How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front)

How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) | Marc Bousquet | Problems in Higher Education

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How the University...

	How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) Marc Bousquet NYU Press, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Marc Bousquet?s How the University Works should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education, including administrators, faculty members, graduate students, and?even more significantly?undergraduates and their parents."
?Thomas Hart Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"How the University Works is a serious wake-up call for the entire profession, and, based on what I overheard at the [2007 MLA] book fair, Bousquet is about to emerge as the Al Gore of higher education."
—Thomas Hart Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Marc Bousquet is the most trenchant theorist of the current academic labor situation, and How the University Works is the best study of academic labor conditions in the U.S. since the 1970s. It is thoroughly and creatively researched, theoretically bold, often mercifully frank, and frequently poignant in its arguments and findings."
—Vincent B. Leitch, General Editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

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 disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.

Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education — a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher educations corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.

ALSO OF INTEREST Author interview with Cary Nelson Author Blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education Call to Arms for Academic Labor?Review by Inside Higher Ed Author's Blog View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

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A Substantial Book, not a Hard Read

Marc Bousquet has written quite a book that deserves to be widely distributed not only in academia but to any organization involved in labor issues. The University (capitalized as generic) may be the main topic but the background and consequences apply to general labor-management relations. It's a very dense book that weaves social theory, labor relations history and contemporary academic labor analysis.

It should command one's attention and will give academic readers quite a few "wow, that's what's going on where I work" moments. And if you enjoy Michael Berube's writing, you'll enjoy this as well.

I disagree with the previous reviewer that it is badly written. It is dense, yes, but not inaccessible. Most of the concepts used will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to labor issues beyond academia. It is one of the arguments of the book that, indeed, academics have tended to not think of themselves as labor, and that therefore, academia would be exempt from the major trends affecting the labor market. It has been a costly mistake, for instance, with the massive increase in the use of contingent work. Two major points made by the book:

*"We are not `overproducing Ph.Ds'; we are underproducing jobs." The university would not be able to function without the reserve army of graduate students and contingent workers. In this sense, the work they do constitutes REAL jobs and positions that are simply never filled but could be filled by degree holders. But the way the managed university works is to fill these positions with contingent work, on a casualized basis and treat them as if they were not actual positions. Moreover, contingent workers can often only afford to take these low-paid positions because they have spouses with full-time positions, other systems of financial assistance, or simply get into debt. In other words, cheap teaching is subsidized by other parts of the social structure.

* "Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime." Such labor made and maintained cheap hurts everyone in addition to contingent workers. On the end of the labor chain, the increasing casualization of work at the university tends to increase the stressing of the system: full-time, tenured faculty still have to teach more, advise more, publish more, serve on more committees or continuous improvement teams, get more involved in "shared governance", etc. It also leave undergraduate teaching to the less experienced graduate students.

Marc Bousquet compares the current university system to an HMO. The university has become an organization to be managed like an efficient business where efficiency means delivering education at the lowest possible cost and running at a profit. However, as in the case of health care, this managerial revolution has not brought about cheaper education. Quite the opposite, the cost of higher education has been consistently increasing but not because of expensive teachers but by adding layers upon layers of administrators.

The strength of the book is in raising awareness, through various forms of analysis, regarding working conditions in universities but also in placing academia in its proper social context: the larger global marketplace.

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Problems in Higher Education

This is an excellent introduction to the problems of higher education. It focuses on exploitation of junior scholars. One could add a great deal more: shenanigans with retirement systems, horrible treatment of nonacademic staffs, squandered money, outright theft, and more. In a 45-year career in the game, I knew higher administrators who appropriated considerable university money for private parties, one who redirected the library's book-buying budget to redirecting his office, and several who managed to be gone almost all the time (frequently to shop for even better jobs). The one who redirected the library money also got his university involved in various deals with private corporations; they cost the university plenty, benefited the corporations some, benefited the students little.
Many high-level schools reward (sic) famous-name professors by "liberating" (sic) them from teaching undergraduates! They teach a seminar a year, and often no more than that.
At most universities today, expenses on administration--especially high administrators' salaries--skyrocket while expenses on actual teaching are flatlined or nearly so. This is not education at all, let alone "higher" education.
Bousquet and Nelson are right: academics have to organize in some way that will give them some power against these abuses. Meanwhile, any and all students and especially parents and alumni should really take a very long, hard look at what is going on, and act accordingly. Above all, parents and alums, demand that your money goes to teaching and research, not to bloated salaries of supernumerary administrators.

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Required Reading for all College Faculty, Grad Students, and Undergrads!

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.

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Polemical, wordy, often right on target

This book is smart and laudable in its aims, and well worth reading: it argues forcefully against many of the illusions academics, and others, subscribe to about their working conditions, and for a more class-conscious and organized professoriate, one that refuses to allow the invisible trend of adjuncts and graduate students taking over most of the university's teaching load to continue without a fight. Though some of the book's specific analyses are new -- especially its bracing analysis of the use of graduate student labor and its total rejection of the commonplace idea of "the job market" -- its argument in broad outline is far from groundbreaking, but it's still a useful piece of advocacy. It's perhaps a bit oversold, with the author busking its cause in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on YouTube, and with the book's own web site, as well as the gripping cover design; all of this might suggest more novelty and perhaps more of a manifesto than the book actually delivers. What it actually gives us is mostly fairly dry and academic in tone, and the book spends as much time on critical readings of various cultural texts about academic labor as it does analyzing data, synthesizing conclusions, or delivering arguments for proposed solutions.

But the major strike against this book is simply how sorely it needed a good copy-edit from front to back. No book aimed at advocating political change to a broad general audience should be written in such bloated academic-ese. For instance, no one ever simply subscribes to a mistaken view in this book when they can be "interpellated" by it instead. The constant use of vaguely theoretical jargon ought to have been held in check, and the convoluted sentences simplified; the arguments themselves are relatively simple, and mostly right on target, so it's a shame to see them advocated in a manner that will cut them off from the agreement (or even the comprehension) of as many people as possible.

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Good content, too much jargon

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.

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