As David Noble, Randy Martin, Gary Rhoades and others have observed: the new realities of managed education strongly correspond to the better-understood realities of managed care. The structural correspondences between the health maintenance organization (HMO) and education management organization (EMO) can be elaborated in many registers: both education and health have been increasingly “marketized,” transformed into sites of unprecedented capital accumulation by way of the commodification of activities and relationships, the selling-off and spinning-off of public assets and activities into private hands, the introduction of market behaviors (such as competition for resources and profit-seeking) into professional cultures, the unapologetic delivery of degraded service or even denial of service to the vast majority of the working class, and the installation of corporate-managerial strata to direct professional labor toward this neoliberal agenda.
 

In this issue of Workplace and a companion volume, leading scholars of critical higher education will address the processes of academic capitalism and management domination of the workplace under the informational transformation represented by the "network society." Possible topics include: The substitution of information download for education >>> Management practices of command and control >>> The university as profit center >>> Privatization of the intellectual commons >>>Informatized teacher labor as flex labor >>> The university as a fusion reactor for casualization more generally, profiting from casual student labor and producing subjectivities compliant with flexible accumulation >>> University partnerships, providing student labor under contract, (providing flex workers with the identity of "student")>>> Teacher work as the source of value, even under deskilling>>> The "labor of education"--the labor of learning as productive work and source of value>>> corporate training and retraining services (“lifelong learning”)>>> corporatization more generally: how does “higher education” serve as thef academic-capitalist’s flag of convenience? >>> the “mission differentation” of postsecondary institutions providing tiered learning horizons corresponding closely to the class fractions of their constitutencies >>> the commodification of teaching and research >>> teacher work in relation to other work>>> theories of mental labor >>> the creation of nonteaching education employees to facilitate the technological "delivery" of  course credit >>> Education as a managed working environment: the use of technology  to surveil, punish, regiment, censor, and control faculty and students >>>  to direct how they allocate time and effort; to cement administrative control over the curriculum, and to impose supplemental duties including technological self-education and continuous availability to students and administration via email.  In some cases technology has even displaced living labor entirely with automated learning programs tended by software maintenance and courseware sales personnel. The collection seeks essays that understand informationalism as a present reality, not future dystopia.  If we understand informationalism in terms of already existing dominant formations (such as the student as information deficit and laboring "in the mode of information" for management's convenience and capital accumulation):  to what extent is the fantasy of some future  fully-downloadable and teacherless education a red herring? Rather than organize "against technology" on the rather unlikely future possibility of an education experience divorced from the body, to what extent should we organize the contemporary reality of campuses--with their vast new buildings, gyms, stadia and food courts--that provide an embodied experience divorced from education?

Of particular interest will be the university's role in composing labor-power  “in the mode of information.” Laboring in the mode of information means, above all, delivering one’s labor “just in time” and “on demand,” working “flexibly.” Informatized labor appears when needed on the management desktop—fully trained, “ready to go out of the box,” and so forth--appearing only upon administrative command. When the task is completed, labor organized on the informatic principle goes instantly off-line, off the clock, and –most important—off the balance sheets.  This labor is required to present itself to management scrutiny as “independent” and “self-motivated,” even “joyful”—that is, able to provide herself with health care, pension plan, day care, employment to fill in the down time,  and eagerly willing to keep herself “up to speed” on developments transpiring in the corporate frame even though not receiving wages from the corporation; above all, contingent labor should present the affect of enjoyment: she must seem transparently glad to work, as in the knowledge worker’s mantra: “I love what I’m doing!”  As with other forms of consumerist enjoyment, the flex-timer generally pays for the chance to work—buying subscriptions to keep up, writing tuition checks, donating time to “internships” and unpaid training, flying herself to “professional development” opportunities—in all respects shouldering the expense of maintaining herself in constant readiness for her “right to work” to be activated by the management keystroke. Contrary to the fantasy of the sedentary knowledge worker who “telecommutes” and never leaves home, the actual flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare, grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous existence in order to present the working body required by capital: healthy, childless, trained, and alert, displaying an affect of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources. Laboring in an informatic mode does not mean laboring with less effort—as if informationalized work was inevitably some form of knowledge teamwork scootering around the snack bar,  a bunch of chums dreaming up the quarterly scheduled product innovation.  Laboring in an informatic mode means laboring in a way so that labor-management feels effortless: the relevant perspective is the perspective of the management desktop, from which labor power can be made to appear and disappear with a keystroke. Informationalized labor is always "informationalized" for management's convenience.  Indeed: for labor-management to feel so transparent and so effortless, a great deal of additional effort has to be expended (just not by management).  For capital to have labor appear and disappear at the speed of the bitstream might, for instance, require concrete labor to drive sixty miles between part-time gigs, gulping fast food on the highway, leaving its children unattended: the informatic mode doesn’t eliminate this effort, it just makes that effort disappear from the management calculus.  