Abstract
Braverman’s analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being “unbundled” and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming “just-in-time,” deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.
Keywords
Higher education has been undergoing a slow moving transformation almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Like Hephaestus, falling to earth for an entire day after Zeus threw him from Mount Olympus as punishment for attempting to protect his mother Hera, the crash will be catastrophic for campus workers and learners. The entrepreneurialization of higher education is transforming our campuses to operate as if they are a business. 1 And like Hephaestus’ attempt to resist Zeus’ violence, this reorganization is a strategic counterattack on the remnants of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s resisting the violence of what Mario Savio famously called the “odious machine” during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. The reorganization of the academic division of labor is a strategic unwinding of the gains of the student, staff, and faculty struggles that expanded access to higher education and transformed its content to make it more relevant to efforts to reorganize society. To see this at work, we need to revisit Braverman’s 1974 classic Labor and Monopoly Capital to understand how Taylorism is being used to transform the work of teaching and learning in higher education.
At the center of this strategy is the growing shift to not only online classes but also computerized planning and resource allocation, and the quantification of teaching and learning. Drawing on the monumental work of Braverman, this article will illustrate how online education has become the model for reorganizing the academic division of labor. Although the focus of Braverman’s analysis was the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s, an industrial engineer who sought to dismantle skilled workers’ control over the factory shop floor, it is useful for understanding what is happening to academic labor today. By applying Braverman’s analysis of the changing division of labor to academic labor, we can better understand why after forty years of the neoliberal assault on higher education, worsening learning conditions for students are the flip side of the worsening working conditions of academic workers.
While Braverman pioneered the analysis of the changing division of labor in industrial capitalist production he was not working alone. Braverman was engaged in a renewed effort ignited in Italy and the United States during the 1960s and 1970s to assess what Cleaver calls the “composition of capital.” 2 Braverman’s careful study of Taylorization has given us the analytical tools to understand the new composition of academic capital and how campus workers can devise new organizational forms, tactics, strategies, and objectives to recompose their power. 3 Although Braverman did not explicitly acknowledge that class struggle from the late 1920s to 1940s forced capital to impose a new division of labor in response to earlier class struggle, it is possible to see the current “student success” push as a strategy for imposing a new division of academic labor through “just in time” adjunct faculty, online Content Management Systems, and data management systems that provide administrative tools to dismantle the power and democratic controls academic workers further expanded during the campus struggles and strikes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Student success initiatives, such the 2012 California Student Success Act, are effectively a campus speed-up for students and faculty alike. Students are expected to reproduce their labor power for waged work faster than before by matriculating and graduating faster. Simultaneously, faculty are expected to push ever larger groups of students through faster while assessing how “work ready” they are with a new range of measurement tools. The linchpin to this entire model is online education. This article will draw on Braverman’s analysis to examine how online education illustrates the newly emerging division of academic labor and explore what it means for new types of faculty organizing today. 4
The Changing Division of Academic Labor
Berry and Worthen (2012, p. 21) succinctly pinpoint the question on which Braverman’s analysis can shed light. They write that “in the past 30 years, the higher-education work force has been completely reconstituted. As a result, class lines in the higher education workplace have been redrawn, with a heavy marker.” Across the academy labor is being reorganized. Food workers are serving prepackaged meals for fast food chains that deskill their labor, groundskeepers are reduced to emptying trash cans, and office staff are replaced by computerized data management systems. The most skilled workers, faculty, face typical Taylorist rationalization of teaching so that “traditional faculty work is unbundled into separate jobs, with ‘content deliverers’ having very little say over curriculum.” (p. 21)
Academic teaching is being broken up into discrete parts by which it can be reorganized. Doing so means applying tools that presumably claim to measure “teaching effectiveness” and “student success.” Once measured, so the Taylorist argument goes, teaching can be broken down into its component parts, the parts standardized and transferrable to other faculty who reassembled them as discrete tasks in standardized and compartmentalized online Content Management Systems used to run online courses. It is no accident that the bulk of on-line courses are taught by adjunct contingent faculty lacking not just equivalent pay but an equivalent share of governance power.
The predominance of adjuncts is key to this process. But unlike the plethora of warnings about the erosion of tenure, it must be placed in the larger context of the changing division of academic labor. With the shift to about 70 percent of faculty being contingent faculty without the protection of tenure and the stability of teaching full-time on one campus, faculty shared governance—the center of faculty power—is being severely eroded. With the shifting of more faculty, departmental, and curricular decisions to the growing middle level administrators of deans, specialists, researchers, consultants, and “course designers,” the faculty power needed to resist the new division of labor is being defanged. This is not merely happening to faculty. As Berry and Worthen also note, the shared governance power of students and other campus workers is undergoing the same assault and require further analysis.
