The Academy in the Age of Digital Labor
Employers are increasingly asking universities and colleges to produce a digital labor force. Despite the demands for high-tech skills, today, more than ever, faculty need to promote liberal learning.
By Michelle Glaros
Much discussion among academics today centers on labor in the academy, in particular on the uses and abuses of that labor. Such discussions are important, but it is equally critical to look at the ways in which we shape laborers in our classrooms, especially how we prepare students to enter the digital labor market.1
In this article, I address a problem I have encountered in my professional life as a teacher of writing in the context of computing, a teaching field often referred to as "computers and writing," "electronic writing," or "computer-assisted writing instruction." The problem I have observed has to do with teaching technology in a curriculum increasingly driven by the labor market's need for skilled workers. I have often been asked to design curricula focusing on teaching students particular technical skills, leaving little time for practicing critical reading, writing, and thinking. The increasing emphasis in higher education on placement and assessment leads me to suspect that such curricula are designed specifically to feed students directly into the digital labor market. What are our responsibilities as educators in this context?
There are at least two identifiable parts to the problem. The most obvious is the digital labor market itself, with its tyrannies; the second is the educational system that prepares laborers for that market. While I doubt my ability to alter the shape of the digital labor market, I do believe that I can prepare students to interact successfully with that market. How can we as teachers educate students to be more sophisticated laborers? We might begin by raising their consciousness about labor issues in general and the digital labor market in particular.
Simultaneously, as academic laborers ourselves, we might raise our own consciousness about the labor market. Our responsibilities as educators change when the goals of our programs change, and those responsibilities constitute a component of our working conditions. Many of the issues faced by digital laborers parallel those faced by academic workers; critical analysis and discussion of the problems of digital laborers can therefore inform our investigation of the difficulties of workers in the academy.
Responsible Teaching
I use the phrase "school-to-work" in this article to signal an increased pressure to make writing programs vocationally responsible. I do not think that vocational responsibility is in itself a burden or that vocational irresponsibility is to be heralded, but I do worry that the push to make writing programs vocationally responsible often comes at the expense of making them critically responsible.
As I near the end of my first decade as a writing teacher, I find that I have increasingly been asked to narrow my focus by replacing critical and theoretical approaches to the practice of writing with technical training. Working in a first-year program that initially focused on interdisciplinary approaches to critical writing, I found that over the course of four semesters, my electronic-writing courses came to concentrate less and less on the art, craft, and aesthetics of writing so that students might have more time to learn software applications.
My sense that we are witnessing a shift in curricular focus comes from professional observation and personal experience. In part, school-to-work manifests itself as a desire to push students through universities and colleges quickly, to train rather than educate them. The trend has already had far-reaching effects on curricula. Each year, students have fewer choices about their schedules, which advisers set for them far in advance to guarantee that they take no "irrelevant" courses. Electives are increasingly seen as wasteful, as time spent goofing off. General education requirements are viewed similarly and are regularly reduced to ensure that schools can process more students in less time; the remaining general education curriculum focuses on entry-level training, not a broadening of the mind.
In his essay "Academic Unionism and the Future of Higher Education," published in the 1997 book Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz outlines the conceptual changes that have influenced U.S. higher education since World War II, focusing finally on the corporatization of higher education that came into fashion during the 1980s. He notes that the corporatization of higher education has led to just this sort of "academic planning" and reminds us that amid discussions and debates about what institutions of higher learning should be, educators need to accept responsibility for what they currently are: training centers for new laborers.
Increasingly, liberal arts disciplines think of their curricula specifically in terms of their connection to the world of work and even justify certain areas of study in terms of that world. Among other things, the introduction of computing to the liberal arts has meant justifying its "real-world" practicality. I have heard colleagues speak of computing as a savior for the English profession. Indeed, at a computers and writing conference I attended several years ago, a round-table discussion on academic labor echoed this refrain. Graduation requirements no longer suggest that writing imaginative, interesting, and cogent prose is an important job skill. Note the reduced writing and literature requirements in college and university curricula and the increasing tendency to transform English departments into programs specializing in computer literacy and technical communication.
My own experience has been that expanded composition programs and writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives service a vocationalized interpretation of writing; writing becomes little more than one aspect of the training for new laborers. Because writing imaginatively and thinking critically are no longer viewed as labor skills sufficient to sustain a curriculum, English departments have begun to stress computer competence and literacy.
