Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  And that more prestigious research part of the job is increasingly commodified. In 1980, the US Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to generate funds from licensing intellectual property and the sale of research. Universities like Columbia—which made it policy almost immediately that the school had rights to faculty inventions, though they generously granted them royalties—generate hundreds of millions of dollars from their professors’ intellectual work. Outside funding for research also has an effect: drug companies subsidize research at universities that they then get to patent. Research funds are scarcer in general, and often tied to specific outcomes—which may incentivize tweaking of results. Graduate students, paid far less than professors, do much of the actual work of laboratory research. And sometimes sponsors demand such secrecy that researchers cannot always publish what they’ve discovered—it’s all swept up into the company, rather than the tenure file. Even in the humanities, corporate donations wound up shaping policy; sponsorship of “chairs” meant influence over which professors got to sit in them. The fears of that British professor in 1988 were well founded, as funds pumped into the sciences are often drained away from the humanities, creating yet another form of tiering in the workplace.27

  All of these changes crept in under the mantle of “accountability,” to use Margaret Thatcher’s words. Accountability meant stripping away the traditional faculty governance in favor of external boards and executives who come in from other parts of the business world or from government. As it happened to public school teachers, and indeed, to the autoworkers at Lordstown, so it did in the university: demands for reform and accountability to the community or the workers themselves were turned into excuses to impose “flexibility” on the workforce. The protest movements of the 1960s, led by radical students demanding control over curricula and challenging the power structures of the university, were turned, in the hands of the right, into letting “the market” decide what should be taught, while challenging the usefulness of education for its own sake. Thus, Aronowitz wrote, “neoliberalism entered the academy through the backdoor of student protest.”28

  Globalization has in one way brought the university back to its roots. Medieval European professors taught in Latin, and faculty and students crossed borders freely in pursuit of education; now a global labor market for academic work has opened up, and students regularly study outside of their countries of origin. The European Union has instituted regulations requiring comparability of degrees, and some American schools, including New York University (NYU), have campuses littered across the world. This phenomenon has created an international job market for academic workers, such that conditions in one place wind up linked to conditions elsewhere.29

  In academia, as in many other professional fields, the tradition of a period of apprenticeship dates back to the medieval guilds. In the modern university, PhD students teach and grade and research while they earn their degrees, doing the work that allows full professors to focus on their own projects; indeed, grad students do some of the research that goes out with the professor’s name on it. This hierarchy is justified as paying one’s dues, but it also, importantly, functions to maintain quality control. Not just anyone can be a professor; one must have done research judged to count by one’s peers, passed through hurdles set by accomplished mentors, smiled through the long hours, and pretended to be cheerful while eating ramen noodles, all this hope labor performed in what used to be more than a hope of a career. Passing through the set of qualifications to a good job at the end was, for a time, a ritual that one could more or less count on. Nowadays, this isn’t true.30

  Graduate students who are funded receive a stipend, and in return, they do plenty of teaching and grading as well as their own research. Yet university administrators will argue, if those graduate students try to unionize, that they are not really working at all—that their funding is not a wage, but a grant to subsidize their education. Their labor is not really labor, but a privilege. Sociologist Erin Hatton called this double bind—applied not only to graduate students but also to student athletes (as well as to prisoner laborers and workfare recipients after welfare reform)—“status coercion,” because their status as something other than workers allows their supervisors extra punitive power. “The education, degree conferral, and future employment of science graduate students are in the hands of the faculty advisors for whom they labor,” she wrote. “Such advisors can dismiss them from the PhD program as well as delay their graduation because they have become productive workers in the lab.” This kind of coercion links the working conditions of graduate students to other precarious workers—to retail workers and domestic workers as well as interns—as it primes them to accept undervalued and insecure work in the future. And like welfare-to-work programs, graduate programs mobilize both moralistic language about hard work and a labor-of-love rhetoric that denies certain work is work at all by denying that what workers are paid is indeed a wage.31

  To Aronowitz and others, the “last good job in America” could be a guidepost for all: shorter working hours and more autonomy could be key demands to improve others’ working conditions. Instead, though, the opposite has happened in the twenty years since he wrote about it: the academic workplace has become more like the rest of the service sector. For those who had that last good job, as it was with other parts of the PMC, it had been, for a while, easy to ignore the struggles of those outside the university, those with fewer credentials, doing manual labor, perhaps, or caring work. Even on campus, tenured faculty could be prone to ignoring the conditions of those serving the food or keeping the lecture halls clean; off campus, the tradition of seeing the university as a location apart meant that too few professors realized that the downward trajectory of other knowledge work was connected to their own. The university’s culture of individualism—particularly the intense focus on individual research, created in part by the endless pressure to produce and publish such research—mitigated against academics’ collective action for a while. But as the conditions of academic workers began more and more to resemble those of those other workers, academic workers began to reach for the tool of the working class: labor unions.32

