundred billion on education. And a real health-care plan, not the sorry crap he’s been pushing.
As the folks from GSOC-UAW point out in the clip above (part 3 of 4); the TRACBRA legislation we discuss in the video, ensuring bargaining rights for teaching and research assistants–that’s a gesture, a drop in the bucket. It’s important, but nowhere near as important as self-organization.
Take it from the folks of GSOC: politics, politicians, and legislation follow activism and self-organization. Not the other way ’round.
Steve Street thinks you could be part of the problem, and he’s right.
In the current issue of _The Chronicle,_ faculty activist Steve Street writes from the perspective of the overwhelming majority who serve contingently to the shrinking minority of us who serve in the tenure stream.
Titled Don’t Be Kind to Adjuncts, the piece has an appropriately angry and dismissive tone. (The original title, softened by the editorial staff, was “Kick an Adjunct Today.”)
Keep your sympathy, he says. Don’t bother being kind, he says, unless you’re willing to step up and fight on behalf of the exploited majority:
unless you can also put equity for us — proportional pay, benefits, security, and opportunities for professional development and advancement — front and center in department meetings, faculty senates, budget allocations, and even mission statements.
There may well come a time when the tenured minority do these things. It’s worth noting that they haven’t thus far. There are exceptions, of course, but fairly consistently over the past four decades the tenurable–in their senates, disciplinary associations and even their unions–have played along with administrations in permatemping.
This was preserving their own perquisites the easy way–not by arguing for the profession’s contribution to society, defending tenure and faculty governance, but accepting expedience and selling out the future in exchange for the easiest path to 4% salary increase and easy course releases.
And that’s what the tenured did when they were still in the majority!
So, as I’ve said to Steve before: I agree wholeheartedly that this is what the tenurable ought to do. I agree that change will come faster and better when the tenurable end their complicity and silent, relatively comfortable acquiescence.
But I doubt they’ll do that unless and until the time comes when the majority–faculty serving contingently–step into leadership.
My long experience in the movement–and my long study of movement cultures in the United States–suggests that there won’t be effective leadership by the tenured on these issues until there is leadership by the nontenurable. The nontenurable majority will have to show the tenured what to do.
While my little boy was having trouble getting back to sleep, I watched a suffragist docudrama I’d speculatively recorded, but didn’t necessarily plan on ever watching, HBO’s Iron-Jawed Angels.
I’m not a big fan of docudramas, but this one was exceptional, featuring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul, who was an insurgent within the suffragist movement. She had to fight against the established leadership of women in the movement–to defy them and suffer retaliation, mount a campaign to embarass those women and the politicians they supported, picketing the White House in wartime under a banner referring to the president as “Kaiser Wilson,” endure vilification, go to jail, and be force-fed. Read more
Once upon a time, Derek Bok was a scholar of the labor movement, co-authoring a massive, landmark study of the role of labor unions and workplace democracy in fostering a more just, equitable–and productive–America. A few years later, he had to be restrained by the study’s co-author, John Dunlop, from his campaign to bust the mostly-female Harvard clerical union.
Somewhere along the way, Bok converted to quality management, probably during the years that Clinton-Gore made it respectable by pushing it into government. (You remember, the “good economy” that had great metrics but was lousy to live in? The race to the bottom of awful jobs and petty tyranny by management chronicled by Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed?)
As I’ve previously written in this space, and discuss in some detail in How the University Works, quality management invokes the strategies of kulturkampf: creating a strong, corporate culture with the explicit aim of stamping out traditional faculty beliefs, values, and practices; manufacturing consent to the mission; inducing compliance. As Bok rather nakedly put it earlier this week, administrators should “establish a cult of continuous improvement.”
On the factory floor, “continuous improvement” of productivity is clearly understood; it’s speed-up. The goal is standardization of movement to better harmonize with the needs of the machine, to move faster, and therefore cheaper.