While such transformations may not be inherently problematic, we must remain aware of their connection to other changes taking place in the business of higher education. Such curricular changes are in large part an effect of the "bandit economy" that writer and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich suggests has come to dominate higher education. In her foreword to Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, Ehrenreich defines the bandit economy as a form of hypercapitalism, which stresses "the practice of driving down the wages and the living standards of people at the bottom and the middle. . . . It begins with downsizing." Ehrenreich notes that the effects of this economy on higher education are twofold:
There is a difference when the bandit approach to management comes to the nonprofit sector and particularly when it comes to the university. In a nonprofit service institution, however, like a hospital or a university, this style of management, of exploitation, invariably changes the nature of the product. You are no longer making the same thing when you make it via bandit management. Hospitals, for example, are attempting to eliminate their nursing staffs. They eliminate educated nurses and replace them with people earning the minimum wage who are only minimally trained. You don't have the same health care when you do that. It's not even health care when you do that. It's a different product. I would say that when-ever you underpay and underappreciate service workers—nurses, teaching assistants, and so on—you get a different product from them than you might have gotten otherwise.
The erosion of tenure, coupled with institutions' increasing reliance on part-time, underpaid, exploited labor, functions in tandem with the shift in curricular focus from liberal education to job training. Fewer tenured and tenure-track faculty means fewer people to design, guide, and implement inspired, inventive, thought-provoking liberal arts curricula. Let me be clear: while part-time and adjunct faculty are certainly capable of doing this work, they are not paid to do it. While running all over town, if not all over a state, to teach courses, they can hardly be expected to also design curricula gratis. Without a secure, inspired, guiding vision, curriculum design falls to administrators, whose primary concern is increasingly profitability.
Ehrenreich proceeds to note that the practice of bandit management in higher education teaches students some dark lessons.
In a university, something even more sinister happens. When Yale, in the name of finer scholarship, sets a goal of paying its food workers $10,000 a year, and those workers have to go on welfare to survive their summers off, the institution is telling its students that their convenience outweighs the most basic economic needs of people around them, people they see every day. The students learn, in other words, that some lives are valued a lot more than others. And somehow, since it is such a fine institution making these judgments and treating its workers this way, it's all OK. So this is what students learn in a place that purports to teach the world's most noble philosophical traditions, that teaches the humanities while ignoring the humanity of its own employees and part of its teaching staff.
Are these the lessons students need to learn in the bandit economy? Elite universities may assume that in the work world their students will become the exploiters rather than the exploited, but that seems to be a risky assumption for other schools to make. More than likely, my students will find themselves exploited at some point in their careers.
As educators functioning (however unwillingly) within the bandit economy, we must make sure that students leave our classrooms understanding not only how the bandit economy functions but also why it functions and how to resist it. These are the alternative lessons we might teach. We should not be shortsighted. If we are indeed to jump on the school-to-work bandwagon—and we have been on it for some time now—and proclaim our usefulness to the labor force in terms of the skills we offer students, we should also give students the skills that will allow them to be sharp, critical workers.
Students need skills that will make them desirable employees, but they must also acquire those that help them evaluate the conditions in which they work. As I witness the vocationalization of writing within the context of computing, it occurs to me that it does not have to take place at the expense of critical reading, writing, and thinking if I use the concept of labor consciousness as a means to relate these conceptual skills to the demand for technical skills.
Insufficient Skills
As I noted above, my personal experience informs my sense that our curricular focus is shifting. It also serves to illustrate the changes a trend like school-to-work brings to the study of writing. I first began thinking about the ramifications of higher education's relationship to the digital labor market in 1997, when I was working as a consultant on an electronic-literacy project that was a joint endeavor of a community college and a state university.
When I began designing a curriculum for the project, I discovered that faculty members at the community college were adhering to an explicit agenda that dramatically affected their approach to teaching reading and writing with computers. They were expected to move their students seamlessly from the community college into the labor force. School-to-work was a mandate upon which state funding hinged. Because legislators needed to see clear evidence of the mandate at work in all curricula, school-to-work focused pedagogical attention on teaching a series of technical skills.
