From an interview with Marc Bosquet, author of "How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation".
TT: In your writings on US academic labour, you emphasise the increasing polarisation between tenured academics (of which many exercise mainly administrative/managerial functions of ‘directors of transformation’) and a large casualised teaching force of graduate students and temporary workers.
MB: Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a disciplined professional-managerial class.
Getting beyond either schizophrenia is a hazardous project that ultimately threatens the faculty’s ‘directorial’ position. In the US, for instance, more than half of tenured faculty in public higher education are unionised. This is not impressive by European standards, but it’s three times the average level of worker organisation in the US. I bring it up because – with a few exceptions – it has thus far been very much an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs while selling out the future. While those unions are moving slowly to address casualisation, the kind of dramatic change implicit in the notion of a mass intellectuality or even the smaller fraction of mental labourers off the campus, would really imply a reverse of the trajectory we usually imagine: not, ‘how can the university serve as a platform for changing society on behalf of the casualised,’ but ‘how can the casualised hijack the university in their own interest?’
This dictatorship of the flexible would not be a safe process for the tenured who imagine themselves as directors of transformation and safely above the fray.
full: http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/recomposing-the-university-with-tiziana-terranova
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