How the University Works: Higher
Education and the Low-Wage Nation
(Cultural Front) by Marc Bousquet
A Substantial Book, Not A Hard Read
As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has
been said about what its like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-
profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees—including the
vast majority of faculty—really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of
the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with
adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This
super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than
$16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per
year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable
workforce.
Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes
the seamy underbelly of higher education—a world where faculty, graduate

students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages.
Assessing the costs of higher educationÂ?s corporatization on faculty and
students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for
anyone interested in the fate of the university.
Personal Review: How the University Works: Higher Education
and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) by Marc Bousquet
Marc Bousquet has written quite a book that deserves to be widely
distributed not only in academia but to any organization involved in labor
issues. The University (capitalized as generic) may be the main topic but
the background and consequences apply to general labor-management
relations. It's a very dense book that weaves social theory, labor relations
history and contemporary academic labor analysis.
It should command one's attention and will give academic readers quite a
few "wow, that's what's going on where I work" moments. And if you enjoy
Michael Berube's writing, you'll enjoy this as well.
I disagree with the previous reviewer that it is badly written. It is dense,
yes, but not inaccessible. Most of the concepts used will be familiar to
anyone who has paid attention to labor issues beyond academia. It is one
of the arguments of the book that, indeed, academics have tended to not
think of themselves as labor, and that therefore, academia would be
exempt from the major trends affecting the labor market. It has been a
costly mistake, for instance, with the massive increase in the use of
contingent work. Two major points made by the book:
*"We are not `overproducing Ph.Ds'; we are underproducing jobs." The
university would not be able to function without the reserve army of
graduate students and contingent workers. In this sense, the work they do
constitutes REAL jobs and positions that are simply never filled but could
be filled by degree holders. But the way the managed university works is to
fill these positions with contingent work, on a casualized basis and treat
them as if they were not actual positions. Moreover, contingent workers
can often only afford to take these low-paid positions because they have
spouses with full-time positions, other systems of financial assistance, or
simply get into debt. In other words, cheap teaching is subsidized by other
parts of the social structure.
* "Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime." Such labor made and
maintained cheap hurts everyone in addition to contingent workers. On the
end of the labor chain, the increasing casualization of work at the
university tends to increase the stressing of the system: full-time, tenured
faculty still have to teach more, advise more, publish more, serve on more
committees or continuous improvement teams, get more involved in
"shared governance", etc. It also leave undergraduate teaching to the less
experienced graduate students.

Marc Bousquet compares the current university system to an HMO. The
university has become an organization to be managed like an efficient
business where efficiency means delivering education at the lowest
possible cost and running at a profit. However, as in the case of health
care, this managerial revolution has not brought about cheaper education.
Quite the opposite, the cost of higher education has been consistently
increasing but not because of expensive teachers but by adding layers
upon layers of administrators.
The strength of the book is in raising awareness, through various forms of
analysis, regarding working conditions in universities but also in placing
academia in its proper social context: the larger global marketplace.
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