Introduction
Your Problem Is My Problem
We have taken the great leap forward and said, “Let’s pretend we’re a
corporation.”
—John Lombardi, president, University of Florida, 1997
Over the past forty years, the administration of higher education has
changed considerably. Campus administrations have steadily diverged from
the ideals of faculty governance, collegiality, and professional
self-determination. Instead they have embraced the values and practices
of corporate management. Consequently, the new realities of managed
education strongly correspond to the better-understood realities of
managed health care. For example, both education and health have been
increasingly marketized—transformed into sites of unprecedented capital
accumulation by way of the commodification of activities and
relationships. Public assets and activities intended for the public good
have been transferred into private hands. Workers in both health and
education have seen the compulsory acceleration of market behaviors
(such as competition for resources and profit-seeking) in their
professional cultures. In both fields, the management of professional
activities has resulted in the return of the sort of dizzying
inequalities formerly associated with the Gilded Age. Under the
principle of revenue maximization, managers direct professionals to
provide ever more elaborate boutique services to the wealthy. At the
same time, under the principle of cost containment, they constrain
professionals to offer degraded service or even deny service to the vast
majority of the working class.
Most people intuitively understand the consequences for health of
managed care. Because the calculus of profit demands continuous
reduction in the costs of care, especially the expensive labor time of
highly trained professionals, the “management” of care implies the
substitution of lesser-skilled and lesser-paid workers, such as nurse’s
aides, for highly skilled and higher-paid physicians. Fewer people get
to see doctors. Doctors have fewer options for treatment and diagnosis.
Many critical health care decisions are made by nonmedical management or
by doctors with strong incentives to accommodate their managers. More of
the expense and burden of care is shifted to patients and families.
Under a profit regime, the standards of care are established not by the
measure of lives saved but by the measure of financial risk: At what
point do the fiscal liabilities for malpractice exceed the dollar
savings of using fewer, cheaper, less experienced, and less elaborately
trained personnel? Up to the limit of malpractice exposure, health-care
providers have real incentives to use older equipment, take smaller
precautions against infection and complication, shorten hospital stays,
and deny access to the best procedures in favor of cheap procedures.
Less well understood is how the logic of the HMO increasingly rules
higher education. For example, management closely rations professor
time. Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers
were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or
nontenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed. If you’re
enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good
chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a
doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession
has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure
system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be
taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was
hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the
field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for
the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official
poverty line (often under the delusion that she could “work her way
into” a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your
institution three years from now. In almost all courses in most
disciplines using nontenurable or adjunct faculty, a person with a
recently earned Ph.D. was available, and would gladly have taught your
other three courses, but could not afford to pay their loans and house
themselves on the wage being offered.
Most undergraduate education is conducted by a superexploited corps of
disposable workers that Cary Nelson describes as a “lumpen
professoriate” (Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords, 208), often
collecting wages and benefits inferior to those of fast-food clerks and
bellhops. According to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey of
2000, for instance, fewer than one-third of the responding programs paid
first-year writing instructors more than $2,500 a class; nearly half
(47.6 percent) paid these instructors less than $2,000 per class
(American Historical Association). At that rate, teaching a full-time
load of eight classes nets less than $16,000 annually and includes no
benefits. By comparison, research faculty with half their workload in
“publish or perish” activities usually teach four or fewer classes in a
year. Persons who have acquired $30,000 to $100,000 in debt en route to
a Ph.D. cannot afford to work for those wages. More often than not,
working for those wages is the reason they acquired debt in the first
place. In fact, without some kind of assistance, few can afford to work
for two or three times that amount.
full: http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814799741_Bousquet_intro.pdf
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