Adminispeak 2

Condescend

I see myself as trying to bring them down to earth and steer them in a logical direction but that very often is over-taken by politics and academic freedom which I always argue is freedom of thought, not freedom of action, but others wouldn’t agree with that [laugh]…I’ve got mixed feelings about academics as managers. I think most of them are appalling, but then perhaps my professional bias would come though in this [laugh], they are gifted amateurs, not all of them, but a lot are therefore um, I think very often they will welcome the public support that you give them, but they are also hyper-critical because they don’t really understand and don’t want to understand the big picture either. They don’t think realistically at all. –Senior Administrator

There are people I have met in academe who see it as their job to make life of the Administration, as they call it, ‘Hell’, because they see themselves as being better. I mean, I’ve had an academic, you know, sort of shouting at me and saying, ‘It’s none of your business to be giving us this, you’re just an administrator, an officer, that’s an academic decision’…It was Jarratt who talked about the integration of academic, financial and physical planning and clearly, in any business, it doesn’t matter what the business, but if you don’t integrate the business planning with the financial planning and with physical resources i.e. whether it’s a university, a factory, an office block or whatever, the end result is chaos and that’s no different for a university. –Senior Administrator (Deem et al. 157-8)

Future-Direct

The picture of the future is not a euphoric one, but the educational enterprise can indeed be managed. The focus must be on increasing effectiveness and efficiency, on bringing to bear a managerial approach with an emphasis on planning, managing human resources, financing, innovation, successful representation of the institution to outside constituencies, organizing, coordination, and budgeting.

Marketing will become of increasing importance in terms of defining the institution’s mission, improving or developing programs and approaches so that the “product” is appealing and sought after in a competitive world. It appears from several studies that where there is demonstrably evident academic quality, higher tuition rates are not necessarily an impediment. Tuition levels seem to become a major factor when one institution is basically indistinguishable from others. (Karol and Ginsburg 243)

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Works Cited

Deem, Rosemary, Sam Hillyard, and Mike Reed. Knowledge, Higher Education, and the New Managerialism: The Changing Management of UK Universities. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Karol, Nathaniel, and Sigmund G. Ginsburg. Managing the Higher Education Enterprise. New York: Ronald P, 1980. 

Collegial Innovation

 “Society has rules. And the first rule is: you go to college! You want to have a happy and successful life? You go to college. If you want to be somebody, you go to college. If you want to fit in, you go to college!” Such is the lesson Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) learns from his father and from his own experience in the 2006 Universal comedy Accepted. The film follows Gaines in his quest to trick his parents into believing a college accepted him after he receives rejection notices from all the schools where he applied. He does so by inventing his own school: the South Harmon Institute of Technology. All is mostly well until the realistic website Gaines’ friend made for South Harmon, including an actual link “acceptance is one click away,” becomes the only hope for around three hundred other students in his same position. Unable to tell the truth and turn them or the one million dollars in tuition they pay away, Gaines allows South Harmon to turn into a student-run haven of alternative learning. With Lewis Black playing the sole disgruntled former professor turned dean, the students design the curriculum and teach the classes. Collectively, they set out to build the exact opposite of the colleges that rejected them.*

One of the more sober scenes includes a montage of Gaines at nearby and prestigious Harmon College. He goes there to see “how this college thing works” and finds students bored, asleep in class, high on caffeine, disgruntled and stressed out. The abandoned psychiatric hospital Gaines leases and turns into South Harmon comes to mean more than just its location in the area Harmon Dean Van Horne needs for his “Van Horne Entryway.” All great colleges have buffer zones “to keep knowledge in and ignorance out,” Van Horne says as part of his prescription for what makes greatness: “exclusivity.” This guarded concentration of wealth historically led to the rise of asylums, a fact the film twists. The students in the former asylum liberate themselves intellectually while those in the college are mentally ill. When a student with an exaggerated form of ADHD declares that his acceptance to South Harmon led to the only moment his parents were ever proud of him, it is part of an overall resistance to the “epidemic of compliance.” Rather than unfit the rejected are, again, the opposite.

After telling Mr. and Mrs. Gaines that college is a place for indoctrinating students “into a lifelong hell of debt and indecision,” Lewis Black’s character eases their worry by stating the only reason “that kids want to go to school: to get a good job.” This helps Gaines fool his parents for a bit longer, but also leads to the film’s most radical point: South Harmon students will be completely unemployable. Not only does the actual college represent strands of socialism, but its future graduates will likely find themselves socialist as well: starting their own places of business, reproducing the ideals of the college therein, etc.** Like the innovation that takes place in the technology industry, we take from the film the idea that innovation in higher education comes from those venturesome few who leave the dominant structure in order to produce for creativity and passion’s sake. In the end, though, such innovation is not harmful to the dominant structure of power. Baring the unlikelihood that every student will join South Harmon or alternative schools like it before “real” colleges subsume these schools, the prevailing system of higher education will stay intact. Thus at the end of the film when in a hearing with the state accreditation board, the chair of which declares that the “board does not reject innovation, but it must be watched carefully,” we see that South Harmon’s innovation does not just lead to its own victory to exist. It is a contribution to the dominant system it bucked in the first place, a system that will likely appropriate it when it has fully scaled-up. When Bartleby asks Dean Van Horne, “Why can’t we both exist?” the answer is not only can they, but that they exist to reinforce each other. The small innovative college does not answer the question of the students and faculty of Harmon College who are the main ones left to accept or not accept the status quo of higher education. 

