The University and Precarity
This proposal was written as a first step in a much larger process. Please feel free to make comments, suggestions, criticisms etc. This would ideally work as a collaborative and collective project, with many sources of input, so all forms of participation are definitely welcome.
Proposal for Mapping Exercise: The University and Precarity
“Dream Large” (University of Melbourne slogan)
The past few decades have witnessed massive structural reforms on an international scale in the higher education and University sectors. These reforms have not necessarily coincided from region to region or nation-state to nation-state, nor have they been linear or confined to a single set of protocols. Common to all, however, have been striking shifts in the relations between the production of knowledge and the capitalist marketplace. This is what might be linked to the idea of the Education Factory; here, the University becomes a highly commercial and managerial enterprise, a hothouse for the production, qualification and dissemination of cognitive labour. Simultaneous to this has been the increased diffusion and expansion of the University into various terrains, from the social, economic, creative and cultural, to the geopolitical.
Because these imperatives of the University have played out in myriad ways across different zones, it is problematic to mark out a paradigm that would somehow claim to encompass them all. It is possible, though, to research and sketch out some of the common organisational models and the effects that these have had on labour and social production. What could be proposed is an exercise of mapping, or cartography, that would illustrate some of the relationships between the University and the production of precarity. At stake in such an exercise or project is the visual tracing out of a few of the complex and often ambivalent processes and developments that have taken place, and are taking place, in the University – as well as their wider implications. It is clear that there are a number of effects that these new University structures and knowledge institutions have been having on the labour market and on social relations. These include (but are not limited to): increasingly uncertain job futures for academics vying for a small pool of positions; increase in administrative, bureaucratic and management functions in academic work; shifts from focus on teaching work to research work; normalisation of unwaged/ low/ or erratically waged labour for cognitive and creative workers; new creative industries serving to expand arts and humanities into new vocations and markets; supply of students, artists and researchers often exceeding job demands; exploitation of postgraduate students trying to “get a foot in the door”; more demands on academics to create “industry linkages” via funding proposals; systems of “differential inclusion” based on valuation of educational institution, kind of knowledge learnt, reputation etc; the evaluation and stratification of immaterial and cognitive labour via merit and points systems such as performance analysis; uncertainty associated with informal job networks; precarity of student life juggling both study and work; etc.
Methods to investigate these effects can include: forms of militant research, short questionnaires sent to students and staff of various knowledge institutions, collation of personal stories, research of statistical data, political theory and analysis, Zoe’s diagram (pentagram) of creative work “love-cash-personal growth-social valorisation/recognition-social and environmental impact”.
Some questions regarding scope: What kind of geographical focus could it have (problems of “global”)? What are problems surrounding making it too specific or too general, how to refine it/ expand it? Would it be only state universities or also include colleges, private universities, vocational institutes etc.? In the University would it just be academic staff or include other staff? What key aspects might be included? Would it be more focused on the creative and humanities sectors and industries or also scientific/medicine/engineering? What kind of language/ vocabulary might be best used? How to analyse material and data collected, how to negotiate general political/economic analysis with empirical work? What kind of aesthetic would be best suited to it? What function would it serve, who and where would it go to?
Some comments so far:
Brett:
We have to be careful of such statements of the industrialisation of the university since they can be read to imply the reaching of an older mode of production into the university. In edufactory we received this criticism of the name many times. It is true that this is a powerful metaphor, coming from Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory and other sources. Sometimes the word corporitisation is used, although surely the point, as registered in the following sentence here, is that work patterns in the wider economy have come more to resemble those developed in the university, as well as other sites. In edufactory the metaphor of the factory was used to suggest that, as was once the factory, the university is now a paradigmatic site of struggle between labour and capital. Although this begs the question of the status and location of the factory now.
This sounds close to the work of the countercartographies collective and their disorientation guide of the research triangle. See http://www.countercartographies.org/. At edu-factory we have contact and collaboration with them, so there is a question of how to relate to their experience.
Perhaps more accurately in some contexts the creation of two classes of academic workers – teachers and researchers – with perhaps a transfer of resources/subsidies from one to the other.
Questions of terminology – e.g. the term precarity travels well in the European space but may be less effective as a political concept in other continental contexts.
