About six weeks ago, I reported on the decision by the Union of Part-Time Faculty to make job security the core demand of their first contract negotiation at Wayne State, where graduate employees and faculty serving on a full-time basis are already unionized.
In the tentative agreement reached between the administration and UPTF-AFT, the faculty forced the administration to accept job security after 6 consecutive semesters (to one-year renewable contracts with seniority protections) and, after 6 more terms, 2-year renewable contracts with seniority protections. Salaries were raised to a minimum of $700/credit hour (from a current low of $582), with a floor of $1000/credit hour in the most secure tier. Above these minimums are fifteen salary levels to avoid wage compression.
They did not press on health insurance and the percentage raises in this four-year first contract are modest (2% + $75/credit hour in the first year, then 2.5% year for the succeeding years).
But the union delivered on its controversial (to some) core strategy of zeroing in on job security, reflecting the reality that most faculty serving part-time are in this to make their living (despite most administrative propaganda to the contrary). There is specific language in the agreement guaranteeing continuing employment after six terms: so long as “faculty are available to perform the duties that they have previously regularly performed, and there is no reduction of available work…they will be reappointed at that same level of employment as in the previous academic years” except in the case of demonstrable poor performance or a substantial loss in the availability of work.
The UPTF-AFT contract continues a trend toward bargaining contingency out of existence established in the Cal State and New School/NYU (UAW) campaigns. Next post, I hope to follow up on events at McGill.
Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines.
In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’ editorship, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Ed than any other academic journal.
But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well-managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”
Upon arriving at CMU, Williams’ 2-year deal for support of mr was similar to the arrangements he’d had previously at the University of Missouri and ECU: modest subvention for office space and mailing, and just $9,000 for graduate student labor, plus a single course release and one month of summer pay. Hardly a fortune in a world of $50,000 vehicle allowances and $6 million mansion renovations for university “leadership.” And a real bargain for a school like CMU with an engineering rep and a confessed need to brush up its humanities cred. As Williams notes wryly, the level of support he negotiated from CMU–and believed would continue, or he would have negotiated a longer arrangement–was provided without question by the “much less wealthy and prestigious institutions” where he’d previously worked.
But at the end of his first year there, Williams found himself without prior warning (surprise! managerial “innovation” at work!) pressed to “do more with less.” It was suggested–just as a for-instance–that he could get one graduate student to do the work of two, and thereby shave a princely $4500 off the hefty 9 grand they chipped off of CMU’s mighty fiscal block. He quickly assembled a roster of luminaries (Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand) to defend the journal, and limped through for another three years, when, in in 2007-08, the demands were renewed, this time more firmly.
This time he was offered the option, instead of shortchanging the graduate student employees, of giving back his month of summer pay–doing the same work as before, but for a 12% cut in pay.
There’s a slim chance that the quality clowns will relent, with the possibility of resistance emerging from Williams’ departmental colleagues and graduate students in the literature and cultural studies program at a meeting tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meanwhile, though, Williams has taken the line that enough is freaking enough. He’ll give up the journal if another editor can be found and–more likely–if not, he’s made plans for a final issue. Inspired by the 1950s “My Credo” issue of Kenyon Review featuring short, passionate essays by, among others, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and Austin Warren, Williams has invited sixteen cultural-studies intellectuals to contribute credos and reflections about the dismal state of the profession for an issue that he feels would fittingly mark his retirement.
You know, there’s a thread over on (union-busting former university president) Trachtenberg’s corner of the Brainstorm group blog on “education gurus.” Twenty Chronicle of Higher Ed readers offered their thoughts. Nobody mentioned Aronowitz. Nobody mentioned Slaughter, Leslie, and Rhoades or Bill Readings. Henry Giroux? Cary Nelson? You gotta be kidding. Nobody mentioned even centrist disappointments like Bok or Kirp.
Quality management? It’s all about taking actual, tangible, meaningful, intellectual quality and turning it into fresh paint for the business school in quest of enhanced revenue.