The “cult” part is to make you overlook the pain, or to feel that the pain is for a higher purpose (”go team!”), just like you overlook the pain when you’re sitting in cold bleachers at a football game, kneeling in church, or being laughed at while proselytizing.
The cult part is to extract extra effort, “voluntarily” given — you know, the way that women and young people just “naturally” enjoy serving! The cult takes so many forms: “You care about your customers/patients/students;” “You’re a professional;” “You love what you do!” “You’re not really working!” So come early and stay late; don’t punch the clock, don’t ask for extra pay. Accept an increased workload when the year turns out (surprise!), just like every other year for 30 years in a row, to be one of “fiscal crisis” and “belt-tightening” — pay no attention to the beautiful new business school, to the gleaming gyms, and the platoons of BMWs in the parking lot!
The reason business administration has turned to a cultural strategy is in part because in many industries technological innovation/technological improvements in productivity have maxed: where to get additional productivity except by increasing the willingness of the worker to give it away? When the “cult” strategy isn’t enough, the law steps in: “You’re not a worker — you’re a student!” “You’re not a worker — you’re an independent contractor!” “You’re not a worker — you’re a supervisor!” “You’re not a real worker — you’re just part-time!” Or the administrator breaks the little bit of law that’s left: “Punch out but stay until you’re done!” “Documentation? Dunno, that’s our subcontractor’s responsibility!”
The idea is to have as much work as possible done by all of these workers-who-aren’t-workers-under-the-law, by students, interns, volunteers, the undocumented, eager “professionals” who have none of the traditional benefits, privileges, or autonomy of professionals.
Pretty soon, GM will be inviting church ladies to the plant to lend a hand with the painting, and having student interns in to “learn how to man the robots” for a couple of semesters (but not hiring them when they get their degree). When they get to that desired end, they’ll finally be emulating the ideal workplace of current management theory — the campus, which has pioneered the voluntary super-discount of labor, the super-exploitation of students, and the creation of an utterly managed and docile class of professionals who exercise little professional control over their work.
Cults, of course, need priests, and the priests are paid for disseminating the rituals that cultivate obedience and docility, “conformity with mission.” It’s a culture war, and the function of administrative priestcraft is to create a cult of personality around leadership: While things got worse under the last overpaid cliche-spouting buffoon, perhaps things will be different under the next leader!
Yeah, right. This is part of what I argue, in different terms, in “Battling for Hearts and Minds” in the next issue of AAUP’s Academe, that faculty are losing this culture war for control of the academic workplace — have been losing for decades. Have lost, actually. It’s over. The tenure-stream faculty don’t represent a counter-culture or counterpower. And aren’t likely to change in the near future: they’ve been selected for compliance, self-interest, social avoidance, comfortable relationships with authority figures.
(By the way, you get Academefree if you join — and boy, you should. It’s the antidote to the dizzy propaganda circulated by the shamans of the cult.)
One place that there has been a concrete response to the “cult of continuous improvement” has been in the labor movement, which has pretty much everyhwere adopted one version or another of a “culture of continuous organizing,” meaning a cultural strategy of face-to-face encounters, actual participation in the affairs and decisions of the union — the daily practice of democracy, amplified and solidified by togetherness and sociability. See the NYU GSOC folks talk about this strategy in part 2 of my interview with them, above.
The cutting edge of the academic labor movement — the folks adopting this counterpower of continuous organizing — are graduate employees and faculty serving contingently.
They are the leadership. From them — both as the embodied, overwhelming majority of the academic faculty, and as the architects of the most vigorous response to the cult of administration — will come higher education’s new deal, whatever it turns out to be.
And whatever it turns out to be, it will be better than the train wreck created by the high priests of greed, super-exploitation, and a “labor market” rigged at $2,000 a class.
These are the CONFIRMED appearances as of October; I’ll revise these as the additional plans firm up.
Keynote Address. “Labor in Higher Education.” Sponsored by the Association for Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty. Slippery Rock, PA: October 2009.
Featured Speaker, Cultural Studies Association Annual Meeting. Kansas City: April 16-18, 2009.
