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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
About Brainstorm
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Brainstorm Alumni
Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Must-See Patriotic TV | Comment
How to Get Food Stamps | Comment [1]
Poverty in Higher Education | Comment [9]
What I'm Reading Now | Comment [7]
Meet the Trustees | Comment [4]
Administration's Culture War From Above
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
ADMINISTRATOR: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator.
—Joe Camhi, “Screw U, a play in one act” performed at Portland Community College
One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture — targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This administrative movement shot into high gear in the mid 1970s after anti-union labor economist Clark Kerr and his pet Carnegie Commission gazed with trepidation at the then-rising faculty-union movement. Just as the 1960s had been the “decade of student power,” Kerr wrote, the rising culture of faculty solidarity seemed certain to make the 1970s the “decade of faculty power.” What we need, Kerr suggested, is a “management science of reaction.”
And boy, did he get what he wanted. Administrations have succeeded hugely in substituting for faculty values their sick culture of competition, quality engineering, market responsiveness, and mission-centeredness — academic capitalism, in the indispensable formulation of Leslie, Slaughter, and Rhoades. The studies I’ve read conclude that university administration has achieved a profound “corporatization of the self” in most faculty, despite occasional “concrete opposition” in faculty institutions, chiefly unions.
But there is an emergent culture of struggling back from below, evident in the self-organization of graduate employees and contingent faculty. California COCAL used to have a great online resource of some of the Wobbly-style agit-prop performed by the West-coast contingent faculty associations: I hope they get it back up soon. And I just taped a Wobbly grad student activist at the University of Chicago and his comrades singing a truly affecting resistance song.
These performances work, communicating the dishonesty and bad faith of administrations to students, parents, and legislators. In the taped Portland Community College productions and following open-mike responses of the students, you can hear the horror in the voices of the students when they learn that their faculty earn less than $20,000 a year.
The Philadelphia academic unions have been very active in supporting the campaigns and rights of other workers in the metropolitan area, and the proceeds will go in support of fired Embassy Suites housekeepers affiliated with UNITE HERE.
If you’re in the Philadelphia area on Saturday May 3, check out the award-winning play about the bad-asses at TUGSA/AFT Local 6290 (the Temple grad employees’ union), sponsored by the Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT Local 4531, the Temple University faculty and librarians’ union, and co-written by Lonnie Carter and Rich Klimmer.
Location: Saturday evening, May 3 at 7:30, Rock Hall, Cecil B. Moore and Broad St., Temple main campus.
If you can’t make it, you can send a check to: TAUP- AFT Local #4531 AFL-CIO, 1900 N.13th Street, Barton Hall Room A231, Philadelphia PA 19122-6013, or write April C. Logan, TUGSA/AFT #6290, Department of English, Temple University, AprilCLogan (at) aol.com .
Posted at 09:04:19 PM on April 27, 2008 | All postings by Marc BousquetComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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TO: Bousquet, Marc; 2LT, ARMY OF DUH PEOPLE, Rhode Island, 3rd Res.
FROM: Seinfeld, Kálmán
Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere, then?
— S. Britchky · Apr 28, 04:48 AM · #
I am no friend to lazy faculty, never have been. Nor am I a friend to lazy students. Nor am I a friend to higher education bloggers. Nor am I much of a friend to my personal friends. Nor am I a friend much to myself. I do not find the “friend” relationship to things of much use.
However, I have been inside the beast—working in the heart of darkness that drives psychopaths to the top of “organizations” that “maximize” outputs for profit. I am no friend to the monstrous souls that current top ten MBA programs systematically produce—their monster traits imbibed from what economics does to the soul of faculty most of whom are men, dedicated from birth to being ruled by the hormones from the glands that swing between their legs, driving them from emotion, from sensation, from sensitivity to others, towards selfish, gargantuan self promotatory bombast.