While many have criticized the private for-profit college model of standardized administration, textbooks, curriculum, hiring, and so on, its insidious influence on public higher education has been little recognized. The very act of teaching itself is undergoing a rational decomposition into discrete interchangeable component functions that are being standardized, automated, and deskilled. The completely Taylorized model of teaching that underlies their approach is becoming a firmly anchored model for all public higher education.
Former American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Gary Rhoades (2014) in his aptly titled article “We Are All Contingent: Reorganizing Higher Education and Society,” identified some of the forces driving the subtle restructuring of the division of labor.
Partly in response to state disinvestment in higher education, demands for accountability, and the infusion of high-technology delivery systems, administrators have increased their exercise of “strategic” managerial discretion. That discretion has involved applying the logic of the market to academic decision-making, thereby reducing—and not uncommonly, overriding and replacing—the role and plans of faculty in various academic and educational matters. (p. 2)
In the face of austerity, budgetary considerations have taken predominance over learning and teaching. As deans and other middle management are called upon to implement funding cuts, they are making the increasing balance of decisions about courses, curriculum, and disciplinary programs over which professors have traditional control (Rhoades and Slaughter 2004).
The shifting of control over curriculum, programs, and teaching is one element of the deskilling of teaching. According to Rhoades and Slaughter (2004), Academic capitalism in the new economy is moving us toward a model of reduced complexity of academic work and breaking down the inter-connected activities of professors and the discretion that they exercise in enacting their craft into discrete, delimited parts. It is, in a high-tech world, a reconceptualization of a virtual assembly line in which employees work on separate parts of the whole process. (p. 54)
As the balance continues to shift from majority tenured to majority contingent faculty, the organizational and knowledge base of the faculty to counter this development is eroded.
Pierce the myth of shared governance, and behind it we will find that the logic of the market, as Rhoades puts it, is transforming the very work of teaching. The threat to higher education teaching is not merely disinvestment, which has been exhaustively documented. What Rhoades calls “demands of accountability” and the “infusion of high-technology delivery systems” that have shifted power to emerging administrative managerial strata have escaped attention.
Berry and Worthen and Rhoades and Slaughter’s analyses of the transformation of academic work are the much-needed beginning of the study of the changing division of academic labor. Such a study can draw upon Braverman’s effort to map the changing power on the shop floor of industry. Braverman identified how capital responds to growing working class power in a “war of position” in which the changing character of work is driven by the need to “innovate” and make work more “efficient,” but not in the way we commonly understand these terms. This is informed by Marx and Engels’s analysis of capitalist innovation as a weapon to reimpose discipline on recalcitrant workers by introducing new techniques that make their skills obsolete, deskill, automate, or just eliminate their jobs. Capital is driven to respond in these ways to workers who have managed to find ways to make their work less efficient for capital while more efficient for the purposes of the working class’ struggle against work and to reshape society to better serve its needs.
The doors of academia had been blasted open to working class, black, Latino, Asian, and immigrant students, reforming the curriculum to teach the histories of native, black, Latino, women’s, environmental, pre-industrial people, and social movements. With no or very low fees or tuition, student were effectively paid for their school work by need-based federal Pell Grants and state grants funded by high taxes on property, corporations, and the wealthy. It is no coincidence that with this shift of power, these students almost immediately began to confront the role of the university in what President Eisenhower infamously called the Military-Industrial Complex. These many points of light of class struggle on the campuses are today the target of initiatives that promise to move student up and out as soon as possible. What they intend to do is make colleges more relevant to business by assessing and sorting student based on the their “competency,” eg. the effectiveness of their self-discipline to labor.
Taylor Goes to College
Braverman has given us the tools to understand how the Taylorist rationalization of teaching is proceeding by the introduction of new technologies and management strategies. The subtle shift from defining and assessing the purpose of the college or university and student’s objectives for attending them to measuring faculty and student output is made possible by breaking up the work of teaching. Analogous to the process analyzed by Braverman on the factory shop floor, doing so allows faculty control over the assessment of learning to be transferred to middle level management (e.g., deans) that has been growing in number and funding over previous decades far beyond the size of the faculty. The changing division of labor of teaching is stripping faculty control over teaching as it fragments, rationalizes, and reassembles it according to the prerogative to more effectively discipline labor power for the purposes of the accumulation of capital.
Taylor’s objective was to decimate worker control by shifting knowledge of the work process and power over it from the skilled worker to a new emerging layer of middle management. The foreman, often a former skilled worker, lay at the lowest level of expanding management. Not coincidentally, universities were launching business, management, personnel, and human resource management disciplines to teach upper level management how to wield the power over work that once belonged to the skilled worker. The junior college was also introduced at this time to meet the needs of training foremen and other workers by systematizing the knowledge being taken out of the hands of the skilled craft workers (Meier 2008). Alongside this newly redesigned management system was science and higher education that appeared on the shop floor harnessed to instruments of control. Rather than a “science of work,” Braverman (1974) noted, Taylorism is intended to be a science of the management of others’ work under capitalist conditions. It is not the “best way” to do work “in general” that Taylor was seeking . . . but an answer to the specific problem of how best to control alienated labor—that is to say, labor power that is bought and sold. (p. 90)
The science of management was a science with a class purpose.
