Chomsky: Thinking Like Corporations is Harming American Universities
http://www.alternet.org/education/chomsky-thinking-corporations-harming-american-universities
The following is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks given by Noam Chomsky last month to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Penn.
On hiring faculty off the tenure track
Thats part of the business model. Its the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call associates at Walmart, employees that arent owed benefits. Its a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.
The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, youre getting the same phenomenon in the universities.
The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the plutonomy (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a precariat, living a precarious existence.
This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called greater worker insecurity. If workers are more insecure, thats very healthy for the society, because if workers are insecure they wont ask for wages, they wont go on strike, they wont call for benefits; theyll serve the masters gladly and passively. And thats optimal for corporations economic health.