thenation--2020-09-08--Can the American University Be Saved?

Can the American University Be Saved?

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the glaring contradictions in American higher education .
State research universities are preparing to decrease services in light of anticipated budget shortfalls as small liberal arts colleges teeter on the brink of financial ruin .
Meanwhile , Ivy League and other rich universities have refused to dip into their massive endowments and have instead chosen to pursue austerity while increasing tuition—and increasing debt—for their students .
The Gig Academy : Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University The Meritocracy Trap : How America ’ s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality , Dismantles the Middle Class , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ universities are canceling classes and furloughing workers , leaving thousands stranded without income .
Though some schools have lengthened the tenure timelines of assistant professors , the majority have refused to extend a similar courtesy to graduate students .
Staff members and adjuncts have likewise been abandoned—forced to work fewer hours or unceremoniously let go .
The situation is likely to get worse as students refuse to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to take subpar online courses while sitting in their living rooms .
Without exaggeration , American higher education may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ breakdown .
To those who labor in universities , the precarious condition in which academia finds itself is no surprise .
For years , the university system has been operating on borrowed time .
Beginning in the 1980s , college administrators , often employing high-fee consultants , hollowed out the academic workforce , replacing full-time jobs with contingent positions that were poorly paid and benefited .
At the same time , exploding tuition costs obliged students to take out enormous loans that compelled them to view higher education primarily as a precursor to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was rarely guaranteed .
This house of cards , built on exploitation , anti-intellectualism , and massive debt , was doomed to collapse .
In the past decade and a half , many people involved in the system have begun to do something about it .
Undergraduate students have formed organizations that challenge their teachers ’ poor working conditions , graduate workers and adjuncts have unionized and demanded respect and compensation for their labor , and even tenure-track and tenured professors have started to unionize and recognize their contingent peers as colleagues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a dawning awareness that saving the university requires cross-occupation solidarity , in which people working at various jobs in the academy come together to demand transformation .
Yet in the face of administrator intransigence ( the failure to recognize graduate unions , improve salaries and benefits , and abandon contingent labor ) , the situation remains dire .
The crisis of American higher education is central to two recent books that link the diminishment of universities to the pathologies of contemporary capitalism .
The Gig Academy , by Adrianna Kezar , Tom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ documents how the neoliberal obsession with cost cutting and disinterest in labor rights has crept into the university , engendering the rise of a generation of precariously employed scholars teaching undergraduates burdened with titanic debt .
Tracing the decline of stable university jobs , the authors insist that only radical , collective action can rescue American higher education .
More than reform , they assert , what the university—and , in fact , the economy as a whole—needs is to be revolutionized .
In The Meritocracy Trap , Daniel Markovits approaches the crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a different set of conclusions .
Instead of focusing on those who labor in universities , he highlights how the ideology of meritocratic capitalism ( a system in which talent and achievement , as opposed to connections and blood ties , are supposed to lead to material benefits ) has transformed the most selective colleges into the primary sites of elite reproduction .
For Markovits , the crisis of higher education consists of the elite university ’ s role in fostering inequality between the rich and the rest—a role , he insists , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is transcended .
Although he emphasizes cultural more than material reform , his analysis suggests that the deliverance of US higher education depends on directly attacking the source of its problems : capitalism .
The Gig Academy is a wonderful précis on the dire state of the modern American university .
According to its authors ( a tenured professor at the University of Southern California and two of her graduate students ) , the central cause of its demise is the combination of cutbacks and corporatization .
University administrators seeking to reduce costs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cheap and deprofessionalized workforce…employed on a part-time , temporary , or contingent basis.
” In the process , they have taken power away from faculty members , who historically have put up little fight to defend their prerogatives .
Gone are the days when one could make a stable living as a professor or a university staff member .
In 2020 the lives of those who labor at American colleges are defined by a “ pervasive insecurity ” that makes it difficult for them to contribute to higher education ’ s two chief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ produce original research .
To make their case , Kezar , DePaola , and Scott point to the fact that nearly 75 percent of college instructors in the United States are contingent , non-tenure-track , or graduate students .
Despite working dozens of hours a week and teaching an unconscionable number of classes ( often at different schools ) , many faculty members “ lack a living wage , benefits , pension , long-term contract , paths for career advancement , involvement in [ university ] governance , [ and ] protection [ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nonunionized universities , which is to say most of them , the median pay for contingent faculty is $ 2,475 per course .
A contingent faculty member would therefore have to teach an impossible 19 courses a year to earn $ 47,025 , the median estimated income for a full-time American worker in 2018 .
Unsurprisingly , one analysis found that about 25 percent of contingent faculty members receive some form of government assistance .
Beyond the atrocious pay , contingent faculty members labor in awful conditions .
University administrators hire around one-third @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , providing them with little time to prepare for class or organize their research and personal lives .
Contingent faculty members are also regularly dismissed within days of a new semester ’ s start , which makes it incredibly challenging to find other courses to teach .
Adjunct precarity has only gotten worse with the Covid-19 pandemic : In May , for instance , a memo from the City University of New York ’ s John Jay College revealed that the college intended to lay off 450 contingent professors .
Furthermore , Kezar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administrators regularly ask contingent faculty to do unpaid labor as bureaucrats or mentors .
The workers usually accede to these requests because they feel it is their ethical duty and because they hope it will enable them to obtain a full-time position .
While tenured faculty members often traffic in meritocratic myths about their institutions ’ just rewarding of the best and the brightest , what Kezar , DePaola , and Scott hammer home is how much of an aristocracy the modern university has become .
In this , higher education mirrors other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Only a small minority of professors receive the storied benefits of the vita contemplativa : control over one ’ s work life , light teaching loads , research support , a significant amount of vacation time , and an upper-middle-class salary .
The rest put in long hours , laboring in poor conditions with little chance to earn a middle-class income .
Perversely , the gig academy ’ s never-ending supply of cheap labor has improved the lives of the few remaining tenured professors .
As Kezar , DePaola , and Scott highlight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to work free of contingency are increasingly insulated from responsibilities thought to be central to the job of a professor , including teaching , advisement , assessment , grading , and course design.
” Perhaps the most grotesque embodiment of the current academic caste system is the contingent researcher , a scholar whom wealthy tenured faculty members employ to conduct “ the rudimentary work of actual research.
” The execrable conditions of the gig academy exert a disciplining effect on contingent faculty members , who are understandably wary of criticizing their institutions or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fear of blowback .
And of course , very few have time to pursue research in their fields or write for general audiences , which is an enormous loss to their disciplines and the public as a whole .
In the contemporary United States , one of the richest countries in world history , scholars whose work might have cured cancer or transformed our understanding of racial inequality are instead compelled to spend their time grubbing for scraps .
Predictably , the gig academy ’ s rise has been accompanied by a decline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social , ” the authors rightly declare , but the university that has emerged in the past three decades does everything in its power to weaken the bonds that connect scholars and university staff members with students .
Atomized , exhausted , and precarious faculty and staff simply can not engage with students in meaningful ways .
As Kezar , DePaola , and Scott underline , “ Gig Academy employment conditions are negatively associated with [ student ] persistence , retention , graduation , academic performance , transfer from two-year to four-year institutions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interactions.
” In the gig academy , everyone—including students—suffers .
How did this happen ?
How did the neoliberal logics of cost cutting , corporatization , and contingency infect US higher education ?
There are many causes of this transformation—decreased government support , the mass entrance of racial minorities and women into colleges , the collapse of American unions—but Kezar , DePaola , and Scott point to an obvious and important one : the ascent of an administrative class that has taken over universities .
In 1990 , “ there were at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for every [ university ] administrator ” ; by 2012 , “ this figure had declined ” precipitously .
Instead of building communities that promoted teaching and research , universities instituted a new regime of top-heavy administration .
Buoyed by the neoliberal insistence that all organizations must abide by corporatist and consumerist principles , administrators cut costs , increased tuition , and reallocated funds to amenities like fancy gyms and dining halls to better their university ’ s ranking in U.S. News & World Report .
In the gig academy , a business @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the university ’ s purpose is to increase revenue and improve the customer ( i.e.
