Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I give this three stars to split the difference between possible reactions. For those wanting a pep talk on the virtues of collective bargaining and the horrors of casualization, this is a five-star book. For those seeking to know what the title promises--how the university actually works--it is a one-star book.

Casualization refers to the substitution of part-time teachers in universities for full-time, tenure-ladder faculty. It is a real and important issue. Large numbers of part-time teachers (adjuncts, visitors, lecturers, etc.) are now employed in lieu of hiring tenure-ladder Ph.D.'s (though some of the part-timers hold Ph.D.'s). As a rule, these individuals have less experience and training than tenure-ladder Ph.D.'s. They are less expensive to employ. Many work at very low salaries, often without fringe benefits or appropriate instructional support.

There are a number of reasons for this. "Choice" is now a summum bonum on college campuses, required core curricula a thing of the past (at least to a considerable degree). Deans are less likely to allocate permanent positions in such an ethos and thus they hire adjuncts to fill gaps, not knowing where student demand is likely to go next. For decades now, the public support for higher education has eroded. At the same time, the number of students seeking higher education opportunities has increased. What are deans to do when enrollments increase at the same time that allocations from the state decrease? Students now expect a multiplicity of services that were not expected a generation ago. If those services are not provided, students will go to institutions where they are available. Information technology now requires funding that is probably 4x the cost of operating the university library (though the library still requires support). In the face of such pressures administrators economize and if large numbers of competent individuals are available (and they are willing to work for low pay), schools will hire them.

Bousquet argues that these individuals are hired in order to permit administrators to feather their personal nests, pursue capital projects involving donor- or administrator vanity, fund athletics, recreation facilities, and so on. Adjunct activism, unionization and collective bargaining will reduce the adjuncts' exploitation. There is some truth to this, but also some misunderstanding. Many of the student emoluments (luxury dorms, recreation facilities) are paid for by the students directly, either through room/board charges or activity fees. Students want these things and are willing to pay for them. In many cases, auxiliary enterprises (the bookstore, dorms, etc.) are operated on separate budgets. While these should not be subsidized by the instructional budget, their surpluses or reserve funds are sometimes tapped to address instructional problems. It is true that most athletic programs are subsidized. Some few athletic programs help subsidize instruction. The value of big-time athletics to the local economy, to alumni satisfaction and support, and so on are open to debate. The Ivy League, which does not pursue `big-time' athletics feels the need to subsidize athletics significantly.

Bousquet includes graduate students among the casualized labor force. This is open to significant debate. Are graduate students sometimes exploited? Yes. Do they carry a large portion of the instructional load? Yes, they often do. In general, however, certain things should be kept in mind. Bousquet does not acknowledge, e.g., that graduate teaching assistants (and research assistants) generally receive tuition scholarships. If one takes the tuition benefit which they receive and combine it with their stipend, while recognizing that they are teaching part-time, the compensation is not exploitative. Graduate students matriculating in professional schools at top, private institutions are generally expected to pay full tuition ($40,000+ for each year of law school, e.g.). Students in graduate school in the arts and sciences generally pay no tuition, but receive a modest stipend (say, $10,000-$20,000 for nine months, depending on field). In return, they may work half-time. At my institution students on quarter-time grants still receive full tuition remission. Do the math. They also often receive subsidized graduate student housing. Moreover, the teaching experience afforded by these appointments is very important in securing full-time tenure-ladder positions. There have been large numbers of such students for generations. The best schools limit their number and fund each of their graduate students.

Note that many private colleges and regional publics that are not in the top tier will sometimes advertise that they `do not put graduate students in the classroom.' However, they often hire other institutions' graduate students to staff their courses, particularly advanced graduate students who have years of teaching experience and are in the process of completing their dissertations.

It would be very nice to know how many adjuncts are being systematically exploited (and why). Some individuals want to teach, but already have full-time day jobs. Part-time teaching is an avocation. There are individuals who are sought out for part-time teaching because of their expertise. Many professional master's programs are operated using such individuals. In Washington, for example, the public policy and security studies programs draw heavily on such expertise. There are individuals who want to teach but do not want to teach full-time. They may be retired. They may have independent means. They may have a partner with a good income and health plan. There are individuals who want to work full-time but do not want to do research, work to secure grants and do not want to work with the tenure clock ticking in the background. Some individuals willingly withdraw from the tenure ladder but negotiate other sorts of full-time appointments. While they cannot receive tenure they cannot be denied it either. There are, of course, some individuals who teach part-time at multiple institutions, laboring to secure something approaching a living wage. These individuals are the focus of Bousquet's book. But how many are there in that position and why do educated, capable people labor so hard for so little? That would be the subject for a very interesting and important book.

In the late 70's I was part of a CIC (the big 10 + the U. of Chicago) program to help humanities Ph.D.'s secure `nontraditional' employment, i.e. employment beyond the university. With the transferable skills possessed by humanities Ph.D.'s the individuals in the program were very successful in securing such employment. Moreover, they reported greater job satisfaction than those in universities. They earned salaries which enabled them to travel and to buy books. They only reported one difficulty: they had trouble working to deadlines and with circumscribed budgets. In other words, they had problems in completing a task within the time and budget allowed. They were used to `doing a job until it was finished.' (Of course, hardened academics will tell you that no project is ever really finished; it is simply abandoned. We set our own time limits; otherwise books would never be written. Those in the sciences, of course, work to very tight schedules with carefully metered budgets.)

Bousquet writes with passion and, given his assumptions, with a great deal of information at his disposal. He is correct in his statements with regard to the growth in academic unionization and the fact that it far exceeds the level of unionization outside the academy, particularly in the private sector. He does not provide much information on the actual differentials between the compensation of unionized employees and those who are not unionized. Nor does he discuss the tradeoffs involved in those transactions. Some reviewers have said that the book is badly written, that it needs copy-editing and so on. While I had reservations concerning what was discussed and what was not, what was assumed and what was overlooked, I would not say that the book was badly written. It is written in the vocabulary of the labor activist and with many bows to the academic left. It tends to demonize all expressions of capitalism and sees university administrators as oppressive, self-seeking corporatists. Whether this is fair or not I leave to the reader to decide.

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.

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.

Why are we talking about "science fairs" when college educations are increasingly impossible to complete? Students face massive overcrowding, overworked and underpaid professors - to the point of meltdown among faculty, a lack decent parking (that faculty and staff often pay for!) lousy housing in comparison to what their parents recall (condos to share are a booming biz in college towns, which is fine for kids with rich parents but what of everyone else?), junk food courts as if their university were a mall ...

I really could go on. The treatment of our best and brightest young scholars has led to burning out, unemplyment, failed attempts at educational intervention that do NOT get the expected community support despite all the lip service. Bard College's wonderful Early College iniative has inspired high tech firms to futher rip apart universities, colleges, and high schools with bloodless distance learning. Not using tecnology to aid real interaction, but to simply replace it. Who suffers most? Thrown away scholars or conned and cheated students?

It's a tossup. And an ignored catastrophe for the U.S. as a well-educated nation. The world literally laughs at us. I know people in European higher ed and we are a pitied JOKE.

Oh, and that is no joke.

Mr. President, get this book. Now.

All the best.

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.