One mistake radical students have been making in relating to the worst aspects of the multiversity’s academic apparatus has been their avoidance of it.
-Carl Davidson[1]
Davidson’s critique also applies to most critical observers of the university: in attempting to discuss the university, they have ignored the university. A lot has been written about the presidents, regents and businessmen who run them, income characteristics of students and the various assumed ideals which drive student protest. Far and few between are there actual attempts to understand the causes of the breakdown of the universities and what part students have played in them as students.
As the entrepreneurialization of US-based universities offers evidence of the productive relationship of the university to capital accumulation, it requires that we reevaluate our understanding of what students mean in a capitalist society and student political organization. Are students merely “privileged,” “workers” or a combination of both and more? Is student political activity, to the extent that it disrupts the operations of the university, a subsidiary or complementary part of class conflict?
Studies by the Brookings Institute and the Committee for Economic Development in the 1960s showed that higher education was related to one-half the growth rate in the 1950-60s, one-fifth was the direct result of the increased quality of the labor force from education and one-third from “advances in knowledge” applied to the production process.[2] Considering the widespread manufactured disinvestment from higher education since the late 1960s, I am compelled to ask what happened? Since the 1950s much attention has been focused on the contribution of higher education to economic growth in the development of disciplined intellectual labor according to theories of investment in “human capital.” With the campus rebellions of the l960-70s, the focus shifted to ongoing discussions of the university’s generation of new marketable technologies, start-up of new high tech companies and direct role in the global economy.
While little critical commentary has been offered regarding the productive economic activity of the university in a capitalist society, even less has been offered concerning the dynamics of the internal conflicts and struggles taking place during the transition of the university into an overt multinational business. Critical commentators on the university still hold to the notion of the universities being organized to serve only the development of disciplined labor while ignoring the more direct participation through the process I call entrepreneurialization. The changing “class composition” of the universities has been almost entirely ignored.[3]
Our failure to investigate the class composition of the universities is a direct result of the theoretical failures of our understanding of student political activity. This chapter analyzes the two most common views of students as either “middle class” and “privileged” or working but not part of the working class that is most common among contemporary student activists. As we’ll see, both theories rest on an identical assumption of the university as a marginal and unproductive institution in capitalism – the very assumption this dissertation seeks to refute by documenting the continuing reorganization of universities into overt profit-making businesses.
This debilitating assumption has been taken for granted among many student activists, as we saw in the case study of multiculturalism and the rightwing counterattack in chapter 3. Although student activists lacked a thorough analytical critique of the university in capitalism, the repression was predicated upon the threat of the multiculturalism movement to the university’s role in capital accumulation. In order to better understand why the movement lacked such a critique we need to look at the theoretical underpinnings that has informed nearly every radical study of students and higher education since the 1960s.
Ironically, the more the managers of higher education have indirectly and sometimes directly attributed the breakdown of the universities to the struggles of faculty and students, the less credit we receive from the left. On the left, there have been a few recurring themes that define the way many look at the universities and students. These themes have received much agreement between a diverse array of theorists and activists who may agree upon little else. The first seems to be a vulgar idea that students are “privileged” because of their location in the university or because of their parent’s income level. Such labels as “petit bourgeois” or “middle class” often explicitly or implicitly resound in discussions of students. This one-dimensional thinking has great parlance among students themselves as well who have come to believe that their roles as students are insignificant because of a presumed privilege and thereby prefer to identify with other groups (waged workers, “minorities,” black South Africans etc.) who are perceived to be more exploited or less privileged. It is vital to understand how this dynamic is rooted in theories of students as middle class.
Some have attempted to deal with these theories by looking at how students do fit into the working class. “Fit” is the key word here, since students are seen to be part of the working class only because of their work role whether in or after school rather than for their self-activity. As we’ll see, many times the working class is boiled down to a category in the strictest sense in which being a worker is to have a specific type of job, level of salary or even a salary itself. Students are then forced into this category since they are being trained to fit into these functions. However, the activity of students as students is neither perceived as productive to accumulation nor are their forms of refusal recognized as class struggle.
Given the reorganization of the universities into overt businesses, students can be understood as unwaged workers – to the extent that they do the work of disciplining themselves to work. Expanding upon the analyses of the “Wages for Students” movement of the 1970s, I argue that student struggle, both against being unwaged workers and in pursuit of their own autonomous projects within the university antagonistic to work, is not subordinate to other sectors of class struggle.
This chapter concludes with an analysis of how these theories implicitly informed the multiculturalism movement at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). In what way did the student organizers failure to develop a critique of UT-Austin as a business in organizing their struggle contribute to the movement’s inability to respond to the attempts to coopt and institutional limited demands as well as the repressive countermeasures? In light of my case study of the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, a class analysis of the university and student movements can benefit student resistance to entrepreneurialization.
The Myth of Students as Middle Class
Richard Flacks, an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has spent much of his academic career critically investigating student and youth rebellion. In Youth and Social Change (1970) Flacks contends that the student movements of the 1960s grew out of a structural breakdown generated by technological change.[4] Student movements and other “generational revolts occur when societies undergo processes of cultural breakdown” according to Flacks.
Such cultural crises have typically been evident when traditional values, meanings, and norms appear to be obsolete, retrogressive, or incoherent to an increasing number of members of society. Usually these crises are symptomatic of the fact that technological change has rendered traditional practices and institutions irrelevant and has generated a spreading pattern of new hopes, expectations and demands. These new aspirations are, however, not met by existing institutions and by the established structure of authority. Indeed, they are often actively resisted and repressed by those who have power (p. 18).
Flacks assumes that these movements grow out of a structural-functional breakdown of the dialectic.[5] The existing values and norms are no longer suitable due to technological change, the motivation for which is unexplained, that then triggers dissatisfaction. These norms, transferred to the youth by their parents, become irrelevant and leave perceptions of “declining expectations” to repeat in “middle class” jobs and communities. Yet, with the new requirements of technological change, these students no longer have the possibility to continue as middle class (e.g. petit bourgeois), but are in turmoil due to their unpredictable future and “receptive to new values, meanings, and identities” (p. 35).
As a result, the universities appear to breed radical criticism at the same time they are preparing the new managers, a “vanguard” group of middle class intellectual youth who come to be caught between the deterioration of the petit bourgeois and the demands of technological change (p. 52-54). Spurred by the civil rights movement, this vanguard began to perceive of themselves as agents of social change and sought to realize the radicalizing potential of the universities.
They shared with their parents a reverence of the university; like their parents, they found organized religion an inadequate source of values, and perhaps even more than their parents, they identified the university as the sole institution in the society that could facilitate the search for new values and meanings and help define a morally coherent and humanistic way of life. Far from wishing to destroy the university, Flacks sees radical students as among the most committed to its fulfillment as a central institution in their lives (p. 79).
More than making education the “new religion,” as Ivan Illich called education in the west,[6] Flacks portrays the university as the final synthesis of the capitalist dialectic, resolving political crises by transferring new values and behavior to the alienated vanguard. Isolated from “the rest of” capitalist society, the universities could serve to resolve the cultural contradictions of technological change.[7] The university
provided a kind of freedom virtually unavailable elsewhere in society. First, time was relatively free and unsupervised. The university student was at once free from the supervision of parents and the regimentation of work situations. His time was his own and he need not account for it to either his parents or his employer (as he would in a work situation). (p. 40)
With all the talk of freedom, Flacks has apparently overlooked the central aspect of school that makes it useful to business: self-managed discipline for work. Work at the university can be more vicious than at a waged job because it has no set work hours or evident boss. Since no one looks over the shoulder of a student or pays for the work, work can conceivably go on all day long – there is no end to the work day. These invisible means for regulating and regimenting the work day defies any universal claim that “his time was his own and he need not account for it” or that it is “free and unsupervised,” as Flacks suggests.
Of course, it is not so clear cut. Flacks overlooks the conflicts between the unwaged work of self-discipline and the ideal of the “free and unsupervised” student from which the pursuit of autonomous social projects can emerge when students resist the imposition of self-discipline. At UT-Austin I have found this antagonism quite strong. Many students feel the pressure to work but relay it by accomplishing the most in the least amount of time and effort possible by taking classes that give credit for what they would do anyway, cheating, cooperation, absenteeism, purchasing or trading notes, attending part-time, staying longer and dropping out and back in. With their “free time” carved out by refusing such discipline they have been able to pursue a multitude of projects from publishing alternative newspapers, starting a radio station, playing music, traveling, or organizing protest movements.
Using a structural-functionalist approach, Flacks argues that student rebellion is determined by technological change that renders the traditional social structure irrelevant and raises social expectations. When these expectations are not realized student and youth rebellion limited to aspirations of the middle class results.[8] The crisis of the universities originates in capital’s need for new technology. Not only are these developments not explained in terms of the disruption of their usefulness to capital accumulation (which primarily is the accumulation of a class of workers[9]) but it even determines a possible resurgence of activism.[10] Nonetheless, his theories do not fit. If students are “free and unsupervised” within a space that allows for critique how is their rebellion structurally determined? Ironically, although Flacks was a member of one of the students movements that created the crisis, he finds the crisis originated in a structural-functional process of social change.
Jurgen Habermas carries this theme of psychological disruption a bit further in his commentaries on the West German student movement in Toward a Rational Society.[11] Like Flacks, Habermas locates the motivation of the student movement in the breakdown of the university’s function of transmitting the “dominant culture”.
Habermas finds the 1960s generation to have been the first to have grown up under less burdensome economic conditions and is psychologically less subject to the disciplinary compulsions of the labor market. He hypothesizes a context on the basis of which we can explain the singular sensitivity of young activists: They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the bureaucratization of all regions of life. These costs seem to them disproportionately high in relation to the technological potential. (p. 29)
Put another way, the breakdown of parental authority and the spread of permissive educational systems “make possible experiences and promotes orientations among children that necessarily conflict with the standards of the perpetuated ideology of achievement while simultaneously converging with technologically available, although socially enchained, potential leisure and freedom, gratification and pacification” (p. 30).
There is little difference between Habermas and Flacks on the cause of the movements and their analysis of the role of the universities in a capitalist society. Habermas identifies three functions of the university: to efficiently instill skills and abilities, transmit the dominant culture, and form the political unconsciousness of students (p. 2-4). The crisis erupts as a result of technological imperatives, the student rebellion grows from the structural technological imperative that stirs middle class values of extended leisure. With rising development in the Western countries “the problems of structural social change…once again find in the formative processes of the rising generations a correspondence with psychological development.” (p. 30)
Once again, student movements rise out of structural maladjustments of the accumulation process, posing a crisis of values to the middle class youth. Studying the role of education in the production of labor power is forsaken in favor of a superficial articulation of the accepted ideology. Habermas and Flacks never question the myth that education is a “privilege” and not a virtually costless means for developing a potential labor force. In turn, student movements are not struggles against the hidden process of production but a searching for new middle class values of consumption. To them, students organize movements not to realize their own articulated needs and desires, but to defend their narrow middle class interests so as to bypass the psychological disruptions of economic reorganization.
Education is seen as subordinate to production, not a part of the process of circulation, a “use value”, of “exchange values” writes Habermas (p. 48). It is no more than a distribution system of social status that is challenged in the process of conflict, not a hidden part of production. Habermas’ failure to apply a class analysis to education itself leaves his analysis looking much like the Carnegie Commission’s,[12] by calling for the development of more critical professionals, subordinating research to popular needs, and equalizing access to the status rewards of the university (p. 47-48). When he dismissed the student movements’ claim that students are workers, even going so far as to say that the movements are entirely unrelated across national boundaries, it is not shocking to read that he disagrees that student movements are a part of international circulation of class struggle (p. 35). This conclusion is easily reached by dismissing any significant meaning of the universities in capitalist society except as a functional institution. If students have no strategic place to play his call for student/faculty councils to run the universities would eventually backfire. If students are socially insignificant, then such a strategy would be no more than sloganeering designed to allow the faculty, who like him have rejected any suggestion that the student movements have ruptured accumulation, a foothold in what they have long abandoned.
Instead of using the university for “pseudo-revolutionary adventures,” Habermas argues, “the movement should aim at creating for it an institutional framework that would make it possible to undo the interlocking of instruction and research with power and privilege inside and outside the university” (p. 46). Aside from proposing that the struggles inside the universities could and should speak for those outside it, he attests to the need to preserve not just the universities but make them more efficient in their tasks. Thus, turned against the students who seek to burn the universities down, Habermas offers a fire extinguisher. Now the universities are not only linked to “outside” struggles as their vanguard but are made even more efficient in their calling to resolve structural complications.
So too does Robert Paul Wolff, in the Ideal of the University, set aside the student movements in the U.S. in favor of preserving his ideal university.[13] Rejecting the movement’s analysis that students are workers in the corporate universities (p. 44-45), Wolff from a counterview of faculty as the actual workers, with the students acting as a consumers, investing in their own human capital (which we will soon discuss in relation to Gary Becker) to the universities being an assembly line for the production of “establishment man”, which are really no more than middle level managers[14] (p. 50). In fact, by the end of the book, the university appears as neither. Instead, it has become a place of “free inquiry” (p. 56) that is being corrupted by outside forces that have imposed on it arbitrary rules and regulations such as grading, admissions and sorting mechanisms.[15] While the university is far from neutral, Wolff pines for the old days when the campus was a community and an assembly line left to “intellectual maturation” (p. 150).