, student ) experience , came to dominate .
Kezar , DePaola , and Scott ’ s book is primarily diagnostic : It seeks to elucidate the dreadful working conditions of one peculiar industry .
But the authors also offer a solution to the gig academy ’ s problems : Like workers in all sectors , professors and other university laborers must concentrate their power .
Indeed , in the last 15 years , college campuses have witnessed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unionization , with unions forming at the University of Chicago , Columbia , Yale , and other schools .
Unfortunately , tenure-track and tenured faculty members have often remained aloof from these struggles ; occasionally , they have actively opposed them .
Throughout the country , innumerable faculty members have crossed picket lines or graded papers while graduate students were on strike .
At many universities—including mine—the permanent faculty members have rejected unionization efforts .
As this suggests , much remains to be done to persuade those with stable jobs that they share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if tenure-track and tenured faculty members remain disconnected from the fight for labor rights , it ’ s likely only a matter of time before their own jobs are put on the chopping block .
Kezar , DePaola , and Scott deftly show that the conditions of the gig academy reflect those of the broader gig economy , which may make it possible to organize successfully across industries .
Most workers in the contemporary United States , from the contingent professor to the Amazon warehouse stocker to the Uber driver , live similarly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contingent academic laborers and their tenured allies must think seriously about organizing cross-industrial groups that take on capitalism itself .
Even if university workers succeed in revolutionizing higher education , this success would be short-lived if the American political economy remained unchanged .
The system as a whole must be transformed .
One of the most important underpinnings of the gig academy—and one of the reasons so many tenure-track and tenured faculty members ignore their precarious colleagues—is the underlying myth that the university system rewards merit and not accidents of birth .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ based solely on her or his talents is the primary intellectual justification for academic inequality .
In The Meritocracy Trap , Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits attacks meritocratic myths like this one head-on .
Meritocracy , he argues , is a false ideology that has torn society asunder and created a “ caste hierarchy that simultaneously excludes most people and damages the few that it admits.
” To tell his story , Markovits explores how the material realities of contemporary capitalism and the ideology of meritocracy reinforce each other .
He maintains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meritocracy is not only a mirage—most people don ’ t rise because of merit—but also the primary contributor to “ the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.
” He argues that the major way to succeed in the present political economy , which depends on highly skilled labor , is to participate in expensive educational training .
But only the rich have the resources to send their children to the exclusive schools upon which admission to Harvard and Yale often relies .
As a result , from the beginning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the foremost mechanism of meritocratic success .
Moreover , once affluent scions graduate from an elite college , they are usually able to move into careers ( law , medicine , consulting , and banking ) that provide them with the funds needed to guarantee that their children are educated as they were .
Meritocracy , which was initially envisioned as a means to collapse social barriers , thus engenders an impenetrable aristocracy .
Markovits further notes that in a highly skilled meritocratic economy , much of the labor traditionally undertaken by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Technologies recently invented and promoted by meritocrats—computers , robotics , the Internet , novel methods of administration , sophisticated financial techniques , and so forth—dispense with the need for medium- and low-skilled labor , creating widespread unemployment and underemployment .
To add insult to injury , meritocrats declare that this joblessness is not the result of peculiar economic structures and decisions ; rather , they insist it is the collective fault of those who failed , because they simply lacked the industry and talent required to succeed .
By means of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Markovits also argues that it ’ s not only the middle and working classes that suffer prodigiously under meritocracy : the wealthy do so as well .
As children , meritocrats in training are forced by their ever-anxious parents through an educational meat grinder , in which hours of homework a night is common and everyone is gunning for her or his spot at Harvard .
Tragically , the “ reward ” for the lucky few who graduate from a prestigious university is more of the same : a work life defined by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a bank , law firm , or consulting agency , where mature meritocrats devote themselves to protecting the interests of the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world .
In Markovits ’ s telling , meritocrats comprise a “ superordinate working class ” that derives its wealth from labor , not capital .
And similar to all working classes , this superordinate working class is alienated .
According to Markovits , meritocratic elites ’ alienation is a function of the fact that , under meritocratic capitalism , people are merely means to produce rents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ superordinate worker must comprehend herself in instrumental terms ” and “ must act , in effect , as an asset manager whose portfolio contains her own person.
” From childhood onward , meritocrats in training obsess over accumulating human capital—the specialized skills needed to thrive in the present economy .
Foreseeably , this all-consuming quest damages meritocrats ’ mental health .
To cite just one statistic , Markovits reports that “ students at wealthy high schools…suffer clinically significant depression and anxiety at rates double or triple the national average.
” Meritocratic distress is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s relatively easy for would-be meritocrats to tumble down the class hierarchy .
Harvard and Goldman Sachs , after all , have only so many spots .
In the meritocratic economy the working , middle , and upper classes share a general experience of precarity that makes it impossible to live a fulfilled life .
The present system , in other words , works for no one , and Markovits insists that it must be transformed .
Unfortunately , his suggestions for how to do so offer a compelling display of liberalism ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Scott , who advocate for collective action that seeks to remake the structures of an industry ( and then , perhaps , the whole economy ) , Markovits embraces a narrower , more elitist program : He argues that to destroy meritocracy , anti-meritocrats must educate Americans from all social classes about its negative effects .
This , he continues , will engender “ political understanding ” among the classes , which will encourage the rich and the rest to form coalitions devoted to overcoming “ meritocracy ’ s burdens.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ naive and sanguine view of political change , one that ignores the struggles that have actually enabled subaltern groups to force social transformation .
From the labor agitation of the fin de siècle to the civil rights movement to the battle for women ’ s and LGBTQ equality , elites have surrendered privileges not because the oppressed won an argument but because they were compelled to do so .
To end meritocracy , we need collective action geared toward seizing power .
The rich won ’ t alter their behavior or relinquish their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hearts or because they attended a few anti-meritocracy seminars .
The wealthy , in fact , have long recognized the working and middle classes as their enemies ; now the working and middle classes must identify the wealthy as theirs .
As Markovits himself notes , the richest Americans have for decades employed lobbyists and influenced politicians to ensure that “ law and policy respond sensitively to [ their ] preferences while remaining almost totally unresponsive to the preferences of everyone else.
” There is a class war , and it is being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countervailing force , consisting of working- and middle-class laborers who know their enemy , can reverse the staggering inequality that defines contemporary American life .
Markovits rejects class war because , like many liberals , he accepts the legitimacy of social stratification .
As he says , “ It is one thing for a person to be confined to his birth rank in a narrowly compressed economic distribution , in which the classes lead materially and socially similar lives.
” A problem emerges only when people are confined to their birth rank “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which even adjacent [ class ] ranks experience material and social conditions that render their lives mutually unrecognizable.
” Markovits doesn ’ t want to move past capitalism ; instead , he desires to return to its pre-meritocratic , midcentury “ golden age.
” The problem , of course , is that for many Americans , the golden age wasn ’ t all that golden .
To take the starkest example , throughout the mid-20th century , Black Americans were far poorer than their white counterparts ; in 1966 , for instance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And though it is true that at midcentury the United States was a more equal society than it is today , this equality was substantially undergirded by Cold War militarism .
For example , the 1958 National Defense Education Act , which drastically increased the federal government ’ s support for higher education ( and which thus aided class mobility ) , was passed only because of fears of the Soviet Union ’ s perceived technological advantage after the launch of its Sputnik satellite .
If Markovits had dug a bit deeper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ age ” to which he wants us to return , he would see that the so-called equality the United States achieved was never experienced equally and was partly a function of militaristic pressures .
Moreover , the progress the country did make in moving toward racial , gender , and sexual equality was attained only through political struggle .
Put simply , we shouldn ’ t want to return to an era plagued with its own inequalities .
Instead of falling into a counterproductive nostalgia trap , we must dedicate ourselves to revolutionizing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a small number of groups .
To do so will require far more than a few anti-meritocratic self-criticism sessions .
Together , The Gig Academy and The Meritocracy Trap paint a dire portrait of higher education .
