About Marc
Marc Bousquet is a tenured asssociate professor at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in radical U.S. culture, internet studies, and writing with new media. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by NYU Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
Email Address: pmbousquet@gmail.com
Website: http://howtheuniversityworks.com/
Posts by Marc
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Mama, Don’t Let Your Kids Grow Up to Be Grad Students
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Tip of the hat to an anonymous commenter over at Household Opera’s entry on Adjuncting in the Tar Pits:
I suppose part of the reason why I never considered a career in academia is that I am the child of an adjunct. My father was teaching at three different institutions when I was small, and later, as he gained more seniority, he was able to teach at just one. He teaches at a community college, and he was *finally* made a full-timer this year, at the age of 63, thanks to the union. The only reason we had (barely) enough money or health insurance growing up is that my mother taught in the local public schools. And funny enough, my mother is the one who went to a state school and my dad is the one who went to the Ivy. Dad’s employer, and lots of others are making more and more use of adjuncts and driving wages down to a despicable level. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
You can say that again.
I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
Thank you.
If you’re at the MLA annual convention in San Francisco and feeling, well, precarious, the discussion group for faculty serving contingently invites you to a guerilla happy hour at the Hilton’s Urban Tavern, Monday, December 29, beginning 4:30 pm. I’ll be there with young Emile, who may literally have bells on.
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Friday, December 19, 2008
Some Critical Blunders By the MLA
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.
All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate exercise of institutional authority.” The effective compromise between these positions is the committee’s endorsement of rights and privileges for the nontenurable that are as similar as possible to those of the tenured. (Elsewhere, I’ve written about this kind of compromise under the heading of “the intricate evasions of as.”)
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What the MLA Got Right
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am - 12pm
In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag—important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some oversights and blunders regarding the circumstances, views, and needs of the workforce they were reporting on. I also shared some key facts from the report, including that women disproportionately fill the worst-paying jobs, and that English is unique in having lost 3,000 tenure-track lines in the ten years before 2004. All indications are that the bleeding will continue—this year’s advertised positions are down 22%, and many of the advertised searches are cancelled, or will be.
In this part, I want to focus on kudos for some of the report’s key recommendations.
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The MLA Report on the Academic Workforce in English
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Literally a decimation. And so many women faculty, toiling out of the tenure stream for incredibly low wages.
Part 1: Key facts and kudos
Part 2: Complaints and concerns
Part 3: Interview with Paul Lauter
The Modern Language Association has only recently taken real notice of the nontenurable majority, having abandoned meaningful consideration of lower-division disciplinary issues to NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. Ditto for workplace matters, which the late Phyllis Franklin once announced to me was “really AAUP’s job.” English studies is still reaping the fruits of Franklin’s leadership today—a rich, briskly efficient disciplinary association that can’t quite bring itself to reach into the crapper where the discipline’s most immiserated faculty desperately swirl....
That’s why the recent Report on the Academic Workforce (large pdf) is a mixed bag for me personally.
On the one hand, I’m happy and relieved to see some of the major recommendations in this report, and think it takes a number of critical, long-awaited steps in data gathering, angle of analysis, policy thought, and disciplinary self-reflection. It’s the first time I can say that the MLA has made a thoroughgoing effort to describe how faculty are really employed in English, and make recommendations based on that reality. It’s a must-read for anyone in the field.
On the other hand, despite welcoming most of the recommendations, graduate employees and faculty serving contingently—not to mention quite a few of us writing on these issues—can be forgiven their disappointment that it’s taken MLA so long to act on observations and demands that have been made with perfect clarity over the past quarter-century, since the events leading to the landmark Wyoming Conference Resolution. (In one of the interviews she gave about the report, Franklin’s successor Rosemary Feal claims that the shift to a nontenurable faculty has been “rapid and largely unnoticed.” Um, not really.)
It’s a long report, and I have a lot to say about it, plus—I hope—an interview with Paul Lauter, one of the report’s authors, and one of the earliest and best analysts of the role that permatemping began to play in English by the early 1970s. A couple of key facts in this post; more key facts and kudos in the next; complaints, concerns and interview with Paul to follow.
