Frederick Taylor

I do not think that many faculty members would challenge the notion that their universities are run by people who are primarily managers and not academics. At the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where I work, our administrators have never been scholars and no more so than at present when the very titles so common to academe have been changed to reflect the managerial and business like role those who hold these titles are expected to play. We do not go to the Dean's office but to that of the Vice President for Academic Affairs.

As any management expert will tell you, the essence of management is control, control over every aspect of the enterprise. In most workplaces, the one element that can impede the ability of management to control its domain is the human element. That is why managerial control is essentially a matter of controlling the organization's employees, or to use a word that college teachers don't like to hear, its workers. Over the past 150 years or so, managers have devised a number of techniques for managing (controlling) their employees. These techniques have been theorized and systematized, first by Frederick Taylor, and many times since by his disciples. It is possible to learn these techniques and the theory behind them in business schools, seminars, and journals. We must have no doubt that our administrators have studied the theory and practice of managerial control and that they are busy applying what they have learned.

The most comprehensive system of managerial control has been pioneered by Japanese automobile manufacturers and is known to its critics as “lean production.” It is based on the twin ideas that every aspect of work must be controlled to the greatest degree possible and that the employees must be led to believe not only that this is good for them but that they have some real say in directing their enterprise. With our faculty senates and their ideology of shared governance, many of us have already absorbed the second idea. The first idea is more radical, and poorly understood by most of us.

The control over work is necessary if management is to contain costs and enlarge the organization's surplus. There are many aspects to lean production, some of which need not concern us, at least yet, because they are impossible, at least so far, to apply to teachers. For example, the job of teaching college students is not as susceptible as are most other jobs to Tayloristic time and motion studies. (See historian David Noble's article, “Digital Diploma Mills,” Monthly Review, February 1998, for evidence that this is being considered.) Nor is the utilization of “just-in-time” inventory, an innovation in which a firm keeps no stock on hand but rather has it delivered just as needed, usually by an outside contractor. (Here again, the use of part-time teachers called on just as needed, i.e., without advance notice, can be considered a form of just-in-time.)

Those features of lean production which are applicable to teaching are the detailed division of labor, systematic hiring, stressing the system (what the Japanese call “kaizen” or constant improvement), and mechanization. The use of the division of labor is based on the “Babbage principle” after the mathematician and entrepreneur, Charles Babbage (inventor of the first computer). The idea is to substitute lesser skilled (cheaper) labor for skilled (more expensive) labor whenever possible. This we see being done with a vengeance with the proliferation of part-time, temporary, non-tenure, and graduate student instructors. As more expensive faculty retire or leave, they will be replaced whenever possible with cheaper and less secure people. For example, it makes no sense to managers that I teach two sections of Introduction to Economics, a course that, from their point of view, can be taught by anyone minimally qualified. So when I leave my university, I will likely be replaced with part-time faculty. The other courses I teach can either be dropped, or if needed, taught by other part-timers or shifted to the remaining teachers on an overload basis.

Systematic hiring fits in nicely with the Babbage principle. The idea is to hire people who can be easily controlled. Of course, most new teachers do not have to be controlled since they have already learned that they must behave themselves if they want to get tenure (this, in turn, is partly a function of the glut of new teachers brought about by the use of part-timers, temporaries, etc.). Over the past 20 years at my campus, not a single new faculty member has become an active dissident; few have been willing to take even the smallest risk. The part-timers and other contingent teachers are, almost by definition, so insecure that they will seldom rock the boat, no matter what an administration does.