*Apparently I lied about moving away from close readings because I decided to write this after rewatching Accepted.

**I take this entrepreneurial description of socialism from Prof. Richard Wolff’s lecture, “Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View.” In it, he describes a former student of his who wrote a dissertation on the socialist aspects of Silicon Valley startups. Before the venture capital arrives, startup workers mostly produce for themselves, in ways they decide, and thus offer a model for every worker in the economy. I haven’t read the dissertation, but I think this is the point Wolff presents. It ignores the fact, at least here, that these tech innovators who decide to develop their own products usually do so under harsher conditions (long hours, little pay, surviving on pizza and ramen noodles, etc.) that then self-justify the ridiculous amounts of money that come with venture capital or going public. But I think it’s still a good reference as far as worker-operated workplaces.

Higher Op-Ed

I awoke this morning to write a review of two books, then decided Sundays are not for writing book reviews. Maybe for reading, but not writing. Instead, I decided to write an op-ed. One of the tones I’ve tried to strike with this blog is that of a deeper analysis of the university than just saying it’s in ruins. One of the reasons I feel I’m afforded this tone is the spate of popular news articles in recent weeks that have propelled the university into a burgeoning political issue. (See The Nation, TomDispatch, Alternet, and The Times UK.) Add to this Democracy Now’s segment on student debt and the sit-ins at New School and NYU, and we have some serious traction. After all, higher education is a common experience we can rally around in this country. Approximately 70% of high school grads go onto some form of higher ed. Half drop out. It’s time to change that.

 (Also, looking back on my writing now, there’s a weird Obama ’08 “change” thing happening in my conclusions. I do it here as well. I’ll stop. In the meantime, I’d say the difference is that my optimism is grounded in a materialism: It’s no longer just “Yes we can!” but “Yes we own this university because as labor we hold all the power and through organization we can change it!” Not as catchy, yes, but still effective. Hopefully. Here’s to hope.)

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The contemporary university has emerged as a vocational training ground for international capital. The cloudiness of this reality, muddled for most of us who take part in it while we pursue higher learning and positions not normally thought of as vocational, becomes quite clear when we consider the changes in the economy the past forty years. As capital has come to depend more and more on information, we have reached a point where exploiting mental labor is now more profitable than manual labor. Mental (creative, communicative, affective, immaterial, etc.) labor propels the university and in many ways, the university propels the international economy. The university pre-1970 did as well, but to a lesser extent and in different ways. Then it was a place of privilege; a place for elites trained to manage the economy from the top. Granted it is still a place of relative privilege but not all attendees can still be managers; in fact, the majority of university attendees are now and will be workers in an information economy concerned with intellectual property rights, international finance, corporate-university partnerships, and the like.

 The university has always been a guarantor of cultural capital, in degrees; Pitt produces a bit more than Penn State, Penn a bit more than Pitt. But the changes in regular capital have also meant changes in the value of cultural capital. University degrees are more in demand but produce less. Teachers and students put more into their work but get less out of it. Cultural capital ever diminishes while many of us turn a blind eye in the hope that the university still holds its perceived status as a great bastion of upward mobility outside the reach of the economy’s negative effects. With cultural capital, we have stayed separate from other workers. Those who teach and study in the Cathedral of Learning, for example, are set apart from those who work in Pittsburgh’s other buildings.

 This has remained so even when the majority of teachers and students now work on contingent statuses and struggle to live on near-poverty wages. Without cultural capital, we will no longer have the choice of remaining separate. Our positions in the economy will come forward while it continues to change. Higher education itself will be viewed through a different lens, one that sees its pursuit of knowledge for property’s sake instead of knowledge for its own sake. In fact, perhaps through a lens of the history of higher education we will look to see its present and future. Rhetoric (or, discourse more broadly) constituted the main part of higher education in Ancient Greece and it grew out of the legal concern for property rights in the fifth century B.C. Today parallels. Discourse is still our labor; property still our director (although it is now intellect instead of land).  

Of course, this is not what the university should or could be. If mental labor propels the university then it could easily move the university toward its interests. If teachers and students create the intellectual property sold to corporations by university administrations then teachers and students could easily hold onto and own this property themselves. Or perhaps even envision a university as a commons where knowledge remains ownerless—a knowledge commons which is more properly how we perceive the university anyway. Why not materialize our thoughts and feelings about the university? Why not have a university run by faculty, students and staff, self-managed instead of managed by administrators with corporate ends in mind? “Could be” is future-oriented and in a way, the university is as well. With our mental, creative, communicative, linguistic labor, our intellectual property, our very intellects, we are creating the future. We have been for centuries, but now it could be time to create a different one. 

Publish or Not

Over at The Valve, Bill Benzon, via Academic Productivity, pointed to CMU comp science heavyweight Luis von Ahn’s post against research papers. (von Ahn invented the smart and cool, yes, but super annoying CAPTCHA, which seem to have grown increasingly difficult over the past year or so. I usually have to type words at least once; often so many times that it gives me a new one. If I can’t pass his bot vs. human test, what does that make me?) Prof. von Ahn isn’t against research. He’s all for it, and thus his stand against research papers: “Once a paper is “published,” it is set on stone and cannot really be changed, even if you find a much better way to convey the results or if you find that the data is better explained by a different hypothesis. The reason for this restriction is that, 30 years ago, papers were published using physical paper. Such a restriction makes no sense today.”