In the former , Kezar , DePaola , and Scott reveal that the modern university is a site of extreme exploitation , in which the majority of workers , like many of their counterparts in the broader gig economy , live undignified lives .
In the latter , Markovits demonstrates that the nation ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ miserable aristocracy .
It ’ s clear that in 2020 , universities have imbibed the worst elements of contemporary capitalism and in the process have deemphasized teaching and research .
American students , suffering under enormous debt , have recognized that college is not about learning .
Many of them , Markovits notes , “ approach their schooling with a compulsive fixation on the competition that they are in and the prizes that they seek.
” My experience as a professor confirms this .
At the beginning of each of my courses , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For years , I have received the same answer : to get a job .
It ’ s therefore unsurprising that grade inflation and grade grubbing have become rampant ; in a winner-take-all economy , people must distinguish themselves lest they fall down the class hierarchy .
Modern universities , ideally places where people explore new ideas and take intellectual risks , instead function as the finishing schools for the future workers of America .
In this environment , it ’ s not a shock that the humanities , formerly a centerpiece @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aside in favor of science , technology , engineering , and math—the fields that best prepare indebted and desperate young people for a meritocratic economy designed to reward their wealthy peers .
Humanistic thinking can ’ t and won ’ t survive in a world in which students—and their parents—must view college in instrumental terms .
The facts on the ground demonstrate this .
My field , history , has recently witnessed a dramatic drop in majors .
As the American Historical Association has reported , “ of all the major disciplines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the number of bachelor ’ s degrees awarded ” since the Great Recession .
The English major is in a similar free fall , experiencing a decline of 25.5 percent in the same period .
It ’ s easy to imagine a world in which universities stop teaching these and other subjects that don ’ t result in immediate pecuniary benefits .
Recent events in Australia , where the conservative government has announced that it will charge students pursuing degrees in the humanities more than what it charges those pursuing more “ practical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sooner rather than later .
The major crises of the contemporary American academy—increasing debt , administrative overreach , the casualization of labor , the instrumentalization of knowledge , the collapse of the humanities , and the growing reliance on anti-union consultancies and law firms—emerge from a broken system that overrewards the few at the expense of the many .
These crises are fundamentally tied to the political economy and will not be solved by confining agitation to the university .
Only an extra-university movement , connected to other anti-capitalist movements and dedicated to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ higher education and those who have devoted their lives to it .
Absent such activism , the American university will remain a site of exploitation and anxiety in which no one ’ s genuine interests—to learn , to earn a living , to discover new things—are truly met .
As we head into the fall semester , in which the coronavirus will inevitably endanger the lives of professors , university staff members , and students , building the solidarity upon which the transformation of higher education relies remains as important as ever .

This article appears in the September 21/28, 2020 issue.
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the glaring contradictions in American higher education. State research universities are preparing to decrease services in light of anticipated budget shortfalls as small liberal arts colleges teeter on the brink of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Ivy League and other rich universities have refused to dip into their massive endowments and have instead chosen to pursue austerity while increasing tuition—and increasing debt—for their students. Books in Review The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University By Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott Buy this book The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite By Daniel Markovits Buy this book
Across the country, universities are canceling classes and furloughing workers, leaving thousands stranded without income. Though some schools have lengthened the tenure timelines of assistant professors, the majority have refused to extend a similar courtesy to graduate students. Staff members and adjuncts have likewise been abandoned—forced to work fewer hours or unceremoniously let go. The situation is likely to get worse as students refuse to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to take subpar online courses while sitting in their living rooms. Without exaggeration, American higher education may be on the verge of a total breakdown.
To those who labor in universities, the precarious condition in which academia finds itself is no surprise. For years, the university system has been operating on borrowed time. Beginning in the 1980s, college administrators, often employing high-fee consultants, hollowed out the academic workforce, replacing full-time jobs with contingent positions that were poorly paid and benefited. At the same time, exploding tuition costs obliged students to take out enormous loans that compelled them to view higher education primarily as a precursor to employment—employment that, as the economy worsened, was rarely guaranteed. This house of cards, built on exploitation, anti-intellectualism, and massive debt, was doomed to collapse.
In the past decade and a half, many people involved in the system have begun to do something about it. Undergraduate students have formed organizations that challenge their teachers’ poor working conditions, graduate workers and adjuncts have unionized and demanded respect and compensation for their labor, and even tenure-track and tenured professors have started to unionize and recognize their contingent peers as colleagues. Throughout the United States, there is a dawning awareness that saving the university requires cross-occupation solidarity, in which people working at various jobs in the academy come together to demand transformation.
Yet in the face of administrator intransigence (the failure to recognize graduate unions, improve salaries and benefits, and abandon contingent labor), the situation remains dire.
The crisis of American higher education is central to two recent books that link the diminishment of universities to the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. The Gig Academy, by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott, documents how the neoliberal obsession with cost cutting and disinterest in labor rights has crept into the university, engendering the rise of a generation of precariously employed scholars teaching undergraduates burdened with titanic debt. Tracing the decline of stable university jobs, the authors insist that only radical, collective action can rescue American higher education. More than reform, they assert, what the university—and, in fact, the economy as a whole—needs is to be revolutionized. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits approaches the crisis from a liberal perspective and thus offers a different set of conclusions. Instead of focusing on those who labor in universities, he highlights how the ideology of meritocratic capitalism (a system in which talent and achievement, as opposed to connections and blood ties, are supposed to lead to material benefits) has transformed the most selective colleges into the primary sites of elite reproduction. For Markovits, the crisis of higher education consists of the elite university’s role in fostering inequality between the rich and the rest—a role, he insists, that will change only if meritocratic ideology is transcended. Although he emphasizes cultural more than material reform, his analysis suggests that the deliverance of US higher education depends on directly attacking the source of its problems: capitalism. Current Issue View our current issue
The Gig Academy is a wonderful précis on the dire state of the modern American university. According to its authors (a tenured professor at the University of Southern California and two of her graduate students), the central cause of its demise is the combination of cutbacks and corporatization. University administrators seeking to reduce costs have replaced secure jobs with “a cheap and deprofessionalized workforce…employed on a part-time, temporary, or contingent basis.” In the process, they have taken power away from faculty members, who historically have put up little fight to defend their prerogatives. Gone are the days when one could make a stable living as a professor or a university staff member. In 2020 the lives of those who labor at American colleges are defined by a “pervasive insecurity” that makes it difficult for them to contribute to higher education’s two chief missions: to educate students and to produce original research.
To make their case, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott point to the fact that nearly 75 percent of college instructors in the United States are contingent, non-tenure-track, or graduate students. Despite working dozens of hours a week and teaching an unconscionable number of classes (often at different schools), many faculty members “lack a living wage, benefits, pension, long-term contract, paths for career advancement, involvement in [university] governance, [and] protection[s] of academic freedom.” At nonunionized universities, which is to say most of them, the median pay for contingent faculty is $2,475 per course. A contingent faculty member would therefore have to teach an impossible 19 courses a year to earn $47,025, the median estimated income for a full-time American worker in 2018. Unsurprisingly, one analysis found that about 25 percent of contingent faculty members receive some form of government assistance.
Beyond the atrocious pay, contingent faculty members labor in awful conditions. University administrators hire around one-third of non-tenure-track faculty at the last minute, providing them with little time to prepare for class or organize their research and personal lives. Contingent faculty members are also regularly dismissed within days of a new semester’s start, which makes it incredibly challenging to find other courses to teach. Adjunct precarity has only gotten worse with the Covid-19 pandemic: In May, for instance, a memo from the City University of New York’s John Jay College revealed that the college intended to lay off 450 contingent professors. Furthermore, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott show that administrators regularly ask contingent faculty to do unpaid labor as bureaucrats or mentors. The workers usually accede to these requests because they feel it is their ethical duty and because they hope it will enable them to obtain a full-time position.
While tenured faculty members often traffic in meritocratic myths about their institutions’ just rewarding of the best and the brightest, what Kezar, DePaola, and Scott hammer home is how much of an aristocracy the modern university has become. In this, higher education mirrors other sectors of the broader gig economy. Only a small minority of professors receive the storied benefits of the vita contemplativa: control over one’s work life, light teaching loads, research support, a significant amount of vacation time, and an upper-middle-class salary. The rest put in long hours, laboring in poor conditions with little chance to earn a middle-class income.
