How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation » (1st Edition)

Marc Bousquet is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University and the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His previous books include Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers and The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change.

Cary Nelson teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. His recent books include the landmark co-edited collection Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester.

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.

Acknowledgments     xi
Foreword: Resistance Is Not Futile   Cary Nelson     xiii
Introduction: Your Problem Is My Problem     1
The Informal Economy of the "Information University"     55
The Faculty Organize, But Management Enjoys Solidarity     90
Students Are Already Workers     125
Composition as Management Science     157
The Rhetoric of "Job Market" and the Reality of the Academic Labor System     186
Yeshiva University 444 US 672, "Justice Brennan, Dissenting"     211
Brown University 1-RC-21368, "Liebman and Walsh, Dissenting"     224
Notes     243
Works Cited     255
Index     275
About the Authors     281