Taylorization did not proceed uncontested. Both unionized and unorganized workers in the 1910s and 1920s engaged in a range of “strikes on the job” in which they remained at work but worked slowly, manipulated machines to make them less efficient when they were being watched by the time study engineer, and cooperated to control their output in order to achieve certain wage rates. In fact, a pioneering study of widespread resistance to Taylorism by nonunionized workers provided one of the most compelling arguments for legalizing collective bargaining under federal law. 5 The legalization of collective bargaining, and the negotiating and grievance processes that accompanied it, soon transformed the industrial union from a threat to a partner as it began to impose discipline on an increasingly restless working class engaging in frequent wildcat strikes, sit-down strikes, striking on the job, and other means to control output. 6
A Class Analysis of Online Academic Work
The division of labor of academic work is being facilitated by the consolidation and automation of information management or what is more popularly called “big data.” To understand how this works, it is necessary to look beyond the headlines about MOOCs and their automated grading algorithms. MOOCs are merely one subset of the online classroom management tools making the Taylorization of teaching possible.
Online classes provide the most potent glimpse into the new division of labor of college teaching, providing excellent samples of how the complex and multifaceted character of teaching is broken up into interchangeable component parts as Braverman described occurring with skilled factory work. Courses are organized on the premise of discrete quantifiable actions that supposedly add up to teaching. The logic follows what sociologists call the fallacy of the parts adding up to the whole. Teaching as skilled work is analogous to the competing notion that the parts add up to more than the sum of the parts.
The Moodle Content Management System (CMS)—the name itself illustrates the process at work—allows the breaking up of teaching into discrete functions of discussion, testing, grading, resources, readings, and so on. CMSs provide panoptic 24/7 total surveillance of student and faculty online activity, compartmentalizing learning into “forums,” automated test banks, and disembodied “discussions” in which each student’s “post” can be fragmented, isolated, and compartmentalized from the context of the collective community of learning that otherwise takes place in the classroom on campus.
Fragmentation of teaching and the compartmentalization and quantifiable measurement of learning is central to the online division of academic labor. It is assumed that the online professor merely serves to measure the student’s discrete acts, presumably according to the set SLO, and pin a quantified assessment on the student’s response. The student who proceeds through the requisite number of benchmarks and receives the required numerical range of assessment (e.g., grade) passes the class.
Online education is characterized by hyper connectivity in which the faculty is always available, always teaching, and always working, busy answering a flood of emails and postings that never cease regardless of the day or time. At the same time, the work of the student never ends. Learning becomes a task to completed during the open window at the end of which they can be locked out. Teaching becomes transformed into the management and monitoring of student progress through the series of discrete work tasks to the final product (completion of the course). In turn, administration becomes transformed into a monitoring of teaching and learning to ensure accountability that both faculty and student are completing pre-designed sequences of discrete tasks used to measure the level of “success.” Because the online course leaves a thorough and ubiquitous “paper trail,” and is always capable of being monitored, it is analogous to an open-ended, never-ending time-motion study.
The vocabulary of online education has so embedded itself into the vernacular of the classroom that students now commonly refer to test questions or assignments as “prompts” even in the flesh class, as I call them. In the online world, the professor prompts the student to act. Outside the milieu of the classroom and stripped of the complexities of learning as a social relationship of students with one another and with the professor, in the online world, the professor “prompts” the student to act on a task and provides a grade on the corresponding action. In effect, teaching becomes rationalized into simplified discrete movements that when added up supposedly are the equivalent of teaching. Learning becomes an endless series of benchmarks to be achieved and assessed by the professor.
While setting up my shell for an online class I teach at a community college, I was told by the “course designer,” who serves as the gatekeeper to getting the online course approved and activated, to not set due dates for assignments. In other words, we are encouraged to de-link learning the content from the assessment as students can take the exams and then do the readings and post their assignments afterward. Of course, students try to do this all the time in flesh classes but with mixed success. It is certainly not something we encourage as a pedagogical approach to learning the course content.
In the online world, learning is subordinated to completing the interchangeable discrete tasks that are measurable and delinked from teaching. As a result, learning (which can be standardized, assessed and quantified) is assumed to be distinct from teaching (which is delivered out by faculty). As the delinking accelerates, learning becomes administered and assessed by a growing body of administrators and nonteaching staff and corporate contractors and teaching delivered by interchangeable contingent faculty with little to no say over courses, curriculum, programs, grades, students, and definitions of progress and graduation.
