Highly educated cheap labor pool!
“This proposal also betrays the uniquely regressive labor politics in academia — which is, ironically, populated with many tenured scholars who call themselves Marxists and teach and write about class consciousness, but ignore the economic exploitation of adjuncts and other non-tenure-track colleagues. Academic culture and institutions also continually reinforce the privileged myopia that “loving what you do” makes up for not receiving monetary compensation.”
This article says a lot about the role of colleges and universities in promoting exploitation culture, a signifying characteristic of our exploitation based economy that is capitalism. I once thought higher education to be an element of society that stood for the improvement of the society, that existed to find truth even when the truths discovered upset the status quo. In fact, I thought that upsetting the status quo WAS a major role to be played by institutions of higher education, this in order to bring about necessary changes to better the lives of human beings.
While our attention is on other things and there is so much out there to be worried about, it would probably be a very good thing to consider what has become of universities and colleges, how they are funded, by whom, and for whom and for what they now operate. If the higher education system has been coopted by those who now own the country, what entity does their exist to study what is wrong with “democracy” for the profit of a few?
For institutions of higher learning to exploit its workers and its graduates is a problem at least as important to remedy as dependence on fossil fuels, hunger, or corrupt politics, income inequality, because hardly anyone would know of such things or take the time to find cures if uncorrupted universities and colleges did not exist. Consider the path on which we are traveling.
One reply on “Workers with Ph.Ds! Jobs available for less than nothing.”
At every institution a boatload of money is being funneled into the admin sections. How are the institutions supposed to survive when only the head is getting fat off of the lamb?