How the University Works

Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Marc Bousquet, Cary Nelson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814791127
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it's like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees—including the vast majority of faculty—really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.

Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education—a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher education's corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.

1
Introduction

Your Problem Is My Problem

We have taken the great leap forward and said, “Let’s pretend we’re a corporation.”

—John Lombardi, president, University of Florida, 1997

Over the past forty years, the administration of higher education has changed considerably. Campus administrations have steadily diverged from the ideals of faculty governance, collegiality, and professional self-determination. Instead they have embraced the values and practices of corporate management. Consequently, the new realities of managed education strongly correspond to the better-understood realities of managed health care. For example, both education and health have been increasingly marketized—transformed into sites of unprecedented capital accumulation by way of the commodification of activities and relationships. Public assets and activities intended for the public good have been transferred into private hands. Workers in both health and education have seen the compulsory acceleration of market behaviors (such as competition for resources and profit-seeking) in their professional cultures. In both fields, the management of professional activities has resulted in the return of the sort of dizzying inequalities formerly associated with the Gilded Age. Under the principle of revenue maximization, managers direct professionals to provide ever more elaborate boutique services to the wealthy. At the same time, under the principle of cost containment, they constrain professionals to offer degraded service or even deny service to the vast majority of the working class.

Most people intuitively understand the consequences for health of managed care. Because the calculus of profit demands continuous reduction in the costs of care, especially the expensive labor time of highly trained professionals, the “management” of care implies the substitution of lesser-skilled and lesser-paid workers, such as nurse’s aides, for highly skilled and higher-paid physicians. Fewer people get to see doctors. Doctors have fewer options for treatment and diagnosis. Many critical health care decisions are made by nonmedical management or by doctors with strong incentives to accommodate their managers. More of the expense and burden of care is shifted to patients and families. Under a profit regime, the standards of care are established not by the measure of lives saved but by the measure of financial risk: At what point do the fiscal liabilities for malpractice exceed the dollar savings of using fewer, cheaper, less experienced, and less elaborately trained personnel? Up to the limit of malpractice exposure, health-care providers have real incentives to use older equipment, take smaller precautions against infection and complication, shorten hospital stays, and deny access to the best procedures in favor of cheap procedures.

Less well understood is how the logic of the HMO increasingly rules higher education. For example, management closely rations professor time. Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or nontenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed. If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could “work her way into” a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now. In almost all courses in most disciplines using nontenurable or adjunct faculty, a person with a recently earned Ph.D. was available, and would gladly have taught your other three courses, but could not afford to pay their loans and house themselves on the wage being offered.

Most undergraduate education is conducted by a superexploited corps of disposable workers that Cary Nelson describes as a “lumpen professoriate” (Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords, 208), often collecting wages and benefits inferior to those of fast-food clerks and bellhops. According to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey of 2000, for instance, fewer than one-third of the responding programs paid first-year writing instructors more than $2,500 a class; nearly half (47.6 percent) paid these instructors less than $2,000 per class (American Historical Association). At that rate, teaching a full-time load of eight classes nets less than $16,000 annually and includes no benefits. By comparison, research faculty with half their workload in “publish or perish” activities usually teach four or fewer classes in a year. Persons who have acquired $30,000 to $100,000 in debt en route to a Ph.D. cannot afford to work for those wages. More often than not, working for those wages is the reason they acquired debt in the first place. In fact, without some kind of assistance, few can afford to work for two or three times that amount.

Higher education employers can only pay those wages in the knowledge that their employees are subsidized in a variety of ways. In the case of student employees, the massive debt load subsidizes the wage. For poorly paid adjunct, or contingent, faculty, who are women by a substantial majority, the strategies vary but include consumer debt and reliance on another job or the income from a domestic partner. Like Wal-Mart employees, the majority female contingent academic workforce relies on a patchwork of other sources of income, including such forms of public assistance as food stamps and unemployment compensation. It is perfectly common for contingent university faculty to work as grocery clerks and restaurant servers, earning higher salaries at those positions, or to have been retired from such former occupations as bus driving, steelwork, and auto assembly, enjoying from those better-compensated professions a sufficient pension to enable them to serve a second career as college faculty. The system of cheap teaching doesn’t sort for the best teachers; it sorts for persons who are in a financial position to accept compensation below the living wage.

As a result of management’s irresponsible staffing practices, more students drop out, take longer to graduate, and fail to acquire essential literacies, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on a credential that has little merit in the eyes of employers. The real “prof scam” isn’t the imaginary one depicted in Charles Sykes’s fanciful 1988 book by that title, which concocted the image of a lazy tenured faculty voluntarily absenting themselves from teaching. Instead, the prof scam turns out to be a shell game conducted by management, who keep a tenurable stratum around for marketing purposes and to generate funded research. The tenured are spread so thin with respect to undergraduate teaching, however, that even the most privileged undergraduates spend most of their education with parafaculty working in increasingly unprofessional circumstances. As the union activists of the nontenurable will tell you, the problem is not with the intellectual quality, talent, or commitment of the individual persons working on a nonprofessorial basis; it’s the degraded circumstances in which higher education management compels them to work: teaching too many students in too many classes too quickly, without security, status, or an office; working from standardized syllabi; using outsourced tutorial, remedial, and even grading services; providing no time for research and professional development. Working in McDonald’s “kitchen,” even the talent of Wolfgang Puck is pressed into service of the Quarter Pounder.