While von Ahn writes from the comp science perspective, the post, as Benzon says, surely has implications for all academic publishing. The goal of publishing should not be publishing. The goal of research should be research. As per how to share research, better ways exist today than when the research paper first became a staple of the research university growing out of the 1950s and 60s. Papers eventually made their way into the struggle for tenure: As less and less positions led to tenure beginning in the 70s, those that did required more and more publishing. Competition ensues. Add to this the shear growth of universities, and now, van Ahn writes, “[g]iven the number of people working in computer science and the fact that publishing papers is considered the goal of our work, there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam.” I would say this is probably less true in the humanities, spam-wise, but it doesn’t change the fact that the dominant model could and should change.

Alternatives? “Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?” Let’s hope so. In the meantime, a simple shortening of publications could help. A paragraph could replace most ten-page comp science papers, says von Ahn. In the humanities, most 25-30 page papers could probably stand to be a third of that. (Most humanities books could probably be whittled down to 25 pages.) Not that this would mean less polished work or less information in it. It would mean more actually, because of more editing (less noise). I’ve found that 1,000 word research blog posts are the best to read and write, if a paragraph won’t suffice. And I’m in a transition of sorts between genres: before I get to producing “new knowledge” in the work I’m going to do in digital studies soon, I’m trying to move away from the tendency for close readings left over from my undergrad English days. This blog is more for revaluation writing than any other type. Making connections after reading what I haven’t yet read. Construction over deconstruction. Reconstruction. All of this isn’t publishable in a traditional journal, but is on here. 

Adminispeak

This is the first of a ten thousand part series in which I gather the best of the best administration literature for use in my upcoming project exams, dissertation, books, articles, blog posts, ideologies, jokes, and nightmares. In all seriousness, though, this stuff is tremendously fascinating. And it must be read by those not making decisions, but affected by them.

Incorporate

The corporation’s systems of financial accounting, personal management, plant operation, and resource allocation are essential preconditions for the research, teaching, and service that constitute the principle activities of the modern university. If the academic corporation is not well structured, financed, governed, and managed, the cause of scholarship will be, depending on the degree of deficiency, impeded or imperiled. No one would claim that the corporation is itself the essence of the university. To the extent, however, that it makes possible the institutional autonomy, the material resources, and the administrative order essential for the conduct of the work of the university, it is an indispensable vehicle for that essence. (Downey 306)

Flexploit

There is no way, with the best possible planning and optimal flexibility, that academic institutions will be able to keep pace with the manpower demands in the light of inevitable surprises. Time and again there will be an unanticipated need, either in kind or in scope, to which a college or a university cannot completely adjust by using only its own faculty or its own facilities. There already exists an acute shortage of qualified faculty in computer science  and other high-technology areas, and no scheme of increased salaries and incentives can change that. Business and higher education will have to work out systematic ways of using corporate professionals on a part-time basis to augment instructional resources. This cannot be left to individual initiative but must be institutionalized through discussions and planning at the highest level. (Lynton 146)

Innovate

“The key words to describe…any innovation might be new and different. Innovation combines the elements of reform and change; reform implying new and change implying different. Innovation can operationally be defined as any departure from the traditional practices of an organization” (Levine 3-4).

            Diffusion is the process whereby innovation characteristics are allowed to spread through the host organization, and enclaving is the process whereby the innovation assumes an isolated position within the organization. (14)

All organizations “share three characteristics—norms, values, and goals. Norms are the commonly prescribed guides to conduct in the organization—means of communication, patterns of authority and control, rules of membership, and all other characteristics that describe the way the people should interact. Values are the commonly shared beliefs and sentiments held by people in the organization. And goals, which are reflective of organizational values and are attained according to organizational norms, are the commonly accepted purpose and direction of the organization” (11).

Manage

The key to managing the learning university is grasped in the paradox that it cannot be managed. One needs a different metaphor for different behavior in our different times. Clues to finding this different behavior lie scattered in the debris of university’s history and traditions. This the last place where it seems comfy, much less smart, to be rooting around. We have asked frequently where university managers look for guidance and whether this sector provides a test-bed and models for other twenty-first-century organizations—the workplaces of the knowledge society. A dominant impression is of loss of self-confidence and faith in the university itself, understandable given the stresses of massification, marketization and managerialism. Such demoralizing weakening is fatal when university managers see survival by any means as the object, and eighties-style business management as the means. (Duke 150)

Market

In the 1990s, the name of the game will be marketing. Only high-quality [higher ed] institutions will remain intact in the first decade of the next century. But as Sir Christopher Ball (1985) has put it, ‘What the hell is quality?’ None other than fitness for purpose. There will be three key elements in a successful marketing strategy:

·         Reading the market and targeting a niche in it.

·         Giving one’s product brand identity and positioning it within the niche market.

