- ISBN13: 9780814799758
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it’s like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees—including the vast majority of faculty—really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of dispo… More >>
How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Bousquet does a good job exposing the exploitative practices of the corporate university. He’s at his best when he discusses specific cases (the UPS “earn while you learn” ripoff, for example), and he gives a very perceptive analysis of why the perennial optimistic reports about the PhD job “market” (like the Bowen report) got things so wrong.
But I have to agree with a previous reviewer that the book is pretty tough going for a general audience. Bousquet is (alas) a “theoretician”, and the neo-Marxist jargon makes one’s eyes glaze over for entire paragraphs (and sometimes whole pages). Alas, the effect of this is that the book is really readable only for someone who is already comfortable with this jargon, which means that he’s basically preaching to the choir, since anybody who can read the book is already appalled at the abuses! Too bad.
Rating: 3 / 5
I agree with an earlier comment. It is way too verbose and circumlocutory. I also wonder how these liberal arts guys are equipped to tell us, as they do in the book’s third sentence, that universities “have embraced the values and practices of corporate management.” First, I believe for-profit corporations that manage their budgets as most universities do would go broke very quickly. Second, I don’t think universities have a clue about corporate values (which is both good and bad) since most university “managers” have never set foot in a corporation during their professional careers. Take big time sports a the large universities as an example of an area cited in the book: in fact, most such programs are poorly managed; most are losing money; and most are highly inefficient and wasteful of resources.
The book is good when it speculates about the future of the university, though I am not convinced what they predict is what will actually happen.
Rating: 3 / 5
Marc Bousquet is efficient in revealing (though often in horrible heavyset prose) the system of increased corporatization of universities (since 1960s) and its progressing reliance on exploited labor of graduate students, part-timers and (no-benefits) adjuncts. Bloated ranks of administrations, inflated athletic programs, kowtowing to the whims of rich donors who are often quite illiterate themselves are indeed signatures of the modern American edutainment industry.
“Cheap labor” graduate students who teach for many years are getting kicked out upon graduation only to enhance the pool of part-timers at other colleges. The corporate “system” is identified as the biggest problem and the class of “management” that “enjoys solidarity” as the primary foe of academics, who need to unionize and oppose the exploitators (“by the most inclusive forms of unionization”, p. 28).
Page 27: “Imagine what would happen to graduate programs… if they were held responsible for… the employment of every person to whom they granted a PhD but who was unable to find academic employment elsewhere. In many locations the pipeline would jam in the first year!”
I hear sincere enthusiasm here, an Utopian dream of professorship for everybody and even a call for authoritarian rationing of PhD degree holders production.
Still, the author never asks an obvious question: why do we see the commercialization of higher education in the first place? The “system” in his view is such a big and horrendous monster to be destroyed that the author is unable to master the fortitude to look past it and analyze from what kind of social mutation this monster came to life.
To unite achievers (those faculty on tenure-track positions with decent benefits and livable salaries) with exploited workers Bousquet claims (p. 41) that “the cheapness of their [grad students, adjuncts] labor holds down salaries in the ladder ranks [tenure track faculty]“. While a nice rhetoric this makes for a poor analysis. The statement is not necessarily true. Correlation does not mean causation.
As a socialist Bousquet is understandably unwilling to blame the actual cause of the shifts in higher education — American public, the taxpayers. Some statistics could be useful here. From UC President Mark Yudof’s 2009 article in Chronicle of HiEd:
– “in 1980s higher education made up 17 percent of the state budget, and prisons accounted for 3 percent. Today those figures are 9 percent and 10 percent, respectively.”
– “the fact is that the university [of California] has half as much money per student today as it did in 1990, based on current dollars. That’s because the state is no longer a reliable partner.”
The last sentence sums it all. The state legislators (who represent American public) moved HiEd down in their priority list. Taxpayers are no longer willing to bear the costs of education (Californians voting agains tax increases for their education in 2009 is a good example of the shiftinng priorities). They want bigger homes, more expensive cars, bigger TV screens and they want it now and on credit. They even want more education they are not willing to pay for collectively. At the same time American workers produce less and of lesser quality. It is no surprise that money available to universities started to dry up at the same time when US consumerism skyrocketed.
You get what you pay for. If you abandoned your public institutions of education to their own survival (and many institutions’ budgets have only 1/5 coming from state appropriations), if you force them to earn money they need, they will have no choice but to adopt a business model. Corporatization of HiEd is not the cause, it is the consequence. Reliance on cheap labor as well as bloated ranks of executives whose primary role is procurement and management of funds is not so much the malice of administrators as the sad situation they (and HiEd) are placed into by the taxpayers.
Provided that society is not going to increase public funding of colleges (and at the moment this seems unlikely) no attempts at unionization will improve the situation. Unionization did not benefit US auto industry much, or did it?
Rating: 3 / 5
This amazing book has received rave reviews in the major higher ed press–and for good reason. If you or anyone you know is even thinking about college or graduate school, stop and read this book first! Bousquet has been called the “Al Gore of higher education” and compared to Upton Sinclair (the author of Oil! and The Jungle) for this eye-opening expose. Cary Nelson calls it the “single most important” recent book on higher education.
Faculty who spend ten years in graduate school earn less than waiters and bartenders? Most of the courses are taught by grad students and “adjunct faculty,” who make about fifty dollars a head for teaching all semester?
No wonder most students don’t graduate. Students who do get degrees spend years being farmed out by sleazy administrators to local corporations as cheap or free labor, and then another ten years paying off loan debt. And a college degree doesn’t even get you a decent job anymore–unless you’re willing to be a business major.
If you want to learn how higher education has become worse than health care, turned into a scam and “profit center” for Enron-Halliburton-Blackwater types, read this book. There are a couple of dense passages, but if you’re going to read one book about higher education, this is it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bousquet’s analysis of the “informationalized” university is interesting and rings true. Unfortunately, his sloppy organization and unedited writing result in needless repetition and obscure what would otherwise be a compelling indictment of higher education’s exploitation of its educated workforce. He places the blame where it belongs–not on technology or the insignificant employment of “distance learning,” but on the public university’s adoption of a for-profit, capitalistic mission, top-heavy with overpaid administrators, which in turn creates the need for an informal, “right here, right now” supply of cheap labor. Though he makes his points, the author’s long-winded, cluttered sentences and “spiral” organization–he keeps coming back again and again to points already made–detract significantly from his book’s effectiveness.
Rating: 3 / 5