With the foregrounding of technical skills such as word processing, Web searching, and e-mail transmission, larger issues such as the theory and art of writing fell away. The community-college faculty felt that including critical approaches to writing in the design of a course might jeopardize their funding. Delivering concrete technical skills would satisfy the legislature's demands in ways that teaching more conceptual skills could not.
The legislators may have come by their demands honestly; judging from my course evaluations, students clearly wanted technical skills. Asked to indicate changes that would improve the course, my students consistently demanded that we spend more class time learning "useful" software programs. By useful, they meant software immediately applicable in today's work world, that is, office suites and design software such as Photoshop, Flash, and Director. And they suggested that dropping hypertextual writing and MultiUser Dimension Object-Oriented Technology, or MOO, might improve the course.
Although students reported that they understood, at least conceptually, the benefits of learning to write creative hypertext, they did not seem interested in abstract returns. They noted that employers in the digital market want software proficiency. Administrators respond to such comments by arguing that schools need high placement rates to succeed and that these placement rates often depend on the strength of students' vocational skills.
Current discussions about teaching technical skills to the exclusion of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills remind me of a series of curriculum meetings I attended as a graduate student. An ad hoc committee formed by the English department to rewrite the mission statement governing the university's composition program called the meetings in response to pressure from other departments and colleges at the university. Faculty in these departments wanted the composition program to teach their students technical writing skills.
They complained that the English department's composition program did not focus tightly enough on the kinds of skills students would need in their chosen professions. The computers-and-writing component needed to be reined in, they argued, and its exploration of the production of electronic literary forms curbed.
The composition program was asked to rearticulate its mission in more vocational terms. When the English department resisted this rearticulation of its mission, preferring to maintain a focus on critical and theoretical explorations of writing, the administration threatened to remove the composition program from the English department and place it under the Office of Instructional Resources, which was responsible for conducting standardized testing, making slides, and maintaining audiovisual equipment and the audiovisual library.
I should pause here to clarify what I mean when I speak of writing programs and the changes I see coming to them. My concern is that programs that once taught writing as a critical, creative, inventive, exploratory process are now being asked to teach technical writing (memo and report production) and "infotainment." New-media journalist and critic R. U. Serius warned participants at a 1999 computers and writing conference that infotainment and "gonzo," or supersubjective, journalism may well define the future of Web-based writing. The electronic marketplace does not value exploratory and avant-garde approaches to writing. Certainly, this is not news. Print publications hardly differ in their evaluations of what constitutes good, saleable writing and what does not. Still, we should heed composition theorist Cindy Selfe's warnings about allowing this particular valuation of writing to seep into our writing programs. At the same conference, she voiced concerns about our need to resist administrative pressures to transform the teaching of writing with computers into the teaching of computer literacy.
My professional endeavors have made me wary of the ways in which skill-based approaches to computer literacy can shape the learning experience. In addition to technical skills, students need cognitive skills to survive in a rapidly changing electronic world. What they do not need is the false security of knowing how to use a few key software packages; that kind of knowledge will be obsolete as soon as the software is. Digital labor is plagued by the threat of obsolescence. Software upgrades continually render technical skills useless. To flourish or even survive in this labor market requires more than technical skills and application-based know-how.
As an academic worker, I find myself in a similar bind. Most of the technical support people with whom I have worked know nothing about coding hypertext markup language, or HTML, for example. Yet when I finished graduate school six years ago, knowledge of HTML was thought to be important. The technical skills I left school with are already obsolete, even in academia, which is notoriously slow when it comes to technological innovation.
My experience has convinced me that students should enter the digital labor market with the kinds of critical thinking skills that will allow them to adapt to whatever shape the next reconceptualization of the digital workplace takes. Surviving in the digital labor market requires sophistication; a curriculum that delivers only technical skills ensures a steady supply of unquestioning, unthinking low-wage labor to digital sweatshops. Trends such as school-to-work invite the academy to comply with this exploitation.
