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Showing posts with label dehumanization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dehumanization. Show all posts

Monday, March 31, 2025

How Severance Mirrors U.S. Higher Education Administration: The Compartmentalization and Bureaucracy of Modern Academia

In the dystopian world of Severance, employees undergo a controversial procedure that separates their work lives from their personal lives, creating a chillingly compartmentalized existence. While this premise seems far-fetched, the show’s underlying critique of institutional control, bureaucratic systems, and dehumanizing workplace environments mirrors certain aspects of U.S. higher education administration.

The Compartmentalization of Roles

At the heart of Severance is the radical division of personal and professional identities. Employees, when at work, have no memory of their personal lives, and when they leave the office, their work experiences are erased from their minds. This deliberate separation is an exaggerated version of a common practice in higher education—compartmentalizing roles and interactions.

In many academic institutions, faculty, staff, and students often navigate strict hierarchies and narrowly defined roles, which can create significant barriers between these groups. Administrators focus on policies and data, while faculty members concentrate on teaching and research. This division can lead to limited communication and a lack of understanding between those shaping the institution’s direction and those most impacted by decisions.

Dehumanizing Bureaucracy

Severance also critiques how systems of power, driven by bureaucracy, strip employees of their humanity. This theme resonates with the reality of higher education administration, where decisions are made far from the classroom, often by individuals who may have little connection to the day-to-day experiences of faculty or students.

Universities rely on complex bureaucratic systems to manage operations, from student admissions to faculty performance assessments. These systems can often feel impersonal, and the pressure to conform to institutional standards—whether in terms of research output, teaching evaluations, or service requirements—can leave faculty and staff feeling like mere cogs in a well-oiled machine. The result is a sense of alienation and detachment from the institution, not unlike the isolated existence portrayed in Severance.

Institutional Control and Surveillance

In Severance, employees are constantly surveilled, their actions monitored and manipulated by the corporation to maintain control. This chilling form of oversight is mirrored in higher education, where increasing reliance on data analytics and monitoring systems tracks everything from student performance to faculty productivity.

Universities increasingly collect vast amounts of data, from tracking graduation rates to measuring faculty research output, with the intent of improving efficiency and accountability. However, for many faculty and staff, these systems can feel intrusive, reducing their work to numbers and metrics, much like the employees of Severance who are stripped of their identities in favor of institutional goals.

The “Work-Life Balance” Paradox

One of the key tensions in Severance is the idea of “work-life balance” taken to an extreme, where the characters’ personal and professional identities are completely isolated. In higher education, this balance is a perennial challenge. Administrators often promote the importance of self-care and work-life balance, yet faculty and staff are regularly expected to juggle multiple roles—teaching, research, administrative duties—and produce high levels of output.

As a result, the lines between personal and professional life often blur, with faculty members frequently working late into the night or on weekends to meet the demands of the job. Despite official policies promoting balance, the pressure to perform can create a culture of burnout, not unlike the invasive control experienced by Severance's characters.

Conformity vs. Individuality

Finally, Severance explores the tension between conformity and individuality, a dynamic that is also evident in academia. In the show, employees are forced to conform to the institution’s demands, stifling their personal identities. Similarly, universities increasingly measure success through standardized metrics—graduation rates, research grants, and student satisfaction surveys—that prioritize efficiency over creativity or personal growth.

For faculty members, this pressure to conform to institutional expectations can stifle academic freedom and exploration. While universities often champion individuality and intellectual curiosity, the overwhelming focus on data-driven outcomes can push faculty to prioritize “safe” or “marketable” research topics over more innovative or personal endeavors.

Thursday, October 10, 2024

University of Phoenix: Training Folks For Robowork

The Higher Education Inquirer has published a number of articles on robocolleges, robostudents, and robowork, noting that the University of Phoenix has been a pioneer in the evolution of making humans more machine-like (or in science fiction terms, cyborgs). This is an evolution that spans more than a century, with Frederick Taylor and his Scientific Management of Work and Clayton Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Innovation.

More recently, we have posted articles on artificial intelligence and the dehumanization of society, including futuristic work by renowned sociologist Randall Collins

The University of Phoenix, in the present, has taken another step in this profit-making dehumanization process, formal online customer service training for the international workforce. According to the University of Phoenix, customer service is in high demand globally, and UoPX offers a convenient series of professional development trainings for making human skills more efficient. It's not known how many humans are involved in teaching or content creation. What we do know is that the University of Phoenix relies on little human labor, with an average student-teacher ratio of 110 to one

What are your thoughts on this training program? And how does type of online education and tech work bode for humans and humanity?  

Related links:

Wealth and Want Part 4: Robocolleges and Roboworkers (2024)

Robocollege Update (2024)

New Data Show Nearly a Million University of Phoenix Debtors Owe $21.6 Billion Dollars (2024)

University of Phoenix and the Ash Heap of Higher Ed History (2023)

How University of Phoenix Failed. It's a Long Story. But It's Important for the Future of Higher Education (2022) 

Robocolleges, Artificial Intelligence, and the Dehumanization of Higher Education (2023)