Despite the tens of billions saved on faculty wages by substituting a throwaway workforce for professionals scrutinized by the tenure system, managed higher education grows ever more expensive. Tuition soared 38 percent between 2000 and 2005, outpacing nearly every other economic indicator. Where does the money from stratospheric tuition and slashed faculty salaries go?

At for-profit institutions, the answer is obvious: it goes into shareholder pockets. Currently enrolling about 8 percent of the 20 million students in financial-aid-eligible institutions, publicly traded education corporations have shown eye-popping return on investment. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, the average annual return on publicly traded education corporations ranged from 63 to 75 percent (Cho). Since a sizable fraction of these large profits come from tax dollars in the form of financial aid, there has been growing scrutiny of nearly every major player in the for-profit sector. Recently, ITT, Corinthian, and Apollo have all endured substantial federal or state investigation; Career Education underwent investigation by both the Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission, while simultaneously defending a rush of lawsuits from investors and employees (Morgenson; Blumenstyk, “For-Profit Colleges”). In early 2006, the New York State Board of Regents placed a moratorium on new programs by for-profit vendors, after “perceived abuses” at institutions enrolling 60,000 students and receiving more than $100 million in aid from the state (Lederman). I’m persuaded by Jeff Williams’s elegant formulation describing the defunding, privatization, and commoditization of higher education as the creation of a “post welfare-state” university. But I wonder if we might not press even harder at the matter by describing this restructuring of higher education as the “corporate welfare” university?

The explosive growth in the profits of education corporations comes at a time of intensifying corporate profits globally. In the five years after 2001, the Standard and Poor’s 500 showed a record-setting twelve straight quarters of profit gains averaging 10 percent or more. In 2005, the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan each showed all-time highs in profit share as a percentage of gross domestic product. This could mean that education corporations were lifted by a generally rising tide of profitability. Alternatively, insofar as education profits were well ahead of most other industries, there might be features unique to higher education, enabling it to take special advantage of the conditions particular to this historical profit opportunity. The latter seems more likely. Goldman Sachs, which reported most of these figures, attributes at least 40 percent of the record expansion of corporate profit margin directly to corresponding financial losses by workers, especially the erosion of wages and benefits due to casualization, outsourcing, deregulation, and globalization (Greenhouse and Leonhardt).

It seems probable that the larger-than-average success of education profiteers has quite a bit to do with a larger-than-average ability to extract concessions from its workforce. Lacking even the veneer of a tenurable stratum, the dollars squeezed from a 100 percent casual faculty joined tax money and tuition from the country’s poorest families in enriching the shareholders of education vendors.

But in nonprofit education, which only “pretends” to “act like” a corporation, where have the billions gone? At first glance, there are no shareholders and no dividends. However, the uses to which the university has been put do benefit corporate shareholders. These include shouldering the cost of job training, generation of patentable intellectual property, provision of sports spectacle, vending goods and services to captive student markets, and conversion of student aid into a cheap or even free labor pool. So one sizable trail to follow is the relationship between the financial transactions of nonprofits and the ballooning dividends enjoyed by the shareholder class.

The shareholders of private corporations aren’t the only beneficiaries of faculty proletarianization and the tuition gold rush. Because public nonprofits have been receiving steadily lower direct subsidies from federal and state sources, there has been a general belief that higher tuition and staff exploitation have somehow been accomplished by sharp-eyed, tight-fisted managers with at least one version of public well-being in mind, if only within the narrow framework of “reduced spending.” But that belief is open to question, since managers have been spending fairly freely in a number of areas.

One area in which nonprofit education management has been freely spending is on themselves. Over three decades, the number of administrators has skyrocketed, in close correspondence to the ever-growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has soared as well, also in close relation to the shrinking compensation of other campus workers. In a couple of decades, administrative work has morphed from an occasional service component in a professorial life to a “desirable career path” in its own right (Lazerson et al.). Nonprofits support arts and sciences deans, chairs, associate deans, and program heads comfortably in six figures. Salaries rise into the mid six figures for many medical, engineering, business, and legal administrators. University presidents have begun to earn seven figures, close on the heels of their basketball coaches, who can earn $3 million annually and are often the highest-paid public employees in their states. There are also notably those who directly administer capital. In 2003, the administration of Harvard University compensated the individual who managed just one sector of their endowment to the tune of $17 million. This rate of pay was 1,000 times higher than the compensation doled out by that same administration to Harvard’s lowest-paid workers. In thirty years of managed higher education, the typical faculty member has become a female nontenurable part-timer earning a few thousand dollars a year without health benefits. The typical administrator is male, enjoys tenure, a six-figure income, little or no teaching, generous vacations, and great health care. Nontenurable faculty are moderately more likely, and nonteaching staff substantially more likely, to identify themselves as belonging to an ethnic or racial minority than the tenure-stream faculty. Administrators are less likely to identify themselves with minority status the farther they are up the food chain.

