William Deresiewicz in Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education in the US. The effects of academic capitalism--the corporatization of the university -- makes for depressing reading. In Australia the emphasis of the current Gillard Government, which used to talk about the 'education revolution', is on ‘training’ rather than education.
Deresiewicz's argument is not just about the cut backs on the humanities or liberal arts in the US due to the economic and political pressure pushing higher education toward the “practical,” narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian,---ie., the professional, technical and vocational training. It about the effects of the casualizaiton of academic labour. Deresiewicz says that the grad students are:
doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.
If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap.
The changing structure of academic work in the corporatized academy--ie.,extent of casual labor--threatens both the system of tenure and shared governance—the principle that universities should be controlled by their faculties.Public institutions enroll about three-quarters of the nation’s college students, and public institutions are everywhere under financial attack--because of the deliberate defunding of public higher education.
Its another sign of the decline of the US.
Australian social democracy is in urgent need of a period of renewal and reconstruction. It has to confront the fundamental causes of its vulnerability, loss of trust and élan in past years, reconnecting with both the contemporary challenges of government and a more educated electorate. Thus public concerns over migration, identity and culture loom large in Australian politics. Social democrats appear to be paying a heavy price in this regard, losing ground to parties on the centre-right and far right. They have lost trust and support across the social spectrum to a resurgent right.
Tim Bale in Exploring the cultural challenges to social democracy says that the right – helped by its friends in the media – seems to be able to supply answers that resonate with, and solutions which cut through to, ordinary people, be they working or middle class.
perhaps you’re feeling like you don’t belong in your own country, like you’re losing out to foreigners when it comes to getting a job, a home, a doctor’s appointment, a place for your kids at a good school – or at least one in which most of the kids can speak the language? The answer is equally obvious: the liberal elite has let us all down, made us part of a multi-racial, multicultural experiment that none of us ever voted for but that suited them perfectly, providing the nannies, the nurses, the builders and the barristas that make their lives easier but keep our wages down and render some parts of our towns and cities unrecognisable or even turn them into virtual no-go zones, fit only for scroungers, criminals and even terrorists. The tide has to beturned, borders have to be closed, rules have to be obeyed, political correctness and this human rights nonsense has to end. Those who don’t like it know where they can go.
The latest issue of M/C Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2011) - 'diaspora' In the editorial Lynne Pearce returns to the “here and now” of the late 1990s. More specifically it is a return to theorists like Arjun Appaduri, Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Robertson and others were “imagining” the consequences of both globalisation and glocalisation for the twenty-first century in order that we may better assess what is, indeed, coming to pass.
The term glocalization combines the idea of globalization with that of local considerations. As a combination of the words 'globalisation' and localisation'. Meaning the ability to 'think globally and act locally", The media, for instance, is a powerful means of making connections on an international scale and is also capable of having an impact on a more local stage. Glocalization suggests that people have global and local perspectives at the same time.
Pearce says:
While most of their prognoses for this “second modernity” have proven remarkably accurate, it is their—self-confessed—inability to forecast either the nature or the extent of the digital revolution that most vividly captures the distance between the mid-1990s and now; and it is precisely the consequences of this extraordinary technological revolution on the twin concepts of “glocality” and “diaspora” that the research featured in this special issue seeks to capture.
She says in relation to (a) that:
while the processes of globalisation have clearly been instrumental in creating the financial crisis that Europe is presently grappling with and does, indeed, expose the extent to which the world economy now operates outside the control of the nation-state, the nation-state still exists very palpably for all its citizens (whether permanent or migrant) as an agent of control, welfare, and social justice. This may, indeed, cause us to conclude that Bauman’s vision of a world in which globalisation would make itself felt very differently for some groups than others came closest to what is taking shape: true, the transnationals have seized significant political and economic power from the nation-state, but this has not meant the end of the nation-state; rather, the change is being experienced as a re-trenching of whatever power the nation-state still has (and this, of course, is considerable) over its citizens in their “local”, everyday lives
... the Internet may be used to facilitate transnational “actions” against the nation-state (individual or collective) through a variety of non-violent or violent actions, but nation-states around the world, and especially in Western Europe, are currently wielding immense power over their subjects through aggressive “austerity measures” which have the capacity to severely compromise the freedom and agency of the citizens concerned through widespread unemployment and cuts in social welfare provision.
