How The University Works

When the president named Arne Duncan as his first Secretary of Education, he was doing a lot more, and a lot worse, than just naming a Chicago crony and basketball buddy to a critical Cabinet position. He was adopting one of the most aggressive, least tested, top-down, pro-corporate philosophies toward education administration ever promoted in this country.

Despite clear evidence that Duncan’s methods had failed to improve Chicago Public Schools by the only measure he overwhelmingly targeted (test scores), reporters from the corporate media tripped all over themselves to lavish friendly coverage on Duncan’s efforts to bring the same tactics to bear on a national scale. Taking advantage of state revenue shortages, Duncan took command of a massive fiscal war chest and turned it into a reality legislation show called Race to the Top.

“Want a piece of my billions?” Duncan asked the states, shaking his money bag. “Fight for it, winners take all! Whichever five or ten state legislatures enact law coming closest to my cruel, unproven vision of test-driven education, well, you folks can ride out the money storm in relative comfort. The rest of you, with your pie-in-the-sky ideas from John Dewey, you can rot in fiscal hell–no cash for the disobedient!”

Poll: Parents Won’t Be Fooled Again

Despite 18 months of press love, yesterday’s Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll shows Americans completing a resoundingly negative report card on Obama’s education initiatives, with a mere 34 percent giving the president a “B” or better, and 59% giving him a C, D, or F.

These numbers are significantly lower than his overall approval rating (currently near his lowest, at 42% favorable, 51% unfavorable). They represent consistent, bipartisan drops from the previous year, and come after sweeping legislative “victories” by the administration in dozens of states.

With similar clarity, the public overwhelming rejected point by point the aggressive, market-ideological thuggery comprising Duncan’s arsenal of “school reform” tactics: paying students for grades, mass firings, using punitive funding schemes, etc.

So far the main result of Obama and Duncan’s adventures in school reform is that now a startling 80% of respondents believe the federal government should play no role in school accountability.

In stark contradiction of the administration’s views, respondents shared the beliefs of most teachers and their unions, that the largest problem with schools is a shortfall in funding, that the major issue with teacher competence is support for retraining and keeping up to date, and that the primary purpose of evaluating teachers is helping them to improve teaching (rather than assessing eligibility for merit pay or providing evidence for dismissal). Only a small number of Americans (19%, down from 25% in 2000) agree with the administration that teaching pay should be “very closely tied” to students’ academic achievement (though a clear and growing majority feel that it should be “somewhat” closely tied, whatever that means).

It turns out that most Americans like the public schools they know most about, the ones their children attend–and they like those schools a lot.

Seventy-seven percent of public school parents give an A or B to the school their oldest child attends, the highest such figure since Gallup first posed the question, in 1985.

However, respondents rate other schools in their area–the ones they only read press reports about–lower, or just over half favorably.

Most interestingly: respondents rated public schools in the nation as a whole–schools they only know about from national corporate media–very poorly, with just 18% giving an A or a B.

Even in this context–with widespread concern about the schools for other people’s children–respondents actively rejected the draconian close-the-school, fire-them-all approach. Gallup’s discussion of the poll concludes: Overwhelmingly, Americans favor keeping a poorly performing school in their community open with existing teachers and principals, while providing comprehensive outside support. This finding is consistent across political affiliation, age, level of education, region of the country, and other demographics.

What’s next?

From the point of view of actual electoral politics: well, I’d watch out if I was Arne Duncan. The teachers’ unions may not be able to hold out on Obama in the next national elections, but they can sure choose to let a few Democrats dangle in the cool breeze of public disapproval. Especially in those forty or so states dubbed “losers” by Duncan’s Race to the Top chicanery.

And how better to signal a change of direction than to ask Duncan to fall on his basketball? In fact, displeased Dems have already trimmed a few hundred million from Duncan’s war chest, a legislative shot across the executive bow.

I’d say Duncan’s days of spanking the states are soon over–either that, or he’ll spend a lot of time eating love-the-teacher crow through the next national election campaign.

All the news fit for education corporations?

Closer to home, I guess I’d like to see a few more of us start to question the objectivity of The New York Times and Washington Post, both corporations with increasingly large hopes that profits from their education ventures will prop up sagging journalism revenues. The Post, which owns Kaplan and shocked readers by blatantly pushing Kaplan’s legislative agenda in print and in person is already an education corporation that owns a newspaper as a sideline.

The Times is only aspiring to that level, but as they say of the number-two organization in any field, that just means they’re trying harder.

An interesting piece in last week’s Chronicle, Goodbye to those Overpaid Professors in their Cushy Jobs, attempts a possibly premature farewell to a stereotype, the enduring myth that “college professors lead easy lives.”  According to reporter Ben Gose, once-rampant complaints about the imaginary prof on a three-day workweek are now hard to find.

Nonetheless he notes an interesting source for some doozy “last gasps” of lazy-prof stereotypes–faculty themselves. Gose speculates that the prof-on-prof stereotypers are trying to do the profession a favor, in the front line of faculty “policing their own” and targeting “perceived slackers,” etc.

The photograph and first third of the article are devoted to the emotional and contradictory views of Prof. John Hare, chair of English at Montgomery College, Maryland. According to Gose, Hare “became furious” at a distinguished scholar he doesn’t know, Florence Babb, the Vada Allen Yeomans Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Florida and former president of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, then serving as graduate coordinator for the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. Recruited with the named professorship to Florida from the University of Iowa in 2005, her scholarship and service to the profession has been massive: multiple stints as department or program chair, numerous editorial boards, etc.

The trigger for Hare’s rage? Prof. Babb contested the university’s attempt to violate the contractual terms of its appointment letter in recruiting her and unilaterally downgrade the 2-course release associated with her service obligation in the Center to zero. Arbitrators eventually settled on reducing it to a one-course release, citing the figleaf of fiscal exigency.

One way of parsing Hare’s emotion is to see him as the chair of a teaching-intensive department himself trading in stereotypes about faculty with research-intensive appointments. Babb, by any reasonable estimation, works pretty hard, so Gose allows Hare to qualify his position pretty carefully.

It seems that Hare’s problem with Babb doesn’t depend on the factual question of whether she’s actually a slacker or not. It’s that she’s willing to look like one, fueling “public perceptions” that he claims harm all of us.

But the article itself says that these public perceptions are way down, so Hare’s own account of his rage just doesn’t make much sense.

What does? Is it the resentment of someone on a teaching-intensive appointment?

I wonder, but I don’t think so. By his own frequently contradictory account, Hare–like most folks with his kind of appointment–loves his job. Most of the folks I know on teaching-intensive appointment feel fortunate, like Hare, not to be subjected to the constant pressure of publishing, and to be paid for spending a lot of time with students on topics that interest them.

And as many irate commenters on the piece substantiated, it’s a fact that many jobs “in industry” are far easier than faculty appointments, especially research jobs, which tend to be radically underpaid for the difficulty of the work–it’s not the “ease” of the position, but the challenges and the self-directedness that accounts for the willingness of many to work twice as hard for half the pay.

Given what the most successful people in other fields earn these days and the kind of accomplishment it takes to earn the rank, it’s fairly hard to argue that distinguished research faculty in Babb’s bracket– earning $90,000 to $100,000 a year–are either overpaid or underworked.

In fact, as I’ve written before: plenty of undistinguished civil servants, firefighters and military officers have retirement compensation higher than the salaries earned for 60-hour weeks by extremely accomplished teachers and/or researchers in the humanities!

So what explains Hare’s irrational, data-free anger at Babb? Especially when the supposedly benighted “public” is increasingly able to do the relevant math?

The Gendering of Professional Service

One dimension of Babb’s situation that didn’t factor into Hare’s position or come out in Gose’s otherwise well-reported piece is the role of gender in who the University of Florida demanded “pitch in” and make “sacrifices” during the fiscal crisis.

It appears that Babb is the only female distinguished professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the only one actually forced to teach more. According to one source and multiple commenters on press reports of the case, of the many male faculty with her load and rank, many earning more, only one man was even asked to teach additional courses and, being eligible to do so–apparently as expected–chose to retire instead.

I was happy to see the comments on the Chronicle article overflowing with faculty, including the intrepid Bill Pannapacker, hastening to question Hare’s suitability as “our” spokesperson. Pannapacker targets Hare’s implication in the ideology of teaching for love, a topic I’ve written about several times before.

It’s too often assumed that “teaching for love” is a win-win situation: some people are happy with psychic rewards instead of pay, which saves a few bucks that institutions or legislators can then spend on other important projects. What’s the harm?

But a labor market arranged around working for love–rather than fair compensation–is actually one of the most sexist, racist and economically discriminatory arrangements possible. From a class point of view, as I emphasize in Gose’s piece and elsewhere: by making the professoriate an economically irrational choice, you stop sorting for the most talented people and begin to sort for the people who can afford to discount their wages. That cuts out most people, period, making the best jobs in the academy largely a preserve for persons with fortunate economic backgrounds or circumstances.  And via the wealth gap, that primary economic discrimination has direct consequences for the racial composition of the faculty. By making it too hard to get a job, too arduous an apprenticeship, too poor of a return on education investment: only the wealthier among us are able to “irrationally choose” to accept psychic wages–and the wealthier among us are disproportionately white, just for starters. All of this has tremendous, documented consequences for the achievement and persistence of students from less advantaged economic circumstances and ethnicities poorly represented among the faculty.

As for gender, the rendering of faculty positions to the extreme of economic irrationality (six courses a year for $15,000, eg)  assigns them disproportionately to women, especially persons–whether male or female–married to professionals and managers. The other, primary wage earner supports the economically irrational partner, a person teaching for what used to be called pin money. This structural feminizing of the job was traditionally associated with converting the positions formerly held by men (such as secretarial positions, once a high-status job) to those held increasingly by women, as Michelle Masse explains in a 2008 interview and is just one of the ways that she says higher ed forms a “pyramid scheme” especially for women faculty.

Broadly speaking across many disciplines and institution types women still tend to disproportionately hold low-paying, low-status, insecure teaching-only or teaching-intensive jobs while men continue to disproportionately hold high-paying, high-status, secure research-intensive and top administrative positions.

In an important new book, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces Masse and Katie Hogan take the conversation about gender and the distribution of academic rewards & responsiblities beyond the relatively well-understood territory of research and teaching to service labor. (Disclosure: the book includes a chapter adapted from HTUW.)

The book surveys the complexity of academic service, from the manifold senses of a calling (ranging from  communitarian, sociable, and professional impulses to an opportunity to rebel or transform the academy) to close connections with the rise of a service economy, to specifically feminized forms of exploitation–ie, doing the university’s “housework,” or an undercompensated labor of care that in many circumstances falls harder on women. Women faculty face larger career penalties for not seeming to “care sufficiently” for the institution, and their research contributions are correspondingly discounted–I think analysis of the comments on Babb’s case at the Chron and other media outlets strongly supports this view!

Among the countless insights that Masse and Hogan develop in the collection is the emergence of a complex and contradictory “service unconscious” among feminized faculty, male and female (ie, such as the angry and confused John Hare):

We know that our [willingness to serve] sometimes damages us and supports organizational structures we don’t want to reinforce. And yet we nonetheless persevere in these behaviors and articulate their value for the best of all possible reasons: the ways in which ‘helping’ and ’serving’ please us and fulfill our deepest-held beliefs about the importance of existence in a community and the need to achieve change and support for our colleagues and students. We know that service and sacrifice are often necessary to bring about more just workplaces, but much of the service we are pressed into is not about creating just and fair workplaces…

Hogan’s analysis alone is worth the price of the book. She contends that academic women, and men in feminized sectors, are expected to be “superserviceable,” ie to williingly do labor not recognized as such. Across vast swathes of the academy, faculty have service-intensive appointments (especially involving labor of care for students or the institution) in which the nature of their service is not even recognized.

Using data from significant assessments of the labor performed by women in both nontenurable and tenured positions, Hogan documents the unspoken demands of the academic service economy. In a final twist, she argues that the same is true for the intellectual output of persons in feminized positions, especially feminism itself–ie, that feminist research and teaching is meant to be especially “serviceable” as well.

Should The New York Times (NYT) exist? Ha–you’re thinking, “What an unfair question!” Or “You’ve framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way.”

And right you are. But since I’m a rich and powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in the answer, I don’t care what you think, and I’m free to compound the injury by holding a false “debate” on a question that unfairly asks one side to argue for its existence.

Enter The New York Times and its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed, which just riffs on a piece reported by Robin Wilson for the Chronicle. As if framing a loaded question weren’t enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways. In the more obvious manipulation of the lineup, opponents of tenure outnumber proponents 3-2.

More importantly: in a debate about the “demise” of tenure,” the debate’s framers don’t include any voices of persons who are living the circumstances they purport to examine: the life of career faculty, full time or part time, with a teaching-intensive load and a nontenurable contract. One participant is on a nontenurable research contract–for a Harvard outfit that does management consulting for higher-ed administration, natch. But that’s like dressing up the testimony of someone who’s always driven a Rolls as the honest voice of straphangers–the near-volunteer faculty on freaking food stamps, like Monica, Andy, and many others.

As it turns out, 95% of the sense made in this debate is contained in the 40% assigned to the pro-tenure folks. AAUP president Cary Nelson patiently explains the centrality of tenure for academic freedom, and USC’s Adrianna Kezar, points to the real debate we should be having–about the high cost of nontenurable hiring in higher education, especially for the majority of faculty whose appointments are teaching-intensive, and the students they try to serve in the unsavory conditions management has created.

In the Opinion of L. Ron Hubbard…

Excepting a couple of minor points by the nontenurable researcher/management consultant, the anti-tenure side had little to offer beyond witless praise for The Market. Remember the the Planet of the Apes sequel where the surviving mutant humans live in a cave and worship the Holy Bomb that destroyed them?

It’s like that, including the gallows flavor to the campy humor, once you rip off the masks of the robed ritualistas:

Batting first for the NYT education-capitalist home team is Richard Vedder, perennial flack for the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute. His line here, that tenure “reduces intellectual diversity,” is just warmed-over David Horowitz, long debunked by any serious study.  The fact is that more academics fear for their academic freedom today than in the McCarthy era–because they lack access to tenure, not the other way around.

Playing new kid in the lineup is Mark C. Taylor, a distance education entrepreneur with books and interests ranging from religion and organization theory to management and–I am not making this up–stealing dirt from the graves of famous persons.

Taylor’s data-free ruminations bear as much connection to the actual world of higher education as Scientology does to particle physics. He’s the fellow that bemoaned per-course salaries “as low as” five grand (!) and basically acts as if you could still arm-chair analyze the academic labor system, which is nearly 80% contingent, as if it were a “market” in tenure-track jobs.

Taylor’s retread analysis is straight outta 1972: “If you were a CEO,” he begins, and races downhill from there. Dunno, Mark: If I was the CEO of my neighborhood… If I was the CEO of my marriage… If I was the CEO of this poker game… If I was the CEO of your church… If I was the CEO of the planet… If my dad were my CEO… If I were the CEO of this one-night stand… If I was the CEO of this classroom… If I was the CEO of this audience at this Green Day concert…

Gosh, Mark. Seems like some social organizations and relationships shouldn’t have CEOs at all.

Wait, there’s more. Taylor goes on to, like, use math and stuff because it sounds good when you’re talking about money. He figures out the lifetime cost of paying tenured faculty and boggles, claiming that funding this commitment “would require” four million in endowment now and thirty million thirty years from now. Et voila! Clearly, then, paying faculty anything at all is impossible! QE freaking D, lads and ladies.

Of course the fact that most faculty aren’t paid out of endowments at all but, like, from tuition and appropriations and grants and stuff, does create some stumbles among the seraphim in Taylor’s elegant pin-top choreography.

I did say that the anti-tenure side contributed 5% of the sense out of the 60% of the space allotted to them.

That modicum goes to Cathy Trower of Harvard’s COACHE, like the handbag, with an elegant E for education.

Her project is like a higher-ed stepchild version, less mean and less well-funded, of Harvard’s toxic b-school/ed-school partnership–you know, the folks that brought you Arne Duncan.

Unlike her comrades, Trower actually thinks about tenure and correctly advocates for a less rigid understanding of it. Somewhat overdramatically, she proposes blowing up the tenure system and starting over with a new constitutional convention:

Some features of a newly imagined faculty workplace might include variable probationary periods, with extensions for parenthood, rather than a fixed seven-year up-or-out provision for tenure; a tenure track for faculty members focused on teaching; a non-tenure track that affords a meaningful role in shared governance; interdisciplinary centers with authority to be the locus of tenure; broader definitions of scholarship and acceptable outlets and media to “publish” research….

Most of these notions, of course, are very sensible, and versions of them are in place all over the country. No need to lug jerrycans of petrol to the bonfire.  It’s not until we get to Trower’s stealthy last two suggestions (”tenure for a defined period of time; and the option to earn salary premiums while forgoing tenure entirely”) that we see that the NYT was perfectly fair to run her piece under the headlines “How to Start Over” and “Get Rid of (Tenure).” Trower conveniently left these out of the version she published two years ago in AAUP’s Academe.

Most Tenured Faculty ARE on a Teaching Track

If Trower were better informed about what’s actually going on, she’d be aware that all of her reasonable suggestions have distinguished histories as well as plenty of contemporary reality. Rendered most invisible by Trower’s crowing from the business-administration battlements is the suggestion that we need to invent a “tenure track for faculty members focused on teaching.”

Huh?

In 1970, the overwhelming majority of tenured faculty were on teaching-intensive appointments. Even today, after four decades of hiring teaching-intensive appointments nontenurably (full-time and part-time), tenured teaching-intensive faculty out-number tenured research-intensive faculty as much as two to one.

The idea that “tenured” equates to teaching 6 hours a week or fewer is just silly propaganda. And I for one am sick of liberal bastions like Harvard and the NYT passing off propaganda as scholarship.

Including propaganda that has numbers in it: for crying out loud, my math-avoidant friends, the whole meaning of the expression that “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics” is that any paid mouthpiece, windbag or liar can claim to be “data-driven.”

I mean, Cathy, let’s be real here.

MANAGEMENT has spent the last four decades actively dismantling a long-existing “tenure track for faculty members focussed on teaching.” Now you lean out from the windows of your Lear jet to shout that we need to hold a constitutional convention to invent it?

You folks at Harvard oughta know that “data-driven” should mean something more than running a bunch of surveys. It should mean some reasonable attempt at a connection with the facts.

Regular readers know I’ve been pointing out the epic badness of the New York Times’ reporting on higher education for some time now. For what it’s worth, I have it on good authority that more than one academic journal is interested in taking a closer look at media bias in higher education coverage.

Of course this is a little like saying I know several clever Davids prepared to flip the bird at slow-witted Goliath. On the other hand, one of them might prove to own a slingshot.

Joe Ramsey is a talented young scholar of the radical writing that often characterized the American cultural landscape in the first half of the last century (and which the cultural criticism of the second half largely ignored). He writes politically-relevant poetry under the name J. Gallant Ramsey. This piece on Haiti is presented here with his permission. Over one and a half million Haitians are still homeless, many of them the children of the quarter-million dead.

Fault Lines–Six Months After, July 12 

The Earth has traveled half way round the Sun

Since the day it shook and sucked them down.

Down

Down and

down

everything fell:

Shacks and hovels smashed through sewers;

Palace collapsed like an empty egg shell.

Three hundred thousand, maybe fewer

Thousands buried, never found.

A nation of souls, searching, searing

Buried in a human hell.

La Terre Tremble.

Have we forgotten what that shaking ground

Revealed for all to see, who cared to look?:

The way the streets filled up with bloated bodies;

The way the troops drove on, and let them cook.

The ‘aid’ delayed,

as if for fear of zombies

Rising from their rubble graves to run–

White eyes blazing bloody memories

of how white masters came and took by gun.

But—as we know—poor Haitians did not riot;

worked to pull their brothers from the ruins.

Carried those who died, and those who wouldn’t

for a while,

And those who lived.

Gave until they had no more to give.

*

A hundred miles of broken blister

oozing, live on your TV,

draped in pathos and then charity:

Nightly News

For about a week.  But even then,

If I may ask:

Did they let the Haitians speak?

What did the people have to say?

When they look at us what do they see?   

Do you dare to take a peek with me today?

Caught in the sun, the pocked eye turns away.

How much can the blinded stand to see? :

Band-aids slap where barricades should be.

*

Worldwide

They say there are a dozen cities

With at least a million people each

Lying, waiting, sleeping on a fault line;

Slum-dweller flesh to feed the breach.

For every year the Earth, it shivers

In the endless cold of space;

Quakes and quivers, like a bull whose skin

must knock flies from its face.

The fault is not the moving earth’s

–We know that quakes will come, and even where–

The problem: a crooked scheming class

That crams the poor into the cracks

And stitches them into the seams

Breaking their backs

Letting them choke

Gasping for air–

Stripping them down to their dreams,

Then bare.

There is no plan

No care for the people

except for the juice

that can be squeezed

from their bones

to quench the schemers’ thirst:

Markets pressure

and hearts burst.

(The heads of state remain aloof:

Crisis equals opportunity, after all

Helicopter blades

give the world a roof.

And there’s plenty of sweat to catch, as they fall.)

*

Outside Port au Prince:

Refugee Cities–

tents made from tarps

Flap on and on,

But only the bugs can fly.

Eyes peer out through the fraying holes;

Fingers point

At jet-liners tearing the sky.

First-class passengers,

Glide overhead,

travelling onto milder climes:

if they look down

between shared clouds,

see nothing

but

dirty laundry lines.

-J. Gallant Ramsey

Somerville, Massachusetts

July 12, 2010

Only way to please me
turn around and leave
and walk away
–Alabama Getaway, lyrics by Robert Hunter

Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt’s report for the Chronicle blamed “Dixie” culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who “bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same.”