The two most important control mechanisms, in my view, are the stress now being placed on our system and mechanization in the form of computers. On an automobile assembly line, stress is delivered by speeding up the line, reducing the amount of materials available to workers, or taking a person off the line. Sooner or later, a bottleneck appears along the line, indicated by flashing lights. Then management focuses attention on the trouble spot and the workers, usually grouped into teams, are expected to solve the problem, but without the stress being removed. When they solve the problem (by working faster, for example), management has gained a reduction in unit cost. In the colleges and universities, the stress takes the form of recurring budget cuts (these are usually blamed by our employers on outside forces, such as state legislatures, but they are really the result of their own plans). We are then expected to continue to teach an increasing number of students with fewer resources. We are encouraged to believe that we must all pull together to get through the crisis, though a minute's reflection would tell us that the crisis is permanent and has already consumed most of our work lives and that we suffer (as do all of the other workers in academe, such as secretaries, maintenance and custodial, and food service employees) disproportionately to the top administrators who continue to draw the largest salaries and whose staffs continue to grow. We “alleviate” the stress by teaching more overloads, doing more class preparation, agreeing to larger class sizes, foregoing sabbaticals, never asking for release time, paying for our own conference trips, making fewer copies of articles, concurring with the hiring of more part-timers and temporary instructors, and so forth.

The electronic revolution confronts us with the most extreme assault on our traditional patterns of work. The future will see more and more distance education, the cloning of lectures captured on video and sent out over the web, the forcing of faculty to put their courses online, increased electronic monitoring of faculty effort, and other such methods of substituting capital for labor. Teaching as traditionally practiced is labor intensive and the labor is not especially cheap. These facts are inimical to sound business practice, so the obvious remedy is to replace us with machines, the prices of which have been falling for quite awhile. As David Noble puts it: “Educom, the academic-corporate consortium, has recently established their Learning Infrastructure Initiative which includes the detailed study of what professors do, breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks, and determining what parts can be automated or outsourced. Educom believes that course design, lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside commercial vendors. ‘Today you're looking at a highly personal human mediated environment,' Educom president Robert Heterich observed. ‘The potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and replace it with automation-smart, computer-based, network-based systems is tremendous. It's gotta happen'.”

It is reasonable to ask why all of this is happening. The proliferation of administrative staff, the extraordinarily high salaries paid to top administrators and research faculty, the tremendous expansion of buildings, laboratories, and computing equipment at universities around the country suggest that it is not a true financial crisis which is to blame. Rather, I think that the universities have become centers of accumulation, or, to put it more bluntly, places in which a lot of money can be made. Universities today are more concerned about generating patentable research, often the basis for spin-off businesses owned by researchers and administrators, and the corresponding alliance with private corporations (which supply computer software and hardware, purchase the patentable research, form partnerships with researchers and administrators, and supply employment for the higher ups in the academy when they leave academe) than with anything else.

It may seem heretical to say it, but most universities have no sincere commitment whatever to the education of undergraduates. If they did, they would not be employing the lean production techniques outlined above, all of which are harmful to the “production” of educated human beings. If, for example, my university cared, it would not be implementing a system of “differential teaching” in which those who don't publish enough or bring in enough grants will be punished by being forced to teach more. If it cared, it would not allow professors to “buy back” their courses by hiring part-timers to teach them. (I was once hired to teach a course at the central campus by a professor who literally begged me to do it and who had never previously met me and knew nothing about my background.)

Undergraduates are a major source of the large sums of money needed to convert the university from a school into a business. These expenses are the main reason why tuitions have risen by a much greater percentage than have prices for so many years. Now that further tuition increases are getting difficult to sustain, the universities are coming after us, ruthlessly cutting the cost of instruction and pressuring us to work harder. (I should note that some money has to be spent on students, mainly to entertain them. In addition, students must be led to believe that their “education” is the reason why their wages will be higher after graduation than they would have been had they not gone to college. It really makes no difference to the university and, sad to say, to many students, whether they learn anything or not.)

In the face of what is essentially an attack on the craft of teaching, the reactions of the teachers have been remarkably passive. Some of us keep our heads firmly in the sand; a few of us have actually become cheerleaders for lean production. A friend of mine and I gave a talk at a conference on education and technology. In it, we pointed out the potential downside of things such as distance learning. Our presentation was met with derisive attacks from academics that believed that the electronic revolution was, by definition, a good thing. They could not grasp that technology is always embedded in a system of social relationships and that, in a capitalist society, technology can and will be used to control workers. There are even teachers who argue that tenure may not be a good thing, or that the downsizing of the universities may be a blessing in disguise because it will give us a chance to weed out superfluous departments and programs.