Featured Speaker, Initiative on Labor and Culture at Yale University: April 6, 2009.
Featured Speaker, Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center at New York University, April 3, 2009.
“Job Security for Composition’s Contingent Majority.” Adjuncts and Allies workshop. Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Francisco, CA. March 11, 2009.
Featured Speaker, “Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up.” South Atlantic Quarterly conference on Academic Freedom, Cornell University. February 6-7, 2009.
“The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. December 30, 2008.
“Social Media and Social Reality.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. December 29, 2008.
“Who is the You in YouTube?” Panel presentation: Theories in American Studies III: Class. American Studies Association Annual Meeting. Albuquerque: October 18, 2008.
Keynote Address. “Participatory Governance in a Contingent and Corporatized Academy.” Keynote address, California AAUP Annual Meeting. Santa Monica: October 4, 2008.
Keynote Address. “Undergraduate Labor: The Final Frontier?” Illinois Education Association Higher Education Conference. Bloomington, IL: October 3, 2008.
Those of us who care about education and what’s been done to it in the cruel, foolish, and profligate class war from above over the quarter-century that has been my entire adult life are likely to know Bill Ayers or his work as a scholar, teacher, activist, teacher educator, fixture in Illinois politics, and extraordinarily decent person.
There are any number of folks testifying about the actual life, character, accomplishments and associations of Bill Ayers in response to the shabby propaganda being slung by the desperate bottom-of-their-class duo trying to ride the last, sputtering wave of reaction.
There are two glimpses I find especially evocative. The first is the brief YouTube clip from 1981 talking about his work as a caregiver in an innovative New York City daycare center.
The second is this letter from Ayers’ colleague William Schubert, the former president of numerous scholarly societies who served on the committee that hired Ayers to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1987. (Thanks to Jamie Owen Daniel for forwarding it.)
The Bill Ayers I Know
I feel compelled to comment on our friend and colleague, Bill Ayers, in view of the disappointing distortions and insinuations perpetrated against him. Here is the Bill Ayers I know.
I have known Bill Ayers as a colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) for over twenty years and know him as a good and just human being. I served on the search committee that selected him as the most outstanding applicant based on his scholarship, teaching capacity, and doctoral work at Columbia University. I became Chair of Curriculum and Instruction at UIC (1990-94) shortly after Dr. Ayers was hired in 1987, and became Chair again (2003-2006) as he became a recognized scholar. Moreover, as a thirty –plus year member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and presidents of the Society of Professors of Education, the John Dewey Society, the Society for the Study of Curriculum History, and vice president for AERA’s Division B, I have had ample opportunities to observe the emergence of Dr. Ayers’ outstanding contributions to education. The fact that Dr. Ayers was elected this year as the vice president of AERA’s Division B is a testimony of such a stature and high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Bill has written extensively about social justice, democracy, school contexts, and ethics regarding students, families, and educators. His has written more than 150 chapters and articles that have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, the Nation, Kappan, and the Cambridge Journal of Education. He has authored or edited sixteen books. His research and innovation based on it has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, the Annenberg Foundation, Readers Digest, and the Chicago Public Schools.
The Dow plunges 40% in one year. You tell me: which fella looks like Herbert Hoover and which one looks like FDR?
I recorded this interview with the University of Pennsylvania’s Adolph Reed just about a year ago, while the Dow was still cheerfully flirting with 14,000, and it originally ran on How The University Works on January 17th of this year. The sound isn’t great–I hadn’t figured out the importance of a lapel mike. But the ideas are making more sense than ever.
Reed proposes that we pay the tuition of all students at public colleges and universities in the U.S.
“The laughable thing about it,” he said, “is that it is so cheap, so unbelievably cheap. It’s the kind of sum, I hate to say it, that Congress passes out as a tip in corporate welfare.”
As if he were channeling the bailout he continued, “It’s like, ‘Here’s $900 billion–and take another $40 billion for the cab ride home.’”