Responsibility-center management theorist William Massy (download and play his revolting Virtual U training game–it’s scarier than anything I could tell you about it) once opined, in the midst of an essay praising the work of the HMO, that starving the revenue-poor locations in the university made great sense, saying that if you had six gold mines, you’d want to invest most in the one with the greatest assay. But if you have six runners on your team, are you helping the organization by giving nine lungs to the fastest? If you play football, do you win by giving everyone’s meal to the quarterback?
“We theorize utopias and live a life of slaves.
All for an ounce of prestige…and some letters on our graves.”
In 2004, the Bush mob’s infamous executive arrogance in the Brown decision jammed the brakes on the organizing of graduate student employees at private universities (previously green-lighted by a bipartisan unanimous NLRB decision consistent with the law governing grad employees at public institutions, affirming the victory of GSOC-UAW at NYU).
Despite the setback, organizing is once more on the front burner at private universities in the U.S., including by committed, activist grad employees at the University of Chicago, outraged by an unfair stipend arrangement and by some of the lowest wages for teaching in the country (as low as $1500 per quarter). As a result of graduate employee agitation, commonly through collective bargaining, 3/4 of university employers pay for graduate employee health insurance; the University of Chicago does not. Among the graduate employees that I met there last month was one whose earnings as a gardener offered far better pay than his teaching.
On May 2, the members of Graduate Students United announced a membership drive for an independent union with a philosophy of “active solidarity with other workers in the university and the community of which the university is a part.” Asking for annual dues of just $5, and leaving for later consideration such questions as possible affiliation with a national organization, the card drive netted 70 members at their first event and has an innovative membership structure relying on open organization and mass electronic referenda for significant decisions.
After a year of preliminary organizing, the group looks to the future with confidence. “Over the past year we organized 2 well-attended demonstrations, collected about 500 signatures on a petition with demands for the administration, and set up a basic organizational structure,” said organizer Joe Grim Feinberg. “We are optimistic about our chances.”
When I resume the video series in the next couple of weeks, I’ll begin with my recent interview with some of the Graduate Students United core organizers. I taped them singing one of Joe Feinberg’s songs for the union, conducting an intentional culture-struggle from below. It’s good stuff.
In the meanwhile, here’s some of the lyrics from a new piece he penned for the May 2 event:
Oh, graduate studying is the hardest work I’ve ever done.
It sucks away your spirit, and it kills all of your fun.
In exchange for future dreams you give up years and hours.
And while others walk through poppy fields…we live with paper flowers.
Whiles muscles wither in our arms we press our keys to dust.
We write about libido and forget about our lust.
We theorize utopias and live a life of slaves.
All for an ounce of prestige…and some letters on our graves.
We spend our youth in musty halls and laboratories cold.
We spend our nights in beds of books with lovers ages old.
Each day we say tomorrow then at last we will be free
Until we’re tenured and retired then…(then) we’ll finally live our dreams.
We dream of picking up our pens as swords to save the world.
Instead we work for warlords under flags of greed unfurled.
We teach of revolutions we forgot how to believe.
We’ve got to raise our pens to change…the University.
I am a graduate student and I wish the best to you.
Let’s get together and transform this system through and through.
For if we act in union there is nothing we can’t do.
Come one, come all, right now, come join…come join in GSU.
Give ‘em hell, Joe & co. Rumor has it, the Kennedy bill reversing the sleazeball work of the Brown decision–supported by both Obama and Clinton–was partly inspired by the U Chicago organizers, as well as by the continuing determination of the GSOC-UAW membership. I can believe it.
Next couple of posts: 1) thanks to the quality trolls, is it the end for minnesota review? 2) Update on McGill Joins the Bush League which has racked up 70 comments and counting.
An award-winning play about organizing grad employees opens May 3 in Philadelphia.
