If you are starting your university career straight out of high school, it may be tricky to get your head around how different some things work. Let us make your first days easier with an overview on how this teaching and learning universe works with some tips and insight. Essentially, college students take control of how to spend their time and what to study, which can be very empowering. However, with great power comes great responsibility, meaning that your education is your responsibility; no one is going to do it for you.
A lecture is the most common learning form at university. Here, students — sometimes more than hundreds in one room — listen to a professor, or an expert in the field giving a presentation about a specific topic. The duration is up to two hours. In addition to the lectures, there are often tutorials offered. Tutorials are much smaller than lectures with up to 20 to 30 students in attendance. They often take place in a classroom setting.
In these one or two hour courses, material from the lectures and readings are discussed in more detail. Also, students can ask questions. The aim is a more in-depth understanding of the course material. Especially in science-based degrees students attend science-based workshops to gain practical scientific experience.
Many computer-based degrees also hold workshops in computer rooms so that students are able to use the necessary programmes to complete activities. An empowering element about university is that students are free to decide about their lectures, courses and tutorials — giving students the opportunity to learn pretty much everything they are interested in. Almost every university offers a variety of studies from science and aviation, to business and government, humanities, social sciences and languages, education and even music; every theme is presented.
As a student, the most important thing at university is to know the dates which are relevant for your studies. To be successful in your studies, you have to know what is up next and what needs to be prepared. Some students may struggle with such liberty and freedom, especially when introduced to so many curricular and extracurricular activities. If this is the case, it is essential that students go in with a plan, focused and seek out support to be successful.
The best way to keep an overview is to get a calendar, to note all relevant dates. Speaking of tons of possibilities at university: besides lectures, tutorials and workshops you can also follow your interests while attending sports courses or political speeches. Also there are cultural, religious or social offers at university.
In many different ways students can participate in what they are interested in, including making friends and memories along the way. In thirty years of managed higher education, the typical faculty member has become a female nontenurable part-timer earning a few thousand dollars a year without health benefits.
The typical administra- tor is male, enjoys tenure, a six-figure income, little or no teaching, gen- erous vacations, and great health care. Nontenurable faculty are mod- erately more likely, and nonteaching staff substantially more likely, to identify themselves as belonging to an ethnic or racial minority than the tenure-stream faculty.
Administrators are less likely to identify them- selves with minority status the farther they are up the food chain. There are lots of other areas in which nonprofit administrators have spent even more.
Under managed higher education, cross-subsidy has eroded un- dergraduate learning throughout the curriculum and become a gold mine supporting the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!
Why have those who control nonprofit colleges and universities so readily fallen into the idea that the institution should act like a profit- seeking corporation?
At least part of our answer must be that it offers individuals in that position some compelling gratifications, both mater- ial and emotional. This is an age of executive license. In addition to a decent salary and splendid benefits, George W. Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. College administrators com- monly enjoy larger salaries and comparable benefits.
They, too, have the privilege of declaring war—on their sports rivals or on illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and industrial pollution. It feels good to be president. What must be swept under the rug is that the ability to do these things is founded on their willingness to continuously squeeze the compensation of nearly all other campus workers.
The uni- versity under managerial domination is an accumulation machine. This is a very commonsensical assumption, and it is correct in the general sense that nonprofits have adopted revenue-maximizing princi- ples borrowed from the larger world of profit seeking.
Who is influencing whom? While for-prof- its enroll about 8 percent of students in institutions receiving financial aid, they capture only 2. There are certainly some ways that the low, single-digit market share of degree-seeking students en- joyed by the for-profits places pressure on certain segments of nonprofit education, especially community colleges.
But it is hardly the case that for-profit schools taught nonprofit higher education how to cheaply de- liver a standardized, vocationally oriented curriculum designed by ten- ured administrators and implemented by a massively casual instruc- tional force.
That practice was perfected decades earlier by the non- profits themselves, while billionaire University of Phoenix founder John Sperling was still a labor activist and president of a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, struggling to better the situation of faculty exploited by his nonprofit higher education employer. The dis- honest staffing of the nonprofits taught Sperling, a one-time idealist and faculty unionist, how to harvest surplus value more ruthlessly than Nike and DeBeers, not the other way around.