Informationalism cannot present labor in the form of data without offloading  the costs of feeding, housing, training, entertaining, reproducing, and clothing labor-power onto locations in the system other than the location using that labor power. So, in reality, it “takes a village” to present informationalized labor to capital. This form of the work process, “flexible,” “casual,” permanently temporary, outsourced, and so on,  offloads the care and maintenance of the working body onto society— typically, onto the flex worker’s parents or a more traditionally-employed partner, as well as onto social institutions.  This means especially, in the U.S.,  the health care provided at the emergency room and the job training provided by “higher education.” It is obvious that the labor of the university teacher is already deeply informatized. Three quarters of all teaching is done by persons laboring according to the informatic logic of management domination.  Because nearly all of this contingent labor has passed through the system of graduate education, graduate students and former graduate students must become visible as doubly exploited. There is the super-exploitation of laboring contingently, but also a second, silent exploitation. Insofar as their “education” no longer leads to employment but is itself that employment and is continuously evacuated by increasing quantities of “teacher training” and other duties, s something that counts as “graduate education” is stolen from them and something else is substituted, something that contributes to the university’s direct accumulation. The apprentice teaching that graduate employeess used to do as training for a future career has been transformed by the informatics of university profit-taking into the only teaching career that most graduate employees will ever have. But have we even begun to ask what it means that the university organizes the labor of nearly all undergraduates in this informatic mode?           --Marc Bousquet

 
 
 
 

There are, however, interesting differences in the social reception of the HMO and EMO. First, there is a striking contrast in the overall affect displayed toward these transformations: the HMO is universally reviled, while “student satisfaction” with higher education has never been higher, at least according to corporate-university surveys.  According to these sources, students in all institution categories are overwhelmingly satisfied with the learning dimensions of their college experience, in many cases reserving their complaints for the quality of food and availability of parking. [USA group, etc]  Second, the transformations in higher education are widely perceived as technology-driven. Much of even the most-informed and committed discourse in the field is obsessively focussed on information technology as the engine of change. This leads to the likely-mistaken concern that the “real issue” with the management revolution in higher education is that all campus-bound activities will be vacated in the metastatic spread of distance education—as in Noble’s widely-known formulation of “digital diploma mills” producing the “automation of higher education.”
It is important that these two differences in the social reception of the managed university push toward partly conflicting conclusions.  On the one hand, the concern with technology represents the faculty’s idea that students are willing to accept a disembodied educational experience in a future virtual university of informatic instruction. On the other hand, the student concerns are overwhelmingly attentive to the embodied character of their experience—where to park, what to eat and so on.  Why do the faculty envision students willing to give up the embodied experience of the campus, when the students are in fact increasingly attentive to embodied experience?  Campus administrators continue to build new stadiums, restaurants, fitness facilities, media rooms, libraries, laboratories, gardens, dormitories and hotels: are these huge new building projects, funded by thirty years of faculty downsizing, really about to be turned into ghost towns?  In my view, the claim that (future) students will generally accept a disembodied education experience is at least a partial displacement of the underlying recognition, not that future students will accept an “education experience divorced from the body,” but that present students have already accepted an embodied experience divorced from education.  While the dystopic image of distance education captures the central strategy of the information university (substituting information delivery for education), that dystopia erroneously maps that strategy onto the future, as if informationalization were something “about to happen” that could be headed off at the pass, if we just cut all the fiber-optic cables.
What does it mean for students and teachers that informationalization has already happened? It means that we have met the Info. U., and it is us—not some future disembodiment, but a fully-lived present reality already experienced in the muscular rhythm of everyday life.
Understanding the information university as an accomplished fact means understanding that we’ve already done a pretty good job of translating education into information delivery over the past 30 years, and further understanding that this substitution has been accomplished by transformation of the academic workplace rather than by stringing optic cable.

Informationalization without Information Technology?
The text that in some ways strikes nearest and in other ways less close to this understanding is the well-known series of articles by David Noble. Focussing on Noble’s three-part “Digital Diploma” series is helpful not only because it has been widely disseminated across the world wide web, but also because the analysis originates in actual workplace struggles of faculty in California and Canada, and because it maps the area of starkest contrast in the technology conversation: at the bargaining table, with the tenure-stream faculty mostly “against technology” and the administration mostly “for technology.”  This conflict is at least partially chimerical: the faculty and the administration aren’t primarily struggling over technology, but rather what they think “it” will do—something they agree on, and regarding which they’re quite possibly both wrong. The faculty and administration are fighting over what is essentially a shared vision, a vision of a future “created by” classroom technology, of a fully downloadable and teacherless education, at least for some people.  This isn’t a fight over what’s actually going on at most sites of technology-assisted research, writing, and pedagogy. Instead, it’s a fight over the elimination of the jobs of teachers and scholars: the administration seeks to employ ever fewer teachers and scholars, and the tenured faculty seeks to preserve their own jobs and even, occasionally, also a handful of positions for a future professoriate. Technology fuels an enormous fantasy on both sides of this fence.  On the administration side, it drives an academic-capitalist fantasy of unlimited accumulation, dollars for credits nearly unmediated by faculty labor--as Noble says, an “automated” wealth creation. The professoriate has its own equally fantastic idea, that they are preserving teacher work by taking a stand “against technology.”