Like Habermas, Wolff hypothesizes the taking power by the university student/faculty community with the goal of returning to his self-described utopian campus of intellectual pursuits. “Utopian” may be a misnomer for his vision since the Carnegie Commission’s reforms look quite like Wolff’s community of scholars. Some of their reforms are even identical: reduce the undergraduate education to three years, abolish the Ph.D. and replace it with a three year professional degree for college teaching. While some of his other reform ideas were not replicated by Carnegie (abolish grades, sever the professional schools and create random admissions) functionally they serve the same purpose of institutionalizing student’s limited demands for reforms to reimpose control over the campuses. In the meanwhile, the universities could keep churning out “establishment men,” Wolff’s term for students.
The same problem can be raised with Wolff’s analysis as well as Habermas’ and Flack’s: the universities reproduction of labor power is never challenged and students resistance to that reproduction is nonexistent. Instead, Wolff sees the assembly line as something imposed from the outside on the university (p. 53), which is seen as marginal to economic production, totally divorced from its pursuit of profit through the imposition of work. Without recognizing the centrality of the university in the sphere of circulation, Wolff’s ideal reforms are easily complementary to capital’s dire need to reestablish control inside them. His analysis speaks to capital’s search for an answer to a crisis wrought by student and faculty struggles – ironically it is even complementary to National Association of Scholars’ current proposal for returning to the classics – not to students desires to transform or even explode the university. The class content of the struggles is gutted in favor of restoring the universities role by resolving supposed structural-functional crises generated by changing capitalist imperatives. Flacks’ analysis has come full circle, choking the necks of the student movements like a noose.
Implicit in Wolff’s characterization of the assembly line rolling off new units of “establishment man” is the concept of education as consumption. Rather than seeing education as producing labor power, leftist consumptionist theories accept the notion of human capital that education is an investment in oneself that later results in a higher standard of living without questioning its fundamental basis. In other words, because a student is consuming and paying to do so, education must be a privilege restricted to only those who can afford to do so. Ironically, not only is this the mask spread over education, but it is dated even by common knowledge that the expansion of higher education in the late 1950s was seen as tied to economic growth. Even today, neo-classical economics uses education to account for residuals in growth that cannot be specifically accounted for.
Yet, even in the face of such evidence that education is a source of growth and profits, the left still persists in calling students consumers. Michael Miles writes that “the position of students is not the role of the proletariat but, on the closest analogy, the role of consumers.
The outputs of the higher educational system are educational credentials, which determine the holders’ place in the labor market on the presumption that they represent mental skills and intellectual training. In this enterprise, the major universities certify the elite cadres, while the lesser institutions turn out trained manpower. Although these degrees and credentials are the main products of the educational institutions, students are in a sense not only consumers of the products but the products themselves.[16]
A few years later Gintis and Bowles would subscribe to a similar model of education which they called the “correspondence principle” which suggests, as Miles does, that education mirrors ones position elsewhere in the economy.
The irony of the theory of students as consumers is that it fetishizes credentials and status in the form of degrees and grades in the same way the universities present them as rewards. Each of these supposedly indicates the promised students’ future standard of living and status in society. However, what is ignored is the means in which grades and degrees are used to measure, channel, and divide students among themselves and serve labor planning. The difference between universities and community colleges are not strictly the graduates’ wages as much as the work they do in school. Low entropy students generally make it up the educational hierarchy while the slackers are kept below. Even university students are subject to such evaluations that are used to channel them from “state” to “research” or “undergraduate” to “graduate” universities. Grades indicate both the amount of work a student has done and the quality, or the extent to which the students fulfill the expectations of the authority structure. Grades hypothetically lead to a degree which indicates to a potential university or employer that the individual did the required amount of work in the prescribed amount of time and has the potential to do so again. According to the rhetoric, grades serve like company script which can be turned in upon graduation for a certain wage.
Left theories of students as consumers shamelessly fail to recognize how what are described as beneficial are actually used against them as forms of control and work. The student as consumer reinforces the ideology of education as privileged access to a piece of the socio-economic pie. However, as the percentage of people who attend college rises and employment opportunities dry up due to automation, telecommunications and capital flight, these pieces are no longer guaranteed. Students may not graduate with a guaranteed step on the ladder but they are stamped with the assumed seal of quality self-discipline that will contribute to their productivity and their employers profits in a waged job.
This is especially so in the case of the draft which ranked students based upon grades and area of study. According to a document liberated from the Selective Service, deferments were used as a means to channel youth into various types of work, including school. The term “deferment” is used
to describe the method and means used to attract to the kind of service considered the most important, the individuals who were not compelled to do it. The club of induction has been used to drive out of areas considered to be less important to areas of greater importance in which deferments were given, the individuals who did not or could not participate in activities which were considered essential to the defense of the Nation.[17]
In other words, for the Selective Service, students were no more than labor power being driven to areas of training that were most needed by business. “The psychology of granting wide choice under pressure to take action is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted,” the planners wrote themselves. By exposing the use of grades, degrees, deferments, and wages as part of a process of labor distribution and control, the notion of free choice that lies behind theories of students as consumer is shattered.
Another twist to the student as consumer argument is the view that students are a product. In the absence of an understanding who does the work of producing the student and what exactly is produced, such an approach frequently becomes reduced to a view of students of as tabula rasa, blank slates to be written upon at will. Not only is this hardly been the case since the mid 1960s, but to see students this way is to disempower them by reducing the process to a one-sided passive activity.
These theorists abandonment of the class struggle inside the university left open a space for Ernest Mandel to charge through with The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice.[18] Giving ideological lip service (with slogans like “revolutionary youth”) to a role for students in revolutionary struggle, Mandel attempts to capitalize on the theoretical vacuum on the left to insert the student movement into an effort to build a vanguard party. Dismissing claims that students are workers, Mandel easily finds student self-activity insufficient as long as it remains confined to a struggle against the university (p. 5). Student struggles over the conditions and content of education are a dead end; “the mainspring of the revolt would persist even if these material conditions were corrected (p. 7). “Student power” is meaningless since the root of the problem for students is the capitalist economy that has invaded the universities. Seeking a “transitional slogan” to draw in those students who have not seen the priority of the larger struggle “outside” the universities, student power is limited because it “would not change the roots of alienation of students because these do not lie in the university itself but in society as a whole” (p. 9).
Dismissing the claim that students are workers as “bourgeois,” he posits the university as Flacks and the others do as separate and margin to the economy. In his passing critique of liberal reformers, Mandel suggests that they would only serve to further the invasion of business in the universities (pgs. 7- 8). Likewise, the students themselves may begin their struggles by resisting the universities and seek to change them but that in itself is limited. While it is valid to attack any idea that the university is isolated from other sectors of capitalist society, Mandel abuses this to suggest the reverse: that rather than isolated, the universities are a subordinate institution: “The structure of the bourgeois universities is only a reflection of the general hierarchic structure of bourgeois society,” he writes (p. 6). Thus, what is required is that the movement “spill over the limits of the university” to achieve its revolutionary subjectivity.
This “spill over” is suggested in order to establish subordinate links with Third World Liberation movements (p. 9-10) and the industrial working class (p. 25). At this point can students gain revolutionary consciousness by studying Marx and socialism, finally offering a contribution to the revolution (p. 18). It is at this point that the struggle has transcended the limits of the struggle against the university and raised the necessity of the party.
Like the others we’ve discussed, Mandel places the university on the margins in order to save it. He begins by prompting students to “spill over” in order to distract them from burning them down so that they can return later to work in them after the revolution. Certainly, the university are important, Mandel implies, even if students themselves are not – especially if they do not pledge their allegiance to the waged working class. Here raises the unresolved contradiction of left theories of the university: the universities are important – if only marginally – but students themselves are not. Only the worst mind games can hide this, but never any better than the planners who utilize the same myth of the insignificance of students to maintain the unwaged reproduction of labor power.
Much of Mandel’s analysis has become the commonly agreed upon analysis of higher education for many “white” radical student activists. Groups such as the Progressive Student Network, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and many local independent “progressive” campus groups have accepted the notion that students themselves are insignificant in absence of their service to struggles outside the university or those of waged university employees or people of color who are perceived to be more oppressed. As a result, many student movements that gained ground in the 1980s such the anti-apartheid, anti-CIA and anti-intervention movements did so at the expense of circulating the struggle to millions of other students fighting their own struggles against school/work, austerity, cutbacks, and for enlargened social wages and protection from sexual violence. While these movements have contributed to the continued disruption of the universities, they have self-circumcised themselves by ignoring their relationship as students to the university itself and the relationship to a host of other struggles taking place alongside them but with hardly any public exposure.
Working But Not Workers
One of the problems with these theories of students as the middle class, Carlos Munoz points out is that “it is generally not placed in the context of class conflict.”[19] Some attempts to answer the charge that students are part of the middle class posited students as part of a “new working class” yet not as workers themselves, as those who see the school as a social factory have attempted to do.
Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, who were also active in SDS for a few years, attacked the idea that students are middle class as destructive to attempts to relate student struggles to those of other parts of the working class. Not only do they attack the “Old Left’s” demand that students subordinate their struggles to that of industrial workers (which were assumed to be the real proletariat) but it is
blind to the real role of the multiversity in the transformation of the labor force and the training of a new and vitally important sector of the work force to fit the needs of the new technology, but it was attempting to enforce false consciousness within one group in the society – a group which was beginning to develop a revolutionary class consciousness of its relationship to the means of production. Old Left ideological categories centering on ‘the industrial working class’ hindered rather than aided the development of socialist consciousness among students. In calling students ‘middle class,’ the Old Left was promoting a false picture of class relations in the society – a false picture which was precisely the same as that promoted by the governing ideology.[20]
Michael Spiegel, former SDS National Secretary, is cited by Neiman and Calvert as an extension of their attack. Clearly, the concept of students as middle class does not grow out of the expressions of students themselves, but has been imposed from elsewhere, creating a schizophrenic disruption between experience and ideology. Spiegel explains that
A consciousness which defines students as members of the elite is obviously destructive not only to the establishment of our own identity as radicals but also to our ability to become a vehicle for the challenging of ruling class values. We cannot see ourselves building a totally declasse movement of people who stand outside of the classes of society as pure revolutionaries. One may be able to build a cadre who perceive themselves in that way, but not mass movement. A mass movement must grow out of the experiences and oppression of people’s lives. An organization must see itself as being able to speak for a group of people out of a set of values, but to accept the false definition of the role of students in this society denies us the ability to build anything more than a small organization of guilty, alienated youth who see themselves as ‘denying class privilege’ (an unheard of basis for building a mass movement).
Spiegel’s analysis is quite prophetic today. Because the student movements were not able to heed his warning that they base themselves on the experiences of students, much student activism since the 1960s has been based upon “guilt politics” where “white” activists act not so much because it is an expression of their own resistance to their oppression as students but because out of a rejection of privilege that contributes to the oppression and exploitation of others. In a sense, the notion of students as middle class has served to not only keep students divided from the rest of the working class by tainting them as inflictors of exploitation but has perpetuated a paternalism within the working class generated by those perceived as privileged aspiring to dedicate their lives to serving those perceived to be more exploited and thus powerless.
Spiegel rejects this paternalism and intra-class division by examining the actual social relationships of students. While Spiegel does not conceive of students as oppressed, he does offer a substantial methodology for relating the struggles of students to other struggles, something few other theorists of student struggles have been able or willing to do.
A class is defined by its relationship to the means of production: by whether or not it control those means and has the power to direct their course. As students, it would be difficult to say that we are oppressed – but our class situation is certainly not one of control over the means of production (or of eventual control over them) – at least this is true for the vast majority of students. Thus our interests lie with others who have the same relationship to the means of production (for most of them, their material condition is also much worse than students – they are more clearly “oppressed”). The values of a student struggle must be seen as part of a broader class struggle against the ruling class. (Even though the other elements of the struggle may not have emerged yet, the values must show implicit support of other potential struggles.)
A correct understanding of our own consciousness in these terms makes it possible for us to not only “fight our own battles,” but also to link up with other groups of oppressed people (in determining values, conscious strategy and direction, if not in tactical or strategic coalition.) If we are to direct our struggle against the oppression of all people, we must first be clear about our own relationship to the class structure of America. No organization ever succeeded in building a strong movement for social change out of guilt – by building the consciousness of a movement on the motivation that one is in fact a member of the class of the oppressors and must salve that guilt. If we are to go beyond the politics of alienation, we must be able to present students with an analysis which does not motivate them to move out of guilt produced by false consciousness. In this respect, the widespread use of the concept of manpower channeling when working with draft resistance has been very important…Manpower channeling is no replacement for a class analysis by destroying the self-concept in middle class students that they are members of the ruling class and that their interests are thus tied to that class.[21]
However, this attempt to articulate a relationship between students and “workers” turns into a strategic dead end because Calvert, Neiman and Spiegel are all unclear on exactly what students mean in a capitalist society. Students are neither workers nor are they part of the middle or ruling class. It appears that they desire to destroy the idea of students being privileged but are afraid to call them workers. Such ambivalence becomes apparent when Calvert and Neiman dismiss calling students middle class as a myth perpetuated by the ruling class “to obscure their real position in society” as “pre-workers, trainees for the new jobs created by advanced industrial technology” needed to run the empire (p. 56). While the university creates these pre-workers and serves the repressive needs of the military to control the empire, and perpetuates competition between students and reproduces the ideology of capitalism, being a student itself never factors into the equation capital accumulation, from Calvert and Neiman’s and Spiegel’s points of view. In fact, students are only workers once they leave the universities and become waged workers.
While Calvert and Neiman attack the Marxist-Leninist position that students are not a revolutionary force as students and must subordinate themselves to the waged industrial class to be part of that force, they are also unable explain what makes students revolutionary as students. The only difference with Marxist-Leninists they attack, is students are revolutionary only because they will be waged workers after they leave the university. But students, the “ghetto poor”, unemployed and rural poor, are “peripheral” to the means of production because they do not have jobs and are not a force of “socialist revolution” (p. 99). In effect, while they suggest we examine the conditions of students, they fail to do so themselves. For them, their lack of a formal wage indicates that they are not really workers and do not contribute to the accumulation of capital.