Yoni:
1) I think it would be interesting to look at the content of study as well. Weber already accepted specialisation as a fact in 1918 (Politics as Vocation) but today we face a problem of de-skilling. That is, it is not even possible to specialise in a discipline ecause there is no canonical literature, no preparation and apprenticeship, and in Australia, a painful lack of post-graduate courses in the humanities. Not to mention the dispersal of humanities subjects under the guise of ‘Theory’ in all faculties. It is simply impossible to get an education in any meaningful sense at an Australian university and Postmodern scholars have no choice but either to stick to being followers of one thinker (Derrida, Deleuze, Aagamben) or rehashing new ‘readings’ of older texts etc….of course this relates to the structure of the entire education system, and perhaps isolating the university, whilst methodologicaly useful , might be theoreticaly and politicaly harmful.
2) The suitablity of the structure of teaching to the imperatives of pedagogy on the one hand and production on the other. That is to say….what is the real nature of seperating courses into lectures and tutorials. Using the assesment methods of essay, examination etc. What are the ethical and proffesional imperatives guiding student and teacher behavior…..have they changed in accordance with the advent of so-called post-fordism???? Are conferences are suitable model for the production of knowledge etc… Roland Barthes already hinted at the neccesity of a research program on a genealogy of the academic world ased on a history of the conference, lecture, tutor, essay etc….as have the folks up on www.notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com in relation to a foucaultian project, saying that the university is the one disciplinary institution foucault did not subject to a major critique….a possible question to start with is ‘what are the conditions for the production of the distinction between productiv/non productive knowledge etc, what are the theological and disciplanary heritages of the academic assesment system (theis, confirmation!, etc…)
Jon:
What an exciting prospectus for a very ambitious project! Bravo!
I wonder if it is best to map out ‘precarity’ or ‘insecurity’ per se? My preference would be to see you/us map out the way bodies and knowledge are linked in a system of capitalist valorization and circulation in general. Needless to say, in a global industry valued at US$40-50 billion/year, some people/institutions are making a lot of money. Have a look at the Humanities Indicator Prototype project for some useful US data bases http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/default.aspx which suggest, as you indicate above, that disciplinary differences are extremely important factors in the process of valorization.
I have a couple of suggestions for concrete indicators of ‘precarity’ that are vitally important but perhaps not so immediately obvious:
1) language and translation. Of course, the very concept of the national university is a means of instituting standardized national language that throws minority languages into precarity. Of the 8,000 extant languages, only some 200 are official state languages, and among those there is a clear heirarchy related to flows of knowledge, good, and bodies. It would be extremely useful to chart flows of knowledge according to their function as raw data or finished product. The introduction of English-language based programs in many universities is a crucial part of the attempt to attract funding and students. In Translation and Globalization, Michael Cronin (with whom I have serious methodological differences) makes some astute remarks about the precarity of minor languages in relation to institutions of translation today; researchers in the field of biocultural diversity have taken this up in a different but related way.
2) “subjugated knowledge”. The term of course comes from Foucault, whom I love in spite of his incurable and methodological eurocentrism. Concretely, this would be an attempt to chart out kinds of knowledge excluded from journals listed in the major commercial indices like the SSCI and A&HCI, which are almost exclusively official organs of scholarly associations and narrowly-defined disciplines. What kinds of economy exist around these marginalized journals and what kind of relation do they have to the major commercial products?
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One Response to “The University and Precarity”
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comment from zoe:
Interesting proposal. some comments to the discussion
Concerning Brett comment about the concept of university as a factory:
I used the concept of factory to describe university not because i believe
is the new site of struggle but only to underline the fact that
universities have become sites not for the production of knowledge but
sites for the production of graduated students (they have become a
product).
so universities are companies that manifacture a product: graduates. And
now we have a crisis of overproduction of this new product, it’s called
precarity (the word is already used in japan and united states, so i wont
be preoccupied of the latin root).
Concerning the comment about countercartography:
I would be careful to use the word “counter”. The crisis offers us an
opportunity to show the emperor new clothes and the fact of using the word
counter, puts you in a kind of a ghetto. We are here, with our body and
minds, with a brand new sexy interpretation of what we see.
I would focus the mapping on simple things: comparing levels of causal work
and number of graduates (in the faculties with the biggest number of
students) in big cities, in europe and united states, any kind of
university (private or public).
It’d prefer to start with small objectives, producing a fast result and
then enlarge the research, instead of starting with too high objectives and
not finishing within 6 months.