This is an excellent article about the way universities deceive and rip-off students and most academic staff, in the US and increasingly Australia, a process that education minister Pyne wants to accelerate but has been under way for decades. It calls for student revolt. It underestimates the potential for academics to organise in unions and resist, despite the obstacles, and gets the expansion of admin staff numbers entirely wrong. Most admin staff are not high paid managers but workers, who have fewer illusions in myth that if you work hard and are clever you will prosper. The sooner that deference to academic status inside campus trade unions is dies and is replaced by respect for competence in leading industrial struggles against management, the better. salon/2014/10/01/college_is_ripping_you_off_students_are_cash_cows_and_schools_the_predators/ The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence. … Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins. … Another fact: This same industry, despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives indistinguishable from the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange. There is zero solidarity in a meritocracy, even a fake one… Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by definition, that they are where they are because they deserve it. They’re the best. So tenured faculty find it easy to dismiss the de-professionalization of their field as the whining of second-raters who can’t make the grade. Too many of the adjuncts themselves, meanwhile, find it difficult to blame the system as they apply fruitlessly for another tenure-track position or race across town to their second or third teaching job—maybe they just don’t have what it takes after all. Then again, they will all be together, assuredly, as they sink finally into the briny deep.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 20:44:12 +0000
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