Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University

Chalk Lines: The Politics

Of Work in the Managed

University

Randy Martin, ed. Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 1998, $17.95

MARTIN J. FINKELSTEIN

LET ME BE CLEAR FROM THE OUTSET:

I am not a Marxist. Never have been. Indeed, I am only reluctantly an academic unionist. And yet Chalk Lines, a volume based on a special issue of the journal Social Text that appeared in summer 1997, certainly has me thinking, as it will you.

The great strength of this volume (twelve essays in all, four of which are original) is that it applies a coherent interpretive framework to the bewildering variety of new and not altogether salutary developments afflicting our universities and our profession. From the increased use of part-time faculty (the "casualization" of labor), to the emerging battles over intellectual property rights, to the developing corporatization of the research enterprise and the disenfranchisement of the faculty (especially in matters of budget and strategic planning)-all of these apparently singular developments are, according to the authors, part of a larger restructuring of higher education and, with it, the academic profession as one of the ineluctable phases in the triumph of "privatization" and "market capitalism." Higher education is simply the latest episode in the transition of the world order to "pure market capitalism," the logical culmination of Reaganism and Thatcherism come home to roost.

The first eight chapters are divided into two parts. The first focuses broadly on the restructuring of higher education, the second on the restructuring of faculty work and careers. The basic thesis is set out in the first chapter coauthored by Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, entitled "Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education." The chapter represents a blending and distillation of Slaughter's work with Larry Leslie on Academic Capitalism (1997) and Rhoades's work on the analysis of faculty union contracts reported most fully in Managed Professionals (1998) (reviewed in the July- . August 1999 issue of Academe). They argue that it over the past quarter century, there has been a significant shift in the revenue base of public universities, with a proportionate decline in public funding and a proportionate increase in private, frequently corporate, funding and reliance on tuition increases. Parallel to this shift in funding sources, public universities have come to behave more and more like profit-making organizations, seeking to own patents, invest in faculty members' start-up companies, develop units for technology transfer, and so forth. This largely unacknowledged privatization of the ivory tower has resulted in a variety of internal organizational changes-in governance, administrative and faculty roles, and budget control-as well as a broadening of the marketplace for higher education to include the private, forprofit sector. Much of the worst in American higher education can be traced to this ongoing, if tacit, privatization.

The subsequent seven chapters represent, in many ways, simple variations on this theme. They include the report of a comparative, empirical study of the "devolution" of managerialism into the "inner sanctum" of the academic department in American and Australian universities; a comparative analysis of the cultures of corporate managerial and human-development models of organization; an extended meditation on the bifurcation of American higher education into a large, mass system crowned by a small, elite sector of the few wealthy, independent institutions; and a Marxist analysis of the surplus value being squeezed out of academic labor by the "new managers," especially through the use of part-time faculty. To what extent these variations contribute integrally to a single gestalt that is more than the sum of its parts, or alternatively, merely represent a repetitive chorus of likeminded singers, will be determined by the background of the reader. For a non-Marxist like myself, it was quite useful to be introduced to different analytical conceptsprivatization, devolution, casualization, managed professionalism-in different chapters inspired by the same underlying intellectual theme. For more jaded readers, it may be less satisfying.

The volume concludes with four chapters that raise a very practical question: how can we as enlightened academic workers resist the wholesale restructuring of higher education and recapture the enterprise in the interests of preserving its essential intellectual values? The answer is not surprising. The broad political agendas pursued by those in power can be countered only by the concomitant marshalling of political power, which means a new "service sector" proletariat actively engaging the faculty in "organized resistance" through unionization. Indeed, the volume concludes with a plea to the profession to join the labor movement in higher education best exemplified by the recent flurry of organizing activity by teaching assistants at Yale and in the University of California system.

In all of this, the volume provides a tremendous service to those faculty who are disturbed by the changes in their working conditions and are feeling assaulted and vaguely ill at ease in their institutions and profession, but who have not yet been able to articulate their anxiety and its etiology in a coherent and analytically rich way. For them, this volume provides a framework for articulating their concerns and recognizing their source.

In assessing the volume's limitations, I would make three points, only the last of which is genuinely serious from an analytical perspective. First is the volume's lack of historical context, an unusual weakness for an essentially Marxist analysis. The advent of Taylorism in higher education is nothing new; indeed, as one of the authors remarks, the question of academic efficiency has been explicitly on the public agenda at least since Morris Cooke's publication of Academic and Industrial Efficiency in 1910, recommending, among other things, the abolition of tenure because it was an impediment to managerial intervention. The controversies over academic control that boiled over into the pages of The Nation during the first decades of this century pitting newly professionalized professors against those who would restructure higher education fueled the same conspiratorial condemnation of the "captains of erudition." By any serious yardstick, the American faculty had lost claim to "ownership" of higher education by 1707, when Harvard first began excluding newly appointed tutors from concurrent appointments as Fellows of the Corporation. It has been an uphill, and mostly frustrating, battle ever since. And it is only in the post-World War II period that the growth of the professoriate's public stature as a result of the New Deal Brain Trust and the Manhattan Project has been translated into effective gains in faculty compensation and professorial influence on campus. Higher education is again undergoing another of those epochal transformations that come along once a century or so, and wholesale restructuring of some kind is the inevitable result. The last such restructuring, at the turn of the twentieth century, brought us tenure and the flowering of specialized faculty expertise and influence. It made the modern academic profession. This one, alas, may unmake it.

A second concern (and a limitation less on the volume's analytical power than on its potential for broad public influence) is lack of clarity about the threat that restructuring poses to higher education. It is clear that the "new capitalism" threatens the trajectory of academic careers, the integrity of academic work, and the privileges of those holding "the last good job in America" (the title of chapter 8). These are matters of great concern to professors, but, unfortunately and realistically, to no one else (except perhaps their spouses and offspring). What is not as immediately clear is the threat the "new capitalism" poses for academic quality, the integrity of scholarship, and the quality of the student learning experience. These threats are serious matters for the broader society; and professors play (or, at least, should play) a key role in articulating the threat and dramatizing its potential social consequences. This is the case that we need to be making and that we need to be asserting forcefully and even militantly, in contrast to the more self-serving lament that our admittedly privileged way of life is in peril. The faculty needs to emerge from this debate as the stewards of the higher education enterprise rather than its parasites, but I am not sure this volume will serve that particular purpose.

A final concern, which represents more of a serious analytical limitation, is the inexplicable absence of any reference to the shaping, or at least enabling, role of information technology in the current restructuring of higher education. Information technology is changing the cost structure of higher education, reshaping the marketplace for educational services, transforming scholarship and teaching, and challenging the dominance of the holy trinity of the faculty role: teaching, research, and service. At the least, it is serving as a preferred tool of the academic capitalist; at the most, it constitutes its own independently powerful impetus to the restructuring of the global postsecondary market.

All this said, Chalk Lines will provide a quick and intellectually entertaining read to faculty who are seeking to understand the changing world of higher education. Alas, it must remain only one piece of the puzzle.

Martin Finkelstein is professor of higher edu

cation at Seton Hall University.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Sep/Oct 1999
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