The shared vision of a fully-downloadable education creates the scene of a pseudo-struggle, with the depressing consequence that it drains off the energies seeking to preserve the dignity of academic work. Noble himself acknowledges that the struggle over technology is a surface conflict (“a vehicle and disarming disguise”); beneath the technological transformation, “and camouflaged by it” is the major transformation represented by the commodification of higher education. Noble narrates the commodification process as a two-stage affair: phase one begins about 1980 with the commodification of research (“the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property”), converting the university into a purveyor in the commercial marketplace of the products of mental labor. Phase two as he tells it (and this is the only point at which I vary with his analysis) is what he describes as the more recent corresponding corporate colonization of teaching, the “commoditization of the education function of the university.”  Several useful insights flow out of the commodification heuristic applied by Noble, chiefly the understanding that universities are increasingly in open partnership with software, hardware and courseware vendors in the conversion of student learning activity into a profit center, and that—in an area also importantly discussed by Stanley Aronowitz and Dan Schiller—this partnership extends beyond the education vendors into the corporate world more generally, with the university eager to provide corporate training and retraining services (“lifelong learning”), an activity for which the rubric of “higher education” serves largely as a kind of academic-capitalist’s flag of convenience. [Knowl Fac; Dig Cap] In a scathing indictment of the growing “mission differentation” of postsecondary institutions (providing tiered learning horizons corresponding closely to the class fractions of their constitutencies), Stanley Aronowitz argues that most college students receive “higher training”  and not higher learning and that overall “there is little that would qualify as higher learning in the United States.”
 The main way in which Noble makes use of the “commodification of teaching” heuristic, however, is to relate faculty labor to “the historic plight of other skilled workers” for whom technological change provides a vector through which management can impose reductions in workplace autonomy and control—so that for academic administration the ultimate goal of technological deployment is to “discipline, deskill and displace” the skilled faculty workforce, just as in any other labor circumstance. This is a point that Gary Rhoades has also made quite well. [Man Prof] For the most part, again, this approach is enormously helpful (to a real extent because it generates an accurate description of administrative intentions regarding technology).  Furthermore, because—as the Italian autonomists have been at pains to demonstrate--mental labor is in fact labor (despite the folk-academic sense of exceptionalism), Noble’s series of observations paralleling skilled academic work with other forms of skilled work largely ring true.  Management dissemination of technology has been used to surveil, punish, regiment, censor, and control faculty; to direct how they allocate time and effort; to cement administrative control over the curriculum, and to impose supplemental duties including technological self-education and continuous availability to students and administration via email.  In some cases technology has even displaced living labor entirely with automated learning programs tended by software maintenance and courseware sales personnel.
 Nonetheless, Noble’s techno-dystopic focus doesn’t quite capture what is “informationalized” about the information university.   He is right that the administration’s motive in attempting to get faculty to convert their courses to courseware is ultimately to dispense with faculty altogether. Noble compares the plight of the tenure-stream faculty to the plight of the machinist Rudy Hertz in Vonnegut’s Player Piano: “They buy him a beer. They capture his skills on tape. Then they fire him.”  But does dispensing with the “skilled academic labor” of the tenured faculty result in the workerless academic environment Noble pictures?  Not at all: there are more academic workers than ever before.  Noble’s vision of the information university is of a fully “lights-out” knowledge factory, an entire virtual u. on a bank of hard-drives facelessly dispensing information to students across the globe. While this science-fiction view of an automated higher-ed completely captures administrative ambition (ie, for academic capital to emancipate itself from academic labor, realizing value magically in a workerless scheme of dollars for credits completely unmediated by teaching) and equally captures the anxiety of the tenure-stream faculty regarding the systematic imperative relentlessly driving toward the elimination of their positions, it misses the underlying reality:  dispensing with the skilled professoriate is accompanied by the installation of a vast cadre of less-skilled workers--graduate students, part-time faculty, technology specialists, writing consultants, and so forth.
 In trying to understand what is “informationalized” about the information university, we have to acknowledge with Manuel Castells and others that informationalization is profoundly a transformation of the work process.  It is not so much about delivering labor, teacher labor or any other kind, in a commodity form—it is a general feature of all capitalisms that workers are required to “sell their labor” in order to live.  Rather, informationalization is about delivering labor in the mode of information.  A word about informationalization and the material world is probably in order. Generally speaking, informationalization does not mean that we cease to have or handle things, or that we have and handle virtual objects “instead of” the material world  (as in Negroponte’s formulation that we move bits “instead of” atoms). Instead it means that we continue to have and handle material objects (more and more of them, at least in the thing-rich daily life of the northern hemisphere) but that we have and handle these objects in what Mark Poster calls “the mode of information,” which means that we manipulate objects as if they were data. It’s not that we don’t have car parts, novels, and armored divisions—only now we expect those things to be available to us in a manner approximating the way in which information is available to us.  A fully informationalized carburetor is available in the way that electronically-mediated data is available—on demand, just in time. When you’re not thinking of your carburetor, it’s off your desktop.  When you need to think about it, the informationalized carburetor lets you know. When it does manifest itself it gives the illusion of a startling transparency—you have in the carburetor’s manifestation the sense that you have everything you need to know about carburetors: how they work, fair prices for them here and in the next state, and so on.  Informationalization means that artifacts are available on an informatic logic: on demand, just in time and fully catalogued; they should feel transparent and be networked, and so forth. Informationalization creates data streams alongside, crossing, and enfolding atomic motion, but doesn’t replace atomic motion. To the contrary, informationalization is a constant pressure accelerating and multiplying atomic motion toward the ideal speed of the bitstream and toward the ideal efficiency of capturing (as profit) the action of every fingertip, eyeball,  and synaptic pulse [Terranova].
