Grand Canyon University, Inside Higher Education reports, has taken the unusual step of giving nearly 100 adjuncts full-time positions (“Adjunct Promotion at a For-profit“) in hopes that “having a cadre of long-term online professors will prove a competitive advantage.” It’s another sign of the ways that the for-profit industry might realign itself in the face of an increased regulatory presence. Grand Canyon may be the first to try to reorganize by redefining the dominant casualized labor model.
In the old lax regulatory environment the schools made money simply by competing for the huge pool of students who were ignored by the public academic industrial complex. Competition without regulatory supervision led to the abuses which (finally) reawakened the regulatory political will. It remains to be seen if the emerging regulatory regime will have any teeth. Meanwhile the for-profit universities have begun to shift their focus away from the now loosing numbers game and towards building institutional capital.
It’s no small thing to get a full-time job, with benefits, in your chosen profession, in a stalled recovery. That’s a form of employment that capital seemed determined to drive off the face of the earth. On the other hand it’s a deeply paranoid model that only a control freak could love: the teachers are asked to adhere to a specific schedule (8 to 12) and to work in a designated work space. On yet another hand, you can organize in that sort of space in a way that was difficult if not impossible with everyone working at home…