·         Knowing the value of one’s product. Pricing will not be a function of manufacturing costs but a function of value to the customer. (Slee 90)

Technologize

Between us, we in industry and those in higher education need to engender a more positive attitude to the modern high-tech environment, to recognize the importance of industry to the economy of the country and society, and also to increase awareness of the opportunities that it offers. Technology has a major role to play and students must be prepared to work with it, with information technology in particular. It is not important to know exactly how technology works, but it is vital to understand how it can work for us: how to use it as a tool to ‘get the job done’. (Bailey 68)

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Works Cited

Bailey, Ann. “Personal Transferable Skills for Employment: The Role of Higher Education.” Industry and Higher Education: Collaboration to Improve Students’ Learning and Training. Ed. Peter W.G. Wright. Buckingham: Open UP, 1990. 68-72.

Downey, James. “Balancing Corporation, Collegium, and Community.” Organization and Governance in Higher Education. 5^th ed. Ed. M. Christopher Brown II. Boston: Pearson, 2000. 305-312.

Duke, Chris. Managing the Learning University. Buckingham: Open UP, 2002.

Levine, Arthur. Why Innovation Fails. Albany: SUNY P, 1980.

Lynton, Ernest A. The Missing Connection Between Business and The Universities. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Slee, Peter. “Apocalypse Now? Where Will Higher Education Go in the Twenty-first Century?” Industry and Higher Education: Collaboration to Improve Students’ Learning and Training. Ed. Peter W.G. Wright. Buckingham: Open UP, 1990. 68-72.

 

The State of Work

The destruction of the State can be envisaged only through a concept of the reappropriation of administration—in other words, a reappropriation of the social essence of administration, the instruments of comprehension of social and productive cooperation. Administration is wealth, consolidated and put at the service of command. It is fundamental for us to reappropriate this, reappropriating it by means of an exercise of individual labor posed within a perspective of solidarity, within cooperation, in order to administer social labor, in order to ensure an ever-richer reproduction of accumulated immaterial labor. –Antonio Negri

Stefano Harney’s work on governance offers an acute understanding of managerialism today. By default, this means an acute understanding of the way things work in the world today. For Harney, governance has become so pervasive that it is now the new mode of capitalist production (that is, capital now accumulates by and through the practice of administration). Moreover, for Harney, the (non)workers of the university offer us an insight into possible resistance to this new mode of production. What he and Fred Moten call “the Undercommons,” the production and organization of those who labor beneath the university’s perceived purpose, inherently, though complicatedly, antagonize the administered university and direct our attention toward a possible alternative to it.

Who composes the Undercommons? “Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” for starters. It is they who “are often said to be dumb, and often said to be insolent. They must not go out in public. They do not exhibit the right attitude. They are workers from the darkness of the private. To governance they offer only dumb insolence” (“Governance”). To governance, the tool of capital and its managers in the university, this insolence is a byproduct of the self-organization of the Undercommons and as long as these workers keep working, and don’t go outside, all will remain as is.

Governance sees dumb insolence and no possibility in the Undercommons. Harney and Moten see the perception of dumb insolence in the Undercommons as possibility. In contrast to the critical academic, the researcher, the administrator, the traveler, the speaker, the professional, a level of unprofessionalization fosters this possibility. For it is in the unprofessionals that “the condition of possibility of production of knowledge in the university” exists (104). It is in the acts of teacher who teaches for food where the conditions for knowledge production emerge. The teacher who teaches for food does not take a stance against the university like the one of the critical academic. Those in the Undercommons are not against the university, nor are they for it. They do not act unprofessional either, but are only perceived to be unprofessional by management. Their position complicates resistance because it is not one of choice, at least not in the same vein of choice as others in the university. To choose professionalization or criticality is no choice at all. Management offers both; both have become one in the same. To choose to be a thief, “to become unreliable, to be disloyal to the public sphere, to be obstructive and shiftless, dumb with insolence in the face of the call to critical thinking” (109) becomes a choice that creates its own possibility, and is therefore a real choice. A choice leads to the possibility of organization. 

In State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality, Harney explores the substance of government labor. If we begin with the basic problem of all management, how to get workers to not only work in the first place but work hard, we soon come to ask why workers themselves work in the first place. That through laboring for the state, workers, consciously or unconsciously, desire to make the state whole and able to fulfill its promises of community, security, etc., doesn’t add up. Although “government work itself is a richly desiring machine,” or perhaps because of it, the reasons government workers work are more complex. There is the reason that government work “may be an activity not only for others but with others, where administered publics are sparked to recognize something of the labor in themselves, a labor that is not a displacement of society, but a practice of it, a practice of society on society” (5). But it is precisely because government workers are working in this metasocial way, doing social work for an entire society, that their autonomy as individual laborers disappears under the guise of granted citizenship. Government “workers work because they are cheated out of their autonomy on the shop floor through accepting citizenship in an unequal and distorted republic of work” (177). The machine desires, but the desires of those who operate it get mixed up in it in complicated ways. The state that government workers work to bring about never arrives, in part because they work to bring it about.  

