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

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How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) ReviewMarc 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.
How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) Overview
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 education's corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.


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