When the culture of detachment that academia WAS in society is invaded by the culture of out of control male hormones that MBAs embody (nice word that, in this context), you get out of control monkeyisms as policy for higher education—make the little monkeys “more productive”, make the monkey compete more, make the little monkeys divided into striata/rankings/social-classes, make the little monkeys compete for who has the biggest banana (sexual pun intended). A more enobling enticing atmosphere for developing the mind has never been imagined!!!!!
Americans have this ignorant penchant for thinking “more of our wounderful selves” and “more of our wonderful past” is the cure for all failings. It never occurs to them that “their very nature is producing their deepest recrudescent problems”. Oh no—our identity could NOT be at fault—we are wonderful—it is must slight inadequacies of technique that ail us. This stubborn, anti-educated, bigoted stance causes 1/6 of the US national population, decade after decade, policy after policy, candiate after candidate to be without parents, healthcare, or schooling. What a HARD problem it is!!! We must think of more freedom, more innovation, more any sort of solution BUT getting our elites to practice elemental responsibility for the societies that enrich them. Anything BUT that is “a solution”. So for “improving” higher education, we turn to our past—let’s do to higher education what MBAs have done for our economy (produced a world wide recession built on houses of cards collapsing as regulators become ideologically unkempt). Let’s have a world wide knowledge recession regularly as MBAs “manage” knowledge and faculty and all that. Think how much MORE we can get from the same inputs if we use professional management!!!!!
Clark Kerr was, actually, Satan and only now are we discovering his evil nature—he made the system a system, he made it efficient, and now 30 years later, the system he made a system is decaying, year by year, state budget deficit by state budget deficint, republican by republican—into academic mediocrity (plus home prices making high salaries a joke there). Let’s spread that to all of America!!!!
Let’s get the lazy faculty turned into high performance monkeys!!!! THAT will inspire students and introduce them to the world of work and its cultures sooner and better!!! Students can start eating bananas right after their SATs!!!!
Monkey see monkey do. Why delay becoming a productive monkey if colleges, taught by newly en-monkey-ed professors can instill monkey-dom in one and all from freshman year!!!!! Wonder of wonders!!! Progress of progress!!! Sloughing toward Berkeley to be decomposed!!!!
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 29, 05:25 AM · #
Actually, it’s “slouching” not “sloughing,” as in “slouching towards Bethlehem” or “Slouching Toward Kalamazoo.”
— Dan · Apr 29, 08:10 AM · #
Dan, I’ll bet you a banana that RTG knows full well the Keatsian AND the Didionian references he references in his final sentence.
RTG: very cute. It’d‘ve been better if you’d cast the asides aside and trusted your audience to get all your sly metaphors.
Too bad. Style is all very well, and entertaining to boot. But the play (and the players) at hand resist style almost as much as substance. M. Montaigne, where are you when we need you?
— barbara · Apr 29, 10:37 AM · #
Huh. I’m on the road, a bit tired, really psyched about super-thoughtful conversation with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney about the labor of administration, administration as labor during my engagement at Duke.
Genuinely don’t get #1 and #4. I mean, I get Britchky: “duh people,” a not very amusing knock on democracy from an elitist dullard in the class war from above. But the rest of it is just wierd—Rhode Island, etc, what’s that all about? And then #4 seems to think that I don’t get Richard Greene, and maybe I don’t, because he seems fairly sincerely critical of MBA culture and the monkey drive to “productivity.” So if Barbara sees a sophisticated irony on his part, she’s right that that I don’t. But I’m happy to have the wizardry explained to me.
I’ll be a bit behind in posting while traveling, but have some updates on McGill and other nastiness across the northern border to come after I get back from New York
— Marc Bousquet · Apr 29, 11:11 PM · #
To Marc: If you have any time please post something about your conversation with Moten and Harney, too.
— Therese Quinn · May 12, 10:38 AM · #
Marc: A point of clarification. There are two Embassy Suites Hotels in Philadelphia. The HERE-NOW workers that were fired in Philadelphia were employed at the Embassy Suites at the Airport. All housekeepers, including some displaced from that hotel, are fully employed at the Embassy Suites in Center City.
— Albert Palubinsky · May 13, 08:21 AM · #