An article in the Guardian that was both interesting and thoroughly depressing at the same time. The growth in adjunct and "contingent faculty," casual employment.
Mary O'Hara:
"Many academics in Britain are angry at what they say are exploitative, insecure contracts with deteriorating pay and terms, including zero-hours contracts".
The Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism exacts a heavy price. Of course, there's a need to put this in some context: thirty years of neoliberalism but also, you feel, the deeper and wider political and cultural currents that aim to measure, quantify and monetize all that lies outside the realm of the economy. It's not just that education and knowledge must be made into capital, servant to the master of endless accumulation and restless aspirations; it's not just that you have to become a small capitalist yourself and "invest" in improving your own productivity and job market skills, sacrificing any notion of current contentment for a future that either never arrives or, if it does, isn't what it was cracked up to be. No, it's that the changes are bound up with, and dependent on, a whole mentality and language that you have to "buy" into if you want to be "successful". 'Think, but don't think too much'should be the guiding philosophy of universities today.
Temporary contracts and instant gratification stem form one and the same root, are thrown up by the same underlying processes, consumer and producer being different aspects of the same kind of subjectivity, and subject to the same kind of institutional control. Flexible labour, disruptive technologies. Move with the times or be sunk by the movement of the times. Surfing, that's what it's ultimately all about (why does that line make you sound like Gaddis from Agape?)
If only everyone had an ocean across the US-A..
~
Burrawoy hits the nail on the head with an incredibly perceptive essay. Commodification or regulation as the only paradigms available. And how they interact with one another-through instrumental rationality-is the key, you suspect.
Add to this austerity mode of being ("value for money") MOOCS and the current fad for reducing everything to technological screen solutions, then you've got the perfect recipe for more downsizing. Capital must be allowed to flow and any institution or way of thinking that hinders that process-which is what critical inquiry does-has to be broken. Broken and then fixed by capital.
I read something the other day but still find it hard to believe. Did the Japanese Education Ministry actually say that? Close down the social sciences, since what is needed is knowledge that keeps the economy going. Really?
Mary O'Hara:
"Many academics in Britain are angry at what they say are exploitative, insecure contracts with deteriorating pay and terms, including zero-hours contracts".
The Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism exacts a heavy price. Of course, there's a need to put this in some context: thirty years of neoliberalism but also, you feel, the deeper and wider political and cultural currents that aim to measure, quantify and monetize all that lies outside the realm of the economy. It's not just that education and knowledge must be made into capital, servant to the master of endless accumulation and restless aspirations; it's not just that you have to become a small capitalist yourself and "invest" in improving your own productivity and job market skills, sacrificing any notion of current contentment for a future that either never arrives or, if it does, isn't what it was cracked up to be. No, it's that the changes are bound up with, and dependent on, a whole mentality and language that you have to "buy" into if you want to be "successful". 'Think, but don't think too much'should be the guiding philosophy of universities today.
Temporary contracts and instant gratification stem form one and the same root, are thrown up by the same underlying processes, consumer and producer being different aspects of the same kind of subjectivity, and subject to the same kind of institutional control. Flexible labour, disruptive technologies. Move with the times or be sunk by the movement of the times. Surfing, that's what it's ultimately all about (why does that line make you sound like Gaddis from Agape?)
If only everyone had an ocean across the US-A..
~
Burrawoy hits the nail on the head with an incredibly perceptive essay. Commodification or regulation as the only paradigms available. And how they interact with one another-through instrumental rationality-is the key, you suspect.
Add to this austerity mode of being ("value for money") MOOCS and the current fad for reducing everything to technological screen solutions, then you've got the perfect recipe for more downsizing. Capital must be allowed to flow and any institution or way of thinking that hinders that process-which is what critical inquiry does-has to be broken. Broken and then fixed by capital.
I read something the other day but still find it hard to believe. Did the Japanese Education Ministry actually say that? Close down the social sciences, since what is needed is knowledge that keeps the economy going. Really?
No comments:
Post a Comment