Introduction: Laboring in the Extractive University

Abstract

The twin pressures of dwindling state funding and widening student access has created a crisis of higher education that reverberates into the hidden abode of teaching and learning. In this special issue we reconnect pedagogy to its context of determination (and nondetermination) by bringing theories of the labor process to bear on the dilemmas and challenges faced by teaching assistants (TAs). Our project of auto-ethnography was suspended between two crises—COVID-19 and an unprecedented university-wide strike by graduate students. Elizabeth Torres Carpio advances the idea of the university's “selective recognition” that expands the work of street-level educators -TAs facing increasing numbers of students from economically poor and culturally diverse backgrounds. Natalie Pasquinelli considers the way faculty manage TAs as apprentices through hegemonic “status control.” Justin Germain focuses on the autonomy that allows TAs to turn teaching into “innovation games,” offering the players a sense of accomplishment. Thomas Gepts examines the “arrhythmic” time bind in which graduate students are caught between commitments to future-oriented research and present-oriented teaching. Margaret Eby shows how the “power of silence” allows TAs to conceal their anxiety and defend their autonomy. The university extracts the labor of TAs by giving them “constrained autonomy” to absorb, divert, and conceal the pressures descending from a top-heavy administrative structure. We extend the idea of “constrained autonomy” to other occupations.