American Universities are Abusive

Teen Vogue laced up their truth dropping boots and explained why a lot of us in higher ed break into frustrated laughter when talking heads accuse us of liberal propagandists: “The Modern American University is a Right Wing Institution.” It’s nice to see more people criticizing the current higher ed policy of “Use your privilege for good and tell truth to power but not in a way that challenges our authority!” And while the university-as-hedge-fund-playground model is accurate, I want to talk about how abusive academia is as a system.  

The Prestige and Homogeneity Problems

Universities are catastrophic snobs. First and foremost, the college administrators’ collective sense of Harvard envy is real. Picture middle class Victorians who developed an elaborate set of social rules to differentiate themselves from the lower class while aligning themselves with the upper class, but really they just ended up looking ridiculous because the upper class gets to throw away any rule they want (I can’t wait until I have enough money to be eccentric rather than quirky). Their modern mummy-eating pseudoscience turns into some weird obsession with baseless US News & World Report rankings and shapes the institutional “prestige” problem.

The obsession with Ivy League degrees offers one sense of enforced conformity, the other problem is lack of institutional diversity. Forget everything you know about “DEI” hiring and your friend who didn’t get a job because he was “a white conservative.” When it comes to getting a job, who you know still matters: one in every 8 faculty members at PhD granting institutions comes from the same 5 universities. Approximately 80% of faculty are from 20% of graduate schools.

Institutional culture is important and where you’re trained in your PhD has some shaping effects on your sense of pedagogy, your sense of inclusion in the classroom, your desire to burn down the building because your University is being ridiculous, and your understanding of workplace and classroom culture. Plus, knowing the statistics PhD granting institutions keep admitting students as cheap labor (teaching undergraduates or as research assistance).

Academic Publishing is Unsustainable and Exploitative

Nobel-prize winning physicist Peter Higgs said that by today’s standards he wouldn’t be productive enough for academia. If Nobel Prize guy isn’t working hard enough, maybe we should just admit that the neoliberal “productivity” culture has won.

But even when we do produce, we’re not paid for our work. My grandfather was dumbfounded when I told him that if I published a book with an academic press, I would likely not make much (any) money off of it (though if academic presses want a book on the Politics of Childbirth, hmu, I’m in book proposal mode). He was equally surprised when I explained that all that peer-review work is done for free. (Admittedly, there are ethical issues with paying peer reviewers, but we’re smart people and need to come up with a better solution to academic publishing).

Universities are judged better if their faculty publish and research (bring in money that mostly doesn’t go to the students). Yet very few academics admit that who publishes and researches is not a matter of being so special you get the R1 (fancy school) job but the working conditions at the job because students are paying a ton more. At R1s faculty teach 1-1 or 2-2 (courses per semester fall-spring). They’re also getting paid better and are more likely to have TAs, access to research databases and software, and lo and behold, they publish more. Faculty at R2 and R3 institutions might teach some version of 2-2, 3-3, or 3-2, but they’re still teaching more classes than at R1s. Then you get to the “teaching” school and community colleges (aka the Basement of the Ivory Tower) where people are teaching 4-4 or 5-5 and making a lot less money and have less time to research and write. Universities found a way to replicate the class hierarchy while packaging objective measurement and US News and World rankings help them convince incoming students to go there.

One of the key figures in the corporate takeover of academia, and one of the most patently abusive job practices is the adjunctification of higher ed. Instead of full time, tenure or non-tenure track, Universities rely on contingent faculty. These “part time” faculty are often teaching at least ¾ the classes of their full-time counterparts (full time at my school is 4-4 and I teach 3 or 4 each semester).

But many adjuncts have to teach at multiple schools to make ends meet. This can mean teaching 6 or 7 classes a semester. This leaves little time for giving good feedback (the penny pinchers forget that our working conditions are students’ learning conditions) and no time for research and publishing.

Plus, adjuncts have no job security no matter how good we are at teaching or publishing (even when we find a way to play by their rules we still lose). This lack of job security means that at any point you can lose access to the software you’re using in your research, your institutional email aligned with your research, and any other things you need to conduct successful research.

United States of Abuse

So, why do adjuncts and many faculty members stay? I do it because my husband can pay the mortgage and I get summers with my kids, but also because I deeply love teaching.

But the high ed isn’t just a right-wing institution. Like a lot of the United States, it’s an abusive corporate oligarchy. Whether physical, sexual, or psychological, and certainly economically, US institutions in general are abusive and exploitative, and for all its pomp, circumstance, and pretenses to wokeness, academic institutions are no different.

Higher ed stuffs itself with administrators and drives up costs while never lowering tuition even with “operational surpluses” or big endowments. When students are sexually assaulted, universities hush it up, especially if it is by prominent faculty members. Psychologically the University works on the same fear response as other American institutions.  It exploits privileged students for their money and under-privileged students for their dreams. If economics on college campuses were directed towards those who most affect student wellness, it would be: custodial staff, food service, tutoring and academic support, faculty, health and mental health, and everyone else. Find me a college budget that prioritizes the pay scale in that order.

Today police forces are marching against our students and faculty on campuses across the country. In typical abusive-gaslight fashion middle class and upper-class white people are staggered the police can be violent against unarmed protestors (apparently, they didn’t do the reading). The same universities that fail to protect their students from gun violence, racial violence on campus, and sexual violence are now weaponizing the police in order to maintain their veneer of prestige. Those beautifully photographed lawns don’t look as pretty when students do what we taught them and fight back against systems of oppression.

Of course, universities are right wing institutions. The United States is a right-wing institution. And our universities are subject to the same exploit-abuse culture as every other aspect of our society.

But I’m suspiciously optimistic this week because the kids are alright, and they might help those of us who’ve been poking at the system for years find some traction.