What organizations are able to become has strictly to do with what is already in motion and what captures a form that can then be presented as an organization. The state worker captures a form that becomes the state labor process, but because of the agencies of capital with which the form is invested, that labor process develops a general character. To rephrase it, the state labor process might be understood as the place where the underlife of revolution chooses a form of self-discipline to express itself as a relation, an organization. But if the form of organization is to hold, and is to contain this underlife even temporarily, it must generalize itself. It must produce the homogeneity of form that capitalism requires. This remains so difficult because the genesis of that form is not in the process of planning but the restlessness of labor to find itself. This means that public administration cannot plan or conceive of this form, it can only try to convince labor to rest—the one thing it cannot do under capitalism. (178)

We are left with Negri’s call to reappropriate administration, to reappropriate “the instruments of comprehension of social and productive cooperation.” Solidarity and cooperation, like that in the Undercommons of the university, will lead to the abolition of the state—“not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

“As was the factory, so now is the university.” “Call out to it as it calls to you.”

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Works Cited

Harney, Stefano. ”Governance and the Undercommons.”

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. ”The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text. 22.2 (2004): 101-115.

Negri, Antonio. “Constituent Republic.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 

 

Becoming Managed

Despite the injustice and impracticality of the arrangement, large numbers of young people continue to present themselves to the meat grinder of doctoral study. Most fall away, but a significant number persist, and of the persisting few, only the tiniest fraction take advantage of tenure to refuse steadily mounting demands. These are the questions that corporate managers have been examining for decades with a keen sense of envy. How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all? –Marc Bousquet

Writing about the current state of higher education, with any bit of awareness or commitment at all, means writing about mostly depressing conditions. Fascinating stories that could have gone a number of different directions lie in the university’s history and an abundance of possibility and hope lie in its future. But the present mostly sucks. Still, the task of today must be done and part of this task includes simply highlighting what have become the norm experiences of higher ed—experiences that tell us what it means to be managed.

For example, what is a graduate student today? In her recent call to raise “pack consciousness” amongst grads, Heather Steffen gives an historical account to frame the possible answers: “The history of the graduate student in America is a short one. We’ve only been around since the turn of the twentieth century, and we’ve only been used as TAs in large numbers since the 1970s” (248). Coincidentally, or not, the 1970s also saw the beginning of university administrations’ move toward employing casual labor. During the 80s, it got a little tougher for recent PhDs, especially in the humanities, to find assistant professorships. The 90s got a little tougher. Today, it’s extremely tough.

It took thirty years, but, starting with Marc Bousquet’s groundbreaking essay, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education,” we eventually began to see the reality of what a graduate student is. The “apprenticeship” label no longer holds any sway. If grad students are apprentices, we would presumably, like apprentices, be guaranteed full jobs after our apprenticeships. We aren’t. If the so-called job market were really a market, it would presumably get better. It doesn’t. And so now, rather than erringly following slight peaks and dips on graphs, we know that the job market isn’t a market at all—it is a smoothly functioning system that continues to do exactly what it was designed to do: produce cheap labor. Recent PhDs are not meant to get jobs “because new graduate students or former graduate students without a doctorate are [the ones now] doing the teaching” (Bousquet, “We Work,” 151).

What does it mean to be an undergraduate? For most, it has come to mean being an indentured subject. Not only are students already workers (average undergrad age: 26; average hours of work per week: 30), they are indebted workers who are not likely to see anything like economic freedom until their retirement (if then). “The average federal loan debt of a graduating senior in 2004 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) was $19,200. Given that tuitions have nearly doubled in the last decade and grants have barely risen, and that debt more than doubled from 1994, when it was $9,000, not to mention from 1984, when it was $2,000, one can assume that the totals will continue to climb. Also consider that, as happens with averages, many people have significantly more than the median—23 percent of borrowers attending private and 14 percent attending public universities have over 30,000 in undergraduate loans” (Williams 36). Essentially, being able to take out loans no longer means you’ve made it out of the working class. It means you’re going to be struggling to pay them off for the better part of your life. Being a student no longer means attaining intellectual and economic freedom. It means paying money you do not even have yet in order that your labor, present and future, be taken from you.

What does it mean to be faculty? For starters, it means not being a professor. Since the 1970s, when three-quarters of faculty were on the tenure-track, we have witnessed an exact inverse of tenurable faculty ratios: three-quarters are now off the tenure track. Nearly half of higher ed teachers work only part-time on semester-to-semester contracts, with poor to no benefits or resources for teaching. Higher ed teachers no longer have the right to profess. Should one be lucky enough to receive an assistant professorship out of grad school, and publish rather than perish, the extremely hard and talented work of scholarship and teaching now finds itself confounded with required service work.

Increasingly, the very language ascribed to the university is a language of service: faculty members respond to increased demands for endless reports of various kinds; administrators ask faculty and staff to assist them in marketing the public image and mission of the institution; students are treated as discriminating ‘customers’ to whom faculty and staff must provide academic guidance and personal attention. At the same time, contingent faculty and students serve as cheap sources of campus labor so that colleges and universities can direct funds toward improving campus facilities and sports complexes, all in the name of recruitment, retention, and marketing. And while there are fewer full-time tenured and tenure-track professors to join committees and work closely with administrators and students, the legwork related to these services has not decreased. This ‘servicification’ of higher education shifts attention from the production of basic knowledge and bold intellectual inquiry toward a model of selfless serving, helping, and assisting with some kind of institutional goal or on-campus—and, increasingly, off-campus—agenda. (Hogan and Masse xv-xvi) 

It’s important that service has come to separate itself from its perceived purpose. No longer is it for the betterment of the particular academic community for which it’s done, but for the betterment of particular financial interests of said community. It is unpaid labor; devalued, feminized, and part of a continuing exploitation of affective labor. It also shows how higher education lies in the center of the service economy rather than apart from it. 