In his Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, London, 2007) John Roberts moves the discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s original radical gesture away from the ‘desire-value’ of mass culture and firmly into the realm of artistic and productive labour and the displacement of the artist’s identity.
According to Roberts, in his early readymades Duchamp overtly shows what had been largely hidden since the decline of the old studio-system: that every artist must start from readymade things (for example in the use of industrial paint), and consequently that all art relies on the collaboration of artist’s hands and non-artist’s hands. Moreover, in the stripping out of the traditional artisanal base for art Duchamp aligns his readymades (to) with the general historical process of deskilling as the result of the division of labour under capitalism and the law of the value-form.
In the Preface Roberts says that:
In the 1980s the debate on simulacra, copying, surrogacy and authenticity dominated Anglo-American art discourse. There was a widespread assumption that claims to subjective expression and aesthetic originality on the part of the artist were a myth, a delusional hangover from the Cartesian fantasy of the ‘inner self’ as an authentic expressive self. Since the 1920s and the social claims of the early avant-garde the continual expansion of technology into art’s relations of production made it increasingly difficult to equate normative value in art with such claims. Touch and manual dexterity had lost their place as markers of artistic taste and authority. As such, the artist was no longer seen as a self-confirming ‘creator’, but as a synthesizer and manipulator of extant signs and objects.
The post-gendered monteur was now merely an ensemble of techniques, functions and competences. In the 1980s much critical art and much art theory under the banners of postmodernism and post-structuralism was produced within this framework.
Today this sense of a ‘paradigm shift’ is the commonplace stuff of postmodern history and theories of the ‘end of modernism’, taught in art schools and art history and cultural studies departments in Europe and North America. Where once the expressive skills of the (male) artist were existentially inflated, now they are deconstructively deflated.
In this post at the Defend the Arts and Humanities blog David McCallam says that the Browne Report into funding higher education in England was depressingly reductive, judging the worth of university education almost exclusively in economic terms.
McCallam says:
Only those subjects deemed capable of growing the economy were hailed as fit for funding. The general good, in other words, is nothing more than GDP. No mention of university’s moral transformative capability, its democratizing potential or its civic duty. No defence of its role in providing personal enrichment, cultural apprenticeship or aesthetic pleasure. Society, in Browne’s vision, is competition, not conversation; it is entrepreneurial, not inclusive....his is today’s world, Browne says, and there is no alternative. And in such a world those academic disciplines caricatured as having no clear economic utility should have their public funding withdrawn in its entirety.
In this sense, the arts and humanities are the prime site of resistance to Browne and the coalition government’s economic instrumentalization of university education. What they ‘produce’ instead is critically empowered citizens with the capacity to envisage a different future from the one presented to them by the logic of the market
In this work post at Defend the Arts and Humanities blog David McCallam says that the common perception is that students don’t do ‘work’ at university, they ‘study’. (And study at university is itself often a stark departure from a school system that betrays its roots in the nineteenth-century mills and manufactures).
So work at university, especially in the arts and humanities, is not at all recognizable as work. It clearly isn’t manual labour, it doesn’t produce material goods like a factory, it doesn’t generate profits like a company, and it doesn’t offer a service to customers.
McCallam comments:
The arts seminar affords a very different order of productivity to those familiarly deployed by the market or indeed the state; for its primary mode of production is not economic but dialogic. It produces above all meanings, interpretations, theories, propositions, anecdotes, stories, chat, dissent, wit and questions. It is not utilitarian but value-based, that is, it is less concerned with quantities than with qualities. It can’t be calculated in terms of labour, since it is the fruit of unforeseeable elaborations. When text and class meet, what they produce is inimical to econometric measurement. And as such it is both an enigma and a threat to the prevailing socio-economic orders of work and production.
He adds that:
The reason for this lies in its very means of production: language not labour. In generating discourse, that is, language at work, each of us contributes to discursive production to a unpredictably fluctuating degree, but none of us ever owns, appropriates or expropriates it completely or indefinitely. Discourse makes sense only insofar as it is shared, constituted by a given language community, as a given language community, for a given language community. It is the original ‘common wealth’, and as such, it manifestly fails to fit the capitalist mould. It is similarly anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian.