May 102011
 

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“Academic labor is becoming like every other part of the American workforce: cowed, harried, docile, disempowered.”

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But the tenure system, which is already being eroded by the growth of contingent labor, is not the only thing that is under assault in the top-down, corporatized academy. As Cary Nelson explains in No University Is an Island (2010), shared governance—the principle that universities should be controlled by their faculties, which protects academic values against the encroachments of the spreadsheet brigade—is also threatened by the changing structure of academic work. Contingent labor undermines it both directly—no one asks an adjunct what he thinks of how things run—and indirectly. More people chasing fewer jobs means that everyone is squeezed for extra productivity, just like at Wal-Mart. As of 1998, faculty at four-year schools worked an average of about seven hours more per week than they had in 1972 (for a total of more than forty-nine hours a week; the stereotype of the lazy academic is, like that of the welfare queen, a politically useful myth). Not surprisingly, they also reported a shrinking sense of influence over campus affairs. Who’s got the time? Academic labor is becoming like every other part of the American workforce: cowed, harried, docile, disempowered.

via Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation.

  3 Responses to “Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation”

  1. Put this problem together with that in the post below (“S*** My Students Write”) and what do you get?

  2. Actually, you should read the sh*t academics write about writing.

    No, don’t.

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