Key Facts
+ Between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole. In terms of raw numbers, however, most disciplines actually gained tenure track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5% new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43%.
English, however, lost over 3000 tenure track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than 1 in every 10 tenurable position in English—literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued—and all indications are that it has--by early next year we will have shed another 1500 lines.
+ Rewards in English are profoundly stratified by gender. While men hold the majority of tenure-track lines in Carnegie Research and Master’s institutions, women hold a substantial majority of tenurable lines at the less prestigious baccalaureate and two-year schools.
Only a third of tenurable positions in community college English departments are held by men. Additionally, women continue to substantially outnumber men in nontenurable positions—both full and part-time at every institution type.
Part 1, with more key facts and kudos regarding some of the recommendations, will continue....
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Friday, December 12, 2008
An Extra Half-million in Every Pot
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
you gotta watch this Batgirl video!
Look, there’s no way to confront how the gated-community crowd has stunk up the economy without core legislation addressing higher education, health care, gender equality and workplace association as human rights. While the five million top consumers were out getting boob jobs, BMWs and blood diamonds, the rest of us were grading their kids’ papers, scrubbing their toilets and doing their nails. (The chance to “choose” paper-grading instead of other things has a lot to do with the racial division of wealth.)
Here are five key pieces of legislation for The One to jump on--like, yesterday-- if he wants future historians to give him the “FDR meets Lincoln” treatment he craves. As I’ve previously written, Obama doesn’t have the luxury of hedging his bets, robbing Peter to pay Paul the way Clinton did. He has to go all in and actually accomplish things.
First, he’s got to work for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The Reagan-Bush mob has used the law and regulatory power dishonestly, as a bludgeon to deprive U.S. workers, including faculty and staff, of internationally-acknowledged rights to organize. 60 million Americans would join unions tomorrow--if there were real protections for human rights in the workplace.
Second, he’s got to stop fooling around with the tissue-paper health care “proposals” he had stuck to his shoes throughout the campaign. He needs to get behind something like Rep. John Conyers’ HR 676 Medicare for All single-payer plan. Watch the news in early January for the 20 (yep, 20) major labor organizations launching the “Labor for Single Payer” campaign.
Third, women on average lose half a million dollars over the course of a lifetime due to the gender wage gap--and that’s just comparing full-time to full-time. Add in the ways that “part-time” employees are ripped off--especially in higher ed--and it’s a boatload more. So it’s time to strengthen the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which passed the House last year, to include 100% equal pay for equal work for part-time employees and then get it past the Senate.
Fourth, as long as we’re on the MomsRising.org agenda, Obama had best pass unemployment modernization--and also strengthen that bill to include provisions specific to faculty serving contingently.
Fifth, back when higher education provided real opportunity and not free job training for corporations, it was free or nearly so. Every state that actually spends money on higher education has slashed that spending over that past four decades: time to put real Federal billions on the table as matching funds with one string for the states accepting it--make public higher education free, period. Cost: $25-40 billion federal, similar in the states--an amount that Adolph Reed presciently said in our interview over a year ago, “that Congress passes out as a tip in corporate welfare.”
Redistribute the wealth? You betcha. Special thanks to Maria Maisto of adj-l for links provided in this piece.
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Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Gifts for Academics
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
So appropriate, and at the right price.
Whether you dropped half a million in your TIAA-CREF or are standing in line for free cheese this holiday season, you may be looking for ways to cut back on your dispensation of holiday cheer, while still letting your friends and colleagues know that you’re thinking about them.
Enter Shite Gifts for Academics, my new favorite Facebook app. Devised by someone named “Michael,” you can choose from a wide array of thoroughly appropriate virtual gifts, from an “overbearing, maladjusted colleague” to a “crappy office chair,” a “vengeful student evaluation,” an “idiot chairperson,” “condescending IT guy,” “colleague who knows Robert’s Rules of Order by heart,” a “4-4 load,” or a “windowless office.”