Precisely because academic work occupies a place in the regular economy, it, like all labor, holds the potential for change. Our natural desire can change the present state of higher education.

“This human drive—toward integrity, autonomy, and dignity in our work—is so powerful that capital’s latest round of innovation depends on it, far more so than it depends on ‘technological’ innovation of the production process” (Bousquet 149).

Instead of being flushed through the system without resistance, we can block it. We can make it stop working. In part, by recognizing our own work—and its potential. 

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Works Cited

Bousquet, Marc. “We Work.” the minnesota review. 71-72 (2009): 145-52.

Hogan, Katie, and Michelle Masse. Intro. Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces. Albany: SUNY P, Forthcoming.

Steffen, Heather. “Pack Consciousness.” the minnesota review. 71-72 (2009): 248-53.

Williams, Jeffrey J. “Student Debt and The Spirit of Indenture.” Dissent. Fall 2008: 73-78. 

The Network University

…a big part of the university’s work is still institutional: reproducing hierarchical differences and producing docile subjects, so hacking the machine of social reproduction in Higher Ed is bound to be complicated work. I doubt whether a successful engagement with this process would produce another 1968 – the latter was still a revolt against the institutions, while we know now that power operates in and through networks. But it will definitely be a challenging process to be part of – requiring commitment and imagination. –Tiziana Terranova

Just as networks are not tropes, what I am here calling the network university is no trope either. Metaphors pervade (descriptions of) the university, yes—the “corporate university,” for one example. It has a nice ring to it: a crisp, clean sound that makes sure we know corporate greed drags the university into “ruins.” If only we could get back to the good ole’ days when universities weren’t like corporations. But the metaphor works against itself. Even if we are bold enough to claim that the university has become so corrupt that it is no longer just like a corporation but now is a corporation, we still miss what the corporate university really means.

Harvard’s board of trustees is the oldest corporation in the US. In 1819, the Supreme Court decision handed down in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward set parameters for contract clauses that still stand. The autonomy of private corporations from the states that grant them the right to exist in the first place actually derives from the model of a university. In sum, not only was the first corporation in the US a university, but each subsequent corporation has legally modeled itself after a university. Situated historically, then, the corporate university metaphor operates on levels. In a way, it’s a metaphor that isn’t. Such is the network university. 

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I’m just back from a great discussion of The Exploit in Digital Media Theory. (Note: Digital Management Theory, my blog name, is not a play on Digital Media Theory, my seminar for which I am currently writing my blog. It began as a simple play on digital theory in general.) Jamie Bianco’s mention of regulation, a keyword now pervading dominant economic discourse (and therefore our lives and their future directions) in connection to Alex Galloway’s positioning of “protocol” triggered something I’m still working out with regard to network theory. Specifically, with Alex Galloway’s Marxism—which is a post-post-Marxism or Marxism after post-Marxism. Even more specifically with the idea that networks have replaced old models of organization and antagonism such as class or other transformations that prefigure protocol. I agree that Tim Geithner’s desperate task to set protocol for future of capitalism impacts the future of—and will on our part require—network theory (“new rules that will reward and drive innovation”). But it seems important to remember that while regulation is making its way back into discourse, it is not making its way back into practice. The past of forty years, including the Clinton years, of deregulation have only been regulation in favor of capital. Capital regulates itself. I don’t think The Exploit disagrees with this; the main idea of protocol is to show how control has always existed. But I’m struggling to see where class fits into protocol. I don’t mean to be a vulgar Marxist, but the writing I want to do on networks will likely contain a strong emphasis on labor and anti-capitalism. How each has changed, or now talked about, from even Empire and Multitude, is what I’m wondering.

Tariq Ali’s joke that Bush & Cheney tried to disprove Empire sums up the past eight years of power formation well. Of course, they didn’t actually try to disprove it, and sovereign power functions differently now than it has. Similarly, it seems Bob Kerrey is trying to disprove the network university. (The network university is the theory I have now decided to shelve after not developing it thus far.) What happens to a distributed, digital media based, information managed network when one (no-confidence-voted) president calls the NYPD on its programmers?

Life lesson from The Exploit: What is life? What does it mean to be alive? It means resisting force, power. Life is the capacity to resist force. Life is a counterpower, “a return flow of forces aimed backward toward the source of exploitation, selectively resisting forms of homogenization, canalization, and subjectification. (But then this is really not a resistance at all but instead an intensification, a lubrication of life)” (79). Don’t resist then. Move beyond resistance. Be a counterpower, live, by intensifying, scaling up. Create new modes of existence. Create new modes of production. Think informatically. Think in terms of possibility. Discover holes, exploits, through which to practice politics. Biopolitics: the right to foster life. Hypertrophy. Push beyond rather than desire stasis. “Then, during the passage of technology into this injured, engorged, and unguarded condition, it will be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its users” (98-99).

