Customer Reviews

Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement

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a reader, you are clearly ignorant of the realities of adjuncting and grad school, and why it is not acceptable for universities to make hefty profits off of their students and then turn around and pay adjuncts and grad students sub-poverty wages. The class I'm teaching right now at a state college pays $2800. I'd have to teach ten classes a year to make $28k! Four and four is the 'normal' load...lets see *you* teach four classes and then come home and read a little critical theory so you can finish your Phd. What a reader sees as 'back to the sixties' and hostility is really a struggle by working people to make a living doing something they believe in, and what they believe in is being gutted of learning content and franchised and commercialized by corporations. Yes it's true, a reader, and you shouldn't make light of the struggle of working people and intellectuals to fight for the power of education. Pendejo.

Of the books I have read thus far on the corporatization of the university, this is by far the clearest and most direct. Steal this University has some poignant essays in it, in particular the one by the MFA artist who has spent years as a freeway flier in Southern California. Also very enlightening is the essay on the "merit system" for tenure line and tenured profs, and not only, how unfair it is (which I, as a UC employee already know), but actually how expensive and inefficient it is to run.

What I think is missing from the book (and from others like it) and what another reviewer has commented upon is the student perspective and the other odd market forces at work, as well as the ongoing mystery as to why higher education gets more and more expensive for the student, while the pay-scale for everyone other than top administrators seems frozen or going down.

The final issues seem crucial to get answers to, if we are going to have any chance of improving the status quo.

This collection of essays is well organized to outline the key higher education issues of corporatization, organizing, what it's like to be a non-tenured faculty member unsure of their next contract.

Casual labor is here to stay, but solutions to current problems are few and far between. Tenure battles, personal stories of anguish, and barriers to unionization provide the reader a thorough and actually entertaining escape from their own problems resulting from the increased use of contingent faculty.

Although it appears as that the University of Phoenix is being singled out as the great perpetrator, the fact the students have a choice is overlooked. There are more University of Phoenix style schools out there, some of which are being organized with tremendous entrepreneurial funding sources and will probably eclipse Phoenix.

The diverse array of assembled writers and editors adds variety and perspective to this book.

The other two reviews accurately reflect logical perspectives on the clash of the dwindling but nevertheless delighted adepts securely tenured in the guild, the restless hordes of journeymen "freeway flyers" doomed to adjunct/part-time work (or in my case, full-time, non-tenured at a corporate university [not U of Phoenix, thank heaven for small mercies] which grants nobody tenure but everybody must work on an "at will" agreement sans contracts), and the eager if exhausted grad students, the apprentices. Benjamin Johnson's edited this collection of accounts, which range from overviews of the situation to analyses of the corporatization effects on higher education, union efforts, and a critique by David Noble (see his "Digital Diploma Mills" for more of same). Ana Marie Cox, whose essay is not really about Phoenix per se as much as the profit-making universities--disdains the proprietary system and makes the negative observations that are largely accurate, and to be expected.

As one from within such ivy-less, for-profit walls that Cox evidently has not entered, what this essay (and book) lacks, however, in my judgment is the first-person testimony of a faculty member from the ranks that Cox and all other contributors shrink away from as if they'd come into contact with lepers. The essayists understandably bewail their fate, lest they end up--desperate and humiliated after graduate matriculation at the Ivies and East Coast elites--at such an institution.

I see from the notes appended that all but one of those with PhDs, no matter their earlier travails, are employed full-time now at universities. Nearly all of those with doctorates (reading between the lines of some descriptions?) seem now on tenure-tracks; Cox alone went into journalism on- and then off-line; two more are doctoral candidates, the remaining two are union organizers. One PhD who has not entered the ranks of the blessed, artist Alexis Moore, shares with me an Angeleno experience of commuting and teaching all about this vast gridlocked expanse, and the fact that she continues to do so in such a journeyman fashion. Her account, as with Kevin Mattson's narrative that includes tellingly a stint of one class taught in a shopping mall at a community college branch, should remind those who declaim solidarity and radicalism from their tenured lecterns that they also are in part responsible for perpetuating not even the status quo of tenure even as a hope to the worthy one in a hundred applicants, but as smug contributors to its decline. How many salaries at the top, administrators, full profs with two or three courses a year, football coaches, fundraisers, are paid so generously thanks to the "surplus labor" of many more adjuncts, with six courses to teach, as scattered across three colleges a semester?

Johnson notes that one in three tenure-track positions recently opened up by boomer-retirees are filled with tenure-track candidates; the rest are divvied up into cheaper disposable part-time and grad student slots. One in three, at best, of those of us with recent PhDs enter tenure-track status; and of course those granted tenure, as Jack Westheimer's chilling tale depicts, will comprise about 10% of all up-and-coming PhDs. Those of us outside of this status are teaching often at basic or remedial levels many of the working class, poor, immigrants or marginalized Americans praised so often by postcolonial, radical, or transgressive theorists who view these disenfranchised from distant ivory towers where few of the proletariat settle or where few of the indentured professoriate ascend.

