The Dylan reference is probably unfair. But whenever I read a piece like this (“Value Students? Then Value Adjuncts“) I can’t help but feel more than a little frustrated. Academics– not just adjuncts– just don’t seem to understand the basic paradigms of power in a capitalist economy. I know that in part it’s just a figure of speech, but it’s absurd to ask the university to “care.”

It just does not work that way. No capitalist institution, no matter how rooted in the liberal arts (or organic foods or solar power or anything else) is going to willingly give up power over something as basic as labor costs. Adjuncts, especially in writing programs, like the author of the…

My educated guess is that the class divide that seems to have become so normalized economically is going to become ever more sharply reflected in the cultural capital of education. I think this will first happen in the institutional capital of universities, particularly in the way they represent learning. These new emerging class divisions will turn on technology.

More and more, I think, online education will come to be seen as analogous to the large lecture halls of the public research universities and the community colleges. That is, as cost and labor saving techniques by and large inappropriate to the higher reaches of the hierarchy. Elite institutions will use distance education, but only as a supplement to their…