The University As Factory

...Strangely, few writers about the university have so far noticed its resemblance to the factory...

...The unskilled workers are called graduate students, and part of the university's role in the division of labor that distinguishes it from colleges is that it administers the training program for unskilled workers called graduate school...

...The most widely used cost reduction method, though, has been downsizing and the replacement of full-time workers with involuntary part-time and "contingent" workers, "private contractors," and all the other types of cheap and temporary labor found on the market these days...

...Also, just as industrial firms raid one another for executive talent, universities try to lure away their competitors' star professors, who, they believe, will attract more publicity, heighten their prestige, and improve their products and sales—meaning bring in bright students and large alumni donations...

...But that they also bear some similarity to factories as workplaces has been virtually ignored...

...Because universities lack a factory floor and physical assembly lines, management-to-labor and worker communication mechanisms in many of them are top-down-no-information models, variants of which can be found in many factory management and union circles...

...Let us say they add value to their basic products, usually called students, which pass through their four-year-long (or longer) assembly lines—the value being added by professors, books, computers, laboratories, and even fellow students...

...In the diversity of their products, universities are thus no different from mass production factories and custom manufacturing "workshops...

...Academic novels, for instance, are almost invariably similar to the prima donna politics-with-sex fiction written about Hollywood and corresponding entertainment centers...

...But presidents almost always come from sales, referred to as fund-raising...

...Herbert J. Gans has worked in academic factories for 40 years and is currently the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University...

...Management is here called Administration, with departmental chairs functioning in the manner of industrial foremen eternally caught between labor and management...

...Along with many other factories they have unions, however, and when their workers go on strike the management follows much the same script as commercial management...

...To be sure, our universities have never been dark satanic mills, although their architecture has occasionally been inspired by them...

...As a result, most of the workers are deprived of accurate information, tire vacuum being filled with management public relations and especially with rumors...

...The members of both corporate and private academic boards are usually outside business executives...

...Curiously, no one has yet invented a robot even to simulate the work of faculty deadwood...

...These occupational benefits are not generated until the pieces of writing are fully manufactured, whether as books or articles, and much of the time the larger the number of such pieces the greater the occupational payoffs...

...Students of immigrant economies in the United States will recognize this system bears a resemblance to a type of garment industry sweatshop where workers spend the day laboring for wages but are required to do piecework at home in the evenings and on weekends, sometimes without additional compensation...

...Universities do follow the pattern of factories in using joint managementlabor committees to enhance production, the latter's quality groups being roughly equivalent to the former's faculty senates and committees on instruction, among other bodies...

...Still, the campus is swept by the same fear about the future as every other factory: that one day the task of professors will be done by computers...

...In contrast to regular factories, too, with their endemic policy conflicts between the design, engineering, manufacturing, finance, and other divisions over the nature of the product, at universities such disagreements are concentrated in units within the same division, here known as departments...

...They are not strictly speaking manufacturers, and they are not quite service industries either...

...Workers who cannot produce the required piecework are said to perish—meaning that they must leave the university to pursue their livelihood in a conventional factory...

...at some private universities they are now being asked to participate in the increasingly important branch of sales called student recruitment...

...To date, the notion of the conglomerate university or the university conglomerate has not even been proposed by educational innovators...

...Presumably, the university's prime workforce is the faculty...

...The situation helps to keep them uninformed, and sometimes in a state of communal paranoia that further empowers management...

...Many have begun shifting to the justin-time inventory systems invented by Japanese auto companies, known on campuses as cutting the library budget...

...His most recent book is War Against the Poor...

...In this scheme, information trickles down from the top in the same amount and at the same rate as power...

...Nor do their interiors usually call to mind the ear-splitting assembly lines of automobile plants or the eyestrained work stations of electronic assembly operations...

...The products vary widely, since universities manufacture everything from human widgets for private and public bureaucracies to elites ranging from worldclass intellectuals to Washington power brokers and Wall Street speculators...

...Two other industrial cost-cutting devices have so far not appeared on campus...

...Universities are distinctive, of course, in that all proceedings, except for the support staff, are formally conducted on the basis of academic freedom, and that workers, including most of the support staff, can enjoy human freedoms not always found in other factories, such as going to the bathroom whenever necessary...

...The added values themselves include not only the occupational and cultural skills most students seek but practice in upward mobility—and for some, training in serious drinking and sexual activity...

...Indeed, the use of adjuncts and graduate students as instructors enables the university to employ a higher proportion of this sort of labor than any other manufacturing enterprise...

...Even so, if they gave the matter some thought, any faculty or students caught in the giant academic bureaucracies of the major state universities orthe tradition-encrusted Ivy ones surely would compare themselves to Charlie Chaplin trapped in the bowels of his assembly line in Modern Times...

...Like other factories, the university stratifies its labor force, although professors are graded less by skill levels than by overt ranks having some resemblance to those of the military...

...Yet, as is true of the production workers in any other factory, it would not last a day without the rarely noticed support staff that keeps the place running...

...in others on the speedup, here called course load and class size increases...

...In overall structure, universities arenot very different from other factories, except that they tend to be freestanding organizations rather than parts of larger wholes...

...No university is known to have moved South in search of cheaper labor, much less to Mexico, Taiwan or Indonesia...

...Admittedly, universities do not easily fit into the standard classifications for postindustrial factories...

...Sometimes it actually hires the same unionbusting law firms as advisers...

...Today's universities employ all of the cost reduction schemes found in the rest of the factory world...

...In some places, they rely principally on minimal wage increases...

...Meanwhile, workers concerned with job security are increasingly criticized as dinosaurs for having or seeking tenure—probably because ever fewer jobs in America are as safe and satisfying as a tenured professorship...

...Universities, and some colleges, also differ from the conventional factory in that the former incorporate a second, piecework-dominated manufacturing system producing handcrafted and mass produced writings that are used to determine worker reimbursements and promotions...

...No one has ever explained why university boards of trustees do not consist of academic executives from outside universities...

...In effect, faculty members trying to determine what is happening in their workplace are reduced to exchanging those rumors...

...This difference aside, private university executives, like those of other factories, report to boards of directors, frequently called trustees (at public universities they are committees of legislators...

...The faculty rarely admits it is Labor even when it is so treated, and therefore tends not to sympathize with the support staff, which is often unionized...

...In addition, only a relatively small part of the work force has been replaced by computers, and their victims are to be found mainly in the support staff—for example, secretaries and librarians...