ADMINISTRATOR: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator. –Joe Camhi, “Screw U, a play in one act” performed at Portland Community College
One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture-war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture–targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This administrative movement shot into high gear in the mid 1970s after anti-union labor economist Clark Kerr and his pet Carnegie Commission gazed with trepidation at the then-rising faculty union movement. Just as the 1960s had been the “decade of student power,” Kerr wrote, the rising culture of faculty solidarity seemed certain to make the 1970s the “decade of faculty power.” What we need, Kerr suggested, is a “management science of reaction.”
And boy, did he get what he wanted. Administrations have succeeded hugely in substituting for faculty values their sick culture of competition, quality engineering, market responsiveness, and mission-centeredness–academic capitalism, in theindispensable formulation of Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades. The studies I’ve read conclude that university administration has achieved a profound “corporatization of the self” in most faculty, despite occasional “concrete opposition” in faculty institutions, chiefly unions.
But there is an emergent culture of struggling back from below, evident in the self-organization of graduate employees and contingent faculty. California COCAL used to have a great online resource of some of the Wobbly-style agit-prop performed by the West-coast contingent faculty associations: I hope they get it back up soon. And I just taped a Wobbly grad student activist at the University of Chicago and his comrades singing a truly affecting resistance song.
These performances work–they communicate the dishonesty and bad faith of administrations to students, parents, and legislators–in the taped Portland Community College productions and following open-mike responses of the students, you can hear the horror in the voices of the students when they learn that their faculty earn less than $20,000 a year.
The Philadelphia academic unions have been very active in supporting the campaigns and rights of other workers in the metropolitan area, and the proceeds will go in support of fired Embassy Suites housekeepers affiliated with UNITE HERE.
If you’re in the Philadelphia area on Saturday May 3, check out the award-winning play, “Organizing Abraham Lincoln,” about the bad-asses at TUGSA/AFT Local 6290 (the Temple grad employees’ union), sponsored by the Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT Local 4531, the Temple University faculty and librarians’ union, and co-written by Lonnie Carter and Rich Klimmer.
Location: Saturday evening, May 3 at 7:30, Rock Hall, Cecil B. Moore and Broad St., Temple main campus
If you can’t make it, you can send a check to: TAUP- AFT Local #4531 AFL-CIO, 1900 N.13th Street, Barton Hall Room A231, Philadelphia PA 19122-6013 or write April C. Logan, TUGSA/AFT #6290, Department of English, Temple University, AprilCLogan (at) aol.com .
McGill grad employees have been picketing since April 8
This is an era of executive license, exemplified by the Bush mob’s trampling on labor rights, habeas corpus, international law and even the remnant trappings of democracy in the U.S. and in its various client outposts across the globe.
Now the McGill administration seems determined to show its continuing alienation from the Quebec mainstream by hitching up its jeans and defying provincial labor law in a great imitation of George W. Bush’s style of executive bullying.
According to multiple sources, including an official Quebec Labor Department report, and the independent reporting of the Montreal Gazette, McGill administrators have illegally pressured faculty, including vulnerable untenured juniors, to do the work of striking grad employees as scabs.
Additionally, they have fired striking unionized grad employees from various additional-income positions that are not covered by the union contract–including positions as exam graders and summer session instructors. A second story on McGill’s emulation of the Bush mob in the Montreal Gazette quotes a grad employee calling these moves “retaliation,” and then rips into the faculty association, which has bleated about the plight of junior faculty forced into scabbing–asking for them to be taken off the tenure clock until they’re done helping the administration to break the spirit of the grad employees:
The McGill Association of University Teachers says it has been “very insistent that everything possible be done to help faculty members who are seriously overburdened by the consequences of the strike.” It has proposed “stopping the tenure clock” for junior faculty unable to complete projects, cancelling committee work and postponing deadlines for annual reports.
But why hasn’t MAUT risen up with a banshee’s wail, if not to decry what smacks of vindictive treatment of striking TAs who wear multiple hats, then at least to complain bitterly about the extra work that has been dumped on them?