  Union density was in decline across the United States by the 1990s, but two hundred thousand or so faculty and staff at universities were still union members. Graduate students organized in large numbers, challenging the idea that their work was not work. They were aware of their importance in the institution, the amount of work that, if they refused to do it, would simply not be done. The corporatization of the university, by requiring graduate students to produce useful research, had hastened their realization that they, too, were necessary workers. By 2000 there were more than thirty graduate assistants’ unions with contracts across the country. Most of that unionization came at public institutions, though; private institutions have had a different war to fight. The National Labor Relations Board, with its Yeshiva University decision in 1980, ruled that faculty at private universities were management and therefore ineligible for union protections. Looking over the arguments for faculty governance of the university, the board decided to take professors at their word, despite the trimming away of those privileges and duties as the tenure track declined.33

  When NYU’s graduate student union, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee / United Auto Workers (GSOC-UAW) Local 2110, struck in 2005, it made visible several of the many fault lines of academic labor. The strike dragged on for seven months before being broken by the university through a process of intimidation, media battering, firings, and more. GSOC had been the first union to win a contract at a private university in the wake of the 2000 NLRB decision that graduate assistants were workers, and the university management was determined not to have a second contract. And the board had changed by then—in 2004, with a majority of new conservative appointees, it reversed itself and said that private universities had no right to union recognition. Even at the time, NYU was a popular and relatively newly prestigi
ous university, an emblem of the corporate or neoliberal turn in the academy, with high demand for applications and students who graduated with the highest debt load in the country. It also had one of the highest percentages of courses taught by non-tenure-track staff, including the striking grad students. Its president at the time had made an argument for the role of the university as anchoring a new key sector of the economy: he called it “ICE” (intellectual, cultural, and educational) as a complement to New York’s famed FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate), from which the university drew most of its trustees. He had thus concretized the argument that the university was key to the new “knowledge” economy, melding it with the “creative class” even as he tried to worsen working conditions for those knowledge producers.34

  There was a core group of some 220 tenured and tenure-track faculty who supported the strike, even moving classes off campus so as not to cross the grads’ picket lines. In the midst of the strike, the union managed to win another majority vote among graduate students, reiterating that it had wide support even if the university wouldn’t recognize it and some of the grad students (particularly international students) had been bullied into returning to work. Protests by undergraduates and union activists, including the president of the AFL-CIO at the time, John Sweeney, supported the graduates, but in the end, the university held out and broke the strike. The union did not give up, though, and eventually, in 2014, after protracted battles and a new union vote, it won another contract.35

  The question of what higher education is for is intimately tied up with the questions of the conditions of its work. If higher education is to be, as the students of the 1960s demanded, open to all, a place to explore and to learn and to challenge, that means it should be taught by faculty who are supported and encouraged in their own learning, who are challenging and exploring themselves. If, however, the university is simply a machine for producing credentials, with degrees like commodities to be purchased by students shopping in the market, then it is harder and harder to argue for the necessity of faculty who have time and resources to develop their own minds. What political theorist James Cairns called “Austerity U” is, he wrote, about “teaching disentitlement,” not only to students, but also to faculty.36

  Perhaps the best example of the simultaneous deskilling and deprofessionalization of higher education and its corporate takeover is the for-profit college. In her book Lower Ed, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom dissected the for-profit college industry, pointing out the ways in which it is a logical outgrowth of both the “education gospel” and the neoliberal turn. When demand expanded for education in the 1960s, she noted, public universities expanded. But now, with public funding on the decline, and the stagnant economy making a new credential more appealing, for-profits have stepped into the gap. As for work at the for-profits, recruitment is more of a focus than teaching, and forget about research. The courses remain the same, but the faculty are constantly changing: they are even more temporary than the adjuncts at more traditional institutions.37

  In 2013, the Ehrenreichs revisited the professional-managerial class and found it much decomposed. In a report titled “Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class,” they documented the “devastating decline” of many of the professions they’d originally tracked. “In this setting,” they wrote, “we have to ask whether the notion of a ‘professional-managerial class,’ with its own distinct aspirations and class interests, still makes any sense, if it did in the first place.” The replacement of tenure-track professors by low-wage adjuncts and the increasing concentration of control at the top of the university were high on their list of changes in the class’s expected privileges. The cost of college itself was also part of the problem—it was increasingly untenable for the PMC to reproduce itself, with the price of a degree spiking nearly eight times faster than wages were rising. By 2020, a degree was 1,410.83 percent more expensive than it had been when the Ehrenreichs first coined the term PMC. Those who can, therefore, jump ship from academia into “direct service to capital,” becoming analysts for finance or working exclusively for the wealthy. Those who can’t wind up as adjuncts, in the service industry, or sometimes both. In a 2019 interview, Barbara Ehrenreich explained, “I would say that what happened to the blue-collar working class with deindustrialization is now happening with the PMC—except for the top managerial end of it.” In other words, instead of a professional-managerial class, you have management—and everyone else.38

