Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education

by Evan Watkins

Overview

A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to cool outexpectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization.In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a cooling outto a heating upof class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from beat the oddsof long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds.Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823229833
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2008
Edition description:	3
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

EVAN WATKINS is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education (Fordham); Everyday Exchanges: Marketwork and Capitalist Common Sense;Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education; and Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
We're Going to the Show     1
New Selves/Old Selves, Class Dreams/Class Nightmares     17
School to Work to School to Work to...     39
How the Inequality Connection Was Timed Out     60
Class Processes 101: The Purpose of Competition     74
Competition, Choice, and the Management of Class Doubling     92
References     119
Index     123

Editorial Reviews

No, classes haven't disappeared in the United States. But they certainly don't operate the way they did 150 or even 50 years ago. In this original and timely book, noted scholar and teacher Evan Watkins uses vocational education as a lens to focus on the dramatic changes that are currently taking place in the areas of work, choice, and higher education, which have led to new processes of class formation. He also shows how, if we challenge the assumptions about the magic of the economy, those of us who work in postsecondary education—including, and perhaps especially, the humanities—have a unique opportunity to use where we are to bring into being a social world without exploitation.EMAIL IF CHANGING -David F. Ruccio

One of America's foremost scholars of work, class, and education at the top of his game.-Catherine Prendergast

A crucial new work from one of our leading theorists.-Jeffrey Nealon

From the Publisher

One of America's foremost scholars of work, class, and education at the top of his game.

University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana - Catherine Prendergast

A crucial new work from one of our leading theorists.

Pennsylvania State University - Jeffrey Nealon

No, classes haven't disappeared in the United States. But they certainly don't operate the way they did 150 or even 50 years ago. In this original and timely book, noted scholar and teacher Evan Watkins uses vocational education as a lens to focus on the dramatic changes that are currently taking place in the areas of work, choice, and higher education, which have led to new processes of class formation. He also shows how, if we challenge the assumptions about the magic of the economy, those of us who work in postsecondary education—including, and perhaps especially, the humanities—have a unique opportunity to "use where we are" to bring into being a social world without exploitation.

University of Notre Dame - David F. Ruccio