As a matter of policy, accreditation, and sometimes law, the non- profit institutions themselves intentionally crafted the low standard of a majority nonprofessorial faculty between and the s. It was this low standard, set by the nonprofits for themselves, that, in turn, permitted the explosive profits of commercial education providers circa One valuable approach fo- cuses on the ways campuses actually relate to business and industry in quest of revenue enhancement and cost containment: apparel sales; sports marketing; corporate-financed research, curriculum, endowment, and building; job training; direct financial investment via portfolios, pensions, and cooperative venture; the production and enclosure of in- tellectual property; the selection of vendors for books, information tech- nology, soda pop, and construction; the purchase and provision of non- standard labor; and so forth e.
Included in this line of analysis are diverse bedfellows. The left wing of this approach is led by such con- tributions as Campus, Inc. An important alternative understanding of the transformation of the university focuses not on commercialization but on organizational cul- ture.
In both cases, the particular merit of the projects is the sense of human agency. Changes in the aca- demic workplace come about as a consequence of clearly understood and clearly intended managerial, corporate, and political initiatives with the explicit intention of inducing the faculty to relinquish certain values and practices. Individually and collectively, faculty members make choices when they adopt new organizational cultures. However, the cir- cumstances supporting the flourishing of those cultures have eroded.
Because the traditional figure of the tenure-track professor is now a small minority of the instruc- tional force in U. As a result, investigating faculty culture means investigating the multiple subcultures of the persons doing the work formerly done by the tenurable faculty: part-time pieceworkers, graduate-student employees, undergraduate tutors, and full-time non- tenurable instructors.
Even as the s sense of strong faculty and student cultures has dissipated, management culture has moved in the other direction en- tirely—becoming ever more internally consistent and cohesive. The cul- ture of university management has the power and, crucially, the inten- tion to remake competing campus cultures in its own image. In fact, the extent to which we increasingly see campus administrations as domi- nant over other campus groups has much to do with what we see as the success of administrative culture: that is, its capacity to transmit its val- ues and norms to other groups.
As I relate in chapter 3, since the s the faculty have certainly organized—with greater and lesser success, depending on immense variables—but, in the same period, campus ad- ministrations have enjoyed a massively increasing sense of solidarity.
The managerial caste has grown by leaps and bounds and is tightly knit. Through a complex and vigorous culture of administrative solidar- ity, university management sees itself as a culture apart from faculty. Even when it is not aimed at defeating a par- ticular faculty initiative, management culture is pitched toward continu- ous struggle with faculty culture.
In large part, the self-recognition by management of an emerging cul- ture of its own flowed from the extent to which university administra- tion through the s increasingly took traditional faculty beliefs and practices as an object of study. Management theory turned away from the human-resources model of developing individual potential.
This phase of management theory—the lead- ership discourse—also saw organizational culture as the wellspring of all possibilities. If this sounds Orwellian, or a bit like Foucault goes to business school, it should. In adopting a management theory founded on the dis- semination of a carefully designed organizational culture, campus ad- ministrations were like most U. Plainly put, higher education administration pervasively and self-consciously seeks control of the institution by seeking to retool the values, practices, and sense of institutional reality that comprise faculty and student cul- ture.
And they have succeeded wildly. With the spread of acceptance among the tenure-stream faculty of academic-capitalist values and behaviors, and acquiescence to an increasingly managerial role with respect to the con- tingent, there is little evidence of anything that resembles an opposi- tional culture. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to speak of anything resembling faculty culture apart from the competitive, market- based, high-performance habitus designed for them by management.
Of course, there are exceptions, and self-consciously militant faculties have made their mark in California, New York, Vermont, and elsewhere, in- cluding the South. But even most collective-bargaining faculties have not fully addressed such core issues of administrative control of the workplace as the massive creation, over the past twenty years, of a ma- jority contingent workforce. There is nonetheless an emergent and vigorous culture of faculty op- position—just not in the tenurable minority.
This is a group whose precari- ous position is overwhelmingly designed to disable solidarity, face-to- face encounters, and the emergence of a sense of common culture and communal interest.
Still, they have succeeded in forging an emergent culture of opposition—a culture that sustains and promotes a move- ment to transform policy, standards, knowledge, appropriations, and the law itself. This book is a product of that culture.
That par- ticipation was itself a major part of my graduate education. Bowen and Sosa. As I relate below, the interesting question is not whether Bowen was wrong and the contingent workers were right in a particular instance. The better question is: Why were we right? Other than, fascinatingly, novelist, then-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and English Ph.
Lynne Cheney, who did so from her experience as a contingent worker, not from her pulpit in the administration. In addition to more accurate description, I also believe the standpoint of the contingent faculty and graduate employee generates a more just claim on our attention and action than the standpoints occupied by ad- ministration or even the faculty in the tenure stream.