At my college, many teachers seem to believe that there are good and bad administrators; if we could just get rid of the bad ones, our problems would disappear. They fail to understand that all administrators are firmly positioned in the corporate hierarchies that are implementing all of these policies. They do not act in our interests because they cannot do so and keep their jobs. If our administrators were really on our side, they would understand that in a war, the generals have to do more than make private pleas. They have to rouse the troops to action. If our branch campus wanted more money from the central university, our administrators would try to put enough pressure on the university to get it. They would mobilize faculty, staff, and students to write letters, send emails, march and demonstrate in Pittsburgh and the state capitol, Harrisburg, raise a fuss in public meetings, and other such direct actions until the university capitulated. But, of course, this is unimaginable. No matter how odious our administrators might think a particular university decision is they always go along. They know who butters their bread. The university has decided to try to break the union of maintenance and custodial workers at my campus over pathetically small sums of money (to the university, though not to the financially strapped and hardworking employees), a truly rotten thing to do, but not so awful that any of our administrators would take a public stand against it.

Probably the most common faculty response is cynicism. We distance ourselves from our colleges and refuse to participate much in their affairs. This is an understandable response; after all, the crisis forced on us causes a lot of pain and anguish. But even as we are cynical, we do continue to solve the pressures created by the continued stressing of our system. We do give up our sabbaticals; we do teach larger classes; we do pile on the overtime; we do not challenge our employers when they tell us there is no money for anything; we act as if it is impossible to do anything about the shrinking of the tenure stream faculty. We could resist but we do not.

What is worse, the very accommodations we now make to lean production prepare our work for its final mechanized degradation. There are plenty of studies purporting to show that, in terms of narrowly defined competencies, distance learning yields the same results as classroom teaching. As we allow our work to be stressed, we inevitably begin to take shortcuts (less writing, more “objective” tests, less rigor, greater willingness to agree to the elimination of low enrollment programs in difficult subjects, etc.) to ease the stress. But as we do this, we make the learning experience more amenable to replication through electronic means. Administrators will then say, with some truth, that we might as well put our product on the Internet. It is a lot cheaper and the results are the same. Of course, this will be accompanied with a lot of hype about how electronic education allows the schools to tailor schooling to the exact needs of individual students and to serve constituencies who otherwise could not go to school. But this will be propaganda masking the true motive: raising large revenues with minimum costs.

In the end, our only hope is to organize ourselves, both at our workplaces and with teachers around the world. Some teachers, including graduate students, have done this, but the resulting unions have been rather tepid examples of what is needed, namely militant organizations aimed at taking control of the schools so that they can serve the majority of people, creatively and equally. Unfortunately, for most faculty, any type of formal organizing is too big a step to take immediately. So, in the short term, perhaps we can do some things to show our employers that we know what is going on and that we do not like it. First, we can begin to speak out in meetings and in private conversations. When administrators say something ridiculous or simpleminded, we must challenge them. We can challenge administrative policies with speeches, with letters, with petitions, with emails, to them, to the media, to politicians, to board members, any way we can.

Second, we can refuse to participate in our own demise. We can insist on our leaves and let the university turn us down. (At my college, we just received a memo canceling all sabbaticals for next year. So much for collegiality on this matter.) We can appeal the decision and make it public. We can refuse to teach overload. We can refuse to give up our syllabi and to put our courses on line. We can resist any administrative prying into our classrooms. We can, at least if we are tenured, refuse to give student evaluations; if we do give them, we can refuse to show them to any administrator. These can only be used against us, as is also the case for the teaching and research dossiers teachers are now commonly required to furnish each year to their supervisors. We can refuse to serve on committees, including those that hire new faculty members, unless these are going to be given real authority. Third, we can offer our support to any group on campus, such as students or other employees, who are resisting being sacrificial lambs. If we are going to protest what is happening to us, we had better realize that we will need the support of others and to get this, we must give unconditional encouragement and aid to working people on and off the campus.

Perhaps the cynics are right and nothing will come of any efforts we make on our own behalf. I do not believe this, and the history of resistance movements tells me that it is not true. But even if we accomplish little, at least we will stop living on our knees.      Z