This analysis is replicated by David Smith in Who Rules the Universities.[22] Smith explains that with the reorganization of higher education following WWII to begin training working class youth, an expanded conception of the working class became necessary. With the new technological imperatives discussed above, these working class students are trained to become low level managers and skilled workers that can be described as part of the “new working class” (p. 12). What is unique to his approach is that students need to be considered as part of the working class, if not for what they do as students as much as kinship or as future members of it.
Similar to Gintis and Bowles efforts in Schooling in Capitalist America, Smith begins by offering a long account of monopoly capital’s invasion into the universities that were under the control of the churches and aristocratic elite. Ignoring that the universities have long since served the purposes of business through research and the training of a selected capitalist elite, Smith demonstrates that with the rise of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations the new focus of the universities became the development of technology and workers (p. 119). Nearly mimicking Mandel and Wolff, Smith ascertains that the universities were invaded by business: “The systematic organization of the universities thus mirrored and contributed to the systematic [sic] organization of capital itself taking place during this era [turn of the 20th century]”[23] (p. 139-140). In the drive to capture the universities, Smith also portrays “monopoly capital” as entirely in control of a passive working class.
While recognizing that “the principal relation between higher education and capitalism resided in the production of a new type of labor power,” John Beverly surprisingly finds that “higher education cannot be considered a branch of capitalist production per se” (p. 69, 75).[24] Rather, “higher education [is] a dependent and subsidiary institution of capitalist society involved in particular with the training of certain areas of the labor force and (as in the past) with the elaboration of the technical and ideological practices that permit the maintenance of the capitalist system” (p. 75). Students are found to be part of the working class as far as their families (read: waged relatives) are or, confusingly, as far as “their work as students in higher education increasingly takes the form of an apprenticeship for wage-paid labor.” (p. 74) In short the absence of the wage means students are not workers. Ironically, although seeing universities as “large socialized workplaces” and calling for a class analysis of the crisis he can only recognize class struggle occurring within the university among waged workers. Nonetheless, he analyzes strategic relationships between struggles within and outside the university and rejects the subordination of the former to the latter (p. 86).
Gintis and Bowles, however, see a different history of education, one wracked by class struggle. “The organization of education…has taken distinct and characteristic forms in different periods of US history, and has evolved in response to political and economic struggles associated with the process of capital accumulation,” they write in what could be taken as a retort to Smith (p.12). Gintis and Bowles make this clear: “The three turning points in U.S. educational history [land grant colleges, progressive education and the growth of the universities] which we have identified all corresponded to particularly intense periods of struggle around the expansion of capitalist production relations” (p. 234). While Gintis and Bowles nearly abandon the implications of recognizing that the struggles of the working class have shaped the structure of education as business has sought to control them, it lays the groundwork for understanding the contemporary crisis of higher education discussed above (chapters 2-3).
In fact, by understanding how the organization of education follows the class struggle, the current crisis can be placed in an historical context. A study sponsored by UT-Austin’s Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital (IC2) of the form of university-industry connections found that there have been four clusters of activity since 1900. The author suggests that “Each of the four clusters occurred during the periods of intensive international competition and/or crisis, and during times noted for pronounced technological change.”[25] These four clusters occurred during the 1880-90s, beginning with the creation of Johns Hopkins University in 1875, between 1910-WWI, during WWII, and following 1967. What is interesting to note is that each of these clusters follow or begin during intense periods of working class insurgency and drop off as a new cycle of struggle begins. This is demonstrated in chart 5.1 that shows a rise of innovative linkages during 1880-90 that drops off during a period of international revolution at the start of the century and begins recovery with WWI.[26] The next decline occurs a little before the 1960s but falls to zero during the 1960s (chart 5.2) and begins to rise in the 1970s, a period of austerity and cutbacks. In other words, these new university-industry links are necessitated by a need to decompose existing working class insurgencies. This also indicates that although many of these forms (chart 5.3) have existed for decades, in some cases “direct investment” and “indirect investment”, that is, the university using its own capital to invest in spin-offs, limited partnerships etc., did not occur until 1981, the start of a significant transformation of the university from a subordinate to an overt business discussed in chapter 2.
Chart 5.2 Invention of University/Industry Linkage Models
Chart 5.3 Date of Invention or Early Prototype of University/Industry Linkage Models
According to David Noble, beginning in 1900 research became a coordinated effort by corporations in the telephone, chemical and electric industries to name a few and formal private contracting of university professors by large corporations began soon after in 1910.[27] This industrial activity was predated by the creation of the agricultural extension and experiment services at Land Grant Colleges in 1862 with the Morrill Act, its extension in 1890, and the 1887 Hatch Act that set up extension offices and programs throughout the country to transfer agricultural technologies straight from the university laboratories to the fields. In fact, the Morrill Act also called for the teaching of “mechanic art” or engineering; it never worked as well as its agricultural segment because it never received support for extension and research. Increasing industry relationships with the universities in the early part of the 20th century were modeled on the agricultural extension program and began to coalesce around many institutions that were created during WWI such as the National Research Council and engineering and technology research programs at various universities such as MIT’s Division of Industrial Cooperation and Research in 1920 which became the Division of Sponsored Research after WWII.
What appears to have driven capital’s turn to higher education by 1900 was the rupturing of accumulation by frequent waves of class insurrection that began in 1848. The frequent periods of insurrection in the 1840-50s, 1870s, and 1890 by both industrial and agricultural workers resulted in massive uncontrollable collapses in production and depressions. The Hatch Act for example, was devised soon after the abolition of slavery, which eliminated a source of unwaged labor, and at the same time the agriculture industry was importing large numbers of asian workers to undermine strikes by developing and applying new technologies in the field that could increase productivity and control while reducing the need for human labor. The same can be said for industry’s interest in university research in the 1910s which also happened to be a period of mass revolution throughout the world including the US.
Andrew Carnegie’s new attention to education immediately followed his long inability to crush the Homestead strikers short of military attack. In the process, business sought to raise the organic composition of capital (e.g. the process of substituting technology for labor, or automation) by developing new forms of technology and planning that could be used against the working class struggle.[28] Best known from this period were of course the development of Taylorism and its time-motion studies, social welfare planning, housework efficiency studies, and mass public high school education that is still with us in similar form. With the waves of international struggles between 1910 and 1920 and 1930-1940s, higher education was reorganized by combined efforts of corporations, private foundations and the state in the search for a means of disciplining workers in the universities and developing further increases in the organic composition of capital. Thus, the massive new involvement of the federal government in the universities marked the extension of state capitalist planning to the university as a source of disciplined labor. Following the civil rights and urban inner city insurrections in the 1950-1960s, yet another strategy was devised to invest in the reproduction of labor power as a means to channel the power of the working class for struggle into energy for work. Of course, we need to also take into account the rise of elementary and kindergarten schools in the late 1800s as well.
In all, it appears that with each cycle of class struggle that taken the form of resistance to work by fighting for and winning shorter working hours, day and lifecycle, the amount of school work increases. Marx himself recognized this connection early on in volume I of Capital.[29] He found that as workers fought successfully to have their children removed from the workplace and to have time and resources to learn, business distorted their demands by putting the children into rooms they called schools located in the factory in order to hold them until they could work their shorter shifts or learn to obey authority.
The last period of reorganization of the university that began in the late 1950s and lasted until the late 1960s was guided by a theory of human capital. Growing out of the Keynesian recognition that labor was not just a cost but a factor of growth, human capital theory attempted to apply this idea to education. “The basic reality, for the university,” wrote Clark Kerr “is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth,” ironically calling knowledge the “invisible product.”[30] Gary Becker, in Human Capital, attributes education as contributing to future earnings and views it as an investment made by the individual student.[31] No doubt Becker’s approach mystifies education to appear as a privilege, since it offers payoffs to the individual down the road in terms of higher wages.
In reality, the largest return on the investment goes to the employer, which Becker almost entirely neglects. The return is no more than the resulting higher productivity from a worker that comes from years of disciplining oneself as a student with grades, homework, papers, exams, etc. which translates into a net loss of wages. According to one estimation,
The financial opportunities forgone to pursue these [Ph.D.] studies are immense. These losses are never recovered…To use Electrical Engineering (EE) as an example, EE Ph.D graduates earn an average salary of $57,800 while EE BS graduate earn $43,700. Taking $8,000 as an average GSE salary [graduate student employee] and 5 years as the average program length, one finds a total opportunity cost of $178,500 while in a graduate program. After graduation however, the EE Ph.D graduate earns $14,100 more per year. Using a 7.75% discount rate, one finds that the Ph.D graduate recovers the lost funds only after 53 years of employment (long after retirement).[32]
Human capital theory turns out to be no more than the application of the productivity deal (i.e. that wages rise with productivity) to education in terms of future wages. The work put into preparing oneself to work for the rest of one’s life is what is valuable to an employer. The degree itself is evidence that one has done a lot of bullshit and is willing to do more. This what Jerry Farber meant by “student as nigger”: that being a student means learning to internalize authority and endless work.[33]
Yet, there is a catch: the return on capital’s investment in education is not always accessible; students aren’t always willing to spend the rest of their lives working. This is one way to interpret Becker’s fear that human capital is “illiquid” and “uncertain” (pgs. 77-78). Human capital cannot be used as collateral because unlike constant physical capital, paying for a worker’s capacity to work does not mean that she will actually work. If there’s one problem that has haunted business from day one it is that people are unpredictable. This has showed itself most of all in the universities during the 1960-70s and is the root of the disinvestment from human capital investment.
Ironically, if Becker and other human capital theorists could foresee the productive relationship between education and profits, neither Smith nor Gintis and Bowles could. Smith identifies the class relationship of students in their lack of control over their working conditions, the domination of the universities by business, and the incomes of their parents and future labor (p. 229-231). But one’s existence as a student itself is not important in a class analysis of the universities. There is a possibility that Smith might go further however when he reproduces a passage where Marx explained that “no longer the individual labor but rather the socially combined labor power becomes the actually agent of the collective work process” concluding himself that “the proletariat as a whole must be viewed as the agent of productive labor” (p. 213). Yet, in his discussion of housework, he finds that although it contributed to production “indirectly” by serving to prepare the waged worker for work, it is not productive. This is never pursued in any understanding of the work students do.[34]
A lot of this has to do with his confusion around the meaning of value. Smith offers a fetishized definition of “value” as some magical essence passed only by the working class and “surplus value” as being the amount of that essence retained by the capitalist “above the wages paid to the worker”. Without getting into a drawn out argument, it could be said that value is simply an abstraction for explaining the organization of capitalist society around work. There is no such thing as value. It only represents the centrality of putting people to work for maintaining capital’s control over the organization of society. In turn, surplus value is an abstraction for the surplus amount of work business can extract from a person above what the working class can be forced to do.
This is an important distinction to be made; Smith offers us a definition of value, rather than an understanding of the social relationships of capitalist society it represents. By explaining that students are part of the working class because of their or their parent’s salaries is a classification, not a class analysis of the content of education. Students are not understood to be workers because they actually do work without being paid for it (Becker claims they are paid back later). Rather, they are workers because they will be waged workers. This is explained in his analysis of housewives and state workers who are not workers because they do not directly produce commodities for sale (p. 219). Class has been reduced to just another category, stripping it of its value in understanding the relationships of class struggle.
Strategically, these problems compound themselves. While Smith brilliantly argues that as part of the working class, students – as other sectors of the working class (i.e. housewives, people of color, etc) – cannot be subordinated to other sectors. Joined by Carl Davidson, Carol Neiman, and Greg Calvert, Smith launches a critique of the left’s subordination of student struggles still applicable today, which we’ll discuss further in the final chapter. He proposes that “what this means is that students must no longer confine themselves to supporting struggles of other sectors of the international working class but must work among students; in order to truly support other branches of the working class and make a shared revolution possible, students must be an organized force in their own right,” echoing the strategies of Wages for Housework (p. 248).
Yet, this all falls short in his long run strategy, for a couple reasons. First, student autonomy, while important, lacks an explanation of the source of intra-class domination through the wage in the first place. Considering that the subordination of students has been rationalized by their absence of wages to prove their usefulness to business (as if the wage were a reward) Smith strips autonomy of its strategic importance: to demand an independent source of power to counterbalance the wage.
Secondly, Smith sees the potential for radical organizing growing from rising unemployment and continued job dissatisfaction. Like Flacks, the potential for struggle among students results from education’s provision of higher consciousness, giving them a “special role to play” in spreading that among other workers.[35] (p. 279) In the long run, the struggle is carried beyond the universities where it has the most value. Whether inside or out, workers are reacting; to unemployment, alienated schoolwork, unsatisfying jobs, capitalist regents. Nowhere in Who Rules the Universities?: an Essay in Class Analysis is there a class analysis of how students struggle. The overproduction of college graduates that leads to unemployment and radical struggle is only a structural side effect of the capitalist system. These same college graduates for whom no jobs exist is never seen as a counterattack for their refusal to be disciplined in the universities in the 1960s. Rather than seeing unemployment as an attempt to prevent them from carrying their struggles into the waged workplace, Smith fits the recession of the early 1970s into an overproductionist framework. In the schools, students are trained for work, outside they do the work. The unwaged exploitation of students is resolved with the waged work outside the universities. Never does there appear the duality of the class struggle: teachers and university administrators trying to make students work and students resisting homework and term papers in order to put out an alternative paper, take over a building or have a party. From a wide angle, students are part of the working class because they are trained to be not because they struggle against being workers and for a different way of organizing society.