Perversely, the gig academy’s never-ending supply of cheap labor has improved the lives of the few remaining tenured professors. As Kezar, DePaola, and Scott highlight, “faculty who are fortunate enough to work free of contingency are increasingly insulated from responsibilities thought to be central to the job of a professor, including teaching, advisement, assessment, grading, and course design.” Perhaps the most grotesque embodiment of the current academic caste system is the contingent researcher, a scholar whom wealthy tenured faculty members employ to conduct “the rudimentary work of actual research.”
The execrable conditions of the gig academy exert a disciplining effect on contingent faculty members, who are understandably wary of criticizing their institutions or teaching their students controversial subjects, for fear of blowback. And of course, very few have time to pursue research in their fields or write for general audiences, which is an enormous loss to their disciplines and the public as a whole. In the contemporary United States, one of the richest countries in world history, scholars whose work might have cured cancer or transformed our understanding of racial inequality are instead compelled to spend their time grubbing for scraps.
Predictably, the gig academy’s rise has been accompanied by a decline in student achievement. “Learning is social,” the authors rightly declare, but the university that has emerged in the past three decades does everything in its power to weaken the bonds that connect scholars and university staff members with students. Atomized, exhausted, and precarious faculty and staff simply cannot engage with students in meaningful ways. As Kezar, DePaola, and Scott underline, “Gig Academy employment conditions are negatively associated with [student] persistence, retention, graduation, academic performance, transfer from two-year to four-year institutions, early-college experiences, and high-quality faculty-student interactions.” In the gig academy, everyone—including students—suffers.
How did this happen? How did the neoliberal logics of cost cutting, corporatization, and contingency infect US higher education? There are many causes of this transformation—decreased government support, the mass entrance of racial minorities and women into colleges, the collapse of American unions—but Kezar, DePaola, and Scott point to an obvious and important one: the ascent of an administrative class that has taken over universities. In 1990, “there were at least three [full-time] faculty and staff for every [university] administrator”; by 2012, “this figure had declined” precipitously. Instead of building communities that promoted teaching and research, universities instituted a new regime of top-heavy administration. Buoyed by the neoliberal insistence that all organizations must abide by corporatist and consumerist principles, administrators cut costs, increased tuition, and reallocated funds to amenities like fancy gyms and dining halls to better their university’s ranking in U.S. News & World Report. In the gig academy, a business ethic, in which managers insist that the university’s purpose is to increase revenue and improve the customer (i.e., student) experience, came to dominate.
Kezar, DePaola, and Scott’s book is primarily diagnostic: It seeks to elucidate the dreadful working conditions of one peculiar industry. But the authors also offer a solution to the gig academy’s problems: Like workers in all sectors, professors and other university laborers must concentrate their power. Indeed, in the last 15 years, college campuses have witnessed a rise in contingent and graduate student unionization, with unions forming at the University of Chicago, Columbia, Yale, and other schools.
Unfortunately, tenure-track and tenured faculty members have often remained aloof from these struggles; occasionally, they have actively opposed them. Throughout the country, innumerable faculty members have crossed picket lines or graded papers while graduate students were on strike. At many universities—including mine—the permanent faculty members have rejected unionization efforts. As this suggests, much remains to be done to persuade those with stable jobs that they share interests with their contingent colleagues. But if tenure-track and tenured faculty members remain disconnected from the fight for labor rights, it’s likely only a matter of time before their own jobs are put on the chopping block.
Kezar, DePaola, and Scott deftly show that the conditions of the gig academy reflect those of the broader gig economy, which may make it possible to organize successfully across industries. Most workers in the contemporary United States, from the contingent professor to the Amazon warehouse stocker to the Uber driver, live similarly precarious lives. For this reason, contingent academic laborers and their tenured allies must think seriously about organizing cross-industrial groups that take on capitalism itself. Even if university workers succeed in revolutionizing higher education, this success would be short-lived if the American political economy remained unchanged. The system as a whole must be transformed.
One of the most important underpinnings of the gig academy—and one of the reasons so many tenure-track and tenured faculty members ignore their precarious colleagues—is the underlying myth that the university system rewards merit and not accidents of birth. The belief that a scholar rises and falls based solely on her or his talents is the primary intellectual justification for academic inequality. In The Meritocracy Trap, Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits attacks meritocratic myths like this one head-on. Meritocracy, he argues, is a false ideology that has torn society asunder and created a “caste hierarchy that simultaneously excludes most people and damages the few that it admits.”
To tell his story, Markovits explores how the material realities of contemporary capitalism and the ideology of meritocracy reinforce each other. He maintains that in today’s economy, meritocracy is not only a mirage—most people don’t rise because of merit—but also the primary contributor to “the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.” He argues that the major way to succeed in the present political economy, which depends on highly skilled labor, is to participate in expensive educational training. But only the rich have the resources to send their children to the exclusive schools upon which admission to Harvard and Yale often relies. As a result, from the beginning of their lives the nonwealthy are excluded from the foremost mechanism of meritocratic success. Moreover, once affluent scions graduate from an elite college, they are usually able to move into careers (law, medicine, consulting, and banking) that provide them with the funds needed to guarantee that their children are educated as they were. Meritocracy, which was initially envisioned as a means to collapse social barriers, thus engenders an impenetrable aristocracy.
Markovits further notes that in a highly skilled meritocratic economy, much of the labor traditionally undertaken by the middle and working classes becomes redundant. Technologies recently invented and promoted by meritocrats—computers, robotics, the Internet, novel methods of administration, sophisticated financial techniques, and so forth—dispense with the need for medium- and low-skilled labor, creating widespread unemployment and underemployment. To add insult to injury, meritocrats declare that this joblessness is not the result of peculiar economic structures and decisions; rather, they insist it is the collective fault of those who failed, because they simply lacked the industry and talent required to succeed. By means of this reasoning, meritocratic inequality justifies itself.
Markovits also argues that it’s not only the middle and working classes that suffer prodigiously under meritocracy: the wealthy do so as well. As children, meritocrats in training are forced by their ever-anxious parents through an educational meat grinder, in which hours of homework a night is common and everyone is gunning for her or his spot at Harvard. Tragically, the “reward” for the lucky few who graduate from a prestigious university is more of the same: a work life defined by incessant, arduous, and soulless labor at a bank, law firm, or consulting agency, where mature meritocrats devote themselves to protecting the interests of the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world.
In Markovits’s telling, meritocrats comprise a “superordinate working class” that derives its wealth from labor, not capital. And similar to all working classes, this superordinate working class is alienated. According to Markovits, meritocratic elites’ alienation is a function of the fact that, under meritocratic capitalism, people are merely means to produce rents. For this reason, “the superordinate worker must comprehend herself in instrumental terms” and “must act, in effect, as an asset manager whose portfolio contains her own person.” From childhood onward, meritocrats in training obsess over accumulating human capital—the specialized skills needed to thrive in the present economy. Foreseeably, this all-consuming quest damages meritocrats’ mental health. To cite just one statistic, Markovits reports that “students at wealthy high schools…suffer clinically significant depression and anxiety at rates double or triple the national average.”
Meritocratic distress is bolstered by the reality that it’s relatively easy for would-be meritocrats to tumble down the class hierarchy. Harvard and Goldman Sachs, after all, have only so many spots. In the meritocratic economy the working, middle, and upper classes share a general experience of precarity that makes it impossible to live a fulfilled life.
The present system, in other words, works for no one, and Markovits insists that it must be transformed. Unfortunately, his suggestions for how to do so offer a compelling display of liberalism’s limits. Unlike Kezar, DePaola, and Scott, who advocate for collective action that seeks to remake the structures of an industry (and then, perhaps, the whole economy), Markovits embraces a narrower, more elitist program: He argues that to destroy meritocracy, anti-meritocrats must educate Americans from all social classes about its negative effects. This, he continues, will engender “political understanding” among the classes, which will encourage the rich and the rest to form coalitions devoted to overcoming “meritocracy’s burdens.”
