Author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (NYU, 2008). weblog with video:
http://howtheuniversityworks.com
youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/MarcBousquet
So Brainstorm comrade Dan Greenberg has had a couple of great posts about academic labor in the sciences recently. A few days ago, he commented on the fake undersupply of scientists, essentially pointing out that labor markets are socially structured. When capitalists, universities, and farm employers don't want to pay fair wages for work, they ask governments to help by saying that fruit pickers or software iengineers are "in short supply," so can they please import some workers willing to accept the low wages?
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 that happen?
Quality management.
Ever since the first Clinton came to office, we've had bipartisan agreement that the quality management of everything--the military, municipalities, colleges, philanthropies--was going to magically reduce expenditures and raise revenue by encouraging market orientation and market behaviors. All we needed was better, leaner leadership in ever stronger control of institutional mission.
The AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO) walked off the job at 5 am this morning, shutting down classes, construction sites, and loading docks at the University of Michigan, with the support of undergraduatesand union workers.
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
When you teach for love, how do you pay the teaching assistants?
Youtube phenom "Hotforwords" raises the ante on the "teaching for love" canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really can realize the administration's dream in the form of the ultimate "quality" process.
John Adams goes to war on behalf of the professional-managerial class.
The first two segments of the HBO miniseries "John Adams" screened last night, featuring the title character as an unwilling professional-managerial incendiary.
Repelled by the melodramatic "join or die" rhetoric of the Sons of Liberty and not entirely unaware of the advantages of currying favor with the administration, Adams enters the picture deeply invested in colonial shared governance, declaring "The crown is misguided, but it is not despotic—I firmly believe that."
The most compelling aspect of the character in these segments is the movement from this faith in shared governance to outraged revolutionist. Professorial in demeanor and temperament, Adams’ personal journey to democracy is perhaps farther even than his journey to dissent.
In an essential new tract for the majority of faculty who serve contingently, Joe Berry explains how sleazeball administrations game the social-service system to vacuum every last dime from your pocket.
So I actually watched "Aftermath: Population Zero."
The concept isn't the worst: the producers ask, what will the planet look like after humanity? As you'd expect, it's a platform for exploring all the unsustainable things that humans do. Subtract humanity, and watch how the planet finds a balance.
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 mold by offering the same argument for developing teacher talent that administrators make for themselves: you pay for it. A starting salary for teachers of $125,000 a year, to be exact.
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 television critic James Poniewozik puts it, "All The Wire's characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they're all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for."
It’s reasonable to question the views that humanities faculty have regarding enterprise. But does that mean five philosophers teaching full-time should earn less than one nurse?
While one university president jacked tuition through the roof and whacked away millions in personal compensation, he permatemped the faculty. Upon his retirement, about 60% of the faculty (not counting grad students) were contingent, teaching a full-time load for $18,000.
In a couple of recent posts, I raised questions about the 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 repairing the shortcomings of his health-care plan?
So it’s neck and neck in the Democratic race and I wonder: which of the candidates has a viable plan for covering contingent faculty, grad students, and the working poor?
Obama relies on subsidies: working adults who "need financial assistance will receive an income-related federal subsidy to buy into the new public plan or purchase a private health care plan."
It used to be that feminists adhered to a "pipeline" theory of progress in gender equity in higher ed--the more women with PhDs, the more tenure-stream women, the more women in leadership.
It hasn't turned out that way. The majority of women teaching in academe get paid in the same range as men working as bartenders and waitstaff (and often worse).
Higher ed employment has become a pyramid scheme, explains Michelle Masse in part 1 of our interview, with mostly-male sectors at the top and mostly-female sectors at the bottom. The relationship between "feminization" of the humanities and "masculinization" of administration means we're all in the harem of the dean.
Part 2 of my interview with Andy Smith, Faculty on Food Stamps 2. Smith describes his decade as a professor on public assistance.
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... all for less than $20,000 a year. For most faculty, university teaching has become just another lousy job in the service economy.
I've been asked to update this piece by several folks with a link to the Chronicle discussion, and some commentary on the student's memoir. Rather than hazard a translation myself, I am providing, warts and all, a few paragraphs from the Dictionary.com translation. (Yes, we reside part time in Quebec, but my francophone neighbors wisely prefer my spouse's language skills.) The gist of the excerpts and brief introductory remarks by Anne Vidalie suggests that precarity--the European term for the institutionalization of precarious forms of employment, the government-sanctioned offloading of risk from corporations to citizens in employment, education, and health care--is the frame of reference for the experience of this student, and the tens of thousands like her in every European country, as well as the United States.