Keep up with the story on AGSEM’s shame campaign on Facebook. And I’ll have updates and individual stories in the coming weeks.
Good show, McGill. It’s nice to know that my fellow Americans residing in gated communities have a place to call home when visiting Canada. Maybe you can give Dick Cheney a visiting professorship in labor relations as well.
Ted Kennedy says that workplace rights for graduate employees improve undergraduate education.
So I’m back from Illinois and Ohio with some kind of Andromeda strain eating away at my lungs and sinuses, but wanted to quickly post the interesting news that Ted Kennedy has–after several years’ dithering–at last waded into the fray over bargaining rights for graduate employees at private institutions.
Graduate employee bargaining rights have been won in numerous public institutions (where they are covered by state law) and were won for private institutions, which are covered by federal law, during the Clinton administration. The critical case was GSOC-UAW, representing grad employees at NYU, and was decided unanimously by a bipartisan NLRB–only to be shabbily reversed by Bush appointees during the Brown decision. You can read the scathing dissent to the sleazeball work of the Bush mob on my site and at the NLRB.
In all likelihood, a Democratic victory will see those bargaining rights restored. But Kennedy has introduced a bill guaranteeing those rights, seeking to put them beyond the increasingly dishonest political manipulation of the NLRB:
More than ever in modern education, teaching and research assistants are in classrooms every day, educating students in colleges and universities across the country. Their numbers are increasing as the number of full time faculty dwindles. Often, teaching and research assistants are now doing the same job as junior faculty members.
In fact, the classroom is a workplace for these scholars. It’s where they earn the money they need to pay to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They deserve the right to stand together and make their voice heard in their workplace. Like other employees, they should have the right to join a union and improve their working conditions. Obviously, better wages and working conditions for them also means better education for their students.
In 2004, however, a decision by the National Labor Relations Board changed the law and denied fundamental workplace rights and protections for teaching and research assistants. This ruling stopped an active organizing movement in its tracks and deprived thousands of teaching and research assistants of their right to organize and bargain over their wages and working conditions.
It’s hardly the only bad decision by the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush Administration, which has been the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union NLRB in history. The Board has let workers down at every turn. It has blocked efforts to gain union representation, undermined workers’ attempts to improve their pay and benefits, and exposed them to penalties for seeking to improve their working conditions.
Of course changing the law won’t magically fix the problems of grad students–I put this question to the GSOC-UAW organizers and others in an interview recently. The key will have to be maintaining an organization that can express the united power of the student employees regardless of who seizes control of the law. More on that after I’ve defeated the Andromeda strain.
Oh, and I know I should weigh in on the whole discussion of tenure raised by comrade Fendrich. I’ll have to save up my energy for that.
University of Chicago grads march on the provost to protest unequal stipends
Chicago remains one of the few bastions of labor militancy in the United States and graduate employees have had enough at the biggest private and public campuses in the city.
Last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where unionized graduate student employees teach 1/3 of all credit hours, 150 UIC-GEO members rallied against a sleazy “tuition differential” fee structure that adds as much as $10,000 to the cost of graduate education for some members. The fees are not included in the “general tuition” waived for graduate student employees and offload such costs as high salaries for business faculty onto student workers.
Increasingly students find that the administration is using the fee structure to get around the contract and consume these working students’ already meager stipends. Numerous students arrive on campus believing that their assistantships covered their expenses only to find that the fees eat up half or more of their extremely modest stipends.
Amber Cooper of UIC-GEO says that the grads will rally at Springfield on April 30:
Thousands of other higher ed union workers from universities and community colleges across Illinois will be there withus to make sure they fund higher education so that our Deans and Board of Trustee won’t have to look to us to balance their budgets.
At the University of Chicago, students have been rallying since February against a plan by administrators that substantially raised stipends for graduate students newly enrolled in 2007-2008 to $19,000 while continuing to pay earlier-enrolled grads as little as $5,000. Many of the latter are eligible for food stamps and unable to pay medical bills. Read more on their blog. According to a report by Robin Wilson, some of the disgruntled grads are talking about unionization.
