Yes, I know they do it by being union-busting assholes and crapping on the life of the mind, as represented by independent booksellers.

“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.

Jan Clausen, “Coerce U”
March 30, 2008.
http://www.ablationsite.org/ABlog_frame.html
 
COERCE U.
Like others involved in the labor of social reproduction, educators are under particular pressure to embody and transmit the values of power—which seeks through their labor to reproduce itself and the circumstances most favorable to it. The degree to which schooling can serve anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic purposes, and complicity with capitalist exploitation, is also the degree to which educators can be persuaded to arrangements that are hostile to democracy and equality in their own workplaces.—Marc Bousquet

By reading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (NYU Press), I’ve been gaining some wonderful insights into the coercive structures my intellect is attempting to flourish inside of (a.k.a. my “world of work” nightmare). Bousquet’s basic argument is that the higher education industry has to be understood as a labor regime in which the lived experience of a range of hyper-exploited workers can and must become a resource for transforming not only the functioning of specific institutions but our basic beliefs about the nature and purpose of something called “education.” These workers include graduate teaching assistants and other types of contingent (non-tenured) faculty; undergraduate students who must work long hours to finance the credit hours that they hope will catapult them into a privileged realm of better-compensated, less-degrading work; and the campus and off-campus workers in a variety of non- or para-professional capacities who keep the physical campus and its virtual spaces up and running.

Countering the powerful image of the university as a sort of sheltered workshop for intellectuals, and a college education as an idyllic interlude before the pressures of the workplace and adult responsibility take over, Bousquet shows how the existence of a privileged “top tier” of tenured faculty who supposedly represent the “real” university masks the reality of instructors and students scrambling to survive. In this view, heeding the siren song of most Ph.D. programs (particularly in the humanities and other areas where the academic “job market” consistently runs with the bears and not the bulls) is the higher ed equivalent of a poor inner city kid’s getting suckered by “hoop dreams.” Many are called, exceedingly few chosen. The system is designed to spit most aspirants out long before they attain the prize, whether it be tenure or a well-paid career in pro basketball.

Part of the satisfaction of reading Bousquet’s analysis is that of seeing elegantly articulated and indeed “called out” the structural obstacles I’ve been struggling with in my teaching life, particularly my New School job. As an organizer of a union for part-time faculty, I hardly need reminding that “contingent” faculty have a fine vantage point from which to analyze the realities as opposed to the pipe dreams of higher education! And it’s a treat to see the profoundly anti-democratic impulses of most higher-level university administrators, which I see enacted daily in my own shitty little academic microcosm, nailed through research studies and direct quotes from managerial screeds. But in a couple of crucial ways, Bousquet has also caused me to re-evaluate my own entrenched understanding of these problems.

For one thing, his analysis shows me that I’ve been too focused on the university as a self-contained entity dedicated to “growth” and a range of other quasi-corporate measures of success, at the expense of considering what the quoted passage that opens this post makes clear: that this institutional orientation reflects the values and imperatives of the larger society’s bosses and “deciders.” Which is another way of saying that my/our (often pathetic-seeming) local fight for a definition of education that centrally includes democratic values, critical consciousness, and a concern for social justice is also really (not just rhetorically) a fight for the functioning of the world beyond the classroom.

Bousquet also makes me realize to my considerable chagrin that I’ve spent years reading my students’ writing about their jobs, years describing the student body at the New School division where I teach as “basically middle-class, but often struggling, with an awful lot of students working so many hours that they have trouble keeping up with seminar assignments”… while continuing to buy into the ideologically poisonous notion that their economic struggles are somehow very much secondary to their primary identities of “student.” I obviously need to think a lot more about the ways in which my students and I share the experience of super-exploited labor. I need to consider how to talk with them about this, and how our mutual recognition of the implications might affect our work together. (more…)

In the meanwhile, you can print and read the 50-page introduction as well as chapter 4 which discusses “extreme work-study,” or the startling emergence of “financial aid” as a vector for hyper-exploitation of undergraduates by corporate-university partnerships.

Chapter 4 was written to be read by a general audience and can be assigned in undergraduate classes of all disciplines. The average age of an undergraduate is now 26. Currently 80% of undergraduates work an average of 30 hours a week to fund educations commonly lasting 6 years or more: ask them to write about their experiences. You’ll be shocked at what they endure.

I am extremely grateful for the outpouring of reviews, sharing of stories, invitations to speak, and the expressions of solidarity, here and at the Valve, on Brainstorm and in private email. If you are a faculty member serving contingently, let me urge you to acquaint yourself with the resources at Joe Berry’s Chicago COCAL page, and to think about attending COCAL 8 in San Diego (August 8-10, 2008).

This month, I’ll be making a series of book-related appearances. Hope to see you there!

Special thanks for reviews or generous mentions by Bill Pannapacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Global Sociologist, Gregory Zobel of Adjunct Advice, Emily Hegarty of Open Admissions, Chuck Tryon, Leslie Madsen Brooks of Blogher.com, Miriam Burstein of The Little Professor, Scott Jaschik and Scott McLemee (recently elected to the National Book Critics Circle–yay, Scott) at Inside Higher Ed, Sound & Fury, Purse Lips Square Jaw, Jan Clausen (”coerce u.”) at ablationsite.org, Gerry Canavan, Professor Zero, Subaltered, Historiann, Dave Mazella of Long Eighteenth, Lila Harper at FACEtalk, the Citizen of Somewhere Else, and Gifthub.org.

Next month, I begin a series of book-related appearances with April stops in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and New York. I’ll publish all the details soon–hope to see you there!

Very special thanks to Christine Monnier over at the GlobalSociology edublog for an incredibly detailed, thoughtful, and generous review of HTUW. Ditto for a kind mention by Lila Harper over at AFT’s FACEtalk blog.

You can preview part 1, Twilight of Academic Freedom, of my 3-segment interview with Cary Nelson in the mini-player above, or by following the link in the right column. It’s a doozy. I’ll write a proper intro for it tomorrow.

Finally: if you notice the “On Resentment” thread disappearing, it’s because I’ve decided on a firm anti-troll policy. When you have a gentle, kind zen master and experienced unionist like The Constructivist getting so frustrated that he smokes the troll with an “F-bomb,” you know it’s time to pull the plug.

Barnes and Noble continues to offer the book at a substantial discount, pricing it at $17.60, or for under $16 if you join their program. I’ll update the links in the pages shortly.

All over the country, administrations have established contingency as the norm in academic employment while retaining tenure for themselves.

This is part 2 of my interview with Andy Smith. Use the miniplayer on this page or view it full-size on the associated youtube channel, where you can also view part 1 together with other greatest hits. You can read Andy’s own remarks on “postmodern wage slavery” by following the “more” tag at the bottom of the post.

Thanks to Thomas Hart Benton (Bill Pannapacker) for his kind words about the book while blogging on assignment for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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I’m especially interested in interviewing:

1) graduate employees and contingent faculty

2) folks willing to talk about their experiences as _undergraduate_ workers (new book in progress!)

Email me at pmbousquet (at) gmail if you’ll be at MLA and have time to sit with a camera or voice recorder.