Net/Working in the Edu-factory

[...]it's not just us inmates of the asylum: as a greater and greater proportion of youth pass through our halls, as the so-called labour market seems to demand bachelors' and even masters' degrees where once they required only high-school diplomas or informal apprenticeships, the university is emerging not merely as a source of a commodity called "higher learning" but as a key site of contemporary "biopolitics": the production of life itself. [...]the university has become a fulcrum of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call "biopolitical production," a place where life is made and remade by the millions of students, workers, and others who pass through the institution. [...]the university becomes a laboratory for new forms of labour discipline. The grinding combination of budget cuts, peer evaluation, the impetus to "publish or perish," the reliance on part-time, temporary, and "casual" teaching staff, and the overproduction of doctoral students all speak not only to the transformation of the university into a pared-down teaching machine but to the way the university has come to prefigure the forms of what Tiziana Terranova calls "soft control" and the insidious self-exploitation that is quickly being foisted on the rest of the workforce as trade unions and workers' rights are systematically dismantled. Max Haiven Mount Saint Vincent University Max Haiven is a post doctoral fellow in the department of Art and Public Policy at New York University, adjunct faculty at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a member of the Edu-Factory Collective.