How the university works: higher education and the low-wage nation

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Notes

1. Now an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and New Media at Santa Clara University in California, Bousquet remarks on The Chronicle of Higher Education's ‘Brainstorm’ blog entry ‘The United States of Alabama’ (14 July 2010, 12.19 pm):

I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of ‘research-1’ status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.

2. In Chapter four of this book, ‘Students are Already Workers’ (125–56), Bousquet details the ‘sweetheart’ deal the University of Louisville and other Kentucky higher education institutions have made with package carrier United Parcel Service (UPS), in which UPS is thus able to employ enrolled undergraduate students for less than nominal wages to staff their late-night shift at its national airport hub facility in return for conditional scholarship tuition payments. While some committed students (such as my HNU colleague Kevin Kester) have benefitted from this programme, the data and stories Bousquet tells strongly suggest that many students are exploited by the arrangement, and in the end, do not graduate from their academic studies as promoted by UPS and the higher education institutions involved.

3. Bousquet pointedly asks:

But in nonprofit education, which only ‘pretends’ to ‘act like’ a corporation, where have the billions gone? At first glance, there are no shareholders and no dividends. However, the uses to which the university has been put do benefit corporate shareholders. These include shouldering the cost of job training, generation of patentable intellectual property, provision of sports spectacle, vending goods and services to captive student markets, and conversion of student aid into a cheap or even free labor pool. (5)

4. ‘One area in which nonprofit education management has been freely spending is on themselves. Over three decades, the number of administrators has skyrocketed, in close correspondence to the ever-growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has soared as well, also in close relation to the shrinking compensation of other campus workers’ (6).

5. In ‘You Are Not a Gadget – Why Open Culture and Technocentric Philosophies Are Ruining Our Lives’ computer Artificial Intelligence theorist Jaron Lanier argues that the thoughtless embrace of the ‘open source’ knowledge production model (exemplified by Wikipedia, produced by ‘amateur’ volunteer labour), ‘while it all sounds good, what it's actually created is an amoral world in which consequences aren't considered, the victims are blamed, technical solutions are thought to be better than common sense, creativity has been stifled, commerce is abandoned, and gee-whiz wonderment conceals deeply cynical plays by scheming companies.’ In addition to this, under this regime of ‘Digital Maosim,’ social inequality will only increase. In the words of Kent Anderson (2010):

Lanier also paints a commercial world that has divided the haves and have-nots more severely, emptying our culture of what he calls the ‘intellectual middle-class,’ the journalists, musicians, authors, and composers whose careers are made as stringers, session players, genre authors, and journeymen songwriters. These truly creative people have been sidelined by algorithms (Last.fm, Pandora) and digital tools framed as open but really voiding commercial reality from the equation.

Otherwise, this reviewer would surmise, higher education will become as degraded as TV drama has been by the rise of cheap, vapid ‘reality’ TV, wherein the people shown are basically ‘paying for the privilege of working [ineptly]’ all for the desire of illusive, momentary ‘fame.’

6. ‘The system was not replaced until after 1969, when it “broke down” because the problem “was now one of locating jobs rather than candidates.” At this point, the association dismantled the Job Mart and initiated the Job Information Service, which ceased to collect candidate dossiers and began to publish job listings’ (192).