Pinocchio Jobs

“A boy who won’t be good might just as well be made of wood”

Thoughts on excerpts from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works

First, thanks to Steve for assigning Chapter 4 of Marc Bousquet’s book. The interplay between the individual and society vis-a-vis the “working scholar” motif is a great supplement to our discussions of the university writ large.

The president of Harvard and others, according to Bousquet, have tended to portray the university as “victims of history” (10) meaning that the austere and technocratic innovations made to higher education could not be avoided (154). But victims occasionally become predators, sometimes they become opportunistic. We live in a culture imbued with the philosophy of desert. This can probably be traced back to Calvinist if not Puritanical notions of divine signs coming through mundane happenstance and luck; though going so far back unnecessary. The university, perhaps under duress from its governmental parents cries of poverty, but also in an effort at self-transformation and autonomy, entered a marriage of convenience with business. Business is of course known for its gallant stewardship; indeed it has guided towards such wrecks as the Great Depression. For Bousquet, this convenient narrative holds the university faultless but also obviates the more pervasive issue of the toll that late capitalism takes on everyone from cradle to grave, with higher education often placed as a critical juncture in the lives of youth in developed nations.

In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century we teach that victimhood is a rite of passage, a mystical adventure that all must endure in order to successfully complete the quest and emerge a hero (see the book GRIT.) Often this quest is towards “adulting”, which rather than a fiat of anniversary, is now a discrete set of activities that one must conduct upon completion of the adolescent quest. Self-identification plays role in keeping the mechanism of “super-exploitation” moving. Employees who identify as something other than workers (146) are critical to exploitative labor practices. Those who identify as students are less likely to complain about conditions and wages and more likely to blame themselves if they cannot manage the Herculean feat of balancing work, and school (147). The aftermath of the experience of low-wage pink- and blue-collar work is a disassociated view of those performing the same tasks.

Like a ten-year frat hazing of climbing to a white-collar job; the journey through a doctoral program is also painfully exploitative, Bousquet “excrement” analogy (26), though jarring, does give metaphorical structure to an experience that can be just as disassociating and disorienting as that of the UPS student/worker. While the lack of academic work for PhDs is excused by “alternate careers” (because ten years of Classics obviously recommends writing pharmaceutical copy); the obscene exploitation of undergraduates qua workers is likewise excused as a support for their dreams.

The fecundity promised to society by that marriage of convenience has not sired any real children. Instead it creates a repletion of wooden facsimiles that may one day become real, but only after a harrowing adventure, many demonstrations of learned obedience, and only happens “when you wish upon a star.”

How culpable is academe for the state of faculty hiring? Has the traditional structure of higher ed as an assemblage of “content experts” (while a mark of expertise and attainment) given edu-business an excuse to treat content delivery as the primary mission of the university?

In an excerpt The Uses of the University Clark Kerr develops a model of the evolution of the modern university that is strongly reminiscent of the geocentric astronomical models that dominated the embryonic centers for higher learning of medieval times.

Culture, what is culture for the author? If culture and intellect began with the ancient Greeks, where did they get it from? Perhaps they reached beyond the quotidian to the lofty ether and snatched the knowledge of the gods. Indeed, the West tells just such a story. Conflating formalization and compartmentalization with creation. Indeed, what’s striking in the multiversity is how multifaceted knowledge production has become and is expected to be.

The high medieval guild like structure of academia persists, despite the liberality of professors. That they would advocate for socialist causes in society at large but fiercely defend the hierarchical and antiquated structure of academia is odd. But it’s also indicative of the many contradictions the modern university must address and even serve simultaneously. While some advocate learning for its own sake, most people have to earn a living. More and more said living is earned by selling ones creative and intellectual ability to engage with an elaborate counting machine; as opposed to one’s physical capacity to interact with a fabricating machine.