I’ll be on the U Chicago campus Friday, April 18, 2-4pm, in Harper hall room # 140, 1116 E. 59th Street, giving a talk entitled “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.”
So I’m French Canadian by extraction, not very recently, but I’m pretty much related to everyone with my last name in North America. We spend every summer in the Laurentian foothills, a couple of hours from Ottawa, three from Montreal. (I have the heritage, but my spouse has the language skills.)
It’s far from a perfect culture, wracked with its own issues of racism and xenophobia, but one of the things we really like about residing in Quebec is the profoundly pro-social commitments: day care, health care, women’s rights and, especially, labor rights.
Even anglophone McGill benefits from the Quebec labor code. When the grads went on strike for smaller classes, office space, better teacher training and better pay yesterday, they’re protected by the toughest labor law in North America:
TAs have a legal right to strike and interfering with the impact of our work stoppage is a serious offense known as “scabbing”. It is prohibited by article 109.1 of the Quebec Labour Code. Regrettably, it seems that the university has instructed its professors and sessional instructors to ignore the law and perform the normal and usual tasks of the members of our bargaining unit. The university is not above the law: our rights are not diminished simply because we are hired as teaching assistants. The duties delegated to us remain our responsibilities, and they cannot be completed when a strike has been called.
AGSEM is collecting evidence of scabbing so that we may assert the rights of our members to the Minister of Labour. If you believe another university employee has been directed to or is currently completing work that is included under your contract, e-mail that evidence (syllabi, personal e-mails and correspondence, or completed workload forms) to myjobmywork [at] gmail.com.
Professors and sessionals should know that the university cannot require an employee to break the law. If you are being pressured to perform the work of your TAs or your pay has been threatened, please contact us. You should be aware that the Labour Code allows fines of up to $1,000 per day for both the employer AND the individual found to be scabbing for each day that the offense continues. Association of Graduate Employees Employed at McGill (AGSEM)
One of the sessions will feature Jeff Williams, Heather Steffen, David Cerniglia, and Eric Leuschner on the importance of engaging undergraduates in debates about the meaning, purpose, funding, and nature of higher education.
This is a persuasive position since undergraduates are the largest group of stakeholders in the institution, yet draw their information about it from a hodgepodge of under-informed and often mendacious sources.
I’m particularly interested in Steffen and Cerniglia’s paper, “Composing the University,” which reflects on their experience of teaching the university in a first-year writing course. Ultimately, they are making the arguments made by Jefferson and Dewey. “The university as a topic for composition courses makes sense for both their humanities gen ed content goals and their writing goals,” Steffen says:
Our ultimate objective in teaching the university and in thinking about its potential as a pedagogical move is to discover whether knowing more about the institution in which they spend four—or often more—years of their lives can help to make students more critical, active citizens of the university and, by extension, other communities in which they participate.
Steffen and Cerniglia are Jeff Williams’ research assistants for minnesota review, a widely-respected humanities journal that may soon discontinue publication due to the quality-management of Carnegie Mellon University. (By continually pressing for such “quality improvements” as asking one graduate student to do the work of two, or for the editor to edit without summer pay, etc.)
Williams’ own paper draws on his recent article for Pedagogy (Winter 2008), and makes a series of arguments against continuing the notion that the university is a transparent or neutral place from which to accomplish other things.
“Next to healthcare,” Williams says, higher education
“is the most significant public institution of our day that speaks to the distribution of resources and the welfare of citizens. Prompting students to reflect on how they are formed, where modern institutions come from and how they work, is, I should think, a primary pedagogical goal of higher education and especially of criticism.”
The Pedagogy article offers many suggestions for courses fulfilling this ideal—from a course in the academic novel, to a historical survey of the changing idea of the university, to courses treating “the student” as an anthropological sociological, or internationally comparative subject, or a course on particular themes relevant to student life—such as the growing problem of debt or the hyper-exploitation of the undergraduate as a source of cheap labor. More on the latter tomorrow with respect to my own contribution, Extreme Work-Study.