While you might think austerity is an appropriate response to three decades of bungling, it’s probably time to break the “quality management” pattern of austerity with the aim of accumulating money pots that our executive class then spends freely. This has been public policy as economic feudalism, primitive accumulation: drain the serfs so that the aristocrats can buy baubles for their paramours.
Robert Reich argues persuasively that we’ll need to spend our way out of this crapstorm.
I agree. And what better way to spend some chump change than on completely tuition-free public higher education for everyone who wants it?
This is a practical, realizable ambition, says Reed–a canny investment in our collective economic wellbeing, he argues, as well as a long-overdue step toward greater equality. We could do it for less than $50 billion annually.
In part 1 of the video we talk about the way that higher ed produces a vast, captive workforce of students. 78% of undergraduates work an average of 30 hours per week, or twice as much as even the most corporate-friendly surveys think is beneficial (if the work were connected with a course of study–and most is not).
See my account of the savage exploitation of student workers here and if you think I’m exaggerating (I’m not), then take it up with the ACE.
Taking students out of the workforce would create more jobs for non-students. Students would actually acquire educations. Schools might start to graduate their students in percentages resembling those of Canada and Europe, instead of pretending that 6-year graduation rates of 40% are “normal” and not the fault of the freebooters jacking their own salaries through the roof and turning the faculty into Wal-mart greeters.
Hell, let’s go whole hog. Let’s spend some of the revenue on faculty and not on business centers. And while we’re on this whole socialist joy ride, let’s cap administrative pay at, say, four times the pay of the lowest full-time-equivalent faculty salary. So if you pay contingent faculty 2000 a class, and a full load is 4-4, the most the top administrator could earn is 4x 16,000, or $64,000. Sounds fair to me.
Boy, this is fun. The “economy” should melt down more often.
Follow along with any of the FOUR McLiar Bingo cards created by John Sellers and Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop Communications.
From Card 2:
“Obama “pals around with terrorists.” ACTUALLY: Obama was 8 when radical Bill Ayers planted bombs to protest Vietnam. Now a professor, he & Obama volunteer for the same charity. (CNN FactChecker)
From Card 1: “Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergartners.” ACTUALLY: The bill Obama voted for in the Illinois Legislature helps protect children from sexual predators. (factcheck.org)”
Founded by Robert Greenwald, the creator of Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Brave New Films has become a powerhouse in the world of viral video.
Greenwald’s latest series of political microdocs, The Real McCain, have racked up millions of views on his YouTube channel and the Brave New Films homepage. The popularity has something to do with Greenwald’s decision to step out of the way and let McCain indict himself in his own words, such as “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
This is part 1 of 4 in my series of interviews with NYU GSOC activists. In this segment they reflect on the lessons learned from the 2005 strike, concluding that no union can stand alone.
MB: So why don’t we talk about the lessons learned. I think one of things that graduate employees, at whatever stage of the struggle they’re in, in their different circumstances–they’re going to want to know what you guys drew from this experience.
Andy Cornell: That’s right. I think we learned a number of lessons about what we could do better. The first thing is that we went into the strike having not been particularly active on campus, or as an organization, between contracts.
When our union, GSOC, first won recognition and we won our first contract, obviously there was a lot of momentum around that. But people got exhausted, wanted to get back to their studies, and the momentum fell off. So that made it particularly hard to mobilize quickly.
We had to build amongst ourselves, we had to build an organizing structure. We had to pull people back into the union and educate them into what that meant. The harsh lesson was that at a lot of universities the withdrawal of the labor of graduate student teaching assistants and research assistants may not be enough to cause the campus to come to a screeching halt. So you really are reliant on a lot of other constituencies on campus.
GSOC-UAW’s struggle with NYU represents some of the greatest successes and also some of the greatest setbacks in graduate employee labor organizing so far, and as such is especially worthy of detailed study.
Carter has written an especially good assessment of the core point made by the GSOC folks in this video–the crucial role of campus alliances, in his just-released Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton, 2008). Chapter 4, “The Student as Organic Intellectual,” tracks the importance of undergraduate USAS activists in GSOC’s successful first round of bargaining.