You do have to be on Facebook to use the app. Your students can use the app to send you gifts as well. You can create your own gift app, or use some of the other great gift apps out there. (Yes, Virginia, two of my faves are the “Send Che” and “Send Power to the People” apps. As your holiday gift to me, we’ll pretend you already made your “if wishing made it so” joke.) There’s already a gift app tailored to a particular academic discipline: “Shite Gifts for Computer Scientists.”
Not all are flavored with irony, outrage, or weary amusement at our collective folly--you can also send an earnest “enthralled class.” Which, whether you’re on Facebook or not, is my holiday wish for you. Solidarity, M
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Thursday, December 04, 2008
Taking the Austerity Bait Will Shatter Obama’s Plans For Higher Ed
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Without federal leadership, the crumbling faculty infrastructure will remain disproportionately white and male in the best-paying and most secure positions.
With everyone else getting bailed out, higher education is at an absolutely critical juncture, with profound implications for academic actors at all institution types, and their ambitions to serve racial and economic justice.
On the one hand, yesterday’s major AFT report on the permatemping of the faculty urges the necessity of reversing course on academic staffing. That would imply a greater investment in higher education, almost certainly including substantial federal leadership and funding. Most of the public don’t have any idea how many of the faculty are untenured, and are shocked--not in the Casablanca sense--to learn how much they’re paid. When they are given the true picture, every ordinary taxpayer gets it: something’s wrong when faculty earn less than bartenders; nobody would trust an accountant earning less than a living wage, etc.
On the other hand, as education “leaders” across the country have already made clear, their intentions aren’t really to get together and demand a “bailout” or a “new New Deal for higher ed,” etc. Why not? Instead they seem all too ready with even more grandiose plans for austerity.
That’s because administrations have found four decades of austerity useful to establish greater “productivity” (more work for less pay) and more “responsiveness to mission,” which is to say, more control over curriculum, research, and every dimension of teaching, from class size to pedagogy.
They anticipate the coming years will be even more of an opportunity in this respect. In addition to massive world-historical spending on the military, police, and prison sectors, the diversion of public funds to the financial and industrial sector gives the rhetoric and tactics of austerity a needed shot in the arm: just when we were about to stop falling for the “oh, this year it’s austerity again” rhetoric and demand restoration of public funds to a public good, we have the whole government standing in front of flags with their empty pockets turned out.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Tennessee Takes “Turkey at the Top” Award
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Turkey at the top is always intensely competitive. This year’s contenders included first runner-up Robert Felner, the U of Louisville dean indicted for conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in what the feds allege are repeated acts of embezzlement of grant monies amounting to over $2 million. Not content with these escapades, Felner racked up 31 grievances and complaints in his 5 years at the “U of L” but was consistently backed against the faculty by upper administration, especially Provost Shirley Willihnganz and President James Ramsey, who spent extravagantly on lawyers and consultants to prop up his administration despite what numerous accounts (including this one and others that I’ve privately confirmed) termed an “onslaught” of complaints from faculty, staff and students alleging “unsavory behavior, ranging from sexual harassment to workplace intimidation.” This pair continued the authoritarian regime of wall-to-wall administrative solidarity and secrecy established by their high-living predecessors, former provost Carol Garrison and former president John Shumaker--later found sharing lavish hotel rooms and limousines at public expense, while jetting to trysts in the University of Tennessee’s private plane.
But every year only one can win. This year’s award goes to the chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, Charlie Manning, for his new business model for higher ed in his Appalachian state. Over the past couple of decades, the great state of Tennessee has burned millions of education dollars on executive compensation, sports facilities, and miles of orange carpet--while leading the country in squeezing its faculty.
Of course the “new” business model isn’t new at all--it’s just Chuck Manning refusing to let a good crisis go to waste. It’s the same tired Toyota-management theory from the 80s, with wide-eyed managers and credulous politicians swapping bromides (crisis=danger + opportunity) of doubtful validity, linguistic or otherwise.