Markovits’s solution demonstrates a rather naive and sanguine view of political change, one that ignores the struggles that have actually enabled subaltern groups to force social transformation. From the labor agitation of the fin de siècle to the civil rights movement to the battle for women’s and LGBTQ equality, elites have surrendered privileges not because the oppressed won an argument but because they were compelled to do so. To end meritocracy, we need collective action geared toward seizing power. The rich won’t alter their behavior or relinquish their authority out of the goodness of their hearts or because they attended a few anti-meritocracy seminars.
The wealthy, in fact, have long recognized the working and middle classes as their enemies; now the working and middle classes must identify the wealthy as theirs. As Markovits himself notes, the richest Americans have for decades employed lobbyists and influenced politicians to ensure that “law and policy respond sensitively to [their] preferences while remaining almost totally unresponsive to the preferences of everyone else.” There is a class war, and it is being waged—and won—by the rich. Only a countervailing force, consisting of working- and middle-class laborers who know their enemy, can reverse the staggering inequality that defines contemporary American life.
Markovits rejects class war because, like many liberals, he accepts the legitimacy of social stratification. As he says, “It is one thing for a person to be confined to his birth rank in a narrowly compressed economic distribution, in which the classes lead materially and socially similar lives.” A problem emerges only when people are confined to their birth rank “in a widely dispersed society, in which even adjacent [class] ranks experience material and social conditions that render their lives mutually unrecognizable.” Markovits doesn’t want to move past capitalism; instead, he desires to return to its pre-meritocratic, midcentury “golden age.”
The problem, of course, is that for many Americans, the golden age wasn’t all that golden. To take the starkest example, throughout the mid-20th century, Black Americans were far poorer than their white counterparts; in 1966, for instance, nearly one-third of indigent Americans were Black. And though it is true that at midcentury the United States was a more equal society than it is today, this equality was substantially undergirded by Cold War militarism. For example, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which drastically increased the federal government’s support for higher education (and which thus aided class mobility), was passed only because of fears of the Soviet Union’s perceived technological advantage after the launch of its Sputnik satellite.
If Markovits had dug a bit deeper into the history of the “golden age” to which he wants us to return, he would see that the so-called equality the United States achieved was never experienced equally and was partly a function of militaristic pressures. Moreover, the progress the country did make in moving toward racial, gender, and sexual equality was attained only through political struggle. Put simply, we shouldn’t want to return to an era plagued with its own inequalities. Instead of falling into a counterproductive nostalgia trap, we must dedicate ourselves to revolutionizing contemporary capitalism—a system that necessarily concentrates wealth in a small number of groups. To do so will require far more than a few anti-meritocratic self-criticism sessions.
Together, The Gig Academy and The Meritocracy Trap paint a dire portrait of higher education. In the former, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott reveal that the modern university is a site of extreme exploitation, in which the majority of workers, like many of their counterparts in the broader gig economy, live undignified lives. In the latter, Markovits demonstrates that the nation’s top colleges exist primarily to reproduce a miserable aristocracy. It’s clear that in 2020, universities have imbibed the worst elements of contemporary capitalism and in the process have deemphasized teaching and research.
American students, suffering under enormous debt, have recognized that college is not about learning. Many of them, Markovits notes, “approach their schooling with a compulsive fixation on the competition that they are in and the prizes that they seek.” My experience as a professor confirms this. At the beginning of each of my courses, I ask students why they attend college. For years, I have received the same answer: to get a job. It’s therefore unsurprising that grade inflation and grade grubbing have become rampant; in a winner-take-all economy, people must distinguish themselves lest they fall down the class hierarchy. Modern universities, ideally places where people explore new ideas and take intellectual risks, instead function as the finishing schools for the future workers of America. In this environment, it’s not a shock that the humanities, formerly a centerpiece of university education, have been shunted aside in favor of science, technology, engineering, and math—the fields that best prepare indebted and desperate young people for a meritocratic economy designed to reward their wealthy peers.
Humanistic thinking can’t and won’t survive in a world in which students—and their parents—must view college in instrumental terms. The facts on the ground demonstrate this. My field, history, has recently witnessed a dramatic drop in majors. As the American Historical Association has reported, “of all the major disciplines, history has seen the steepest declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded” since the Great Recession. The English major is in a similar free fall, experiencing a decline of 25.5 percent in the same period. It’s easy to imagine a world in which universities stop teaching these and other subjects that don’t result in immediate pecuniary benefits. Recent events in Australia, where the conservative government has announced that it will charge students pursuing degrees in the humanities more than what it charges those pursuing more “practical” degrees, suggests this might occur sooner rather than later.
The major crises of the contemporary American academy—increasing debt, administrative overreach, the casualization of labor, the instrumentalization of knowledge, the collapse of the humanities, and the growing reliance on anti-union consultancies and law firms—emerge from a broken system that overrewards the few at the expense of the many. These crises are fundamentally tied to the political economy and will not be solved by confining agitation to the university. Only an extra-university movement, connected to other anti-capitalist movements and dedicated to reallocating power to workers, can save higher education and those who have devoted their lives to it. Absent such activism, the American university will remain a site of exploitation and anxiety in which no one’s genuine interests—to learn, to earn a living, to discover new things—are truly met. As we head into the fall semester, in which the coronavirus will inevitably endanger the lives of professors, university staff members, and students, building the solidarity upon which the transformation of higher education relies remains as important as ever.


thenation--2020-09-08--C Pam Zhang’s Radical Retelling of Western Myths

Six hundred and ninety miles of the Transcontinental Railroad were laid by Chinese immigrants .
Many of them were drawn to California by the gold rush of the late 1840s , but a scant decade later , the land had been depleted of riches , and they arrived instead to encounter unfriendly locals who distrusted foreign faces .
The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad , the segment of the Transcontinental Railroad that stretched from Sacramento to Utah ’ s Promontory Summit , began in 1863 , and white foremen quickly recruited Chinese immigrants looking for work to do the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a fraction of the pay that whites received .
By 1867 , Chinese immigrants made up about 90 percent of the Central Pacific ’ s labor force .
Historians estimate that at least 1,200 died in the construction of the railroad—approximately two Chinese men for every mile of track they laid .
How Much of These Hills Is Gold : A Novel Set in this historical landscape , C Pam Zhang ’ s debut novel , How Much of These Hills Is Gold , tells the soaring saga of two siblings trying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s XX62 when the book begins , the redacted numerals hinting at a slightly alternative universe , and 12-year-old Lucy and 11-year-old Sam are setting off to bury their father , Ba .
An alcoholic and a gambler , a harsh , impulsive man prone to fits of violence and , less frequently , of tenderness , he has died perhaps of exhaustion , perhaps of alcoholism—either way , leaving his children without money or a home .
We learn that Ma , their mother , died three and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and penniless children set out from their town , beginning a quest in which both , in their different ways , hope to find a place to belong .
Zhang ’ s novel recalls our own world—or rather , our history—in certain ways , yet with dashes of magical realism .
One thing that remains in her reimagined American West is the racism , shaping every aspect of Sam and Lucy ’ s experience of the world .
At each turn in their journey , the two face odd looks from strangers that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sometimes physical harm .
The world the two inhabit is a dangerous one , shadowed by the great white mounds of giant buffalo bones and the paw prints of stalking , mythical tigers as well as more human threats : hateful men , leering cowboys , greedy gold prospectors , and below it all , the blistering thrum of heat , thirst , and potential starvation .
The siblings have different stances on these dangers .
Sam responds to conflict with conflict , unafraid to fight and constantly yearning to wander .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ thoughts of finding a new home ; she craves wooden houses with glass windows , baths , and clean sheets .
As they move through this hazardous landscape , the two remain caught in a liminal space , stuck between the American West and the storied , half-remembered China of their mother ’ s memories .
Without their parents or an immigrant community to guide them , they must choose how to navigate not just the West ’ s dangers but also their unfixed and uncertain identities .
“ In Lucy ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t want to wake from , she braves no dragons and tigers , ” Zhang writes .