Emile had a visit with his physician upon our return from Quebec, and at 7 1/2 months, he was up 11 pounds and 11 inches. The eleven inches part is kind of scary when you think about it–1.5 inches a month!
He also has 3 teeth, nearly 4, and pre-verbalizes, we would like to believe, in both French and English. Just in the past week he’s gone from amiable explorer of space in an eight-foot diameter to I-can-race-across-the-room-before-you-can-blink.
Emile’s credo: Here comes trouble!
That’s him five or six weeks back (2 pounds lighter, 3 inches shorter!)Speaking of milestones, undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon took notice of the expected passing of minnesota review with a front-page article in the Tartan.
While editor Jeffrey Williams is still taking queries for a new editor and institutional home, most watchers are guessing the respected journal will fold: the problem with the quality management at CMU–like the “quality management” of our government, implicating Clinton and Blair as much as Reagan-Bush-Thatcher-Bush–is its typicality, not its deviation from the norm.
When CMU cries poor (”our endowment is much smaller than Harvard’s!”) as an excuse for under-spending on undergraduates and tells Williams, “hey, we insist that you save $4500 by asking one grad student to do the work of two–or, if you can’t stomach that, give up the ten grand we pay you in summer salary,” it’s exactly the same game we’ve seen in government. Austerity for the public sphere, but plenty of cash for the “entrepreneurs” gambling with our lives.
Williams is preparing what he expects to be the final issue, the Winter 2008/09 number, scheduled to appear in March. Based on the “My Credo” symposium published in three consecutive numbers of Kenyon Review, Williams has invited Jameson, Berube, Berlant, Graff, and many others to articulate their own credos. It’ll be a very special issue indeed.
It’s terrible of the engineering-friendly management at CMU to shut down a humanities institution over what they call Williams’ failure to find independent funding for $4500 a year. But Williams has picked a great way to go out.
In Kenyon Review 12.4 (Autumn 1950)
1. Leslie A. Fiedler, Toward an Amateur Criticism
2. Herbert Read, The Critic as Man of Feeling
3. Richard Chase, Art, Nature, Politics
4. William Empson, The Verbal Analysis
In 13.1 (Winter 1951)
5. Cleanth Brooks, The Formalist Critics
6. Douglas Bush, The Humanist Critics
7. Northrop Frye, ³The Archetypes of Literature²
In 13.2 (Spring 1951)
8. Stephen Spender, On the Function of Criticism
9. Arthur Mizener, Not in Cold Blood
10. Austin Warren, The Teacher as Critic
“It seems that anyone who attempts to have a frank discussion about labor and/or capitalism finds themselves staving off the same arguments again and again.”–The Girl Detective @ Alas, a Blog
All year long over at the Chronicle’s Brainstorm, I’ve been grappling with market fundamentalists (Why doncha go where the Market will pay ya! My big wages and your little wages are fair ’cause the Market says so! Don’t look at the little pinstriped men behind the curtain!).
So have others trying to suggest what any actual student of economies knows: markets are social formations, closely and carefully managed by law, power, appropriations, policy, and culture. That includes the system for proletarianizing faculty colloquially and fallaciously known as the “job market” (long since turned into a market in contingent appointments, not jobs).
As the current drama fairly conclusively demonstrates, all of our markets are carefully managed to advantage the holders of enormous wealth, as well as their most loyal servants. Not everyone’s consciousness is so aggressively shaped by material circumstances, but there’s always a few who are especially eager to believe the things that are most convenient.
Most recently, a couple of real clowns weighed in to insult and attack Melanie Hubbard, the Columbia Ph.D. willing to put her face on camera and describe the life of contingency the “market” imposed on her for the radical choice of trying to live in the same general region as her family. Yep, it’s just her choice and bad judgment.