As a couple of folks have noticed: I haven’t issued a new video in a while, despite having fifteen or so great interviews backed up on my monster new 750-gig external hard drive.
The videos will begin releasing again in May, about 1 per week. They include great interviews with AAUP past president Jane Buck and California faculty unionists Robert Samuels, Susan Meisenhelder, and Elizabeth Hoffman; a twofer with Steven Mailloux and Patty Harkin, a blistering conversation with Sid Dobrin, a view from the dark side of administration with Joe Urgo, gloomy thoughts on the future of academic freedom with John Wilson, and much, much more. Each video takes about 8 hours to edit and publish, so once a week is about the best I can do. And when I’m doing family videography, the series goes on hold!
While I’m traveling this month for a series of book-related appearances, I’ll have my video gear and be collecting another 20 or so interviews–with academic staff, faculty serving contingently, and working undergraduates, as well as with thinkers and activists like Stanley Aronowitz. If you’ll be near one of my talks and are interested in telling your story on camera, please let me know and I’ll reserve a few minutes to talk. Each interview takes about 20 minutes, and I can store about 10 per trip on my camera’s hard drive.
Frank Donoghue argues that professors of the humanities have already “gone too far to rescue themselves.”
This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11-13. In attendance will be plenty of Minnesota folks, like Paula Rabinowitz and Lisa Disch as well as a great lineup from GSOC-UAW (who have a new book out regarding the landmark strike of graduate employees at NYU), David Downing, Dick Ohmann, Jeff Williams, and many others.
Also in attendance will be Frank Donoghue from Ohio State, whose new book The Last Professors portrays the swift demise of the tenurable minority in the permatemped disciplines, arguing that with respect to silent acquiescence to casualization, “professors of the humanities have already gone too far to rescue themselves.”
This is a vigorous, approachable, and often angry book that seeks to hold the tenurable minority responsible for the steady flowering of multiple tiers of labor—the “new majority” serving contingently as well as graduate employees. To that end, he offers a trenchant critique of the communications of disciplinary associations and graduate program advisors that tend to paint the graduate-employee-as-disposable-worker as the victims of their own bad choices, bad preparation, or bad timing “on the market.” As a result, the relentless “job-market” propaganda and pseudo-knowledge produces a graduate-student subjectivity that willingly self-fashions as a commodity:
This take-charge, self-help approach is perfectly pitched to an audience of job-seekers who have survived graduate school and earned the Ph.D., and who cannot bring themselves to admit that the academic labor system is rigged against them. Instead, they deny it, or, more accurately, they don’t believe that the system will personally victimize them. If they fail, it is because they were “underprepared.” Ideally, they believe that their personal merit and thorough preparation will override the workings of the ‘market.’ … If you believe that success or failure is largely up to you, the job search itself becomes an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit. (40)
Donoghue goes on to note that the intensified world of competition hardly ends with the job search but continues throughout the life cycle of the tenured minority, noting the sheer unsustainability of speed-up at this level (and, one might add, at wages often much lower than those of nurses, bartenders, and police officers).
The one caveat I’ll raise with Frank this weekend regards the general probem of using “vanishing” tropes. As many have observed, the “vanishing Indian” didn’t actually disappear, but moved to degraded circumstances with a limited purchase on the public sphere. We might say the same for the faculty.
Since future higher education won’t be “professorless,” but filled with faculty—research professors of retail marketing, distinguished chairs in business ethics, but $1000-per-course lecturers in Homer—there will remain opportunities for resistance, for political action, especially by way of activist unions of the faculty serving contingently, including those faculty who serve contingently as graduate employees.
This is the argument of The University Against Itself, the GSOC-NYU collection just released by Temple University Press: corporatization is neither inevitable nor impersonal. It is a matter of human, political, reality that we can make or unmake as we choose–if we choose.
