The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the glaring contradictions in American higher education. State research universities are preparing to decrease services in light of anticipated budget shortfalls as small liberal arts colleges teeter on the brink of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Ivy League and other rich universities have refused to dip into their massive endowments and have instead chosen to pursue austerity while increasing tuition—and increasing debt—for their students.
Across the country, universities are canceling classes and furloughing workers, leaving thousands stranded without income. Though some schools have lengthened the tenure timelines of assistant professors, the majority have refused to extend a similar courtesy to graduate students. Staff members and adjuncts have likewise been abandoned—forced to work fewer hours or unceremoniously let go. The situation is likely to get worse as students refuse to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to take subpar online courses while sitting in their living rooms. Without exaggeration, American higher education may be on the verge of a total breakdown.
To those who labor in universities, the precarious condition in which academia finds itself is no surprise. For years, the university system has been operating on borrowed time. Beginning in the 1980s, college administrators, often employing high-fee consultants, hollowed out the academic workforce, replacing full-time jobs with contingent positions that were poorly paid and benefited. At the same time, exploding tuition costs obliged students to take out enormous loans that compelled them to view higher education primarily as a precursor to employment—employment that, as the economy worsened, was rarely guaranteed. This house of cards, built on exploitation, anti-intellectualism, and massive debt, was doomed to collapse.
In the past decade and a half, many people involved in the system have begun to do something about it. Undergraduate students have formed organizations that challenge their teachers’ poor working conditions, graduate workers and adjuncts have unionized and demanded respect and compensation for their labor, and even tenure-track and tenured professors have started to unionize and recognize their contingent peers as colleagues. Throughout the United States, there is a dawning awareness that saving the university requires cross-occupation solidarity, in which people working at various jobs in the academy come together to demand transformation.
Yet in the face of administrator intransigence (the failure to recognize graduate unions, improve salaries and benefits, and abandon contingent labor), the situation remains dire.
The crisis of American higher education is central to two recent books that link the diminishment of universities to the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. The Gig Academy, by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott, documents how the neoliberal obsession with cost cutting and disinterest in labor rights has crept into the university, engendering the rise of a generation of precariously employed scholars teaching undergraduates burdened with titanic debt. Tracing the decline of stable university jobs, the authors insist that only radical, collective action can rescue American higher education. More than reform, they assert, what the university—and, in fact, the economy as a whole—needs is to be revolutionized.
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