There had been a cycle of bad times for holders of the Ph. As late as , the report of the American Philosophical Association on employment issues, re- published on many department websites, continued to give credence to the Bowen projections, even though the first years of the projected boom had instead conclusively showed only a massively intensifying bust.
Slowly through the second half of the decade, most disciplinary associations somewhat reluctantly gave up favorably citing the Bowen projections of a rosy future.
As many readers will know, instead of a jobs bonanza, the s and the first decade of the new millennium have seen an intensification of the pattern established in the s and s. In many academic fields, especially the humanities, as few as one in every three holders of the Ph. Those who do succeed will spend more time toward the degree bulking the curriculum vita, teaching more, racking up debt , and more time in non- tenurable positions after receiving the doctorate.
It is easy enough to measure the gulf between the 1. Most egre- giously, for instance, when confronted with data that increasing num- bers of doctoral degree holders had been accepting nonacademic work since the s, Bowen ignores the abundant testimony by graduate students that this dislocation from the academy was involuntary. The result of this tautol- ogy was that he projected a spiraling need to increase graduate school admissions—in order to compensate for the imaginary, ever-increasing cohort of people that he wrongly portrayed as choosing nonacademic work.
This error was only one element in an overall set of ideological as- sumptions. He also excluded the majority of academic workers. In reality, every nook and cranny of the public discourse on the question held reams of evidence attesting that what institutions really wanted was to accumulate capital and conserve labor costs by casualizing faculty positions by any means available: early retirement, expanded graduate programs, outsourcing, distance education, deskill- ing, and the like.
Some- time between and , Bowen was sure, things would turn around. Bowen is hardly alone in erroneously imposing market ideology on data about the structure and relations of academic labor. Job-market theory is a significant vector through which managerial thought spread to faculty and graduate students as part of what I call a second wave of dominant thought about the situation of academic labor after During the past quarter century, the worldview of faculty and students has repeatedly threatened to collapse entirely into the management viewpoint.
Nonetheless, there are many lines of alternative thought. It cannot be said that the profes- soriate provided leadership to this movement.
Rather clearly, school- teachers, municipal clerks, firefighters, police officers, and their unions showed professors the way. During its heyday, however, the ideas of fac- ulty unionists pervasively infiltrated the thinking of management, stu- dents, and the public. As I note in chapter 3, Clark Kerr and the Carne- gie Foundation gazed at the movement for unionization of the tenurable faculty with intense trepidation, projecting that the decades of student power would be followed by decades of faculty power.
The intellectual roots of the managerial sec- ond wave are in neoclassical economics, the neoliberal political regime, and the pervasive discourse of management theory. While this language originally served as analogy, for most producers and consumers of job-market theory the terms hardened un- der neoliberalism into a positive heuristic, serving as a kind of half- baked approximation of labor-market analysis.
Responsible labor-mar- ket analysis, for starters, would have accounted for casualization. Even faculty who saw the need to bargain collectively on their own behalf took up job-market theory with relief. Through it, the issues of gradu- ate employment appeared susceptible to a simple solution—the balanc- ing of supply and demand by concerned academic citizens perhaps ad- ministrators or graduate faculty.
As a result, it was possible to believe that these were not issues that had to be confronted by the unions them- selves. Job-market theory separates the workplace issues of the graduate em- ployee from the workplace issues of the faculty and sweepingly defines the workplace relation of faculty to students in paternal, administrative, and managerial terms. Whatever actions faculty might take to secure their own working conditions, job-market theory defines their responsi- bility toward graduate students and former graduate students not as a relationship of solidarity with coworkers but, instead, as a managerial responsibility.
Even to the most idealistic and committed observer, the job-market model of- fered the seductions of a quick, technocratic fix.
Reality is very different from the model. In the reality of structural casualization, the jobs of professors taking early retirement are often eliminated, not filled with new degree holders. Nor does reducing grad- uate school admissions magically create tenure-track jobs. Most gradu- ate schools admit students to fill specific labor needs. One of the core functions of graduate programs is to enhance flexibility, always pre- senting just enough labor, just in time.
Universities that have cut their graduate employee rolls have consistently preferred to make other flexible arrangements, hiring part- timers or nontenurable lecturers and not new tenurable faculty. Insofar as these new flex workers are themselves inevitably former graduate em- ployees, there can hardly be said to be any net improvement.
