"The single most important recent advance in our understanding of the structure of higher education." Cary Nelson How the University Works by Marc Bousquet
This is the seamy underbelly of higher education — a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates all work long hours for fast-food wages.
This is the seamy underbelly of higher education — a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates all work long hours for fast-food wages.
Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses.
Burdened by debt, millions of undergraduates work multiple part-time jobs but quit before they earn a degree.
Meanwhile college presidents and basketball coaches rake in millions, even at schools where fewer than half of students are able to earn a degree in six years.
Assessing the costs of the corporate university at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of higher education.
Cary Nelson describes how the shift to a majority contingent faculty is an intellectual sea change for undergraduates as well as faculty themselves.
Working in an airport gift shop, standing in line for free cheese, sharing a bowl of soup for dinner... these are the all-too-typical coping strategies adopted by the working poor among the contingent faculty who are now the overwhelming majority of the professoriate. In part 2 of our interview, Cary Nelson discusses the abjection of the professoriate and the role of the AAUP in pushing back against the callous, systematic exploitation of students and faculty by university management.
Higher ed employment has become a pyramid scheme, explains Michelle Masse, 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.
"Wal-mart workers know they're being had," Michelle Masse says. "Academics don't."
She argues that the call to service in higher education has been a vector for cynical exploitation by administrations, but also for willing submission to exploitative demands. This is especially the case for womenn faculty, but also for men in feminized sectors, such as the humanities.
A professor on public assistance. Andy Smith describes his ten years as a contingent faculty member. The vast majority of all college faculty are now hired on a contingent basis.
"I'm 30 years old and I've never made 30 thousand a year." Monica Jacobe, who is about to finish her dissertation in American literature, describes her life as a contingent faculty member. In Part 2, she talks about her prospects for an academic job and the sorry state in which previous generations of faculty and administrations have left the profession.
Getting a Ph.D. is like playing the lottery, explains Monica Jacobe. After a median 10 years of study, and perhaps four or five years of job hunting, 40 percent of language PhDs will not have tenure track jobs anywhere.
California Faculty Association activist Elizabeth Hoffman describes the "permanently temporary" condition that is now the norm for faculty in U.S. higher education.
Activists from Graduate Students United at the Universiy of Chicago explain their collective and personal motivations for unionizing.
Activists from Graduate Students United at the Universiy of Chicago describe their vision for intellectual and workplace democracy in higher ed.
Activists from Graduate Students United at the Universiy of Chicago sing Joe Grim Feinberg's "Ballad of the Marooned Dissertation Writers."
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