Campus Equity Week

Campus Equity Week is dedicated to addressing one particular inequity among the many inequities of life in the neoliberal age, and on the neoliberal campus: the increasing turn toward part-time and temporary positions among university teaching faculty.

I draw here chiefly on two essays, one by mole favorite Yasmin Nair, titled "Class Shock: Affect, Mobility, and the Adjunct Crisis," and published on contrivers.org, and the other by Nancy Welch, from International Socialist Review, titled  "Educating for austerity:  Social reproduction in the corporate university."  Both of these are worth reading in their entirety.

As Welch notes,

While 75 percent of US college and university faculty at the start of the 1970s had the security of long-term tenure-track employment, today more than 75 percent of instructional faculty are classified “contingent,” teaching on contracts as short as a single semester, typically without healthcare, disability, [or] retirement benefits. Half of these precariously employed professors are classified part-time and paid a per-course median rate of $2,700. Dubbed “freeway fliers,” they must frequently speed from one campus to the next, and still they fall short of a living wage. ...

Yet hard times have not come to all on college campuses. Administrators in US colleges and universities now outnumber faculty and reward themselves with salaries worthy of Wall Street. . . . By 2013 nine public university presidents were drawing more than $1 million in annual compensation, up from four the previous year. Skyrocketing, too, are public universities’ net assets. . . . Public and private universities alike foreground in their mission statements the business-like goals of efficiency and external investment opportunities. ...

These rags or riches tales also represent the reversal of fortune that neoliberalism—the employers’ offensive of the past 40 years that has smashed unions, slashed wages, and eliminated healthcare and retirement provisions—has brought to all employment sectors in the United States. . . .

Far from existing as an island apart, the university is subjected to that transformation described by Harry Braverman at the start of the employers’ offensive forty years ago: the transformation of all society into a “gigantic marketplace.”

Welch notes that while cuts in funding have rationalized cuts to programs---in subjects like women’s studies, Africana studies, German, music performance, public history, and linguistics--spending has actually increased at universities--paid for not by public spending but by exploited faculty and debt-ridden students. "Between 1978 and 2012, US college students have borne a total tuition and fee increase of 1,120 percent."  Meanwhile the government has been increasing its surveillance of academia with demands for assessment and accountability.  While programs in Women's Studies or American Ethnic Studies are still available at elite universities, on other campuses, there is more angling to deliver core curriculum on the cheap, through online courses, or through so-called competency-based education.   These changes are part of bringing universities (back) in line with the needs of a differentiated capitalist economy, sorting and ordering the work force: "the Ivies [are] charged with elite formation; other privates and a handful of public “Ivies” [with] credentialing a professional middle class; and the many state university regional campuses, state colleges, and community colleges [with] training skilled workers.

Preparing workers for an increasingly precarious labor market  means providing those workers not only with the knowledge appropriate to the work they may do, but also the dispositions to accept the exploitative system in which they find themselves.  This "education in disentitlement" is delivered through both "curricular content and the disaffecting experience of enrolling in high-priced super-sized or online classes" but "an education in service to austerity is delivered foremost through escalating debt that trains a generation of students to accept the notion . . . that education should properly be an up-to-the-individual expense."

As Yasmin Nair points out, many recent narratives about adjuncts rely on what she calls "class shock,"  juxtaposing, for example, the advanced degrees and other accomplishments of contingent faculty with their reliance on public assistance and food banks.
 

A PBS report puts . . . feelings of entitlement and shame . . . bluntly, when it quotes [a] professor . . . fighting on behalf of adjuncts, [saying] “Adjuncts are the lowest paid people on campus. They get paid less than the folks who come in at night to clean the classrooms.”

This last statement is, of course, meant to be a damning indictment of the betrayal of the adjunct, saying, in effect, We pay highly-educated people with multiple degrees less than the uneducated slobs who clean up our trash.

[The press has highlighted] the apparently shocking fact that a great many highly educated adjuncts [are] on food stamps. But . . . so is a full 15 per cent of the US population. ...

In the US, everyone pretends there is no such thing as class, but everyone’s biggest nightmare is facing a descent into a lower class category. . . .
For years, academia has meant a form of class mobility for many (and it has also, at the same time, for many, been a way to maintain class hierarchies) but the rise in adjunct positions and the slashing of tenure lines, along with the increased contempt for the professorial class has meant, in effect, a dwindling of the possibility of entrance into a class position and, consequently, a wider sense of class shock. . . .

if we ignore the class narratives at play in all of this, we run the risk of only making incremental gains for a select few. . . . There is no returning to [those] real or imagined halcyon days when (white male) professors in tweed jackets peacefully toiled at their desks unencumbered by questions about their next meal; there is, indeed, much about that scenario that needs drastic revision. At the same time, substituting women and/or people of color in that scenario in some neoliberal version of diversity will do us no good. . . .

Rather than insist that we need and want more places in a system that will reward the deserving with a privileged class position, we might want to argue, simply, that we deserve the rights of all workers, that intellectual production is labor, that teaching is . . . labor. . .

The reality, of course, is that adjuncts are not simply after class status but very real benefits, including life-saving benefits ... like healthcare. But, in the US, such benefits are part and parcel of class status. Employment itself is seen only as a product of hard work (with no attention to the systemic inequalities produced by capitalism) and, consequently, benefits are seen as accruing to those who deserve them because of their greater devotion, their work ethic, [and so on].

....the perception of a failure to achieve class status as a failure . . .  reinforces the link between material benefits and class status, instead of what should be a logical outcome of any real understanding of inequality: that everyone deserves benefits, regardless of class status.

As Welch points out,

The movement to abolish tenure altogether in the University of Wisconsin system is the latest logical development in capitalism’s in-built drive to commodify all labor—to convert, as Marx wrote more than 150 years ago, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers”—and prepare the way for deskilling and proletarianization.

As Welch stresses,

reproducing capitalist social relations and ensuring a desired quantity and quality of labor power are [not] schooling’s only possible functions. Workers historically have fought for education benefitting the development of their human capacities rather than restricting them to serving as instruments of profit.

But the successful demonstrations in South Africa this past week against increases to university tuition are only the most recent indication that mass struggle can beat back the corporate offensive.  Such movement is most successful when it forges alliances among students and faculty, workers and community. As Welch stresses, "protracted intersectional struggle is the only antidote to the market subordination of all society."

In South Africa, in Wisconsin, in Chile, and Canada, and Portland,

Each strike and struggle throws up the immediate, urgent questions: Who will have the rights to education, health care, retirement, and a life, unburdened by debt...? Each strike and struggle also throws up the biggest question of all: What kind of social order will our schools serve?

[for the Old Mole Variety Hour October 26, 2015]

see also  Higher Education: Capitalism At Its Most Despicable by Paul Buchheit