 So what does it mean to labor “in the mode of information?”  Above all, it means to deliver one’s labor “just in time” and “on demand,” to work “flexibly.” As Castells observes, the informational transformation relies even more on just-in-time labor than on just-in-time supplies (I: 289).  This means that labor appears when needed on the management desktop—fully trained, “ready to go out of the box,” and so forth—and after appearing upon administrative command, labor should ideally instantly disappear.  When the task is completed, labor organized on the informatic principle goes off-line, off the clock, and –most important—off the balance sheets.  This labor is required to present itself to management scrutiny as “independent” and “self-motivated,” even “joyful”—that is, able to provide herself with health care, pension plan, day care, employment to fill in the down time,  and eagerly willing to keep herself “up to speed” on developments transpiring in the corporate frame even though not receiving wages from the corporation; above all, contingent labor should present the affect of enjoyment: she must seem transparently glad to work, as in the knowledge worker’s mantra: “I love what I’m doing!”  As with other forms of consumerist enjoyment, the flex-timer generally pays for the chance to work—buying subscriptions to keep up, writing tuition checks, donating time to “internships” and unpaid training, flying herself to “professional development” opportunities—in all respects shouldering the expense of maintaining herself in constant readiness for her “right to work” to be activated by the management keystroke. (note Ross, “Mental Labor”) Contrary to the fantasy of the sedentary knowledge worker who “telecommutes” and never leaves home, the actual flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare, grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous existence in order to present the working body required by capital: healthy, childless, trained, and alert, displaying an affect of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.
Laboring in an informatic mode does not mean laboring with less effort—as if informationalized work was inevitably some form of knowledge teamwork scootering around the snack bar,  a bunch of chums dreaming up the quarterly scheduled product innovation.  Laboring in an informatic mode means laboring in a way so that labor-management feels effortless: the relevant perspective is the perspective of the management desktop, from which labor power can be made to appear and disappear with a keystroke. Informationalized labor is always informationalized for management, i.e., so that management can always have labor available to it “in the mode of information,” called up effortlessly, dismissed at will, immediately off the administrative mind once out of sight.  Indeed: for labor-management to feel so transparent and so effortless, a great deal of additional effort has to be expended (just not by management). For capital to have labor appear and disappear at the speed of the bitstream might, for instance, require concrete labor to drive sixty miles between part-time gigs, gulping fast food on the highway, leaving its children unattended: the informatic mode doesn’t eliminate this effort, it just makes that effort disappear from the management calculus. Informationalism cannot present labor in the form of data without offloading  the costs of feeding, housing, training, entertaining, reproducing, and clothing labor-power onto locations in the system other than the location using that labor power.
So, in reality, it “takes a village” to present informationalized labor to capital. This form of the work process, “flexible,” “casual,” permanently temporary, outsourced, and so on,  offloads the care and maintenance of the working body onto society—typically, onto the flex worker’s parents or a more traditionally-employed partner, as well as onto social institutions. This means especially, in the U.S.,  the health care provided at the emergency room and the job training provided by “higher education.” In the northern hemisphere, the operation of global capital somewhat cushions the care of higher-latitude flex workers by providing cheap consumer goods produced by contingent labor in the southern factories, so that, without the assistance of a parent or traditionally-employed partner, northern-hemisphere flex workers typically cannot afford to buy real property (a home) or services (health care, legal services, day care, etc) at northern-hemisphere prices. Nonetheless they may be otherwise rich in possessions fabricated by southern labor (compact discs, computer hardware, clothing, assembly-required furniture).  The most substantial expenditures made by the typical northern-hemisphere flex worker are the debt-funded car and tuition payments that inevitably figure as the prerequisite for entering the flex-time economy in the first place.