Tomorrow I’ll write about the importance of Jeff Williams’ mantra to “Teach the University,” and perhaps the day after, I’ll say something about my presentation, Extreme Work-Study.
If you’re trying to get the book from an online bookseller and seeing an estimated delivery of 1 week, it’s because the first printing of HTUW has sold out. The second printing was due in warehouses April 4, and should be shipping shortly. (The best price–$15.84 to $17.60–is at Barnes and Noble. Ordering directly from NYU Press may result in the fastest shipping, at least until the big discounters have completed the restocking process. And it’s always okay to order through your local independent bookstore!)
In the meanwhile, you can print and read the 50-page introduction as well as chapter 4 which discusses “extreme work-study,” or the startling emergence of “financial aid” as a vector for hyper-exploitation of undergraduates by corporate-university partnerships.
Chapter 4 was written to be read by a general audience and can be assigned in undergraduate classes of all disciplines. The average age of an undergraduate is now 26. Currently 80% of undergraduates work an average of 30 hours a week to fund educations commonly lasting 6 years or more: ask them to write about their experiences. You’ll be shocked at what they endure.
I am extremely grateful for the outpouring of reviews, sharing of stories, invitations to speak, and the expressions of solidarity, here and at the Valve, on Brainstorm and in private email. If you are a faculty member serving contingently, let me urge you to acquaint yourself with the resources at Joe Berry’s Chicago COCAL page, and to think about attending COCAL 8 in San Diego (August 8-10, 2008).
Friday April 11, 4:30 pm “Extreme Work-Study.” Panel presentation. University of Minnesota. Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value. CSOM, room L-110.
Saturday April 12, 12:45 pm. “The Faculty Organize, But Management Enjoys Solidarity.” Keynote Address, 54th Annual Meeting of Michigan Conference AAUP. Marriott Hotel, Eagle Crest Resort, Ypsilanti.
Wednesday April 16, 4- 5:30 pm. “Permanently Temporary: How Higher Ed Became a Wal-mart-style Employer.” Sponsored by University of Cincinnati AAUP. 53 McMicken Hall.
Thursday April 17, 7 pm. “Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.” Institute of labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 504 E Armory Ave (Wagner Education Center).
Friday April 18, tba. “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.” University of Chicago, tba.
Tuesday April 29, 11:30 am. “The Campus is Burning: The Corporate University and Its Antagonists.” Sponsored by the Polygraph Collective. Duke University. Seminar with Fred Moten in the afternoon.
Wednesday April 30, 6pm. “From ‘I Feel Your Pain’ to ‘Your Problem is My Problem’: Precarity, Universality and the Future of Academic Labor. ” Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the City University of New York. Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6112.
Possible appearances in FALL 2008:
Central Connecticut State University (no date, not confirmed)
Illinois State University: (no date, not confirmed)
NYU/New School, sponsored by ACT-UAW (no date, not confirmed)
October 16-19 Albuquerque, NM (American Studies Association) “Who is the ‘You’ in Youtube?”
November 21-22 Washington DC (AAUP Council, if re-elected)
December 27-30 San Francisco (MLA) “Social Media and Social Reality,” “The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies”
I posted yesterday on the campaign of 900-member United Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State, an AFT affiliate, to win job security for faculty serving contingently. Like workers in most fields, they believe that serving part-time doesn’t exempt faculty from workplace due process, seniority, and continuing appointment.
I wrote my letter to WSU president Irvin Reid and copied the union as below:
April 2, 2008
To: president@wayne.edu, uptf@aftmichigan.org
Subject: End Permatemping Now
Hi, Irvin. I understand you’re having a little trouble with your 900 permanently temporary faculty. The thing to do here is follow the lead of John Sexton and Bob Kerrey of NYU and the New School, who made quick deals with the 4000 faculty represented by Academics Come Together (ACT-UAW Local 7902)–deals that made the faculty and students happy, didn’t bankrupt the school, and kept “the business of education” rolling on smoothly.