“ She sees wonders from a distance , her face unnoticed in the crowd .
When she walks down the long street that leads her home , no one pays her any mind at all.
” Sam doesn ’ t share Lucy ’ s assimilationist dreams , never content to stay in one place for very long and refusing to fit into any existing framework .
“ We can ’ t survive out here , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point , when Sam wants to homestead at the base of some mountains miles from civilization .
“ There ’ s nothing .
No people.
” “ What ’ d people ever do for us ?
” Sam retorts .
Despite the historical setting , the striking familiarity of Lucy and Sam ’ s narrative and the world we live in suggests that , despite the likely passage of 160 years , little has changed in the experience of racism as an Asian American .
It ’ s the crack of a gunshot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ town , after Sam fires their father ’ s gun during a botched bank robbery and the bullet narrowly misses a white man .
The bungled , impulsive holdup forces the two to flee .
When Sam stubbornly argues for staying—they didn ’ t hurt nobody—Lucy disagrees : “ They ’ ll make anything a crime for the likes of us .
Make it law if they have to.
” By “ the likes of us , ” Lucy is aware that the rules are different for them .
And so the two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gather up their provisions , and flee into the desert , lugging the corpse of their father in their mother ’ s old medicine chest .
The novel ’ s first part follows Sam and Lucy ’ s journey east ; evocative and sharply honed , the prose can occasionally get mired in its lyricism .
Zhang ’ s sentences are deliberately hewn to the point of fracture , the diction dry as the scorched landscape the siblings traverse , conjuring up rough gems embedded in earth .
But as the two flee @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zhang deftly integrates their upbringing through a series of flashbacks .
Though the siblings are trying to find a proper burial place for him , their father ’ s decomposing body parts are deposited by Lucy in several places along the way : a finger under a mound here , a toe buried there , even his flaccid penis , falling out of the medicine chest after a good thump , which “ gives under her toes , like a dried plum.
” As the novel progresses so , too , does the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less arid as the story dives back into the past in the second section , set in XX59 , before their mother ’ s death , in which the family ’ s relationships are triangulated among parents and children , each marking the changing world around them .
Here we learn of the racist treatment that their parents faced .
Ba , reduced from gold prospector to humble coal miner , was severely underpaid , and when he had to find shelter for his family , he was offered only a former chicken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ animal shit .
Meanwhile , Ma was the person who held the household together , at times stridently demanding , at others wielding her femininity and beauty like a weapon .
In fleshing out the family ’ s world , Zhang gives further context to the bigotry they experienced and outlines the lesson—hard-earned for Lucy—that appearances are both of the utmost importance and , when sorely tested , completely illusory .
As we move through these sections , we also discover that Lucy has a secret , one she hopes will propel her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a budding intellectual .
Her mother taught her and Sam to read English , which astonishes the settlement ’ s white schoolteacher ( yes , the same one whose horse they later steal ) .
After a difficult start at school stemming from racist bullying , Lucy begins private lessons at Teacher Leigh ’ s house , ostensibly in return for helping him with a monograph on the Western territory .
The visits introduce her to a different kind of society : straitlaced , genteel manners ; cookies with jam centers ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ makes her mouth water .
Teacher Leigh has an ulterior motive , however .
To him , Lucy is an object of study herself , part of his monograph ’ s survey , and he plies her with questions accordingly : “ What does your father drink ?
How much ?
Can you describe his attitude toward violence ?
Would you call it savage ?
” Though Lucy learns the language and the manners and is increasingly able to comport herself like a young lady of “ great breeding , ” it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what he thinks of as good intentions , still can ’ t see her as a person and always categorizes her as other .
He refuses to grant Lucy the humanity so easily ascribed to white men and women , and he ’ s quick to let his praise drop when her true personality and upbringing show .
When his own teacher , Miss Lila , visits him , wishing to witness the miracle of Lucy ’ s learning , he presents his young pupil with a hypothetical scenario intended to display the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s say you and I are traveling the same wagon trail , ” he begins .
The two have equal provisions in this scenario , but misfortune causes Lucy to lose all her goods while fording a river , and the water is unfit to drink from .
What is she to do ?
“ Lucy nearly laughs , ” Zhang tells us .
“ Why , this question is easy .
The answer comes quicker than math or history .
‘ I ’ d butcher an ox .
I ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fresh water , ’ ” she answers confidently .
This , Lucy learns , is the wrong answer , one that ’ s unbecoming for a young lady .
The correct answer : She should ask for his help , for Leigh would surely lend a hand and thus spread goodwill .
Yet Lucy recalls a time on the trail with her parents , who had nothing : “ All those miles they traveled , and not once did another wagon offer help.
” Assimilation , it ’ s clear , is impossible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it .
When her family is betrayed by a group of white men at a crucial moment at the settlement , this lesson is only underlined : No matter how good you are , no matter how honest your motives , it ’ s your otherness—the fact of your face , a thing no one can control—that will eventually betray you .
In Zhang ’ s text , the manifold experiences of racism are manifested in the two siblings ’ contrasting presentations .
Sam , a year younger , is impetuous , masculine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , quiet , and determined .
As she becomes aware of her burgeoning womanhood , of how it feels to be looked at and what being looked at means , she also becomes aware of the risks that her body , fetishized by white men , makes her vulnerable to .
Meanwhile , Sam knows the importance of presenting oneself in a calculated way : “ What people see shapes how they treat you.
” Early in the text , Sam ’ s gender is revealed—the two siblings are , in fact , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be perceived otherwise .
Though Lucy continues to use “ she ” and “ her ” for Sam throughout the book ’ s narration , it ’ s clear that Sam presents as a man and wishes to be treated like one , going so far as to pack a phallus-shaped rock in a secretly sewn pants pocket near the crotch .
Performance is everything : Both siblings know that a change in dress , a lowering or softening of the voice , good manners , or a gun can affect how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can make the difference between life and death .
Yet no matter their dress or manners or competence , their faces remain a constant reminder of their otherness and , in turn , reveal the inequity of the world they inhabit .
What does it mean to live in a country that refuses to accept you ?
Lucy and Sam , born in the United States , have an only rudimentary grasp of Chinese ; they ’ ve grown up speaking and reading English .
Their dialogue is a mix of English and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the reader .
Yet they have no memories of their motherland ; they don ’ t even have images of it .
While Lucy yearns for acceptance in the American territories , Sam wonders about the country their family decided to leave .
It feels inevitable that Zhang has chosen to present this search for home as a split narrative , the decisions of the siblings fragmenting into separate futures .
The forking paths of Lucy and Sam remind the reader that there isn ’ t one true way of feeling at home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as many ways of navigating a fractured identity as there are immigrants and the children of immigrants and their children ’ s children .
The book ’ s fantastical refiguring allows for some moments of narrative poignancy , particularly in dreamlike images like the repeated motif of a stalking tiger ’ s paw prints , which make literal the cultural and inherited trauma and perhaps even hope that link parent and child .
In the book ’ s most magical and breathtakingly beautiful section , told from the point of view of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how Ba ’ s relationship with their mother came to be and the sacrifices it required from them and their community .
It ’ s revealed that Ba was born in America—or at least found there as an orphaned child—and so he grew up speaking English , unfamiliar with Chinese .
When he meets Ma , she ’ s the person who teaches him the language .
The gaps of understanding between the two lovers—and later between them and their children—contribute to the intergenerational immigrant experience Zhang ’ s narrative describes , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reckon with the chasm their parents did not bridge .
What Zhang describes in the plight of Lucy and Sam and their parents isn ’ t new , but it continues to resonate with a contemporary audience .
Despite the many generations of Asian Americans who have been born in the United States since the first wave of Chinese immigration , there remains a resistant strain of xenophobia , an unwillingness by white Americans to accept that other American faces—Chinese American faces , Mexican American faces—might not look like theirs but have a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s this kind of xenophobia that prevents first- or second-generation Asian Americans from finding comfort in this country , caught between a lack of language that connects you to your family ’ s roots ( imagine being told to go back to your country when English is the only tongue you ’ ve ever spoken ) and the inability to feel welcome in the only place you know as home .