This same approach to analyzing education is repeated in many ways by Gintis and Bowles.[36] In debunking the idea that education contributes to equality and liberty in the form of higher incomes, they perceive of education as separate from and subordinate to the economy, explaining that “the pattern of economic inequality is predominantly ‘set’ in the economy itself” (p. 102). The school itself is set in an analogy to the workplace, “mirroring” and “corresponding” to many aspects in the form of grades, rules, threats and hierarchies (pgs. 12, 125, and 131). Yet, never does education appear as part of the productive circuit of accumulation. Never is the school a workplace.
This is no mistake, but follows their long run reforms for the US. While the US, they argue, is democratic in its political institutions, the economy is undemocratic. It is the economy, with its alienating, powerless jobs that need to be changed first. Education is seen as separate from the rest of capitalist society (“the economy” for them) because it is determined by it: “the sources of repression lie outside the school system. If schools are to assume a more humane form, so, too, must jobs” (p. 252). From this easily follows their defense of education as essential to production in their vision of a democratic socialist economy. It would serve to train youth to not only work but accept a new type of authority that resolves the contradiction between the needs of the hypothesized community for workers and our needs (or desire not to work, I would argue) (p. 269-272). The construction of their new society differs little from capitalist society: work is the defining activity of life and school services the need for obedient workers.[37] It is no surprise then that the authors never take their analysis of education any further than the issue of whether it actually offers equality of opportunity to each worker. That the schools serve to reproduce our one-dimensional role as workers is never questioned, but is actually reinforced under democratic socialism. While education arose as capital’s response to periods of class struggle, as they brilliantly note themselves, it serves their functions in a socialist state capitalist system.
Gintis and Bowles’ correspondence principle is applied by John and Margaret Rowntree in their analysis of students and soldiers as workers.[38] The Rowntrees argue that although school is a full-time unpaid job, students themselves are not productive: “Students absorb surplus that has already been produced; and they refrain from producing more surplus product that must be disposed of profitably; instead they labor but do not produce a tangible product.” However, two sentences later, they cite the U.S. Council of Economic advisors figure that estimate that “earnings forgone by students would be between $20 and $30 billion a year” and “would have increased 1966 GNP by 3.5%.” This 3.5 percent along with the 6.5 percent of the GNP invested in education, they suggest, shows that students “in effect absorb the economic surplus that they refrain from producing.” Instead of arguing the obvious: that the investment of 6.5 percent of the GNP results in a 3.5 percent increase in the GNP as the result of school/work by students, the Rowntrees instead accept capital’s ideology that students are only consuming and not working.
While they try to suggest that students and soldiers are workers (although unproductive) because of the work they do, in reality their analysis is grounded in something else entirely: the sheer number of people engaged in particular activities. Because the defense and education industries have absorbed two-thirds of the total increase in 18-64 year old in the working population (which I assume only accounts for waged workers), they suggest that students and soldiers are workers.
While they seem willing to call students workers, one has to ask whether they actually mean they are workers in the sense of what social relationships they are a part of or whether they fall into the right category. It would not be adventurous to suggest that they are not really sure what about school makes it work, which is surprising since they immediately dismiss it as unproductive. They even suggest that “studying has lost any trace of the self-directed activity that it may once have been” ignoring that the essence of school/work is self- imposed labor without anyone looking over one’s shoulder and describe the passing of bourgeois education which foster “maturity” or “self-direction” with a socialized workplace that builds docile workers while “simultaneously promotes proletarian consciousness” (p. 175). With their extensive use of data, it appears that most of their argument rests on a strictly quantitative understanding of the working class based upon predefined notions of productive labor. This is especially clear when they suggest that Canadian youth are not a class formation because the number of Canadian youth in the universities or the military is only half that in the US. (p. 184).
However, the Rowntrees are able to make some significant insights into the issue. They briefly attack Richard Flacks and others theories of “youth exploitation” as a mystification of the class nature of education. Even though the Rowntrees appear to be trying to define a “youth class” they look at it in occupational rather than ideological terms.[39] For them, the ideology of youth oppression
functions to explain the discontent and anti-social attitudes of young people in terms of their personal problems (as the poverty of the working class was attributed to their defects of character by Social Darwinists). This ideology seeks to obscure the emerging class struggle between youth and the dominant forces of society by discussing the “conflict of generations” as if age were the significant source of the conflict. (p. 174)
They also raise the issue of student struggles moving from being a youth class-in-itself to a youth class-for-itself. This is explained in terms of black youth and white youth whose “Communities also offer laboratories for the development of communal, life-affirming forms of living, eating, sharing and participating in public activities.” (p. 177-78) This is an especially unique insight since they find youth and students doing more than struggling against their social position but also creating new ways of living, which was widespread during the 1960-70s in the form of housing and food coops, communes, festivals, music, underground newspapers, health clinics, free universities, etc.
In addition, the Rowntree’s strategic analysis of student autonomy precedes but is complemented by Calvert and Neiman. The Rowntrees reject the notion that the idea that the university is not an integral part of the system and that students should be radicalized “in terms of their future rather than present class roles.” They explain that “Increasingly, however, youth are understanding that they must mobilize for their own liberation as oppressed youth before they are ready to join other oppressed groups in revolutionary action,” they write. Exposing the relationship of the university to corporations and the war machine “has made an increasing number of young radicals ready to disrupt and even destroy it [the university], if they can” (p. 182, italics in original).
This is hollow praise since they earlier flesh out their intention to preserve the university – and thus the work – while changing only the content.
But we do not want to abolish broad based mass education anymore than we would advocate abolishing mass production because the factory system of capitalism is alienating to the workers. Socialists have never been machine wreckers; but just as the socialist order will change the product of the factories, ending the production of fanciful packages for inferior detergents, so will the content of education change, ending college courses that are merely cold war indoctrination. The students have become proletarians and the class rooms their workplaces in the mass education systems of the United States. Ironically, dialectically, the highly touted growth of mass education, the “best” feature of liberal capitalism, will be a major engine of the destruction of the system.
Once gain, we find the identical perspectives shared among these diverse group of theorists. One main theme holds them together: that the universities should be preserved. They would not let them be burned down as the Irish immigrants continually did to the one school the Lowell School Board kept building in their neighborhood in the mid 1800s. The inadequate analysis of the role of education in the sphere of accumulation is no accident, but the outgrowth of the ideological imperatives of these writers. By attributing a potential to the student struggles to rupture the process of accumulation would mean reevaluating their whole understanding of capitalist society and the working class. It would also mean acknowledging that these antagonisms would continue in the state capitalist systems they favor where education still serves to discipline youth for work. In an ironic way, this thesis is a child of their failings.
Offering insight into the false dichotomies often utilized by many of those we have discussed, Gareth Stedman Jones suggests that “any characterization of students as a social group must simultaneously encompass student origins, the student situation itself, and the social destination of students. It is the unilateral insistence upon any one of these factors to the exclusion of the others that has resulted in lopsided or reductionist theories of student consciousness.”[40] Unfortunately, these are not the standards Jones holds to his own analysis. Failing to defend his argument empirically, he rejects the idea that the university is a central productive institution in capitalism and the strategic placement of students as part of the working class as “scientifically incorrect and politically reactionary” (p. 27). Rather, he concludes that “students are not a class, but a temporary occupation: they are apprentice intellectual workers…” (p. 35).
Carl Davidson’s quote at the start of this chapter critiquing student activist’s avoidance of the university itself is just as applicable to those who write about it. While he calls most students “workers-to-be, i.e. trainees or apprentice”, what he describes is students as unwaged workers. “It is important that we recognize that many students share many of the social relations and conditions of production with many of the skilled workers of large-scale industry”[41] (p. 18). Those conditions, he continues, is that the universities “are deeply involved in the production of a crucial and marketable commodity – labor power. It is this aspect of the university that is most crucial for the political economy. The production of an increase in socially useful and necessary labor power is the new historic function of our educational institutions that enables us to name them, quite accurately, knowledge factories”[42] (p. 19). With the recognition of the university as the knowledge factory comes the antagonism of the class relations: the resistance to work. “But it is not enough for the knowledge factory to produce skilled labor power in the form of a raw material. The commodity must be socially useful as well” (p. 21). Quoting Clark Kerr that “the well-behaved advance even if the geniuses do not”[43] Davidson locates the root of the crisis of higher education: our resistance to being disciplined as workers. “Our rough edges must be worn off, our spirits broken, our hopes mundane, and our manners subservient and docile. And if we won’t pacify and repress ourselves with all the mechanisms they have constructed for our self-flagellation, the police will be called” (p. 21). And if that doesn’t work, disinvest.
To begin to understand the crisis of the universities, and in turn the meaning of the struggles that created them, Davidson’s perspective entices us to read the managers of education own explanations of the rupture of the system. It is here, with a little demystification, that Davidson’s analysis proves political useful by indicating how the crisis is a development of the class antagonisms of the multiversity. But before we can do this reading, a new theory of students as workers needs to be developed.
Class Struggle in the Classroom: Students as Unwaged Workers and the University as Social Factory
We have traced a recurring theme that appears throughout many radical and left theories of the universities and student struggles: the insistent refusal to analyze either students or the universities in terms of their antagonistic relationship to the interests of maintaining the social organization of capitalist society. However, there is something even more fundamentally inept in the methodologies of the theorists discussed above.
These and many other writers have attempted to examine the universities and students without even specifying the particular class composition of students or the working class as a whole at the time they are writing. This is especially the case in each of the works we have examined so far with the exception of the Rowntrees. Every other study has either abstracted or ignored the issue of the class composition. This problem is not unique to these writers. While speaking specifically about left theorists of public education, the following critique is equally applicable to studies of the universities:
There is a gap here between class struggle understood theoretically (an important first step) and class struggle understood in terms of revolutionary practice. Without a practical grasp of the class struggle the Monday morning chapters [which explain “what is to be done” in a mere 20 or so pages at the end of the book] assume the general significance of educational struggles when this can only be demonstrated concretely.[44]
What is at stake here is understanding how education functions and is griped by conflict and crisis created by student (or teacher) struggles so these struggles can be extended and circulated. This is the fundamental failure of abstract theories that neither grow organically out of existing struggles nor can be appropriated by them.
It appears difficult to undertake an analysis of the crisis of the university without examining both the forces that gave rise to and have extended their breakdown. It is my intention to avoid this shortcoming of previous and existing theories of the universities by not only examining the cause of the crisis but the very student struggles that have deepened it and how the ongoing recomposition of class struggle within them threatens the very existence of the universities as we know them.
Henry Giroux points out another fundamental inadequacy of left educational theory which may explain why this work remains so abstract. Many educational theorists, especially on the left, view the schools as a location of absolute capitalist power and domination, rather than a terrain of conflict and struggle. Giroux contends
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of “happy” classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The notion that human beings produce history – including its constraints – is subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.[45]
Giroux suggests that there is a duality at play in the schools, a contestation between the power and desires of students and teachers and that of business. “One of the most important theoretical elements missing from the hidden curriculum literature is a view of schools as sites of both domination and contestation…In other words, domination is never total in this perspective, nor is it simply imposed on people.” (p. 62-3) The power of the dominant society and culture “is not simply inscribed or imposed in the consciousness or ideologies of the oppressed. It is always mediated – sometimes rejected, sometimes confirmed. More often than not it is partly accepted and partly rejected. The issue here is that class and power intersect in the form of lived experiences that accommodate and contest the dominant school culture in a complex way.” (p. 66)
Needless to say, this is not evident to nearly all the theorists of higher education we have examined. In fact, it could be said that their failure to recognize education as a terrain of conflict and resistance is responsible for their failure to offer a strategic analysis that takes into account current struggles or any strategizing at all. As Giroux suggests, for some to transcend their bleak view of totalizing capitalist power over the schools and mention the existence of resistance and struggle would be a monumentous task out of their reach.
This inadequacy spins off a much more serious problem: there has very little work on developing a theory of students as part of class struggle that may offer us a methodology for recognizing and strategizing about the everyday contestations that occur in education. Without such an understanding of the role of students and the university in capitalist society, the same mistakes in understanding the political significance of the continuing crisis of education will be dangerously continued. As Giroux perceptively warns:
The issue here is that the current withdrawal of resources from the schools and the redefinition of the curriculum in watered-down pragmatic and instrumental terms cannot be viewed as problems solely due to demographic shifts in the population and short-term recessional tendencies in the economy. Such a position not only abstracts the current crisis from its historical and political roots, it also uses the existing economic crisis to legitimate conservative modes of pedagogy and to silence potential critics. (p. 44)
Rather than understand that the crisis lay in the conflicts and antagonisms within the schools, it has been perceived in structural terms as the result of functional maladjustments or other maladies. As a result, students, faculty, courses of study and research, funding and other spaces that have been opened through struggle over the last twenty years have been exposed to the threat of austerity, entrepreneurialization, and counterattacks from the right. What is needed is an analysis of the university as a terrain of conflict within capitalist society in which we recognize entrepreneurialization as a counterattack against continuing efforts to expand those spaces that have subverted the university’s production of disciplined labor and prolonged the crisis.
For the past few decades, a theory of “social capital” has been elaborated that analyzes capital’s attempt to turn all of society into a social factory.[46] Inside the social factory, “all of human activity outside the sphere of production would be subordinated to the reproduction of life as labor power.”[47] Tronti analyzes how “capital” replaces the concept of the workday by expanding work into the sphere of reproduction. As he says, “the social work-day functions directly within the process of production of social capital. Within this process of production it produces, reproduces, and accumulates new labor power” (p. 101). This extension of the work-day into the sphere of reproduction, which was once understood as “unproductive” by both capital and Marxists alike, serves as the “maximum degree of socialization of capitalist production, socialization of labor power and, therefore, socialization of capital” (Tronti, p. 101).
