December 29, 2007
Service With a Frown
The service economy. Indentured servitude. Research, teaching, service.
At a panel yesterday called “How the University Works: Higher Education and the Service Economy,” no one claimed that “service” meant the same thing in all those contexts.
But those seemingly divergent uses of the word do share a family resemblance, the panel suggested — and they are all in play in the modern university.
Katie J. Hogan, chairwoman of the women’s studies program at Carlow University, argued — as many scholars at the MLA annual meeting do — that universities are behaving more and more like part of the service economy.
“Students are increasingly treated as delicate customers,” she said — and as universities have become more active in the service sector, the traditional service component of professorial work has ballooned.
But it isn’t being counted as labor, Ms. Hogan argued. Instead, the service component of a professor’s work (basically, all the managerial, clerical, and governance tasks that fall outside of research and teaching) is treated as “a labor of love, akin to the work women do for their children,” she said.
Shifting the focus to students, Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon Universty, drew an extended comparison between student-loan debt and indentured servitude, an idea he has written about in The Chronicle.
While early American indentured servants had to work off the cost of their ocean transport to the New World, he said, modern students have to work off the cost of their college education — or their “transport to a job.”
That labor often “begins on ship,” Mr. Williams said, segueing into the next talk, by P. Marc Bousquet, a professor of English at Santa Clara University.
Mr. Bousquet said that on many campuses, undergraduate workers make up the largest chunk of university employees and that many of them work at or near minimum wage.
In the bulk of his talk, he discussed a partnership between United Parcel Service and the University of Louisville in which thousands of undergraduates work the night shift at a UPS facility partly for wages and partly in exchange for financial aid. The students he said, “are more likely to be retained as UPS employees than to be retained as college students.”
John Gravois | Posted on Saturday December 29, 2007 | Permalink
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