HMO logic increasingly governs higher education. Management tightly rations teachers’ time. Thirty-five years ago, almost 75% of all college professors were full-time. Only a quarter were employed, part-time or unsustainable.
Today, those proportions are reversed.
If you are enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a Ph.D. and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has been the subject of intense peer scrutiny. associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but has not finished it, who has been hired by a manager other than a fellow professional, who never posts in the field that he is teaching, and who entered the group of people considered for the position because they were willing to work for a salary close to the official poverty line.
In almost all courses in most disciplines that use non-tenured or adjunct professors, a person with a recently earned Ph.D. was available and would have gladly taught their other three courses. But they couldn’t afford to pay off their loans and support themselves on the salary they were being offered.
This is a topic that was explored in depth in my new book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Higher education employers can only pay those wages knowing that their employees are subsidized in various ways. In the case of student employees, the enormous burden of debt subsidizes wages. For underpaid contingent teachers, who are women by a substantial majority, strategies vary, but include consumer debt, dependence on another job, or income from a domestic partner.
Like Walmart employees, the majority of the female contingent academic workforce relies on a mosaic of other sources of income, including forms of public assistance such as food stamps and unemployment compensation.
It’s perfectly common for contingent college professors to work as grocery clerks and restaurant servers, earning higher salaries in those positions, or to have retired from previous occupations like bus driving, metalwork, and auto assembly, enjoying those professions better. paid. a sufficient pension that allows them to carry out a “second career” as university professors. The cheap teaching system does not suit the best teachers. People who are in a financial position are ordered to accept compensation below a living wage. As a result of irresponsible personnel management practices, more students drop out of school, take longer to graduate, and fail to acquire essential literacies, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on a credential that has little merit in the eyes of employers. .
The real “Profscam” is not the imaginary one described in the fantastic 1988 book by Charles Sykes, who invented the image of a lazy full professor who voluntarily absent himself from teaching.
Instead, the “career scam” turns out to be a management-driven shell game, maintaining a sustainable stratum for marketing purposes and generating funded research, but so dispersed with respect to undergraduate teaching that even students The most privileged spend most of their education with for teachers working in less and less professional circumstances.
As unsustainable union activists will tell you, the problem is not with the intellectual quality, talent, or commitment of people who work unprofessionally; it is the degraded circumstances in which higher education management forces them to work, teaching too many students in too many classes too quickly, without security, status, and office; work from standardized study programs; Outsourced tutoring, remedial, and even grading services, which do not provide time for research and professional development. Working in the McDonald’s “kitchen,” even Wolfgang Puck’s talents are put at the service of the QuarterPounder. Despite the tens of billions “saved” in teacher salaries by substituting disposable labor for professionals vetted by the tenure system, managed higher education is becoming increasingly expensive.
Enrollment soared 38% between 2000 and 2005, outpacing almost all other economic indicators.
Where does the money from sky-high tuition and lowered teacher salaries go? In for-profit institutions, the answer is obvious: it goes into the pockets of shareholders. Lacking even the semblance of a sustainable stratum, dollars squeezed from a 100% informal faculty joined tax and tuition money from the nation’s poorest families to enrich the shareholders of education providers. But in nonprofit education, which only “pretends” to “act” like a corporation, where have the billions gone?
At first glance, there are no shareholders or dividends.
However, the uses that have been made of the university do benefit corporate shareholders. These include bearing the cost of job training, generating patentable intellectual property, providing sporting events, selling goods and services to captive student markets, and converting student aid into cheap or even free labor. . Therefore, a considerable trail to follow is the relationship between the financial transactions of nonprofits and the growing dividends enjoyed by the shareholder class.
Shareholders of private corporations are not the only beneficiaries of the proletarianization of the faculty and the gold rush of tuition.
Because public nonprofits have been receiving lower and lower direct grants from federal and state sources, there has been a widespread belief that, somehow, sharp-eyed and strict managers have achieved higher enrollment and exploitation. of staff with at least one version of the public welfare in mind, if only within the narrow framework of “spending cut.” But that belief is questionable, as managers have spent quite freely in several areas.
One area that the nonprofit education administration has freely spent on is themselves.
For three decades, the number of administrators has exploded in close correspondence with the growing population of undercompensated people. Especially at the higher levels, the administrative salary has also skyrocketed, also closely related to the reduction in compensation for other campus workers. In a couple of decades, clerical work has morphed from an occasional service component in a teacher’s life to a “desirable career path” in its own right (Lazerson et al, A72).
Nonprofits comfortably support deans, presidents, associate deans, and directors of arts and science programs in six figures. Salaries rise to half of the six figures for many medical, engineering, business and legal administrators. College presidents have started earning seven figures, hot on the heels of their basketball coaches, who can earn $ 3 million a year and are often the highest-paid civil servants in their state. In thirty years of managed higher education, the typical faculty member has become an unsustainable part-time woman earning a few thousand dollars a year with no health benefits. The typical manager is male, enjoys tenure, a six-figure income, little to no education, generous vacations, and excellent medical care.
There are many other areas in which nonprofit administrators have spent even more. With the support of activist legislatures, they have especially enjoyed playing venture capitalists with campus resources and tax money by participating in “corporate partnerships” that generally generate financial benefits for the corporate partner but not for the campus ( Washburn).
More prosaically, they have engaged in what most observers call an “arms race” of spending on expanding physical facilities and plants. And as Murray Sperber and others have documented, they have spent recklessly on sports activities which, despite the fact that in some cases they make millions in streaming revenue, generally lose huge sums of money. The commercialization of college sports has raised the bar for participation so much that students who would like to play cannot afford the time to practice. Students who would like to watch cannot afford the ticket prices.
Traditionally, the phenomenon known as “cross-subsidy,” the support of one program by income generated by another program, primarily meant a modest surplus provided by higher enrollment and lower wages associated with undergraduate education, used in support of the research activity that was It is unlikely that you will find an external funding agent. Under managed higher education, cross-subsidization has eroded undergraduate learning across the curriculum and has become a gold mine for all kinds of activities that satisfy entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and workhorses. administrators:
Digitizing the curriculum! Building the best pool / golf course / stadium in the state! Bringing more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship! Why have those who control nonprofit colleges and universities so easily succumb to the idea that the institution should act as a for-profit corporation? At least part of our answer must be that it offers people in that position some compelling rewards, both material and emotional.
This is an executive license age. In addition to a decent salary and lavish benefits, George Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. College administrators generally enjoy higher salaries and comparable benefits, and have the privilege of declaring war on sporting rivals or illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, or industrial pollution.
It feels good to be president.
As a “decision maker” one can often arrange to strike on behalf of at least some of their values.
The thing to hide under the rug is that your ability to do these things relies on your willingness to continually squeeze compensation from nearly every other worker on campus. The university under managerial rule is an accumulation machine. If nonprofits accumulate in any way other than dividends, there is much more surplus for administrators, trustees, local politicians, and a handful of influential professors to spend on a discretionary basis.
