How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York University Press, 2008, 93-4:

It is obvious today that managerial values interpellate the faculty and students as well, framing not just possibilites for action (what can be done) but possibilites for knowing ("this is the world"). In this way, tenured faculty, even unionized tenured faculty, accept the managerial accounts of 'necessity' in the exploitation of part-time faculty, graduate students, and the outsourcing of staff. Through the managerial ideology, itself supported by a vast ensemble of reactionary social movements in the 1980s and 1990s, faculty no longer question the claims of 'fiscal crisis' while the campus pays millions to basketball coaches [in York's case, it's PR personnel and Vice-Presidents] but sub-Wal-Mart wages to mathematics faculty and custodians. The knowledge has taken hold everywhere that 'markets' are real but 'rights' are insubstantial, as if 'market-driven' indicated imperatives beyond the human and political, of necessity itself, rather than the lovingly crafted and tirelessly maintained best-case senario for the quite specific minority interest of wealth. The managerial mind-set is currently widely shared by faculty, including the values, structures, and limits to possibility of, for instance, 'continuous quality improvement' and 'responsibility centers' and 'informal' decision-making (as if the absence of regulation or due process benefited anyone but those with the power to hire, fire, reward, and discipline). Students, too, share the mania for assessment, ranking, pay-as-you-go, revenue mazimization, and continuous competition in pursuit of 'excellence,' even where these values are demonstrably against their own interests.

The extent to which managerial ideology is at least partly hegemonic of faculty generally and even, distressingly, of organized faculty, is a matter of immediate political urgency. To some extent, the vulnerabilities of faculty in this regard flow from their situation as educators...The degree to which schooling can serve anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic purposes, and complicity with capitalist exploitation, is also the degree to which educators can be persuaded to arrangements that are hostile to democracy and equality in their own workplaces.

[...author notes general willingness of U.S. organized labour to accept multi-tier workplace and its influence on the growing complicity of academic unions in worker exploitation.] ..

This means that higher education is a typical workplace in that 'solidarity,' like faith and chastity for Augustine, is more of an ongoing project and often-deferred goal than a naturally occurring phenemonon waiting to be discovered."

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