As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All-The-Kings-Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of “research-1″ status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.

As just one small instance of my own experience: the aforementioned embezzling dean tried to shut down the academic labor journal I founded (then being edited by one of my graduate students and my friend and colleague Wayne Ross, one of the many who left UL– in his case moving on to Canada’s answer to Cal-Berkeley, the University of British Columbia). That little act of nastiness wasn’t even one of the 30+ official faculty complaints about that one individual that the UL administrative Borg was covering up. But what drove us away was in most cases not one act; there were dozens of acts that each dissenter experienced, some raising to the level of grievable offenses, others just making life hard.

‘Sweet Home USA’ for Business

But despite that temptation, my second impulse is more analytical. The point isn’t any minor differences (even differences of degree) displayed by scandal-plagued politicos and jet-setting higher ed “leadership” in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee over the past decade. The real point, as commenter Ellen Schrecker points out, is the similarities–that labor and labor scholarship continue to be under assault across the country.

I’d go further than Ellen with the similarities–it’s a question of the turn toward steadily more anti-democratic practices of education administration more broadly. Not to mention the related notion that politicians are, effectively, the “managers” of the public sphere that we can trace to Democrats Clinton and Gore, right on down to their intellectual heir and Wal-mart admirer currently occupying the White House.

It’s a pretty big picture, and one that clearly doesn’t yield to partisan analysis: the scary stuff is what Democrats and Republicans agree on. Obama’s ed secretary Arne Duncan made Tennessee sole winner of the reviled Race to the Top competition because of the state’s willingness to do to both K-12 and higher ed what he’d already done in Chicago: turn schools over to private and for-profit managers; silence teachers, students, and parents; strip down the curriculum; increase the direct voice of commercial interests in administration at every level.

Likewise, the UAB business school dean (Klock) responsible for pushing  first practiced his hatcheting ways here in California. It’s not a regional issue at all or even restricted to higher education workplaces.

The many things that should concern us about Feldman’s experience in Alabama are all things happening in schools at every level across the country:

+ Administrator pro-business bias

+ Consolidation of administrator power

+ Declining faculty power and declining faculty solidarity

+ Abuse of credentialing (UAB has demanded that full-professor Feldman go back to school and earn a year’s worth of credits to retain his tenure)

+ Ever-closer ties between corporations, politics and the campus

+ Business influence on curriculum

+ The culture-struggle practice of administration, designed to produce compliant subjectivities and expel dissenters

+ A growing legal web that muzzles faculty governance speech at public institutions

+ The abuse of standards of civility and collegiality to paint an understandably upset victim as unreasonable, a tendency in which I have to say that Peter Schmidt’s reporting unfortunately participates (though to be fair to Schmidt I haven’t seen the documents he characterizes).

In general, though, on this subject I agree with the complaints of commenter “thomasjefferson”:

“Let’s see. He was a tenured, full professor at UAB for 14 years. They shut down the labor center of which he was director and then they tried to set him up for termination by trying to get him to take 18 grad hours in a subject in which they’re planning to shut down the department. And he’s not happy about that. I wonder why?”

And with commenter “mchag12″:

“The relationship with the faculty at public universities is just becoming untenable as faculty are treated as line items to be dispensed with at will by high paid administrators. What would you do, azprof, if your department was slated for demolition and your university actually asked the state legislature to defund it? Back out of the room shuffling and bowing and repeating thank you, thank you? If you think you are safe, you’re not.”

That last line by mchag says it all.

Just last year, Stanley Fish was playing Clint Eastwood with his manifesto: Do Your Job, Punk! (or, My Tinfoil Hat Keeps Politics Out of My Teaching–Get Yours Today!) In that widely panned book, he argued that the role of the faculty was to produce and distribute knowledge magically apart from the mundane and political.

Earlier this week he more convincingly took on the student evaluation of teaching and specifically, a Texas proposal to hold tenured faculty “more accountable” by giving faculty bonuses of up to $10,000 for earning high customer assessments of specified learning outcomes.

Fish makes two arguments against the proposal. He squanders pixels bolstering his weaker point, that students aren’t necessarily in a position to judge whether Fish-as-teacher-phallus has, ugh, “planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding.”

Far better is his second point:

Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers. But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed….

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger.

This part rings mostly true for me. No question, Fish is clearly wrong to generalize so broadly about students and evaluation instruments. As students enter majors and graduate programs, they are of course far more likely to welcome the sort of intellectual adventure that he describes.

And it’s just plain out of touch with the subject he is purporting to address to claim that all kinds of student evaluation are “by their very nature” (huh? philosopher much?) of the sort that can “only recognize” teaching-as-information-delivery. Nonetheless, that’s the kind administrators mostly impose so his point is valid despite the unwarranted generalization.

That said, I personally like getting student evaluations of my teaching, even the lame sort that predominate and which Fish is critiquing here. I learn things even from bad instruments poorly used by persons with little knowledge of the field or who display imperfect judgement, and so on.

My concern is with the way these instruments are misused–by activist administrators and politicians, aided and abetted by paid policy flacks. The managerial literature cheerfully describes all this as the “assessment movement” to consolidate their control of “institutional mission.”

Faculty themselves, even with tenure, learn all too quickly to teach to the instrument.

Example: long after receiving tenure (twice!) I once got mid-range scores in response to a question asking students to assess whether their capacity for critical thought improved. The next term I included a twenty-minute exercise studying different definitions of critical thought the week before they took the survey: my scores jumped to the top of the range, with no other change in the syllabus.

I use that example because it’s double-sided. On the one hand, it shows how a modest change can essentially manipulate the results or, more to the point, manipulate the students providing the results.

On the other hand this modest change, motivated by a base consideration, was also a real one: it marked a moment where I took seriously the importance of reflection in the learning process.

By asking students to reflect on what had happened to their thinking in the class, they were not only more likely to appreciate the teaching, they were more likely to appreciate, value–and retain–the change itself.

So the stupid instrument, my vanity, and a modest change resulted in better learning.

While that instance of teaching to the instrument worked out more or less fine, most responsible studies are pretty clear that teaching to the instrument is generally harmful.

For instance, one Fish commenter quoted a reliably-constructed study that concluded “professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.”

In other words: teaching to get high customer assessments produces intellectual junk food: the focus group says “yum!” but it’s all bad news after that. This is consistent with study after study on “teaching to the test” in K-12: the more tightly that management and politicians grip the handful of sand that is teaching and learning, the less they grasp.

Most of the commenters don’t address the motivation for the Texas proposal, which is to standardize and marketize the curriculum along the lines supported by the current administration. An easily assessable form of learning-as-information-download is an easily commodified form of learning: “Log in to Pixel University, where you get the exact same education as Yalies!” It’s also more easily controlled by a political bureaucracy, along the lines of K-12. Both Republicans and Democrats are actively supporting for-profit “education providers,” and the leading edge of their contribution is redefining knowledge as information delivery.

So what’s best about Fish’s effort here is the emphasis upon the nature of learning itself, which is easily distinguishable from information download.

The most difficult lesson for my first-year students to learn–the most frustrating, the one with the longest-term impact–is the construction of a review of scholarly literature, toward posing a research question unanswered by that literature. I ask them to zero in on a “bright spot” in the literature, where conflicting views are unresolved, or a “blank spot,” a question that hasn’t been posed. I try to help them to think of a modest but original way that they might advance the conversation.

The lesson takes them on a journey of the sort that Fish describes, full of frustrations and ventures into the failings of academic prose, dead ends and discombobulations. What they learn is that any act of knowledge origination emerges from a vast multivocal conversation and is framed by the professional modesty of the actual researcher. They are often amazed by the narrow frame of actual research questions, the extent of qualifications and hesitations, and the ways that knowledge is produced by error. They are often confused by the extent of collaboration, the fact that questions aren’t constructed in binary terms, the fact that questions are constructed, and by the amount of time spent acknowledging the diverse views and paths explored by one’s professional colleagues.

As Fish points out, students come to us trained to see “the master perspective” (of history-as-objective-fact, eg, rather than history-as-historiography, the writing of Helen Keller, Jack London and Einstein’s socialism into, or out of, the conversation). Or at most they see two perspectives, the binary the either/or of right and wrong, or for and against, good and evil, etc. I tell them that easy clarifications–such as “are you for or against” such and such a proposition– are usually trick questions, that making knowledge and the act of learning entail entering into a hive of confusion, ambiguity, and error.

They don’t always like this lesson, which is deeply experiential: they have to try to read difficult things, ask for help, wait in line to get journals delivered to them. But they are always glad to have had it, and it clearly yields real results in subsequent classes.

Can this sort of lesson and journey be assessed? Yes, but not so easily by the sort of instruments we use for the purpose. We do need better instruments. For instance, measurement per se is not intrinsically useful: you might say losing 20 lbs at Pixel U is the same as losing 20 lbs at Swankfield–until you learn that at one school you lost the weight by exercising, and at the other they amputated a limb.

More than better instruments, though, we need better attitudes toward these instruments. We could start with a critical understanding of why administrations and politicians support the kind of assessments they do, and not the many better alternatives.

Above all: we need to be able to offer a clear, cogent justification of education as learning and distinguish between learning and download.

Let’s say you teach at an M.A.-granting state school with 2,000 new first-year undergraduates entering annually. Let’s further say they take half their load with faculty on part-time appointments. Controlling for other variables, one new multi-campus study suggests that this degree of contingency in faculty appointment could play a significant part in 600 students dropping out before their sophomore year.

The latest chapter (pdf) in the cautious series by Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan focuses on the critical first year in four-year institutions, following up previous efforts on community colleges and the lower division more broadly.  Their conclusion: a merely “average” degree of contingency in faculty appointments and working conditions at four-year institutions affects year-to-year student retention by as much as 30 percent:

Students with average levels of exposure to full-time, nontenure-track, “other”
contingent, and graduate assistant faculty may be as much as 30 percent less likely
to persist, compared to their peers who have only full-time faculty.

Noting that at all of the institutions they studied but one, “more than 50 percent of the credits taken by students during their first year were led by a contingent faculty member,” Jaeger and Eagan dryly conclude, “given these findings, employment status of faculty deserves further discussion.”

Studying several years of data from a state system, they carefully document a close correlation with the degree of contingency in faculty appointment and retention.

In the baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral-extensive institutions studied, they found consistent decreases in the likelihood of sophomore-year retention ranging from 2 to 7 percent for every 10-percent increase in contact hours with faculty on contingent appointment.

Disaggregating appointment categories, they found that the more contingent the appointment, the stronger the association with negative student outcomes.

Credit hours led by faculty on full-time nontenurable appointment outperformed those led by graduate student instructors and both outperformed sections led by faculty on part-time appointment.

But “greater levels of contingent faculty instruction, despite whether these faculty
are working full time or part time, typically have a negative effect on student persistence,” they emphasize.

Working Conditions Matter

At the two doctoral-intensive institutions they studied, Jaeger and Eagan found modest positive correlation between retention and exposure to graduate student and faculty on contingent appointments. This finding contradicted what they learned at the other institution in this study and in their own previous work.

This unusual finding led them to examine the working conditions of faculty serving contingently at those two institutions. Finding greater support, funding for faculty development and integration, they hypothesize that supporting part-time faculty better might have an impact.

As in their other published studies, Jaeger and Eagan interpret their results to mean that the conditions of contingency are the culprit, not the faculty. They observe that there may well be less harm in appointing faculty on a part-time basis in upper division and graduate study.

Research-Intensive Faculty Share the Blame

The shrinking minority of research faculty have developed a culture of contempt for general education. Regular readers know that AAUP conspicuously declined to sign on the latest report by the “Coalition on the Academic Workforce” in large part because this report, scripted by the staff at disciplinary associations, essentially abandoned the first two years of college instruction.

Disciplinary associations are dominated by research-intensive faculty who have been making this bargain with administrators for the past 40 years: “Keep our tenure lines in the major and grad program, and we’ll supervise students and lecturers teaching gen ed.”

Probably the number-one reason AAUP declined to sign the CAW report is the disciplinary associations’ insistence on recommending that “tenure lines should be sufficient to cover courses in the upper-division undergraduate and graduate curricula and to ensure an appropriate presence of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the lower division.”

As my committee at AAUP analyzed it, CAW’s waffle regarding “an appropriate presence” in the lower division aimed to serve the self-interest of a tiny fraction of the faculty at the expense of students and most other faculty.

The CAW report and the minority faculty it represents flies in the face of research by Paul Umbach, Jaeger and Eagan, and many others. The recommendations are exactly the reverse of Jaeger and Eagan’s, who find great impact from contingency in the early years and less in the upper division and graduate study.

So long as privilege continues to flow to the disciplines, the CAW is cheerfully willing to underwrite the steady casualization of the majority faculty teaching the majority of students, i.e. community colleges and the first two years everywhere.

Responsible policy makers, researchers like Jaeger and Eagan, and many administrators, however, acknowledge that the lower division and general ed are the area where the US system of higher education already is the most dysfunctional by most measures of student success.

The Buck Stops With Administrators

Administrators ultimately make resource allocation decisions that shape first-year teaching.

Many administrators would willingly see more experienced tenure-stream faculty in the first-year classroom and grumpily point to the unwillingness of research-intensive faculty to appear there.

However, administrators are the ones who have steadily whittled away at a career path that this research suggests is one of the most important in the academy: the teaching-intensive tenure track.

While no faculty appointments should be teaching only—it is the teaching-only nature of most contingent appointments that accounts for much of the negative impact—appointments that are teaching intensive should be an important component of every faculty.

Much reduced from their high point in 1970, appointments to the teaching-intensive tenure track nonetheless remain widespread, especially at the M.A. and B.A.-granting institutions where the difference between their student outcomes and those of faculty on contingent appointments are most obvious.

At 9-plus teaching hours per week, with full campus citizenship and full obligations to professional development—which might include appropriately modest expectations for research activity—faculty on these appointments work hard for bartenders’ wages, but deliver real results for students.

Over the decades, administrations have lost literally millions of students by replacing appointments that enable teaching-intensive campus citizens with those that give faculty little choice except to be teaching-only freeway flyers.

As I and many others have noted, administrators have actively chosen to disinvest in faculty, spending instead on sports, infrastructure, and venture capitalism.

Even in naked business terms: were the gains they achieved with these allocations really worth the loss of  millions of “education customers”?

Considering the role tuition plays in most budgets, I doubt it.

related posts:

The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies
Dismal Science Fiction
Who’s a “Historian” to the AHA?
Conversion to Tenure
Stabilizing Persons, Creating New Lines
We Work

http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/201

Across the planet for the past two years, university management has been opportunistically putting the screws to faculty, staff and students with bogus claims that “the economy made us do it.” Professor of accounting and AAUP Secretary-Treasurer Howard Bunsis has made a second career of flying around North America debunking these hilariously dishonest claims, a reason Bunsis is one of my top picks for next AAUP prez.

One of the more sinister categories of administrator opportunism is program closure, and winner of 2010 Most Egregious Sleaze in that category has to be the UK’s Middlesex University, which in a burst of vocationalist enthusiasm closed an active, successful philosophy program. The department was by far the top research producer in the school, according to the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and ranked thirteenth nationally among philosophy programs measured by the RAE.  (For purposes of thought provocation only, the irksome Philosophical Gourmet ranks the following at around 13th among public philosophy programs in the U.S.: IU-Bloomington, UC-Irvine, and UW-Madison, UC Boulder, and U Mass-Amherst.)

The excuse for this travesty? A temporary 2% shortfall in the percentage of income from the department. British universities are required to pay a 55% pimping-and-moneychangers’ share of their income to central administration. Supporters like John Protevi note that Middlesex will contribute 59% in 2010, but contributed only 53% in 2009–an amount that appears to be well within normal fluctuations, especially considering global financial turbulence. The grant monies pouring into Middlesex’s coffers due to the philosophers’ research amounts to several hundred thousand dollars annually.

The harms to the university’s reputation have been mounting quickly. Already Middlesex’s administration has been widely reviled during occupations and protests. Other institutions have quickly cherrypicked its top talent, petitions of protest have garnered a thousand signatures a day, and mass outrage has forced reversals of draconian suspensions of protesting faculty and students.

The Dollar Cost is High Too

This week gives us yet another example of the mounting dollar costs of the Al Haig (”I’m in charge here!)” school of administration. At Temple, a sleazy management team felt that “the economy” carte blanche to bully the nurses’ union into rolling back tuition benefits and giving up First Amendment rights in the workplace. Outraged staff walked out and management blew through $4 million a week on hotel rooms and airfare for scab labor in its doomed, month-long effort to show dominance.

A Pennsylvania compensation board just delivered the coup de grace, ruling that the administration had acted so high-handedly prior to the 4-week strike that its actions amounted to unilaterally changing the terms of employment–with the result that, for purposes of eligibility for unemployment compensation, the strike was to be treated as a lockout by the hospital… adding another $1.5 million to Temple’s bill.

Global Resistance Rising

Obviously, from the broader perspective of professionalism in the public service, of course one wants nurses, staff and faculty in a position to criticize the reckless incompetence of management. I mean, do you really want to be cared for by professionals whose speech is controlled by someone with an MBA?

Of course even from the narrowest administrative point of view this kind of high-spending thuggery is bad management.

In addition to the bad publicity, lost work time, and direct costs, this sort of humiliating failure thoroughly emboldens other unions, like the surging campaign to organize the 1,585 Temple faculty who are on contingent appointment.

It seems pretty clear that this kind of administrative bullying is generating a shock wave of global resistance, creating new opportunities to organize and make democratic change.

The day to watch this fall will be October 7th as, already, dozens of groups have committed to it as a global day of action.

More on that, and on the massive student occupation at the University of Puerto Rico, in my next post.

After that, I’ll have lots of exciting news from the AAUP annual gathering and national Council session, including new reports on how to fight administrator efforts to gag faculty (a la Garcetti), sharp reductions in dues for faculty serving contingently and graduate students, changes in election structure, and, from the committee I co-chair, a sneak peek at an important report on tenure and teaching-intensive faculty (over 80% of the faculty are teaching intensive).

I’ll also have follow-up on the iPad as e-reader story, focussing on early learning issues (or, How Apple the Money-Hungry Flash Grinch Deprives Children of Early Learning Opportunities in Favor of Mind-Numbing Game Apps.)

So when I heard Anya Kamenetz, once the passionate shoot-from-the-hip spokesperson against student debt, was reinventing herself as the passionate shoot-from-the-hip analyst of new media in education, I was prepared to give her a listen. I thought, well, at least she has enough dignity and intelligence not to turn herself into a pimpette for learn-while-you-sleep audiocassettes.

Whoa, was I wrong. She turned out a book that stays relentlessly on its Twitter-sized message: OMG! OMG! The internetz a library! (Speaking of Twitter, you can relieve your boredom with the book by following Kamenetz’s real-time feed about her visits to the dentist.)

Kamenetz turns out to be an adherent of the most shopworn education fantasy in history: education without educators! Like untold generations of blatherers before her, she opines that information technology will deliver education without an education workforce–therefore saving untold bazillions of dollars that would otherwise go to faculty salary. These savings will inevitably result in a “free or marginal-cost” education! At least for savvy “edu-punks” and “edu-preneurs.”

Right you are, Anya, and monkeys are flying through the webbing of my chair seat as we speak.

This fantasy didn’t work with prior revolutionary education technologies (like, hm, the book, the library, the pony express, the radio, or the tee-vee, where free education of the sort that Kamenetz envisions for non-Yalies can still be had for the asking.)

All those technologies have been accompanied, not only by more teachers and teaching, but also by massive growth in non-educator education employees (to tend to the technology, administer the credits, cash the checks, etc).

So–as I’ve already (pdf) pointed out, like, I dunno–centuries ago in texting years?–in The Informal Economy of the ‘Information University’–ditching the faculty (even the modest minority of them who actually earn wages higher than bartenders!) isn’t going to magically reduce costs:

…The concern with technology represents the faculty’s idea that students are willing to accept a disembodied educational experience in a future virtual university of informatic instruction. On the other hand, the student concerns are overwhelmingly attentive to the embodied character of their experience-where to park, what to eat and so on. Why do the faculty envision students willing to give up the embodied experience of the campus, when the students are in fact increasingly attentive to embodied experience?

Campus administrators continue to build new stadiums, restaurants, fitness facilities, media rooms, libraries, laboratories, gardens, dormitories and hotels: are these huge new building projects, funded by thirty years of faculty downsizing, really about to be turned into ghost towns?

In my view, the claim that (future) students will generally accept a disembodied education experience is at least a partial displacement of the underlying recognition, not that future students will accept an “education experience divorced from the body,” but the extent to which present students have already accepted an embodied experience divorced from “education.”

While the dystopic image of distance education captures the central strategy of the information university (substituting information delivery for education), that dystopia erroneously maps that strategy onto the future, as if informationalization were something “about to happen” that could be headed off at the pass, if we just cut all the fiber-optic cables…

Close readers will know that this piece, substantially rewritten and expanded, became ch 2 of HTUW. For a more fun, blistering and relentlessly scatological skewering of Kamenetz, you can’t do better than the anonymous purveyor of ginandtacos.com (h/t to Bill Benzon of The Valve).

Over at the Atlantic, business editor Megan McArdle lit up the Beltway blab-o-sphere by posing an interesting question: If “almost every” tenured professor she knows has a “left-wing vision” of workplace issues, why do they accept the “shockingly brutal” treatment of faculty with contingent appointments?

Her perception of leftism among the faculty leads her to think that our values “should result in something much more egalitarian.” So, she asks, how is it that higher ed sustains “one of the most abusive labor markets in the world”?

Good question. One answer, of course, is that the faculty aren’t “leftists” at all, but American liberals, whose commitments to equality are relatively clear in matters of ethnicity and gender, but hopelessly confused when it comes to class and workplace issues generally.