The social factory grew very early to incorporate education into the social workday. In the 19th century, capital was forced to respond to worker’s demands to reduce the length of the work day and working week, and to remove children from the sphere of direct production, by colonizing the resulting free time won by these struggles to serve the reproduction of labor power for work[48] (Cleaver, 1979, p. 122). It is important to note that from its outset in the US, education has been characterized by conflict and struggle, from its beginning which was forced upon capital by factory workers, to the burning down and attacks on schools in Irish and other ethnic neighborhoods, the creation of summer vacation in response to farmer’s children refusing to attend during harvest, to today with its high drop-out rates that belies an inability to make youth go to school.
Attempt to colonize various spheres of social life outside of the factory (such as housework, the peasantry, prison, the unemployed, etc.) is an effort to make these areas productive for the needs of business. People involved in activities such as housework, schoolwork, sex, unemployment, among others, are therefore part of the working class to the degree that capital has been powerful enough to use their activities to reproduce them or others for waged work. When it has been successful in turning it into work, it hides it with the absence of a wage.
The Wages for Housework movement has explained how the service of the wife (or partner) in reproducing the spouse for work is work for capital which is hidden by the wife’s dependence on the wage of the spouse.[49] Similarly, the wage of the parent hides the work of the child and student for capital as that sibling is (or may be) dependent on the wage of the parent. The demand for wages for housework is part of a greater strategy to destroy this veiled hierarchy to show how these unwaged workers are a part of the working class and that their struggles are those of the class. Forcing business to pay a wage for housework is seen the first step to achieving autonomy by providing houseworkers with a wage which can then be used as a source of autonomous political power (what they call a political wage) and destroying the waged/unwaged hierarchy of the class. Although we will further examine this demand for wages in chapter 6, it is important to note that this hierarchy of the wage is critical to capital’s control over the social factory by maintaining intra-class divisions among the working class. When this hierarchy and division crumble these newly autonomous sectors may contribute to a recomposition of working class power.
While many have accurately examined the role of education in disciplining workers, they have fallen very short of perceiving this as productive unpaid work. Moreover, the controversy on the left surrounding the analysis of students as workers is especially perplexing when economic planners frequently examine the relationship of education to growth, productivity, and even taxes scholarships and fellowships as income. While it would be easy to explain this by overt ideological bias to students, in turn it is rooted in inadequate and narrow frameworks that are for the most part uncognizant and unrelated to any struggles taking place within the schools at best and ignore students and the universities themselves, at worst.
When Marx wrote that “capital is not only the command over labor…it is essentially the command over unpaid labor” he was referring to capital’s ability to extract surplus value from the waged work he was documenting.[50] This analysis has allowed us to see how capital’s control over unpaid labor may occur both with and without the wage form. While Marx did not perceive this command over unpaid labor in the school he agreed with Robert Owen that the “germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system” (p. 614). The Factory Acts were recognized as the first attempt to successfully combine “education and gymnastics with manual labor, and consequently of combining manual labor with education and gymnastics” (p. 613). These acts were an advance over previous legislative acts that resulted in the four-walled circuses used to control youths freed from factory labor. Business, unable to use children in the sphere of direct production, began using children in the sphere of reproduction. In the words of one capitalist at the time, it became clear that “the secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in uniting education and labor from a period of childhood” (Marx, p. 613). By the turn of the century, compulsory education became the mechanism for the development of workers who would be willing to accept a life of work.[51] Rooted in the ideals of the “progressive education” and its best known theorist John Dewey, the schoolplace has become integral to capitalist accumulation by creating the means for the reproduction of labor power.
“Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not directly waged,” explains Cleaver (p. 165). From the time one starts school it is made clear that one must work to survive and that the amount of schoolwork will supposedly indicate one’s future level of pay and thus the “quality” of adult life. Pink Floyd puts it rather simply in the song Another Brick in the Wall: “if you don’t eat your meat/How could you have any pudding?/How can you have any pudding/if your don’t eat your meat?” The greater the amount of self-discipline a student develops, the more valuable the student’s labor power will be to capital and will, supposedly guarantee a higher future wage. While this process certainly does not go unchallenged by these unwaged workers, as will be shown, some fundamental aspects of school, such as homework, extend and reproduce this unending work beyond the classroom into the evening, the weekend, and even vacation.
The role of school/work in accumulation was understood by human capital theorists but articulated in terms that mystified the actual relationship as an individual rather than social investment. At the level of the individual, this investment is made to appear as resulting in a later payoff in one’s wages while glossing over the return to business. In order to understand this, it is necessary to read through the rhetoric to understand the actual social relationships at work. “Capital shaped ‘public’ education, not for the ‘enlightenment’ of workers’ children, but to meet its own needs for particular skills, for new technology, for new social control strategies, and above all, to inculcate discipline.”[52] This discipline is intended to make the worker more productive, thus increasing the surplus value produced in the waged workplace given that all else is constant. “The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in their training and disciplining for the factory (or the home)” (p. 122). This is what lies at the heart of human capital investment. School insures that this discipline is instilled in students with endless schoolwork. Students do the unwaged work of developing their productiveness that would ordinarily be paid in the waged workplace.
Grades, like the diploma, are supposed to serve as a standardized measurement of the “quality” of the student and her potential usefulness to a future waged employer. It is grades that offer a bridge along the continuum from unwaged work in school to waged work elsewhere. Cleaver suggests that,
We are not just talking about analogies here. At the heart of the clear historical parallels between grade inflation and price inflation, lies the basic homology between grades and wages. As a general rule, wages are the monies workers get in return for working for business (whether directly in industry or indirectly in the state, whether in Stanford’s industrial park, or on campus). The harder they work, they are told (often fraudulently), the more wages they will earn. Grades, on the other hand, are supposed to be IOUs on future wages. Good grades now, ‘educators’ promise, will mean good wages later. Grades, like the university diploma, are both an index of work performed and an indicator for business of an individual’s willingness to work in the future.[53]
As Henry Giroux reminds us, this process can be easily exaggerated to paint schools as hegemonic without conceptualizing how they are complex terrains of struggle. Cleaver uniquely notes that one of the fundamental lackings of Marx’s work was an analysis of the struggle between capital and the working class over the content of free time (1979, p. 121). For example, higher incomes resulting from struggles over the wage were transformed into a Keynesian strategy for turning consumption into a source of economic growth and thus more instead of less waged and unwaged (such as housework) work.
It is insufficient to restrict an analysis of education to its role in capital without seeing how this process is far from automatic and monolithic. Once we see how business profits from students as unwaged workers it becomes necessary to see how students struggle not only against school/work and the subordination of their youth to work, but also for expanded free time to pursue their own needs. While Cleaver has begun to do this, there are still empirical gaps to be filled in order to understand how these struggles are the source of the ongoing “education crisis” to be laid.
Throughout Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver examines how the unwaged have figured centrally to the accumulation of surplus value. His analysis is the most extensive to date, and has many insights which we will review. It is necessary, however, to test his analysis in the context of schools today and explain how these mechanisms of control have continued to fail as a response to student struggles against schoolwork.
As in the waged workplace, many types of hierarchical divisions other than the wage began to be adopted before WWI from Morris Cooke’s recommendations discussed in chapter 4 in the universities as a means to ensure the imposition of work and control. At first, one may find it difficult to recognize these divisions, because we have been long trained to accept the structures of school without question, but they do exist as Cleaver points out:
The division of labor in the university is structured partly along disciplinary lines: economics here, anthropology there, etc. and this departmental division helps the university to rule its workers, professors and students alike. Professors are pitted against each other within and between departments over allocation of money, prestige, etc. Students are mobilized around liberal arts versus practical sciences, etc. Within the classrooms and courses the students are always organized hierarchically by grades, there are good students and bozos and everybody knows it. And the interests of one are not those of the others. Computers are “personal” and students are to work as individuals most of the time, pitted against each other in the struggle for grades (IOU’s on future income). Even when they work as teams it is one team against another. The competition is reinforced in reproduction as students are divided and organized in competitive sports, fraternities, and sororities, etc. These divisions serve to keep students pitted against students and undermine efforts to build united student movements which could press for issues of concern to all students, or at least to all who don’t want to play the game according to current capitalist rules.”[54]
The Wages for Students collective found that these divisions are used as tools to divide students so as to better train them as workers. “Grading and tracking are ways of measuring our productivity within the school-factory. Not only are we trained to take our future ‘position in society’ we are also being programmed to go to our ‘proper place.”[55] Grades can serve to separate out uncontrollable workers, those making Ds and Fs for refusing (which is often assumed to be because they can’t) to do their schoolwork, from those who have shown their willingness to work. Mediations are used to divide students among themselves to ensure that work is imposed upon them. Both parents and teachers are used to mediate the relationship between business and students. Teachers make sure students work while in school and parents make sure that students work on their home/work. One need only examine the many proposals suggested for improving “the quality” of students to find recommendations for more attentive teachers and parents to spend more time at home with their children. It is their job to ensure that students are kept working hard and that this is rewarded while avoidance of work is punished.[56]
In theory, these mediations are reproduced throughout the social factory to fulfill its need for control over the working class in abstencia. Since it is a system that organizes society around work, access to those who can continue the imposition of work is essential. Thus the need for mediations between business and the working class is satisfied by attempting to use one part of the working class to mediate and eventually, by taking on that role, that group acts as part of capital (Cleaver, p. 159). Parts of the working class are used to force other parts of the working class to work. This takes place throughout society with the use of race, sex, sexual preference, wages, age etc. that are not only used to divide and conquer but to turn one sector of the working class to manage and discipline another. The other forms of domination are hardly new with capitalism but have been appropriated by it in new ways.
Within the schools, teachers and students are used to mediate at different times and in different ways. Teachers are used to mediate between students and the school administration or state legislature and students are used to mediate between teachers and the administration/legislature. In some cases, graduate students are used to mediate undergraduates and blacks mediate whites, etc. As teachers mediate between university administration and students, so as to serve the process of work discipline, students may also do the same for teachers who refuse this task by inflating grades, calling in sick or striking. “The administration mediates the relations between students and professors through its institutional structures, from class structure to the use of police” (Cleaver, 1979, p. 160). Not uncommonly, the administration is composed of members of the managerial sector of the capitalist class and so their interests lie with ensuring the disciplining process of the school. Unruly students are punished by teachers who refuse to allow them to make up missed work while they were taking over the president’s office and were hurried off to jail. Teachers who refuse to succumb to competition, massive workloads, and undisciplined students by striking are attacked for letting thousands of uncontrolled kids run free in the streets. Teaching evaluations by students, merit pay scales and other mechanisms are some of the subtle uses of students as watchdogs over faculty work levels. However, mediations are needed as reactions to conflicts in order to generate additional forms of control to supplement institutional means that have been attacked and subverted. These mediations are most commonly rejected when teachers go out on strike over their working conditions, rejecting claims that they are letting down their students, and students attack the administration, regents or legislature rather than the teacher or each following level of mediation (Cleaver, 1979, p.161).
These mediations are strengthened by the wage hierarchy within the schools. Students appear to be marginalized from the sphere of accumulation because they lack a wage. Teachers appear lumped in with the administration, and other waged workers on campus such as those in the cafeteria, the dorms, or the physical plant appear as workers because they receive a wage. Graduate students employed as teaching assistants (TAs) and assistant instructors (AIs) are isolated from graduate students on financial aid or fellowships, faculty and undergraduates. All of these particular group’s interests, we are told by the administration, are separate and antagonistic. This is especially the case among students: those who have to work to make it through school, because they are unwaged, are used by employers antagonistically against waged workers by paying them less to undercut the power of the waged. The use of underpaid desperate students serves as a mechanism to control and manipulate waged workers. Unemployed graduate students are held out as replacements for recalcitrant RAs, TAs and AIs. The unwaged status of students is used as a means for not only controlling students but waged workers and those few students who have wages.
Parents are looked upon to insure the imposition of work on students at home when teachers have failed. Because they lack a wage, students are frequently dependent on a waged worker such as parent or spouse, further undermining the autonomy of the student. Rather than a wage, they receive an allowance contingent on the satisfaction of the demands of the benefactor. The “sibling wage” is comes with many strings attached as even the highest paid sibling will testify. Parental expectations to “graduate in four years, go to medical school and date the right boy or girl” is a form of parental control in the absence of, or in addition to, the disciplining of the school.
Yet, this dependency is also turned the other way in order to use the student against the waged benefactor. The parent or spouse is restricted in their range of activity because losing their job or taking a pay cut would negatively affect their dependent. They could also be threatened by competition with unwaged desperate students who may be willing to replace them at a lower wage and higher productivity. In effect, the unwaged status of the student turns dependency on a waged supporter into a mechanism of control over that person.[57]
Whether as a requirement of financial aid, the sibling wage or as a calculation of future wages, the use of grades is used to measure the amount of school/work performed and what wage it justifies. In a sense, before the 1970s period of rising unemployment and wage reductions, the grade served as a wage-productivity deal modeled after Keynesian productivity deals between unions and business. Grades provide a way for potential employers to measure the development of labor power of students and how likely it can be used by in waged work the way productivity of waged workers is a measurement of the amount and intensity of work a business can get out of them.
There are two primary aspects to grades. Assuming that they are accurate indicators of both work performed and futures wages to be received, they can either function in a fascist or democratic manner.[58] The latter form takes the place of what we perceive as choice: no one has to do their homework, only not doing it means low grades and possibly being kicked out of school into the welfare lines or to a more tedious and underpaid job than you had expected. This explicitly underlined the strategy of the Selective Services use of deferments to manage the flow of labor. Democracy is equated with choice: “if you don’t like it here then go somewhere else.” This choice is only an illusion. Sure, leaving school may mean going home with your tail between your legs but putting it in this manner only distracts the focus from seeing how students are trained to internalize this work discipline in order to intimidate students into endless studying. Since, in capitalism, work and money are used as the means social control by forcing one to work to survive (Cleaver, p. 189), we can perceive of this choice as nothing but a serious threat to those less able or willing to both produce and keep reproducing one’s ability and willingness to work (Cleaver, p. 175). School obviously involves something more than consumerist choice.