In effect, Content Management Systems such as Blackboard and Moodle (and the local versions adapted from the latter by colleges and universities) have now made it possible to reduce teaching to its component, interchangeable, and measurable parts. Each part is now apparently able to be performed by anyone deemed qualified to teach college by possessing as little as the requisite graduate (or sometimes even undergraduate) degree.
For example, in Moodle, a lecture is no longer the complex human interaction between professor and students. It has become the “forum” where the professor types a question or comment (the so-called “prompt”) and the students respond in a linear manner as “replies” in a “chain.” While this might appear similar to an in-class discussion at first glance, it, in fact, follows a subtle but fundamentally different process. Because the complexity of all sensory inputs of human interaction (tone of voice, facial expression, tempo of speech, body movements, position in the room, etc.) is impossible in the online format, the lecture must be broken up into discrete component prompts and the interactions of students into discrete component “posts,” each one evaluated and graded in isolation and replies possibly sent to individual students in private “replies.”
While setting up my online “shell,” I was told that faculty should have “regular” interaction with the students. This is not merely an intrusion into our pedagogical prerogatives, it eviscerates any pedagogy whatsoever by reducing the act of teaching to quantifiable interactions. According to the new division of labor, as seen online, the work of the professor is being redesigned into what workers called “straw bosses” on early 20th century assembly lines, former workers promoted to watch over workers and keep them on task and prevent them from striking on the job. Like the straw boss, the professor is responsible for keeping the line of warehoused students, for whom there is no willingness to provide necessary resources to teach, moving. Simultaneously, we are tasked with imbuing a respect for work by inculcating in young people a discipline to engage in abstract labor in isolated conditions in which they are physically disconnected from one another.
Online teaching is an exercise in Taylorism. Moved online, the act of teaching in the classroom is stripped of its human elements and qualities, removed from the accumulated collective knowledge craft of college teaching and cheapened to low skilled series of time sequenced tasks along a parallel “virtual assembly line” on which adjuncts labor as pieceworkers (Rhoades and Slaughter 2004). In the CMS, teaching is rationalized into a series of measurable actions of the professor that function as interchangeable parts that can happen in any order along the learning assembly line. Faculty are robbed of their control over the form and methodology and increasingly the content and assessment of teaching. Instead, the power over teaching becomes reduced to deciding the time sequenced ordering of the operationalized tasks of forum postings, discussion, chats and emails, and online exams using automated test banks, in which teaching is measured by the number of tasks and hours spent “interacting” with students. The cheapening of teaching is no better illustrated than the minimum wage level pay commonly received by faculty teaching online courses.
In for-profit colleges, the sliver of human creativity that still remains online, the actual faculty responses to student posts have been timed, rationalized, and standardized. Faculty who teach online for for-profit colleges have reported being provided with a bank of canned comments from which they cut and paste in replies to student online posts, simulacra of “discussion.” Faculty monitor students and are monitored online by low-level administrative course observers and prohibited from deviating from the way they are written. Rationalized in this way, the substance of teaching is eviscerated and replaced by timed acts literally put into comment boxes.
Online teaching and the for-profit college “business model” applied to the classroom is the realization of what Braverman (1974) called Taylor’s second principle, “the separation of conception from execution.” With the knowledge and power over teaching removed to the level of course designers and monitors and other low-level managers, the focus of teaching has shifted from the intellectual mental design of education, teaching, expanded self- and social-awareness, and the social act of learning to the execution of discrete tasks along a predetermined sequence (assembly line). Education becomes reduced to the management of enrollment, progress, and matriculation, such as the policies described below following the implementation of the 2012 California Student Success Act.
To understand the impact of Taylorist standardization on teaching, it is necessary to take a step back into the industrial history Braverman studied. In the early 1900s, plant owners and managers began to use experts such as Taylor to carry out time-motion studies informed by scientific management, a data driven approach to reorganizing work and the management of the production process. Using sociological methods of data collection, time-motion experts literally observed and recorded the intricate details of how each worker did his or her work. They broke down each job into its component tasks and systematized literally each movement they made. Mental and physical tasks were divided up and the knowledge of their interrelationship transferred from the worker to management. Each physical task was reduced to its component bodily movement that could be taught to any worker.
The objective was not merely to make workers more efficient in their work, for example, by teaching them to avoid unnecessary bodily movements that slowed them down. It was also not merely intended to re-engineer machines, tools, and other technologies to ergonomically “fit” the worker better. The primary objective of the Taylorization of work was to take away control over the work from the individual worker. According to Braverman (1974), scientific management was “an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises.” (p. 86)
Science is similarly being applied to address capital’s problem of control over the complex work of learning and teaching. Online teaching is perhaps the most apparent example by which teaching is literally broken down into its component part. This allows the work to be standardized so that each component part can be eliminated, taught to other workers, or automated according to the prerogatives of management and the available CMS technology.
