On Academic Labor
By Noam Chomsky
The following is an
edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014
to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the
United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA.
Prof. Chomsky’s
remarks were elicited by questions from Robin Clarke, Adam Davis, David
Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua Zelesnick.
The transcript was
prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.
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 Wal-Mart, 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. Therefore, 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 30 or 40 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 (Oxford University Press, 2011), 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 labor—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, whom 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 (New York University Press, 1975), 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 50s, 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. On how higher education ought to be First
of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things
were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The
traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very
little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of
the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student
representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These
efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of
success.
Most universities now
have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think
those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic
institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may
be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the
institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. These are
not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical
liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in
the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought
to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them—that’s freedom and
democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book
4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas in the United States.
Let’s say you go back
to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish
co-operative institutions such as would tend to supersede the wage-system, by
the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for
newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a
mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education
directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in
industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the
crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation,
media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow
cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party”
[1931]).
This idea is almost
elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism,
it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way
to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want
to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy,
say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal
activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t
be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years
we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department
meetings. On “shared governance” and worker control.
The university is
probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic
worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at
least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what
their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach,
what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work
that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of
course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or
control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be
turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or
legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does.
And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always
existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was
drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable.
Under representative
systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be
recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer.
That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators,
layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from
the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin
Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several
universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of
others.
Meanwhile, the
faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are
assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have
personal acquaintances that are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not
given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get
appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case
of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of
the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which
merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into
decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university.
So there’s plenty to do,
but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They
are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life.
That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for
40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And
it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much
escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and
South America in the past 15 years.
On the alleged need
for “flexibility”. “Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in
industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more
“flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to
ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a
good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the
same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So, take a case where
there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem.
One of my daughters
teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that
her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being
offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t come to an end, they just
shifted around the teaching arrangements—you teach a different course, or an
extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be
insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses.
There are all sorts
of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the
conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and
domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s
nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees—what do they have to be there
for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to
be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even
harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this.
Just to take the news
from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan
Chase bank: he just got a pretty substantial raise, almost double his salary,
out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would
have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines
for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like
that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking
about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to
suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s
piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient
and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical
systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s
imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This
shouldn’t be any secret.
On the purpose of
education. These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of
higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just
education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models
discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty
evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel
that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to
test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water.
But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school
experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no
interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was
about.
The vessel model
these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,”
whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment
thinkers opposed that model. The other model was described as laying out a
string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or
her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere
else, maybe raising questions.
Laying out the string
means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it
may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes;
it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire
the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge—that’s education.
One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are
we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we
cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence
for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn;
that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter
of accumulating some fixed array of facts, which then you can write down on a
test and forget about tomorrow. These are two quite distinct models of
education.
The Enlightenment
ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be
striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate
school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good
ones.
On the love of
teaching. We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in
activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting—and I don’t really
think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to
know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of
your head, it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities
to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying
things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re
a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a
difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of
thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a
reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because
they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they
have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and
creative—what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be
done at any level.
It’s worth thinking
about some of the imaginative and creative educational programs that are being
developed at different levels. So, for example, somebody just described to me
the other day a program they’re using in high schools, a science program where
the students are asked an interesting question: “How can a mosquito fly in the
rain?” That’s a hard question when you think about it. If something hit a human
being with the force of a raindrop hitting a mosquito, it would absolutely
flatten them immediately. So how come the mosquito isn’t crushed instantly? And
how can the mosquito keep flying? If you pursue that question—and it’s a pretty
hard question—you get into questions of mathematics, physics, and biology,
questions that are challenging enough that you want to find an answer to them.
That’s what education should be like at every level, all the way down to
kindergarten, literally.
There are
kindergarten programs in which, say, each child is given a collection of little
items: pebbles, shells, seeds, and things like that. Then the class is given
the task of finding out which ones are the seeds. It begins with what they call
a “scientific conference”: the kids talk to each other and they try to figure
out which ones are seeds. And of course, there’s some teacher guidance, but the
idea is to have the children think it through. After a while, they try various
experiments and they figure out which ones are the seeds. At that point, each
child is given a magnifying glass and, with the teacher’s help, cracks a seed
and looks inside and finds the embryo that makes the seed grow. These children
learn something—really, not only something about seeds and what makes things
grow; but also about how to discover. They’re learning the joy of discovery and
creation, and that’s what carries you on independently, outside the classroom,
outside the course. The same goes for all education up through graduate school.
In a reasonable
graduate seminar, you don’t expect students to copy it down and repeat whatever
you say; you expect them to tell you when you’re wrong or to come up with new
ideas, to challenge, to pursue some direction that hadn’t been thought of
before. That’s what real education is at every level, and that’s what ought to
be encouraged. That ought to be the purpose of education. It’s not to pour
information into somebody’s head, which will then leak out, but to enable them
to become creative, independent people who can find excitement in discovery and
creation and creativity at whatever level or in whatever domain their interests
carry them.
On using corporate
rhetoric against corporatization. This is kind of like asking how you should
justify to the slave owner that people shouldn’t be slaves. You’re at a level
of moral inquiry where it’s probably pretty hard to find answers. We are human
beings with human rights. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for the
society, it’s even good for the economy, in the narrow sense, if people are
creative and independent and free. Everyone benefits if people are able to
participate, to control their fate, to work with each other—that may not
maximize profit and domination, but why should we take those to be values to be
concerned about? Advice for adjunct faculty organizing unions. You know better
than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you face. Just got ahead
and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated, don’t be frightened, and
recognize that the future can be in our hands if we’re willing to grasp it.
