The use of on-line education (OLE) to deliver higher education using learning management systems (LMS) has received growing critical attention for its reliance on precarious faculty, high dropout and failure rates, and as a form of privatization. While these critiques are well grounded, they overlook the role of OLE as a strategy for rationalizing teaching and deskilling academic labor in order to produce more self-disciplined precarious “platform” workers who can labor remotely under the control of algorithmic management. To recompose the power of academic workers, new tactics, strategies, and objectives based on an analysis of the new technical composition of capital in higher education are needed.

Ovetz argues that higher education worldwide is becoming ‘entrepreneurialized’ as universities are forced to organize themselves increasingly as profit-oriented businesses. This involves commercial partnerships with private capital and the State; and the growing exploitation of both teaching staff and students. However, there is also growing resistance to this trend from students, staff, and local communities. Ovetz illustrates his argument by detailed reference to the USA, and especially to the University of Texas at Austin.

The reorganization of higher education has been made possible by a new division of labor that is rationalizing and deskilling college teaching. These new relations of academic labor are disempowering the professorate by transferring control over teaching to a growing middle management and automating it as online distance learning. In order to respond to this threat to higher education, it is necessary to shift the focus from the commercialization of higher education to the adjunctification of the professorate. This requires a critical rethinking of organizational tactics, strategies, and objectives of academic labor organizing.Higher education is being reorganized. Privatization, disinvestment, online courses, for-profit colleges, tuition and fees, budget cuts, centralization and outsourcing of maintenance, food service and administrative services, and the use of "adjuncts" like myself have become rampant in the past four decades. The logic of the market subtly transforming the very work of teaching is obscured by discussions about commercialization. A new division of academic labor is being gradually imposed in order to expand control over academic labor, produce labor power better disciplined for contingent work, and design and build the technology to exploit that labor power. In order to develop new tactics, strategies, and objectives to respond to these threats, it is necessary to do a class analysis of the new division of academic labor. From the Mass to the Taylorized UniversityThe academic labor of the professorate is being rationalized, fragmented, deskilled, standardized, and disempowered, a process commonly called "adjunctification." This Taylorization of academic labor is proceeding in order to increase "output" of both the exploitation of adjunct faculty and the students disciplined and trained for flexible, part-time, contingent work. 1 The adjunctification of academic labor is the dominant model for the relations of contingent labor throughout the economy. 2 Prior to World War II, higher education almost entirely served the elite and played little direct role in the disciplining of labor power. However, the wildcat bs_bs_banner

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