https://lithub.com/how-austerity-is-killing-higher-ed-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/
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“And it is austerity that sets the bar.”
“But as one of my beloved colleagues is always reminding us, they are in fact describing what modern institutions inevitably are.”
“It’s an ever-renewable gift, the wonky alchemical incantation designed specially for those looking to transform less (funding, resources, commitment to future expenditure) into more (labor).”
“We go to the union to protect our labor and that of our colleagues, and to preserve the best of our mission from being winnowed down into something cheapened and unrecognizable.”
“Neither field nor discipline, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of any specific stance in relation to the hard, brutal, and ever-expanding fact of austerity.”
“Scan the higher administrative ranks of any major institution of your choosing.”
“This is why…we need unions more urgently now, inside this moment of accelerated dismantling, than perhaps at any other time since the ‘50s.”
“This is the truth that, although the managerial ranks are surely sometimes allies in the pursuit of a whole suite of mission-related ends, you’ll do well to remember at all points that they are also, necessarily, adversaries .”
“Not according to these newly discovered metrics!”
“When we think more closely about the conditions of that work, of the institutions that do and also do not nurture it, things shift around a little.”
“And of course, behind and beneath all that busybody managerial fervidity and annihilating indifference to the quantities of goddam work entailed in so much newly-mandated compliance, there’s the mortal incapacity to manufacture anything like an encompassing vision for the future of the institution, one that is substantive rather than bureaucratic, humane rather than wonky, cohering rather than imposed, and doesn’t sound like a sickly compound of consultancy-speak, Winner-Withinishness, and ChatBot.”
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“Literary Hub » How Austerity is Killing Higher Ed (and What We Can Do About It) Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture History Science Politics Biography Memoir Food Technology Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Travel Music Art and Photography The Hub Style Design Sports Become A Member Lit Hub Radio The Lit Hub Podcast Awakeners Fiction/Non/Fiction The Critic and Her Publics Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Memoir Nation Beyond the Page First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Thresholds The Cosmic Library Culture Schlock Reading Lists Book Marks Best Reviewed Books CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill Log In Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Book Marks CrimeReads Log In (and What We Can Do About It)"> How Austerity is Killing Higher Ed (and What We Can Do About It) Peter Coviello on Bullshit Metrics and the Necessity of Unions Peter Coviello October 29, 2026 Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similarly be-gowned faculty who’d served one sort of semi-administrative role or other.”
“austerity higher education labor organizing unions Peter Coviello Peter Coviello is the author of six books, including Long Players , a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM ’s Best Books of 2018; Make Yourselves Gods , about the Mormon nineteenth century; and most recently Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things.”
“The managerial classes are not the instigators of a generations-wide, epically-scaled divestment prosecuted both inside higher ed and out , making its ruinous way through the American world long before the lurid , loathsomely Muskian reign of DOGE.”
“They do all the good things unions do: above all insist that working conditions are the surest register of mission integrity; make for less rather than more precarious appointments; return doggedly to the principle of best practices; instill an entire community with a vastly galvanizing sense of shared endeavor.”
“They are “labor” and “union.” That absence doesn’t make it less galvanizing or less right, neither about our blithering enemies nor the lasting value of the work we do as writers and critics.”
“As a card-carrying humanist critic, and also as a person who’s long been of the conviction that we must never forget that (as I put it one battering decade ago) “ our enemies , whatever their awful power over us, are clownish and laughable and vile , ” I can do nothing in the face of this rousing exhortation but cheer and cheer.”
“There’s a wrinkle, though.”