Perhaps someday, the thinking of the so-called “progressives” will progress beyond the mid-1800s.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and in particular, national council member Marc Bousquet, who was the headline speaker at this year’s North Carolina AAUP conference in April, and past president Cary Nelson, who was the headline speaker at the 2007 conference, fit firmly into the progressive category. They seem to long for the days when Karl Marx was building his Communist philosophy upon such thoroughly discredited theories as the labor theory of value (in which the value of a good is determined by how much work goes into making it). That theory was swept away a decade or two later by the understanding that value is determined by the interplay between supply and demand.
Bousquet’s 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Nelson wrote the forward), reveals that their perspective of modern-day academia is more in tune with the worst aspects of the Industrial Revolution than the modern world of need scholarships, research grants, graduate fellowships, Pell grants, and guaranteed student loans. The authors could use a better understanding of how the world works.
Somehow, when most people hear the term “super-exploited workers,” images of graduate students chained to their workstations for eighteen hours a day, or adjunct faculty forced to lecture beyond the limits of human endurance do not immediately spring to mind
Exploitation conjures other impressions: children forced into sweatshops to pay off family debts, involuntary prostitutes controlled by criminal gangs, third-world tenant farmers who can either eke out a precarious existence on the land or flee to even worse circumstances in urban shantytowns. Many people in this world are born or coerced into horrific conditions that they never will escape.
But American graduate assistants and non-tenured faculty are not among them. Some of them receive low wages for teaching, but they are hardly exploited. They chose their careers, and at any time, they can choose not to continue their “super-exploitation” if it is so unbearable. They can use their educations to find more lucrative employment elsewhere, and if they can’t, nobody forced them to study disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that fail to develop any practical skills.
Quitting an academic career does not mean the end of life, only a new direction. This is to be expected upon entering a highly competitive field. In many cases, it turns out for the better.
Yet Bousquet and Nelson paint the existence of the untenured faculty in colors of bleak Dickensian hopelessness. Bousquet comments that “most undergraduate education is conducted by a super-exploited corps of disposable workers…often collecting wages and benefits inferior to those of fast food clerks and bell-hops.” Nelson, in good Marxist fashion, calls graduate assistants and contingent faculty a “lumpen-professoriate.”
Bousquet’s reason for this sad state of affairs is the “solidarity” among college administrators who “are aligned against the faculty” in a system of “academic capitalism” that a permits them to undermine the solidarity of the faculty. This academic “managerial caste” is “pitched toward continuous struggle with faculty culture.”
Bousquet makes little explanation for how the lumpen-professoriate came to be so ripe for exploitation. But the problems facing contingent faculty exist because there is a surplus of Ph.D.s in many fields. That is why colleges and universities can pay them low wages and still meet the need for instructors.
But Bousquet and Nelson don’t seem to like the idea of supply and demand (or for that matter, market economics), for it does not conveniently support their intentions. Nelson, in the foreword to Bousquet’s book, wrote the following:
There never really has been an overproduction of Ph.D.s, although we have recklessly produced Ph.D.s without doing the work to guarantee them jobs.
In other words, there are not enough jobs for Ph.D.s. Yes, we have recklessly produced Ph.D.s, but there is no overproduction because, instead, we should have created jobs that guaranteed them work in their fields. Nelson would effectively divorce the production of Ph.D.s from any sort of market mechanism featuring supply and demand, and place it under some sort of planning authority.
Bousquet calls his conception of the job market in academia the “excrement theory,” in which new Ph.D. holders are treated like, to be tactful, sewage. As graduate students, their teaching services are needed, since they are a low-cost substitute for tenured faculty. But once they receive their Ph.D.s, they are cast out of the program to seek employment on their own—hence, they are considered a “waste product.” And as more Ph.D.s are cast out, there becomes a “blockage” of Ph.D. holders without work, forcing many Ph.D. holders who wish to continue to work in the system at sub-par wages. (This seems like a roundabout way of saying the supply of Ph.D.s is too great for the demand.)
He suggests that, when schools recognize that there is a glut of Ph.D.s in a particular field and attempt to prepare new terminal degree holders for alternate careers, they are creating a “waste pipe to flush away persons whose teaching services are no longer required precisely because they now hold the degree.” Their abrupt return to the world outside of their graduate program is somehow considered abusive—in Nelson’s call for guaranteed employment, for example, one hears a cry for cradle-to-grave security of socialism that inevitably chokes off the dynamics of a thriving, innovative economy.
Besides guaranteeing jobs, Bousquet and Nelson propose unionization of both non-tenure track faculty and graduate assistants. Bousquet wrote:
Even observers who have been skeptical of the economic impact of unionization agree that it has reduced wage and benefit inequalities, especially between highly paid and lower-paid disciplines.
Unions, however, are not a solution, but instead will distort the market in a manner likely to intensify the situation. If unions enable low-demand humanities professors to earn a salary comparable to high-–demand financial or technical faculty, this will likely encourage more young people to try to become humanities professors, creating further “blockage.”
The increased costs from unionization might also force universities to reduce the number of full-time faculty positions, further choking off opportunities for younger workers. After all, universities did not begin to rely on contingent faculty until after the tenured faculty organized in the 1960s and 1970s. This is often the way of unions—the secure jobs and high pay of senior workers rest upon the insecurity and lower pay of younger workers. This is perhaps best illustrated by the recent collapse of the automobile industry. As senior workers reaped tremendous pay and benefits, the number of jobs was steadily reduced since the higher overhead made Detroit car manufacturers less able to compete. And as the lay-offs occurred, those same workers were able to use their seniority to “bump” younger workers from their jobs.
But such realities don’t matter when radical ideology gets in the way. How the University Works is Marxist at its core, and that philosophy is apparent throughout the book. For example, Bousquet called the preferred state of academia, in which contingent faculty and graduate students achieve political parity with tenured faculty, “The Dictatorship of the Flexible” (the flexible are the same as Nelson’s lumpen-professoriate), reflecting the Marxist call for a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
It is sad that the AAUP, which has made some important contributions to freedom in its long history, has become besotted with a false, counterproductive, and sometimes evil ideology. Yet adherents to that ideology, such as Bousquet and Nelson, are solidly established as part of the organization’s leadership. The organization has forsaken serious thought for shallow trendiness, and abandoned the important mission of preserving academic freedom for promoting radical politics. If How the University Works is an example of how its leadership thinks, perhaps the best thing it can do is to continue to lose membership, as it has done for 35 years, and slide into eternal irrelevance.