The Girl Detective over at Alas, A Blog continued the the Hubbard conversation late last month–running into a pack of true believers from the same church, wisely kicking one or two of the most hostile clods out of the conversation, after giving them a fair chance to be respectful. For Labor Day, she reflected on the conversation, adapting and posting the Laissez-Faire Bingo chart above. (”It seems that anyone who attempts to have a frank discussion about labor and/or capitalism finds themselves staving off the same arguments again and again.”)
Not that I think posting their playbook will make any difference. Last time I posted on the way current events refuted their faith–the airline companies pleading for regulation of the oil market–there was total silence from the fundamentalists for a week or two, and then they came out of hiding again with the same old cant.
“There’s no way I could have kept my scholarship if I didn’t use it.”
I’m working on a piece about undergraduate academic freedom that relates changes in campus culture to changes in the culture of schools. One area of particular interest is the medicalization of youth relations with authority. In a previous section, I discussed the 1980 introduction to the DSM IV of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).
College faculty will be more familiar with another intersection of pharmacology and curriculum, the widespread diagnosis of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders (ADD and ADHD), and the corresponding prescription of amphetamines and cognate medicines. In 2003, six million American schoolchildren–about 15%–took methlphenidate (Ritalin) alone. Methylphenidate has replaced Prozac as the drug defining an entire cohort, with authors beginning to speak of a “Ritalin nation,” a “generation Ritalin,” and the like.
Students themselves actively seek the ADHD diagnosis. The pills have many uses related to the spectacularized culture of testing, overwork, stress, and body-consciousness–they aid in concentration, provide wakefulness, suppress appetite, assuage certain emotions, and improve athletic performance. They can be crushed and snorted or smoked recreationally in ways similar to methamphetamines. The diagnosis itself directly addresses high-stakes testing: medicated or not, ADD and ADHD-diagnosed students can request additional time in many testing circumstances.
Many more students than diagnosed use the medication: there is an active black market in Ritalin in every educational environment from primary school through graduate degrees. Students pay up to $10 a dose for “vitamin R.”
Just as thematized in the mass culture of the professional-managerial class (in tv shows like Desperate Housewives) there are widespread reports of parents using Ritalin prescribed to their children to meet the demands of their own “standards-based” existences. In families trapped in low-wage jobs, parents may also take Ritalin to meet the demands of their own working lives in the service economy or, sometimes, illegally sell it to make ends meet.
Leonard Sax reports one case of a teacher fired for stealing his students’ Ritalin. After belatedly banning amphetamines in 2005, diagnosis of Major League Baseball players with ADHD quintupled.
Though NCAA has banned “illicit” use of ADHD medications, college athletes are routinely issued “exemptions” upon showing a diagnosis, in many cases continuing usage patterns begun in high school or earlier. I have had former high-school athletes describe to me their decisions not to continue in college sport as in part a decision to stop taking medication to keep up with the demands of teams, tests, and employment.
The use of methylphenidate and related drugs has exploded in close relation to standards-based education reform (what we call “the assessment movement” in higher education). Between 1990 and 1997, production increased 700%, and two million children were using it; between 1997 and 2003, use tripled again, to six million. In recent years, the FDA has restricted some ADHD medications and required its most serious black-box warning on others, and questions have emerged about the late-90s studies urging medication over therapy. Better-designed studies have raised questions about those studies and suggest that in many cases therapy may be more effective, certainly with fewer side effects, but usage continues to soar. With the wide availability of ADHD drugs direct to children and small dealers via offshore Internet pharmacies, usage becomes more difficult to track.
A coalition across the admittedly narrow political spectrum of the United States has begun to question the relationship between educational practice & policy and medication, bringing together the readership of the New York Times with figures like Phyllis Schlafly and John Silber.
