NYU Press has kindly made available a pdf of chapter 4, which is suitable for undergraduate reading. It discusses the nightmarish experience of working-class students recruited to work midnight shifts five school nights every week at UPS on the promise of education benefits that few persist to receive.
Per shift, they earn about what administrators spend on a sushi lunch. Most drop out, and many get injured. Only a fraction persist to degree. In some terms, because of the obligation to pay back tuition remission if they quit this horrendous job “early,” more students were working off their “education benefits” without actually taking any classes than were enrolled.
This chapter is suitable to be assigned to undergraduates. Ask your students about their working lives. You may be shocked by what they endure.
Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for a thoughtful story on the book and a kind mention in Scott McLemee’s always bracing column, Intellectual Affairs. (Special kudos to McLemee who was just elected to the board of the National Book Critics Circle.) PS–if you ordered the book in the past three weeks and have been waiting: NYU has just assured me that it ships today!
Recently:
- Baddest of the Bad
- Learning to Remember: After March 4
- Scientific American: Academic ‘Labor Market Gone Seriously Awry’
- MLA Confidential, Part 1
- Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
- Kindle or Netbook?
- Occupy the AHA!
- History “Job Czar” Shuts Down Phd Production (PhD “Oversupply” Continues For Two Decades)
- Who’s A Historian to the AHA?
- At the AHA: Huh?
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under UPS, academic labor system, corporate university, real institutional sleaze, tuition gold rush, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I want to give a class using this, among other texts about how the university really works.
I went to public university but people were richer than where I work. When I became a professor was when I started having students coming to class off the graveyard shift, etc., etc.
I’m glad you’re going to use it. So are some others, and I’m thinking about doing a video teach-in on the exploitation of undergraduate labor. If you (or anyone else) is interested, let me know ASAP and I can try to coordinate it! Solidarity, M
First I need to get the class, though! However I am interested in the teach-in. It dawns on me more and more how plantation-like the whole thing is. It always was, of course, but it keeps getting moreso, and more glaringly so, as the economy polarizes further and further.
[…] Jump to Comments Read this, from How the University Works. Then read the whole […]