In early May 2023, as contract negotiations with major film and television producers broke down, branches of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) voted to go on strike. This latest writers strike comes as the media entertainment environment has shifted dramatically over the past ten years. Those of us who work in Higher Education should take note of what is happening in the media environment; the parallels with our own industry and work are striking.
Like Hollywood writers, university faculty are increasingly fighting to retain pay, working conditions, and benefits. For example, amidst growing dissatisfaction with compensation and working conditions, in March of 2022 two of the largest unions in higher education–the American Association of University Professors (AUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)–began a close collaborative relationship to strengthen their bargaining power with universities. Concurrent with rising unionization, strikes are happening more frequently than ever within higher education. There were more strikes in 2022–including the University of California system–than in the past two decades. For the past two months, graduate student workers at the University of Michigan have been striking.
What are the drivers of this increasingly contentious relationship between academics and universities? The Hollywood Writers’ strike offers five insights into how industry-wide changes can meaningfully alter the design of intellectual work, with implications for compensation and conditions.
- From full-time, steady employment to gig work. As streaming has become the dominant platform in media, once-steady work has become gig work for the broad range of workers engaged in production–including writers. A proliferation of content, as well as a shortening of the length and duration of series, now requires writers to constantly seek out work.
Like the media industry, gig work is now the dominant mode of employment on university and college campuses. According to some estimates, roughly 75% of instructors in higher education are “contingent faculty”–adjuncts, grad students, and non tenure-track professors. Once in the majority, tenured and tenure-track faculty now represent a small percentage of those who teach courses in Higher Education. Stable employment relationships, with predictable promotion and career development milestones, have been replaced by one-off course contracts, one-year teaching agreements, and unpaid or underpaid student teachers. - From content-scheduled-in-time to content-on-demand. Television and movies were once consumed at the time and place determined by the content distributors. To watch a movie, viewers needed to go to a theater at a designated time. To watch a TV show, people needed to gather around a television set at the time that the show was programmed to air. Streaming platforms have decimated that model. People can now view movies and shows at the times and in the places of their choosing.
Similarly, higher education was once–and still, predominantly, is–a content-scheduled-in-time model. To receive instruction, students need to go to a dedicated place (i.e., a classroom) at a designated time (i.e., the scheduled course period). The acceleration of the demand for online and asynchronous courses, however, threatens to disrupt this basic model–one that has thousands of years of history. According to a McKinsey & Company report, drawing from the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS), “between 2012 and 2019, the number of hybrid and distance-only students at traditional universities increased by 36 percent, while the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 rapidly accelerated that growth by an additional 92 percent.” In a world when learners can access thoughtfully designed online coursework, with asynchronous course support, there becomes little need to require students to be in a given place at a given time. - From a few dominant distributors to a proliferation of many smaller distributors. The Big Three networks have been the dominant distributors of TV content for many years. And, yet, the relatively low barriers to entry in streaming–not content creation–have contributed to a proliferation of distributors. Content can now easily be presented to viewers across several platforms. From Netflix to Peacock, there are currently a slew of options for content creators to consider when seeking to distribute their content. Accordingly, there are numerous options for viewers to consider when deciding where to spend their leisure time.
Higher Education is still a model that is dominated by a few dominant distributors of respected and legitimate educational credentials. Although there are many universities, the accredited university is still the premier and societally-accepted distributor of credentials. But this is changing rapidly. Particularly in technology, credentialing through badging or online courses is becoming a valid and accepted model. At the extreme, concepts like the Thiel Fellowship–a grant for students who choose not to go to college–directly threaten the traditional distributors of credentialing. - From a single modality to many modalities. We use the word “TV,” contrasted with “movie” or “film,” to refer to smaller, serial pieces of content. The word TV is synonymous with this format because there was a time when the physical hardware of a television set was the primary way that this content was delivered. In an era of on-demand streaming, viewers can–and do–consume content through a wide variety of platforms. Television sets still exist, of course, but they are supplemented by devices like Apple TV, Chromecast, and Amazon Fire. People watch shows and shorts through computers, tablets, and phones. And, they even listen to shows as the audio content is released through audio streaming platforms like Spotify and satellite radio.
There was also once a time when educational content could only be consumed in-person and in the classroom. To learn, students needed to attend a professor’s class and follow the professor’s rules regarding in-class conduct. This is simply no longer the case. Data indicate that today’s–and tomorrow’s–students demand flexibility. A SalesForce global survey underscored current students’ hunger for flexible options. Notably, “students expect 50% of their courses to be online” and 43% prefer hybrid modalities. Concurrent with this shift to blended learning, students can now consume educational material (i.e., learn) through several different modalities–their computers, their mobile devices, and/or in-person, sometimes all at once. - From involvement in the whole production to involvement in small segments of the production. Accompanying the shift to dig work in the media industry has been a gradual shrinking in the involvement of any given person in a production. In the era of stable TV series, writers would be involved in the production in a wholistic way, gaining exposure to many different jobs, roles, duties, and responsibilities. In the era of short and unstable content, writers’ work is segmented and isolated from the rest of the production. Writers may draft an entire show in an intensive writing period, then hand the scripts off to the next team involved in the production. The work design has shifted from one of reciprocal interdependence to one of serial or additive interdependence.
Higher Education has undergone a similar transformation. Though, of course, there are differences across institutions and specific schools, many faculty members are increasingly isolated and separate from the whole of the educational process. Duties that faculty once held–including student academic advising–are designated to full-time staff members. Benjamin Ginsberg documented this trend–and its impact–in his book “The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.” While faculty teach, advisors advise. As a result, faculty and staff alike are becoming increasingly specialized, and isolated, in their work. This makes any one person less essential to the operation of the whole.
In the media industry, these changes have contributed to the degradation of the work experiences of writers–something that is on full display during the current strike. At the same time, these changes have contributed to a wave of interesting content that is widely accessible for viewers. The key question for those in higher education is how to gain the benefits of these industry changes–for students and workers alike–without undermining people’s experience of meaning, stability, and joy in their work.