  Years after her fight with Ronald Reagan for her academic post, Angela Davis suggested, as the Ehrenreichs did, that academics had to answer for their own elitism. The solution to the problems of academic labor, and particularly for Black women in the academy, she wrote, would come not simply from defending their individual rights to exist there, but through collective struggle—a struggle that should include university workers from the cafeteria and cleaning staffs to the professors. “I include workers because it would be a mark of our having reproduced the very elitism which excluded and continues to exclude so many of us if we assumed that there is only one group of Black women whose names are worth defending in the academy,” Davis wrote. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, lecturer and social theorist Mark Fisher noted that teaching itself was becoming a service industry, with teachers required to treat students as customers rather than encouraging them to challenge themselves. “Those working in the education system who still want to induce students into the complicated enjoyments that can be derived from going beyond the pleasure principle, from encountering something difficult, something that runs counter to one’s received assumptions, find themselves in an embattled minority,” he lamented. Once the United Kingdom’s vibrant art school culture allowed the working classes to create; now education was being restratified, restructured along lines dictated in a report that was overseen by a former British Petroleum executive: the 2009 “Browne Report,” commissioned by a Labour government but released under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition. It recommended the series of changes, including huge tuition hikes, that would spur a massive student protest movement in 2010.39

  The proletarianization of big chunks of the PMC makes them dangerous even as it strips away their power. As Nixon and Reagan and their advisers once worried about an educated working class, so today’s politicians face uprisings of what journalist Paul Mason called “the graduates with no future.” In response, they have cracked down further on the university. In Britain the student movement of 2010 was a response to student fee hikes and broader austerity and laid the groundwork for the left turn of the Labour Party. In Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker all but eliminated tenure and public-sector collective bargaining in 2011, faculty, and particularly graduate students, led the protests and the occupation of the statehouse that ensued. (Politicians also pursued access to faculty emails, in a breach of both academic freedom and privacy that seems both small and telling.) In Quebec, student protests against tuition hikes brought down the provincial government after weeks of strikes. As long as academia provides some top-tier positions to aspire to, hope labor may keep some graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty scrambling along, cobbling together a living and eking out research. But for how long?40

  Even tenured faculty are feeling the crunch, the pressure to do more. As one professor wrote, “We live a day-to-day illusion that we don’t have a boss. We have only ‘self-imposed’ deadlines. Everything we do is our choice.” After her physical collapse due to overwork, she tabulated what she had been doing regularly: “In the fall semester, I taught two graduate courses. My department has three programs, and I was running one of them, with its 10 faculty members and about 50 master’s and doctoral students. I served on two committees, one in the department and another at the college level. I completed six manuscript reviews for leading journals, serving as a deputy editor on one of them. I had four doctoral and two master’s advisees and served on 15 graduate committees—providing feedback an
d writing letters of recommendation. Last fall I wrote close to 40 such letters. Add to that the steady stream of emails I must read and respond to every day.” Her job description said that 60 percent of her time should be spent on research, but where were the extra hours in the day to come from? Faculty of color, particularly women of color, do even more of this “invisible work” of “making the academy a better place,” everything from serving on diversity committees to extra mentoring for students of color. Such invisible work eats up their time and hinders, rather than helps, their chances at promotion up the ladder. And then there’s yet another form of labor expected of faculty in the digital age—becoming a social media star. McMillan Cottom noted that, like these other forms of extra work in the academy, such a burden falls hardest on Black women.41

  In higher education organizing, it is common for adjuncts or others to note their educational attainments as they draw comparisons to “other” low-wage workers. The implication can often be that perhaps low wages are fine for some, but those who have jumped through the university’s hoops are entitled to the middle-class trappings to which they’d aspired. This can be an insidious argument, although, as theorist and occasional adjunct herself Yasmin Nair reminded us, “we might seize this opportunity to reconfigure the terms of academic success to signify a system that allows everyone opportunities to do the work they desire, without holding ourselves up to mythical standards of class empowerment.” Nair called it “class shock,” and we might note it as a symptom of the decomposition of the PMC, of downward mobility, or at least thwarted upward mobility. That sense of middle-class scarcity can lead at all levels to wanting to pull the ladder up behind you, whether that be the tenured professor ignoring the struggles of the adjunct down the hall, or the graduate student breaking the strike, or the adjuncts themselves casting aspersions on “those” workers.42