Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/jeanbaptisteparis
February 28, 2014
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The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam
Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and
allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.On hiring faculty off the tenure track
That’s
part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry
or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed
benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce
labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become
corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last
generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population,
their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The
effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of
state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that
labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially,
temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal
period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea
is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the
“plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were
advising their investors on
where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally
but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other
group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious
existence.
This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was
testifying before Congress in
1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out
that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he
called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s
very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they
won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for
benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s
optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone
regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of
reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the
universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially,
by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than
can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny
salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed
to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should
welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies
efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as
universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is
exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
That’s
one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar
from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of
administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have
to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even
more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management—a kind of
economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is
true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very
sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and
students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative
to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up.
There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin
Ginsberg, called
The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford
University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style
of massive administration and levels of administration—and of course,
very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional
administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members
who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative
capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly
professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so
on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with
administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.
But
using cheap labor—and vulnerable labor—is a business practice that goes
as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in
response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts
and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for
obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious
workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the
transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of
course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn
into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a
business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact,
economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a
mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix
it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a
recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has
what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the
right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a
voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your
business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a
human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists
call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor
costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs
are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous—but that’s
not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the
way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university
imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but
are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no
security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business
models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
In
fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you
go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of
concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of
the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time
of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s
dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to
gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women,
working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a
serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the
spectrum, there’s a book called
The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral
Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New
York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an
organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was
drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what
they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much
democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these
“special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena,
and that put too much pressure on the state—you can’t do that. There was
one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector,
because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector
is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the
“special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have
more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being
passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools
and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of
“indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil
rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the
environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated
properly.
Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a
number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition
debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far
larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life
because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a
business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but
individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through
bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s
a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously
introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s
hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look
around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with
the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top
all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful
capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country,
which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic
difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States:
if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close
to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who
would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them
and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the
reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges,
education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945
at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was
$100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy
to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school
and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have
grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and
it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary
technique.
And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back
faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are
overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you
don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move
on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline,
indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect
in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be
obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing
production or determining how the workplace functions—that’s the job of
management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it
shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise,
in industry; that’s the way they work.
On how higher education ought to be
First
of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden
age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far
from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely
hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in
decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to
democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives
to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts
were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of
success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation
in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we
should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people
involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students,
staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how
it runs; and the same should go for a factory.
These are not
radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical
liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major
figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that
workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in
them—that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill,
Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7).
We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to
the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish
co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the
wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (
“Founding Ceremony” for
newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a
mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for
education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker
control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that
as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production,
commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then
“politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John
Dewey,
“The Need for a New Party”[1931]).
This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history
and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working
people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some
decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic
transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and
there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal
activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation
can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example,
for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating
in department meetings.
On “shared governance” and worker control
The
university is probably the social institution in our society that comes
closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example,
it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to
determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re
going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will
be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is
doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there
is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control.
The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned
down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or
legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it
does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which,
although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when
the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle
recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing
administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under
the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true.
There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer
of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the
faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin
Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the
several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a
couple of others.
Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced
to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious
existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal
acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given
real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get
appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in
the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted
to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded
from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff
ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a
part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can
easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part
of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s
the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under
for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance
to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least,
have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never
really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.
On the alleged need for “flexibility”
“Flexibility”
is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s
called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier
to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of
profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like
“greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is
true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where
there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my
daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night
and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the
courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world
didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements—you
teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that.
People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the
variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all
sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor
should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard
technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators
should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or
trustees—what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same
with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about
management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so
let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the
news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP
Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty
substantial raise,
almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the
bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail;
he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well
I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful
to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they
talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer,
and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s
piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and
obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way
that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical
system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the
same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.
On the purpose of education
These
are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher
education and mass education were really being raised, not just
education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two
models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed
with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should
be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call
these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then
the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of
us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize
something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a
week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these
days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to
top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities.
Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.
The other model was
described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in
his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the
string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions.
Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an
educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or
something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain
structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity
to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge—that’s education. One
world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what
are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter
what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the
capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create
and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the
material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed
array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about
tomorrow.
These are two quite distinct models of education. The
Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that
we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from
kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind
for kindergarten, pretty good ones.
On the love of teaching
We
certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in
activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting—and I don’t
really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative,
inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things,
and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of
your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and
concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if
you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re
trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem
and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want
to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably
functioning university, you find people working all the time because
they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the
opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and
independent and creative—what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And
that, again, can be done at any level.
It’s worth thinking about
some of the imaginative and creative educational programs that are being
developed at different levels. So, for example, somebody just described
to me the other day a program they’re using in high schools, a science
program where the students are asked an interesting question: “How can a
mosquito fly in the rain?” That’s a hard question when you think about
it. If something hit a human being with the force of a raindrop hitting a
mosquito it would absolutely flatten them immediately. So how come the
mosquito isn’t crushed instantly? And how can the mosquito keep flying?
If you pursue that question—and it’s a pretty hard question—you get into
questions of mathematics, physics, and biology, questions that are
challenging enough that you want to find an answer to them.
That’s
what education should be like at every level, all the way down to
kindergarten, literally. There are kindergarten programs in which, say,
each child is given a collection of little items: pebbles, shells,
seeds, and things like that. Then the class is given the task of finding
out which ones are the seeds. It begins with what they call a
“scientific conference”: the kids talk to each other and they try to
figure out which ones are seeds. And of course there’s some teacher
guidance, but the idea is to have the children think it through. After a
while, they try various experiments and they figure out which ones are
the seeds. At that point, each child is given a magnifying glass and,
with the teacher’s help, cracks a seed and looks inside and finds the
embryo that makes the seed grow. These children learn something—really,
not only something about seeds and what makes things grow; but also
about how to discover. They’re learning the joy of discovery and
creation, and that’s what carries you on independently, outside the
classroom, outside the course.
The same goes for all education up
through graduate school. In a reasonable graduate seminar, you don’t
expect students to copy it down and repeat whatever you say; you expect
them to tell you when you’re wrong or to come up with new ideas, to
challenge, to pursue some direction that hadn’t been thought of before.
That’s what real education is at every level, and that’s what ought to
be encouraged. That ought to be the purpose of education. It’s not to
pour information into somebody’s head which will then leak out but to
enable them to become creative, independent people who can find
excitement in discovery and creation and creativity at whatever level or
in whatever domain their interests carry them.
On using corporate rhetoric against corporatization
This
is kind of like asking how you should justify to the slave owner that
people shouldn’t be slaves. You’re at a level of moral inquiry where
it’s probably pretty hard to find answers. We are human beings with
human rights. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for the society,
it’s even good for the economy, in the narrow sense, if people are
creative and independent and free. Everyone benefits if people are able
to participate, to control their fate, to work with each other—that may
not maximize profit and domination, but why should we take those to be
values to be concerned about?
Advice for adjunct faculty organizing unions
You
know better than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you
face. Just got ahead and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated,
don’t be frightened, and recognize that the future can be in our hands
if we’re willing to grasp it.
Prof. Chomsky’s remarks in this
transcript were elicited by questions from Robin Clarke, Adam Davis,
David Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua
Zelesnick. Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity is published by Zuccotti Park Press.
【惟工新聞】美國著名語言學家諾姆．喬姆斯基（Noam Chomsky）在上月初與美國鋼鐵工人聯合會的兼職教師協會（Adjunct
Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers
）成員對話，內容談到美國大學商業化如何壓逼僱員及學生、工作職位的零散化
