NYU University Press recently published Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. You can read his blog here and find his you tube page here.
Here’s the blurb from NYU UP:
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 educations corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.
The introduction and table of contents are both available on NYU UP’s website, but via Bousquet’s blog, I’ve posted a link to Chapter 4 (“Students Are Already Workers”) which is certainly an issue many of my students are constantly dealing with. (click here for Ch 4 students-are-already-workers.pdf). Bousquet summarizes:
It discusses the nightmarish experience of working-class students recruited to work midnight shifts five school nights every week at UPS on the promise of education benefits that few persist to receive. Per shift, they earn about what administrators spend on a sushi lunch. Most drop out, and many get injured. Only a fraction persist to degree. In some terms, because of the obligation to pay back tuition remission if they quit this horrendous job “early,” more students were working off their “education benefits” without actually taking any classes than were enrolled.
It’s nice to hear how the shifting structure of the University is having an adverse impact on students as well as faculty and graduate students (for good old fashion sexism, see Larval Subjects disturbing, but unsurprising post here) which tends to get most of the attention. Of course, there are the usual ridiculous, horrifying and depressing figures about the job market (again from Bousquet’s blog):
Thinking of grad school in the humanities? Are you ready to gamble your future–your marriage–your kids’ future–your health–your retirement? In part 2 of my interview with Monica Jacobe, she describes how graduate school resembles a lottery. “You can do everything right, ” she says, “and you still won’t get a job.” After a median 10 years of study, most humanities PhDs will have dropped out or not received a degree. Of the minority who do earn a degree after ten years, and perhaps four or five years of job-hunting, 40 percent of language PhDs will still not have tenure-track employment. That means no tenure-track job of any kind–not in North Dakota, not in a community college, not at a religous school where you have to sign a loyalty oath to the pastor. And if you do get that job–in what could be your late 30s or even early 40s–what awaits most is a salary similar to a moderately experienced bartender or a 23-year-old police officer. In many fields this means that perhaps 1/4 of the folks who started graduate school over the past decade might get a shot at lousy pay in the tenure track. If present trends continue, that percentage should drop considerably for folks entering grad school this year, to 1/5 or even 1/6. Of course since the vast majority of qualified persons who might have thought about grad school but couldn’t afford the luxury never even applied, talent–especially working class and middle-class talent–is rushing away like water over the falls. And if family wealth determines who can afford the professorial life as a sort of jolly volunteerism, the wealth gap means that folks from racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to see themselves as able to afford this particular form of philanthropy.
Anyways, interesting and poignant stuff, I’m looking forward to picking up a copy of the book.
i saw the youtube videos some time back about “contingent faculty” and “food stamps” – i thought it was a bit dramatic but certainly on point, i should probably take a look at the book at well…
One of the more vexing things about this is how it isn’t seriously discussed in academia. In Continental thought, at least, you have all these academics who devote their life to thinking the political, yet when the issue of the academic market comes up they suddenly revert back to conservative ideologues, arguing that they arrived at their positions based purely on merit and their hard work (the American myth of the autonomous self-made man that pulls himself up by his own bootstraps), disavowing the opaque power relations governing advance in academia. On the one hand, there’s the tragedy that would-be grad students have to make life defining decisions very early on, despite often lacking the necessary background knowledge that would allow them to make wise decisions. That is, they need to make informed decisions as to where to study and who to study with. If these decisions are poorly made at the outset, the student, despite doing outstanding work, will often be doomed from the start as they won’t have the necessary professional connections and letters of recommendation to get them noticed on the market (e.g. their supervisors won’t have the clout to effectively pick up the phone on their behalf and contact other departments).
On the other hand, there’s academic “quicksand”. This, I think, is particularly egregious. Chances are, most are not going to get a position (or a desirable position) right when they go on the market. Faced with the brute material question of how to support themselves, they are forced to either teach a heavy load of adjunct courses for a pittance and without healthcare, or take a highly undesirable position at a community college, etc., where they have a heavy teaching load and a number of administrative duties. The reasoning of the candidate is that they’ll do this to make ends meet until they finally do get a position. What they fail to realize is that they’ve already fallen into the quicksand. First, they begin to get the ’stench’ of adjunct work, temporary assignments, or community college on them that looks to job committees like failure (the myth of merit rearing it’s head again: “they couldn’t make it so they had to adjunct!”) Rather than adjuncting being seen as a positive insofar as it confers teaching experience, it is instead seen as a negative implying a failure to effectively navigate the system. Second, and more importantly, the job seekers are mired in quicksand as their heavy workload prevents them from doing the research and publishing required to land a tenure track position. As a result, they end up either leaving academia together and beginning their lives much later than all their peers, or, if they’re very fortunate they land a fulltime community college position (where they’re universally disrespected by people both outside academia and by people at four year schools and research programs).
