End Meeting: A Workers’ Inquiry into the Algorithmic University

Resumen

The academic labor of the highly adjunctified higher education faculty is being rationalized into component parts of course design, delivery, and assessment. This is intended to deskill, control, and manage academic labor by breaking it up into discreet tasks and redistributing it to adminis-trators, contractors, and other non-faculty technicians, a process referred to by ‘reformers’ as ‘unbundling’. This rationalization is made possible by the ubiquitous dataveillance of teaching and learning built into the architecture of the Canvas learning management system (LMS) and Zoom teleconferencing app. These technologies are central to the increased production of self-disciplined precarious platform workers who can labor remotely under the ubiquitous surveillance and control of algorithmic management. In order to counter these developments, a class analysis of the new technical composition of capital in higher education, and how it compliments the wider technical composition of platform capitalism, is needed to further the organizing efforts of academic workers.