How The University Works

Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice […]

News flash today: the number of folks on food stamps in Ohio alone has doubled since 2001, now at over 1.1 million. There’s more: Another half million are eligible but aren’t enrolled. One reason they aren’t enrolled? What they get is about $1 per meal, or a little more than a thousand bucks a year.
How’d […]

When you teach for love, how do you pay your teaching assistants?
I completed my app. with style and perfection
Now I wonder how long before you make your selection
I hope you don’t mind that I’m being persistent
But, I really want to be your teaching assistant
–”JD,” March 13, 2008, applying for a “HotForWords” position
I left off […]

Note: discussions on this thread, including a post by Marina herself, have begun separately at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm and The Valve.
“Dude, her metrics are awesome!” Teaching for love, indeed.
Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really […]

What does a young Yalie think it takes to fix our “broken schools”? $125,000 a year for teachers.
I’m not generally a big fan of “charter schools,” which more often than not are sleazy operations that combine experimenting on other people’s children with transparent attempts to break schoolteacher unions.
But one NYC charter school really breaks the […]

In this final season of David Simon’s The Wire, we see the dystopic contemporary Baltimore created by the class war from above. It’s a city ravaged by “quality management,” the same philosophy that administrations across the country have adopted in shunting the overwhelming majority of college faculty into contingent positions.
As Time magazine […]

I was a bit surprised that Stephen Trachtenberg chose to ignore my second invitation to talk about the plight of the majority faculty–those who serve contingently–and, instead, indulged in a speculative ad hominem flight of fancy that ends with inviting me to leave the academy!
I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy… Surely […]

One of the co-contributors over at Brainstorm, Stephen Trachtenberg, president emeritus at G-Dub, recently posted on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators, then followed it with a post in which he questioned the usefulness of tenure for faculty, at least for those profs he described as “burnt-out”:
The academy needs better, more imaginative ways for […]

In a couple of recent posts, I raised questions about both Democratic candidates’ health plans–Obama’s really won’t cover many people and Clinton’s enthusiastically endorses tiering of care.
As we move closer to the likelihood of an Obama presidency, isn’t it time to start moving the candidate toward questioning his own lousy health-care plan?
His plan is simply […]

In the very unscientific polls I placed at DailyKos and the Chronicle of Higher Ed nontenure-track forum, a 3/4 majority responded, “neither–we need a single-payer system.” This seems to reflect at least one of the candidate’s own judgments: Clinton appeared to acknowledge in the last debate that single-payer was preferable, just not in her […]

Teaching as much as an 8/8 load… raising children on food stamps and without health insurance… flying the freeways over hundreds of miles… crashing on couches and holding student conferences in hallways and fast-food restaurants… just another lousy job in the service economy.
All over the country, administrations have established contingency as the norm in academic […]

If you really want to understand what higher education management has been doing to teaching and learning for the past 40 years, just buy Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Watch it and substitute “college education” for “health care.”
Students’ rights to learn are being denied by “quality management” that has all but eradicated their encounters with tenure-stream faculty.
Just […]

In response to an Inside Higher Ed columnist advocating that colleges devote more energy to professional development for their employees, I point out that the model of “quality” management has long ago shifted the costs and responsibility for professional development to the employee–typically by requiring them to purchase higher education services. The old days of […]

A response to the “making opportunity affordable” report funded by the Lumina Foundation and assorted education profiteers, which circulates the tired old canard that there are still inefficiencies to be found in higher education after forty years of downsizing. My response: there’s fat to be trimmed all right–but you’re not gonna find it in […]