Steal This University: The Rise of The Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement

Rating:
Summary: a reader too reactionary
Review: a reader, you are clearly ignorant of the realities of adjuncting and grad school, and why it is not acceptable for universities to make hefty profits off of their students and then turn around and pay adjuncts and grad students sub-poverty wages. The class I'm teaching right now at a state college pays $2800. I'd have to teach ten classes a year to make $28k! Four and four is the 'normal' load...lets see *you* teach four classes and then come home and read a little critical theory so you can finish your Phd. What a reader sees as 'back to the sixties' and hostility is really a struggle by working people to make a living doing something they believe in, and what they believe in is being gutted of learning content and franchised and commercialized by corporations. Yes it's true, a reader, and you shouldn't make light of the struggle of working people and intellectuals to fight for the power of education. Pendejo.

Rating:
Summary: Back to the Sixties
Review: Steal this University is a collection of thirteen essays by various academics and activists, which broadly decries the "corporatization" of American universities and generally recommends the organization of academic labor unions to oppose this trend. The book's title, a riff on 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book!, gives a clue that the essayists wax nostalgic for the New Left but also, oddly enough, the Middle Ages. Many of the essayists assume the existence of a past where faculty, all tenured, governed themselves unencumbered by administrators or financial concerns. A number of the authors appear to equate the notion of faculty governance with "democracy". The faculty governance implied by many of the authors probably never existed, at least in the form of the curiously undefined democracy imagined by them.

One of the editors, in keeping with the book title's lineage, notes that "[t]he 1960s stand as the last decade when big questions were raised about the modern university". While the big question is characterized as "corporatization", the principal issue in this book appears to be the oversupply of Ph.Ds in the humanities. One essayist, Ana Marie Cox, rails against a true corporate university, the University of Phoenix, a successful for-profit company. So incensed by the very existence of such an entity, which emphasizes the "employability" of its graduates, Cox uses corporate names as cursewords and is nonplussed by her admission that Phoenix's students actually want it that way. Of course, the objection to Phoenix's emphasis on employability is ironic since most of this book is about the less than ideal employability of certain academics. So wound up over the existence of corporations, Cox does not understand how universities can hire them to operate dining services and bookstores. Cox's solution is, predictably, state regulation - no student aid for those attending for-profit colleges and laws requiring specific numbers of credits in various disciplines, i.e. government guarantees of employment for under-utilized academics.

Some of the essayists display a precious combination of ideology and naivete. On-line education is no good because it too often requires corporate-university cooperation. Merit pay for faculty is no good because it is too hard. Anyway, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all. Benjamin Johnson complains that adjunct faculty working 40 hours a week have no time to read books. It is safe to say, I believe, that there are a considerable number of people in America who work 40 hours a week and read books. Kevin Mattson cannot imagine anything tougher than earning a Ph.D in 1994. Corey Robbins, writing of the failed graduate assistants strike at Yale, finds Edmund Burke and Augusto Pinochet equally "reactionary". The Modern Language Association is a "conservative organization".

A recurring theme among several of the essayists is open hostility to those who have achieved tenured faculty positions. Not surprising,since what is most evident from this book is that envy is a principal animating feature of the excessive Left. To Johnson, tenured faculty have a "mighty cushy job" and that "very few people on the planet exercise as much control over their daily working lives". If true, it would seem that "faculty governance" is alive and well.

Regarding tenured faculty reaction to attempts at academic unionization, one of the editors asserts that these "winners of the academic lottery are just as interested in crushing such drives" yet some of the contributors acknowledge their disappointment with unions and their "hierarchical" organization.

This is not to say that some of the contributors do not have something to add to the discourse on the modern state of higher education. Is there an overemphasis on on "training" and occupational preparation at the expense of the mind-broadening and critical thinking-enhancing liberal arts? Perhaps, but the answer, as suggested here, is not state-mandated liberal arts curricula or a kind of syndicalist regime in American universities. To use coercive measures, and not reasoned argument, to promote the liberal arts is a jarring irony. In any event, it will be difficult to convince most people that just because someone is attracted to getting a Ph.D in English and the academic lifestyle, that that someone has an inherent right to a high-paying lifetime job.