By setting the novel ’ s narrative in an explicitly historical context , however altered , Zhang reminds readers that Asian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helped build this country , that it ought to be the home her protagonists are looking for .
For all the elements of history and reality Zhang has decided to change as an author , the racism remains .
This should be seen as an opportunity not to bemoan our sullied mythologies of American history but to excavate and illuminate whatever of them exist to this day .
In the last part of the book , which skips ahead five years , Lucy is living in the small , mild settlement of Sweetwater @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where she and Sam grew up .
Sam , meanwhile , is nowhere to be found .
Zhang uses the swift passage of time to emphasize how the land—and the novel ’ s protagonists—have changed .
There are mansions now , even in the middle of the previously untamed American West , and Lucy has fallen in with the wealthy young daughter of a gold mine owner .
But even in Sweetwater , there ’ s a reminder that , no matter how good their intentions , some people simply won ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fully human , this time shadowed by the new , ugly specter of male desire that hangs around 17-year-old Lucy .
When Sam suddenly returns from years spent adventuring , riding on horseback through the deserts and learning to ignite dynamite in mines , the two head back to California in a journey retracing their previous odyssey .
Zhang ’ s lyrical prose is now activated again but at a brisk , thrilling clip .
Sam ’ s dream is to return to the land across the ocean , the one their mother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in gold .
The end of the book finds Lucy in California , after a series of difficult choices , as construction of the Transcontinental Railroad nears its end .
“ She hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tie is hammered .
A golden spike holds track to earth .
A picture is drawn for the history books , a picture that shows none of the people who look like her , who built it.
” Six hundred and ninety miles of track , two men @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The trains have killed an age , ” Lucy thinks .
But has anything really changed ?
The dresses women wear don ’ t have 30 pearl buttons down the back , and gone are the buffalo and the open prairie and the days of the Pony Express .
But even today , in the world we all share , it ’ s possible that one doesn ’ t walk unnoticed , the fondest dream Lucy had .
That with a glance , with spittle or a slur , one can be reminded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in our society today .
As I reread Zhang ’ s novel during lockdown , the characters ’ relationship to presentation and perception took on a new significance .
I can ’ t help but remember the knee-jerk , xenophobic fear that led New Yorkers to avoid Chinatown restaurants before Covid-19 arrived in the States or the acts of racist violence—heckling , spitting , an acid attack on a 39-year-old Asian woman in Brooklyn—that seem to have come , whole cloth , out of another era .
But was it another era , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live in ?
The book ’ s last line— “ She opens her mouth .
She wants ” —offers a final , hopeful flourish .
Zhang ’ s novel ends on an incomplete sentence , an unspoken desire from Lucy , suggesting the opportunity to continue to write her story , to finish the sentence , to compose a future of what we want when we allow ourselves to want anything .

This article appears in the September 21/28, 2020 issue.
Six hundred and ninety miles of the Transcontinental Railroad were laid by Chinese immigrants. Many of them were drawn to California by the gold rush of the late 1840s, but a scant decade later, the land had been depleted of riches, and they arrived instead to encounter unfriendly locals who distrusted foreign faces. The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, the segment of the Transcontinental Railroad that stretched from Sacramento to Utah’s Promontory Summit, began in 1863, and white foremen quickly recruited Chinese immigrants looking for work to do the most physically demanding labor, compensating them at a fraction of the pay that whites received. By 1867, Chinese immigrants made up about 90 percent of the Central Pacific’s labor force. Historians estimate that at least 1,200 died in the construction of the railroad—approximately two Chinese men for every mile of track they laid. Books in Review How Much of These Hills Is Gold: A Novel By C. Pam Zhang Buy this book
Set in this historical landscape, C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, tells the soaring saga of two siblings trying to find their place in the world. It’s XX62 when the book begins, the redacted numerals hinting at a slightly alternative universe, and 12-year-old Lucy and 11-year-old Sam are setting off to bury their father, Ba. An alcoholic and a gambler, a harsh, impulsive man prone to fits of violence and, less frequently, of tenderness, he has died perhaps of exhaustion, perhaps of alcoholism—either way, leaving his children without money or a home. We learn that Ma, their mother, died three and a half years earlier. The two orphaned and penniless children set out from their town, beginning a quest in which both, in their different ways, hope to find a place to belong.
Zhang’s novel recalls our own world—or rather, our history—in certain ways, yet with dashes of magical realism. One thing that remains in her reimagined American West is the racism, shaping every aspect of Sam and Lucy’s experience of the world. At each turn in their journey, the two face odd looks from strangers that can escalate into taunts, slurs, and sometimes physical harm. The world the two inhabit is a dangerous one, shadowed by the great white mounds of giant buffalo bones and the paw prints of stalking, mythical tigers as well as more human threats: hateful men, leering cowboys, greedy gold prospectors, and below it all, the blistering thrum of heat, thirst, and potential starvation.
The siblings have different stances on these dangers. Sam responds to conflict with conflict, unafraid to fight and constantly yearning to wander. Lucy is more cautious and concerned with thoughts of finding a new home; she craves wooden houses with glass windows, baths, and clean sheets.
As they move through this hazardous landscape, the two remain caught in a liminal space, stuck between the American West and the storied, half-remembered China of their mother’s memories. Without their parents or an immigrant community to guide them, they must choose how to navigate not just the West’s dangers but also their unfixed and uncertain identities. “In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers,” Zhang writes. “She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at all.”
Sam doesn’t share Lucy’s assimilationist dreams, never content to stay in one place for very long and refusing to fit into any existing framework. “We can’t survive out here,” Lucy tells her sibling at one point, when Sam wants to homestead at the base of some mountains miles from civilization. “There’s nothing. No people.” “What’d people ever do for us?” Sam retorts. Despite the historical setting, the striking familiarity of Lucy and Sam’s narrative and the world we live in suggests that, despite the likely passage of 160 years, little has changed in the experience of racism as an Asian American. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
It’s the crack of a gunshot that propels Sam and Lucy out of town, after Sam fires their father’s gun during a botched bank robbery and the bullet narrowly misses a white man. The bungled, impulsive holdup forces the two to flee. When Sam stubbornly argues for staying—they didn’t hurt nobody—Lucy disagrees: “They’ll make anything a crime for the likes of us. Make it law if they have to.” By “the likes of us,” Lucy is aware that the rules are different for them. And so the two steal a schoolteacher’s horse, gather up their provisions, and flee into the desert, lugging the corpse of their father in their mother’s old medicine chest. Current Issue View our current issue
The novel’s first part follows Sam and Lucy’s journey east; evocative and sharply honed, the prose can occasionally get mired in its lyricism. Zhang’s sentences are deliberately hewn to the point of fracture, the diction dry as the scorched landscape the siblings traverse, conjuring up rough gems embedded in earth. But as the two flee through the desert seeking sheer survival, Zhang deftly integrates their upbringing through a series of flashbacks. Though the siblings are trying to find a proper burial place for him, their father’s decomposing body parts are deposited by Lucy in several places along the way: a finger under a mound here, a toe buried there, even his flaccid penis, falling out of the medicine chest after a good thump, which “gives under her toes, like a dried plum.”
As the novel progresses so, too, does the prose: The sentences begin to feel less arid as the story dives back into the past in the second section, set in XX59, before their mother’s death, in which the family’s relationships are triangulated among parents and children, each marking the changing world around them.
Here we learn of the racist treatment that their parents faced. Ba, reduced from gold prospector to humble coal miner, was severely underpaid, and when he had to find shelter for his family, he was offered only a former chicken coop to rent, still stinking of animal shit. Meanwhile, Ma was the person who held the household together, at times stridently demanding, at others wielding her femininity and beauty like a weapon. In fleshing out the family’s world, Zhang gives further context to the bigotry they experienced and outlines the lesson—hard-earned for Lucy—that appearances are both of the utmost importance and, when sorely tested, completely illusory.