On Dusting Off Marx

That is to say, I analyze how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter; how the new high technologies — computers, telecommunications, and genetic engineering — are shaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification; and how, paradoxically, arising out of this process appear forces that could produce a different future based on the common sharing of wealth — a twenty-first-century communism. — Nick Dyer-Witheford

Karl Marx makes a comeback. The specter Derrida theorized materializes. All thanks to the latest crisis in capitalism, for sure, but it is nonetheless noteworthy to now witness the so-called free market and its disgraced apostles have to make room for words like socialism in dominant economic discourse. (See here, here, here, and partly summed up here.) The story goes that the meltdown of global markets has also left in its wake a poverty of theory to explain what exactly is happening. Enter Marx, a writer who left behind the most extensive explanations of capital and markets, but also a writer who dominant discourse left behind (not so much in economics itself where he is at least read, but only as a precursor to theories that actually work such as the free market). But now that we have a crisis no one — especially the people advising the president — can solve, we could possibly bring him back. Of course, the story continues, his solutions are a little out of date but his critiques may help us understand what is happening and maybe get back to the way things were (before Bush, before Reagan maybe, maybe even before Nixon, depending on who’s desperately writing about the economy).

As a seer into the future, no one comes close to Marx. But he did not get everything right and many of his insights needed expansion. Enter what we call Marxists – one example being Nick Dyer-Witheford. For if dusting off Marx might help explain the world today, we would do well to dust off Cyber-Marx as well. (Or read it for the first time.)

Dyer-Witheford, as part of his goal to show the continuing relevance of Marx in twenty-first century digital capitalism, paints an interesting start to the relationship between management and technology. After an analysis of the battle between Marx and Charles Babbage, in real life and in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine, Dyer-Witheford writes, “”Although Babbage’s pioneer attempts to develop machine intelligence collapsed, partly because of the limits of nineteenth-century engineering, partly because of his managerial conflicts with the craft-workers crucial to the production of the ‘engines,’ his influence was far in excess of that normally associated with a failed inventor” (2). The workers needed for the “capitalist-computer-savant’s” machines to work apparently went on strike, if they didn’t just quit altogether. Thus began the “cycles and circuits of struggle” between management, technology and labor that Cyber-Marx places at the center of the world’s current state. 

Although Babbage’s book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, stands a precursor to Taylorism, Dyer-Witheford notes that the relationship between management and labor has certainly evolved. For example, through taking apart Alvin Toffler’s writings on the information revolution we come to see as false certain conflations of labor and management: ”The consequence of the high-technology, post-Taylorist workplace is the evaporation not only of the hostility but even of the distinction between management and labor, in its place emerges a shared ethos of participation and professionalism…” (29). Not true. Such an ethos manifests itself in ideological claims such as ” ‘they’ are us,” but it has yet to extinguish worker alienation, and therefore has yet to extinguish class struggle in the “high-technology workplace.”

Digital Affects

Cyber-Marx continues the Autonomist tradition of Marxism, which gave us the theory of affective labor. During the 1970s, as capital began to ship manufacturing jobs to newly opened third world markets, radical feminists, including Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, began to theorize the jobs left to do. Interestingly, as manufacturing jobs left the US, the workforce began to do more. Workers held more jobs and worked more hours, but they received less compensation, benefits and security. What they produced changed as well. No longer just physical goods, workers in the new service economy began to produce things not traditionally thought of as material: emotions, needs, desires, attachments, knowledge, etc. Work was now affective. Moreover, the service economy was primed for takeover by digital technologies (and digital management). This economy was new for most workers but not new for women workers. In fact, the very tradition of devaluing affective labor began centuries ago with the devaluing of women’s reproductive labor. While those manufacturing jobs reproduced the physical aspects of society, domestic jobs reproduced the values and knowledges that constituted the “immaterial” aspects of society. But the truth is the work was just as material as the jobs that eventually left, including the potential for resistance. 

Near his conclusion Dyer-Witheford calls for those of us in the university to accept the responsibility we have as workers in digital capitalism. How are we workers? One of the best examples of affective labor is actually teaching, and one of the best examples of exploited affective labor is the contingent adjuncts and graduate employees who make up higher education’s writing instructors. Eileen Schell, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter and many other scholars have shown how as much as 80% of adjunct writing instructors are women, how they teach (work with emotion, do the work of knowledge) an overload of classes each semester, often at different institutions, for little pay, no benefits or job security, and are importantly managed (by a writing program administrator) as part of a larger corporate desire for flexibility and a bottom line.*

Perhaps, then, the most important assertion Cyber-Marx leaves with us is the call not just to understand how capital and markets work, but to understand the potential in labor to make them work no longer. It isn’t a way out of capitalism’s latest crisis we should seek, but a way out of capitalism itself (60). 

*Regarding the feminization of writing instruction: In addition to Schell’s Moving a Mountain, Carter’s Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy, Bousquet’s “Composition as Management Science,” (which discusses managerialism) and “White Collar Proletariat: The Case of Becky Meadows,” (which discusses affective labor) see Deirdre McMahon and Ann Green’s recent piece in Academe.  

