On Academic Labor
How Higher Education Ought to Be
The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. Prof. Chomsky’s remarks were elicited by questions from Robin Clarke, Adam Davis, David Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua Zelesnick. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.
On hiring faculty off the tenure track
That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.
Related Articles
Las guerras de Washington
El general Wesley K. Clark, que fue comandante supremo de la OTAN a finales de los años noventa, reconoció en 2001 (y publicó en 2003: Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire) que los planes norteamericanos para atacar Iraq tendrían continuidad en Siria, Líbano, Irán, Somalia y Sudán. Detrás de esa planificación estaba buena parte del establishment norteamericano, en el gobierno, en el Pentágono, los institutos de pensamiento o think-tanks, y las corporaciones, con protagonistas como el corrupto Paul Wolfowitz (que llegó a ser subsecretario de Defensa (y, antes, embajador en Indonesia, donde apoyó al siniestro Suharto), quien elaboró la denominada “doctrina Wolfowitz” que postulaba el unilateralismo en las relaciones internacionales y las “guerras preventivas” para asegurar el predominio norteamericano en el siglo XXI. En general, todo el sector neoconservador norteamericano, desde Dick Cheney hasta Donald Rumsfeld pasando por el propio George W. Bush, por William Kristol y Richard Perle, mantenía esa visión belicista y participaron en el desarrollo de los planes y guerras de agresión que han ensangrentado la primera década del siglo XXI, y cuya inercia ha continuado durante el mandato de Obama.
La CIA intenta intimidar al Congreso para encubrir sus casos de tortura: senadora
Brennan rechaza haber espiado a senadores como acusa la demócrata Dianne Feinstein. El resultado de la investigación del Comité de Inteligencia debe ser revelado para que nunca más se permita un programa de detención tan brutal, dice. Ya se indaga si la agencia central violó leyes