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Academic Employers and the Informatic Sabotage of Education
The academy occupies a very special place in this system of laboring in the informatic mode.  First: academic labor is itself highly informationalized. While it is highly questionable how many professors have been fired in consequence of having “their skills captured on tape,” we are nonetheless witnessing the disappearance of the professoriate. Indeed, we’re leaking teachers and scholars from every pore. In 1972, the City University of New York and Cal State systems each had about 12,000 full time faculty. Now they each have about 5,000. The teacherless classroom is no future possibility, but instead the most pressing feature of contemporary academic reality: it is difficult to find any institution of higher education in North America where the full-time professoriate teaches more than thirty percent of course sections—even in the Ivy League. [GESO ,etc] The elimination over three decades (chiefly by attrition and retirement incentives) of 14,000 scholars from CUNY and Cal State didn’t reduce the amount of teacher work being performed in those locations; it just handed teacher work to nonfaculty, subfaculty and parafaculty: a vast corps of administered labor.   At public institutions, in the junior colleges and especially the lower division of senior colleges, as little as 10 percent of the teaching is done by professorial faculty.  The rest is done by a revolving cadre of m.a. and ph.d. students, most of whom have no future as teachers and will leave in a year or two, and former ph.d. students, most of whom have ended their studies before taking the terminal degree.  With occasional exceptions, most of this cadre of students and former students figure as the ideal type of labor-power “in the informatic mode”—they can be called up by the dean or program administrator even after the term has begun, and can be dismissed at will; they have few rights to due process; they are frequently grateful to “have the chance to do what they love;” most rely on parents or a traditionally-employed partner for shelter, access to health care, day care and so on; of the rest, many are willing to finance their own sometimes-continuous training with as much as one hundred thousand dollars of debt. Surely this transformation of the academic work process, the substitution by attrition of contingent labor for faculty labor, is the core feature of educational informatics—a perfected system for recruiting, delivering, and ideologically reproducing an all-but-self-funding cadre of low-cost but highly-trained “just in time” labor power. Little wonder that every other transnational corporation wants to emulate the campus. By nearly any measure, the university represents the leading edge of labor in the informational mode.
  In the end, the one thing that is genuinely troubling about Noble’s analysis is his focus on the future fantasy of transmitting course content over a distance rather than the core transformation of the work process represented by casualization. On the one hand, Noble is pushing toward exactly the right pressure point--informationalization as a matter of the workplace—and yet, on the other hand, Noble risks missing the boat when it comes to the actual informatics of the academic workplace .  Similarly: Noble has hold of the only possible agent for resisting and controlling that transformation—the faculty union—but then goes on to share into the thirty-year disappointing failure of academic unions to confront casualization.  It’s a story that deserves to be told in the key of Shakespearean tragedy, where one’s virtues are equally one’s flaws (Lear’s fondness, Hamlet’s phlegm): since 1970, the academy has become one of the most-unionized sectors of the North American workforce, and yet it’s been a unionization inattentive to management’s stunningly successful installation of a casualized second tier of labor.  While 44% of all faculty and nearly 2/3 of public-institution faculty are unionized (by comparison to about 14% of the workforce at large and 30% of public-sector employees), faculty salaries have generally stagnated in comparison to other workers, and consciousness regarding what to do about the contingent workers of the second tier is all but nonexistent in faculty unions. (By contrast to the union response to tiering efforts at UPS or Delta, or the graduate-employee unions, which are in place or nascent on fifty North American campuses.)
 I make what may seem to some to be a digression about faculty unionism in order to get more accurately at the virtues and failings of Noble’s “digital diploma mills” series—it’s a perspective that draws directly on the perspective that has predominated for far too long in our faculty unions, a perspective that has struggled to preserve the jobs of their membership, as well as a handful of positions for a future professoriate, but which has otherwise failed to confront the structural reality of the informational transformation or even assert such basic principles as equal pay for equal work. There are significant exceptions, such as the CUNY New Caucus, which recently won the general elections in its 17-campus union on a platform of wage parity for contingent labor, including graduate students.  I do not wish to debunk faculty unionism: I am a faculty and graduate-employee unionist, and edit a journal devoted to the academic labor movement. What is truly important about Noble’s work in this series is its grounding in workplace struggle: it is only unionists like Noble who have mobilized any significant opposition to any dimension of the informational transformation, and who are capable of sustaining the necessary vision articulated by the U Washington union, and quoted by Noble, that education can’t be reduced to “the downloading of information,” and is an “intersubjective and social process.”  Nonetheless, Noble’s mistaken portait of informationalization as the “firing of professors” and the lights-out knowledge factory rather than the substitution of nonfaculty labor for faculty labor needs to be confronted by faculty unionists, as well as by other persons situated by the academic-industrial complex.
 Why does it matter? For one thing, the idea that academic informationalization can be equated with distance education leads Noble to conclude in part III of the series that the battle’s been won, even before it was properly started.  In the aftermath of some 1998 consolidation and retrenchment among online vendors, he writes with the triumph of a successful organizer that the “juggernaut” of instructional technology “appears to have stalled” and that “faculty and students have finally become alert to the administrative agendas and commercial con-games behind this seeming technological revolution.”  Would that it were so! Noble comes to this conclusion (November 1998) with his “Part III” just 8 months after issuing a call in part II (March 1998) to defend faculty intellectual property rights in “the coming battle.”  Few people seriously engaged in critical information studies would necessarily jump to the conclusion that defense of faculty IP rights can serve as a core strategy for combatting informationalism, but the real issue is the sudden swiftness with which Noble’s informatic struggle seems to have opened and closed. (note Coombs, acknowledging IP rights can be a tactical rallying point).   If academic informationalization isn’t just a another Hundred Days’ War, then what is it? Noble’s chronological problems begin with his decision to employ a “commodification-of-instruction” heuristic rather than one of casualization-of-instruction. By naming technologization as the key measure of informatic instructional delivery, Noble dates instructional transformation as a recent second wave, one which follows the 1980s commodification of research, one which is only happening “now” and which can be averted, even one which--in his erroneous narrative—by 1998 may already have been averted.