Arguably most of the policy failures by contemporary liberals in matters of ethnicity and gender can be traced back to their blind spot regarding issues of class, labor, and the workplace.

As I’ve noted before, to produce crashing silence in a lecture hall packed with doctorates, all you have to do is ask, “Why are police departments more diverse than English departments?”

Super-Exploitation and the Myth of Faculty Leftism

McArdle speculates that the material condition of the contingent faculty (”some of the worst-paid high-school graduates in the country”) has caused the “leftward drift” of academic politics: ie, that working in a tiered workplace has made typical academics adopt egalitarian values.  She’s completely wrong about that, since it was exactly the other way around: the faculty’s non-leftism (their liberal comfort with inegalitarianism in economic and workplace matters)  helped bring about the system of majority contingent appointments.

Nevertheless she makes a couple of very helpful observations.

She’s especially good at pointing out that the tenured are also victims of this system. She notes that even the fortunate ones on the tenure track are “virtual prisoners” of their administration until tenure (a point now reached for humanities faculty roughly two decades after entering grad school, or in one’s forties!):

And that’s before we start talking about the marriages strained, the personal lives stunted, because those lucky enough to get a tenure-track job have to move to a random location, often one not particularly suited to their spouses’ work ambitions or their own personal preferences . . . a location which, barring another job offer, they will have to spend the rest of their life in.

This leads to the best observation in McArdle’s piece: that many faculty are clueless about worker rights and experiences in nonacademic workplaces. In faculty lore, nonacademic workplaces represent “an endless well of exploitation where employees are virtual prisoners with no recourse in the face of horrific abuses.”

McArdle believes that most academics translate their own experiences and those of their colleagues enduring contingent appointment–of super-exploitation and “monolithic employer power”–and “naturally assume it must be even worse on the outside.”(emph. original)

She’s right on both of these points. Contrary to the assumptions of most observers, faculty in the tenure stream have seriously harmed themselves and the profession by their lazy complicity with the two-tiered system of majority contingent employment. And they foolishly excuse their complicity by assigning blame to any cause but their own failure of responsibility to the profession.

This insight–of professional laziness by the tenured, who are working hard on many things, but not at defending the profession–leads to one of the obvious, clear answers to the crisis of the professoriate.

We’re experiencing a failure of professional control over the terms of professional work, what actual labor economists call a “failed monopoly of professional labor.”

Traditional professions exchange strong (even “monopoly”) control over their terms of work for a public-service mission, an arrangement that has been undermined and all but abandoned under neoliberalism and its ideologies, including the bogus analytical lens of “job market theory.” Sadly, the most common response to McArdle’s piece was the triumphant crowing of the half-smart, sprinting forward with their cliched faux analysis featuring–you guessed it–an oversupply of persons with doctorates, etc etc: “It’s simple! Too few jobs, too many PhDs! It’s simple! It’s simple! Ha-ha! I win! Shut up, whiny girls with your whiny degrees that nobody sees on Sports Center! It’s simple!”

Of course I’ve debunked the inanity of the “overproduction of PhDs” thesis many times before. There is zero such “overproduction,” since what has happened is a restructuring of demand. Regular readers know that structured demand means that work formerly done by persons with doctorates is now done by persons with an m.a. or less. This revolutionary shift was accomplished intentionally, by university management, all without much opposition by the guild of tenured faculty. Like most other senior workers after 1970, the tenured collaborated in the creation of multi-tier workplaces… trading away the future of the young for their own comfort.

The persistence of “job market theory” despite its obvious inanity is partly due to its narcotizing effect on the guilty consciences of the tenured: “Oh, it’s not my failure to defend the profession, it’s The Market.”

This doped-up intellectual response carries through the whole standard hamster wheel of the conversation about academic employment: “Gollleeee, cousin Jim-Bob, I wonder if we should put down our jugs of corn liquor and issue one of them caveat emptors to the young folks? Wouldn’t want them messing up their graduate-education purchasing decisions! Don’t want to get offen my porch, though. Guess I’ll just share my wisdom regarding this here tough job market with any young folks who happen to stop by and ask.”

So American faculty aren’t leftists; they’re liberals, deeply influenced by market ideology and fantasies about meritocratic education outcomes (wonderfully unencumbered by data). They work in institutions that manufacture and legitimate steep economic inequalities that hamper the progress of other egalitarian commitments in ethnicity and gender.

But even liberals can run a profession–when they put their minds to it.

Maybe it’s about time we stopped gassing on fatuously with outdated Fordist analogies, as if we could capture professional responsibilities and realities by pretending graduate schools are factories. Or that professional working conditions and standards are set by “markets” rather than by managers.

Maybe we should ask ourselves, “What obligations do professionals have to the profession, to other professionals, and the society we serve?”

And: “Where are we obliged to act collectively and draw the line with management on these issues? Did we cross that line about thirty years ago?”

It certainly wouldn’t hurt if we asked our professional associations to think this way as well.

As usual, your friends at the New York Times let higher education employers off the hook. After finally picking up on the nationwide scandal of unemployment claims denial, a story that Joe Berry broke years ago specifically in connection with higher ed employers, the Times mentions the complicity of just about every kind of employer except higher ed.

Here’s how it works. Because employers fund unemployment insurance (UI) in this country, generally in some relation to how many of their employees receive UI, they are highly motivated to contest claims. The system was designed, of course, to penalize employers who try to dump the costs of their workforce on the public by making those who aggressively churned their staff pay more.

As Jason De Parle’s piece makes clear, this incentive to fight the claims of the unemployed has created a boom industry for niche sleazebags like the Talx Corporation, to which million-dollar-a-year pimps in management outsource the dirty business of denying a few hundred a month to the serfs they’ve laid off.

They operate on the same “quality” principle as arduous phone trees–Talx employees simply gum up the works for state agencies and applicants, understanding exactly how much delay is required to make a sufficient percentage of claimants to just give up and go away. In many states, including California, state law specifically entitles contingent faculty to unemployment pay over the summer and other periods of unemployment, but state universities will fight the claims vigorously.

Over on adj-l (join), a discussion of Talx revealed prominent universities on their client list, including the unionized Cal State system. According to Jonathan Karpf:

TALX has handled all UI claims for the California State University system (CSU) for a number of years.

I and the other CFA EDD expert, Dan Bratten at CSU-Stanislaus, have noticed an upsurge of denials in the past 4 months or so. At first I attributed this to the number of new hires that EDD had to make to handle the highest unemployment rate since the great depression. Now I suspect it’s a self-conscious strategy on the part of TALX to deny legitimate claims on the hope that a certain percentage of Lecturers will not avail themselves of the appeal process.

I have guided several dozen Lecturers denied UI benefits in the past few months through the appeal process and 100% have won on appeal before an administrative law judge. All of these folks had been to one of my Lecturer Unemployment Rights workshops that I give throughout the 23 campus CSU, so with a bit of guidance they were all able to successfully handle their own appeals. That said, I agree with Jack that in the absence of knowledgeable contingent faculty, it would be ideal to have someone well-versed in that state’s EDD statutes and case law available to accompany the contingent faculty to their appeal.

For those planning on attending COCAL IX in Quebec City August 13-15, I will be part of a workshop panel on unemployment rights for contingent faculty. (used with Jonathan Karpf’s permission)

So, hey, why not make the sleazeballs pay you an extra couple thousand bucks this summer–download Joe Berry’s indispensable free pamphlet on how to succeed in filing for UI.

In the Chicago area? Join one of Joe’s filing parties being held at various campuses May 10-15!

On a related note, please join me in THANKING Joe Berry for his brilliant work (buy his wonderful book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower) and his generous service to the movement over the decades. He is losing his job at UIUC.  Predictably his employers found that the financial crisis is an “opportunity” to cut back on labor centers employing scholars criticizing the labor practice of higher ed. He’s moving back to the Bay area with his retiring spouse, Helena Worthen, so hurray for the Bay area. Joe will remain active and join the AAUP committee on contingent employment that I co-chair.

Finally, I don’t usually mention my appearances here, but I’m trying to cut back on them for the next couple of years, and want to note that I won’t be at COCAL this summer as advertised. But you can still catch me at UCLA on Monday, May 3, and at Simon Fraser on June 10.

How are we to understand this moment? How did we get here? Academic Repression,a blistering volume by Nocella, Best, and McLaren, offers some desperately needed history and analysis.

The history alone is worth the price of admission. If you’ve let your AAUP membership lapse–and have been getting your ideas about the state of the academy from cable news or the business and lifestyle reporters at the New York Times–you might still retain fantasies about the unassailable security of tenure.

This book will change that, with a series of eye-opening stories showcasing the extreme vulnerability of individuals with unpopular views.

As Michael Parenti makes clear in the excerpt that follows, the current wave of repression conceals its agenda behind a mask of proceduralism, backed by a tightening net of repressive law.

As in the case of Ward Churchill, the McCarthyism of today bends over backward to pretend that politics isn’t the reason for the attack on the individual–it is generally some other, often pretended offense that provides the pretext. Ironically, the contemporary war on academic freedom usually employs the very procedures and norms that are supposed to protect it:

EXCERPT

On some campuses, administrative officials have monitored classes, questioned the political content of books and films, and screened the lists of guest speakers—all in the name of scholarly objectivity and balance.

In some places, however, trustees and administrators readily pay out huge sums for guest lectures by committed, highly partisan, rightwing ideologues.

The guardians of academic orthodoxy never admit that some of their decisions about hiring and firing faculty might be politically motivated. Instead they will say the candidate has not published enough articles. Or if enough, the articles are not in conventionally acceptable academic journals. Or if in acceptable journals, they are still wanting in quality and originality, or show too narrow or too diffuse a development. Seemingly objective criteria can be applied in endlessly elastic ways….

Mainstream academics treat their politically safe brands of teaching and research as the only ones that qualify as genuine scholarship. Such was the notion used to deny Samuel Bowles tenure at Harvard. Since Marxist economics is not really scholarly, it was argued, Bowles was neither a real scholar nor an authentic economist. Thus centrists ideologues have purged scholarly dissidents under the guise of protecting rather than violating academic standards. The decision seriously split the economics department and caused Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontif to quit Harvard in disgust.

Radical academics have been rejected because their political commitments supposedly disallow them from objective scholarship. In fact much of the best scholarship comes from politically committed scholars.

One goal of any teacher should be to introduce students to bodies of information and analysis that have been systematically ignored or suppressed–a task that usually is better performed by iconoclasts than by those who accept existing institutional and class arrangements as the finished order of things. So it has been feminists and African-American researchers who, in their partisan urgency, have revealed the previously unexamined sexist and racist presumptions and gaps of conventional scholarship.

Likewise, it is leftist intellectuals (including some who are female or nonwhite) who have produced the challenging scholarship about popular struggle, political economy, and class power, subjects remaining largely untouched by centrists and conservatives.16 In sum, a dissenting ideology can awaken us to things regularly overlooked by conventional scholarship.

Orthodox ideological strictures are applied also to a teacher’s outside political activity. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an instructor of political science, Ted Hayes, an anti-capitalist, was denied a contract renewal because he was judged to have “outside political commitments” that made it impossible for him to be objective. Two of the senior faculty who voted against him were state committee members of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.17 There was no question as to whether their outside political commitments interfered with their objectivity as teachers or with the judgments they made about colleagues.

–Michael Parenti, “Academic Repression, Past and Present”

In a nine-page report, the ACLU just slammed the Berkeley administration for trampling on the rights of two student protesters. And: is the Minneapolis conference about this year’s campus unrest the last act, or a prelude to even bolder action? Watch the live broadcast to find out.  There was a police confrontation at a sit-in yesterday and the Oakland schoolteachers are striking later this month. Stay tuned for the events of  May 1 through May 4.

The ACLU report relentlessly portrays an administration that over-reacted and over-reached its authority, laying ludicrous charges (such as “attempting arson”) for which the university had literally no evidence (nor could have, because no “arson” was attempted, duh), imposing punishment without due process (like, uh, being heard), devising strictures it had no right to impose, etc. Read all blistering nine pages here and sign the petition, if you like.

Since there are dozens of student protesters’ cases still to be considered, ACLU’s swift response is a modest but real blow to the gangster theory of higher education administration: “Call ‘em arsonists in the press and then kick ‘em out without a hearing! That’ll teach the rest of ‘em!”.

Thanks, ACLU. My check is in the mail.

I wouldn’t buy the iPad for me, but I’d certainly consider buying something like it for my son. Infants acquire the ability to point around ten months of age. With touch-screen interfaces, shortly thereafter most can interact with literacy programs designed for much older children.

About this time last year, when Emile was fourteen months old, we evaluated for his use the best options then available, the touch-screen netbook and the large HP TouchSmart 600, choosing the latter for screen size and interface quality. If the iPad had been available, we’d have given it a close look.

When I last wrote about electronic reading devices, I concluded that e-reading was here to stay–but so far none of the currently available e-reading options had pushed beyond travel & leisure use. Neither Kindle-type dedicated devices nor netbook apps had demonstrated their readiness for the prime time of workday academic, business and professional reading.

The arrival of the overhyped iPad doesn’t change that. Heavier than a Kindle, more awkward to type on than a netbook, the iPad is more of a toy than a tool. It’s basically a Kindle plus–a really good device for media consumption on the go–rather than a device for professional reading and writing. Which explains what David Pogue calls the device’s uniquely polarizing effect: working techie insiders like Cory Doctorow despise it, and folks who passively consume a lot of media love it.

Since e-reading is here to stay, the likeliest future for reading on the go will be something like an iPad/netbook hybrid, with a detachable clamshell keyboard/dock, so that you can take either just the tablet or the tablet and a keyboard. Devices of this type are already on the market, and my guess is that the iPad and Kindle will converge on this design configuration. The iPad has an optional keyboard dock, but it’s for your desktop. Doubtless a later iteration or a competitor will have a detachable netbook-style keyboard.

If you are interested in how you can help your toddler or pre-schooler to learn using a touch screen, I’d suggest you take them into an Apple store and a computer store stocking the HP device and go to starfall.com for starters. Also try: jacksonpollock.org, lecielestbleu, poissonrouge, Peep ‘n Quack, and Literactive, among many others. You might be surprised by your child’s abilities in playing memory games and puzzles. The best online jigsaw puzzles for very young users are the 12-piece images at Jigzone: there’s a decent snap-to effect and the pieces remain in the correct orientation to each other (no rotation necessary). For many games you may want to set the monitor resolution lower.

I’ll write about Emile’s early learning experiences another time, and possibly in another forum: there’s just too much to say in this space. In brief, though:

Yes, it’s been a big success by several different measures.

No, we don’t endorse phonics.

No, we don’t think the computer replaces any other traditional learning or interaction.

No, we don’t leave him in front of the computer and yes, we have only gradually increased his time from 15 to 30 minutes a day.

Yes, we agree that soccer, gym, art, music, and play dates and reading aloud are more important for two- year olds.

Yes, there is a great deal of dangerous mind-numbing “educational software” out there, and it vastly outnumbers the useful stuff.

No, you cannot make your toddler smarter by having them watch any kind of video whatsoever.

Yes, you can do any and all of these learning activities without a computer, and yes, most of our reading time is with the several hundred real books he owns, including picture books. Last night, for example, we talked for an hour over his latest, Audobon’s Complete Birds and Mammals.

No, you can’t trust PBS to teach your kids online either.

Yes, it’s one of the few good things about Obama’s education policy that he supports pre-school and zero to three learning.

No, reading and literacy are not the same thing. Reading is a symptom of literacy, not the other way around.

The point is to accommodate your child’s burgeoning literacy–the already existing thirst to communicate, know, learn, and interact.

I once read of a parent bragging that they’d taught a very young child to read by reading the same book over and over again. How sad: I cannot imagine a better illustration of mistaking the sign of a thing for the thing itself. In the context of very young learners, eventually reading is the sign of a rich literacy.

Any activity that seeks to develop early reading per se–at the expense of that rich literacy–is a huge disservice to the child.

All in all, we’re ecumenical rather than evangelical on the question of early learning: it’s all too easy to do the wrong thing in this area, I suppose. But I also think that many people mistakenly deprive their children’s hungry brains of the chance to learn–and then, not knowing what else to do–plunk them in front of an “educational video.”

In a surprise move today, President Obama fired all 5,000 Department of Education staff members, including Secretary Arne Duncan. “Education is a failed Cabinet office,” he said. “We needed a clean sweep.”

Spokespersons for the administration said the president was forced to act by a little-known federal law mandating the radical progressive de-funding of any office or department that fails to meet performance goals, whether or not they had sufficient funding to begin with.

“With less and less funding every year,” sources observed, “it was just a matter of time” before a more draconian provision was triggered, requiring every staffer in the office to be fired, regardless of personal performance.

President Obama acknowledged the injustice of the law, observing that the law’s provision permitting him to rehire only half of the mass-terminated staffers was “five times more severe” than the “most notorious example of arbitrary punishment, the Roman practice of decimation,” under which one of every ten soldiers in a “failing” unit was punished.

He also noted that it was probably unconstitutional to make a law firing individuals who had performed well but that the configuration of the Supreme Court meant that “only a fool would let those jokers have a crack at” any issue one cared about.

“We’ll have to hire a bunch of kids from Administrators for America,” the President complained. “They don’t know squat about administering, and just want something to boost their law-school application. Plus they bolster the ridiculous idea that just anyone can administer without training or support.”

School-reform observers were pleased, however, that the law allowed Obama a graceful exit from his ill-conceived association with Duncan, the product of a highly ideological partnership between Harvard’s business and education schools.

Duncan term is over

As the self-styled chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, Duncan turned curriculum and management over to corporate interests, turned schools into military recruitment centers, and set easier standards to inflate claims of “learning outcomes improvement” under his draconian reign. Most observers agreed that he was an eager mouthpiece for corporate interests in the city.

Nearly all nonpartisan evidence-based analysis suggests that Duncan’s ideological eagerness to “close failing schools” and shuttle students into charter or for-profit institutions yielded no actual academic benefit–changes of up or down about 1% that were statistically indistinguishable from no change at all.

Nonetheless Duncan unapologetically continued to promote this failed policy at the national level, with Obama’s full support.

“I knew all that,” admitted Mr. Obama, “but I wanted Arne on the team.”

Spokespeople later confirmed that by “team” the President meant the White House basketball squad. They later released a statement apologizing for the President’s desire to spice up his daily two hours of exercise with “the kind of hoops you can only get with a six-foot-five-inch player with a good corner shot on the court” over the needs of millions of students.

Confronted by the twitter feeds of several departing senior staffers who compared the president’s turning education policy over to a ballplayer-slash-corporate-stooge to Caligula galloping his horse on the Senate floor, the President’s spokesperson said, “They got all that on 144 characters?”

There’s no word yet on who the President might tap to replace Duncan, but one source highly placed in the administration was eager to comment on the irony of the administration’s support for draconian punishment of faculty in public schools, like the recent mass firings in Rhode Island.

“The President wants you to know,” said the source, “that he was just funning with you on that, sort of an April-fool’s joke. He just didn’t think anyone would believe he was enough of a jerk to actually support the firing of teachers who were demonstrably excellent at their jobs but believed in working with students who struggled.

“That policy doesn’t even make sense–it tells every good teacher in a school with struggling students that they should promptly quit and get hired on at a school where the students are already doing well.

“It would be likely telling the best teachers in rural and urban schools to cut and run for the suburbs.

“Believe me,” the source concluded,”The Prez was just April-funning you on that Rhode Island deal. Now that Duncan is gone, we hope that’s crystal clear. By next year we’ll have a real education plan, don’t worry.”

A new survey conducted for AFT adds confusion to the already muddled debate about the majority of faculty serving outside the tenure system. Ultimately the union is interested in a particular problem–organizing–for which in many states part-time status represents a legal boundary for the construction of bargaining units.

This legalistic definition of the group, and the “who’s the market for our services” orientation makes perfect sense for AFT. But it’s not a particularly good standpoint for analysis.

The problem is that the study focusses on part-time faculty to the exclusion of all the other major categories of non-track faculty, including full-time nontenurable, graduate students, post-docs, staff, etc.

This narrow focus skews the perception of what faculty serving nontenurably “want.” We already know, for instance, that nearly 100% of those in full-time nontenurable positions prefer full-time work. Likewise we know that most disciplines most graduate employees and postdocs want full-time tenurable positions.

As a result, the survey’s suggestion that “only” half of all part-time faculty would prefer full-time work misses the mark. What this really means is something more like seventy-five percent of all faculty (those teaching perhaps ninety percent of all classes) prefer full-time work.

The story being reported out of the survey is the part that isn’t news: The roughly 1/4 of all faculty who are moonlighting and teaching a course or two for love are happy with a psychic wage. (”I teach at the u,” over golf or mah-jong, delivers status compensation with both friends and professional associates in one’s primary profession.)

Asking this question of these people is a a little bit like surveying folks in a burger joint and “discovering” that they eat meat. Of course those who are teaching avocationally are mostly satisfied with working part-time.

When read critically, the survey means something very different: It has discovered that roughly half of the people in the burger joint are actually vegetarians! And even quite a few of the meat eaters think the fare could be improved.

That’s the interesting result–that half of all part-timers are trying to get something that isn’t on the menu. And most of the scholarship suggests that we’d all be a lot healthier if what they wanted (full academic citizenship) was available to them.

In short, at least half of all part-timers are more like all other teachers than the other part-timers with an avocational relationship to the job.

While useful for a union that needs to understand the complex “market” for part-time representation, this survey could have been a  lot more helpful by clearly separating the avocational faculty from those who espouse college teaching as a profession.

Better surveys

We need to ask tougher questions of this kind of data. Here are just three for starters:

Q. Is there anything wrong with converting college teaching to lightly paid volunteerism?

A. In addition to consequences for students, it would seem to contribute to the race, class and gender segmentation of the workforce, as I’ve previously remarked in posts on Obama, on a better AFT report, and in my credo (We Work) for minnesota review.  Police departments are often far more ethnically diverse than English departments, despite decades of elaborate affirmative hiring efforts.

