Academic Austerity

As a follow-up to the scattered notes on academic labor below, here's a link I missed to a very helpful post by Marc Bousquet over on How the University Works:

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. ...

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.

This tendency can certainly be seen on my campus. Nothing shifts decision making from shared faculty governance to administrative fiat quite so quickly as a good budget crisis. The fact that, as Bousquet writes, "many administrators welcome austerity" seems all too likely. It is certainly true that many university administrators have had significantly more experience at successfully implementing austerity measures than they have had at successfully resisting such measures.

Ballad of the Dissertators

By way of Marc Bousquet, here's a sad, sad ballad about the tragedy that is grad school:

So we took on jobs a teachin'
and we worked our brains full sore.
Then we looked into our pockets
and we went to teach some more.
But when our paychecks came
there was almost nothing there.
You had spent it all on school fees
and on your own health care.

And so we got together
and we asked for better pay.
And so we got together
and we asked to have a say.
In all the ways that's schools run
right now and long to come.
So all you coming students
won't have to do like we have done.

Work Study

Curtis Bowman has posted a very interesting review of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works. The review is wide-ranging and I recommend the entire article to you. One passage in particular, though, struck a chord with me. Discussing Chapter 4: Students Are Already Workers, Bowman writes:

The growth of work-study jobs, as is to be expected, has come at the expense of full-time staff members, i.e., secretaries, library workers, and the like. Consequently, an ever greater percentage of staff-related work is performed by students.

The LumpenProf's oldest Lumpkin has just started college, and along with a host of other brand new experiences has come the new experience of a work-study job. She's working in the dining hall during lunch twice a week. This is part of her financial aid package, and has been a welcome alternative to student loans. But the notion of work-study has always made me uneasy, in much the same way that using prison labor makes me uneasy. The goal of teaching students, or of rehabilitating prisoners, does not fit easily with the notion that an institution might also benefit directly from the cheap labor of these populations. That there is a conflict of interest here should be obvious. And even though Karl Marx himself writes in The Communist Manifesto, that there ought to be a "combination of education with industrial production," I have never been terribly impressed with the revolutionary potential of that particular goal.

Faculty, parents, and students themselves, often tend to focus on the positive aspects of these work-study relationships -- building character, job skills, minimizing student debt, etc. But as Bowman correctly notes, it also means universities are free to hire fewer full-time staff. This union-busting aspect of student work-study perhaps should be an issue in much the same way prison labor is when used to compete with outside workers. And parents and students might also notice, as Bowman writes, that "such steps obviously lead to a decline in the quality of the very institutions that cut costs in the above fashion. Such measures are really little more than a form of slow-motion institutional suicide."

There is also a downside for faculty that often goes unnoticed. Each semester at my institution I meet the new cohort of student workers manning the phones and copy room. But after a recent three-day back and forth over how to send a fax (that ended with me sending the document by snail mail), I begin to suspect that I may be disadvantaged by not having more full-time professional staff helping me in my day to day work.

I was initially very happy about my daughter's work-study arrangement. But now I'm starting to have second thoughts. I think work-study may just be evil. It's difficult for me to imagine, though, turning down the work-study offer and taking out student loans instead. It's equally difficult for me to imagine going on a crusade on my own campus against the use of student workers. I don't think students, faculty, parents, or even staff would support it. What do others think about this? Is this a real issue? Or is the LumpenProf just worrying too much?

This Thing That We Do

I've been tagged by Philosophers' Playground with the teaching meme. There have already been so many varied responses to this question of why we teach the things that we do, that I won't begin to be able to respond to all the different issues raised. So I will simply pluck at one or two of the strands of this far-flung discussion that resonate with my most recent teaching. This past week I have been teaching Marx and Zizek. Why?

I'm tempted to simply answer: "Because that's what I've been hired to do." The job aspect of teaching in the academy sometimes tends to disappear behind the presumed pleasures of teaching. After all, any job that pays this poorly must be a labor of love, and variations on "I love teaching" have been one of the most frequently recurring themes in response to this meme. Exceptions to this can be found in posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor (along with a response at HTUW) who both express their ambivalence about this love of teaching. But even those who profess such a love will, I think, admit that on at least some days love is the last thing they feel in the classroom. This would be the Marxist answer in me. I teach because that's the place within the current social division of labor where I can best sell my labor-power. Every other reason for teaching tends to melt away when confronted by this simple economic fact.

However, one of Slavoj Zizek's oft repeated riffs is on the ways our culture has forced us to internalize our duties such that not only must we do them, we must enjoy them as well.

Superego is the reversal of the permissive "You May!" into the prescriptive "You Must!", the point in which permitted enjoyment turns into ordained enjoyment. We all know the formula of Kant's unconditional imperative: "Du canst, denn du sollst". You can do your duty, because you must do it. Superego turns this around into "You must, because you can." ... The external opposition between pleasure and duty is precisely overcome in the superego. It can be overcome in two opposite ways. On one hand, we have the paradox of the extremely oppressive, so–called totalitarian post–traditional power which goes further than the traditional authoritarian power. It does not only tell you "Do your duty, I don’t care if you like it or not." It tells you not only "You must obey my orders and do your duty" but "You must do it with pleasure. You must enjoy it." It is not enough for the subjects to obey their leader, they must actively love him. This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? "I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty." A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: "You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to." Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say "I have a choice, I will not do it." I promise your father will say "What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?" That’s superego. On the other hand, we have the opposite paradox of the pleasure itself whose pursuit turns into duty. In a permissive society, subjects experience the need to have a good time, to really enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and consequently feel guilty for failing to be happy.

This passage also resonates for me with much of Limited, Inc.'s ongoing interrogation of the pursuit of happiness as a new and strangely misplaced goal of life.

Teaching Marx and Zizek provides me with a way to raise these issues for my students who also face a similar bind of being forced first to take classes, and then forced to enjoy them. After all, why would someone pay all that money and spend all that time reading and studying subjects they don't enjoy?

I confess, I enjoy this part of my teaching. D'oh!

Rather than tag new victims and require them to respond to this meme, I'm simply going to ask for volunteers. If you would like to respond to this meme, just leave a comment below with a link to your post. Of course, you only have to respond if you would enjoy it...

Survivor Issues

“I feel fortunate,” he said, of his position, “and I have survivor issues.” -- Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works from Inside Higher Ed's Call to Arms for Academic Labor, by Scott Jaschik.

Survivor Issues. That could easily be the title of my entire blog. I resemble too closely the people described by Bousquet and in the various online posts provoked by his recent book (in particular, a headsup from Ortho and posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor.)



Inside Higher Ed quotes Bousquet:

“Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for 8 or 10 years before earning their doctorate.... Many degree holders have served as adjunct lecturers at other campuses, sometimes teaching master’s degree students and advising their theses en route to their own degrees. Some will have taught 30 to 40 sections.... During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation.... A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental Web pages. Yet at precisely the junction that this ‘preparation’ should end and regular employment begin — the acquisition of the Ph.D. — the system embarrasses itself and discloses a systematic truth that every recent degree holder knows and few administrators wish to acknowledge: in many disciplines, for the majority of graduates, the Ph.D. indicates the logical conclusion of an academic career.”

This describes me. The one very important difference is that, miraculously, my career didn't end with the Ph.D. and I ended up with tenure after another decade-long soujourn through the adjunct wilderness. And like Bousquet, "I feel fortunate, and I have survivor issues."

You can find more interviews with Marc Bousquet on YouTube.