Homework is one of the training grounds on which a student cuts his/her teeth on the production of self-imposed labor. Cleaver has related homework to piecework in that the grade one receives for work performed is gauged not by actual time in hours worked but by the piece. If the other hierarchies are successful in pitting student against student, then fierce competition can drive a student to do more and more homework in quantity and quality while in pursuit of the ever-reduced value of the grade. The more work that students do, the lower the value of the work all of which leads to an ever upward spiral of forced work.
Homework is an important example of how schoolwork can be seen as abstract labor. It is not the content of the work that is significant, but the act of work itself. Each college bound student has it deeply ingrained in their consciousness that once they get to college no one will order them when to get up and when to do homework. This becomes solely the work of the student. Those that can best teach themselves to internalize work as a primary activity will be able to consistently do their homework and get the grade which, in theory, will prepare them for the job of their choice. Homework is the test of this abstract ability to work. The hardest thing, students will tell you, is getting over that procrastination to start on their homework. This is what is meant by “abstract labor.” The everyday experience of students is a struggle to get out of bed and to class on time; a struggle against this self-imposition of work. Going to the lake, listening to the stereo, or having sex instead of going to class or doing homework is a rejection of this work. Since homework is linked to grades, the threat of failing school and being thrown into the welfare lines or fast food sweatshops are hammers students raise above themselves to force themselves to work. Those who refuse to do this have escaped and undermined the disciplining of the schools.
Understanding the use of mediations, grades, homework and the wage in this way differentiates schools very little from any other workplace. For this reason, Wages for Students and others have expanding their understanding of the social factory to include education. Carl Davidson sums up these work relations of education quite succinctly.
What does the interior of the new knowledge factory look like? Where are the workshops? Specifically, these are to be found in the classrooms, the faculty offices, the study rooms in the libraries and homes, the psychological counseling offices and clinics, the conference rooms, the research laboratories, and the administrative staff offices…The machinery of knowledge-production pervades the university. And, despite its apparent invisibility, it is no less real or tangible. The productive apparatus consists of grades, exams, assigned books, papers, and reports, all the curriculum and scheduling requirements, non-academic in loco parentis regulations, scientific equipment and resources, the mechanics of grants and endowments, disciplinary procedures, campus and civil police, and all the repressive and sublimating psychological techniques of fear and punishment. (‘…’ in original, p. 20)
If these mediations offer a commonality to the repressive features of waged workplaces, they also demonstrate commonality as means for managing terrains of conflict. As we’ll see in the conclusion (chapter 6), grades, tests, and other measures of student discipline and productivity are daily subverted through cheating, skipping class and other everyday forms of resistance.
Although they recognize these forms of mediations as hardly absolute and subject to the antagonisms of struggle, these theorists tend to overemphasize the repressive features of education and exaggerate its success in order to make their case that students are workers to the extent that they do the unwaged work of being a student. But in what ways do students resist being students? This is a question they often cannot answer, although they would not dispute it. To see students as workers is to implicitly acknowledge to power of capital and the failure of people’s struggles to transcend a life of work.
Nonetheless, the knowledge/social factory has been forced to take a backseat on the left in favor of guilt politics that romanticizes struggles of waged, black, female and other workers. Ironically, even today, when struggles of the so-called “new social movements”, which are frequently struggles of the unwaged such as peasants, the unemployed and women, are being recognized on the left, the struggle of students have been sacrificed. The left is no less than 30 years behind in understanding the transformation of education into unwaged work. And in doing so, the crisis of higher education that has been ignored and the attempted reinvestment in the universities by business and the state as a means to resolve the crisis of accumulation has gone unanswered by all except students.
Rethinking the Crisis of Higher Education
The two great new forces of the 1960’s were the federal government and the protesting students.
-Clark Kerr[59]
One thing that stands out in the Carnegie Commission’s reports is that they perceived the underlying problem inside the universities to be the uncontrollable struggles of students to transform the universities. If we are to understand their focus on runaway costs as a result of the student movements for new programs, more grants, etc., then their proposals to cut spending by 20 percent by 1980 and holding growth in expenses to 2.5 percent a year rather than the average of “inflation+3.5%” of the 1960s should be seen as an attempt to decompose those struggles. That higher education is wracked by perpetual class warfare with students becomes clear in their research reports. The language may be in terms of efficiency and GNP, but at its heart is the inability to manage the universities.
Civil rights pressure and growing concern over equality of opportunity led to substantial increases in federal funds, and also to significant increases in funds from state and private sources, for student aid. In addition, civil rights pressure stimulated the development of “ethnic studies” programs, while more open-admission standards created a need for expanded resources to serve the needs of larger student populations. “Other forces, such as growing concern over urban issues and environmental problems, led to the development of new programs. Also contributing to rapidly rising expenditures were the…tendency to expand student services, expenses associated with episodes of student unrest, and rising security costs.”[60]
One could say that during the 1960s we moved from Kerr’s “multiversity” to “Crisis U.” In the Carnegie Commission Final Report, chapter 1 begins with a section on “The Political Crisis”, pointing out that “in recent times, students and faculty members in unprecedented numbers have engaged in political activity, some of it illegal, against dominant policies and institutions in the surrounding society. Campuses have been torn apart; relations with external groups seriously damaged. Dissent is an essential aspect of academic life and there was much to dissent about; but the disruption was excessive” (p. 4). A sense of collapse loomed over the education planners.[61] Kerr asked himself “will 1870 to 1970 have been the century of the rise and the beginning of the decline of the American university?” (p. 128). The Carnegie Commission added its own fearful prophesy: “Will higher education,” collapsing under the weight of strikes and rebellions, “follow the course of the railroad industry?,” disbanded by business and the state since it could no longer serve its need for growth (p. 7-8). Then comes the second section, “The Financial Depression,” warning that higher education has gone from “genteel poverty to genteel poverty in one decade” (p.4.) as the assembly line was ruptured by the student insurgency and disinvestment as rates or return tell. Looming over the dark horizon were very hard times. Aside from purposeful mystification, the planners discovered what the left has been incapable or unwilling to do: the rupture of the universities could be traced to the struggles of students inside them.
This was explicitly understood by former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1969 who, much like William Simon and Dinesh D’Souza would later repeat, not only credited the student rebellion with the crisis but warned of corning austerity if order could not be restored. “The time has come for men and women who prize civil liberties and academic freedom to take a public stand against the coalition of destruction that is terrorizing American classrooms and campuses. It is time to act,” Humphrey trumpeted. “Because of the excesses of a hard-core minority of recalcitrant radicals, the entire structure of federal, state, and private financial support to institutions of higher learning is now imperiled.”[62] In no clearer terms was the threat of disinvestment from the universities laid out. Humphrey was echoed by then Yale University President A. Bartlett Giametti who is cited in chapter 4. In her provocative analysis of Giametti’s testimony, higher education historian Sheila Slaughter explains that he
held the student ‘revolution’ generally accountable for problems encountered by the university. He saw what he regarded as the excesses of the 1960s portrayed most clearly by the betrayal of language, which in turn undermined the university by creating bad thinking, a loss of discipline, a preoccupation with feeling, or sentimentality, and a loss of the notion that we should work hard and submit ourselves to the rational and precise discipline embodied by language and the basic curriculum once central to elite colleges.[63]
The crisis turned out to be the rupture of use of education since the late 1950s to stimulate economic growth. This began at the end of WWII, as the GI Bill opened up a new source of massive finds for the university, providing students “an explicit wage for school work as training for a new post-war labor market.”[64] This is also what Becker calls “forgone earnings,” which as we’ve seen is the unpaid wages for school work. Throughout the 1950s funds stagnated at about one billion dollars. During the 1960s, this investment grew from one billion to almost seven billion in 1970s (Caffentzis, p. 130). Clearly, the function of the university became evident to business. At the heart of this new direction in Keynesian planning was an extension of human capital investment to the universities as a means for stirring growth. Caffentzis pinpointed this new strategy beginning with the Kennedy administration: “if increased ‘growth’, hence increased rates of profit and exploitation, were the order of the day, then increased investment in university both for general R&D work and the training of its working class on a mass scale must be instituted” (p. 131). What has become common terminology today was being derived in the mid 1960s:
…automation and the changing patterns of consumer wants have greatly increased the importance of investment in human beings as a factor in economic growth. More investment in plant and equipment without very large increases in our investment in human beings seems certain to enlarge the surplus of underdeveloped manpower needed to design, install and man modern production facilities.[65]
This investment strategy transformed education from being seen as a cost to an investment; which is why education became a “return on investment”. It is worth quoting Caffentzis at length here because the implications of this new investment planning of higher education is fundamental to understanding the crisis:
It constitutes the capitalist recognition that merely planning the level of constant capital does not automatically lead to appropriate changes in the composition of the working class. The working class does not merely follow along with the level and kind of investment, as in the Keynesian supposition, but must also be explicitly planned. And so investment in the university system got pushed through Congress as part of a more general strategy to deal with this new aspect of class struggle. Thus in class terms investment in human capital arose when capital had to begin to take into account in an explicit way the whole social circuit of capitalist society in which labor power is produced, qualified and reproduced. In this attempt to plan social capital in both its constant and variable parts, the previously “non-productive” relations and institutions of capitalist society had to be recognized as productive. The Keynesian integration of the whole reproductive cycle of labor power which could no longer be left to chance, the “automatic” market forces, or ideology. Consequently, the previously “costless” (for capital) and “wageless” (for the working class) work began to change in status for social capital (p. 132, emphasis added).
It cannot be emphasized enough that no matter what the plan, the working class does not necessarily follow; this is an unintended interpretation of what Becker meant by human capital being “ill-liquid” and risky” and not even worth its weight as collateral. By the late 1960s this became so very clear to those who hoped the unpaid studies of students would season them as labor power for endless waged work. The students would have none of it.
After graciously caving into student demands for expanded enrollment and financial aid, the universities were incapable of dealing with the circulation of student insurgency throughout them. Students were doing more than fighting the Vietnam War at home or skipping class to devise a counterculture but were also organizing alternative universities, putting together underground newspapers, and campaigning for “ethnic studies” programs. They also fought for better working conditions in organizing for better dorm food and housing conditions, and against racism, sexism, in loco parentis (which actually began in the 1950s), grades, heavy workloads, and enrollment and sexual restrictions. The vitality of these movements were their at once decentralized yet established local and international complementary connections.[66] As Caffentzis explains, they “used the money from the very investment funds meant to turn students into human capital against the plan of development” (p. 133) by using not only their financial aid to bankroll these struggles but also university resources by demanding new subjects of study and more free spaces. For Caffentzis, the apex of this rupture of the human capital management of the universities came with the defeat of the use of grades as a devise to channel students into the jungles or the waged workplace. The massive resistance made the whole system of grades as a means of control “an object of refusal in a way that the previously ideological attacks never could” (p. 133).
The ensuing fiscal crisis of the universities, Caffentzis posits, was not a misdirection or mistake; the imbalanced books indicated an “inability to deal with the class struggle. The financially endangered universities of 1970 and 1971 were the weak links in the previous development strategy” (p. 136). The “high risk” and “ill-liquidity” of human capital were no longer abstractions. For Becker, the rates of return on investments fluctuated tremendously between 13 percent and 25 percent. The reason is apparent: it depends on both whether students were actually doing any work in the schools and if their labor power could be accessed in the workplace. That the investment in education is not a sure thing is also the reason education is still lumped into the residual left over in calculations of growth.
The relationship between student insurgency and crisis is quite explicit in Earl Cheit’s The New Depression in Higher Education that listed the most important characteristics of a school not in crisis being 1) less affected by campus disorders, 2) good fit between aspiration and program, 3) having high community regard, 4) smaller student aid costs, 5) defined program and controlled growth, 6) lower faculty costs, and 7) efficiency.[67] Then the dilemma for administrators was to stop the movements (although today the sources of the crisis are not always as obvious as student strikes) or risk financial destruction. Once again, Caffentzis puts the predicament quite sharply: “what had to be reintroduced was a wholly new relation between state investment, university structure and labor market with a wider restructuring of capital in the crisis, for the previous relation just could not guarantee control over the reproduction of labor power” (p. 137).[68]
Central to this restructuring was the use of money as a means of control to impose the discipline of schoolwork. The wage-productivity deal established by human capital investment – increased productivity in exchange for low tuition and fees and financial aid for students and increasing wages for faculty – had been ruptured. Financial aid was increasing along with tuition, faculty salaries were rising 1 percent faster than the rapidly increasing salaries of the rest of the working class, and spending on the whole was outstripping productivity (Carnegie Commission, 1972, p. 4). In response, the use of money appeared in many forms in the Carnegie plan to decompose the struggles inside the universities. Spending to fulfill massive student demands for new programs, aid and other reforms would have to be cut by $10 billion a year or 20 percent (1972, p. 1). The cuts were hardy abstract: 50 percent would have to come from reducing time students spent in school (just hanging around, not working was apparently their primary concern), and the other 50 percent by reducing the increase in annual costs per student from 3.4 percent to 2.4 percent, of which, 12.5 percent would be by increasing the faculty/student ratio (breaking the productivity deal) and 12.5 percent by reducing faculty salaries during the 1970s. (1972, p. 15 1-152) Tuition would be increased; every tub would have to be put on their own bottom, selling themselves out to raise their own funds; Ph.D. programs would have to be cut; undergraduate degrees should be sped up to three years; community colleges should be expanded to siphon off unproductive students; faculty productivity measured; enrollment controlled; and most importantly “reluctant attendees” should be allowed to exit the campuses where they have stirred up trouble. The Carnegie Commission plan was explicit: to end the crisis students, staff and academics will have to pay with more work.