The dysfunctional marriage of industry and education has produced many bastards: the proprietary college; on-site corporate facilities and test-preparation business that send tremors through a playing field touted as level, etc. Even have a century ago, Kerr recognized the expanding and contradictory roles the university is asked to play, especially in the United States. The undergraduate student is pushed through a liberal arts/elective curriculum that leads to sophistry and solipsism. The graduate student is atomized in a field of research that by the necessity to be original necessarily means it will be esoteric. This isolated student must then either become a researcher/scholar/educator and/or engage in the fully American twist: service to society. After ten plus years of abstraction the transition to reality must be jarring.  Kerr also highlighted and scarily predicted the role that the university itself would play in vetting prospective sources of labor power for capital. Being hired then trained to do a job is nearly unheard of in the twenty-first century. The expectation is that the BA, will also assure competent training in which ever industry plucks the ripening fruit. Theory, research practice, and job skills must somehow be crushed together in four years. With the quasi-medieval hierarchy in place, students are not a significant part of negotiating the curriculum, but looking to create the best worlds to populate the multiverse, academia looks more and more to industry. 

The gears of old customs and new expectations have found stasis. What the new traveler doesn’t know is that there is no air around or between the turning gyres that cannot stop lest the delicate balance be upset.

The prima facie burden of any organization is to reproduce itself. If indeed we are reproducing this ancient ethos and casuistry through modern means. If at the core and origin of knowledge itself (Kerr asserts) is the hierarchical, belligerent, misogynistic, slave-based culture of the ancient Greeks, then what are the prospects of higher learning as a liberatory tool?

As the college forged its way across the United States following the same strident steps of the pioneer settlers before, public investment in them was gained. Though contested, through efforts of extension courses and other outreach to communities the public funding of public universities finally became part of the status quo, and even summarily expanded by the turn of the twentieth century. The culture of the university and the regional cultures that inform them varied across this massive nation.  A feature in all regions is the dialectic of the self and the collective that plays out on different scales and is practiced in different realms depending on the era and zeitgeist.

The purpose of the college has been to produce young people (read men) capable of taking over at the helm of their forefathers to guides the nation to her future majesty. Where as the odd, quasi-public monstrosity of Cornell in its early days, tried to find a balance between the trade school and training “captains in the army of industry.” A nation eager to develop and cultivate its vast area was surely in need of agronomy and applied science to fuel to its burgeoning industry, but despite that the opportunity to transmit notions of class superiority and fitness could not be missed.

The tension between classical subjects and practical/vocational education: while arguably a more foundational issue in the agrarian Mid-West, was not uniformly settled and instead formed a second part of the identity crisis faced by American higher education.  Where they transmit culture as the English or producing scholarship as the Germans?  The cultural tropes that were part of college preparatory courses were transferred squarely to the high schools. In doing so, graduating high school slowly became the means of accessing a college education. Rather than liberating the student from the drudgery of “irrelevant” classical studies, it instead ensured that only those who could afford to go through high school instead of working were admitted to college. The prepared self won against the collective access granted by having college prep happen within the college.

The agreement of the early twentieth Progressive movement was the higher education should be focused on neither culture or scholarship. Rather it focused on producing citizens dedicated to progress and democracy as the panacea to all societal ills. The protestant marriage of “material and moral achievement” produced Service to individualize responsibility for the problems that plague industrial society. Labor unions and socialism demanded a collectivism that is anathema to the American myth of self-reliance, and sure to bring “disillusionment and despair.” Service was to ameliorate the symptoms urbanization and industrialization brought to those who were not inoculated by wealth.

It seems that the crafting of the middle-class individual is a central duty of the American university from its inception. The public sites, especially, can appeal to the aspirant who might otherwise be drawn to the radical underbelly of the Progressive era. If the university is to make citizens in the image that is needed for the time, as the example of service during the Progressive era demonstrates, are moments of seeming “progress” at universities truly that or merely an institutional effort to provide an outlet as to produce the equilibrium that society needs to perpetuate the status quo?