Women are commonly disproportionately shunted into part-time and nontenurable positions. It’s hardly an accident that since 1970, when women began to stream into higher education teaching, that tenure began to be steadily reconceived as a privilege for research-intensive faculty.

When teaching-intensive positions were held overwhelmingly by men, they were mostly tenurable. Now that they are held disproportionately by women in many fields, most teaching-intensive positions are not tenurable.

This line of analysis ultimately pushes uncomfortable questions: not who is teaching, but who should be teaching?

Q. How many classes are the satisfied faculty teaching vs. the unsatisfied?

A. It would appear that the unsatisfied teach more classes than the satisfied, often at multiple institutions. The conditions with which they are dissatisfied have a larger impact.

Q. What unites the dissatisfaction of the dissatisfied part-timers with other faculty, grad students, and post-docs?

A. The demand for more security, better pay, due process, a fair return on educational attainment, more equitable participation in professional decision-making, et cetera.

In between the satisfied fraction of the tenured and the satisfied fraction of the moonlighers are the majority of all faculty–teaching the highest proportion of students, including the most at-risk students–with profound, frequently shared dissatisfactions about conditions that most analysis shows has an impact on student retention and success.

x-posted:
howtheuniversityworks

Eric Lee’s Labour Start clearinghouse for global labor news has just announced nominees for its first-ever award, Labor Video of the Year. Two of the five finalists are inspired by working conditions in higher ed. I think both are among the three likeliest to win.

My top choice is the clever, often hilarious series of 30-second spots produced for the three-month strike by the union representing 50% of the teaching faculty at Canada’s York University, CUPE 3903.

Eventually ended by an extraordinary legislative intervention, this legal job action was strongly supported by undergraduates and tenure-stream faculty, who joined the picket lines of contingent faculty and grad students at this leading research institution.

Featuring extremely high production values and great writing, the videos use just a few frames to effectively communicate the hypocrisy of the administration, and the explotation of contingent faculty and graduate students.

A close runner-up is The Janitor, tracking the daily experiences of campus custodial staff–many of whom are also current or former students.

In my view the strongest competition to both entries is provided by a snarky Australian effort, What Have the Unions Ever Done For Us? (Answer: duh, pretty much everything you take for granted in terms of the workplace, from sick leave to the eight-hour day.)

If you’re interested, LS offers a comprehensive bibliography of labor video. You can view and vote on all of the videos in this year’s competition yourself.

Other Left-Labor News

Don’t miss this year’s amazing line-up at Left Forum this weekend in NYC, including plenty of discussion of California events, and featured remarks by Piven, Jackson, Ollman, and Chomsky, among hundreds of others.

AAUP members, please be sure to vote in this year’s officer elections. Cary Nelson is up for re-election, and for the first time non-geographical at-large candidates are up for election to the national Council, representing a lot of new blood for the organization. (I was, ahem, on the nominating commitee, so I know.)

California update

As I wrote in advance of the national day of action on March 4, those events were just the second act. The real question is what will happen when the West Coast schools begin their third quarter in early April. At UC Irvine, the possibilities are foreshadowed by a call for an M4 sequel, or a wave of occupations and other bold direct actions (like the blockade of freeway 1-880) on Tuesday, May 4, the 40th anniversary of the Kent State killings. I’ll write more about these events as the time nears.

By the way, if you are among the modest handful disappointed by my having to cancel out of the UC-Irvine Humanities Center colloquium last month, I’ll be up the road at UCLA on Monday afternoon, May 3, doing a tag-team event with Chris Newfield for Robert Brenner’s Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. The topic, unsurprisingly: “The Future of Public Higher Education in California.”

What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.

The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books.  Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine our Democracy, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin.  Since I often can’t make time to review excellent books, I don’t usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz’s failed hit job.

At least the first book in this series, The Professors, gave the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” something to brag about in their red-diaper parent-participation preschools (whilst plotting Trotskyite mayhem from behind piled bookshelves).

This cheesy compilation is too lazy even to attack faculty scholarship. It’s little more than a list of syllabi with a shrill “I see Marxism!” appended to each–150 times.  The somnolence it produces is hard to describe.

Evidently they should have credited Google as the third author.

The Horowitz staffers tasked with compiling this stinker simply trolled online campus catalogs to yield course descriptions employing such “democracy-undermining” terms as justice, inequality, race, and feminism. Then the staffers wrote lame descriptions characterizing the syllabi as part of a plot to deprive plutocrats of their hard-earned profits.

Once I got the concept, I briefly held the flickering hope that I could read it ironically–as in, “hey, what a bunch of good classes I wish I’d been able to take in college.”

Wrong. The relentless, narrow-minded prose immediately disappeared my hopes of snarky thoughtcrime.

Even if you’re sympathetic to its politics, the concrete brutalism of this compilation’s formal properties will crush your spirit in a few pages–like reading a year’s worth of your daily horoscopes straight through, or a cookbook cover to cover.

I know, I know. I’m well-known for holding such anti-democratic views as that we should all have enough to eat, health care, and free education. So don’t take my word for it. Peruse a chapter over at the Random House website. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals–bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.

Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday’s National Day of Action. The hope and the stories will keep coming all weekend. If you jump a bus for Sacramento, you might get a seat next to Etienne Balibar. If you try to enter the UC Santa Cruz campus–the epicenter of the movement–thousands of students and workers will be picketing every gate. Over a hundred major actions are scheduled.

But Tuesday morning, March 8 will begin the next news cycle. Where will the movement be then?

It might look a little bit like this video. Give it ten seconds. I’m pretty sure you’ll watch it to the end.

While there seems to be endless conversation about the violence of smashing windows and the damage to the movement done by spontaneous action, there is a notable absence of discussion about the violence of class division in American society and its relationship with higher education.

Is the movement so fragile that a smashed window destroys it–yet broken bodies don’t bring it to boiling point? We are told that the streets must be policed in order to be safe–that no one will join us–that people who would have supported the cause are now frightened to participate. Yet what we see is laughter, dancing and a freedom that is not possible to describe in the language of everyday capitalism. How, we must ask, is a movement that collapses under the weight of overturned trash cans going to withstand the presence of millions of people challenging their relationship to the economy?

As I listened to this young voice, I could not help but think: “This is Carl Sandburg with a video camera.”

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB–Carl Sandburg

I AM the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.

Flyers and posters
Pamphlets and powerpoints
Planning on getting arrested? (ACLU pdf)
California occupation movement blog
New York occupation movement blog
United States Student Association
Notes on the European occupations (pdf)
Most important conference of the decade–
on the occupation movement: Minneapolis, April 8-11

related posts
California is Burning
Occupation Movement Sweeps California
Berkeley Standoff via Microblog
Students Occupy UC President’s Office
UC Davis Occupiers Force Negotiations
Occupy the AHA!
Occupy and Escalate (AAUP)
Inside the Barricades (AAUP)

In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher ed coverage and what passes for policy “thought” about academic labor. “The real crisis in American science education,” the article concludes, “is a distorted job market’s inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities.” Bingo.

The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a “shortage” of US scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an “oversupply” of persons with doctorates in science.

That doesn’t make sense–except when you understand that both camps are wrong.

There is no shortage of US-trained scientists and engineers and there’s no oversupply of persons with doctorates in science or any other field.

What’s really happening is restructuring of the labor market from a “market in jobs” to a market in contingent appointments. Throughout the economy, we have substituted student and other temporary labor for faculty and other more secure workers.

The name for this restructuring is casualization, the making-temporary (and cheap, and controllable) of work that used to be secure (and more expensive, and more difficult to manage). This restructuring has been in place since 1970, when roughly 3/4 of faculty were tenured or in the tenure stream.

Today, 1/4 of faculty are tenured or in the tenure stream. Less if you address pervasive undercounting of nontenurable faculty, teaching by staff employees and graduate students. The trend line points steeply down.

All of the under- or un- employed scientists with doctorates could be employed overnight if more science, and more science education, was done by persons holding the PhD.  Instead, we do science and science education with persons who are studying for the PhD, or who gave up on studying for the PhD simply because they can work cheaper than persons who actually hold the doctorate.

If the percentage of faculty working in the tenure stream were anywhere near what it was at the high point of US scientific and technical dominance, we’d actually have a vast, sucking undersupply of persons with the PhD. Hell, just one large state system could absorb most of the so-called surplus doctorates in a few years–and as I’ve already noted, taking students out of the workforce and working toward full employment for faculty would be an actual stimulus plan.

Junk Analysis, False Solutions

If the problem is casualization, why is all the policy noise whirling about in the”shortage/oversupply” contradiction? Why is almost 100% of the conversation invested in claims that are equally but oppositely bogus–irreconcilable yet inseparable, glued together like oppositely-charged particles?

Because both wrong answers are useful to those whose interests are served by casualization.

University managers, employers like Bill Microserfs Gates, grantwriters at the pinnacle of the winner-take-all science pyramid, politicians looking to hijack curricula and hand them to corporations–all of these constituencies and many others find that their different agendas are served by either or both of these fictions. (Correspondingly, they have a substantial interest in mystifying what’s really going on)

The Scientific American is particularly good about the first half of the equation. It targets the transparent fiction endorsed by Bill Gates that the United States doesn’t produce enough scientific, engineering and technical talent.

Gates makes that claim because he likes to hire cheaply and contingently, creating huge rewards for loyal core employees, reserving the secure jobs as golden lures to keep the temps working unpaid overtime. (Ironically he borrowed the Microserfs model for his “campus” from higher education.)

With the claim that he can’t find US talent, he wins the right to employ on H-1B visas, importing cheaper labor from offshore. Not only do the imports work more cheaply, they lower the price of non-imported labor.

Politicians support Gates because he pays them handsomely for their loyalty. Or because they support other employers who also want to import labor, or who benefit from the lowered wages that result.

Gates also gets the support of those who want to diminish further the role of teachers and faculty in curricula, and hand schools over to Wal-mart and other corporations.

The piece is less strong on the second half of the equation, the “oversupply of PhDs” fiction, largely because it is so focussed on debunking Gates that at times it uses the claims of oversupply uncritically–as a usefully clear, blunt rebuttal to him and his near-universal political support.

The usefulness of the “oversupply” claim, as I’ve made clear many times, is that it obscures restructuring: work that used to be done by persons with the PhD is now being done by students and staff and adjunct lecturers. Even undergraduates. There’s zero “undersupply” of persons with doctorates if that work is given back to them.

But the piece still makes a good start on this point.  Without explicitly referencing casualization, at several points it complains about the failed structure of the science labor market–as “gone seriously awry,” failing to provide real jobs, etc.

One path forward for the article would be to address a core question such as: Well, is a PhD really only for researchers at R1 schools?

Or is a PhD for those with teaching-intensive positions as well?–as used to be the case.

The combination of speed-up of the tenured minority and casualization of the majority who teach has tended to a growing assumption that the PhD (and tenure) are really associated only with those on a major research track.

But that isn’t the case now, nor was it well back into the last century: tenure and doctoral study were also for those with teaching-intensive appointments.

Failing to address that question, the article lists some of the ineffectual junk responses to restructuring that disciplinary association staffers have been pushing for decades: oh, the excess doctorates should be trained for alternate careers! Or: they should be warned that graduate education is like trying to make a career out of acting or playing the guitar! The problem of a winner-take-all society or winner-take-all science isn’t going to be resolved, as one of their economists recommends, by making tenure function even more like a “jackpot” than it already does.

Still, a nice start.

I Haven’t Forgotten the MLA

Which reminds me: after I deal with some other obligations (reviews of recent books by Cary Nelson and David Horowitz, and covering the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education, etc), I’ll get back to our friends at the MLA.

As I see it, the MLA’s many stages of denial regarding the restructuring of academic labor go something like this:

There is No Problem (1989); There is A Problem But It’s Not Our Job (1995); Shut Up About the Problem!(1996-2000); There’s an Easy Solution to the Problem–Just Be A Screenwriter! (1997-present); The Problem’s Not as Bad As They Say (2007); Let’s Pray For a Literature-Lovin’ Miracle–Or Test Them For Literary Compliance (with our religious friends at the Teagle Foundation, 2008); We’ve Been Working Hard at this Problem for Three Decades, plus Cary Nelson and Marc Bousquet Don’t Exist! (2010).

But that’s kind of a personal perspective. I’ll work on it and get back to you.

Journalism Starting to Get It

The NY Times–which is profiting from the collapse of other newspapers and also trying to make money on a sleazy distance-learning scheme–continues to publish drivel about the radical transformation of the academic workforce.  And the other mainstream higher-ed press (um, you know who you are) continue to give way too much space to disciplinary association staffers producing hackneyed faux analysis.

But other journalistic coverage is getting better in recent years, in part because journalists are being squeezed in the same way, as portrayed especially well by The Wire. Even Michael Connelly’s latest thriller features a one-time investigative journalist bumped from the LA Times for an intern.

Across the country media outlets and journalism programs now use undergraduates and m.a. students to replace working journalists, using an endless supply of feel-good rubrics from “reviving community reporting” and service learning to “internship opportunities.”

But in reality, just like graduate student teachers, their apprenticeships are the only job in their field that most of these student journalists will ever have. When they graduate, most of the jobs they’ve trained for will already have been cannibalized into other “student learning opportunities.”

Related posts:

Occupy the AHA!
At the AHA: Huh?
Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
History ‘Job Czar’ Shuts Down PhD Production
(Oversupply Continues for Two Decades)

Slow dissolve: Manhattan, fifteen years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street– next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe–to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.

I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.

Inspired by a California law that set 75% as a minimum standard for classes that should be taught by a full-time stable faculty, even in its community colleges, we want MLA to establish educationally sound full-time/part-time ratios in the disciplines it represents.

We want the association to lobby for those standards with accreditation agencies and to urge the other big state governments like New York and Texas to follow California’s lead.

We want MLA to help California fulfill the promise of that law by lobbying for federal money to help fully fund it.

We want graduate-student representation on the governing committees of the association.

In short, we want MLA to stop promoting “alternate careers” for PhD holders, and to get busy doing the political work necessary to rebuild professorial jobs out of what’s been converted to shabby part-time work.

Franklin just stares at me. “But all of that is AAUP’s job,” she finally says.

Jump cut to grainy historical footage: a decade farther back, 1984. The MLA has traditionally been directed for a short term by a distinguished tenured faculty person, but the Executive Council now feels that the staffing crisis in the humanities–of which it has been aware since 1970–requires a full-time staffer at the helm.

A significant element in hiring Franklin for the job of director is the desire to have someone willing to devote their career to addressing the professional crisis represented by the accelerating permatemping of the faculty. Franklin represents herself as eagerly willing to do so.

Next: We Occupy the MLA

Related posts:

Occupy the AHA!
At the AHA: Huh?
Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
History ‘Job Czar’ Shuts Down PhD Production
(Oversupply Continues for Two Decades)

A guest post by Henry Giroux

In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high school teacher, Howard’s book, “Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal,” published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard’s working-class background. It offered me a language, history and politics that allowed me to engage critically and articulate my opposition to the war that was raging at the time.

I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the mix of biography, cultural capital and class location could be finely honed into a viable and laudable politics.

Later, as I got to know Howard personally, I was able to fill in the details about his working-class background and his intellectual development. We had grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar cultural capital and we both probably learned more from the streets than we had ever learned in formal schooling. There was something about Howard’s fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special - untainted by the often corrupting privileges of class entitlement.

Before I arrived in Boston to begin teaching at Boston University, Howard was a mythic figure for me and I was anxious to meet him in real life. How I first encountered him was perfectly suited to the myth. While walking to my first class, as I was nearing the university, filled with the trepidation of teaching a classroom of students, I caught my first glimpse of Howard. He was standing on a box with a bullhorn in front of the Martin Luther King memorial giving a talk calling for opposition to Silber’s attempt to undermine any democratic or progressive function of the university. The image so perfectly matched my own understanding of Howard that I remember thinking to myself, this has to be the perfect introduction to such a heroic figure.

Soon afterwards, I wrote him a note and rather sheepishly asked if we could meet. He got back to me in a day; we went out to lunch soon afterwards, and a friendship developed that lasted over 30 years. While teaching at Boston University, I often accompanied Howard when he went to high schools to talk about his published work or his plays. I sat in on many of his lectures and even taught one of his graduate courses. He loved talking to students and they were equally attracted to him. His pedagogy was dynamic, directive, focused, laced with humor and always open to dialog and interpretation. He was a magnificent teacher, who shredded all notions of the classroom as a place that was as uninteresting as it was often irrelevant to larger social concerns. He urged his students not just to learn from history, but to use it as a resource to sharpen their intellectual prowess and hone their civic responsibilities.

Howard refused to separate what he taught in the university classroom, or any forum for that matter, from the most important problems and issues facing the larger society. But he never demanded that students follow his own actions; he simply provided a model of what a combination of knowledge, teaching and social commitment meant. Central to Howard’s pedagogy was the belief that teaching students how to critically understand a text or any other form of knowledge was not enough. They also had to engage such knowledge as part of a broader engagement with matters of civic agency and social responsibility. How they did that was up to them, but, most importantly, they had to link what they learned to a self-reflective understanding of their own responsibility as engaged individuals and social actors.

He offered students a range of options. He wasn’t interested in molding students in the manner of Pygmalion, but in giving them the widest possible set of choices and knowledge necessary for them to view what they learned as an act of freedom and empowerment. There is a certain poetry in his pedagogical style and scholarship and it is captured in his belief that one can take a position without standing still. He captured this sentiment well in a comment he made in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.” He wrote:

“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

In fact, Howard was under constant attack by John Silber, then president of Boston University, because of his scholarship and teaching. One expression of that attack took the form of freezing Howard’s salary for years.

Howard loved watching independent and Hollywood films and he and I and Roz [Howard’s wife] saw many films together while I was in Boston. I remember how we quarreled over “Last Tango in Paris.” I loved the film, but he disagreed. But Howard disagreed in a way that was persuasive and instructive. He listened, stood his ground, and, if he was wrong, often said something like, “O.K., you got a point,” always accompanied by that broad and wonderful smile.

What was so moving and unmistakable about Howard was his humility, his willingness to listen, his refusal of all orthodoxies and his sense of respect for others. I remember once when he was leading a faculty strike at BU in the late 1970s and I mentioned to him that too few people had shown up. He looked at me and made it very clear that what should be acknowledged is that some people did show up and that was a beginning. He rightly put me in my place that day - a lesson I never forgot.

Howard was no soppy optimist, but someone who believed that human beings, in the face of injustice and with the necessary knowledge, were willing to resist, organize and collectively struggle. Howard led the committee organized to fight my firing by Silber. We lost that battle, but Howard was a source of deep comfort and friendship for me during a time when I had given up hope. I later learned that Silber, the notorious right-wing enemy of Howard and anyone else on the left, had included me on a top-ten list of blacklisted academics at BU. Hearing that I shared that list with Howard was a proud moment for me. But Howard occupied a special place in Silber’s list of enemies, and he once falsely accused Howard of arson, a charge he was later forced to retract once the charge was leaked to the press.

Howard was one of the few intellectuals I have met who took education seriously. He embraced it as both necessary for creating an informed citizenry and because he rightly felt it was crucial to the very nature of politics and human dignity. He was a deeply committed scholar and intellectual for whom the line between politics and life, teaching and civic commitment collapsed into each other.

Howard never allowed himself to be seduced either by threats, the seductions of fame or the need to tone down his position for the standard bearers of the new illiteracy that now populates the mainstream media. As an intellectual for the public, he was a model of dignity, engagement and civic commitment. He believed that addressing human suffering and social issues mattered, and he never flinched from that belief. His commitment to justice and the voices of those expunged from the official narratives of power are evident in such works as his monumental and best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States,” but it was also evident in many of his other works, talks, interviews and the wide scope of public interventions that marked his long and productive life. Howard provided a model of what it meant to be an engaged scholar, who was deeply committed to sustaining public values and a civic life in ways that linked theory, history and politics to the everyday needs and language that informed everyday life. He never hid behind a firewall of jargon, refused to substitute irony for civic courage and disdained the assumption that working-class and oppressed people were incapable of governing themselves.

Unlike so many public relations intellectuals today, I never heard him interview himself while talking to others. Everything he talked about often pointed to larger social issues, and all the while, he completely rejected any vestige of political and moral purity. His lack of rigidity coupled with his warmness and humor often threw people off, especially those on the left and right who seem to pride themselves on their often zombie-like stoicism. But, then again, Howard was not a child of privilege. He had a working-class sensibility, though hardly romanticized, and sympathy for the less privileged in society along with those whose voices had been kept out of the official narratives as well as a deeply felt commitment to solidarity, justice, dialogue and hope. And it was precisely this great sense of dignity and generosity in his politics and life that often moved people who shared his company privately or publicly. A few days before his death, he sent me an email commenting on something I had written for Truthout about zombie politics. (It astonishes me that this will have been the last correspondence. Even at my age, the encouragement and support of this man, this towering figure in my life, meant such a great deal.) His response captures something so enduring and moving about his spirit. He wrote:

“Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even critiques we consider ‘radical’ are not sufficient. (Frederick Douglass’ speech on the Fourth of July in 1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our indignation, is what you are doing and what is needed. I recall that Sartre, close to death, was asked: ‘What do you regret?’ He answered: ‘I wasn’t radical enough.’”

I suspect that Howard would have said the same thing about himself. And maybe no one can ever be radical enough, but Howard came close to that ideal in his work, life and politics. Howard’s death is especially poignant for me because I think the formative culture that produced intellectuals like him is gone. He leaves an enormous gap in the lives of many thousands of people who knew him and were touched by the reality of the embodied and deeply felt politics he offered to all of us. I will miss him, his emails, his work, his smile and his endearing presence. Of course, he would frown on such a sentiment, and with a smile would more than likely say, “do more than mourn, organize.” Of course, he would be right, but maybe we can do both.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies at McMaster University. He is on the advisory board of Truthout and the author, most recently, of Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009).

Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them?

As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices–Kindles, Nooks, etc–have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.)

Providing fast, inexpensive and even free access to many titles, portability, adjustable type, searchable text, and a growing list of other functions, these devices meet many readers’ needs on both airplanes and nightstands.

But these dedicated devices just aren’t ready for the prime time of academic and professional use. Limitations and glitches in their annotation functions, difficulties with copying text, and even the need to mimic the paperback book experience present real issues for the scholar, student, lawyer and engineer.

Also, rather than remedy these defects: the teams developing next generations of these devices are focussed on other issues–larger screens, color display, the ability to do email, surf the web and upload other documents and media.

Where are these devices going? It seems pretty clear. Larger, a touch heavier, more functional–their competition is driving them all in the direction of becoming netbooks, the lower end of which retail in the same $200 to $300 price range that the dedicated devices are getting, but which already offer tons more functionality.

Which raises a pretty good question.

Why not just buy a netbook?

Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer free downloadable e-reader software that gets you access to their e-book lines, generally much lower than paperback retail. Many titles aren’t available in both–Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture isn’t offered at Barnes and Noble, for example, but Amazon doesn’t begin to match their rival’s huge line of free classic texts (all of Emile Zola!).

With the netbook you just download both free e-readers and access both lines for the price of one piece of hardware.

These e-reader programs have all the defects of the dedicated readers with respect to annotation and copying, but you can have another program running for notes (and a better keyboard).

Even for night-table reading, I find the netbook e-reader a wonderful experience: no need to disturb anyone else with a light, and supreme choice even after putting your son back to bed at 3 am. Advanced into your bifocal years? No problem–just boost that type size. Are you a speed reader? It’s easy to narrow the width of the page to accommodate those who take big gulps of text at at time.  A $300 netbook has brilliantly backlit screens and lasts nine hours on one charge.

I’m not diminishing the achievements of the codex as a technology, or the marvelous production & distribution associated with these intricate arrangements of wood pulp and chemical ink. I’ve built more bookshelves than most of my colleagues in the humanities and have never sold a book–not one!– or given one away without replacing the title. I have both e-copies and paper copies of certain books, and use the paper for the heavy-annotation work.

But if you are going to tote around a bunch of media in electronic form for professional and leisure use–and you’d prefer just one or two devices, the netbook seems a smarter addition to your phone than the Kindle or its cousins.

Another thing: academic and professional reading increasingly doesn’t need to emulate the codex experience with hypertext and embedded multimedia. The netbook works for that; Kindle doesn’t.

Of course, pretty soon the Kindle will be a brand of netbook, and this will be a moot point.

Just as with paper, the future of electronic reading will offer many options. The one I’d say is potentially the most interesting and promising of all–Plastic Logic’s one-pound, 8 1/2×11 Que, is based on a technology that could lead to computers as light and flexible as a plastic file folder.

Scheduled to ship this spring, this product is clearly at least a couple of years away from serious implementation–offers to review it didn’t get a response, even of the “we’ll get back to you in a month” variety (which tells you what kind of customer service you can expect when your piece of plastic forgets your business docs!).

The stark contrast between recent imaginative actions by students and the decades of poor data, bad analysis, and foot-dragging by most academic institutions suggests a possibility. Could AAUP and the disciplinary associations could become the next target for the more radical students?

For today’s grads, socially conscious unionism no longer represents the left wing of political possibility. Instead it’s a launching pad from which they can surpass the limits to the imagination of a previous generation.

Take the AAUP. I believe we represent low-hanging fruit for the rising generation of students and contingent faculty. We are a democratic association with simple procedures. Occupying the slate with insurgent graduate student candidates can be accomplished using a simple petition process. A few thousand votes-the graduate employees on two or three campuses-could shape the AAUP’s governing Council in a year or two.

The same is true at most disciplinary associations, as we proved with the Modern Language Association Graduate Student Caucus more than a decade ago. From that series of actions dates major improvements in data gathering and analysis, the formation of the Coalition of the Academic Workforce, the minimum wage for contingent faculty, and a legacy of workplace activism in the organization’s Delegate Assembly, (not to mention the morphing of last-generation GSC activist Bill Pannapacker into Chronicle columnist “Thomas H. Benton.”)

Like the AAUP, disciplinary associations have a bullhorn regarding the profession and real purchase on the public sphere. They have staff and resources-often greater resources than the AAUP-as well as contacts with the press and politicians: the associations substantially leverage their own resources with nets of relationships with the richest campuses and wealthiest foundations.

What I am suggesting is that by joining and studying the petition process for officer candidates, a relatively small number of graduate students could begin a peaceful “occupation” of all the institutions of the profession-especially if they coordinated with students, staff, contingent faculty, and fellow travelers in the tenure stream.

What would happen if the submerged 80 percent of the profession-graduate student employees and contingent faculty-occupied the governing positions of the AAUP and of disciplinary organizations like the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Psychological Association?

What if they similarly occupied the governments of college towns-Ithaca, Bloomington, and Ann Arbor? What issues would they engage?

Where would they direct the funds? How would they employ staff time? What improprieties would they commit in public?

I, for one, would like to know.

–adapted and excerpted from Occupy and Escalate, Academe (Jan-Feb 2010).

Occupation Science

East coasters may not realize that the California quarter system means that the very eventful fall term was only ten weeks of drama: we have twice that still to run on our academic calendar.

Students appear to be still forming a response to police escalation and having their civil disobedience labeled arson and terrorism by the administration and the more credulous journalists and think-tank flacks.*

Watch for escalation as the occupations continue to move beyond the UC system into the Cal States and community colleges, and a major coalition with K-12 faculty and staff, which will sponsor a March 4 strike and day of action.

Eli Meyerhoff has organized a conference on the emerging global occupation movement. Featuring Morgan Adamson, Chris Newfield, Andrew Ross, David Downing, and Silvia Federici together with veterans from occupations in Austria, Germany, Italy, Greece, Britain and California, Beneath the University, the Commons will be held at the U of Minnesota April 8-11.

Also of interest: Reclamations, the somewhat Berkeley-centric journal devoted to the occupation movement. The best source for updates remains the OccupyCa website.

Post AHA Link Round-up

Quite a bit of favorable response, including fan mail,  kind reviews, and even an “I heart Marc Bousquet” (blush) over at the academic jobs wiki. So thanks for that. Folks interested in learning more regarding the critique of job-market theory can download the book’s intro (pdf).

I’m moving on to a new project on the Obama-Duncan partnership, so will try not to get sucked into under-informed blog spats on these issues in the future, as I have way too many times in the past couple of years.

But if you like that sort of thing, you can check out the 150 comments spawned by historian Claire B. Potter’s post on these issues over at Tenured, Not So Radical. I haven’t read most of the 60+ comments there or the 80+ over at Historiann’s effort to defend Potter.  I gather that Potter made some suggestions, at least a couple of them of the I-can-fix-the-profession-from-the-watercooler variety (like, let’s not admit folks until they’re older and grad students should have administrative experience). This sort of thing isn’t Mark C. Taylor territory, of course–it’s just under-informed. By under-informed, I do not mean a failure to read my stuff–there’s a whole slew of folks to have read.

Seems some commenters got mad, hoping for more thoughtful analysis from a self-advertised tenured radical– after all it was for a book on academic labor that Cary Nelson first borrowed that phrase from icky Roger Kimball (once my t.a. at Yale, perhaps Potter’s too, actually). Then Potter got a bit hot and started talking about grad students taking personal responsibility for their choices, veering into “Dean Dad” territory (the man’s been over-compensating for years, with his “I used to read Foucault” routine.) Plus there were other commenters who liked talking about grad students as whiny inept choosers in the market of life. Then Historiann picked up on it and, seems like, more of the same.

Read it yourself, if you like, but my impression is that the 150-comment slugfest didn’t get much of anywhere.

Better to read the most recent Academe,  or a few pages by me, Gary Rhoades, Joe Berry, Sheila Slaughter, Frank Donaghue, or Cary Nelson (whose latest is getting good reviews all over the place–even made Stanley Fish take back a few of his choicer ejaculations).

Hell, just a read a moderately conscientious review of a book by any of these folks. I’ve had enough of watercooler wisdom, and the arguments it supports, for a lifetime.

There are real questions here–who should be teaching, with what qualifications? What effect has restructuring had on student learning? Why are history departments less diverse than police departments? (Short answer: because there are real social costs to turning the professoriate into an irrational economic choice. There’s a long answer too.)

I guess what I’d say in response to Potter in particular is meta-critical: the question isn’t what grad programs can do about the “job market,” which is in any event increasingly epiphenomenal to a labor market in contingency, serving the function of managing, reproducing, and legitimating the majority contingent workforce.

The question is what should tenure-stream faculty be doing with the various institutions to which they belong to address the aggressive re-structuring of academic labor?

The second question–the right question–implicates all of us. We are all responsible for struggling against the return of the professoriate to those who can already afford extreme discounting of wages, and for the segmentation of the university workforce it creates: white faculty, brown staff, women disproproportionately in insecure positions, etc.

Whereas the supply-side job-market false heuristic says that the situation can/should be managed by directors of graduate programs. That leaves people who aren’t themselves at grad programs “producing PhDs” free to feel not particularly responsible to address massive structural changes in the profession, and to offer watercooler wisdom.

Luke Menand weighs in

This is how I feel about Luke Menand’s ideas as well–he’s been shopping the three-to-five year PhD idea to anyone who would listen for over a decade now, and has gotten NPR to flack it for him recently. I’ve argued this one out on email with about five people in the past couple of months, and gave it the consideration it deserved fifteen years ago as a grad student.

It’s not that the short degree is the worst idea in the world. I feel the same way about it as about closing programs that are doing a bad job of preparing future scholars, or reducing over-publication pressure.

Like those other Ideas that Won’t Go Away, in itself it’s an okay idea, and a good conversation to have: it’s just that it’s not necessarily going to have much of an impact on Real Issues like permatemping or managerial intrusion into curricula (with tt research faculty who “know better” as the leading edge of that intrusion).

However, if conversion to tenure ever became common a 3-year degree–especially for already experienced teachers–would be brilliantly useful.

Absent that particular utility, though, it strikes me the 3-year degree will benefit those at schools where they already get jobs without publishing–Dukies, eg–and hurt those where part of the 8 or 10 years is publishing your first three peer-reviewed articles/getting a book contract. So it’s not an unalloyed good.

Nor does it answer a bunch of basic questions: when would new faculty learn to teach, and on whom? Who would do the teaching the grads are doing now?

And if the PhD is a nonteaching luxury good like a Mercedes, then who can afford to take it? Even if totally free and affirmatively recruited: when are the interests that lead to the intention to study for such a degree formed, and in what kind of schools? Oh, it seems Historiann has scooped me once more.

Read more:

Part 1 At the AHA: Huh?
Part 2 Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
Part 3 History ‘Job Czar’ Shuts Down PhD Production
(Oversupply Continues for Two Decades)

_________________
*On the bad coverage of the occupation movement: I’ve spoken with a couple of folks regarding Kevin Carey’s sorta aggressively false characterizations of the movement–eg, that protesters “periodically surrounded, stoned, and tried to set on fire” a university official’s home–en route to persistent misrepresentation of their analysis, background, and motivations.

I’ll try to make time to collect some of these responses for a later post. Carey, one of Brainstorm’s two voices for “school reform,” has at least twice defended Yudof from what he saw as unfair or biased coverage, a concern shared by many of the substantial contingent of administration-oriented staff at the Chronicle, which has used mocking headlines to describe the student actions. My own view, of course, is that Yudof gets paid 8 bills a year to take a few shots from the press, and doesn’t need much defending. Students are entitled to have their reputations handled more carefully. At least by my reading of journalistic ethics and established practice (not to mention US libel law).

Okay, let’s imagine the impossible of total supply-side control. Clamp off admissions to EVERY doctoral program in history immediately and what happens?

They all keep pumping out new PhDs at contemporary levels for ten years. Scratch that. They actually pump out higher levels, because fewer of those enrolled will drop out, believing that they have better chances. So that keeps the “supply” at status quo rates for, say, thirteen to fifteen years. Then of course there’s all the underemployed circling the drain. They’re good for at least another five years’ supply.

Another thing. Young people being so clever, they’ll find ways around that job czar and the gerontocracy, enrolling–as so many already do–in American Studies, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies. So while history is choking off “supply,” the “competition” will continue merrily.

So even after total lockdown on admissions, this “oversupply” will continue for two decades at minimum. When could “production” start again? After a decade? At what level?

One more thing. Since we’re still staying hands-off on the demand side–what administrators want is what administrators want, and what can us chickens do about that?–that “demand” will continue to be restructured downward on a dozen fronts: dumping humanities from curricula, more casualization, automated courseware, etc.

So I remain confused, if not downright skeptical. To those of you scoffing at how impractical it is to try and attack the problem where it lives–on the demand side, with aggressive administrator restructuring of demand, I want to say this: Really? You think this is the practical alternative?

Here are some demand-side questions, all of them far more practical, doable, and approachable than the Wiley E. Coyote-style fantasy of clambering atop a giant people pipeline and shutting ‘er down.

1. How much teaching should graduate students do per year, for how many years en route to a degree? At what rate should they be paid?

2. On what basis should teaching-intensive faculty in history earn tenure? If monograph publication isn’t the gold standard for professional activity, what forms of “doing history” should count? What size should their classes be? How many should they teach in relation to participation in governance and “doing history”? What degrees should they hold?

3. What’s the limit to standardization, automation, and “scaling up” schemes? Historians and many other faculty, especially academostars, are susceptible to the idea that the nation really only needs a handful of doctorally-degreed specialist stars in each field, and we can “scale up” their teaching infinitely by streaming their lectures (plus enlarging the army of cheap teachers/volunteers leading discussion sections).

4. When faculty are employed on a “temporary” basis, when is temporary an honest descriptor and when is it a loincloth for exploitation? Shouldn’t “temporary” faculty be paid more than nontemporary faculty (to contribute to self-funding of benefits, inconvenience, etc) What are the academic rights, including academic freedom in the classroom, and to teaching their own syllabi, of “temporary” faculty when they’re truly temporary? What are their rights in that respect when they’re really permanent but being treated as temporary?

Since we’re all so fond of imaginary “basic economics” at one stroke, wouldn’t removing the incentive for exploitation (super-cheap wages for grads and contingent faculty) solve the problem now masquerading as an “oversupply”?

Part 1 At the AHA: Huh?
Part 2 Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?

My piece questioning the supply-side bent to the American Historical Association’s 2010 job report has gotten thoughtful replies by historiann, Alan Baumler, Jonathan Rees, Ellen Schrecker, Sandy Thatcher and others, both here and at Brainstorm.

I really appreciate these thoughts, and want to emphasize how much I respect Townsend’s work for AHA over the years, including his parsing of the data on many fronts-especially “privilege,” which I believe informs his diss as well- or I’d probably have come on a bit stronger on the supply-side orientation.

It seems one part of the problem is the relationship of history faculty at smaller schools and community colleges to the discipline, and to the AHA as a disciplinary organization. As Alan wrote in response to my discussion of the many faculty literally off the AHA’s chart:

Ph.D programs don’t want that. They judge themselves by the number of dissertations completed and the number of good jobs their grads get. If a grad student finishes and gets a job at a no-name school, leaves with an A.B.D and gets a job with the State Department or gets eaten by wolves it’s all the same to most programs; they don’t count.

Isn’t that a fairly unhealthy (not to mention undemocratic, elitist, etc) basis for reproducing one’s profession?

Perhaps fixing this attitude-if it really is as widespread as Alan suggests-is far more urgent, and would do more to improve the working lives of historians, than ill-fated adventures in supply-side pseudoeconomics.

I also take Jonathan’s point (track back to his home blog), that eliminating certain programs might do the profession good. That’s probably true in some ways in most fields–at least insofar as there are programs that might be doing a poor job of preparing future scholars–but I wonder if that’s not a different sort of conversation to have?

Closing programs doing a bad job of preparing future historians isn’t going to answer real questions (should community college faculty hold the PhD?) or seriously alter hiring patterns (who hires badly-prepared faculty anyway?).

The Supply-Reduction Fantasy

I think Jonathan’s saying that reducing supply is more doable than addressing casualization (as Alan hints also) and would at least do no harm.

But I’m not actually sure about either prong of that observation. Including the assumption it wouldn’t be harmful.

Wouldn’t restricting supply (even if possible practically and ethically) do at minimum the harm of answering in advance certain real questions (”nope, community colleges and small schools don’t need ‘real’ historians”) and bypass others (”what should teaching and learning at those schools be like anyway?)?

So for starters I’d like to see AHA giving good, tough activist answers to those sorts of questions, not knuckling under to the managerial dominant of the status quo by naturalizing “demand” (which is just an abstraction of a struggle between real persons and groups, a struggle being won by administrations and the interests they represent).

Regarding the effectiveness of supply side interventions: Well, just imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

And supply-side shrinkage would have at best modest effects on other, simultaneous managerial initiatives-increasing class size, teaching by nonfaculty, deprofessionalization and permatemping, automation of instruction, standardization and managerial control of curricula, etc.

As I document at length in HTUW, contemporary campus management doesn’t “want” persons holding the PhD to teach; they need a very modest number of persons with the PhD to legitimate the presence of a boatload of cheap teachers. During the whole period that supply-side analysis dominated the discourse of the professon with claims about “PhD overproduction,” the percentage of folks teaching with the PhD has steadily dropped.

Supply side analysis falsely simplifies a complex historical struggle between real persons and groups, and-fancifully, unsupportably-imagines that the holder of a PhD is selling a commodity highly desired in an employment marketplace. (And further simplistically assumes that price can always be affected by supply, confuses price and value, etc etc).

What actually affects historians’ lives is their working conditions-how much teaching they do, at what salaries, with what recognition by colleagues, etc etc.

The “market for PhDs” is not the main shaper of those things: they can and should be struggled for directly.

Imagining that all of those issues are explained by, and can be addressed within, a “job market” is intellectually lazy and an indefensible position for a professional association. (See pp 15-27 here for more analysis in this vein.).

IMHO, the real struggle for the AHA is to inclusively shape the working conditions of “all historians,” not play speculator in an imaginary “job market.”

Micro-analysis vs Job-market Theory

Ellen Schrecker very kindly weighs in with comradely concerns (we’re on the AAUP council and Academe advisory boards together), and points out the utility of Townsend’s data-gathering on trends regarding specializations (a point also made by Alan on my home blog).

I agree with both Alan and Ellen that this data gathering and micro-analysis is extremely valuable; my concern is with scaling this up to big-picture analysis of historical transformation (by way of analogizing workplace struggle to “markets”).

Demand-side Solutions to the Publishing Glut?

In the most original response, Sandy Thatcher at Penn State UP and former prez of “the other” AAUP (Association of American University Presses), asks me kinda rhetorically, but still usefully and interestingly, whether I support a “demand-side” solution to the “crisis in scholarly communication”:

demand-side solution for faculty publishing, too, by expanding the number of publishing outlets or increasing the output of those already existing. Of course, that would only exacerbate the chief problem that university presses have faced in the last couple of decades, viz., decreasing demand for their output by libraries. The whole history of university press publishing has been one of market failure, i.e., inadequate demand for the supply of academic writings. Increasing the number of tenure-track jobs will pose greater burdens on the already stressed system so long as P&T committees continue to insist on publication of the monograph as the “gold standard”–and not just one monograph now for tenure, but at some universities two. The analysis needs to go beyond expanding jobs for tenure-track faculty; it needs to deal with the crisis in scholarly communication that such an increase would exacerbate.

This deserves a post or ten of its own. I’ll just make a few points and think about coming back to this later. Like Townsend, I think a lot about digital publication of academic writing, and have taught it to students almost annually for almost fifteen years. From that perspective I’ll indulge in some futurology.

My belief is that historians in particular will move to a standard of digital academic publication–in the form of hypertext. What other form of writing allows historians to present archival material and other forms of data at virtually any length and medium the scholar feels appropriate, while navigating and presenting the existing secondary literature, while presenting their own scholarship in both linear and nonlinear forms? Some historians will write well natively to this medium; others will require specialist assistants; and there will be plenty of digitally-published books, chapters, and articles.

Closer to contemporary reality, and the concerns of presses: the printed book is still a fetish object for the academic gerontocracy, but the kindle, the nook, the sony reader and the plastic-paper people are changing that ground under our feet. A peer-reviewed digitally-published print-on-demandable monograph is just fine. Sandy’s question probably needs to be re-framed as “What role will presses play in digital publication?”  After all, peer review and digital publication doesn’t require the press at all–and others have already long noted the outsourcing of high stakes tenure decisions to university press acquisitions editor (a practice to which many faculty will cheerfully say, “good riddance!”)

And while questions of business models and who reviews the digital academic monograph are being sorted out, we can guess at some of what might happen by looking at the world of digital journal publication, where there’s plenty of re-structuring. Some of the good solutions are in fact demand-side: lots of good new all-digital journals, started up outside of traditional distribution networks, do vastly better work than many of the lumbering paper-slaughterers out there.

I completely agree with Sandy that the question of speed-up–too much publishing, unnecessary publishing–is very important.

We need to address that, but not necessarily from the point of view of the special problems of university presses trying to figure out their business models.

We need to address that question from the point of view of students and faculty–above all, to revalue shared governance and teaching, and remember that tenure is not a merit badge for research faculty, but a guarantee of the professional rights and responsibilities of teaching-intensive faculty.