 But if casualization and not technologization is understood as the key measure of informatic instruction, we see a far more plausible chronology beginning in the 1960s, first observed circa 1968, in a process of steady implementation, current commitment, and no end in sight. Noble’s history of informationalization in the university essentially recapitulates the two-century transition in manufacturing modes of production (from artisanal production to industrialization to post-fordism) but compresses that narrative into just two decades, as if university knowledge work were primarily artisanal before 1980 and primarily industrialized thereafter. This is already problematic: university knowledge work may remain artisanal in certain sectors, but it was also in many other sectors enormously industrialized—especially in the sciences—before World War II.  Rather than viewing information technology in this way, as a threat to some eternally artisanal character of faculty knowledge work, it might be better to follow Virno, for example, who sees informationalization not as determining a single “compulsory mode of production” but as supporting a radically uneven terrain of work practice, preserving “myriad distinct” productive modes, serving as an umbrella “under which is represented the entire history of labor” in synchronic form, “as if at a world’s fair.” Stitching Virno’s observation together with the “taxonomy of teacher work” offered by Stanley Aronowitz in the The Jobless Future, and we recognize a plausible portrait of our own academy, in which the scientific researchers work in entrepreneurial and corporate modes of production; the humanists produce artisanally, but these pockets of “entrepreneurial,” “industrial,” and “artisanal” practice are inescapably conditioned by the umbrella presence of post-fordist production by the seven-in-ten contingent labor of graduate students and former graduate students working on a subfaculty basis.
The best way to make sense of Noble’s narrative, then, is to to approach it as a narrative about the informationalization of academic labor by the sector of academic labor which has been least informationalized. That is: while the full-time professoriate (what remains of it) are increasingly becoming what Gary Rhoades terms “managed professionals,” which is to say increasingly subordinated to the corporate values, ease of command, and fattened bottom line of the management desktop, the degree to which this informational transformation of the tenure stream has been accomplished is very limited. The degree to which the tenured now present their labor to management in “the mode of information” presents only a narrow ledge of understanding regarding the fully-informationalized working reality of contingent academic labor.  As tenurable faculty labor moves toward increasing subordination to management, lower pay, and so forth—toward “proletarianization”--it is obviously because their working conditions inevitably converge on the super-exploitation of the contingent laborers doing the same work. But insofar as there is now, and will likely remain, a very large gap preventing a complete convergence of the flexible and the tenured: we might be pressed to conclude that “artisanal” faculty practice since 1970 has in part been preserved by the compliance of the tenured with management’s development of a second tier of labor.
 Certainly that sense of faculty complicity drives much of the graduate-employee labor discourse, which is to say, the discourse of the most vocal segment of those subjected to the informatic logic of higher education.  Graduate students rightly feel that their mentors, frequently the direct supervisors of their work, owe them something more structurally significant than moth-eaten advice about “how to do well” in the job search. One of the reasons that graduate employees are so vocal is because the transformation of graduate education accomplished by the three-decade conversion of the university to a center of capital accumulation needs to be viewed as a profound form of “employer sabotage”—most graduate employees find that their doctorate does not represent the beginning but instead the end of a long teaching career: the “award” of the doctoral degree increasingly represents a disqualification from teaching for someone who has already been teaching for a decade or more.   In the course of re-imagining the graduate student as a source of informationalized labor, the academy has all but evacuated the professional-certification component of the doctoral degree. The consequence of this evacuation is that the old fordist sense of the doctoral recipient as the “product” of graduate education has no meaning—instead, as I’ve written elsewhere, the degree holder must now be understood in systemic terms as the waste product of graduate education—not merely “disposable,” but that which must be disposed of for the contantly-churning system of continuously-replaced student labor to function properly.
