Hay
cierto papanatismo en España en lo que se refiere a la universidad americana.
Parte del problema es considerarla un bloque homogéneo en el que los árboles de
la Ivy League y resto de las universidades de élite no dejan ver el conjunto.
Pero hay
más de 3000 universidades en América de todos los gustos y colores.
Con su
grandeza y sus miserias. De las luces se habla mucho pero de las sombras no
tanto. Una de ellas es considerar que las universidades son empresas que se rigen por la lógica del beneficio económico. Una de sus consecuencias más
indeseadas es la precarización del profesorado. Cada vez más universidades
contratan profesores temporales, llamados adjuntos, fuera del sistema
tenure-track. No son investigadores, no saben si van a tener clases que dar el
próximo semestre, tantos alumnos enseñan, tanto ganan.
Por
supuesto, esta forma de trabajar modelada por la inseguridad no atrae siempre a
los mejores o a los más preparados que se dedican a otras profesiones.
Nunca he
sido muy de Chomsky. Creo que sus interpretaciones acerca de la política del Tío
Sam eran en muchos casos ingeniosas elucubraciones que no han envejecido
demasiado bien.
Sin
embargo, al describir los peligros que acechan a la universidad norteamericana
no se equivoca. Vale la pena leerlo y perdón si está en inglés (Google
translation ofrece una traducción mínimamente decente).
Noam Chomsky: The Death of
the American University
On hiring faculty off the
tenure track
That’s part of
the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call
“associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a
corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor
servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite
systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal
assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the
bottom line.
The effective owners
are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and
they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient.
The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone
way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the
universities.
The idea is to
divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy”
(a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on
where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but
concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest
of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.
This idea is
sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before
Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said
straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what
he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s
very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask
for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve
the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic
health.
At the time, everyone
regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of
reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the
universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not
guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed
off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do
their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable
conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.
That’s the way
you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the
corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model,
precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
That’s one
aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private
industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy.
If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that
does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer
of management — a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and
domination.
And the same is
true in universities. In the past thirty or forty years, there’s been a very sharp
increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty
and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the
proportion of administrators have gone way up.
There’s a very good book on it by a
well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The
Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, which describes in detail the business
style of massive administration and levels of administration — and of course,
very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like
deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of
years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty;
now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and
secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that
goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business
model.
But using cheap
and vulnerable labor is a business practice that goes as far back as you can
trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities,
cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students
are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer
instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but
also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education.
The costs, of
course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into
these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run
society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate
in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account
and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call
them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.”
Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to
find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a
voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,”
and so on.
Finally, after
some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short
question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures,
that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course, it imposes costs on
you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be
enormous — but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you
look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere.
So the
university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured
but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security.
All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful
to education, but education is not their goal.
In fact, if you
look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early
1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across
the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called
“the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was
getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically
engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special
interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on.
That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt.
At the liberal end of the spectrum,
there’s a book called The
Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel
Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki , produced by the Trilateral
Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration
was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they
called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.
In the 1960s,
there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to
gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the
state. You can’t do that. There was one “special interest” that they left out,
namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”;
the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about
them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have
to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being
passive and apathetic.
And they were
particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not
properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from
student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the
feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not
being indoctrinated properly.
Well, how do you
indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them
with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt,
which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest
of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If
a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but
individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.
They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary
technique.
I don’t say that
it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that
effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just
take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries
with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top
all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist
country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty
decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face,
it’s free.
In fact, look at
the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 1950s, higher education was
pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people
who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and
it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for
the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty
close to free.
Take me: I went
to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and
tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very
easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school
and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in
college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible.
For the students. that is a disciplinary technique.
And another
technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large
classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an
adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security, you can’t build up a
career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline,
indoctrination, and control.
And it’s very similar to what you’d
expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be
obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or
determining how the workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is
now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone
who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they
work….[continue reading]
This is an edited transcript
(prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks given by Noam Chomsky in February,
2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of
the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.