To bring this back to where we started–I think the professional circumstances and needs of teaching-intensive history faculty–on and off the tenure track–is a question that the discipline of history can look at a bit more carefully than heretofore.

A funny thing happened on the way to the AHA this year — American Historical Association staffer Robert B. Townsend issued his annual report on tenure-track employment in the field. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that holders of freshly minted doctorates face grim prospects. What raised my eyebrows — and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor — was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an “oversupply” of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control “the supply side of the market,” i.e., “cut the number of students” in doctoral programs.

This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers — as what I call part of a “second wave” of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don’t hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it’s pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, i.e., that the issue needs to be addressed from the “demand side.” There’s no real oversupply of folks holding the Ph.D. because what’s happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators — in many fields, work that used to be done by persons holding the Ph.D. and on the tenure track is now done by persons without the terminal degree and contingently. Increasingly, even undergraduates are playing a role in this restructured “demand” for faculty work, participating in the instruction of other undergraduates.

In this context, it was a bit unsettling to read Townsend’s 2010 analysis:

The near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years had very little to do with a diminishing number of jobs, or even the growing use of part-time and contingent faculty. … The primary problem today, as it was a decade ago, seems to lie on the supply side of the market — in the number of doctoral students being trained, and in the skills and expectations those students develop in the course of their training.

Red flag, bull, etc.

Now, before I unpack this I want to say several nice things about Townsend. As a long-term staffer at the AHA, over the last couple of decades he’s produced over a hundred useful articles, reports, and analyses on the employment prospects of persons holding the Ph.D. in history. He is also himself the holder of a newly-minted Ph.D. in history from George Mason (2009), where they do fantastic work in the digital humanities (another topic on which Townsend has also written prolifically and well), thanks to Townsend’s late thesis advisor, the brilliant Roy Rosenzweig. The thesis (not yet listed in DAI or the GMU library) is on the early professionalization of history, and apparently overlaps a bit with his staff work. He’s especially to be congratulated for his continuing presentation of disquieting data on the low proportion of women and ethnic minorities amongst historians and history majors, and on the role of privileged backgrounds in shaping interest in history, including careers in the field. Many of the concerns that Rob has expressed in print as a staffer are the same concerns that have shaped my own career, and if he’s job-hunting with that new Ph.D., I’d be thrilled to see him land a job and raise the same questions from a faculty position.

I also want to offer some caveats: Circumstances differ from field to field, and I willingly acknowledge that my own perspective on academic labor is shaped by my more intimate understanding of working conditions in English. I sometimes make erroneous assumptions on the basis of that more intimate understanding. History is different, perhaps very different, and I’ve made no special study of it — and really would like a chance to see Townsend’s dissertation (hint). History is a smallish field, hence more volatile, and has recently seen growth in the undergraduate major and hiring.

Caveats and compliments out of the way, I want to say, though:

I’m confused. I wish some really smart folks  in history — who I happen to know think about these issues — would help me out. Historiann? Jonathan Rees? (Both folks I’d love to see added to Ye Olde Brainstorm’s lineup, btw.)

I think I get what Townsend is driving at. Is it something like this? “In our particular discipline, history, we’ve had a bunch of relatively good years in recent memory, and whatever’s going on out there with casualization in other disciplines, our issue is more straightforward: We wouldn’t have all this stress if we shrunk our doctoral programs.” That would be the “obvious solution,” as Townsend puts it.

As I look at Townsend’s good work for AHA over the years, I believe I see the data driving his conclusion that what history needs is a good supply-side fix.

Looking at his graph of job ads vs new doctorates, 1970-present, a couple of things stand out: 1) in two periods of about a half-decade each, there were more job ads than doctorates awarded, and 2) the raw number of job ads, flirting with 700 annually in the 1970s, were more like 1,000 a year between 2000 and 2010. So one first-pass reading might be that there’s a market in jobs that has boom periods and bust periods, and — with rising interest in the history major, there has been growth in hiring for faculty. This leads Townsend to relative peace of mind about contingency, at least within history, and to further represent nontenurable appointments as “threshold” positions, way-stations to eventual stable employment (though he does note that some folks stay in the threshold, give up, drop out before running this gauntlet, etc.).

But it does seem there’s still a bunch of dots needing to be connected.

For starters, most disciplines have added raw numbers of tenure track lines in the past 15 years, English and sociology being notable exceptions. The percentage of faculty teaching nontenurably, however has soared. Rising raw numbers of job ads isn’t particularly meaningful.

So I’d like to know: What percentage of the history job ads were for nontenurable and senior positions in 1970 versus 2010? What percentage of the faculty in history were teaching nontenurably in 1970 versus today? What percentage of undergraduate sections are taught by graduate students and nontenurable faculty today vs. then? How many folks with doctorates pass through “threshold” positions into stable employment — after how long? How do those considerations relate to the disproportionate whiteness, masculinity, and privilege in tenure-track employment, interest in the field, etc? For that matter, how does AHA account for the labor of graduate students? They too are contingent faculty, when responsible for direct instruction, and also in leveraging the labor of tenure-stream faculty, when serving as teaching “assistants,” permitting larger and larger lecture enrollments, etc. (Related question: Is a lecture course ever too big? If the only function of the tenured is to deliver lectures and supervise subordinates who conduct discussions, why can’t we “scale up,” as our school-reform friends urge us, and have half of the lectures delivered by video? Why not 80 percent delivered by video?)

Which gets me to my second question: Why is the number of jobs “just enough” in this analysis, and the number of historians too many?

One major risk of supply-side analysis is the naturalization of demand — what the market wants is what the market wants.

But is that how professions, and professional associations like the AHA ought to be thinking about professional work? A traditional characteristic of professions is regulating who is qualified to do the work of the profession. And in this case, the word “market” is a heavily loaded abstraction for an actual group: administrators. The “market” is what administrators permit faculty to hire. But what administrators want (or allow) isn’t neutral, or connected to student needs, preferences, etc. in any natural or obvious way; it’s enormously activist, and intentional movement, with the overt intention of changing the faculty workplace. Perhaps a more useful analytical frame is one that captures the struggle between faculty and administrators.

In the end, even if all the history grad programs affiliated with AHA made someone on the AHA staff into a jobs czar — Stalin of the profession! — and allowed her to say how many each could graduate, would that  fix the problem?

If AHA shrunk graduate-student assistantships, what would keep administrations from hiring talented undergraduates or volunteer history enthusiasts lead the discussion sections? Don’t you still have to answer the tough questions: Who should teach, on what terms?

It’s well understood by most folks doing serious work on academic labor that regardless of how one analyzes the problem, most “supply-side” solutions are doomed to fail so long as administrators have so much control over the contours of demand that they can put staff, permatemps, and students — including undergraduates — to work at activities that were formerly done by persons holding doctorates.

Also, overall the AHA data seem gappy. The AHA 2004-05 analysis couldn’t account for the employment of two-thirds of persons with history Ph.D.’s over the preceding 15 years!

Wow. When I went looking at the method, which involved searching history departments in the AHA directory, though, I didn’t see any discussion of community colleges. Which led me to look at the directory, which doesn’t seem to list too many community colleges (unless I was using it wrong). And a lot of other departments don’t seem to maintain membership.

So, again, hard question kinda passed by: If AHA is truly “the professional association for all historians,” as the slogan has it, why aren’t you counting all the folks working in community colleges with their Ph.D.’s? Are they “historians”? Could community colleges use more folks with Ph.D.’s teaching? (Perhaps with some rethinking of the doctoral training?) If the answer is yes, then why talk about shrinking “production” of doctorates when you could be talking about the community college as a center for public history?

Even if Townsend is right that history is different from some other disciplines, I’d like to know just how different, and to have a lot more information before I could get on board with this analysis. This is just a blog post, trying to get some thought started, without a detailed review of Townsend’s overall work (again, which I’d be happy to do), but it strikes me that this report is running some risks — of minimizing the constructedness and gappiness of the data, naturalizing the “market” as force in history as opposed to seeing it as actual relations between persons in organized groups (faculty associations, administrative bureaucracies and college associations, etc.); simplifying a complex labor system by selectively looking at some sectors (tenure-track jobs) and ignoring others…

Update: part 2, Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA? and part 3, History ‘Job Czar Shuts Down PhD Production (”Oversupply” Continues for Two Decades).  All of this with more commentary x-posted to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm group blog, where I’m currently the token left-of-liberal and academic-labor person.

See Townsend’s latest report and the 2004-05 analysis, as well as my introduction (pdf) to How the University Works (NYU, 2008), which analyzes the failings of “job-market theory.” (The final chapter of the book addresses how job-market theory shaped the professional-association discourse over at the Modern Language Association.)”

Bérubé How many submissions did you receive for The Institution of Literature?
Williams 385, not counting the nine essays you submitted, eight of which sucked, if you don’t mind my saying so.
Bérubé Not at all. I totally respect your opinion when it comes to essays of mine that suck.
Williams Well, they did. As did many of the 65 essays I accepted, 38 of which I had to rewrite.
Lyon That sounds like a lot.
Williams Yeah. I take editing seriously.
Bérubé Well, how much rewriting did you do? We’re talking line edits, right?
Williams Fuck no. I rewrote those motherfuckers from scratch.
Bérubé Really? What did their authors say about that?
Williams I didn’t ask them. Why?
Bérubé Well, because most of the time, when editors make substantial changes to a manuscript, they run them by the authors, that’s why.
Williams Fuck that. If I ran things by people, do you know long it would take me to produce an issue?
Bérubé No, how long?
Williams Too fucking long, that’s how long. There’s no way I have time to send editorial suggestions back to people who’ll only sit on them for four or five months and then get back to me with a bunch of bullshit complaints about what I’ve cut. Besides, do you think that guys like Leitch and Kumar give a shit either way? It’s not like they’re going to notice. Hell, I stuck three paragraphs from the Grundrisse into your first essay and you didn’t say a fucking word.
Bérubé Wait, wait. That whole bit about how “the question of the relation between this production-determining distribution, and production, belongs evidently within production itself”? That wasn’t mine?

–excerpted from Michael Bérubé and Janet Lyon, The Early Years: An Interview with Jeffrey J. Williams

In this fanciful interview composed for the minnesota review roast issue celebrating Williams’ eighteen-year run as editor, Lyon and Bérubé capture the true picture of Williams talking out of school about the task of editing the journal that Paul Buhle called “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture,” read by his students at Brown with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.”

Profane, forthright, daring and stylish, Williams made editing an academic journal into a platform for public intellectualism to an extent unmatched by anyone of his generation: during Williams’ tenure, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Education than any other academic journal.

For a warm and frequently hilarious farewell–patched together in just under two weeks from call for papers to shipped print job–wizard managing editor Heather Steffen compiled a mock entry in Jeff’s day planner, a flowchart of his acceptance guidelines for fiction, 4 top ten lists, a mad lib, 4 mock interviews, a previously unpublished actual interview, and 21 funny and touching short notes from grad students to luminaries. You can read the full Lyon & Berube performance, browse the table of contents or download the whole thing (pdf). You can find Steffen’s email address on the contents page if you’d like her to mail you a bound copy.

Kudos to all of the participants for their wit and grace, and special thanks to Steffen for pulling this together in the aftermath of shipping the last scholarly number of the journal under Williams’ aegis, the Feral Issue, which she coedited.

After Four Serious Bids, Journal Moves to Virginia Tech

As previously reported in this space, Williams gave up the journal rather than capitulate when the “quality managers” at Carnegie Mellon demanded that he double his grad students’ workload at minnesota review or else give up his summer pay–a “performance funding” parlor trick intended to transfer piles of loose change from the already-gasping humanities to gimmicks like the Data Truck and scary initiatives like automating the curriculum with standardized course modules (no troubling keeping up with the discipline!) and robotic grading and computerized “feedback” (”I can’t let you do that, Johnny.”)

You know–the kind of “scaling up” and “innovation” that school reform cheerleaders scribbling about college “leaders,” students, and community stakeholders without ever mentioning the faculty, even as an afterthought–”learning,” if that’s what you call it, straight from the mind of the dear leader to the student brain, uncomplicated by scholarship or faculty thought, hurray!

Despite the pressure on humanities faculty everywhere in the past couple of years, Williams received four credible fully-funded proposals from editors at public universities, all meeting or exceeding the reasonable funding standards Williams set for a journal of this stature.  Congratulations to the journal’s new hosts at Virginia Tech, especially incoming editor Janelle Watson and her assistant Grace Mike.

And warm thanks to Williams for eighteen years on the job, and for going out with grace, courage, and principle.

January 28-29,“Can Obama Learn? In its First Year, the Administration Fails Education.” Public Lecture and Workshop, Northern Arizona University.

February 11-12 Plenary, “Robots on Campus: Why We’re Panicked by the Machine Grading of Student Writing.” Networks and Enclaves: Open Access and Work in the 21st Century. University of California, Irvine.

June 11 Keynote, “System Crash: Risk, Crisis, Literature.” Simon Fraser University English Graduate Conference.

June 12-13 AAUP Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education.Washington DC.

June 14-20, MLG Institute for Culture and Society, Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

August 13-15, Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) Biennial Meeting, Quebec City, Quebec.

November 2010, AAUP Council, Washington DC.

January 2011, Modern Language Association, Los Angeles CA.

In a second occupation at Mrak Hall, student activists forced the administration to negotiate, make several concessions, and enter into discussion about their demands. See the full story, complete with a scan of the agreement signed by UC administrator Janet Gong.All thanks to the disobedient!

Several hundred students gathered at the Oakland courthouse Monday to protest the filing of felony burglary charges against protesters last week, then began an impromptu march over to the University of California’s Office of the President (UCOP), the building from which Mark Yudof directs the entire UC system.

During the ensuing sit-in, students demanded to meet with Yudof, and eventually were met by two staffers who apparently admitted earning salaries of between 250,000 and 350,000 dollars.

Follow the occupation news here and here.

Follow the Berkeley standoff via microblog. Also see this video of a unionized campus worker addressing several hundred UCSC students during the third day of the current occupation. Best updates on California occupations here; best strike and breaking media from UPTE; and all other UC news at Newfield et al’s place here.

Update 5pm PST: Berkeley police turned off the campus wireless and sent in the SWAT team: the last transmission was the microblogger recording SWAT smashing the hinges off the doors. Image of the cops bursting in can be found here. Latest: reports of 40 UC-B students arrested, 1 seriously injured.

Update 530 pm: it appears that UC Davis is reoccupied, with as many as 100 students occupying Dutton Hall. No blog source yet, but follow this DailyKos diary and this microblog aggregation.

For those keeping journalistic score: the NY Times, LA Times and CNN utterly whupped the trade press on covering the occupations. Best image, LA Times. Second best image: SFChronicle.

To the disobedient ones: thank you.

Okay, can’t resist. More updates. If you missed it–you gotta read this beautiful account of the occupation of (Clark) Kerr Hall, the UCSC administration building, Reflections on an Arrow in Flight:

tonight around 200 people are occupying the largest administrative building at ucsc. the chancellor’s office is denied to him as education will be denied to thousands of youth in california, as the uc and csu approved 32% tuition hikes earlier today in so cal. (police were exceptionally violent at the ucla protest, where regents were trapped inside the building for a time. lots of pictures of them tasing and beating the fuck out of people. pigs also got pretty brutal at the solidarity demo in nyc and 45 people were arrested occupying an admin building at uc davis. the ucla occupation dissolved today due to threat of police attack.)

but wait how did this happen? weeks ago we said “don’t even bother talking about kerr hall, it’s a pipe dream”. the only way to make the impossible possible is by building action through action. today there was a general assembly at occupied kresge where 3-400 people decided “let’s go occupy something!” really, it was that simple. we marched around campus for about 20-30 minutes chanting. hahn and the bookstore were both on lockdown. then suddenly we were descending on kerr hall. they locked the doors inside as the swarm approached. we started runnning. someone finds an open window and a door is propped open from inside.

then there are 300 people running through kerr hall, chanting, screaming, pounding on the walls. such a tremendous feeling of collective-being. into the stairwell, but the doors are locked; someone hops in an elevator and then we are pouring up into the second floor, where the main entrance lobby and the chancellor’s office both are. HOLY FUCK! we just occupied kerr hall!! um… what do we do now?!

how easily it is done, and how difficult. not to over-dramatize what is happening here, but it immediately brings to mind, for instance, what we’ve heard about mai 68 from theorie communiste. once we make the insurrectionary rupture - then what?? how to organize, how to spread?

there are those who view our struggle as moral or philosophical rather than material or tactical. they are lost in abstractions. they think we all want “democracy” and “openness”, they think not in terms of communication but of appearance, and they feel that they have common ground with bureaucrats. well, let them have it. the strength of our movement, of our communization, if it takes strength, is in our material force and our ability to collectively impose what we want. not to dialogue democratically with those who own the means of our existence; not to recognize, acknowledge and thus reinforce their position but to render it irrelevant.

to push the university struggle to its limits. obviously, it has limits and we are bearing down on them. splits “within the movement” will be clarified (perhaps as brutally as at berkeley, where, again, a certain “section” literally took it upon itself to police the “rest of” the movement, as far as collaborating with the actual police). we’ll see.

the occupation at kerr hall compiled a very long list of demands. this happened because people with a megaphone decided that as soon as we had taken the floor the first thing to do was have a very long meeting where we decide on demands that we want to be satisfied before we would leave the building. demands are all well and good, there were many beautifully impossible demands issued. some of us however ditched this meeting because arguing about impossible demands is silly and pointless and most of all so if there is no occupation - ie no leverage to make them with. so we set about working on the practical details of inhabiting the space.

anyway, obviously the demands are ungrantable. a crisis period means that this will be more and more common, for instance, wage struggles in europe and asia, boss napping in france and riots in bangladesh and china… if there is nothing to pay them, there is just nothing to pay them. at this point it is only the police - the state - who enforce class belonging and prevent forceful communization via rioting and looting. this is the direction in which existing contradictions must currently be pushed.

there will be no business as usual tomorrow at kerr hall. there will be a union-organized rally at noon followed by an enrage-organized general assembly. the admin will begin threatening us that they need the building back on monday. instead of listening to their bullshit, we need to underline our demands. one of which was that school be canceled for a day; this could be monday. the admin obviously don’t know what to do about the fact that they keep losing control of parts of campus, other than wait it out. obviously this may change but we need to keep the initiative.

they also like to portray themselves as being “on our side”, against the cuts. this is a chance to demand that they PROVE IT instead of just talking out their asses like we know they do. they can take our side against the regents. or they can catalyze further struggle. or whatever. again, the point is we want them to become irrelevant. the point is we will hit our limits soon and have some choices to make.

anyway. two buildings are occupied right now. hella tight.

can’t stop, won’t stop. push the contradictions. escalate.

occupy the fucking shit out of everything.

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended 1-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police beat and pepper-sprayed students to re-take the building’s first floor. Students appear to hold the second floor at this time. Two buildings remain occupied by hundreds of students at UC-Santa Cruz, which has been the epicenter of the California occupation movement.

Since the first UCSC occupation featuring only a few dozen students earlier this term, their rhetoric and tactics have spread across the state: even the the more respectable “UC solidarity” movement uniting staff, faculty and students have taken up their mantra, to “escalate” the struggle.

The expanded wave of occupiers, featuring a reported 200-300 students in the Kerr admin building and 500 students in the Kresge town hall, have articulated detailed demands: see below.

Thanksgiving Without The People of the Corn

I’ll be in London as a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University’s School of Business and Management over US Thanksgiving. You know, in a culture where you can actually talk about the failures of capitalism–even in a business school–and not have the droolies come rising out of the corn: the Market is God…must kill the dissenter… he has an Agenda different from Holy Reagan.. my cartoon of Adam Smith proves the Intelligent Design of capitalism….

While I’m off the beat, the best source for occupation news is here. The mainstream press in California and CNN have noticed these events.

Unfortunately, besides my work in the “ideas & opinion” portion of the paper–my tiny blogger stipend representing about 1/15 of a reporter’s salary–all the Chronicle of Higher ED has been able to muster is a California stringer doing a quickie voiceover of a video clip I embedded in this column (and referring, wierdly, to raising “New York City tuition”), and a brief mention of just one of the wave of occupations–at Berkeley, natch.

“Would you like a happy ending with that?”

Well, that’s not quite all.

Senior “reporter” Paul Fain–or someone using his name– did take time out of his busy day massaging the egos of higher ed leadership to upload snotty comments on my last post at the Chronicle of Higher Education Review’s Brainstorm group blog, inaccurately accusing me of having a personal agenda, overblown rhetoric, and the like.

I mean he makes me sound like I’m a blogger with left-wing tendencies filling the token left-of-liberal slot in an ideas & opinion segment of the paper.  Shocking! Gee, Paul, it must be a pretty slow news day at the leadership-ego massage parlor for you to jump on that headline.

If Fain or the person using his name were actually following the story, he’d have known that anti-capitalist rhetoric is part of the global movement, as well as here in California, and that critique of capitalism has been on uptick everywhere in the mass media/entertainment complex. To the extent the first wave of occupiers spoke out, they were fairly bluntly anti-capitalist, without my help.

And battling Yudof and Schwarzenegger, or corporate management of higher ed generally, hardly qualifies as a “personal agenda.”

As anyone who has followed my columns knows, I’ve been curious as to where occupations would go, and have hardly taken for granted that they’d increase:  the trope of a “pillar of fire” refers not to an inferno, but to an enigmatic sign.

My suggestion to Fain or the person borrowing his moniker is that Chron might want to get Fain off his cushy “beat” lecturing executives on how to manage the bad press generated by their greed and selfishness, and do some reporting.

Or at least get the two-by-four out of your own eye before pointing to the ideological specks in others.