The one sure link between a degree and a job and higher standard of living was ruptured. With crisis, all deals were off. Kerr’s pyramid tossed out its base from necessity. “Discipline over students is not accomplished with the old schoolmasterish ways (grading) but through connecting in a very explicit way work in the university with waged work: the job,” writes Caffentzis (p. 138). Unemployment, recession, insecurity were• the result of business’ and government’s disinvestment from employment of a growing restless work force arriving from the universities to join the already recalcitrant work force. Caffentzis’ titled his article appropriately: capital was “throwing away the ladder” that higher education served as into the higher rungs of waged work pyramid.
School administrators would soon seek to institutionalize some innovations such as the open classroom and alternative universities as “informal classes” or attempt to outright crush them. If enrollment would increase and more “minority” students would enter, income would serve to divide and pit students in competition with each other in the face of a growing a shortage of aid, classes and services. This would be the fundamental turning point of the restructuring. Control over the reorganization and crisis of the university would pass by the early 1970s from the students to capital. The failure of the student movements to articulate the position of students in capital would prove to be cause of long-term defeat. “Since the student movement did not take the question of income in its most general form – wages for schoolwork – capital could simultaneously accede to its partial demands while using the imposition of work to silence it. Capital takes the initiative in recognizing school as work and begins to wage it on its own terms”[69] (p. 139). And silence us it did – for more than a decade.
Caffentzis utilized an analysis of the university as a social factory, finding the crisis of higher education rooted in the struggles of students against school as work and for lives filed with a multiplicity of desires and needs. By analyzing the very theories and empirical research of educational planners, he was able to demonstrate that austerity in higher education during the late 1960s and 1970s was no more than the current tactic for repressing students activism within the universities and restoring control.
Multiculturalism, Student Struggle and the Crisis: The Case of UT-Austin
Caffentzis’ analysis can inform our own attempts to transform the university by recognizing the class nature of not only austerity but entrepreneurialization as well. The crisis outlined by the Carnegie Commission reports has hardly been resolved and control reimposed. Rather, entrepreneurialization reflects a new international offensive by business and educational managers not only to restore control but to transform the university into an overt business itself that offers a stable arena of investment.
Such analysis of the political context of such reforms is entirely among the radical advocates of multicultural reforms.[70] Although it is taken for granted that the universities have much in common with large corporations, this almost never appears as part of their analysis. Professors advocate multiculturalism and offer retorts to charges of “PC’ by focusing almost completely upon issues of minority enrollment and the curriculum, ignoring how what we now call multiculturalism originates in the demands of students for the reorganization of the university into an institution that no longer perpetuates various forms of domination and discrimination while at the same times servicing the needs of the oppressed in their efforts to transform all of society. This is especially the case with Debating P.C., a collection of writings from the left and right that not only completely excluded student writers from the volume but ignored how the multiculturalism movement was created through radical student mobilization.[71]
Inversely, radical student advocates of multiculturalism often accept the university as a place of privilege for a select few from the middle and upper income groups, a generalization of some of their own backgrounds to all students. The university is seen to participate in the reproduction of racial, gender, ethnic and other forms of domination but how these contribute to larger social processes are rarely examined since the university is presumed to be marginal to society as a whole, a carry over from the non-academic left. Issues of class and capitalism are subsumed to these other concerns in response to decades of overemphasis of class above other forms of repression. In some ways, this reprioritization stems from the motives and backgrounds of the middle and upper class students who see racism and sexism for example as barriers to their own potential successful careers and ambitions. As a result, the university’s businesslike operations are often ignored, although this is not always the case.
Unlike the substantive critiques of the university’s role in maintaining and building an international empire during the Vietnam War, few students make a connection between the business activities and multiculturalism as we saw Robin Templeton doing in chapter 3. Unconcerned by the widespread austerity and entrepreneurialization of all aspects of the campus, the multiculturalism movement is unprepared for the impact these changes will have on whatever reforms they succeed in forcing the university to adopt and the forces of repression that will seek to block them. Rechanneling resources to commercially oriented operations, university administrators justify their refusal to adopt multicultural reforms with cries of poverty. Those they do eventually adopt not only run through so many layers of bureaucracy that they hardly resemble the original ideal but are funded by rechanneling resources from other related academic programs or student and faculty populations or even from the students themselves through higher tuition and fees or even additional course requirements. In essence, university administrators utilize a divide and conquer strategy to generate new unforeseen conflicts among potential allies in order to destabilize the movement. Without an analysis of the university as a corporation, the movement finds itself unprepared to resist the formalization and institutionalization of their demands into the academic enterprise or even their marginalization, repression and subversion through selective reshuffling of resources to fund them.
Just as importantly, the multiculturalism movement has failed to analyze the university in an international context – quite ironic considering the common goals of the movement are to further understanding of diverse groups of people. The restructuring of the university does not stop at the border but has become formal policy in the US, Canada., Mexico and Latin America we saw in chapter 4. Entrepreneurialization in the US is only the local facet of a global restructuring effort that picked up speed during the 1980s. Without recognition of this process, the multiculturalism movement is unprepared for both the repression and efforts to coopt its goals in order to better manage an undisciplined and diverse international population.
We still have much to learn from the history of previous student movements. Carlos Munoz finds the ultimate vulnerability in the Chicano Studies movement was its limitation to rechanneling resources to the needs of the Mexican-American community without an analysis of how to go about radically restructuring the university. Lacking a critique of the university in capitalism, Munoz finds that the movement was woefully unprepared to defend its position:
A critical look at the nature and structure of the university and, in particular, its role as perhaps the most important institution in the shaping of dominant societal values and ideology (the kind of ideology needed by those who rule) would have provided evidence that the opposition met by Chicano Studies, and similar programs, was inevitable, for in final analysis the university has been created and shaped by those with the same general economic, political, and cultural affinities as those who rule.[72]
Without an analysis of the university’s role in capitalism the multiculturalism movement has been unprepared for the repressive counterattack launched by the right-wing from within the government and through various corporate financed foundations. Unaware that the university is in crisis due to the continuing creation of free spaces that subvert the disciplining of new labor power – to which they contribute – the multiculturalism movement has not expected such incursions motivated by a threat to capitalism posed by their demands. Since the university appears as marginal to capitalism, such concern was unexpected. Caught by surprise, many mainstream advocates of multiculturalism have seized the moment by suggesting that multiculturalism is hardly a threat but actually a potential source of profit for businesses by offering the necessary knowledge for controlling a diverse and antagonistic workforce. It is no surprise that when student demands for multiculturalism finally undergo formal consideration, as happened at UT-Austin, they become reframed in terms of how they can be legitimized as new forms of knowledge within existing academic disciplines.
Efforts to legitimize multiculturalism academically are not limited to the center but are often a side effect of efforts by academic radicals as well. Munoz reminds us how this same process of legitimation occurred once Chicano Studies programs were up and running. “In the absence of a strong student movement, however, most of these [Chicano movement] intellectuals have assumed roles in institutions that reinforce the dominant values of capitalism. The critiques of ‘ivory tower intellectualism’ that characterized the militant period of the movement are often not heard today, and certainly do not carry the sting they once had.” Without the force of a militant student movement reminding faculty allies that the issue is not one of institutionalization but radical transformation, the goals of the movement cannot be realized. “Without a strong student movement,” Munoz notes “it is not always easy to distinguish between the professionalism and sophistication required to compel social change and the professionalism used to maintain the status quo.”[73]
Munoz’ critique applies to the movement at UT-Austin detailed in chapter 3. To some extent, the silence of the student multiculturalism movement at UT- Austin during the process of formalization as a course requirement demonstrated an overall lack of understanding of their own power in not only initiating the demands but implementing them. That PRIDE and ONDA became nothing more than a proposed curriculum change reflects not only the defensive posture of the movement once the repression began but the abandonment of responsibility to faculty allies to see them through. What is unclear are the reasons the movement quieted down once the process of formal adoption began. The demands were not for entirely new changes but an expansion of isolated spaces that already existed to the university as a whole. For example, the proposed English 306 reforms were mostly already in place, quietly initiated by the Assistant Instructors (AIs) who already taught the course. In essence, the class had already been restructured. Yet, once the effort to formalize those changes within the English Department began the movement failed to publicly voice its position. With every defeat, little or no student response was forthcoming. As a result, not only was the space opened by the AI’s shut down but the department split up.
Unaware of the corporate character of UT-Austin, the movement was unable to counter both the corporate backed backlash that eventually defeated even the watered-down distant relative of their plans and insist on militant reforms originally advocated. Instead, ONDA and PRIDE became merely a topic for debate in the Faculty Senate and the newspaper and no longer a demand of the movement in the streets and on the West and Main malls.
The academic professionalism that has developed in programs such as Chicano Studies has become the target of criticism among black and Chicano student activists as we saw in chapter 3 at UT-Austin. However, the same critique could be applied to the multiculturalism movement as well. By abdicating control over the implementation of multicultural reforms by allowing it to take place through formal academic decision-making channels, the movement severed student control before the reforms ever got off the ground. Munoz explains how the realization of Chicano Studies also meant the almost immediate exclusion of students from control over the programs:
Students had supported the efforts to make the [Chicano Studies] programs an integral part of the institution. However, once programs became part of the institution they came under the general rules and regulations governing all academic programs. In the case of Chicano Studies, this meant exclusive control of curricula by the faculty was expected to ensure conformance with university policies. Students thus could no longer expect to play an influential role in the further development of Chicano Studies programs unless ‘understandings’ were reached with the program faculty. Although some programs did make efforts to allow students a direct role in decision making, the usual outcome of institutionalization was the gradual decline of student participation in the governance of the programs. (p. 89)
Unprepared and uninformed about how the university operates and functions, the movement’s success was short-lived. As long it fails to develop a radical critique of the university, the multiculturalism movement is only an implicit threat to the entrepreneurial university. As long as it continues to fail to offer a critique of the university in capitalism and recognize the autonomous power of students it will continue to be subjected to cooptation, institutionalization and repression.
Bibliography
[1] Carl Davidson, The New Radicals in the Multiversity and Other SDS Writings on Student Syndicalism, Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1990, p. 35.
[2] Edward Denison, The Sources of Economic Growth :The Alternatives Before Us, Supplementary Paper No. 13, NY: Committee for Economic Development, 1962, pgs. 67-79 and 229-255; and Edward Denison, Why Growth Rates Differ, Wash. DC: Brookings Institution, 1967, pgs. 78-108 and 279-295.
[3] By “class composition” I mean the way in which institutional organization changes in response to ongoing internal class conflict in an effort to restore manageability. See Harry Cleaver, “Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two case studies,” first draft, April 1989.
[4] Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change, Markham Publishing Co.: Chicago, 1971. He also makes a Freudian argument in the text that these middle class students partially developed their radicalism by identifying with their highly educated, liberal mothers in revolt against their materialistic fathers. This injection of the Oedipus complex into explaining the student revolt of the 1960s could easily be the weaponry of the right. Not only is it premised on the deluded imagination that these movements engendered only male desires whatever that may be (women were subordinated but not powerless) but that there is an instinctual, human rationality that governs our behavior.
[5] Clark Kerr testified to the rupture of the dialectic in the universities as a result of the refusal of students: “Should the model of the university be based more on productive conflict or on doctrinal unity, on the interaction of disparate entities or on the integration of fully compatible parts? The multiversity is based more on conflict and on interaction; the monistic university more on unity and integration” (p. 140). And consider “It [the multiversity] worshipped no single God; it constituted no single, unified community; it had no discretely defined set of customers. It was marked by many visions of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and by many roads to achieve these visions; by power conflicts; by service to many markets and a concern for many publics” (p. 136-7). There is no doubt about the importance of this conjecture in his repeated reminders that the university has never developed by any coherent plan but by haphazard, crisis decisionmaking when needed, whose cause is never admitted, that is constantly blocked by faculty and student insolence (p. 166, 177). Paradoxically, the left grasps to preserve capital’s dialectic capital itself admits, in mystified terms nonetheless, its devastation in the face of struggle (Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, Harvard Press: Cambridge, 3rd ed., 1982).
[6] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, NY: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 15.
[7] Of course, this appears even more ridiculous when takes into account the struggles around race and gender that erupted in the 1950-60s that Flacks totally ignored.
[8] Flacks, p. 18, 35.
[9] This is one possible interpretation of section eight of Capital volume I made by Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Univ. of Texas Press: Austin, 1979.
[10] Flacks, p. 18.
[11] Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
[12] The Carnegie Commission’s proposals for reform are described in The More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education, A report and Recommendations by The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, June 1972, and Priorities for Action: Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973.
[13] Both books by Habermas and Wolff were published by Beacon Press in 1970.
[14] Vladimir Escalante disputes the case that students are consumers, a myth he finds reinforced by “a legal system that tends to view the relation between student and university as a contract for services,” ignoring the fact that students are a disenfranchised sector. (Vladimir Escalante, “A History of University Labor Struggles,” in Trumpbour, 1989, p. 205).
[15] The gravest absurdity behind the claim of “autonomy” is that Kerr himself recognizes that the universities have always been shaped by outside influences (p. 49), and by the time he wrote The Uses of the University would find “the boundaries of the universities are stretched to embrace all of society” (p. 115) becoming entrepreneurial corporations in themselves. (p. 58-9)
[16] Michael Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic of Student Rebellion, NY: Antheneum, 1971, p. 125.