For example, online courses allow faculty to set up a test bank in which questions can be randomized (reducing the administrative work of writing new versions of tests and copying them), taken repeatedly by students until they “pass,” scoring the test, and calculating grades. It is not hard to see how much this removes faculty from this essential role of teaching: evaluating student learning. Software to even “grade” essay questions is currently in development by textbook publishers and corporate funded foundations.
Standardizing skilled work was one face of the Janus head. The other face was the effective deskilling of the worker. Skill means control over the pace, speed, and quality of the work. It gives the worker control over not merely output but who could do the work, the quality of working conditions, and wages. The Taylorist objective of rationalizing work is to accelerate relative productivity by harnessing it to piece rates or productivity goals on hourly wage schemes. “Dividing the craft cheapens the individual parts,” Braverman (1974) succinctly observed. The rise of the just-in-time adjunct professorate is analogous to the reorganization of industrial work a century ago. Adjuncts overpopulate not only online courses but also programs and colleges that are entirely online. There is a reason for that. As online teaching fragments, compartmentalizes, and standardizes teaching, faculty are increasingly becoming interchangeable and cheapened.
Online teaching in the for-profit colleges is not rationalized merely in its form but increasingly in its content as well. Faculty report being given not merely prewritten comments to student postings but also textbooks and standardized courses. It appears that accreditation rules are the paper-thin barrier keeping these corporations from taking the last step and doing away with faculty altogether. Of course, in MOOC courses, faculty merely give a streamed lecture and have virtually no interactions with students, vicariously or otherwise.
Braverman’s insights into the industrial process are relevant here as well. Education, like the scientific management of industrial labor, “involved the establishment of many rules, laws, and formulae which replace the judgment of the individual workman” (Braverman 1974, p. 114) Teaching has been broken up into two separate spheres in which teaching is planned by management and executed by the faculty as discrete tasks that accomplish the output of student success, progress, and matriculation. As the student has become the first product, the faculty has become the second, a low-waged, deskilled assembly-line mindworker.
There are already efforts to assess community colleges and public universities on their ability to meet standardized measures of “competencies” such as those measured by departmental and course level “Student Learning Objectives” or face punitive measures for “failing.” (Ward 2015) Perhaps these measures may be similar to that faced by the City College of San Francisco, which at this time is facing the loss of its accreditation and possibility of being shut down and its staff fired. It is also possible to foresee an expanded use of “gainful employee” reports first mandated by the Department of Education in 2012 and due to go live this year showing how many students who graduated from for-profit colleges obtained work after graduation. These could be required by community colleges and universities in order to quantify student success at these institutions and provide a measurement of their usefulness to the needs of business. (Aspen Institute 2014, p. 3)
In the reorganized world of higher education, teaching is becoming a means of quality control measured by various quantifiable outcomes such as grades, college readiness, success, progress, SLOs, units, matriculation, transfer, class size, and other benchmarks and tasks. Driving it is the fragmentation of teaching into a series of discrete online tasks mediated by a standardized Course Management System. Broken down into tasks, teaching becomes uncoupled and subject to time-motion studies in which the “skill” can be defined, timed, practiced, and taught by faceless, interchangeable adjuncts to faceless, interchangeable students. In this way, online teaching is not merely a foreshadowing of the fragmentation of faculty labor into the discrete tasks of curriculum planning and design, resource management, “classroom delivery,” and measurement of outcomes, but also a degrading and deskilling of faculty so that their labor becomes the equivalent of the student. It is not by accident that the introduction of online teaching appears to coincide with the accelerated dismantling of faculty power through shared governance, including control over curriculum, scheduling, hiring, and tenure. The fragmentation of teaching is parallel to the fragmentation of faculty knowledge, power, and control. Ultimately, the mission of expanding self-awareness, furthering understanding and consciousness, and engagement with the world have finally been reduced to quantifiable outcomes to better serve the prerogatives of capital to obtain disciplined, highly productive labor.
With the power to assess student learning in the classroom rapidly being eroded and moved upward in the administrative hierarchy, anything else is possible. Much like the for-profit colleges and universities, it is not a far step to standardizing the curriculum and even assessment of content learning by using standardized tests to assess standardized SLOs and hold faculty accountable by tying these outcomes to evaluations of their work. (Ward 2015) Considering the massive growth of online education at public colleges and universities in the past decade, the Taylorist model of the for-profits is already rapidly transforming all of higher education. While this analysis only examines how Braverman’s analysis can be applied to understanding the implications of online education for all academic labor, it is by no means limited to it. Along with online education, SLOs, campus data management systems used for campus planning and allocation of resources, hiring, new “free” merit-based tuition plans, and so-called student success initiatives also need to be closely examined (Ovetz 2015).
