“…The overwhelming ‘adjunctification’ of the
university has meant that approximately 76% of professors… aren’t
professors at all, but underpaid and overworked adjuncts, lecturers, and
assistants. And while conditions for adjuncts are slowly improving, especially
through more widespread unionization, their place in the university is
permanently unstable.
“This means that no adjunct can afford to seriously
offend. To make matters worse, adjuncts rely heavily on student evaluations to
keep their positions, meaning that their classrooms cannot be places to heavily
contest or challenge students’ politics. Instructors could literally lose their
jobs over even the appearance of impropriety. One false step—a video seen as
too salacious, or a political opinion held as oppressive—could be the end of a
career. An adjunct must always be docile and polite.
“All of this means that university faculty are less
and less likely to threaten any aspect of the existing social or political
system. Their jobs are constantly on the line, so there’s a professional risk
in upsetting the status quo. But even if their jobs were safe, the corporatized
university would still produce mostly banal ideas, thanks to the
sycophancy-generating structure of the academic meritocracy. But even if
truly novel and consequential ideas were being produced, they would be
locked away behind extortionate paywalls.
“The corporatized university also ends up producing
the corporatized student. Students worry about doing anything that may threaten
their job prospects. Consequently, acts of dissent have become steadily
de-radicalized. On campuses these days, outrage and anger is reserved for
questions like, ‘Is this sushi an act of cultural appropriation?’
“When student activists do propose ways to ‘radically’
reform the university, it tends to involve adding new administrative offices
and bureaucratic procedures, i.e. strengthening the existing structure of the
university rather than democratizing it. Instead of demanding an increase in
the power of students, campus workers, and the untenured, activists tend to
push for symbolic measures that universities happily embrace, since they do not
compromise the existing arrangement of administrative and faculty power…”
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