UCSC Occupiers’ Demands

1. Repeal the 32% fee increase
2. Stop all current construction on campus
3. UC funds and budget are made transparent
4. Verbal and written commitment to Master Plan
5. Total amnesty to all people occupying buildings and involved in student protest concerning budget cuts including: Doug G., and Brian Glasscock and Olivia Egan Rudolph
6. Keep all resource centers open: engaging education, women’s resource center, and all other diversity centers
7. Keep the campus child-care center open
8. Repeal cuts to the Community Studies Field Program
9. Re-funding the CMMU field studies coordinator positions
10. Get verbal and written agreement from admins to shut-down campus for one day for the purpose of educating students on the budget cuts
11. Said support for AB656
12. Said commitment to work-study for all who are eligible
13. Making UC Santa Cruz a safe campus for all undocumented (AB540) students and workers
14. Keeping LALS professors Guillermo Delgado & Susan Jonas
15. Repeal all furloughs to all campus employees, renege the 15% cut in labor time for custodians
16. Stop the gutting of funding for fellowships and TAships and the re-instatement of TAs who lost their jobs due the budget cuts from this quarter
17. Re-prioritizing funding so that essential student services i.e. the library get adequate funding to ensure regular library hours
18. Censure Mark Yudof
19. Un-arming UC police of all weapons including tasers
20. NO SCPD police allowed on campus
21. An apology from the regents and the state
22. Creating a free and permanent organizing space on campus for student activists and organizers (first options: Kresge Town Hall)
23. Due process for students:
a. trial by peers
b. constitutional rights for students tried under the UC judicial system
24. Making rent affordable for Family Student Housing, ensuring that the price does not exceed that of operating costs

Long Term:
1. no student fees
2. return to master plan
3. abolition of regents’ positions
4. abolition of all student debts
5. tripling of funds from the state to public universities
6. all eligible students get work-study
7. highest UC salaries are tied proportionally to the lowest waged workers
8. Impeach Mark Yudof
9. Representation of students and faculty equal to UCOP/UC Regents
10. All UCSC tuition fees stay at UCSC
11. UC Money is only invested to education
a. cut ties with Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos & Livermore National Labs

Update: you’ve got to watch this video.

Yesterday the UC Regents walked into a room packed with gasoline and nonchalantly lit their cigars–handing down tuition increases that will hike 2010 rates 44% over 2008, turning higher ed into a gated community for the offspring of California’s “Real Housewives” class. Their bet is the usual bet made by the comfortable: someone else will get scorched.

Why wouldn’t they feel safe? We live in an upside-down world where bankers–not the capitalists, just their paid lackeys–get bonuses larger than the deficits of entire states, and the money pimps at the Wall Street Journal are saying, yeah, take it, citizens, take it, ha-ha! And say thank you, too!

The misery of tens of millions in every sector of the public–in education, health, income security, could be swept away if we forced more bankers and executives to live like teachers and nurses for a year or two.

California is Burning

That pent-up misery is volatile, though, and starting to flow around the feet of the bankers. More and more of us are waking up to one thought: It’s the capitalism, stupid!

For over a year now, students, faculty, and parents across the globe have been turning out by the hundreds of thousands to protest American-style “reforms.” You know: junk curricula, volunteer teaching, the return of indentured servitude, corporate domination of research, ruthless administrator control. The NYT serving up Stanley Fish (”Do your job, punk!”) as the face of higher ed.

Today, American students, staff and faculty are protesting American-style education.  Led by staff strikes and student occupations, a pillar of fire is racing across the California desert toward the huge air-conditioned mausoleums of the trustee class.

No question, it’s not yet an inferno.

But last month’s occupations featuring a few dozen are now occupations of a few hundred: 500 students have set up barricades at UC Santa Cruz; hundreds more marched chanting through hallways at San Francisco State, taking over an administrative building.

At least a thousand students and faculty will face off against riot police and join staff picketing the Regents in Los Angeles.

Yesterday 14 students were arrested for chanting and singing “We Shall Overcome” during the regents’ theater piece (”we’re having a meeting here and trying to pretend that the outcome is in doubt!”)

At 6 am this morning two or three dozen students stormed UCLA’s Campbell Hall, chaining the doors.

Give Thanks for the Disobedient

This has actually been a season of swift victories for faculty and students–wherever we’ve seen truly organized and militant faculty, as with AAUP-Oakland in Michigan in October, or grad students, as at Illinois this week, the administration has quickly caved.

Of course the administrators caved–the real power is where it’s always been, with the mass of us, if we can just keep ourselves together long enough to say “no” in one breath.

The California situation is bigger and more complex.

And the faculty with the loudest voices, those in the tenure stream at the UC campuses, aren’t unionized: most of them and many of their students have little experience with solidarity with other education groups, much less other labor sectors.

They’re doing their best, but they can’t help themselves. So far it seems they want to save their idea of Berkeley and other public research universities–and just don’t care all that much about Cal State Fullerton,  third grade teachers in Modesto, or the nontenurable faculty they work with every day.

Because, honestly, if they did care about other educators and workers, they’d have been out in the streets long ago! And not too many of them are in the streets right now.

The biggest problem with this California movement is that the folks who are actually in the streets–staff, especially, but grad students, contingent faculty and undergraduates–are letting the tenured do the talking for them.

I mean, these are decent folks doing the talking. Don’t get me wrong. Still, why not shut up and hand the mike to the militant, articulate, intellectual staff, for a change?

As higher ed becomes a mass experience–as more and more workers in all sectors become highly educated, whether they learn in schools or on the job–it is harder and harder to pretend that higher ed is just about the reproduction of the Bush family’s privilege. Today, higher ed is a field of working-class struggle, and one of the reasons it’s still hard to see that is the hierarchical, undemocratic tendency represented by handing the mike to Judith Butler. Again, no offense to Butler and other mike holders. (After all, I’m holding one right now, aren’t I?)

This might be a moment where the tenured might–just might–have unexpected humility thrust on them & achieve enough overnight wisdom to subordinate their Stanley-Fish-sized egos and take leadership from pipefitters, nurses, and food service workers.

We’ll see.

In the meanwhile, I’ll be giving thanks for the disobedient, those chaining themselves to doors and shutting down the absurdity of business-as-usual while thugs in suits hand over our future to yet another movie actor.

Charging tuition to working graduate students is essentially a pay-to-work scheme that would represent an educational death sentence for many grad students, as Robert Naiman at Huffpost puts it.

Noting that the administration’s refusal to bargain tuition security would fall most heavily on “out-of-state, minority, and foriegn graduate students,” AAUP president Cary Nelson walked the line with GEO this morning.

“The diversity that is the lifeblood of the campus is at stake,” he said.

This could be an interesting week, folks.

Couple things of note: the walk-out poster’s imperative to “escalate,” drawn from the language of the more radical UC Santa Cruz occupiers.

Plus all that dancing and drumming.

It turns out civil disobedience doesn’t have to be boring.

The membership of the grad student union at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign just overwhelmingly authorized their leadership to call a strike at will–winning the support of legislators, the undergraduate student senate and the faculty in a savvy media barrage couched in a series of rallies, including one slotted for Nov 12 on the site of the next trustees’ meeting.

This is the same union with a long history of creative disruption in response to intransigent administrations, ultimately forcing the administration to bargain with them by an imaginative well-planned occupation of the administration building (also during a trustees’ meeting).

Militants across the University of California are feverishly building support for a Nov. 18 faculty & student walkout and staff strike with dozens of creative events like tonight’s Bay area Night of Student Art and Protest. Just as I was typing this, my email beeped with an announcement of the UCLA students’ all-night crisisfest.

Follow the news, get the data, and learn the truth  at UC Solidarity, Poverty at UC, and Remaking the University.

Oh, yeah. And the cell-phone-camera and adrenaline-fueled pan-European university occupation movement has just jumped the channel to London, complete with mandatory Facebook group. (Hat tip to Eli Meyerhoff.)

AAUP Gets Jiggy With It

Even the “you’ll tear my print budget from my cold dead hands” contingent over at AAUP are taking to Youtube in an effort to combat the so-dumb-as-to-be-unbelievable Garcetti decision and its consequences for academic freedom.

Of course Youtube is so 2005. This year’s movie tool is the text-to-movie app over at Xtranormal. (”If you can type, you can make a movie.”) Some student did one on Garcetti, in fact. (Not the best example of the genre, but a way cool app.)

When it’s your turn to hit the streets, don’t hesitate to use other cool propaganda generators, like the one that made the cigarette-pack Garcetti above, or assisted creativity apps, such as the Bitstrips comic strip generator, used to develop the Allday University series (starring “Adjunct Alice”), which has racked up tens of thousands of views–likely far more than the all the videos in the AAUP series will get in a year.

Festive Education, Anyone?

So many of these applications can be used in teaching and learning across the curriculum, of course, not just propaganda.

Just for starters: coming soon in this space, I promise–for months now I’ve been looking for a quiet week to spend some time writing about early learning, specifically my son’s experience of early learning software with a large, pricy touch-screen computer. It’s really cool stuff. It doesn’t replace books or (more important) time spent talking with parents or interacting with peers–far from it!–but our experience strongly suggests that it can make a huge difference in early language use.

Californians are mad as hell too. Over 600 militants from every sector of California public education–K-12, CSU, UC, the community colleges–met last week to plan a rolling series of actions in a statewide mobilization.

The first statewide event is a planned massive, open-ended and systemwide UC strike beginning November 18, the day that California regents vote on a 30% increase in tuition and faculty/staff furloughs. The planners vow to stay out if the regents vote to support Yudof’s proposals. Future mobilizations will include all education sectors–stay tuned.

Left vs. Left: Debating the Occupations

Speaking of California militance, there’s an interesting discussion of one of the UCSC occupation manifestos over at the AK Press blog, featuring its authors and some of the New School occupiers. They’re in dialogue with Brian Holmes, who sparked the conversation by saying, essentially, students can’t be workers.

AK’s Charles Weigl does a fantastic job of capturing the differences between Holmes and the student-movement intellectuals by posing three nicely-turned questions:

1) Whaddya mean the management class is being proletarianized!?! Isn’t this somehow an insult/misrecognition regarding the REAL proletariat?

2) Does addressing the university student as the potential revolutionary subject get us closer to revolution? How? How not?

3) What would a non-reformist goal for a university be, if one exists?

Hint: The students are right and Holmes, an otherwise smart guy, is wrong on this one.

Come back to the United States, Brian, and smell what happens to the majority of students who are spat out as nondegreed failures, not to mention the decade or more that the “successful” students among the 80% working an average of 30 hours a week spend earning low wages and acquiring debt.

Sure, the university does reproductive labor.

But it ALSO EXTRACTS VALUE INNOVATIVELY AND ON A SCALE THAT ALL POST-FORDIST EMPLOYERS ENVY AND EMULATE. Bowles and Gintis and Marx were right.

But today’s university needs to be understood as a direct employer and as a site of massive accumulation, not just as a womb for the PMC.

I’m jumping on a red-eye (again), but will get into this conversation next week.  If you can’t wait, download the free pdfs of HTUW’s Intro and/or ch 4, Extreme Work Study.

My reply in a nutshell, for those who can do their own unpacking?

The professional-managerial-class (PMC) isn’t being uniformly proletarianized: some traditional professions (especially teaching) are.

At the same time, some managers are being hyper-professionalized–through the ascendance of the business curriculum, and the way management theory supplants so much intellectual discourse. In connection with this, many workers are being treated as management (Yeshiva–faculty and nurses who don’t supervise anyone–food service supervisors denied overtime, etc) or indoctrinated in cultures of self-management (Randy Martin, others).

Furthermore, the “proletarianization” of a profession doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s been turned over to the actual proletariat.  Poorly waged work with little professional autonomy can be performed by the philanthropic class.

Take the example of higher-education teaching, where deprofessionalization has meant that persons who need a reasonable return on education (ie, they work to live) increasingly leave faculty work to those who have another source of income.  This means that campus employers sort for persons who can subsidize themselves, or find a corporate sponsor.

Even from a straight-up liberal perspective, this has major harms, advantaging corporate-driven curiousity–see Washburn.

Similarly, turning college teaching (back) into philanthropy functions as a significant economic discrimination that, in the U.S. also works to segment campus labor by gender, ethnicity, and age. In turn, this affects student learning, and the nature and quality of research.

*By “American model” they mean the sort of junk education-as-job-training that Obama and Duncan have been cheerfully pushing from pre-school to PhD: privatization, standardization, and control by high-stakes assessment.

The great thing about education as job training is that it provides a rationale for the super-exploitation of the largest workforce on campus: students.  For Obama and Duncan “affordability” means more of what we’ve been doing for three decades: turning out students as disposable short-term teachers, short-term journalists, short-term office workers, short-term nurses and social-service labor–as long-term but replaceable workers in retail, package delivery, food service, day care, elder care, housekeeping, and maintenance.

And then, when the same student workers can’t find employment (much less those who dropped out, or those who didn’t go), wondering, “huh, where did all the jobs go?”

Gee, fellas, you turned the jobs into “financial aid,” or “service learning,” or “internships,” or just good old “working your way through–it’s good for ya.”  As I’ve written before, you want to create several million jobs overnight, at a reasonable cost? Just withdraw students from the workforce. For a bonus few hundred thousand jobs, you could guarantee full employment for teachers.

This is the text of an email blast sent out by AAUP to 370,000 faculty, announcing the release of a draft report on conversion to tenure, co-authored by me, and featuring several examples of different ways that different institutions have moved to stabilize their faculty. We’ve already received over 150 comments, most positive and most thoughtful: direct yours to Gwendolyn Bradley. We anticipate issuing a final report early this spring. Hint: don’t miss the special section on the AAUP website.

The last four decades have seen a failure of the social contract in faculty employment.

With more than two-thirds of faculty working outside the tenure stream or for wages that would embarass Wal-mart, the once-reliable regime of professional peer scrutiny in hiring, evaluation, and promotion has all but collapsed.

The Profession Agrees
In opposition to this trend, a powerful new consensus is emerging that it is time to stabilize the crumbling faculty infrastructure.

Concerned legislatures and administrators have joined faculty associations in calling for dramatic reductions in the reliance on contingent appointments. But how shall we get there?

Conversion to Tenure
By far the best stabilization practices are those that include the rigorous professional peer scrutiny of the tenure system. Managerial plans for hiring and assessment rarely approach the level of scrutiny that faculty peers apply to themselves. There is no basis in AAUP policy for regarding those in teaching-intensive positions as second-class citizens or ineligible for tenure.

A new draft report surveys several noteworthy forms of stabilization practiced or planned at a variety of institutions, highlighting those that feature conversion to tenure for faculty already employed at the institution.

We invite your detailed comment. We have continued to research stabilization practices and will add further examples, comment, and analysis to the final report.

We’ll share some of this continuing research and comments on the AAUP Web site. We’ve just posted a special section discussing two unique contract provisions negotiated by the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties: provision 11.G, which permits departments to convert persons to the tenure track, and provision 11.H, which permits conversion of lines.

Marc Bousquet
Mayra Besosa
Co-Chairs, Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession

Buying Howard Bunsis a plane ticket to your campus might be the best investment you can make right now.

Bunsis, a Michigan professor of accounting and treasurer of the AAUP, has been tracking administrator claims of fiscal crisis for several months. His conclusion, published in this issue of the Chronicle, is that at many campuses, there’s no financial crisis at all. At many schools, tuition and other revenue is up, or existing reserves could easily cushion the shortfall.

Furthermore, Bunsis observes after detailed analysis of university financial data, where cuts have to be made, they don’t need to be made to the core education function–they can be made in athletics, construction, services, and other ventures.

“We need administrations to start focusing on the core mission of our colleges and universities: educating our students,” Bunsis says.

He’s been traveling the country, analyzing the financial data of universities and puncturing holes in the fake claims of crisis by administrators. In the powerpoint above, he demonstrates the clear financial health of one state system (Pennsylvania), and paints the big picture:

+faculty pay is typically less than a quarter of spending;
+faculty often earn less than schoolteachers; faculty earn less as a return on education than other professionals;
+faculty quality, education quality, and affirmative hiring are all harmed by converting education work into philanthropy.

Okay, that last part is from me.

So check out his slides, especially those after #25, recording the steep decline in spending on instruction–what he urges you to understand as the instructional spending gap.

Invite him to take a look at your administrators’ books. You might be surprised at the results.

Speaking of An Instructional Spending Gap:
It’s Campus Equity Week!

From the point of view of the majority of faculty not even in the tenure stream, a “gap in instructional spending” is really

+ a gap in health insurance
+ a gap in feeding one’s kids
+ a gap in one’s ability to stay faculty at all
+ an amplification of the wealth gap’s effect on faculty diversity
+ a gap in the time and attention one can afford to devote to students (see Isaac Sweeney on “winging it,” below)
+ a gap between reality and administrator rhetoric on the subject of access, merit, equality, justice, etc. (see Sweeney again)

There’s an eye-opening study of his own unionized campus by Peter Brown about the longest-running scandal in higher-ed, contingent faculty compensation. At SUNY New Paltz in 1970, there were only 100 adjuncts; today they are almost half the faculty and earn half the pay they did forty years ago. The sad thing is that these faculty are represented by a collective bargaining agent and are better off than many faculty serving contingently in say, the southeast–where they’re on food stamps.

So the governor of Washington state, after a series of lawsuits forcing some gains for publicly employed contingent faculty started issuing annual proclamations one day during Campus Equity Week “Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty Recognition Day.” This year it’s Thursday.

Woo-hoo. That and about half a million dollars per employee will make up for twenty years of extortionate employment practice.  Keith Hoeller’s response: yeah, well, show me the money.  Oh, and if you missed it, check out how the geniuses at Southwestern College marked Campus Equity Week–by suspending four faculty who showed up at a student rally protesting budget cuts, including the union president, natch. Hurray for the students who–like students across California–are fighting back.

Nice work by Isaac Sweeney who tells it like it is for the majority of faculty serving contingently: your students suffer because your employers sort not for the best faculty, but for the cheapest faculty, and arrange not for the best learning conditions–but the cheapest learning conditions, so they can spend lavishly on themselves and their pet projects:

I can wing it if I need to. And that’s a good thing, because I am often not prepared for class. Sometimes, I admit, I haven’t even read my own assigned reading for the day. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s just that I had to take on those extra two courses at the community college and finish up the freelance article so I could pay the mortgage for the month. Winging it usually works OK. But sometimes it doesn’t.

My not being prepared for class is only one way in which the students suffer. More and more, I find myself completely drained by the end of the day. In the middle of a great discussion, a student directs a comment to me. To the detriment of the discussion, I stopped listening a few comments ago, thinking instead about my decreasing checkbook balance or the dishes that have been piling up as I have been grading papers. Or I stopped listening just because I have had similar discussions four times already today, and I am, frankly, bored and/or exhausted. At least once, I stopped listening because of the loud construction across the street, where the university is building a new performance center. And I couldn’t help but remember the news a week earlier that budget cuts had put my job in jeopardy.

In the end, how much does it matter to my department, and to my university, if I do a good job? It’s not like I can share this information in any formal setting.

When I leave the classroom, I know I could have done better. That isn’t an empty thought; I try to do better every day, every semester, every school year. And maybe my efforts succeed-maybe I do a little better. But I can’t help but wonder: Is it enough? If some of these distractions that come with being an adjunct were taken away, wouldn’t my students benefit? If I could talk about teaching and listen to others talk about teaching in that conference room, wouldn’t my students benefit?

Again, I am not bitter about the money (or lack thereof). I chose to enter this profession this way, and I can choose to leave anytime I want. What makes me uneasy is that cheap labor seems more important to academe than quality instruction.

Right now, an estimated 2000 undergraduates are occupying parts of the University of Vienna. You can follow it nearly live on this guy’s cellphone camera.

If the topic of occupying campus space interests you, be sure to check out the Academia Insurgent panel being organized by Eli Meyerhoff (U Minnesota) and the countercartographies collective at UNC-Chapel Hill for the Annual Association of American Geographers Meeting Washington, DC, 14-18 April 2010.

Topics for the panel organized by Elizabeth Johnson and Eli Meyerhoff, Academia Insurgent: Occupying and Communizing Universities // Militant Research and Organizing:

* Strategies and tactics for university occupations

* Theorizing ‘occupation’ of academic spaces and times

* Militant research on universities

* Creating an “undercommons” that feeds us and feeds off of the university, enabling us to do radical work from *within* the institution without becoming *of* the institution

* Collectively preventing the alienating effects of leading such dual lives

* Valorizing our own work without submitting it to universities’ disciplinary metrics

* Maintaining our own invisibility (from capitalism/consumerism and from the university) while linking with one another and with common projects elsewhere

* Building “institutions of the common” across universities and across disciplines, as well as between academics, activists, artists, diverse economies, etc.

* Developing mutually supportive relationships for communities, movements, our teaching, and our activism without creating formal(izing) organizations

* Finding ways within the university’s walls to not only create “living communism” but also to “spread anarchy”

* Learning from university struggles around the world and across history

With a 150-person sit-in at Berkeley and members of the two UCSC occupations beginning a southern tour of talks at several campuses near Los Angeles this week, the movement appears to be gathering steam. In the next 24 hours, occupiers will explain their strategy for movement building–”demand nothing, occupy everything” at UCLA, Irvine, and Cal State Fullerton.

The administration appears to be helping to set the stage for escalation by, according to witnesses and victim testimony on the movement blog, macing students without warning and heavy-handed efforts at police infiltration and espionage.

I interviewed a graduate student with knowledge of the events surrounding the second occupation at UC Santa Cruz last Thursday and Friday:

Q. I understand the group occupied a particular administrator’s office. Can you tell me how that decision came about?

The administrator in question is the Dean of Social Sciences, Sheldon Kamieniecki. The social sciences have been particularly threatened by the “necessary” budget cuts and restructurings, with proposed lay-offs that would destroy both the Community Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies programs. Among those who planned this action, the sense was that Dean Kamieniecki did not pursue alternatives, particularly in terms of keeping the jobs of lecturers vital to these programs, and accepted the cuts passed down in spite of massive student discontent. The decisions of the group are both political and tactical, if the two can be separated. As such, the space was chosen both because of Kamieniecki’s office and because its central location and physical layout made it possible to take the building and to bring a large number of students there to participate following an earlier potluck and discussion.

