Stop pretending
What do a university graduate and an immigrant have in common? They are both strong candidates to swell the ranks of the precariat. This is at least what Guy Standing claims in a book (The Precariat, 2011) where the English professor of Development Studies describes the making of a new social class for the 21st century. You know you have become part of the precariat when you are looking at a life spent in chronic job insecurity, switching from one employment to the next, often in meaningless jobs.
According to Standing, the commodification of higher education is an important element contributing to the emergence of the precariat. One characteristic in this global trend is the lowering of standards. In order to entice students to invest their time and money in getting a degree, courses are made easier and pass rates maximised. If you thought those were good news, think twice. The result of lowering standards is that never before a university degree had been worth so little. No wonder that the market for master’s degrees is booming – at the cost of more debt and more years for students.
The precariat is also leaving its mark on university teaching, increasingly dependant on adjunct teachers on short-term contracts. From being a temporal station at the start of an academic career, adjunct positions are turning into a lifestyle. This is probably related to a shift in the understanding of the role of the teacher. As Standing points out, a new trend in higher education is to move away from the role of teachers as content-creators and to recast them as coachers whose job is to customise ready-made materials for the students’ consumption. The figure of the PhD student put to teach a course on a topic that s/he has no clue about comes to mind here.
There was a famous joke that summarised what was wrong with the Soviet Union: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”. It’s an irony of history that almost 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall students at Western universities can paraphrase the Soviet factory workers. As Standing puts it: “They pretend to teach us, we pretend to learn”. This sounds like a winning formula for the managerial fervour that has taken over other welfare and state services. We read in the Swedish newspapers about policemen who, under pressure to quantify their performance, run field sobriety tests in broad daylight on a working day rather than chase serious criminal offenders (“they pretend to protect us, we pretend to feel safe”). Other reports tell us about doctors who profit more from quickly treating people with minor ailments than from putting the necessary time into patients with complicated diseases (“they pretend to treat us, we pretend to get better”). One is left wondering if what we are witnessing is the start of a charade version of the welfare state.