In this context, the idea of a job market operates rhetorically and not descriptively, serving largely to legitimate faculty passivity in the face of this wholesale restructuring of the academic workplace by activist legis- latures and administrations.
By offering faculty the fantasy of supply- side control from the desktop, the job-market fiction provides an imagi- nary solution—the invisible hand—to a real problem. For many graduate employees, the receipt of the Ph. From the standpoint of the organized graduate employee, the situa- tion is clear.
Increasingly, the holders of the doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its by- products, insofar as that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty. The Waste Product of Graduate Education Grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured fac- ulty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial com- puter problems for one of the other grad students. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a de- gree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dol- lars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.
For instance, it is perfectly common for scholars of professional work more generally to employ the heuristic of a labor monopoly rather than a la- bor market. The best application of a labor-market mode of analysis to academic work might include the concept of segmentation—asking, for example, how is it that women comprise a vast majority in the casual sector and a distinct minority in the tenured sector?
Monopoly control of professional labor generally reflects a social bargain made by profes- sional associations that exchange a service mission with the public for substantial control over the conditions of their work, generally includ- ing deciding who gets to practice. From this perspective, the ideology of the job-market analogy may be seen as having obscured the very useful description of the aca- demic labor system in perfectly scholarly and conventional terms as a failed monopoly of professional labor.
That is, postsecondary educators generally fulfill the service mission that constitutes their half of the bargain; in return, society continues to grant them monopoly control over degrees.
But the labor monopoly fails because degree holding no longer represents control over who may practice. Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for eight or ten years before earning their doctorate. In English departments, a degree holder will have taught many writing classes, perhaps also a literature survey or theme class, even an upper-division seminar related to her field of study.
During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation; most will have a large portfolio of enthusiastic ob- servations and warm student commendations. A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental web pages.
As presently constructed, the system of academic work requires in- structors to have the terminal M. The system cannot run without people who are doing or who have done graduate study, quite frequently persons who can be represented as on some long trajectory toward the terminal doctorate. As presently con- structed, the academic labor system requires few if any new degree holders—but it gasps and sputters when there is a tiny interruption in the steady stream of new graduate students hence, the appearance of employment contracts in admittance packets.
It can also use degreed labor willing and financially equipped to serve in the sub- professional conditions established for the nondegreed, but the majority of people with degrees cannot afford to do so. The plight of recent degree holders encap- sulates this logic. Upon earning the degree or in many circum- stances much earlier , Doe becomes ineligible to teach those sections, unless given a special waiver or postdoctoral invitation.
Because of the related erosion of secure employment opportunity for young workers throughout the global economy, this system has no trou- ble bringing in new persons. Applications to graduate programs primar- ily designed to prepare future faculty have steadily climbed, despite the poor chances of finding tenurable employment. By contrast, the flexible labor at most other campuses, including junior colleges, will often consist of persons who have exhausted their fellowship years and may or may not have received a degree as a result.
They will therefore commonly have between five and twenty years of experience. The academic labor system creates holders of the Ph. This buildup of degree holders in the sys- tem represents a potentially toxic blockage. The system of academic labor only creates degree holders out of a tiny fraction of the employees it takes in by way of graduate education.
Leaving aside the use of M. In many disciplines, the system only employs perhaps a third of the degree holders it makes. Persons who actually hold the terminal degree are the traumatic Real puncturing the collective fantasy that powers this system.
Degree in hand, loans coming due, the working partner expecting a more fair fi- nancial contribution, perhaps the question of children growing relevant, the degree holder asks a question to which the system has no answer: If I have been a splendid teacher and scholar while nondegreed for the past ten years, why am I suddenly unsuitable? Nearly all of the administrative responses to the degree holder can al- ready be understood as responses to waste: flush it, ship it to the prov- inces, recycle it through another industry, keep it away from the fresh meat.
Insofar as graduate employees feel treated like waste, they can maintain the fantasy that they really exist elsewhere, in some place other than the overwhelmingly excremental testimony of their experi- ence. This fantasy becomes an alibi for inaction, because in this con- struction agency lies elsewhere, with the administrative touch on the flush-chain. You are special. These are persons who can perform acts of blockage.
Without expelling the degree holder, the system could not be what it is. In many locations, the pipeline would jam in the first year! Where the degree-hold- ing waste product understands its capacity for blockage and refuses to be expelled, the system organizing the inside must rapidly succumb.