 In pushing beyond Noble’s focus on the perspective of the least-informationalized faculty worker to the most-informationalized faculty workers, we have multiplied the informatic constituency three- or four-fold. So one way of going on with an analysis of the information university is to press at the understanding that is not workerless, but filled with workers, most of whom will never be so lucky as to have Noble’s problems.  Another way of going on from here might be to use the steady increase of a super-exploited labor pool to press quite hard at the shared fantasy by  the tenured faculty and the administration regarding technology as a magical source of accumulation in the information university: as Tessa Morris-Suzuki and others have shown, the general failure of the capitalist fantasy that automated production can create exchange value largely continues to hold under information capitalism. When only a few information capitalists have deployed a particular “labor-saving” technology, the rate of profit rises; but as technological deployment evens out, the rate of profit sharply falls.  Because the profit comes from the uneven deployment of technology, and not technology per se, the falling profits associated with increasing technological equilibrium lead information capitalists back to the fundamental source of exchange value, the exploitation of living labor. In university terms, the super-exploited informatic labor of its ever-growing contingent workforce (and not “information technology”) is the source of the value that the university accumulates as capital. Because nearly all of this contingent labor has passed through the system of graduate education to one extent or another, graduate students and former graduate students must become visible as doubly exploited, first, in the super-exploitation of laboring contingently, but in a second, silent exploitation: insofar as their “education” no longer leads to employment but is itself that employment and is therefore continuously evacuated by increasing quantities of “teacher training” and other duties,  so that something that counts as “graduate education” is stolen from them and something else is substituted, something that contributes to the university’s direct accumulation. The apprentice teaching that graduate employeess used to do as training for a future career has been multiplied three or four times (into the equivalent of a full-time teaching load or more) and transformed by the informatics of university profit-taking into the only teaching career that most graduate employees will ever have.
 But in discussing the conversion of graduate education to labor in the mode of information, we have only scratched the surface.  To go on, we must investigate the ways in which the Info U. has transformed undergraduate experience.

The New Student Movements, Mental Labor and the Class Struggle
  One way of getting into the undergraduate experience is to ask  how teaching in the mode of information affects their learning: i.e., if it sucks to be a disposable teacher, what does it mean to be taught by this “sayonara faculty,” the soon-to-be-disposed-of cheap teachers laboring in the informatic mode? After all: this is a system that takes its most experienced teachers, graduate students who have taught eight years or more, and fires them, replacing them with brand new “teachers” who have no experience at all.  The experienced teachers then go to work “in industry,” while every year ten thousand inexperienced first-year graduate students walk into freshman classrooms with nervous grins on their faces. We could begin by asking whether it is a form of “employer sabotage” when by far the majority of college teaching is done by persons who will never hold a Ph.D., most of whom do not have an active research agenda, and many of whose scholarly ambitions may  have terminated in a sense of frustration, failure or disappointment.  Or we might try to get at the structure of feeling sustaining these college teachers and ask what convictions and behaviors are being transmitted to undergraduates in their first two years by persons whose experience in graduate school has taught them to love lifelong learning more than wages, who do not expect their employer to provide benefits, who are grateful for the chance to “do work they enjoy,” who do not generally have or expect any meaningful control over the workplace, who may feel that they “deserve” their fate at $16,000/year  and so forth.  It is not at all uncommon for a person who believes herself to have “failed on the academic job market” to base her pedagogy on “what you need to do to get a job.”
 But perhaps the undergraduate student’s experience is not only tied to the experience of graduate students and former graduate students along this essentializing binary of “teacher and student”—can’t we also get at the ways that the undergraduate experience is very much like the graduate experience, on a vector of likeness, “student and student”? After all, the young people that teach contingently (21-38) are in most cases near to the age of the young people people being taught by them (average age of the U.S. college student=26.6 years: almost half of all undergraduates are over 25).  The undergraduate’s always-lengthening “time in school” is increasingly a term of service as a flex worker:  nearly all college students work part-time. One-third to one-half of them work directly for the university; in many other cases the university “assists private employers” in finding student labor, creating corporate-university partnerships founded on uniting “scholarships” with the university’s assistance in finding students to work, as at my institution, 20 hours per week in five four-hour shifts beginning at midnight. In contexts like these, the university’s contribution to providing labor in an informatic mode is not limited to exploiting the students on its own campus; the university operates within information capitalism to provide flex workers with the enabling identity of “student.”
This is a double movement: while the number of hours worked and the percentage of students working long hours has increased steadily since 1970 according to every conceivable variable,  there is one telltale countertrend—interestingly, the number of part-time college students “working full time” in 1970 was almost 60%; by 1997, it had dropped to only 42%. This statistic cannot mean that this group is “working less” than in 1972; to the contrary, this group is certainly working more. They are working more, but doing it in the flexible mode.  Increasingly, this group no longer has the option of doing work in the “full-time mode” of benefits, security, vacations and so forth: the very possibility of working “full time” is simply not available to most young persons, who are now widely expected to do flex work well into their 30s. (NCES 1997, 50:1-4) The university’s role regarding the employment prospects of youth is no longer merely that of a space of socially-supported leisure consequent upon the “warehousing” of “surplus labor” for future full-time employment.  Instead, the university’s role is now to profit from student labor-power in several ways: as direct employer, as purveyor of the temp services of enrolled students for nearby corporations, and--in no particular hurry—also, eventually, to provide some degreeholding graduates trained and socialized to deliver their labor in the mode of information. Just as in graduate education: the university as profit center requires an ever-increasing stream of undergraduate enrollment, but it has no particular incentive to actually graduate or educate any of the persons comprising this swollen flow.