This state-of-affairs thus functions as a selection mechanism that reproduces the conditions for the possibility of the system of production. That is, those students who were fortunate enough to make informed decisions early on and go to top notch graduate schools (remember, most undergraduates lack knowledge of the top-notch research programs in academia as they are not yet researchers themselves) land the tenure track positions. Whereas those who attend fair but not stellar programs end up becoming the higher education “proletariat” without a real shot of advancing to those positions. There is something deeply wrong when an academic can publish books with highly respected presses, publish articles, have a stellar teaching record, and letters of recommendation from highly respected academics in the field, and still be unable to land a tenure track position (and here I’m not talking a research one position with grad students either, just a liberal arts position in a four year program). I am not sure what can be done about all this, but it does seem to me that the system is dysfunctional and in need of reform… Even if that means shutting down a number of graduate programs or admitting fewer grad students.
All this aside, whenever I hear faculty engaged in some variant of “critical theory” broadly construed (ranging anywhere from Adorno to Badiou) on search committees who begin talking like Reagan conservatives and placing all the onus on the individual, mocking job applicants and deploring how graduate students “whine” about the market, I want to punch them on the nose. It is astounding to me that any political theorist or continental thinker can so easily disavow their own role in these forms of exploitation.
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Well put, indeed. When I went through my doctoral program I remember my adviser bragging to me early on over beers that all of his students have finished in a timely manner (to him a long 6-7 years) and have been placed in jobs. When I asked him whereabouts he told me that the two most recent graduates landed jobs teaching philosophy in community colleges, but quickly qualified it by saying, “well, er, umm..but they’re good community colleges…” This kind of attitude is as you point out, rather pervasive. My adviser, who likes to think of himself as a beer swilling, whiskey drinking, working class proletariat type talks the talk but just doesn’t walk the walk, his qualification has always been very telling, namely, that candidates that land these type of jobs are somehow failures that couldn’t quite make it in the “real” academy. Yet, he disavows the underlying power structure and his role in furthering it by blackballing job candidates from Ivy League schools. While this may make him feel better it successfully avoids the real issues at hand, e.g. the current state of the University.
I would favor a shutting down of programs, or minimally, lowering how many students matriculate to one or two each year and providing full funding for those students. Generally, the thought is that the attrition rate takes care of this,weeding out the people who can’t hack it and depositing some cash in the coffers. In my program, 8 of us started, so far I’m the only one who finished–and I finished in 5.5yrs.
I think that’s a good point: graduate students from day one have to be “careerists.” That is, latch onto someone, find some hot issues, strategically publish articles etc. I don’t know many first year graduate students who are ready/qualified to do this, I certainly wasn’t.
Anyways, thanks for the attentive comment, it’s all very aggravating and depressing. Especially when you’re spinning your wheels in quicksand…at present, I have the notorious “term to term” position at a CC which means full load, admin. work, no certainty, one step above adjunct, canceled health insurance whenever school is not in session (including the period between Fall and Spring semester) and less than mediocre pay. Pathetically, I feel lucky for this, a very telling commentary on the state of affairs of the University. Hey, as the pelican from the Flinstones used to say, “It’s a living.”
I’m going to buy this book and will read it with interest. Taking into account the academic job market, I advise all humanities graduate students to think, from the very start of grad school, in terms of four job markets (each one being itself both diverse and stratified): academia, business, government, and NGOs. The skills and credentials gained in humanities MA and PhD programs qualify people for many socially important and personally fulfilling jobs. In fact, many of those jobs are far superior in those dimensions to academic jobs.
John, can you say more about the three non-academic markets? I am sure readers for this blog would be interested to hear about some options – do you have any examples of the kinds of jobs that, say, a PhD in philosophy can look for?
Shahar/Larval, I’m sure we can all come up with great stories about how hostile the market is, I wonder if you know about any graduate student/young scholar organizations discussing these issues? we can’t be the only ones asking these questions, right?
That’s good advice, John. Given my experience in grad school, however, I wonder if this is a rather rare practice. However, I’m not sure that steering students towards non-academic markets is a solution to the broader condition of the University, whether the job market, hiring practices, graduate school. What looks most interesting about Bousquet’s book is the work on the student side that looks into the reality of paying tuition for working class and middle class students. Nonetheless, one thing that would be good for philosophy grad students (or any humanities grad students for that matter) to know is that (at least from what I hear and some of my own experiences) there tends to be a good amount of suspicion directed towards PHDs looking for jobs outside of the academy. One way to counter this is to encourage grad students to volunteer, or work part time in a target industry, in other words, getting some experience to bring to the table in addition to the doctorate. That’s what employers understand. We all know exactly how our skills and credentials may work for us outside academia, but sometimes its an uphill battle to sell…
Shahar, it sounds like we’re in similar situations, though my position sounds a bit more stable (I’m full time at a CC as well). The situation is especially difficult for Continental philosophers in the United States as there are only a handful of academic positions. This year, I believe, there were only 8 positions out of some 300 advertised jobs and out of those I was really only qualified for 6. I was fortunate to land two interviews (as I ordinarily do when I apply for jobs), though it doesn’t look like anything is going to pan out this time around. I count myself fortunate to have the position that I do have and we actually have, oddly enough, a terrific Continental department here with a lot going on in the broader area (we’ve hosted two Heidegger conferences now and a Lacan conference, and have a couple really interesting reading groups with some well known scholars in these areas). Things could be worse, but they could also be a lot better. It’s extremely difficult to do research when you have a 5/5 load.
