A Review of How the University Works

reviewed by P.D. Lesko
How the University Works is the first book of a writer who truly believes he has something important to share about what he perceives as the increasingly corporate nature of higher education. His audience is the choir, and he preaches up a storm. Author Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of English, and the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. He founded Workplace 14 years ago, and the Journal has blossomed into a stalwartly left-leaning bastion of thought on labor politics in the United States, and specifically, within higher education.
To title a book “How_______________ Works” is akin to a batter stepping up to the plate, and pointing to the bleachers in left field. A reader expects great things from an author who says s/he knows how a system works and, moreover, is prepared to explain how the system works. If I bought a book titled, “How Vegas Works,” I would, naturally, expect to be able to understand not only that the House always wins, but how, exactly, the House does it.
Marc Bousquet, in How the University Works, not only steps up to the plate and points to left field, he spits and toes at the dirt with his cleats just for good measure. He digs himself into the box, gives a good practice cut, then goes down swinging. The poem “Casey at the Bat” comes quickly to mind. How the University Works doesn’t explain, rather it postulates and asserts; it swings and misses. For instance, Bousquet is of the opinion that there are plenty of academic jobs to go around for the Ph.D.s produced each year (some 40,000+ individuals in 2007). The problem, he writes, is that there is not an over-production of Ph.D.s; there is an under-production of full-time jobs. Ok. I love this kind of bold thinking. Unfortunately, he provides no evidence to back up his theory. There are no numbers, no research; he simply says it and asks me to believe.
He does the same thing when writing about what he perceives as the increasingly corporate nature of higher education, and the impact the change has had on faculty. He writes about huge numbers of administrators hired over the past decade. Again, no data, no research. He just knows. He also writes that part-time employment is about sexism, as more women than men teach part-time. Teaching part-time is also about racism, because more part-time faculty are minorities.
When I checked Bousquet’s assertions, many came up dead wrong. For example, according to the 2006 Department of Education’s Education Digest, over the last decade the number of administrators in higher education has risen one percent. According to the same data, there are more men who teach part-time than women, and there are more minority faculty on the tenure-line than off it. I can be amused at Bousquet’s bravado—fun guy to talk to at a party, but take what he says with a grain of salt. However, one wonders why his editor at New York University Press didn’t bother to check the facts in the book. It would have been simple to do, though it might have left the author scrambling to revise his many interesting theories.
That the book focuses primarily on the use of Ph.D.s as part-time faculty is its first of many flaws. According to data from the National Education Association, the majority of temporary faculty hold Master’s degrees. Bousquet asserts a good portion of part-time faculty are A.B.D.s, a supposition that is bold and interesting, though unfortunately unsubstantiated by any research. As one reads, it becomes clear that the book is a synthesis of the research done by others (in some cases, as far back as the early 90s), in an attempt to explain how higher education came to be dominated by a market economy model of employment. The author offers no original research of his own. He offers several original ideas, some of which are intriguing, but his book is not the definitive answer to how anything works. It’s the stuff of faculty bitch and bull sessions.
Bousquet’s book, in some places, plays like a B movie. It is populated by evil administrators, who concentrate on profit above all else. Yes, there are Deans and Provosts who make Darth Vader look like jolly old Saint Nick, but to Bousquet the Academy divides neatly into ideological and political camps, with unionists fighting for the soul of higher education, faculty caught somewhere in the middle, and students somewhat belatedly accounted for in the equation. There is change afoot in higher education, to be sure; it’s just that Marc Bousquet doesn’t tell us anything new about those changes.
How the University Works could have been a seminal work in the study of labor issues within higher education. It is a book filled with passion for the worker, bold thinking into the the plight of the part-timer, the grind of the graduate student. If you are oppressed, Marc Bousquet can feel your pain. He is among a very few full-time faculty in higher education who have taken the trouble to say so by writing a book. He is working hard to sell his ideas (he has a blog called HowThe UniversityWorks and cross posts to a blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education web site) to anyone who’ll buy them.
If you’re interested in reading this one (and you should be interested), take it out of the library. You’ll probably not get all the way through it before you throw up your hands in frustration, or boredom or a combination of the two. Just don’t expect to learn how the university works—how you ended up teaching part-time for seven years while applying for every full-time job that came along. Marc Bousquet has a lot to say about Academe, but how it works isn’t among the topics he covers in any great detail in his book.