Cary Nelson (in his similar book "Office Hours") laments the loss of "dedicated leisure" for academic progress among the expendable cohorts. What this leaves, as Mattson depicts well, is the lack of time for the life of the mind, for pondering and reading and writing, and the weakening of future scholarship by those of us beaten down after picking up the heavy teaching loads that our 'betters' jettisoned happily. With little grading or lecturing, endowed profs now can roam to far-flung conferences and enjoy media attention given to pundits and sound-bite experts.

At these conferences, some of us listen to them, if more rarely are invited to join with them in their grant-funded research. Many of us were well-trained by such celebrity as well as more humble profs, to follow the boomers that have taught us and granted us PhDs. We have much to offer, but how much can be achieved when one is given no research funds, no time off, and no financial incentive or scheduling break to think for a while about one's specialty and to produce scholarship...and not only teach at basic and remedial levels one's field? Yes, some of us still manage to do research, but far less than may be needed in many fields either to substantially advance our career or further in-depth study in our specialized discipline.

Those on the tenure perch who scoff at the rest of us wishing they could climb up have often emerged from a far more generously funded past, when only a diss. might be required, one had one's pick of postwar posts, and one could expect to land a decent professorship without publishing books while still in grad school. So far, only a few profs bother in print to even fathom this tidal shift and ebb. Cary Nelson (included here), Michael Berube, and Stephen Watt--to name three in my general field--take the trouble to make this contrast known, and from their own tenured redoubts they rally for the rest of us still fighting in the trenches.

With so many more looking up at those few remaining in the heights, the competition fierce, the pre-requisites daunting, the claim that the rest of the PhDs are simply Not Our People, Darling becomes ludicrous. Supply and demand: for humanities and social science PhDs = low pay; much work of many supports high pay, low work of a few. Academic bottom-line merges with corporate capital. Work, yes, is also researching and publishing, but these labors are desired by any PhD who seeks not only a job but a chance to change the world by ideas and intellectual effort. Overwork in the pursuit of knowledge is no vice!

Half of college teaching done by part-timers, an indeterminate amount (useful for juggling numbers of student-faculty ratios and to keep those endowed chairs happy with the life of the mind little hindered by their two or three small seminars annually at the expense saved by administrators of those who teach hundreds of students in a dozen or fifteen courses a year) of grad students and research assistants, and another fifth like me, full time and not lifetime: meet today's faculty cohorts. I teach 45 weeks for the same pay what my colleagues at teaching, not research, universities do for two semesters. I teach about fifteen courses annually, including mandatory night courses in hybrid on- and off-line form; this strategy is shown to maximize space and resources (like us) while getting students through college admittedly faster (in theory) than the 5 of 6 years increasingly common at "traditional" state schools.

This widening disparity, glaringly, is not addressed sufficiently: do professors have to adjust themselves like other white-collar (in status if not in salary) workers to a post-Fordist economy? The impact of on-line and hybrid coursework, mix-and-match distance learning with a customary sit-in-class three hours a week set-up for today's time-pressed and often little-prepared students does demand that those at the NYUs and Yales and Columbias featured here in their righteous organizing also remember that millions of students and faculty do not have even the dubious but still revered privilege of esteem bestowed by an Ivy or elite degree or faculty affiliation. The cc's and the Cal States (which do gain attention in one chapter, as does Minnesota--where the elimination of tenure nearly occurred) and all the second- and third-tier institutions where most faculty teach today are not given the in-depth exploration they deserve.

Still, for my current level of college employment as a PhD from a "public Ivy" in the most "casualized" (i.e., the faculty having been overwhelmingly in the past three decades made not tenure-track but adjunct, grad-student, and full-time without tenure taught) of all disciplines, the fact that I have at last read accounts and pondered strategies for change, does raise my spirits. With this book at least more awareness is generated about those who face deteriorated conditions, and who face opposition, indifference or prejudice from those who again from the security of tenure proclaim so much compassion for the exploited while they ignore those with whom they share if not quiet offices than at least the libraries and classrooms. And we are not whining when we draw justified attention to the inequalities inherent in corporatized education, and how they fundamentally clash with the rhetoric and positions of traditional education that should be less than theory and more in practice. Those like Smith and Mattson teach out of love and idealism, but is it too much to ask for decent pay and an office or phone?

The solutions, honestly, in this anthology are rather anodyne. The union after a year was crushed at a sister campus of my employer. Placing so much faith in collective organizing is to be expected from a collection that takes much of its impetus from the Yale and NYU strikes of the late 90s. But, as past few years since this 2003 publication show only more momentum for alternative and more profitable (to the administration; whether for students and faculty in this standardized process as on-line modules and syllabi and common texts and publisher's add-on platforms and e-books all proliferate) methods of selling degrees, the suggestions advocated here for class awareness and group effort to make others aware of the precarious plight of contingent faculty seem already--as Johnson notes in his afterword--rather conservative and understated.