Ultimately I think things are even worse if you do contemporary French theory as this is generally the domain of lit departments and is not taken very seriously by the philosophy departments. I would advise any philosophy students wishing to study Continental to focus on some variant of phenomenology. The smart move would be to specialize in some key historical figure in ancient or modern philosophy so as to balance out one’s resume. I’ve thought about transitioning into some other branch of the humanities, but given that I’m not published on any literary figures or any form of media studies, I’m not really sure how I’d make the case for being qualified.
Mikhail, I don’t know of any groups offhand that are seriously discussing this issue. This year a group of philosophy graduate students have put together a job market blog to discuss their travails on the market:
http://philosophyjobmarket.blogspot.com/
This site has attracted a good deal of interest from both job candidates and faculty. It’s not unusual to see faculty who interviewed candidates on the market posting remarks from there perspective there. It does seem that this blog is having some effect on some of the uglier aspects of hiring practices, i.e., the lack of information given to candidates post-interview as to whether or not they’re going to get flyouts (it’s not unusual to never hear from a position again after interviewing and a lot of candidates go through a period of extreme anxiety post-interviewing waiting to find out what’s happening). The job blog is a wealth of insight into what goes on behind doors on search committees, and also reveals a lot as to what candidates are going through. The academic job wiki seems to be changing certain practices as well:
http://wikihost.org/wikis/academe/wiki/philosophy
All that said, the job blog is primarily populated by Anglo-American philosophers and Anglo-American philosophers aren’t particularly well known for having sophisticated social and political analyses of systematic forms of exploitation and power. That is, most of the discussion has remained at the level of individual travails undergone by candidates without analyzing the broader systematic context and contours of power through which academia functions and reproduces itself. Everything thus becomes a matter of the personal, whether the personal quirks of those interviewing and the injustice of their behavior or the personal failing of candidates. There has been hardly any discussion of the “temping” of intellectual labor in the form of graduate students and adjuncts and the impact this has on jobs (i.e., universities can save themselves a good deal of money by giving tuition wavers and offering small stipends in return for grad students teaching courses, thereby diminishing the number of tenure track positions). In those instances where graduate students and adjuncts have attempted to organize so as to pursue a better wage, health care, and more job stability, they’ve often been put down pretty hard by administrations. This occurred, for instance, at University of Michigan when the adjuncts and lecturers there attempted to unionize and led to the demise of certain aspects of the English program there where people were hired from year to year with a livable wage and health care benefits. Basically the adjuncts and contract workers are without much leverage at all and thus have very little bargaining power. The situation is exacerbated as so many adjuncts are happy to have any job at all, recognize the precariousness of their position, and are therefore extremely reluctant to speak out lest their course sections disappear. It’s a demoralizing situation all around.
Don’t lose sight of the fact that most big state schools use the graduate students for cheap grading and teaching.
Given this fact, and the Reaganization of everything else in academia, I think it is very unlikely that the supply/demand problem will balance out.
This also is the reason that so many tenured lefty baby boomers are so hypocritical in their political beliefs when it comes the job market issue. The current state of affairs makes their lives very easy as they don’t have to grade many undergraduate papers and for many don’t have to teach (lower level) courses unrelated to their research.
Jonathan Bellman from “Dial M For Musicology” has some great advise for junior faculty/adjuncts – i found it to be very interesting, i suppose philosophers aren’t the only ones with the problem of exploitation…
Check it out here
I’m not pushing the “4 job market” paradigm as a “solution” to systemic corruption, just as a strategy to deal with it.
The result of some quick googlings suggest that museums, tourism, journalism, publishing, legislative staffs, local, state, and federal service (State Dept being only one), and any number of non-profits as obvious potential markets.
The key is to look at your skills: conceptual analysis and clear communication of complex ideas being primary, as well as character traits: self-motivation, ability to independently direct and complete research projects. Many competitors for those jobs will promise these things; you will have concrete evidence of having already done them.
It’s a big world out there: Bousquet’s book shows that you will have to fight stratification and management wherever you go. Looking to academia as an escape from them into an ivory tower is not viable any more.
Look, as a tenured prof in a PhD program at a research university I have a very privileged position. But I was only able to hold out during the poverty of grad school and ten years of having instructor positions due to subsidies (direct and indirect, financial and emotional) from friends, cousins, sibs, parents, and spouse. And I can’t guarantee that if I had shifted gears and gotten a job on a Senator’s staff somewhere along the way that I wouldn’t be even better off, financially and in terms of life satisfaction, than I am now.
It’s a big world; academia is only one part of it.
Thanks, John – as the discussion of these issues continues – both related to Bousquet’s book and not – I’d like to point out a great summary of the recent blog contributions by Leslie Madsen Brooks here.