Ritalin appears on college campuses as part of the performance culture of the “winners” in the regime of high-stakes assessment. In a Youth Radio report for the PBS NewsHour, Michelle Jarboe reported on widespread use at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her own usage followed professional-managerial usage patterns: she got her pills from a boyfriend whose parents were both psychiatrists:
But I was driven to do well in school, and couldn’t see my way through all the papers, tests and projects on two or three hours of sleep a night. That is, until I encountered my friends’ little pills. Sometimes they were free, and sometimes a single pill could cost as much as seven or eight dollars. Whatever the cost, the returns were amazing.
Her report and similar reports in campus newspapers across the country closely align black-market use of attention-deficit medication to being “driven to do well.” Many users are individuals who won’t use other drugs, such as ectasy or even marijuana. Those with prescriptions for the pills report being deluged with requests from friends (or customers) at exam time and resorting to stockpiling
Much of the journalism, official campus and other institutional discussions of the issue (such as the Bush administration’s Department of Education page) emphasize the voluntary nature of the use of nonmedical prescription stimulants, almost universally raising the specter of recreational use–as the Bush DOE says, seeking wakefulness to continue studying “or partying.”
While student respondents acknowledge this use, overwhelmingly the main use is to keep up with work or performance pressure in a high-stakes culture. “I don’t think I could keep a 3.9 average without this stuff,” said one high-achieving college student (Jacobs, NYT). Another report shows that continuous assessment of scholarship recipients leads to usage: “I don’t know what I would do without it,” said another. “There’s no way I could have kept my scholarship if I didn’t use it.” (Stice).
Performance-culture users report that taking the pills made them feel “normal” in their pressured world. One of Jarboe’s interviewees, who took Adderall with her study group says, “The whole time you’re on it, you just feel like that’s the way things are supposed to be. You feel like it’s gotten you normal.”
In these accounts the medication is a precision tool, helping to more closely engineer the mind and bodies of the already performance-oriented to an even tighter fit with their high-performance educational environment. “I remember everyone sitting around and thinking, “You know, maybe we all have ADD, because this stuff makes me feel great, like I don’t feel weird. I feel like I want to do my work.”
A New York Times reporter who interviewed two dozen Columbia students concluded that attention-deficit drugs were part of the “prevailing ethos,” seen by high-achieving straight-arrow college students as “a legitimate and even hip way to get through the rigors of a hectic academic and social life,” quoting one student who said that Columbia’s culture “encourage’s people to use stimulants” to keep up, while recreational use was “generally frowned upon” (Jacobs).
Another college journalist interviewed a typical user who said, “I don’t know that many kids that have done coke, none that have tried crack, and only a few that have dropped acid. I can’t even count all of the ones who’ve taken Adderall.” (Stice)
The normalization of prescription stimulant abuse in collegiate performance culture, athletic and scholastic alike, points to a significant transformation in subjectivity, in the role that the pressured, high-stakes culture of schooling and assessment plays in the formation of personality, values, and behavior.
The “Ritalin generation” is adopting the drug that best suits the disciplinary and spectacular matrix of their lives, framed by performance culture, high-stakes assessment, and vocational schooling–schooling for the purpose of work.
What other drug can help a student display themselves simultaneously as physically fit, academically high-achieving, alert and confidently in command of high-stakes circumstances?
Late 1990s studies found college student abuse of prescription methylphenidates and dextroamphetamines in the 5-10% range and a large 2001 study of four-year schools found lifetime nonprescription use of these medications close to 7%, while more recent studies found usage ranging up to 20% on individual campuses.
Several studies have found that college students are more likely to abuse these drugs than “noncollege peers,” and the 2001 study found that usage rates tended to be higher at colleges with more competitive admissions, and in fraternities and sororities.
An epidemic of compliance in higher ed helps turn parents and schoolteachers into corrections officers.
I’m working on a piece about undergraduate academic freedom that relates changes in campus culture to changes in the culture of schools. One area of particular interest is the medicalization of youth relations with authority. AlterNet’s Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist, argues that “teenage rebellion has become a medical illness” with the 1980 introduction to the DSM IV of “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (ODD):
Many talk show hosts think I’m kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder. After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness — an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers — they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case. Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as “a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior.” The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”
A diagnosis of ODD can result in medication with powerful tranquilizers like Risperdal and Zyprexa. Numerous experts have worried about overdiagnosis and overmedication of young people, and critical educators frequently worry that the problem is not lack of compliance by American youth but its precise opposite, an epidemic of compliance.