In the big picture of capital, Chuck Manning is just a low-level squeezer--the higher-ed equivalent of a regional manager for PepsiCo. The first half of the “opportunity” for higher-level squeezers and shareholders has already been realized, in the stabilization of finance-industry holdings and incomes. Chuck’s job is to realize the other half of the opportunity--squeezing a few more nickels and dimes out of his already-on-food-stamps faculty, and further watering down the thin gruel he passes off as “higher education.”
In the business curriculum, squeezing nickels and dimes until your workers are living on food stamps, loans, or gifts from relatives is called “long term productivity enhancement.” Manning’s ideas for good squeezing include:
+ Requiring students to take a certain number of online courses en route to their bachelor’s and associate’s degrees.
+ Turning online learning into an entirely automated experience “with no direct support from a faculty member except oversight of testing and grading,” and providing financial incentives for students to voluntarily accept teacherless education-as-testing.
+ Use even more adjuncts and convert the remaining tenure-stream faculty into their direct supervisors, “formalizing” that arrangement. (Can you hear me screaming “I told you so”?)
+Use “advanced students” to teach “beginning students” and build that requirement into curriculum and financial aid packages. (Again, I’m screaming. You should be screaming too.)
+Increase faculty workload, initiating a “students-taught” metric to supersede courseload, and “revise” summer compensation.
+Austerity for the poor--cutting athletics at community colleges, eg--but rewards for privatization and revenue-producing programs, etc etc.
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Thursday, November 20, 2008
Faith-Based Economics
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Colbert: “Let’s just classify belief in the free market as a religion.”
Hint: drag cursor to 4:40
I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for help with dislodging the market fetish, whether I’m talking to undergraduates or economists. Some regular contributors at one of my other places have all been expending a ton of energy on recent posts like this one and this one trying to get finance prof “James” to loosen a white-knuckled grip on his Ronald Reagan prayer shawl. Without much success.
So this one’s for Lucky Jim, drj50, Unemployed Academic, Joe Erwin, George Karnezis, Maria, “me,” “k,” angry, Annie, Henry C. Frick, Amanda Huggenkiss, David Yamada, and the rest. You know who you are.
Tonight we’ll let Colbert take a shot at explaining the relationship between voodoo and the business curriculum.
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Monday, November 17, 2008
The Problem Isn’t With Administrator Pay--It’s With Yours
Many administrators are underpaid, but the faculty underpayment is ten times worse—and more consequential for student learning.
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
In connection with the Chronicle’s Executive Compensation supplement, Sandy Ungar of Goucher College and I just appeared on NPR--and we agreed on most things. Sandy for instance described faculty compensation as “appalling,” and concurred regarding our over-reliance on contingent appointments. I argued that we needed to rebuild our crumbling faculty infrastructure, and that presidents should be held responsible for staffing arrangements that lead to scandalously low graduation rates.
I’ll write more about this later, but for now you can listen to the interview and read our commentary.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Iraq War Ends--Bush Indicted For Treason
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
College tuition is free; and executive salaries capped at 15 times the minimum wage.
The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of the New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.
It captures the gap between what is needed--what we hope and long for--and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.
The lead story narrates our exit from Iraq and inquiries into war crimes. Other stories note the passage of universal health coverage, not Obama’s fake plan, and Adolph Reed’s proposals for free higher education, which I’ve discussed in this space before, including a great video interview with Reed, recorded about a year ago.
Of additional interest to Chronicle of Higher Ed readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all executive salaries at 15 times the minimum wage. This means that in a society paying a floor of $10/hour, executives could still earn $300,000.
As I point out in my forthcoming column in the compensation issue, though, public interest pay grades (military and civil service, eg) tend to keep the pay maximum closer to a multiple of 5.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and most state governors earn only about 5 times of the lowest-paid college graduate in their service, generally not more than 8 times more the lowest-paid 18-year old without any college at all.
In Reality, However
Meanwhile the real NY Times pimps one of the sleaziest Sophie’s Choice deals ever concocted by quality management (you know, the same people who have sold you the idea that you’re “participating” in management by getting to decide whether to take on more work or accept less pay).
Obama’s favorite schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, is trying to break the union and teacher tenure in the public schools by offering a $40,000 raise to any teacher who will give up tenure. What they’re proposing is a dual compensation scheme: a $40,000 raise for those on the new “green” track, and squat for those on the tenured “red” track.