The folks of UPTF have quite wisely made job security the core of their project. It sounds to me like they’re pretty serious, as they should be. And as I read the political atmosphere these days, I think their position is going to end up sounding pretty reasonable to most folks–including journalists, who for the past five years have experienced a whole lot of permatemping themselves.
If I were you, I’d give some thought to doing the right thing here. It didn’t hurt the careers of Sexton or Kerrey. I would guess this isn’t the right time to play the pugnacious executive and get booed in every stadium and auditorium you enter for the next several years. In solidarity with UPTF, Marc Bousquet.
In recent years, faculty serving contingently have rung up a series of important successes through unionization, often raising salaries substantially. They’ve also begun to bargain for job security. At some public institutions, notably Cal State, faculty have a contractual pathway to renewable appointments. At private schools, the UAW contract with the New School guarantees not only elements of job security, but contributions toward health care, family leave and retirement.
Now a recently formed AFT affiliate, the 900-member Union of Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State, has made job security the centerpiece of its bargaining. Like workers in every other industry, they believe that working part-time does not deprive faculty of the protections of seniority and continuing appointment.
Organizers feel that the bargaining has reached an impasse and would welcome your emails of support.
In recent weeks, the Union of Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State
University has reached a critical juncture in our negotiations for our
first contract that began in November 2007. The WSU administration has
said “no” to job-security for our members, even those with many years
of service to the university. Rather than recognizing longevity as a
contractual basis for future employment, the administration has
proposed a vague concept: “first consideration.” As a replacement for
the simple and democratic principle of seniority, first consideration
is both inadequate and ill-defined. The UPTF has informed the
administration that it will not accept a contract without serious job
security provisions. The union is also dismayed by Wayne State’s attempt to
maintain 15 separate wage scales for instructors doing the same work.
To support the union’s proposals, contact WSU President Irvin Reid [president@wayne.edu] and
tell him that you support the fundamental right of job security and
equal pay scales for UPTF members… Please cc it to:
uptf@aftmichigan.org.
So Brainstorm comrade Dan Greenberg has had a couple of great posts about academic labor in the sciences recently. A few days ago, he commented on the fake undersupply of scientists, essentially pointing out that labor markets are socially structured. When capitalists, universities, and farm employers don’t want to pay fair wages for work, they ask governments to help by saying that fruit pickers or software engineers are “in short supply,” so can they please import some workers willing to accept the low wages?
What this really means is that they’re in short supply at the crappy wages being offered, and the employers are begging the government to rig–I mean “socially structure”–the market in their favor. As Dan puts it, “The abundantly endowed Gates Foundation might attempt a useful experiment in talent supply. Advertise doubled pay for software engineers. A negligible response is not likely.”
In today’s post, Dan observes that we’re eating our young. (Okay, okay, he more politely quoted someone saying “We’re eating our seed corn.”)
Thousands of young Ph.D.‘s are stacked up in minimum-wage postdoc holding patterns for lack of full-fledged positions. For years it’s been predicted that droves of old-timers would be stepping down from academic posts, making room for a new generation. But the seniors of science continue to show wondrous durability, perhaps because the grant system is loaded in their favor.
This is one area where I’ve done a bit of work. Dan’s also employing what passes for “labor market” theory in writing about academic labor–when he talks about science “seniors” not clearing out, he’s suggesting that the system has a glitch and that sooner or later we’ll be able to employ those thousands of young PhDs.
The problem with this line of thinking (NOT Dan’s thinking) is that it assumes, inaccurately, that the academic labor market is a market in “jobs” when it is actually a market in contingent labor. When you look at it as if were what we call it–the “job market”–something we dearly wish it was–it looks mysteriously broken, and we don’t know how to fix it. Brilliant labor economists like William G. Bowen make ridiculously erroneous projections about it.
But when you look at it for what it is–a labor market in contingency–you see that it’s actually functioning brilliantly. Exploitative, dishonest as
