Adjuncts and Corporatizing Higher Education

The Washington Post ran a profile of an adjunct professor in their magazine last Sunday and used it to draw out larger themes about the dismal situation for part-time faculty on American college campuses. CNN did a similar story last year.

There's been a lot of discussion of this issue in the Chronicle of Higher Education and via organizations like the American Association of University Professors over the past few years. More recently, there's been some serious organizing amongst part-time faculty (especially in the Boston area) and grad students in response.

As I see it, this "corporatization of higher education" - the adoption of a business model for keeping labor costs low, and outsourcing when financially attractive – is bound up with what's been referred to as the “theme-parking” of colleges & universities. Increasingly, students are being sold on the merits of a school's social opportunities and more substantial portions of institutional budgets are being used to invest heavily in technology, state-of-the-art recreational facilities, plush housing, and other athletic/entertainment complexes, while spending on faculty hiring, library acquisitions, and academics in general (especially in the humanities) declines.

Of course, this trend should not be divorced from the general attack on K-12 public education over the past 20 years, either. The emerging dominance of public choice theory completely re-orientated the landscape upon which educators and consumers contextualized the purpose and utility of education; so education is now less a "public good" than something that furnishes individual students with skills for personal advancement in highly competitive job markets.

With this scenario, the locus of education shifts from providing students and educators with the power to define subject matter to a situation where the job market and the needs of employers are given primacy in determining where money and resources are allocated. In a worst case scenario, as David Noble has warned, institutions of higher education will gradually become "diploma mills" to serve commercial interests entirely - both in regards to input (how pedagogy is enacted) and output (the type of student produced).

Vouchers fit nicely into this equation, as well. Privatizing education will likely destroy one of the few remaining avenues for upwards mobility, and further polarize the nation into a binary of "haves" and "have nots". It will probably kill the middle class and dissolve communal bonds fostered by public institutions which have historically allowed marginal populations to feel part of a larger, "American" community. It goes without saying that the long-term effects of this will be disastrous.