Cribbing Walmart: Just-in-Time Higher Education
The ubiquitous expansion of online education and the use of adjunct faculty is modeled after management techniques pioneered by Walmart. Walmart uses supply chain management to coordinate a just-in-time system of production by a massive global network of subcontractors. Using electronic data interchange, Walmart has standardized the logistics among these contractors. Doing so has allowed it to innovate a new business model that is organized horizontally rather than vertically where other firms such as General Motors, for example, still handle much of its production in house. This management strategy has given Walmart extreme flexibility to shift, change, or stop production at any time based on real time analysis of “big data” generated on demand, production, supply chains, worker productivity, and sales, etc. In contrast, GM still has assembly lines, dealers, and so forth to run and the costs of keeping them idle if their product does not sell. As sociologist Anthony Giddens put it, the horizontal type of system “enable firms to order just the right amount of products to meet demand, to shift their orders among different suppliers, and to respond ‘nimbly’ . . . to changing market conditions” (Giddens et al. 2014, p. 406).
This management model has already deeply taken hold in higher education. The model of shifting to part-time and temporary faculty is not merely a cost savings tactic of using part-time temporary workers gone amok. Rather, adjuncts have become analogous to Walmart’s subcontractors who have their contractual relationship dictated to them and can be acquired or disposed of as demand dictates. By understanding the management model at work, we can shift our thinking from the use of adjuncts as merely a cost savings to the central feature of the changing division of academic labor. Stripped of tenure and participation in shared governance, adjunct faculty are a growing wedge used to loosen up and tenderize the shrinking tenured professorate so as to coerce it to meet the dictates of market.
This new division of academic labor belies the meaning of the word “adjunct” as contingent faculty have become central to the reorganization of higher education. According to this new Taylorist business model, the overwhelming predominance of contingent faculty among the professorate makes it possible for the service (courses) to be allocated according to real time data about applications, transfers, enrollments, admissions, and matriculation in the ways Braverman documented happening in industrial workplaces. Just as Walmart uses its electronic data interchange system to inform its delivery of goods by its global network of suppliers, colleges and universities are using their own campus data management systems such as Banner Enterprise Resource Planning to shift the control of faculty hiring, course offerings, degrees, scheduling, and the distribution of resources from the faculty to middle management.
What makes this possible is redefining “student success” as singularly focused on “output” rather than “inputs” such as the diversity of needs and objectives higher education serves individuals, families, communities, and groups. The American Federation of Teachers, one of the five faculty unions I belong to, explained the Lumina Foundation (originally funded by student loan lenders) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s obsessive concern with student success, completion, achievement, and so on. Higher education is pursuing the path of public elementary and secondary education before it, standardizing the curriculum (often written by textbook publishers and corporate foundations) and implementing assessment mechanisms to measure outcomes. “College completion initiatives that emphasize holding institutions accountable for achieving measurable outputs—such as high graduation rates and standardized test scores—and for developing various curriculum frameworks in order to achieve greater student success” have driven colleges and universities to rush to adopt their models and logic of not only management but also teaching. (AFT 2012, p. 7) “In response, public institutions, in an attempt to avoid further government interventions, have begun instituting accountability systems that emphasize learning outcomes and other high-quality assessment mechanisms” (AFT 2012).
It is no surprise that the rash of pressure by accreditation agencies for colleges and universities to implement the measurement of vague SLOs over the past few years was actually launched by Lumina and tested by the Accrediting Commission for Schools (ACS) of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), which is infamous for its current efforts to shut down the City College of San Francisco. In effect, teaching is being reconceptualized in a way in which its effectiveness can be quantified by various measures of progress, matriculation, and success now quantified by units, transfer rates, SLOs, and other variables in addition to grades and graduation rates.
How much longer until these measurements become institutionalized as a criterion to assess faculty and campuses? Can we soon expect a similar use of such accountability mechanisms such as student standardized test scores to evaluate teacher or award merit pay increases and Academic Performance Index (API) scores to reorganize, shut down, and replace public schools and their entire staff with privately run and publicly funded charter schools? There are already discussions in several states about experimenting with charter universities.
This focus on output requires the ability to collect, process, and apply data that are comparable and consistent across institutions in real time. 7 This has been made possible with the widespread adoption of campus data management systems such as Banner Enterprise Resource Planning and Course Management Systems such as Blackboard and Moodle that generate centralized data in real time and allow rapid changes by repositioning faculty labor where student demand and resources are available. Although courses are scheduled and advertised months in advance, adjuncts have no assurance of work until the course meets a certain enrollment level. Resources no longer going to canceled courses are reallocated to add sections where demand exists, often in disciplines desired by business. And, as noted above, if courses are offered, they are increasingly online. Adjuncts can have classes canceled in California community colleges and the CSUs as early as a few weeks before to as late as the first week of class. Semester contracts are only mailed once the class is determined to meet necessary enrollment levels. State law even allows adjuncts to be paid as much as eight days late. Having a professorate that is full-time and tenured is an impediment to this management model. Welcome to the just-in-time professor.
