Sat, 4 Jul 1998 13:38:49 -0600 (MDT)
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 13:38:49 -0600 (MDT)
From: Klocke Brian V <klockeb@sobek.Colorado.EDU>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: CounterPunch article (fwd)



Hi Y'all,

The May 1-15 1998 edition of CounterPunch (a newsletter put out by Ken
Silverstein & Alexander Cockburn) contains an article entitled "Back to
the Middle Ages: The Rise of the Lumpen Teacher". I've excerpted some of
the article below, I would be interested in any comments:

"Across the etnire landscape of higher education in America today a vast
shift has been taking place in the past few years that in many ways
matches the onslaught on the economic security and working conditions of
blue collar workers since the early 1970's. Visit any two or four-year
institution of higher education and one finds the same basic pattern: a
swelling army of low-paid, overworked junior academics, picking up
piece-work assignments with near zero economic security; a shrinking
sector of senior tenured academics; and a swelling academic bureaucracy
over which preside the pashas of the system, the university presidents
and senior administrators pullling down enormous salaries and reveling
in princely quarters and lavish benefits.

"Half of the teaching load in higher education is currently carried by
contingent instructors...This transformation of academic labor raises
serious political economic questions about the power relations driving
the process, yet these structural issues are rarely addressed, even in
the narratives of the victims. Indeed, they tend to parrot
administrative rhetoric about budget crises and the inevitability of
restructuring on 'efficient' corporate lines.

"Downsizing has been a strategy for weakening union power and generating
sublime levels of corporate profit. In the academic world the
downgrading of instructors and the bureaucratic bloat are the forms this
process have taken.

"To be sure, higher education has suffered from economic crises,
especially during the state fiscal crisis of the late '70's and early
'80's. but after the lean years of the early '80's, budgets for higher
education have more than recovered through stable state appropriations,
rocketing tuition revenues from heavily indebted students, and academic
whoring for foundation and corporate grants.

"In many cases, there have been double digit increases in tuition and
class sizes have grown along with reduced course offerings. Once
instituted, tuition increases are never rolled back. So the bizarre
irony has developed that undergraduate students are forced to pay more
and more for instruction that is being relentlessly degraded.

"Where has all the money gone? The money diverted from the funding base
of instruction has been almost entirely absorbed by bureaucratic bloat.
A Michigan State Senate report [on spending in Michigan's public
universities found that] between the years 1977 to 1989 there was a 33
per cent increase in admnistrative/professional employees, while there
was a 5 per cent decrease in tenured faculty.

"A recent study of the University of California system shows that the
ratio of spending on instruction to spending on administration dropped
from $6-$1 in 1966 to $3-$1 in 1991...[and that] over 25 years the
number of administrative positions has increased at nearly twice the
rate of teaching positions, at higher pay.

"Part of the problem is that administrators are often tenured faculty
themselves, and the maintenance of privileges for tenured faculty is in
some ways based on the exploitation of lumpen academics.

"As every generation of student radicals has discovered, high-minded
talk about disinterested learning soon melts under the klieg lights of
reality. In part because of the end of ideological competition with the
Soviet Union, plus the unabashed, pre-millennial rhetoric of corporate
triumph...the function of higher education in capitalist society is now
finding its corresponding form without a tincture of shame. What these
denizens of Grub Street-in-Academe need to find, like any reserve army
of self-employed, is the proper organizations for self-defense and
resistance."

(for subscription info contact CounterPunch at PO Box 18675, Washington
DC 20036, 202-986-3665)

Those are some pretty strong words. Do people have a sense of how much
of this phenomenon can be found at their insitutions?  

Also, what structural changes would need to be made to counter these
problems?

Things for us to think about...

Brian Klocke
University of Colorado at Boulder