As we move through these sections, we also discover that Lucy has a secret, one she hopes will propel her out of her circumstances: She’s a budding intellectual. Her mother taught her and Sam to read English, which astonishes the settlement’s white schoolteacher (yes, the same one whose horse they later steal). After a difficult start at school stemming from racist bullying, Lucy begins private lessons at Teacher Leigh’s house, ostensibly in return for helping him with a monograph on the Western territory. The visits introduce her to a different kind of society: straitlaced, genteel manners; cookies with jam centers; an expensive covered jar of salt that makes her mouth water. Teacher Leigh has an ulterior motive, however. To him, Lucy is an object of study herself, part of his monograph’s survey, and he plies her with questions accordingly: “What does your father drink? How much? Can you describe his attitude toward violence? Would you call it savage?”
Though Lucy learns the language and the manners and is increasingly able to comport herself like a young lady of “great breeding,” it’s clear that Teacher Leigh, despite what he thinks of as good intentions, still can’t see her as a person and always categorizes her as other. He refuses to grant Lucy the humanity so easily ascribed to white men and women, and he’s quick to let his praise drop when her true personality and upbringing show. When his own teacher, Miss Lila, visits him, wishing to witness the miracle of Lucy’s learning, he presents his young pupil with a hypothetical scenario intended to display the quality of her character. “Let’s say you and I are traveling the same wagon trail,” he begins. The two have equal provisions in this scenario, but misfortune causes Lucy to lose all her goods while fording a river, and the water is unfit to drink from. What is she to do?
“Lucy nearly laughs,” Zhang tells us. “Why, this question is easy. The answer comes quicker than math or history. ‘I’d butcher an ox. I’d drink its blood and continue on till fresh water,’” she answers confidently. This, Lucy learns, is the wrong answer, one that’s unbecoming for a young lady. The correct answer: She should ask for his help, for Leigh would surely lend a hand and thus spread goodwill. Yet Lucy recalls a time on the trail with her parents, who had nothing: “All those miles they traveled, and not once did another wagon offer help.”
Assimilation, it’s clear, is impossible, despite how much Lucy might crave it. When her family is betrayed by a group of white men at a crucial moment at the settlement, this lesson is only underlined: No matter how good you are, no matter how honest your motives, it’s your otherness—the fact of your face, a thing no one can control—that will eventually betray you.
In Zhang’s text, the manifold experiences of racism are manifested in the two siblings’ contrasting presentations. Sam, a year younger, is impetuous, masculine, and beautiful; Lucy is plainer, quiet, and determined. As she becomes aware of her burgeoning womanhood, of how it feels to be looked at and what being looked at means, she also becomes aware of the risks that her body, fetishized by white men, makes her vulnerable to. Meanwhile, Sam knows the importance of presenting oneself in a calculated way: “What people see shapes how they treat you.” Early in the text, Sam’s gender is revealed—the two siblings are, in fact, sisters—as well as Sam’s desire to be perceived otherwise. Though Lucy continues to use “she” and “her” for Sam throughout the book’s narration, it’s clear that Sam presents as a man and wishes to be treated like one, going so far as to pack a phallus-shaped rock in a secretly sewn pants pocket near the crotch.
Performance is everything: Both siblings know that a change in dress, a lowering or softening of the voice, good manners, or a gun can affect how someone is perceived and that this perception can make the difference between life and death. Yet no matter their dress or manners or competence, their faces remain a constant reminder of their otherness and, in turn, reveal the inequity of the world they inhabit.
What does it mean to live in a country that refuses to accept you? Lucy and Sam, born in the United States, have an only rudimentary grasp of Chinese; they’ve grown up speaking and reading English. Their dialogue is a mix of English and Chinese, unitalicized and left untranslated for the reader. Yet they have no memories of their motherland; they don’t even have images of it. While Lucy yearns for acceptance in the American territories, Sam wonders about the country their family decided to leave. It feels inevitable that Zhang has chosen to present this search for home as a split narrative, the decisions of the siblings fragmenting into separate futures. The forking paths of Lucy and Sam remind the reader that there isn’t one true way of feeling at home in the world, that there are as many ways of navigating a fractured identity as there are immigrants and the children of immigrants and their children’s children.
The book’s fantastical refiguring allows for some moments of narrative poignancy, particularly in dreamlike images like the repeated motif of a stalking tiger’s paw prints, which make literal the cultural and inherited trauma and perhaps even hope that link parent and child. In the book’s most magical and breathtakingly beautiful section, told from the point of view of their father’s ghost, we learn how Ba’s relationship with their mother came to be and the sacrifices it required from them and their community. It’s revealed that Ba was born in America—or at least found there as an orphaned child—and so he grew up speaking English, unfamiliar with Chinese. When he meets Ma, she’s the person who teaches him the language. The gaps of understanding between the two lovers—and later between them and their children—contribute to the intergenerational immigrant experience Zhang’s narrative describes, as Sam and Lucy are left struggling to reckon with the chasm their parents did not bridge.
What Zhang describes in the plight of Lucy and Sam and their parents isn’t new, but it continues to resonate with a contemporary audience. Despite the many generations of Asian Americans who have been born in the United States since the first wave of Chinese immigration, there remains a resistant strain of xenophobia, an unwillingness by white Americans to accept that other American faces—Chinese American faces, Mexican American faces—might not look like theirs but have a home in this country nonetheless. It’s this kind of xenophobia that prevents first- or second-generation Asian Americans from finding comfort in this country, caught between a lack of language that connects you to your family’s roots (imagine being told to go back to your country when English is the only tongue you’ve ever spoken) and the inability to feel welcome in the only place you know as home.
By setting the novel’s narrative in an explicitly historical context, however altered, Zhang reminds readers that Asian Americans and Chinese Americans in particular have helped build this country, that it ought to be the home her protagonists are looking for. For all the elements of history and reality Zhang has decided to change as an author, the racism remains. This should be seen as an opportunity not to bemoan our sullied mythologies of American history but to excavate and illuminate whatever of them exist to this day.
In the last part of the book, which skips ahead five years, Lucy is living in the small, mild settlement of Sweetwater, many miles from the California desert where she and Sam grew up. Sam, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found. Zhang uses the swift passage of time to emphasize how the land—and the novel’s protagonists—have changed. There are mansions now, even in the middle of the previously untamed American West, and Lucy has fallen in with the wealthy young daughter of a gold mine owner. But even in Sweetwater, there’s a reminder that, no matter how good their intentions, some people simply won’t be able to see Chinese Americans as fully human, this time shadowed by the new, ugly specter of male desire that hangs around 17-year-old Lucy. When Sam suddenly returns from years spent adventuring, riding on horseback through the deserts and learning to ignite dynamite in mines, the two head back to California in a journey retracing their previous odyssey. Zhang’s lyrical prose is now activated again but at a brisk, thrilling clip. Sam’s dream is to return to the land across the ocean, the one their mother described in stories, their passage paid in gold.
The end of the book finds Lucy in California, after a series of difficult choices, as construction of the Transcontinental Railroad nears its end. “She hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tie is hammered. A golden spike holds track to earth. A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it.” Six hundred and ninety miles of track, two men dead for every mile laid. “The trains have killed an age,” Lucy thinks. But has anything really changed? The dresses women wear don’t have 30 pearl buttons down the back, and gone are the buffalo and the open prairie and the days of the Pony Express. But even today, in the world we all share, it’s possible that one doesn’t walk unnoticed, the fondest dream Lucy had. That with a glance, with spittle or a slur, one can be reminded of the persistent inequity and otherness embedded in our society today.
As I reread Zhang’s novel during lockdown, the characters’ relationship to presentation and perception took on a new significance. I can’t help but remember the knee-jerk, xenophobic fear that led New Yorkers to avoid Chinatown restaurants before Covid-19 arrived in the States or the acts of racist violence—heckling, spitting, an acid attack on a 39-year-old Asian woman in Brooklyn—that seem to have come, whole cloth, out of another era. But was it another era, or is it still the one we live in?
The book’s last line—“She opens her mouth. She wants”—offers a final, hopeful flourish. Zhang’s novel ends on an incomplete sentence, an unspoken desire from Lucy, suggesting the opportunity to continue to write her story, to finish the sentence, to compose a future of what we want when we allow ourselves to want anything.