[17] “Memorandum from National Headquarters, Selective Service System,” July 1, 1965, reprinted in The University Crisis Reader: The Liberal University Under Attack, Volume I, edited by Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 195, 200.
[18] Ernest Mandel, The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice, NY: Young Socialist Publications, pamphlet, April 1969.
[19] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989, p. 14.
[20] Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 24.
[21] Michael Spiegel, “The Growing Development of a Class Politics,” Outgoing National Secretary’s Address, New Left Notes, June 10, 1968.
[22] David Smith, Who Rules the Universities: An Essay in Class Analysis, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
[23] This is also the thesis of David Noble’s America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Knopf: New York, 1977, who brilliantly documents the role of capital in reorganizing higher education in order that it may serve its needs for producing highly skilled labor. However, like Smith, Noble seems to imply that capital invaded the universities, thereby subordinating them to accumulation rather than the universities already being a part of accumulation.
[24] John Beverly, “Higher Education and Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Review, no. 42, vol. 6, November-December, 1978, P. 67-91.
[25] Marietta Baba, “University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and University/Industry Relations,” p. 201, in Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: The Role of Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital and Universities, ed. by Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond Smilor, and William Wallace, University of Texas at Austin: IC2, 1987.
[26] All charts from Baba, pgs., 200, 202-203.
[27] David Noble, p. 110-117.
[28] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, especially chapter 25.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Clark Kerr, 1983, p. viii.
[31] Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Specific Reference to Education, 2nd ed., New York, 1975.
[32] Graduate Professional Association, “The Case for the Restoration of Graduate Student Employee (GSE) Insurance Benefits,” no date (estimated to be 1988), Austin, Texas, p. 9.
[33] Jerry Farber, Student as Nigger, reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, assembled by Mitchell Goodman, Pilgrim Press: Philadelphia, 1970, P. 303-304.
[34] Strangely, he develops his analysis of housework from the works of Wages for Housework’s Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, who actually come to entirely different conclusions from Smith. Not only do they aim to dispute any claim that housework is anything but directly productive to capital, but they even extend their analysis and conclusion to all forms of unwaged labor – including education – which for some reason Smith decided to ignore. Instead, Smith fetishizes the “productive” question, which Wages for Housework set out to put to rest by showing how the continuing unwaged labor serves to reproduce the internal hierarchy of power of the working class. This will be further discussed in chapter VII.
[35] This is also Bettina Aptheker’s argument in The Academic Rebellion in the United States, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1972, where she argues that because of technological and structural changes in capitalism that have subordinated the university to the needs of production, intellectuals are automatically part of the working class. Because of the resulting alienation from this subordination, a rebellion will occur that will restore scientific reason to the university by removing the irrationality of capitalist imperialism. As one can imagine, Aptheker’s analysis is a virtual regurgitation of orthodox Marxism. However, beneath the vulgar theoretical posturing is the basic ignoring of students, mystification of the role of the university itself to capital (other than capital’s formal control through military research as she documents) and a dire struggle to save the university from those who wish to destroy both it and science (p. 165).
[36] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, Basic: New York. 1976.
[37] The extent to which they go to defend the value of social control is downright chilling: ‘The majority of individuals with senses tuned to the realities of everyday life will take pleas for a release from the bonds of authority for what they are: poetic fancy” (p. 272). As we’ve seen they have no qualms about authority, considering how it is necessary to put people to work: “Differences must not lie in the absence of authority but in the type of authority relations governing activity.” The new type is none other that the old by a new name.
[38] John and Margaret Rowntree, “The Political Economy of Youth,” Our Generation, number 6, 1968, p. 155-190.
[39] Irving Louis Horowitz and William Friedland do so much more abstractly in The Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America, Aldine: Chicago, 1970. They argue for students and youth as a social class (a “politicized generation class”) involved in inter-generational conflict. However, this is more a rigid categorization based on the arbitrary gauge of age rather than real social relationships. Not only are youths and students “no longer functional participants in the economic and political structure of industrial society; they have no formal role in the world of work and politics.” (p. 120, 125) The class formation is not specific to any self-activity of students and youth or even the Rowntree’s rigid occupational categories. For Friedland and Horowitz they are a social class because of their intuitive expression of desires for political power within the university for example which excludes them from decisionmaking and violates their tights to “full fledged citizenship” in the “university community.” (p. 135) Their ambiguous analysis evolves into a strategy of reinstating these rights in order to heal the university. Without a critical analysis of the role of the university, in the end they simply suggest including students in decision making but not even going so far as to allow one person-one vote or student votes on governance committees to run the university but rather to just consult them in advance and set up a governing senate of the different groups as Wolff also suggests (pgs. 211-217).
[40] Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Meaning of the Student Revolt,” p. 25-56, in Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969.
[41] At this point I am not going to raise any comment on his analogy to ‘industry” since I believe he means and says that the connection exists to work as a whole. Others however have made a similar point about the university being a factory. Besides the ones we’ve already discussed, Veblen, Sinclair, the Rowntrees and Nicolaus have also made this argument. Martin Nicolaus, for example, finds that the university is an assembly line: “One person, a teacher, takes a batch of students…and runs them through a predetermined, standardized routine with textbooks. These are the methods of industry; you recognize them as the method of Taylorism, of scientific work management; you recognize in the process the principle of the highest output at the least cost, least wages and least educational investment.” (Martin Nicolaus, “The Iceberg Strategy: Universities and the Military-Industrial Complex,” SDS: The Radical Education Project, 1967). However, this is taking the “industry” analogy a bit structurally, without examining the content of the work process or motivation for implementing Keynesian planning. Students appear to go right along the assembly line without ever working. They are just products churned out to keep running the system.
[42] It was easy for Kerr to deny he ever called the universities “factories’ in his 1972 postscript, but the fact was that he was analyzing a factory. While describing the growing role of the federal government in the university based high tech research following WWII, he notes that “it all becomes a kind of ‘putting out’ system with the agency taking the place of the merchant- capitalist of old. Sweat shops have developed out of such a system in earlier times and in other industries” (p. 60). It would be hard to get any more explicit.
[43] It is enlightening to consider the full passage: “it is also part of the process of freezing the structure of the occupational pyramid and assuring that the well-behaved do advance, even if the geniuses do not. The university is used as an eggcandling device; and it is, perhaps, a better one than any other that can be devised, but the process takes some of the adventure out of occupational survival and does for some professions what the closed shop has done for some unions” (p. 111). With the student insurgence, he concern soon turned to the immanent threat to this whole hierarchy (p. 133). According to Caffentzis, the entire first rung of the ladder was soon abandoned by the early 1970s. This is what the Carnegie Commission meant by letting “reluctant attendees” leave. It was also echoed by reformer John Holt during the 1960s who feared the purposeful damage and costs wreaked by the “angry and resentful prisoners” (John Holt, “School is Bad for Children,” Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1969).
[44] Hugh Lauder, John Freeman-Moir, and Alan Scott, “What is to be done with radical academic practice,” Capital & Class, number 29, Summer 1986, p. 89. Ironically, the authors ignore that academics themselves are workers and are engaged in struggles within the universities (“the context in which they teach and do research is removed from the real interests of groups engaged in political struggle”) and even suggest that students are part of the “new middle class.” (p. 99) By doing so, they too fall prey to their own critique that left educational theory fails to provide “serious strategic analyses” that can be used by struggles within education.
[45] Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1983, p. 4.
[46] See Harry Cleaver, 1979; and Mario Tronti, “Social Capital,” Telos, number 17, Fall, 1973, reprinted from Operai e Capital, Turin: einaudi, 1966, 1971.
[47] Harry Cleaver, “Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two case studies,” first draft, April 1989, p. 11.
[48] My use of the word “capital” to indicate the characteristics of capitalist society refers to this theory of “social capital” and is not simply an alternative label. Although the word may seem at first to humanize a non-human political system, from my perspective, it explains how through waged and un-waged work humans are organized systematically. Once in place, such a method of organizing society is insistent in the exploitation of living people to give life to a cold, dead system. When used to capacity (e.g. retirement or death) these people join the ranks of what Marx called “dead labor” in which their labor is embedded in the infrastructure (e.g. machinery, buildings, knowledge) in which others work (1976).
[49] For English language perspectives see Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counterplanning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework, A perspective on Capital and the Left, NY: Wages for Housework Campaign, 1975; and Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, NY: Wages for Housework Campaign, April 1975; and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972.
[50] Marx,, p. 672.
[51] John Holt launches an attack on compulsory education, not because it disciplines children to accept work, but because it breeds resistance to work. Abolishing compulsory education, Holt contends, would actually reduce tensions since the unsatisfied could leave and force the schools to improve their preparation of students for a life of work (Holt, 1969).
[52] Cleaver, 1979, p. 122.
[53] Harry Cleaver, “Worried About Grade Inflation? Abolish Grades!,” special to The Stanford Daily, May 31, 1994, p. 3.
[54] Harry Cleaver, Introduction to Marxist Economics, packet #2, p. 94.
[55] The Wages for Students Students, Wages for Students, Amherst, 1976, pamphlet, p. 4.
[56] Martin Nicolaus discusses disciplinary hierarchies in terms of their usefulness to capital’s needs rather than the need to manage conflicts within academia. “The reason we have departments in the first place, other than for administrative convenience, is because industry needs ‘economists’ or political scientists.’ Industry needs people with job classifications thatare standardized, rationalized, and computerized” (Nicolaus, 1967). This is echoed in his discussion of grading: “you will see that the people with the higher grades get the better jobs. Industry needs a better grading system in the knowledge industry in order to know who to hire in the top position and who to hire in the less important positions; to know who to pay and where to feed people into industry.”
[57] Tim Grant, “Student as Worker: Wages for Homework,” the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4, explains this relationship very well as does Cleaver (1979).
[58] I point to Montano’s supposition that capital can use either democracy or fascism interchangeably to reimpose control over workers to make them work, as applicable within schools (p. 51). One only has to look at the use of fascist tactics in the schools to reimpose work, such as the bat wielding principal Joe Clark, swatting, and not police that takes place besides joint student/administration committees and student affairs offices to perceive their flexibility in tactics of control (Mario Montano, “Notes on the international crisis,” Zerowork, Number 1, December 1975).
[59] Kerr, p. 132.
[60] Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education, June 1972, McGraw-Hill: New York, p. 28. Kerr recognized the growing turmoil was brewing in the early 1960s. “What are the current concerns?” There are: “problems related to cost…fuller utilization of the calendar, excessive numbers of courses, mechanization of instruction; problems related to the vast numbers of young people already knocking on the doors; problems related to public service – cultural programs, urban extension. Additionally, there is the general public concern with ‘morality’ on the campus; with the so- called beatniks, with the young radicals, with cheating and with sex. These ‘moral’ concerns are filling the incoming mailbox of the administrator” (p. 106). As we can see, there was no limit to the form and content that forbode crisis to the planner.
[61] Priorities for Action: Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973. Considering that the biggest names among them – Kenneth Kenniston, David Reisman, Norton Simon, Kerr, and Nathan Pusey – sat on the Carnegie Commission and did the research and writing – Earl Cheit, Philip Altbach, Seymour Lipset and Andrew Greeley – their research is quite representative of their varying management strategies.
[62] Hubert Humphrey, “Repression’s Gaining Speed,” Nashville Tennessean, May 18, 1969.
[63] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1990, p. 119; and A. Bartlett Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, “Basic Skills, 1979,” 96th Congress, 1st Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti, “Sentimentality,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January 1976, pgs. 39 and 40.
[64] George Caffentzis, “Throwing Away the Ladder The Universities in the Crisis,” Zerowork, No. 1, December, 1975, p. 130.
[65] C.C. Killingsworth, “The Effects of Automation on lobs,” in B.R. Cosin, Education: Structure and Society, NY: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 94.
[66] Katsiaficas argues that the New Left (including the student movements) were international and triggered by a basic human desire for justice (a “human species consciousness”, p. 11) and the creation of a future way of living in the present (George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968, Boston: South End, 1987). On the other hand, Cleaver rejects any notion of a youth, class or human species consciousness and suggests that the student insurgence was comprised of numerous multidimensional projects of “self-valorization” that at once subverted capital’s subordination of life to work and attempted to realize multiple futures in the present. Nonetheless, even though he does not attempt to deal with students or universities in terms of capital, Katsiaficas provides the most comprehensive and exciting documentation of the international youth and student rebellion that I have found.
[67] Earl Cheit, The New Depression in Higher Education: A Study of Financial Conditions at 41 Colleges and Universities, A General Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Ford Foundation, NY: McGraw Hill, 1971, especially chapters 3 and 6.
[68] This is reinforced throughout the literature of the crisis. It would also be my theoretical motivation for developing this thesis as an extension of Caffentzis’ analysis.
[69] This statement cannot be taken for granted. Business not only has recognized school as work as we’ve seen, but has even devised various tactics to use wages to raise productivity. Gary Becker, a recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, is the first to suggest paying wages for schoolwork as far as I can tell. He argues that since “forgone earnings” contribute a larger cost than tuition charges, poor students would be more likely to attend college if they could do so without the cost of forgone earnings – that is, if they were paid their supposed higher wages while in school (p. 155). This is not surprising, since as a result of discrimination in the universities and job market women and “minorities” will receive a lower return (i.e. lower future earnings in exchange for the same effort), he notes they should be enticed to sharpen their productivity discipline by paying them to attend (affirmative action scholarships). This has been reproduced numerous times with ploys to pay for grades, offer trips and prizes for attendance, and cut the number of required classes or years of school in exchange for high grades or test scores (Business Week, “Special Bonus Issue,” 1989, has some fine examples of this in a special advertising section).
[70] Paul Berman (ed.), Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, NY: DelI, 1992.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989, p. 165.
[73] Ibid, p. 97.