Norm Diamond, for instance, argues that many of the so-called defiant “symptoms” are in many cases “part of establishing independence and developing critical thinking. Equipping children to argue back is part of good parenting and good teaching.” Nonetheless a massive therapeutic industry of behavior modification, including pharmaceutical companies, now targets parents, promising cures for “defiant children.”
One of the most pervasive ad campaigns draws on the rhetoric of homeland security to label youth defiance “The War at Home,” urging a corrections mentality on the family: “The focus of treatment should be on compliance and coping skills, not on self-esteem or personality. ODD is not a self-esteem issue; it’s a problem solving issue.” .
Responding to Big Pharma ads for ODD medications targeting parents in his Portland media market, Diamond created a parody description of what he argues is the real social malaise, “Compliance Acquiescent Disorder,” which played locally in both radio and print versions. (An unexpected result of the parody was that outlets publishing them received calls from readers and listeners seeking treatment for their compliance disorder!)
Noting that “ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don’t respect [but] can be a delight with adults they do respect,” Levine suggests that in many cases the symptoms of ODD are rational resistance to authoritarian abuses and “rebellion against an oppressive environment,” explanations rarely considered by educators or mental health professionals. Levine speculates that the willingness to medicate rebellion and nonconformity emerges in the social psychology of medical professionals, including a sense of shame for “their own excessive compliance”:
It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities — even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.
Of course, Levine’s observations would seem to hold for educators as well, many of whom welcome the diagnosis of ODD and other conduct-related disorders as “classroom management tools.” (On the other hand, the vast majority of teachers discussing “defiant” students on fora like ProTeacher.com are exchanging non-medical tips, often involving massive extra-curricular, non-instructional effort and expense on their part, voluntarily taking on the role of therapist and parent as well as instructor.)
“Finally, a cure for the class struggle,” wryly observed one of the Alternet discussion threads in response to Levine’s piece. “Is there a pill for megalomania and warmongering?” wondered another.
Thanks to Joel Westheimer (U Ottawa, formerly NYU) and Wayne Ross (U British Columbia, formerly U Louisville) for alerting me to the growing enthusiasm of educators and parents for ODD diagnoses of young people.
Earlier in the summer, I noted some opposition by CUNY faculty serving contingently to the contract proposed by the leadership–a group of folks including Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Bowen, Marcia Newfield, and others that I regard as friends and mentors: these are the people that brought me into the movement. At the time, they were the insurgent “New Caucus” leading an innovative coalition of graduate employees, contingent faculty and tenure-stream folks fed up with the business unionism of the Polishook crowd. They have made real gains for graduate employees and faculty serving contingently, but not as quickly as we perhaps all hoped. There are real victories in this contract, including substantial raises, health insurance for graduate student employees, and 100 lines devoted to conversion of faculty serving part-time to tenurable positions.
Nonetheless, faculty serving on a per-course basis (who teach half of all courses on CUNY’s seventeen campuses) noted that the almost 17% gain in their top compensation doesn’t much close the gap toward wage parity with full-time faculty (whose top compensation improved 14%), and that 30 or 35 conversions a year wasn’t going to fix the problem of thousands of faculty serving in permanently temporary adjunct hell.
Additionally, as other unions in New York City and nationally have begun to win improved job security for faculty serving part-time or on term contracts, CUNY adjuncts understandably hope for similar protections. On the basis of these concerns, some faculty serving contingently organized a “vote no” campaign, leading to about a 7% vote against the contract.
As the press release below notes, the PSC leadership is aware that “the abusive adjunct system is not cured” by this contract. They promise to make the issues of faculty serving contingently–job security, stabilized health insurance, wage parity–central to the next round of bargaining. Read more
