Between Meltdown and Community: Crisis and Opportunity in Higher Education

Cary Nelson Between Meltdown and Community: Crisis and Opportunity in Higher Education As UPS workers in the summer of 1997 took up the struggle to gain some control over their segment ofAmerican work, a number of us in higher education realized it could be a story about us as well. Like manyAmerican industries, UPS has seen its part-time work force grow rapidly, while the percentage of full-time workers decreased. The future of work at UPS seemed clear—a smaU core of highly paid employees surrounded by vulnerable and underpaid part-timers. We need to stay flexible and competitive, pronounced UPS management, sounding much like a late night infomercial for an exercise machine. Flexible and competitive. Sounds healthy. Must make sense. Just a matter of discipline. Of course many part-timers in academia would welcome the healthbenefits UPS offers its lower-grade employees. And they might welcome as wellthe union representation and soUdarity, howeverfragile , that made a strike and a victory possible. Unlike academia, however , UPS has not seen its full-time work force dwindle; they remain a growth industry. If the corporate university should come on growth times, unfortunately, its managers wUl choose to grow as UPS has grown, in a spreading marginalized workforce. We hear phrases like "flexibUity and competitiveness" in academia as well, in part because they represent the only knowledge base corporate executives serving on Boards ofTrustees are interested in bringing to bear on higher education. What this rhetoric actually means is another matter. "Flexibility" certainly means something to people hiring academic professionals on soft money, but the term has little meaning when applied to the lower division courses most adjuncts, part-timers and graduate assistants teach. We're not likely to drop composition courses because our splendid high schools have made such courses superfluous. "Flexibility" does mean a loss of intellectual freedom for academics, since it makes it easy to fire teachers. It also points to an area of easily forgotten coincidence between UPS and higher education. UPS needs flexibility to deal with uneven seasonal employment needs. But most of us in academia—from cafeteria workers to faculty—are also inherently seasonal employees, something part-timers already know weU. They don't need us in the summer ; some corporate managers in academia are tired of the largess of year-round employment. 250 the minnesota review As for competitiveness, we have a consistent two-tier pricing system in the form of public and private education. The top Ivy League schools consider it a point of honor not to under price one another, while public education, at half the cost or less, remains a relative bargain . The rich should pay more to educate their children, the poor less. Meanwhile, we certainly seem able to market American higher education to the rest of the world, so "competitiveness" seems to have Uttle meaning. Within a given price range, what competes is quality, prestige, convenience, glamour, and mystification. MeanwhUe, the winnowingaway oftenured facultylines is a genuine threat to the quality of higher education. Although many of them have been trained not to do so, tenured faculty nonetheless have the protection theyneed to speak frankly and controversially if they choose to do so. Along with campus unions, they can offer an effective counterbalance to administrative power. And they have the time and institutional loyalty necessary for curriculum development, recruitment, and long-term planning. At the same time, the exploitation of parttimers , graduate employees, and campus support staff has already criticaUy eroded higher education's moral status. It is hard to idealize a robber baron university. From the vantage point of the City University of New York, on the other hand, UPS looks positively Utopian. In 1974, adjunct faculty amounted to less than a third of CUNY's teaching staff; there were 4,924 adjuncts and 11,268 full-timers. By the fall of 1997 the number of tenure-track faculty had plummeted to 5,505, while across CUNY's seventeen campuses part-timers had grown to 7,500. At the opposite end of the country, on the University of Alaska campus, some 1,800 part-timers have become the 49ers of the 1990s. Hired to replace fulltime faculty, the part...