An examination of capitalism’s influence on student affairs labor in higher education

Abstract

This essay aims to uncover capitalism’s influence over student affairs labor in higher education, by which is meant the labor of non-faculty, student-facing professionals on collegiate campuses globally. It contrasts with works foregrounding neoliberal analyses of the profession, which tend to show the impacts of neoliberal capitalism on student affairs labor in the present, disembodied from the whole of the capitalist system. With assistance from Marx’s notion of contradiction (derived from his dialectical approach), this essay reveals how capitalism’s influence on American higher educational institutions transformed the faculty role and paved the way for student affairs to come into existence. The use of Marx’s value-form helps explain the nature of student affairs practitioners’ labor as abstract. Following that, this work establishes student affairs labor as producing the labor-power commodity for capitalism and implements Marx’s subsumption categories to identify the ideal subsumption of student affairs labor. To conclude, there is brief discussion of an alternative to the current neoliberal university and student affairs labors’ place within it. Achieving this alternative will require political struggle against capitalism and organizing for the common.