Theorizing Blockage There are many ways of writing about the casualization of academic work. As I elaborate in chapter 2, the most inclusive frame is one that addresses the malignant casualization of the work process globally. Mobilization of the academic community will inevitably require tearing down the barriers between academic work and other kinds of work. In this enlarged context, it is fair to ask, Why bother to talk about the doctoral degree holder at all, when the experience of contingency is general, or at least generational?
In the big picture of global exploitation, just how important are the problems of underem- ployed holders of doctoral degrees anyway? Subtract the largely imaginary relationship of most grad- uate-employee laborers to a future job, and the systemic effects of that labor are visible as the effects of casualized second-tier labor in any workplace: management domination of the work rules, speedup, moon- lighting, and grossly depressed wages for everyone.
The system of disposable labor has been consistently mistaken as a problem only for the relatively small constituency of the graduate stu- dent and other contingent faculty. One of the most useful aspects of the knowledge of graduate- employee and contingent faculty unionists is the way it addresses the system as a totality, enabling us to see that few people situated in the education ecology really benefit from the system of cheap teaching.
Your Problem Is My Problem! It is grounded in what has grown into a fifty-campus movement of graduate-employee unions GEUs and the flourishing campaign to organize contingent faculty, which has racked up a string of successful drives at both public and private cam- puses in the past several years. The medium most associated with the movement is the Internet, which hosts, in real time, the unfolding knowledge and burgeoning soli- darity of the movement.
During union activity, such as organizing campaigns or the landmark strike of New York University graduate employees beginning in Novem- ber , Internet commentary effloresces. These typically involve inde- pendent, organizer, and institutional sites and weblogs.
These debates involved un- dergraduates, tenured and contingent faculty, anti-union graduate em- ployees, organizers, activists, New Yorkers living nearby, and alumnae from across the country. Despite its vigor, third-wave academic labor knowledge is continu- ously under active erasure by the positive and commonsensical knowl- edge of the foundations, disciplines, institutes, and media.
To some ex- tent, this erasure takes the simple, ideological form of the power of second-wave market knowledge to interpellate concerned faculty, un- dergraduates, taxpayers, and public analysts, not to mention graduate employees themselves.
In organiz- ing campaigns, the suppression of labor knowledge by administrations can take the form of nonrenewal of the fellowships and assistantships of organizers, as well as punitive recommendations by advisers—even, oc- casionally, expulsion. But coming to this fundamental consciousness is not only a question of overcoming the ideology of apprenticeship and the disciplinary powers of academic institutions, it is a question of strug- gling with the apparatus of the state itself.
Graduate employees understand that all of these forces do not transpire in a dis- tant field of titans but, instead, occur in the arena of everyday struggle with the employer for control of the workplace. For the graduate em- ployee, it has not been a question of forecasting the economy or learn- ing the limits established by the law but, rather, of making the law re- sponsive to their understanding.
Because the National Labor Relations Act specifically excludes government employees from its protections, the circumstances of workers at publicly funded universities—including tenure-stream faculty, nonacademic workers, and student employees— are addressed primarily by state laws. The organization of graduate-employee unions at public universities has therefore depended on an arduous legal and political campaign con- ducted on a state-by-state basis.
Despite great variety in state labor law and political climate, there are significant commonalities in success- ful campaigns to force public universities to the bargaining table. Inspired and often supported by the movement to unionize tenure-stream faculty, graduate employees in public universities began to unionize in the s, beginning with a successful campaign at the University of Wisconsin. The road to a first University of California con- tract in May required a series of legal victories in the s.
These included favorable PERB interpretation of state laws providing bargain- ing rights to other higher education employees and multiple successful appellate lawsuits. One core lesson is that these repeated legal victories were not suffi- cient in themselves. Even after a series of decisive opinions in adminis- trative and appellate courts, the UC campus administration refused to bargain until the union acted politically, engaging in awareness-raising job actions and appealing to state legislators and the public for assis- tance.
Spurred by the mobilization and will to direct action by the grad- uate employee locals, and the concern of the electorate for stability and labor peace on campus, the California legislature threatened to shut down university appropriations until the administration complied with state law. This threat finally forced six UC campuses to the bargaining table, resulting in a first contract in May In consequence, they have learned the importance of educating lawmakers and the public served by those lawmakers.
Even with the electorate and the legislature on their side, graduate employees have come to understand the astonishing persistence, arrogance, ingenuity, and determination of their employers.
The will of public-university em- ployers to defy lawmakers and flout the intentions of labor law rivals the most ruthless union busting of any commercial enterprise generally hiring, at public expense, the same corporate law firms to guide them.
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