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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2023
This review article surveys recent studies of the state of and challenges to academic labor in the ongoing regime of academic capitalism, corporate managerialism, and neoliberalism in colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and select other countries around the world. Some works analyze changing funding models, accountability mechanisms, and forms of administrative power, while others explore the discourses pervading higher education and impacting the self-understanding of academics. Higher education administrators, boards of trustees, and politicians have sought to create flexible and inexpensive academic labor. New studies explore the three main strategies pursued: the failed effort to promote Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the proliferation of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs), and the continuing expansion of contingent labor, full and part time. Other works analyze the innovative unionization efforts on the part of contingent faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
Mary Nolan is Professor of History emerita at New York University. She is the author of The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 and co-editor of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Work Place and of The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties.
2. Slaughter, Sheila and Rhoades, Gary, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Washburn, Jennifer University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. Kirp, David L., Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.
3. Ginsberg's, Benjamin The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. Bousquet, Marc, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York, 2008)Google Scholar. Martin, Randy, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (Durham, NC, 1998)Google Scholar.
5. Schrecker, Ellen, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.
6. Krause, Monica, Nolan, Mary, Palm, Michael and Ross, Andrew, eds., The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (Philadelphia, PA, 2008)Google Scholar.
7. President Biden's 2023 federal budget, for example, asks for $88.3 billion for the Department of Education, while the military is getting $813 billion.
8. Jaffe, Sarah, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (New York, 2021)Google Scholar. This includes the chapter “Proletarian Professionals: Academia.”
9. As Childress notes, numbers are hard to determine exactly, because some surveys divide faculty into TT and NTT, others into full-time and part-time, but many full-time are NTT. Moreover, the 15–20 percent of teachers who are grad students are not included.
10. APL nextED Match Recruiting Services, for example, promises to connect colleges and universities with subject-matter experts through their automated system, often in days. Inside Higher Ed, April 12, 2022.
11. AAUP, Faculty Compensation Survey, 2021–2022. https://www.aaup.org/faculty-compensation-survey-results-tool.
12. For a sampling of this debate, see The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rethinking Tenure: Abolish, strengthen or replace it? (2021). Accessed at: https://store.chronicle.com/products/rethinking-tenure.
13. For information on the culture war and academic responses to it, see the African American Policy Forum Truth Be Told. Accessed at: https://www.aapf.org/truthbetold AAPF and Historians for Peace and Democracy, bit.ly/hpadCWE; https://www.historiansforpeace.org/. For pending and passed legislation, updated regularly by Pen America, see https://pen.org/in-higher-education-new-educational-gag-orders/.
