Students, not Scabs: Full-time Professors as Economic Stimulus

I was just forwarded a great post by Marc Bousquet, where he links the adjunctification of higher ed faculty, the increased institutional reliance on student-workers, and the economic stimulus bill. He writes:

If things get worse, as seems likely, and if—as seems possible—education labor gets its act together, what is actually needed will become clear: full employment for educators and restrictions on student labor.

Is anyone who’s attended a faculty meeting in the past two decades will have observed: higher education is a lead “innovator” of the lousy forms of employment that have gutted the economy—permatemping of the faculty, outsourcing the staff, and myriad ways of extracting un- and under- compensated labor from students: internships, assistantships, financial aid, partnerships with local employers, service learning, etc, etc, etc. Thanks to quality management, it’s Nickel and Dimed everywhere you look–but especially on campus.

On campus and throughout the economy, un- and under- compensated student labor has been aggressively substituted for permanent waged positions with benefits. That’s millions of real jobs, cut into pieces and parceled out as low-wage positions for students, many of whom take on between two and five “part-time” positions annually in order not to get whacked upside the head with debt.

Eighty percent of college students work an average of 30 hours a week, triple the figure most studies say is appropriate for optimal learning. This inappropriate workload bears directly on absurdly low persistence and graduation rates.

It also bears on the immiseration of the American workforce, on campus and off.

Graduate students can’t get jobs as faculty after studying for a dozen years—because all of the positions they have “prepared” for are being filled by other students, or former students working on a part-time basis.

Similarly, undergraduates are now doing journalism as service learning—replacing paid positions for staff reporters—and many will find that the jobs they want upon graduation have been converted to “internship opportunities.”

Check out the rest of the post here - it's well worth reading. It was written before the final stimulus bill was passed. The bill, while raising the Pell Grant maximum by just $500, adds a whopping $490 million for Federal Work Study. $490 million, in most cases doled out in minimum-wage-sized chunks, means your tax dollars are greasing the wheels of downsizing and the casualization of higher ed.