Critical Pedagogy
As Stanley Aronowitz notes in "Academic Unionism and the Future of Higher Education," organized academic labor has traditionally focused on contract negotiation and enforcement to the exclusion of curriculum development and policy planning. He concludes the essay by challenging academics to become "agents of a new educational imagination":
For academic unions there can be no question of reversing the tendency toward the de facto end of mass public higher education through collective bargaining. Having successfully shown that the professoriat in some academic precincts can act like traditional trade unionists without seriously damaging their academic integrity or standing, the unions are now faced with the awesome task of becoming institutions of alternatives as well as resistance. In short, they are challenged to accept responsibility for the academic system rather than remaining representatives of specific interests of faculty and staff within its technocratically defined boundaries. The challenge is to become agents of a new educational imagination—that is, to join with others in counterplanning that aims both to retain mass higher education as a right and to suggest what education is in the new, postregulation, postwork era.
As teachers, we need to accept Aronowitz's challenge.
I cannot stress too strongly the importance of introducing students to the issues of digital labor. It is ironic, for example, that new high-tech communications workers seem to have fewer opportunities for labor-oriented communication than did their industrial predecessors. As responsible educators, we need to teach organizing skills and Internet activism in our classrooms so that students are conversant with them when they enter the labor market. Students should be ready to engage the labor market in all of its permutations. And our classrooms must become the think tanks in which students begin to analyze their desires as workers because the university classroom might well be the last space available to them for face-to-face communication about work before they enter the job market.
Labor politics offers a responsible way of maintaining a critical approach to computing and writing within the context of vocationalization. Critical reading, writing, and thinking require a critical pedagogy. Traditionally, I have introduced critical practices into my computers-and-writing curriculum by focusing on the challenges networked computing poses to many of our basic ideological assumptions about the nature of reading and writing.
I have come to believe, however, that I should supplement the critical focus of my courses with a critique of work. What counts as work in the digital age? What is valued, and how so? These are just a couple of the questions with which we might begin our study of digital labor.
At the same time, the vocationalization of computers and writing changes the demands of our work. My students articulate an acute awareness, if not a full understanding, of academic labor issues. They often ask about faculty contracts, tenure, and adjunct faculty, as well as curriculum design.
In answering them, I draw parallels to digital labor issues. Clearly, temporary technical writers and Web spinners (the low-wage writers and designers who lay out and code Web pages) who work in digital sweatshops share some difficulties with academic labor. Both sets of laborers struggle to keep track of time spent responding to work-related e-mail. Both groups grapple with the problem of being continuously available for work because of the invasiveness of electronic communication. Furthermore, the problems adjunct faculty experience when trying to organize a dispersed labor force parallel those of migrant digital laborers. Introducing a critical approach to digital-labor issues in our curriculum allows us to reflect on the strategies members of our own profession use to combat unfair labor practices.
What I propose as a "solution" to the problems noted by many scholars working on digital-labor issues is not radical. My suggestions are the basic tenets of organized labor. We need to educate students by employing strategic logic of the kind Stanley Aronowitz and sociologist and labor critic Jonathan Cutler outline in their introduction to the 1998 book Postwork: The Wages of Cybernation. We should raise students' awareness of the work world. It is our responsibility to prepare them to enter the labor force not only as well-skilled and talented laborers but also as astute individuals who can think critically about the working relationships in which they participate.
They should recognize and defend the value of their labor and that of their peers. They should expect to have a say about their working conditions, including workload, wages, and job security. Labor should be exchanged for wages fairly and openly, and laborers should have a voice in the governance of their workplaces. Solidarity is the key to understanding and engaging the practices of power in the work world.
For a labor force that has lost access to traditional means of communication about and recognition of working conditions, the classroom, already a site of critical inquiry, must become the training ground for these skills as well. Teaching technical skills alone does not make a curriculum vocationally responsible. Combining the teaching of technical and critical thinking skills, as well as an awareness of the digital labor market, comes closer to establishing a vocationally responsible curriculum.
Note
For the purposes of this article, the "digital-labor market" refers to the army of data-entry clerks, technical writers, Web and graphic designers, and information architects whose labor creates and supports electronic communication and commerce. More broadly, the digital labor market includes these software workers as well as those who produce the hardware that runs such programs (those who solder circuits and the like). Back to text.
Michelle Glaros is assistant professor of communication at Centenary College of Louisiana. She was formerly assistant professor of English at another institution. The observations in this article, some of which appeared in the April 26, 2001, issue of frAme Journal of Culture and Technology (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame5/), emerged from those experiences.
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