How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

This amazing book has received rave reviews in the major higher ed press--and for good reason. If you or anyone you know is even thinking about college or graduate school, stop and read this book first! Bousquet has been called the "Al Gore of higher education" and compared to Upton Sinclair (the author of Oil! and The Jungle) for this eye-opening expose. Cary Nelson calls it the "single most important" recent book on higher education. Faculty who spend ten years in graduate school earn less than waiters and bartenders? Most of the courses are taught by grad students and "adjunct faculty," who make about fifty dollars a head for teaching all semester? No wonder most students don't graduate. Students who do get degrees spend years being farmed out by sleazy administrators to local corporations as cheap or free labor, and then another ten years paying off loan debt. And a college degree doesn't even get you a decent job anymore--unless you're willing to be a business major. If you want to learn how higher education has become worse than health care, turned into a scam and "profit center" for Enron-Halliburton-Blackwater types, read this book. There are a couple of dense passages, but if you're going to read one book about higher education, this is it.

This is an excellent introduction to the problems of higher education. It focuses on exploitation of junior scholars. One could add a great deal more: shenanigans with retirement systems, horrible treatment of nonacademic staffs, squandered money, outright theft, and more. In a 45-year career in the game, I knew higher administrators who appropriated considerable university money for private parties, one who redirected the library's book-buying budget to redirecting his office, and several who managed to be gone almost all the time (frequently to shop for even better jobs). The one who redirected the library money also got his university involved in various deals with private corporations; they cost the university plenty, benefited the corporations some, benefited the students little. Many high-level schools reward (sic) famous-name professors by "liberating" (sic) them from teaching undergraduates! They teach a seminar a year, and often no more than that. At most universities today, expenses on administration--especially high administrators' salaries--skyrocket while expenses on actual teaching are flatlined or nearly so. This is not education at all, let alone "higher" education. Bousquet and Nelson are right: academics have to organize in some way that will give them some power against these abuses. Meanwhile, any and all students and especially parents and alumni should really take a very long, hard look at what is going on, and act accordingly. Above all, parents and alums, demand that your money goes to teaching and research, not to bloated salaries of supernumerary administrators.

Marc Bousquet has written quite a book that deserves to be widely distributed not only in academia but to any organization involved in labor issues. The University (capitalized as generic) may be the main topic but the background and consequences apply to general labor-management relations. It's a very dense book that weaves social theory, labor relations history and contemporary academic labor analysis. It should command one's attention and will give academic readers quite a few "wow, that's what's going on where I work" moments. And if you enjoy Michael Berube's writing, you'll enjoy this as well. I disagree with the previous reviewer that it is badly written. It is dense, yes, but not inaccessible. Most of the concepts used will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to labor issues beyond academia. It is one of the arguments of the book that, indeed, academics have tended to not think of themselves as labor, and that therefore, academia would be exempt from the major trends affecting the labor market. It has been a costly mistake, for instance, with the massive increase in the use of contingent work. Two major points made by the book: *"We are not `overproducing Ph.Ds'; we are underproducing jobs." The university would not be able to function without the reserve army of graduate students and contingent workers. In this sense, the work they do constitutes REAL jobs and positions that are simply never filled but could be filled by degree holders. But the way the managed university works is to fill these positions with contingent work, on a casualized basis and treat them as if they were not actual positions. Moreover, contingent workers can often only afford to take these low-paid positions because they have spouses with full-time positions, other systems of financial assistance, or simply get into debt. In other words, cheap teaching is subsidized by other parts of the social structure. * "Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime." Such labor made and maintained cheap hurts everyone in addition to contingent workers. On the end of the labor chain, the increasing casualization of work at the university tends to increase the stressing of the system: full-time, tenured faculty still have to teach more, advise more, publish more, serve on more committees or continuous improvement teams, get more involved in "shared governance", etc. It also leave undergraduate teaching to the less experienced graduate students. Marc Bousquet compares the current university system to an HMO. The university has become an organization to be managed like an efficient business where efficiency means delivering education at the lowest possible cost and running at a profit. However, as in the case of health care, this managerial revolution has not brought about cheaper education. Quite the opposite, the cost of higher education has been consistently increasing but not because of expensive teachers but by adding layers upon layers of administrators. The stren