Academic Workers on the Rampage

Photo: JULIETTE HUY, Voice of OC, via Left Voice

NYC's Homeless Go On Strike

Refuse to sleep on subways until demands are met

It's an impossible headline--the lumpen proletariat can't go on strike. That's because they perform no useful labor and create no value. Instead, what they do is deprive others of their comfort. Honest citizens will be overjoyed if the homeless refrained from sleeping on subways.

But what about the lumpen intelligentsia, i.e. people who work for our academic institutions? These are folks who think they work hard, but they produce little or nothing of value and receive in return what amounts to a welfare check. Wouldn't the rest of us be better off if they all went on strike?

Olivia Wood, a journalist at Left Voice, reports on that issue in an article entitled The Higher Ed Labor Movement Runs Full Speed Ahead into 2023.

Ms. Wood, a PhD student in English Composition and also a lecturer, inadvertently tells us in one very long, run-on sentence what she thinks about all day.

While higher education is not the most strategically placed sector of the labor movement (like logistics or transportation), these struggles do take on extra weight in the context of the student debt crisis, public divestment from education, and right-wing attacks on “critical race theory” (by which they mean any discussion of racism), queer people in general and trans people more specifically (including teaching about these topics), and all forms of “wokeness” (defined in Florida as any acknowledgement of systemic oppression).

Her first clause ("...not the most strategically placed...") is absolutely correct. Unlike truck drivers, if college professors the world over all went on strike, by the end of the first semester nobody would miss them at all. The bright students can learn on-line, and the really bright students can teach themselves. As for the others, there are lots of folks out there who could substitute in for the professoriate (scabs, if you will), and would be happy to do so. A strike by the professoriate is about as feasible as a strike by homeless people.

The second clause ("...debt...divestment...") is a whine for more money. The student debt crisis is wholly the fault of the higher education establishment. Per the Education Data Initiative (Hanson, Melanie. “College Tuition Inflation Rate” EducationData.org, August 10, 2022),

• College tuition inflation averaged 4.63% annually from 2010 to 2020.
• The cost of tuition at public 4-year institutions increased 31.4% from 2010 to 2020.
• After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 747.8% since 1963.
• The most extreme decade for tuition inflation was the 1980s, when tuition prices increased 121.4%.

This results from the collective greed of the entire academic establishment--faculty, staff and administrators alike. It is recently augmented by colleges now turning themselves into full-service social welfare institutions, increasingly responsible not just for education, but also for food and housing insecurity and student mental health.

Finally, the last clause ("...critical race theory...queer...trans...wokeness...") is a guide to what she wants to "teach." This is straight-up propaganda and has no relationship to actual teaching. A teacher maintains scholarly distance and is not trying to proselytize students. It's an attempt to indoctrinate students into a very particular world view that champions infertility, poverty and self-pity. There is nothing here of value to anybody trying to raise children, establish a career, save for a successful retirement, and hopefully have some money left over to leave to one's grandchildren.

There is no reason for taxpayers to subsidize this, and even less reason for students to pay exorbitant tuition or go into debt over it.

She considers two strikes in detail: at the University of California system where 

The striking scholars included teaching assistants, researchers, tutors and other graduate student instructors at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

And at The New School, where

The sizable walkout had left the school at a near standstill. Classes were canceled because nearly 90 percent of the faculty is made up of untenured adjunct professors and lecturers. The school had also been facing a lawsuit from irate parents, who had threatened to withhold payment or force their children to transfer to other institutions. 

Both strikes were settled before Christmas.

Ms. Wood never really tells us who the strikers were striking against. The closest she comes is the word "management," which I suppose is a synonym for "the administration." The problem is that the administration is on the same side as the "workers." Nobody in the administration is against giving everybody raises--5%, 10%, 200%--it doesn't matter. Administrators favor them all.

The problem is not the administrators' will--it's their lack of money. Beyond their own salaries (often quite meager, eg, for assistant directors), they have no resources to contribute to the cause. For them, therefore, it's a zero-sum game. The more money they give to one group (eg, English adjuncts), the less money they'll have for another group (eg, childcare workers).

Extra money only comes from off-campus. There are three major sources:

• Tuition: As noted, tuition has already gone up way more than inflation. Asking students to pay more tuition in today's environment is a non-starter. Colleges have already priced themselves out of the market. It's ironic that the people striking for more money are many of the same people who will have to pay higher tuition.
  
• Taxpayers: Most tax dollars at the state level are already paid out as charity: Medicaid, housing allowances, prisons, hospitals, mental institutions, public schools, etc. These expenditures--while arguably necessary at some level--produce no new wealth for society. In economic terms they're a dead-weight loss. Higher ed used to justify itself that they prepared students for life and for the workplace. But Ms. Wood's list of priorities puts a lie to that. It seems higher ed is a waste of money.
• Philanthropy: Private colleges, especially elite ones, depend on philanthropy. It's not clear to me why anybody will want to contribute to Ms. Wood's list of sorry causes.

Then there is this:

At The New School, part time faculty (UAW Local 7902) voted down management’s “last, best, final offer” and eventually won their contract shortly after students began an occupation of the main academic building, students’ parents began a lawsuit against the university, and full-time faculty demanded the university rescind its plan to begin docking pay and benefits.

The relevant clause is "...students' parents began a lawsuit against the university...". To what end? Did they demand the university end the strike and volunteer to pay the additional tuition? Or did they demand the opposite: that the university defeat the strike and not raise tuition? It's odd that Ms. Wood doesn't tell us.

Students at fancy schools like the University of California and The New School aspire to join the elite. Some of them will succeed, and themselves become tenured professors at elite institutions, or rise to leading roles in business, government, or media. Others (like me) will get tenure, but only at Podunk State. Many will only get jobs at adjuncts--but that assumes that colleges have enough money to hire adjuncts at the inflated salaries.

There is a word for this: elite overproduction. We're producing way too many elite aspirants than there are elite jobs. And with the skills being taught by Ms. Wood, no other jobs will be available to them.

 Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the SWP
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education