Today we repeat our interview with Michael Burawoy on the “CEO Spiralists” in Public Universities from April 10, 2018, as a kind of preparation for next week’s show on the wildcat strike by graduate students at the University of California Santa Cruz. The University pays its administrators handsomely while bankrupting its working class – teachers.

Graduate student instructors, readers and graders across the UC system earn $2,400 a month, for nine months—around $21,000 a year—as part of their union contract with the United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents more than 18,000 academic workers in the state. With average rents in Santa Cruz at $2,611 per month, many students live under extreme rent burden, paying 50–70 percent of their gross income on rent and utilities.*

This is about public funding for education – California is reported to have a $20 billion dollar budget surplus.

“The strike is a real opportunity for UC to lead on a much bigger national issue: the funding of public higher education. The strike’s caught fire because it speaks to the real need for living wages and for truly affordable college for everyone.” – Steven McKay, associate professor of sociology and director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies.*

*”In the UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike, Class War Meets the California Housing Crisis” (Mother Jones, February 21, 2020)

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Our guest tonight is University of California Berkeley Sociologist, Michael Burawoy, who has studied industrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia, has turned his sociological lens on the workplace that is the modern University. Burawoy says top Universities are now helmed by people he calls “spiralists”: executive administrators who enter the university from the outside, with little knowledge of its inner workings or long-standing values. They cultivate, promote and protect each other through mutual recruitment, at the same time boosting their corporate-level incomes and contributing to administrative bloat, all the while corroding the public-spirited legitimacy universities were founded on.

Work has always been a locus of social construction, from the shop floor to the classroom. And yes, schools, though we may forget, are sites of labor. And one particularly freighted with an inherent socialist tendency. It’s why there has been a great struggle in the last decades for the soul of university: a struggle currently being handily won by spiralists and profiteers.

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Michael Burawoy on Sociology and the Workplace (Social Science Bites)

Privatization increases inequality and reduces the quality of education (The Daily Californian)

Poynter Center Expected to Close Its Doors (Indiana Daily Student)

*Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media by Thomas Frank

GUEST

Michael Burawoy has been a participant observer of industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. In his different projects he has tried to illuminate — from the standpoint of the working class — postcolonialism,