Decades of manufactured austerity have given administrators greater discretionary power to address the crisis as one of mere numbers in which they presumably seek to “keep the cuts away from the classroom” by cutting campus classes with lower enrollment and expanding the number of online courses. Likewise, jobs skills courses that funnel newly trained students into the labor market to serve ever-fluctuating demands of regional employers and academic introductory level courses that channel transfer students into four-year universities are eclipsing the traditional mission of community colleges to serve “life long” learning.
The proliferation of online courses during the ongoing period of intense austerity is an outgrowth of the declining faculty control over course scheduling and academic programming. Not only are online courses most commonly taught by adjuncts, they can also have higher enrollment caps. Since many of these students never come to campus, online courses reduce student demand for other costly services such as counseling, health, tutoring, and so on. This has a feedback effect on all areas of the campus further justifying cuts. The more online courses are offered in place of on-campus courses, the fewer the students using campus services, the more these services are cut, and so on.
The problem is not merely that higher education policy makers and management are misplacing their attention on output to the exclusion of inputs as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) report argues. The opposite of the current problem is not the solution. Doing so implies that the solution would be to merely revert back to the now broken Rawlsian social contract in which inputs (public funding, access to education, and support resources) need to somewhat correspond to outputs (jobs, income, wealth, status, etc.). What Caffentzis (2010) calls the liberal wage-productivity “edu-deal” that harnessed expanded opportunity, tolerated unionization, and higher wages to rising productivity is no longer in service. The contract has been broken for nearly four decades in the so-called post-Fordist era. It is not merely that the cost of higher education and class sizes have risen while public funding declines, wages remain stagnant, campus student services are being starved, and jobs paying living wages are disappearing as this line of analysis suggests. Teaching and learning are being reorganized and the faculty’s ability to control them is being stripped away. Teaching in higher education is rapidly becoming analogous to the work we are preparing our students for: insecure contingent work with low pay, autonomy, and control, and little or no benefits.
From Class Analysis to Class Self-Organization
While Braverman is invaluable for helping us understand the reorganization of academic work by studying the changing division of labor, his analysis falls short for how to apply that new knowledge and understanding. The objective of such an analysis is increasingly being focused on finding new points of weakness that can be transformed into tactics and strategy for academic workers to apply leverage to both defeat the strategy of Taylorism and seek to reorganize higher education to serve an emancipatory project. Ultimately, this is a question of how academic workers will recompose their own power by devising new forms of self-organization, tactics, strategies, and objectives to address the newly composed power of academic capital. This is an urgent task since the fragmentation of academic workers ironically appears to mirror the Taylorist fragmentation of academic work.
While this discussion is elaborated elsewhere, we can see a few examples of staff and faculty unions and activists beginning to develop new tactics and strategies to address the changing division of academic labor. Despite these innovations, a discussion of objectives is missing. What kind of, if any, higher education do we envision would replace our current system which assesses and sorts students and academics based on the discipline and productivity of their intellectual work? Doing so would mean further circulating these struggles against academic work to struggles elsewhere seeking to reconceptualize how we might live and work, or not, in a post-capitalist society.
There are a few impressive examples of unions that organize across either types of academic labor or an entire system or both and cross affiliate with two or more of the largest higher education unions. All tenured and contingent faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches belong to one union across all twenty-three campuses of the California State University system. The ability of the California Faculty Association (CFA) to use its system wide local as strategic leverage has been finely illustrated in the past decade by using several threatened and one actual strike to wrestle small but important compromises from the state and system administration. 8 As a result, faculty still retain sources of power over hiring and curriculum now being stripped from community college faculty in the ways described above. CFA is affiliated with an Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local, the California Federation of Teachers, AAUP, and the National Education Association (NEA), and organizes with students in the affiliated Students for Quality Education. A similar approach is also used by non-tenure faculty (lecturers and teachers), program coordinators, and librarians at the nine University of California campuses who all belong to separate locals that work as a single state-wide University Council of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT). In New York, the United University Professions (UUP) has organized tenured and contingent faculty along with a wide range of nonteaching staff and student employees across thirty campuses and the system administration. It also affiliated with both AFT and NEA.