Also, like it or not, students, parents, and yes, employers are all wondering why, if the prices of tuition skyrocket past the cost of living increases and the rate of inflation, where all the cash goes, and why students are often an embarassment when with BA in hand they display their true level of skills. If companies are held accountable, if offsourcing and outsourcing are common in the employers of these college grads-- companies who invest in universities for-profit or purportedly non-profit, if taxpayers must come up with more funds for beleaguered state schools, if loans become more common and grants less so under the current Federal and state administrations, then is it that shocking that universities should be expected to document more precisely their failures and their flaws to those outside the ivory towers?

This is not to justify faculty or student exploitation but to recognize that many contributors here in the book fail to address in detail the pressures brought upon formerly impregnable colleges by market forces, student needs for flexibility, and the lack of preparation of many students whose demographics little match those commonly found at NYU, Yale, Columbia or, even, the Cal States. Attention must be paid.

College has been sold as a product, more students of all ages are buying it, and for their debt burdens and time committments, they demand quality at best but often efficiency even more. I wish it were otherwise, but job opportunities for idealists are few. The acceleration of on-line courses, the scrutiny this affords administrators of an instructor's course delivery, and the pressure to teach in compressed shorter modules all increase the pace of our performance and intensify its panoptic surveillance. Like it or not, this reduction to practical learning, more than protests in New Haven or Manhattan, is the norm for most of us teaching (for wages that our BS graduates will often surpass immediately upon graduation from four-year schools) on today's very diverse and often underfunded (ironically!) campuses.

If Professor Johnson, his contributors, or others wish to include in another forum addressing more specifically the role of corporatization not at Columbia as a "corporate university" but at a college that actually is run by such an entity, I will be happy to elaborate more my reflections.

Steal this University is a collection of thirteen essays by various academics and activists, which broadly decries the "corporatization" of American universities and generally recommends the organization of academic labor unions to oppose this trend. The book's title, a riff on 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book!, gives a clue that the essayists wax nostalgic for the New Left but also, oddly enough, the Middle Ages. Many of the essayists assume the existence of a past where faculty, all tenured, governed themselves unencumbered by administrators or financial concerns. A number of the authors appear to equate the notion of faculty governance with "democracy". The faculty governance implied by many of the authors probably never existed, at least in the form of the curiously undefined democracy imagined by them.

One of the editors, in keeping with the book title's lineage, notes that "[t]he 1960s stand as the last decade when big questions were raised about the modern university". While the big question is characterized as "corporatization", the principal issue in this book appears to be the oversupply of Ph.Ds in the humanities. One essayist, Ana Marie Cox, rails against a true corporate university, the University of Phoenix, a successful for-profit company. So incensed by the very existence of such an entity, which emphasizes the "employability" of its graduates, Cox uses corporate names as cursewords and is nonplussed by her admission that Phoenix's students actually want it that way. Of course, the objection to Phoenix's emphasis on employability is ironic since most of this book is about the less than ideal employability of certain academics. So wound up over the existence of corporations, Cox does not understand how universities can hire them to operate dining services and bookstores. Cox's solution is, predictably, state regulation - no student aid for those attending for-profit colleges and laws requiring specific numbers of credits in various disciplines, i.e. government guarantees of employment for under-utilized academics.

Some of the essayists display a precious combination of ideology and naivete. On-line education is no good because it too often requires corporate-university cooperation. Merit pay for faculty is no good because it is too hard. Anyway, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all. Benjamin Johnson complains that adjunct faculty working 40 hours a week have no time to read books. It is safe to say, I believe, that there are a considerable number of people in America who work 40 hours a week and read books. Kevin Mattson cannot imagine anything tougher than earning a Ph.D in 1994. Corey Robbins, writing of the failed graduate assistants strike at Yale, finds Edmund Burke and Augusto Pinochet equally "reactionary". The Modern Language Association is a "conservative organization".

A recurring theme among several of the essayists is open hostility to those who have achieved tenured faculty positions. Not surprising,since what is most evident from this book is that envy is a principal animating feature of the excessive Left. To Johnson, tenured faculty have a "mighty cushy job" and that "very few people on the planet exercise as much control over their daily working lives". If true, it would seem that "faculty governance" is alive and well.

Regarding tenured faculty reaction to attempts at academic unionization, one of the editors asserts that these "winners of the academic lottery are just as interested in crushing such drives" yet some of the contributors acknowledge their disappointment with unions and their "hierarchical" organization.

This is not to say that some of the contributors do not have something to add to the discourse on the modern state of higher education. Is there an overemphasis on on "training" and occupational preparation at the expense of the mind-broadening and critical thinking-enhancing liberal arts? Perhaps, but the answer, as suggested here, is not state-mandated liberal arts curricula or a kind of syndicalist regime in American universities. To use coercive measures, and not reasoned argument, to promote the liberal arts is a jarring irony. In any event, it will be difficult to convince most people that just because someone is attracted to getting a Ph.D in English and the academic lifestyle, that that someone has an inherent right to a high-paying lifetime job.