Postwar Counterintuition

The corporate development of industry made solo artisanship seem obsolete. The same was true of self-directed technical work, which by World War I had been largely absorbed into firms and industrial networks that included partnerships between academia and business. Business spoke plainly to universities about its requirements for technical and managerial employees. The corporate-university alliances that caused much concern in the 1990s had been…developed more than a century earlier. –Christopher Newfield

I understand you pay your basketball players more than you do your English teachers. -The Absent-Minded Professor

Maybe management protects the humanities. At least, maybe it protects the sciences. With a 120% increase in enrollment during the 1960s, the American university grew as fast as most other organizations throughout the postwar boom. It did so, according to Christopher Newfield, with equal contributions from business and humanism. Business influenced the structuring of growth: a real problem confronted administrations and teachers alike in the massive growth of students. Exactly how to educate so many people led to the infusion of Fordism in academe. Mass higher education joined mass production generally and the management science principles Frederick Taylor advanced oversaw its development. Higher education, meet Corporate America…and its boards, presidents, vice-presidents, assistants to the president, assistants to the vice-president, managers just below the assistants to the vice-president, managers just below the managers to the assistants of the vice-president, managers just below the managers just below the managers just below the assistants to the vice-president…and, somewhere way down the ladder, the worker-folk. 

But Corporate America and market forces did not yet directly control the work of the university; on the contrary, “[t]he university and its increasingly corporate-styled administration was an anti-market protection device” for its research (Newfield 123). The humanism that underwrote the university as it struggled to form out of the medieval period in Europe, and deeply struggled to form out of the colonial period in the US, gave it enough sense to realize market forces inherently opposed any mission of human development to which it had been established. This is why the corporate-styled administrations of universities actually protected their faculty and students from corporations. And not only was this good for the growth of scientific research now properly funded for the first time by the US government, not only for the humanities which continued the tradition of humanism, but Newfield, in double counterintuitive fashion, says this was good for business as well.* A market-free zone of research benefited all. Plus, “[t]he market had most recently delivered the Great Depression. The government had just won World War II” (122). 

The government was also fighting a new war it needed new technologies to win. Technology, in turn, needed  something more than the individual entrepreneurs that guided its direction up until this point. Newfield quotes from Richard Lewontin’s chapter in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, which details how “innovation became dependent on a very high level of scientific and technological expertise, and on a corresponding investment in an extremely expensive capital plant to carry out research and development so that only very large enterprises could undertake such programs” (119). Left to itself, postwar capitalism would not have provided the resources necessary to organize these enterprises and programs, despite the fact that it needed their R&D. Because research became cooperative in nature, it also became anti-capitalist in nature — at least until the R&D process was over. As such,  ”both the cost and the conduct of research and technological education must be socialized. To produce the spreading effect of innovation on the economy, both the patrons and the performers of research must initially be outside the system of proprietary interest. Only when an innovation comes close to taking a concrete form, as an actual commodity, can an individual firm be allowed to appropriate it as property. Before that point, the process of innovation must be socialized. It is obvious that only the state can be the instrument of that socialization” (Lewontin qtd. in Newfield 120; emphasis in original). This does not, however, exclude capital from the university entirely as private funds were of course flowing through it. It only points to a complex system — the military-industrial-academic complex, in fact — that worked around many competing and intertwining interests and struggles. But it does so with the important contribution that market forces were, if only for a short while, excluded from technological growth.

The 1961 Walt-Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor provides a pop cultural view of this version of history. Fred MacMurray stars as Professor Ned Brainard — a prof whose research leads him to discover flying rubber, “Flubber,” (which provided the title for the 1997 Robin Williams remake) and go on to use it to save the college he works at from a hostile businessman, Alfonzo P. Hawk. Hawk wants to get rid of the college and turn it into something more profitable, part of his belief that “[t]oday’s the day of the supermarkets, the super colleges.” When Hawk realizes the potential of Ned’s discovery, he seeks nothing else but full ownership of it — as does the military. So here lies the film’s version of the times: the professor, whose work corresponds to Newfield’s description of research as play, develops a new technology (Flubber is eventually harnessed as a clean, renewable resource to run his Model T) and owns it from the start. The professor has the power. With it, he seeks nothing else but the betterment of his college and, more largely, his country (he eventually hands the technology over to the military). 

*In “The Post-Welfare State University,” partly a review of Newfield’s Ivy and Industry, Jeffrey Williams explains the still important connection between humanism and the university, which might seem odd to those of us who are no longer humanists: 

Humanism, of course, has generally been discredited in contemporary theory, whether by Foucault or Althusser, as a vestige of Englightenment thinking that ‘man’ stands at the center of the universe. Antihumanism, however, left thinking about the university, historically a quintessential humanistic institution, at a roadblock. [...] Newfield redefines humanism not as the belief in the centrality of man, but, in a pragmatist way, as how people describe their freedom and leisure. He attaches it to the rise of the professional-managerial class that sets itself apart from normal self-interest in capitalist profit for the higher aims of “science and truth” ([Newfield] 46). Humanism is the better genie of the meritocracy. I suspect that an important line of argument about the university will be the recuperation of humanism rather than the evacuation of it, which leaves the university an open field for business… (205) 

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Works Cited

Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 

The Absent-Minded Professor. Dir. Robert Stevenson. Perf. Fred MacMurray, Betsy Carlyle, Kennan Wynn. Walt-Disney, 1961. 

Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History 18.1 (2006): 190-216.