Q. Shortly after the occupation began, there was an incident with the campus police. What happened?

Three students, not involved in the occupation itself, were moving a picnic table in front of the building and were pepper-sprayed at very close range by the police. They were not told to cease and desist, they were not warned that they were about to be sprayed (for doing something that was not in any way physically threatening to an officer or any students in the area), and the one who was arrested was not read his Miranda rights. (He was later told that, “any pain you feel, you deserve.”) This violent response to the action is clearly unacceptable.

Q. Have any charges been filed?

Yes, the student who was arrested was charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice. We expect that the university will try to pursue “disciplinary measures” of their own. We urge them strongly not to do so and to consider once more the gulf between how they valorize a radical past of protest and dissent and how they respond to students pursuing radical actions in the present. It is all too evident that the elevation of past protests as part of a storied history serves equally to denigrate the real attempts now to fight back as misguided anger and to claim and hold spaces as petty vandalism.

Q. Overall, the police response was different this time–is that correct? They were photographing persons gathered outside in support of the occupiers? Do you think this is a change of tactics by the administration?

Yes, that is correct. They were photographing and taking the information of persons gathered in support, not to mention the earlier brutality of outside supporters. The tactics are not necessarily different, but the severity of the response certainly is. It shows that the administration is worried about such events and about the possibility of a far wider radical movement emerging, one that incorporates greater numbers and a broader range of students, workers, and faculty. For this reason, they appear intent on making an example out of those who participate in these actions and on attempting to divide students by falsely portraying the actions.

Q. What motivated the end to the occupation?

The mistreatment and threat, physical and legal, to supporters outside motivated the end of the occupation. Those involved felt that it was not safe to those there in solidarity in this situation. To be clear, this is not how we wanted this action to go. But we remain committed to not putting students and supporters in harm’s way, a commitment the administration entirely to lack. We know that the situation has escalated, and we can only expect that their future responses will be escalated as well. We are not interested in human barricades and refuse to put bystanders and supporters at risk of violence. We are interested in seeing these spaces not simply as calculations of property that has to be protected at all costs, and we will claim them accordingly. Not small numbers of us who ask for the solidarity of others or who assume that we “represent” other students. Massive numbers of us who wish to express discontent in any way that we find productive and necessary. Occupation is one such way, but far from the only one.

Q. What should we look for next–at UCSC and across the state?

Look for the real and rapid expansion of protest across the state, as networks of committed activists merge with those who have not felt actively involved previously. Look for the broadening and innovation of tactics as we respond to the changing conditions and political climate. We should all look forward to, and prepare ourselves for, a far longer struggle, a struggle for which these actions, regardless of what one thinks of them, do not serve as inspirations but rather as concrete expressions of what is felt by countless others across the system and world.

Late Thursday, just two weeks after peacefully concluding their occupation of the graduate student commons, members of the UCSC-based group Occupy California! barricaded themselves into a dean’s office in the Humanites and Social Science building.

According to the statement they issued shortly afterward, they targeted the office of Dean Sheldon Kamienicki in connection with decisions regarding job losses and cuts to program funding

By contrast to the restraint showed in the earlier event, witnesses said that campus police promptly moved in, cuffed and hauled away at least some of the protesters.

In lower Manhattan, students demonstrate in solidarity with protesters at UC Santa Cruz.

The Occupy California group peacefully ended their weeklong occupation of a UCSC facility last Thursday, but announced that they left “in order to escalate” their confrontation with the state and campus authorities.

During the event, messages of solidarity poured in from Britain, South Africa and Croatia, from campus bus drivers and the SDS, from San Francisco State, from Irvine, from Brandeis, Columbia, and the City University of New York.

California’s statewide Defend our Education coalition of K-12 educators, staff and faculty from the UC and Cal State system passed a formal unanimous resolution of support, as did numerous student groups across the U.S.

The largest solidarity demo took place in lower Manhattan, home to TakeBackNYU and the New School Reoccupied, where arrests, expulsions, and other disciplinary actions in response to widely-reported building occupations last year have left simmering resentment. A day after news of the occupation hit indymedia news sources, protesters from both lower-Manhattan campuses marched through Union Square behind posters and bedsheets spraypainted with their own take on the UCSC manifesto: “From Santa Cruz to NYC, We Want Fucking Everything!”

Over the weekend, I completed an interview with a spokesperson for the group:

Q. How did you come to the decision to end the occupation?

We decided to end the occupation because we felt that it was the right time. Our interest in occupying the space was both to put radical actions such as occupation back on the map and to raise awareness. These are emergency times for California and for public education as a whole. We wanted to help generate a sense of urgency, the necessity to act, and solidarity extending far beyond the occupations. We feel we’ve achieved this and move on to plan new actions and create the kind of wide support needed to truly deal with this situation

Q. I was really impressed by the support you received from students all over the globe. What do you think you accomplished?

It’s hard to tell what we’ve accomplished at this point: it is too close. But judging from the truly global solidarity we’ve received, we’re hoping that our occupation is recognized for what it was: a call to mass struggle, an insistence on the severity of the situation, and an inspiration to all those who have become fed up with what resistance to the destruction of public education has looked like. We want to show that occupations can and must be done, that you can reclaim spaces, that you can plan new modes of struggle and manifest the real discontent that seethes in the state now.

Q. It seems you pulled together a diverse coalition of undergraduates,workers, and graduate students. Were there some differences in vision at points, and how did you handle them?

We’re proud of the diversity of this group: it does not represent a single interest or faction. Rather, it developed a momentum and shape of its own, the result of long, heated conversations and careful planning. (Not to mention sharing a space for a week.) Indeed, there are certainly differences in vision, and the range of documents, states, flyers, and speeches has made that apparent. We have tried to walk a very narrow line between the expression of a general line of thinking and the diffusion of our different perspectives and goals. As for the success of that, it is too early to judge, but with every action and meeting, new perspectives and ways of articulating what is common to us all emerge.

Q. What was the role of sociability in the occupation?

This is quite important to us. As mentioned, sharing the space produced a close-knit group, drawing together many of those who otherwise would not meet. We have been accused of making the space “exclusive” because of not letting its normal business go on. To the contrary: the space became a remarkable open zone of mutual aid and intellectual discussion. While the stress of this occupation has rightly been on the university crisis, we are also committed to modes of living and working together that exceed the logic of division between workers, graduate students, undergraduate students, and the unemployed. In addition, we threw dance parties in the quarry plaza, open to anyone, to insist that the escalation of struggle is also a struggle to live better. Giving students an opportunity to dance in a zone of the university normally used only for commerce was important to us.

Q. Are you concerned about repercussions for participants?

With actions such as this, potential repercussions are always weighed carefully. All those participating were aware that such actions are illegal and could result in trouble from police or the university. However, the decision was made that this occupation was of tremendous importance. We stand at a time in which, we argue, normal modes of negotiating with the university for better wages and decent access to education have ceased to be effective without additional escalation to bring a sense of crisis to them. For this reason, these were risks we were willing to take.

Q. I can’t imagine this is the last bold action by students and public employees in California. What do you think is next?

What is next is the broadening of struggle and involvement in actions far beyond our group. This is a year that will not and cannot go back to normal: we cannot feel that “we did our best” and then sit back and watch as public education is dismantled. We urge all students, workers, and faculty members to get involved and to escalate resistance across the state. Another way of running the university is possible, and we have everything to lose if we do not act.

Courtesy of AAUP’s new video series, Voices of the AAUP, you can catch me on tape for a change. In the short piece I respond to questions about faculty democracy and work-life balance.

More entertaining video is provided by the Ad-hoc Post-Tenure UnderAppreciated Band, and more important thoughts are shared by faculty serving contingently, for instance Jeanette Jeneault, Jonathan Karpf and Marcia Newfield.

During last week’s massive 10-campus walkout, several dozen students and workers occupied [video] the Graduate Student Commons at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), issuing statements frankly acknowledging their intention to escalate the conflict: “Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles,” they note at their website, “We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over.”

Their supporters aim to initiate some actual thought about the role of higher education in the economy. “A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors,” observes the author of the compelling Communique From an Absent Future:

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. …Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.

Noting that public employees, the homeless and the unemployed have been demonstrating across the state, supporters argue that “all of our futures are linked” and the struggle over higher education is “one among many, [so] our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets.”

I completed an interview with their spokesperson this morning, on the fourth day of the occupation.

Q. Sounds pretty raucous in there. How long have you been at it?

We’ve occupied this space for almost four days now! This is one of the longest student occupations in many, many years.

Q. How many of you are there, and who do you represent?

There are several dozen or so occupiers, plus countless numbers of supporters on the outside. It’s been very impressive. For example, one first-year student, after being on campus for just one week, almost immediately organized food drives with students in the dormitories for us.

We honestly do not seek to represent anyone or any particular groups. Rather, we’re emphasizing our message: we want students, faculty, and staff at UC to occupy and escalate to stop the destruction of public education in California, and we call on the people of California who are similarly and unfairly affected by our state’s fiscal crisis to escalate in their own communities. The time for piecemeal negotiations with those who have fiscal authority over us to protect our own particular programs, jobs, or bottom-lines is over because our demands are only turned against those who face similar cuts, thus making foes of people who should be building a broad coalition to stop and reverse the damaging cuts.

Q. What inspired you to occupy UCSC, as opposed to other tactics, such as demonstrating, etc?

9/24 was the first day of classes at UCSC. As you probably know, there was a system-wide Walkout across all of the UC campuses on 9/24. We did demonstrate that day; we walked the picket line with the UPTE and CUE unions; we responded to the UC faculty call for a Walkout; some of us walked in uninvited on the large undergraduate lectures of those professors who failed to honor the picket line to make an emergency announcement about the Walkout.

Let us provide some additional context: The Santa Cruz campus of UC was already hit hard last year by steep budget cuts. The Community Studies program was gutted; minority student programs were cutback; faculty searches for departments desperate for replacements, such as the History of Consciousness, were cancelled; health care costs for graduate students were forced up; family student housing rents were jacked up-just to name a few of the attempts to balance the budget on the backs of those least able to afford it and the most vulnerable in the system. Undergraduates, graduate students, and some unions organized to stop those initial rounds of damaging cuts through petitions, demonstrations, and other tactics, to no avail.

A dire situation only worsened over the summer, which prompted the faculty to get more involved at the system level. So many of us at Santa Cruz already realized by the end of last year that the nature and severity of these budget cuts required an escalation beyond tactics of resistance that were attempted yet failed last year. As our press release (https://occupyca.wordpress.com) says, “occupation is a way of escalating struggles.” This is what we decided to do to jumpstart a year of endless confrontation with the administration over their destructive logic that subordinates everything and everyone to the budget. This is only the beginning.

Q. What are your demands specifically?

Our primary message is directed at those who should be our allies within the UC, the public education system generally, and indeed throughout the state of California, as opposed to those who have power over us. We would like to see a broad social movement against cuts to education and all other state social programs and services. Thus we appeal to these groups to organize, occupy, and escalate at their schools and colleges and universities, as well as in their local communities. To sum, demonstrations address specific issues; our actions aim at a much broader struggle. Workers are losing their jobs. Students are unable to enroll in school. We have no choice but to occupy and escalate. We call on the people of California to do the same.

Q. This is a movement that you hope will spread to other campuses, isn’t it? Any developments we should watch for?

Not only the other UC campuses, but actually throughout the entire state of California and even beyond. We’ve already been on the radio shows of several UC campuses to talk to those UC communities about the need to organize and escalate and occupy, so, yes, you should watch for developments there! The one-day Walkout and our occupation are only first-steps, the genesis of a year-long or multi-year effort to take back the UC, to re-write its priorities in the interest of public education and not privatization. The same thing needs to happen to protect K-12 education in California; did you know that one school district closed all 28 of its school libraries due to budget cuts? Whose vision of a quality K-12 education would not include access to libraries? Our purpose is not to blame local school administrators but to show how the cuts affecting the UC are also impacting everyone else in the public sector of the state. The process which has led to this point is simply unacceptable.

Q. I take it you’ve followed the recent occupations at NYU and the New School, and perhaps earlier ones at Urbana-Champaign. Any lessons you’ve taken from those experiences?

We’ve received statements of solidarity from student groups across the country, including several schools along the east coast, which can be read at https://occupyca.wordpress.com. We want to express our thanks for the support across the nation. Why stop at the borders of California? Let’s take this effort to escalate to the nation as well! Public universities are being run like corporations all across the U.S. This must be brought to an end.

Q. Are you in touch with supporters outside?

Absolutely. The occupation on the inside is only one aspect of the escalation. This requires a lot of outside support, including many students who’ve been sleeping outside the doors to the occupation zone, volunteers to pick up trash and keep the space clean, students going around campus to spread the word about the occupation, and more. Then there are those who are working on logistics and press coverage.

Q. What will it take for the state government and administration to
move in a different direction?

This is a big question! Unfortunately, it may not be enough simply to focus on amending the state of California constitution, which makes it notoriously difficult to construct a reasonable budget, or simply to focus on the next round of state elections in order to put into power friendlier decisionmakers. These things might certainly help or be steps along the way.

On the one hand, our occupation is informed by a deep critique of the political economy of the system that underscores the unacceptable way in which things are accorded value by nothing more than the bottom-line, by nothing more than the potential to make profit (and this is what is driving the budget cuts and re-structuring at the UC); on the other hand, we don’t suppose to have the answer in detail to this question, though we are convinced that attempts to negotiate to protect our own singular interests or programs or jobs–which is tantamount to arguing for their value against, and not in conjunction with or in a complementary relationship to other programs–are only making matters even worse for everyone. Deleveraging in order to rectify problems in one’s balance sheet–whether at the state, university, or local level–does not cleanly map onto a process of social devaluation, and yet this congruence is a demand of the standard operating procedures of how our institutions are currently being run, including our universities. Protests are a manifestation of that gap between the two processes of balancing a budget and people feeling their own devaluation by the system.

Anyone who slavishly submits to a social logic that reduces social things to a line item in the budget might find it hard to comprehend how protests are part and parcel to the system, not roadblocks to its smoother operation. Protests on the level of the UC Walkout and now our occupation signify that this imperative to rectify accounts is determined by a grossly unfair set of priorities that must be rejected.

We’re tired of hearing UC President Mark Yudof talk about making the UC more “efficient,” more “competitive,” about “human capital,” not because we are against some notion of what it means to be efficient, to not be wasteful, but because his speech demonstrates he needs a more complex analytic of the dynamics over-taking the UC system in this crisis. A broad-based social movement that has the capacity to articulate an alternative collective vision to the narrow, corporatist special-interests that control our budgets and strategic planning will be necessary. Nobody is sure what this will look like yet.

For now, we believe one of the first steps to building such a movement is to show that escalation and occupation is necessary and possible. We hope that groups of students, faculty, and everyday Californians can begin to see themselves, too, as people who can organize, occupy, and escalate to fight back.

Follow their websites, OccupyCa, We Want Everything and (microblog) occupyucsc and coverage in the UCSC newspaper.

October 16. Plenary, Labor in Higher Education conference, sponsored by APSCUF/PSEA.  Harrisburg, Pa.

October 28, 29. Public lecture, University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, (lecture Wednesday, discussion and workshop Thursday).

November 5.  Panel. Graduate Student Sustainability? American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC.

November 22-29 Global Learning Visiting Fellow, School of Business and Management, St. Mary University, London.

February 11-12  Plenary, Networks and Enclaves: Open Access and Work in the 21st Century. University of California, Irvine.

June 9-12  AAUP Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education. Washington DC.

June 14-20, MLG Institute for Culture and Society, Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Dear University of California students, staff and faculty: Thank you. As a California parent, I am grateful for your courage in standing up to this administration in the massive walkout you’ve planned for tomorrow, September 24th.

You are wise. Without you, tuition would soon rise to a point where most Californians couldn’t afford it. Public higher education in this state used to be free–and now it’s going to cost more than a new small car every year? Pretty soon a UC bachelor’s degree will cost the equivalent of four luxury cars. Who can afford that? Thank you for throwing yourselves into the trenches against the Schwarzeneggers and the Yudofs who want to turn public higher education into a subsidy for the rich.

You are compassionate. You are demanding that cuts not fall on employees earning less than $40,000. Thank you for demanding fairness, and asking that–if cuts are actually necessary– the thousands of wealthiest UC employees dig a little deeper.

You are honest. The reality is that undergraduate tuition subsidizes every other activity in the university, and the administration has billions of reserve funds. As Bob Samuels says, “UC does not have a budget crisis; it has a crisis in priorities.” The savage 40% tuition hike–while raising class sizes, cutting sections, etc–is really a massive increase in the tax on undergraduates represented by cross-subsidy. Thank you for asking that education come first.

You are fighting racism in admissions. Economic discrimination is always wrong in a democracy, but in our state it falls much harder on African-Americans and Hispanics.

You are fighting racism in university employment. Faculty salaries in the humanities already offer an unbelievably low return on the ten years it takes to get a PhD (if you’re lucky, around age 35 or 40 you’ll get a job that pays you $55,000, or less than a bartender). This means that mostly persons from wealthier backgrounds can afford to become professors–a form of economic discrimination that explains why university faculties are among the most disproportionately white workforces in the country.

You make us think. It seems the administration has been trying to mislead the media with the statistic that UC professors make an average over $100,000. Funny thing about averages, though. If your neighbor earns a million dollars a year, and you earn $15,000–guess what? Your average salary is half a million bucks! The fact is that “average” salary includes a lot of people making huge, inflated salaries, and a lot more folks barely scraping by.

Your typical humanities prof–you know, the person they show as a prof in the movies, talking to you about history, culture, or philosophy–puts in about ten years getting the Ph.D., then another three or four years on temporary appointment, before even starting a tenure track job.

Even worse? Most university teachers aren’t tenured profs at all. Most courses are taught by grad students or folks on temporary, part time and nontenurable appointments. Most of these faculty make fifty or a hundred dollars per student per year. Thank you for inspiring us to ask: If it’s not going to the persons teaching our students: where’s our money going?

In solidarity, Marc Bousquet

UC Student Association (pdf)
UC Faculty blog (FAQ, teach-in materials, etc)
UC Staff one-day strike in solidarity

Another scarily bad article from The New York Times on the economics of higher education is making the rounds. Purporting to explain why college costs keep rising, columnist Ron Lieber does a job so superficial, so thoughtless, so unresearched and unfact-checked–in sum, so embarassingly bad–it really wouldn’t have passed editorial review in many responsible college dailies.

Lieber has just one main source for his piece, a college president MBA with nonacademic experience in management consulting.  He tells Lieber that problems one and two with college costs are faculty productivity and faculty resistance to closing departments. Third, he admits that there might also be a bit of an explosion in administrators and service personnel.

Hm–no mention of facilities wars? Marketing? Technology? Venture capitalism and patent questing? Declining public investment? Sports? Administrator salary? Grad programs to scam the rankings?

No mention of who benefits from those unmentioned soaring costs, either: wealthier students and parents, administrators, the business community, local elites consuming the sports spectacle (what, you thought those were students packing the seats at Division 1 basketball games?)

Lieber’s fake journalism here is bad faith on the scale of your Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and other right-wing loons. Obviously, first, he doesn’t know squat about where colleges really spend their money, and isn’t much interested in finding out. His college president isn’t a source of knowledge on the issue; he’s just a quotation farm for Lieber’s half-baked preconceptions. By Lieber’s own admission, he didn’t actually look for a scholar who knows something about these questions–he just went looking for someone, anyone, in university management with an MBA.

Second, he doesn’t fact-check his source’s claims. By any measure, for instance, faculty are INSANELY “productive,” teaching more students at less cost to the employer than at any point since the one-room schoolhouse.

Anyone who knows anything about faculty labor costs knows a) that research faculty in many traditional arts and science fields get a lower return on their years of education than police officers, kindergarten teachers and bartenders and b) about 3/4 of all faculty aren’t even tenurable, much less research faculty, commonly working at “wages” that amount to philanthropy.

Lieber similarly fails to look into the facts of department reorganization–how many such efforts have been made? how many have been defeated by faculty? at what cost? And of course this would really be straining his brain cells, but he’s describing the sort of reorganization that happens all the time at for-profits and community colleges: how’s that working out for students?

In case you’re interested, I’ve an excerpt from HTUW that tries to think a bit about the main questions Lieber is trying to raise, ie, where the money goes and  Who Benefits From the Tuition Gold Rush? Read more here, and if you really want to see how colleges generate revenue from student misery, read this mind-bending case, Extreme Work-Study (pdf).

The Real Drivel

As regular readers know, I already played the drivel and junk-analysis cards with the New York Times earlier this year.  Plenty of people who agreed that the pieces were lousy or off-base thought playing the drivel card wasn’t necessarily a great rhetorical choice on my part, and maybe they were right. I mean, geez, there were ideas in Mark C. Taylor’s piece. They were bad ideas, poorly informed, contemptuous of most other faculty and perhaps a touch self-interested (Taylor is a distance-education entrepreneur), but at least they were ideas. And once you dismiss one piece as drivel, however epic its badness, what have you got left for something that’s next-generation worse?

But Lieber? Come on, New York Times: with all the unemployed journalists floating around, you can’t find one that gets perma-temping and can put it into words for a mass readership?

I’ve also tried to note when Grey Lady gets it right, by the way. Krugman has a great piece on why even good economists have been getting it wrong. He emphasizes the love of modelling over actual research–which is part of the story of why the few economists who’ve taken on higher education have done such a poor job (pdf, pp 15-27).