A couple of
years ago, Inside Higher Education published a piece on how college transforms students.
The author, Steven Mintz, is an historian who opens with reference to how
industrialization enabled women to blend traditional affairs in domestic and cottage
industry with work outside the home in factories, adding to the bargain
another task master in the form of capitalist bosses. Being in the company of
sisters for twelve hours a day earning under an overlord who is not one’s blood
or a blue blood enabled women to share, organize, speak up, withhold, refuse,
and flex in other ways to push back against exploitation and push forward to emancipation.
In this mix
of home, cottage and factory, things like productive forces, personal wealth,
political authority, and personal autonomy went through complex changes for
women and society. This factory-work emancipation is a rich reference, akin to that found in the migration of Blacks to the factories of New England during the 20th
century.
We can add to the tapestry of these changing times, the universities and colleges that produce opportunities for earning and learning and which are routinely described as factories. Even with all the resources spent on trying to localize and levitate their place and space, and after spending over twenty-five years of my life earning and learning inside them, when I think of a university or college the first image is of a place, a where, not a who or a whom, but a edifice with its employee and enrollee, not you, me, or we. I wonder, when late-Victorian women thought of the opportunities factories presented, were images of sisters the first to flash through their minds or was it the horrid buildings, exploitive employment and tyrannical bosses? Was the first and lasting thought of employees or of employers, when north-migrating Blacks strove to control their lives through earning and learning in factories, of all sorts?
This post explores how access to these institutions and the positive impact of higher education they provide to people is aided or better facilitated by the Professional Society of Academics (PSA).