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Saturday, November 08, 2008
Boots on the Ground, Eyeballs on the Screen
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
He texted. He Twittered. YouTube visitors played his official campaign videos for almost 15 million hours. But what impact will social media have on his governing?
We now know that a first-term U.S. Senator overcame two of the most successful political machines in recent history—the Clinton network and the Republican 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation—with his expertise as a community organizer.
In some ways he was wet behind those trademark ears in the matter of presidential campaigns—at one point asking advisers if he could plan to spend weekends at home with his young daughters. But as an organizer, he knew what he was doing.
The numbers are astonishing. In battleground states, uncountable, unplanned-for busloads of volunteers showed up to knock on doors for weeks before polls opened. On election day alone: one million doors in Ohio, almost two million in Pennsylvania, where there were 500 staging locations for canvassers. In one Virginia county of 72,000 voters, two thousand volunteers poured in, many from neighboring states. Enough volunteers to push every wheelchair, call every number, knock on every single door.
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Saturday, November 01, 2008
Facebook the Vote!
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
At 12:01 am on election day, thousands of younger voters and activists will simultaneously reset their Facebook pages to display a get-out-the-vote message--using a new application that allows users to “donate” their status lines to a third party.
The application allows users to specify whether they want to get out the vote for a particular candidate or on a non-partisan basis. With a single click, users can solicit all of their friends to donate their status lines as well.
When I started writing this post, the number of users “donating” their status lines to the message was 45,304. By the time I posted, the number had risen to 47,108. Update 29 hours later: the number of donors has risen to nearly 300,000, suggesting the possibility that it will break a million sometime Monday.
Given the historic level of interest in this election--interest in bringing to an end the three-decade Era of Reaction--the only limit to the spread of this particular application is that only Facebook users signed up for causes can use it.
This may or may not have an impact on the election--it’s just one strand in a vast web of social media and other new-media contributions to this campaign season, including the Democratic candidate’s Obama Girl on YouTube and some spectacular small-donor fundraising.
I suppose this particular app could be a social-media version of a yellow “Live Strong” wrist band, a fashion statement without any real impact on youth turnout. (Some of the reports on early voting in Florida suggests that nursing-home voters in wheelchairs are more likely to endure long lines at the polls than college students.)
On the other hand, the University of Minnesota nearly quadrupled the world record for single-day flu shots by using a similar Facebook invitation. So I guess we’ll see.
By the way, one of my recent posts (Ink for Obama) was probably fairly criticized for a version of early celebration--what Michael Moore is calling “dancing on the 5-yard line.” For the record: get thee to the polls!
Episode #2 of John Lenin’s series Allday University Starring Adjunct Alice.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Colleges Welcome Women Faculty, Especially When They Don’t Ask For Much
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Episode #1 of John Lenin’s series Allday University Starring Adjunct Alice.
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Friday, October 24, 2008
Ink for Obama
It’s not the New Deal yet--Obama could still turn out to be more like Hoover than FDR.
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
It’s nice to see the electorate finally rejecting the same old Raw Deal.
On the other hand, we’re pretty far away from a new New Deal, except for bankers. In fact, we could be in for a long tour of Hooverville.
I know, that’s not what you want to hear about The One.
He’s pretty. Like Kennedy, only moral, and he writes most of his own stuff, which is nice. Daddy didn’t fund his political career.
But his policies on education (charter schools: yum!) and health care (buy your own!) are miles away from the “socialism” that Dumb and Dumber have labelled them.
Sad to say, but if you’re inclined to view the moment through the lens of a potential Second Great Depression, then Obama’s positioned a heck of lot more like Hoover than FDR.
Hoover was a moderate, progressive, market regulationist--like Obama, who invokes Chicago-school praise for markets with the idea that they occasionally need to be managed lightly. The New York Times, unsurprisingly, thinks Obama’s market allegiance is just dandy; Naomi Klein, however, warns in the Nation that Obama’s Chicago Boys represent “the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right.”
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