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

Marc Bousquet (Author), Cary Nelson (Foreword)

Book Description

Release date: January 1, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0814799752 | ISBN-13: 978-0814799758

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bousquet serves up a stinging indictment of those universities that exploit their students from the moment they set foot on campus. . . . [He] reveals the dystopia that the contemporary university has become."

-The Minnesota Review,

“Bousquet takes an uncompromising look at the way colleges employ those who teach - and how many professors have done nothing as tenured positions have been replaced with adjunct slots.”

-Inside Higher Ed,

“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

"Not only the most persuasive political argument, but also the most sophisticated theoretical analysis of the university's labor system."-The Minnesota Review,

About the Author

Marc Bousquet is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University and the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His previous books include Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers and The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change.

Cary Nelson teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Jublilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is also the national president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Among his twenty-five books are Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (also published by NYU) and the landmark coedited collection Cultural Studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 281 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (January 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814799752
• ISBN-13: 978-0814799758
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #695,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Substantial Book, not a Hard Read March 11, 2008

By SocProf

Format:Paperback

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.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Polemical, wordy, often right on target March 10, 2008

By Anonymous VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The book stops short of uncovering the deep roots of the higher education maladies March 14, 2010

By An (almost) impartial observer

Format:Paperback

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?