Meanwhile....
As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, “administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.” [1] There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the “the all administrative university,” noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere. [2]
A number of colleges and universities are drawing more and more upon adjunct and nontenured faculty — whose ranks now constitute 1 million out of 1.5 million faculty — many of whom occupy the status of indentured servants who are overworked, lack benefits, receive little or no administrative support and are paid salaries that increasingly qualify them for food stamps. [3] Many students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a subaltern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values and largely treated as consumers for whom education has become little more than a service. Too many students are buried under huge debts that have become a major source of celebration by the collection industry because it allows them to cash in on the misfortune and hardships of an army of indebted students....Moyers & Co.
Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation
Henry Giroux | Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and distinguished visiting scholar at Ryerson University, both in Canada