There are lots of other areas in which nonprofit administrators have spent even more. With the support of activist legislatures, they’ve especially enjoyed playing venture capitalist with campus resources and tax dollars by engaging in “corporate partnerships” that generally yield financial benefit to the corporation involved but not the actual campus (Washburn, University, Inc.). More prosaically, they’ve engaged in what most observers call an “arms race” of spending on the expansion of facilities. And as Murray Sperber and others have documented, they’ve spent recklessly on sports activities that—despite in some cases millions in broadcast revenue—generally lose huge sums of money. The commercialization of college sport has raised the bar for participation so high that students who’d like to play can’t afford the time required for practice, and students who’d like to watch can’t afford the ticket prices. Traditionally, the phenomenon known as “cross-subsidy,” the support of one program by revenue generated by another program, primarily meant a modest surplus provided by the higher tuition and lower salaries associated with undergraduate education; this income was used to support research activity that was unlikely to find an outside funding agent. Under managed higher education, cross-subsidy has eroded undergraduate learning throughout the curriculum and become a gold mine supporting the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!

Why have those who control nonprofit colleges and universities so readily fallen into the idea that the institution should act like a profit-seeking corporation? At least part of our answer must be that it offers individuals in that position some compelling gratifications, both material and emotional. This is an age of executive license. In addition to a decent salary and splendid benefits, George W. Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. College administrators commonly enjoy larger salaries and comparable benefits. They, too, have the privilege of declaring war—on their sports rivals or on illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and industrial pollution. It feels good to be president. As a “decision maker,” one can often arrange to strike a blow on behalf of at least some of one’s values. What must be swept under the rug is that the ability to do these things is founded on their willingness to continuously squeeze the compensation of nearly all other campus workers. The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine. If in nonprofits it accumulates in some form other than dividends, there’s all the more surplus for administrators, trustees, local politicians, and a handful of influential faculty to spend on a discretionary basis. It’s often assumed that some vaguely defined yet all-powerful force called “economics” or “market pressure,” perhaps from the above-mentioned for-profit education corporations, has made all of this pain, the degradation of teaching and learning, “necessary.”

For instance, in what is otherwise one of the better essays on the rise of for-profit education, Ana Cox suggests that for-profit institutions have a profound influence on the management of nonprofit higher education. As she puts it, a “creeping for-profit ethos” has spread from the University of Phoenix outward, to the nonprofits.

This is a very commonsensical assumption, and it is correct in the general sense that nonprofits have adopted revenue-maximizing principles borrowed from the larger world of profit seeking. But it’s wrong about the heart of the matter. Who is influencing whom? While for-profits enroll about 8 percent of students in institutions receiving financial aid, they capture only 2.4 percent of those enrolled in institutions granting degrees. For-profits collect just 5 percent of the $395 billion spent on higher education in the United States (Blumenstyk, “For-Profit Education”). They remain strongest in distance and nondegree education, in the tradition of correspondence schools such as Donald Trump’s 10,000-student “Trump University” (Osterman). There are certainly some ways that the low, single-digit market share of degree-seeking students enjoyed by the for-profits places pressure on certain segments of nonprofit education, especially community colleges. But it is hardly the case that for-profit schools taught nonprofit higher education how to cheaply deliver a standardized, vocationally oriented curriculum designed by tenured administrators and implemented by a massively casual instructional force. That practice was perfected decades earlier by the nonprofits themselves, while billionaire University of Phoenix founder John Sperling was still a labor activist and president of a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, struggling to better the situation of faculty exploited by his nonprofit higher education employer. The dishonest staffing of the nonprofits taught Sperling, a one-time idealist and faculty unionist, how to harvest surplus value more ruthlessly than Nike and DeBeers, not the other way around.

As a matter of policy, accreditation, and sometimes law, the nonprofit institutions themselves intentionally crafted the low standard of a majority nonprofessorial faculty between 1972 and the 1990s. It was this low standard, set by the nonprofits for themselves, that, in turn, permitted the explosive profits of commercial education providers circa 2000. As a result, the accreditation system, dominated and ultimately corrupted by the administrator class that had engineered these low standards in the first place, was fundamentally helpless to protest that the for-profits had too few highly qualified faculty members. While the Big Ten and the Ivy League were aggressively expanding the meaning of “faculty” to include untrained graduate students, retirees, moonlighters, and anyone else able to work for Wal-Mart wages, who could argue that the for-profit competitors to community colleges should be held to higher standards?

The Culture of the “Corporate University”

There are many ways of understanding what we mean when we speak of the “corporatization” of the university. One valuable approach focuses on the ways campuses actually relate to business and industry in quest of revenue enhancement and cost containment: apparel sales; sports marketing; corporate-financed research, curriculum, endowment, and building; job training; direct financial investment via portfolios, pensions, and cooperative venture; the production and enclosure of intellectual property; the selection of vendors for books, information technology, soda pop, and construction; the purchase and provision of non-standard labor; and so forth (e.g., Barrow; Bok; Kirp; Newfield, Ivy and Industry; Noble, Digital Diploma Mills; Spe...