Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University

Abstract

THE ASYMMETRICAL, UNCOMPENSATED LABORS OF ACADEME have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportionate amount of institutional caretaking: non-research and non-teaching functions such as serving on institutional committees, managing admissions processes, writing student letters of recommendation, and advising, mentoring, and counseling students from underrepresented and marginalized communities navigating hostile or indifferent environments.2 Research plainly shows that such caring labor is disproportionately conducted by feminized workers, and increasingly feminized workers of color.3 Advice for how to rectify these inequities, echoing the victim-blaming bromides delivered to overwhelmed housewives, often is reduced to individual behavioral modification, as when "senior female professors" are encouraged to "model self-restraint" for untenured faculty members by "learning how to say 'no. Small regional private colleges with low endowments currently face financial pressures distinct from vocational twoyear colleges, online credentialing programs, or top-tier global research universities;state regulations and revenue streams vary by national and regional context;religiously-affiliated institutions embody entanglements that non-religiously affiliated institutions do not;in the US context, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and predominantly white institutions occupy dissimilar social positions. The broad outlines of that restructuring are likely familiar to most readers of this academic journal: government divestment from public higher education, increased student fees and tuitions, the corporatization of university administration, the expansion of contingent and disposable teaching labor, the focus on education as a "deliverable" for students to "consume," the extension of working hours through 24/7 email availability, etc.8 Take, for example, the United States, where our academic labor is physically located (even as it is Zoom-distributed elsewhere): as recently as three decades ago, 75 percent of working faculty members were tenured or tenure track;now it is roughly 25 percent, depending on how online educators are tallied.9 The new contingent majority often teach, advise, write, and think in highly precarious conditions, commuting weekly, if not daily, between multiple campuses. Exhausting emotional and manual labor can remain inadequately recognized and compensated as long as that labor is effectively naturalized as maternal affection or feminine empathy.17 Already, in the pre-pandemic university, the affective imperative to work excessively out of love (for literature, for science, etc.) provided a means of access to the academic professional's embodied labor power - access shaped, as ever, by hierarchies of race, language, citizenship, gender, sexuality, age, and ability.