OK—to wrap this up, return to pp 14-20, cutting 2-3 pages and condense the notes below into concluding speculations of about 3 paragraphs: we are more likely to find the organic intellectuals of academic informationalism in the student body and not among the professoriate, for the simple reason that it is really the students, graduate and undergraduate, who labor informationally.
Where would we look for the intellectuals organic to the flexible segment except among the students?  Students do not need to “predict” the future—they embody the future and can and must perform that future. The anti-sweatshop movement—it is obviously sabotage of the corporate university’s regime of accumulation. How much more vitality could that movement express if it incorporated an activism against the flexible dominion of the university managers more locally? Is the focus on the sweatshop an indicator of a student movement that wants to be equally a labor movement? If so, it might be possible to articulate student antagonism to the corporate university at the same level of totality.
In attempting to distinguish between “knowledge” and “information,” we might remember that not all mental effort is “labor” (i.e., mental effort can be expended in management) and also that “information collection” can be fully automated (Ross: surplus information, technoculture) while, by contrast, “knowledge production” can be routinized but not automated. Information can remain “unknown,” but knowledge is always embodied. The association between information and capital on the one hand, and knowledge and labor on the other hand, can be elaborated further: while “knowledge” can be sold in the sense that one can sell one’s mental labor or the product of it, knowledge can’t be given; it always has to be labored over—the recipient must expend mental effort to “have knowledge.” Knowledge requires mutual labor; it can never be transmitted without friction, whereas “information” is native to friction-free environments—it can be “exchanged” and “sold” without ever being “received,” like oranges on the commodity market.  So in a way Noble is right or at least very close to emphasize the “commodification” of the instructional relation, but if information can be partially understood as a “commodity form” or “thing-form” of knowledge, can’t it be even more precisely understood (if knowledge is inevitably embodied) as a “capital” or “dead” form of knowledge—having the relationship to knowers that capital (“dead labor”) has to living labor? (Golumbia, “Hypercapital”).
The problem, therefore, of attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism with “access to capital”—labor’s (“access to information”) no substitute for actual education—Henry Adams: “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”  (information download as ersatz education, but not merely a consumer ripoff, the employer sabotage of worker consciousness, a “planned obsolescence by the credit hour,” substituting the lifelong drudgery of perpetual training for leisure, enjoyment, and free mental activity.  The U. also works to articulate fantasies about creative modes of production, especially ill-paid bohemianism, to mundane activities, giving work the aura of “art” by requiring it to be produced in the mode of art (ie, as super-exploited piecework) [Ross]. the u reproduces labor power in the in the informational mode. In this way, the university more nodal to global capital than the nation state or the nuclear family. So why would we expect that labor’s contact with information capital be somehow more beneficial to labor than its contact with other forms of capital?  And
The same problems adhere to the magical resolution of a public sphere. All the usual critiques of public sphere thought (who gets to participate, etc etc) but also, the structural articulation of communication with command and control: Lazzarato, the command, “You must be subjects of communication,” foundational of workplace discipline, etc.  (This leads into the other chapter, “Composition as Management Science,” in which the work process of the composition classroom—Ph.D.-holding “boss compositionists” directing the labor of non-degreed composition workers, sometimes 300 nondegreed teachers to one degree-holder, is the new model of university work, and which disseminates under the sign of “literacy” and “access to the public sphere” the dicta of corporate communication, including the command “you must communicate,” together with strategies of post-fordist discipline: transparency, enjoyment, teamwork, self-assessment, even anti-intellectualism: composition’s “cultural studies” is a strategics of the flexible, workplace ethnographics for profit and accomodation).  Pedagogies of communication cannot be enough if pedagogies of communication are always-already totalitarian.
 It is clear that information capitalism has empirically widened the wealth and income gaps and will continue to do so with the vocationalization of higher education.  Aronowitz, Schiller. NCES data:  more education has widened the gap between more and less educated, not by increasing the real incomes of the educated (which have declined), but by slashing the incomes of the less educated: more education has produced instead an enormous economic penalty for staying out of the education regime. (note gendered data on this is generational and the question of feminized fields of endeavor.)  Resisting in-formatization has become very costly.
We have to ask, then, what would information socialism look like, especially when we understand that the dissemination of information technology will not automatically produce it? Would it not be something like a refusal to work in the informatic mode? To make the demands of the Italian autonomy: rather than working without an income, to have an income without work? And in making such a demand, are we not making the demand of the student, simply to be allowed to be a student? To have years to study, to do mental labor outside of the regime of accumulation? And in the regime of “lifelong training,” we might find the authentic demand of the flexible: under a socialist informatics, laboring in the mode of information will invite persons to that joy in their muscular and synaptic efforts that capital commands them to ape.
Resisting informationalization of higher education mean that we should keep “information technology” out of the pedagogic contact?  No, it means, on the contrary, struggling to ensure that technology is deployed to increase the student participation in the mutual act of knowledge, and decrease its time spent in in-formatting itself.  It will have to meet the webbed authority of with an answering web authorship. Witheford: “communicating against information.”