But even these impressive models have inherent limits as a large proportion of faculty, counselors, and librarians, for example, are contingent, and few staff and students are members. Since more faculty are teaching for more than one institution within a specific regional area, it is necessary to extend beyond single institutions and systems as well as work types or job classifications. An impressive early attempt to do so was the Greater Boston Area University Organizing Project (GBAUOP) that existed in the late 1990s to early 2000s. The project was a coalition of fifteen faculty associations and unions, and student organizations that included a diversity of adjuncts, student employees, administrative staff (including office, maintenance and janitorial), food service workers, and technical and profession staff. The effort was supported by both AAUP and UUP.
Ultimately, the GBAUOP could have evolved into a kind of regional hiring hall modeled after the way unionized longshoremen have contracted with the shipping industry and ports. Such an approach could make sense for the approximately 22.2 percent of adjuncts who teach full-time at two or more campuses, sometimes with the same institution or community college district. 9 It would overcome the reality that a growing proportion of adjuncts, and thus all faculty, is really already full-time but their labor is fragmented among several employers and/or workplaces, which obscures this fact.
While the GBAUOP no longer exists, it informed the current although less ambitious efforts to organize adjuncts into regionwide locals. SEIU is active in the Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, D.C., and Maryland, among a few others and AFT in the Philadelphia and Los Angeles metro areas. There are numerous colleges and universities in these areas across which most adjunct faculty teach. (Flaherty 2014; Schmidt 2013, 2014).
Such a strategy can overcome the manufactured compartmentalized stratification of the faculty. Since as many as 22.2 percent of faculty are reported to teach “full-time” by teaching part-time at more than one campus and belong to multiple parent unions, 10 a regionwide (or even systemwide or statewide) contract, especially among publicly funded colleges and universities who get their funding from essentially the same pot of money anyways, would overcome the fragmentation of faculty striking or taking other job actions on one isolated campus while classes continue all around them. This is particularly the case with the 113 California community colleges fragmented into seventy-two districts. However, all but four basic aid districts are funded and fall under the authority of both the local district and the state chancellor. Until recently, two California faculty unions, CFT and California Teachers
Association (CTA), attempted to address this duplication by negotiating to merge their campaigns until the effort was abandoned when the state presidents changed.
There are limits to these early efforts. Most of regional or statewide organizing models are still mostly faculty centered except in cases where there are campus labor councils. And without addressing the interconnectedness of campuses with the same adjunct faculty or funded by the same tax dollars either by district, state, or system, a job action would be broken even before it begins. Students could just transfer over to another campus a few miles away thereby increasing the workload and straining the resources of another campus. In effect, strikers would be crossing their own picket lines because they would continue teaching at one campus under a completely different contract with a different parent union while they are on strike at another. The Metro strategy could allow all members to work under the same contract out of a hiring hall avoiding the fragmentation of a single campus where negotiations or job actions of some faculty and staff are weakened by other faculty and staff continuing to work. But the metro strategy needs to include as many faculty and staff and students who work at these institutions as possible to have the greatest impact. So far, however, this hiring hall approach is apparently not being pursued.
In addition to putting all academic workers under the same contract and thereby immensely increasing their leverage, there are other possible tactical advantages to such metro, statewide, or systemwide strategies. It would also allow for possible legal action over wage and hour violations for workers effectively paid by the same employer. In California, all faculty in the sixty-eight non–“basic aid” districts are effectively state employees since they are paid by the state. However, they are all treated as employees of the local district. As a result, adjunct teaching and nonteaching faculty who teach in more than one district experience significant differences in wages, benefits, and working conditions, which in some cases may reduce pay to below minimum wage once a full and comprehensive accounting of number of hours of work is assessed.
Furthermore, faculty are exempted under the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) due to the interpretation of professors as having relative autonomy over their work. Professors are subject to the “Learned professional exemption” of the FLSA for, among other reasons, “requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment. Professional work is therefore distinguished from work involving routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work” (U.S. Department of Labor 2008). This is ripe for a challenge since professors are becoming what Rhoades and Slaughter call “managed professionals,” because we are losing the power to exercise discretion and judgement in assessment, curriculum and program design work. This may provide the basis for claiming that we should be paid minimum wage and overtime (Rhoades and Slaughter 2004).
But in order to explore these strategies, we need to revisit and learn from Braverman’s groundbreaking analysis of the changing division of industrial labor. By thoroughly studying the new division of academic labor, it is possible to document how faculty have become “managed professionals,” carrying out mostly discrete tasks over which we have little or no professional control. Such efforts are not intended to merely acquire data that can inform legislative, judicial, or policy reforms. Doing so is part of a wider approach to devise new organizational forms, tactics, strategies, and objectives that can allow faculty, staff, and students to democratically control higher education and make it an integral part of efforts elsewhere seeking to transform society in economically, environmentally, and socially just ways. Since the division of academic work follows the division of labor throughout the capitalist economy, efforts to recompose the power of academic workers is inseparable from the efforts of workers attempting to do the same elsewhere.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.