| March 20: Marc Bousquet Lecture |
| Wednesday, 18 March 2009 00:00 | |||
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Marc Bousquet The world of higher education – portrayed as an ivory tower far from the harsh realities of the marketplace – is really more like Wal-Mart or a large healthcare company, author and academic labor expert Marc Bousquet argues. While it may appear to the public that this corporate model is an efficient use of taxpayers’ money, the reality is that it lessens the quality of higher education, lengthens students’ time to graduation and exacts a high toll on a new cadre of low-paid overworked teachers. Bousquet will give the annual keynote address, “Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation,” sponsored by the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors. It's at 7 p.m., Friday, March 20 at UNC-Chapel Hill’s FedEx Global Education Center. The talk, co-hosted by UNC's AAUP Chapter, is free and open to the public, with a wine and hors d'oeuvres reception afterward. The market-driven university system that has emerged in the past 30 years extracts more, pays less, and is creating new populations of graduate students and contingent faculty who lead tenuous lives with no job security, low pay, and little chance of advancement. Even those tenured professors who remain in coveted positions with job security are finding themselves acting as bosses of both contingent faculty and student workers, rather than as educators. Non-tenure-track positions of all types now account for 68 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education. These workers earn less than $16,000 annually, often have no benefits, and teach as many as eight classes per year. “Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime,” Bousquet, an associate professor at Santa Clara University, notes. Studies are increasingly showing that working conditions for adjunct faculty, from lack of office space to high teaching loads, affects everything from the quality of the classroom experience to mentoring, and even how long it takes for students to graduate. Bousquet, who blogs for The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/ , is author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008). He is at work on a project on the topic of undergraduate labor, as well as a book about participatory culture in the United States, and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. ______________________________ _________________________________ Bousquet's lecture is the keynote address of the NC AAUP conference More information, workshop schedule, and registration for workshops: Website: http://www.nc-aaup.org <http://www.nc-aaup.org/> Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 21 March 2009 19:24 |
