A Quote by Noam Chomsky

In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. — © Noam Chomsky
In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.
The educational system in the US was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of "private affluence and public squalor." Funding for public education has sharply declined. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students. Cost-cutting leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty.
Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.
Today, the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now, graduate students of American institutions are afraid... He's got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer.
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.
My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.
The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.
We are entering a hyperconnected world where every boss now has more access, cheap access to cheap labor, cheap genius, cheap robot, cheap software, and then this world averages over. There is only one answer to that, and that is to get everyone as close as possible to some form of post-secondary education, it could be vocational, it can be liberal arts, it can be science and technology.
American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.
I do not prize the word cheap. It is not a word of inspiration. It is the badge of poverty, the signal of distress. Cheap merchandise means cheap men and cheap men mean a cheap country.
The growing gap between rich and poor, the seeming lack of concern for the health and well-being of ordinary people, the obscene salaries made by CEOs who are increasing profits by moving their plants to places where labor is cheap - that's where the problem is, not in schools, colleges and universities.
It really pains me greatly to hear from graduate students that graduate education is a lower priority here.
I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the 'economic means' for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the 'political means'.
I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!
There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.
Some colleges and universities in Virginia have chosen to ban concealed carry, and we believe that those universities have created more dangerous environments for their students, faculty, and staff.
We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?
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