How The University Works

I can’t think of a better July 4th message than this, originally posted July 1 on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm group blog.   Here’s to all the trustees, administrators & legislators that made this message possible.   
A couple of days ago, I posted a link to the Living Wage Calculator, and casually & rhetorically — but not accurately — said that […]

This one comes over Vinnie Tirelli’s indispensable ADJ-L discussion list, courtesy of active list member, AAUP past president Jane Buck.
Apparently concerned by the administration’s efforts to transfer students into a program staffed by non-union faculty, the leadership of a creative independent union, the Adjunct Faculty Association at Nassau Community College, began an investigation into whether […]

Despite its length, this “bookshelf” is quite selective and personal. I’ve left out many helpful individual texts, and entire categories of useful material, including histories of academic unionism, studies of comparable worth and gender inequity, the idea of the university discourse, together with studies of postmodernity, disciplinarity, and professionalism. I’ve also largely neglected the larger […]

Teaching in Hell
very short fiction by Richard Dean
He just might get part-time teaching work at one of the several universities in the area, but there were no guarantees. He might well end up working at a grocery store, or a bar, or, if things went really badly, at a convenience store or fast food place. […]

Contrary to administrative propaganda (and the self-image of many faculty members), tenure-stream professors are not tweedy library mice or individualistic mavericks wildly hostile to collective endeavor.
In fact, by the calculation of the brilliant, indispensable Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy), nearly half of all faculty in the tenure stream bargain […]

Loyal readers will have seen some of this before, but I’ve just cross-posted this to the Chronicle of Higher Ed Brainstorm and The Valve.  NYU has made a pdf of the entire chapter available for free download: it’s written for general readership and is suitable for undergraduate reading. Ask your students about their working lives–you’ll […]

Margaret West has worked for Edmonds Community College for 21 years, serving for more than a decade on her union’s executive board, and for most of that time serving under her American Federation of Teachers contract’s “Assurance of Employment” clause. She has joined administrators to testify on behalf of education funding and led the faculty […]

A California court upholds UC-Irvine’s retaliation against engineering prof Juan Hong for complaining about permatemping–are you next?
AAUP senior counsel Rachel Levinson has taken to sending occasional emails to AAUP members about the truly scary state of case law affecting traditional faculty rights. Her latest, on the retaliation against Irvine professor Juan Hong for speech […]

Counseled by a major union-busting law firm, McGill is playing hardball with AGSEM , the union of its striking grad employees. It’s employing what some faculty are describing as “pressure tactics” and erratic behavior at the bargaining table in an effort to stall bargaining, break the strike, and get individual students to sign workload agreements […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

News flash today: the number of folks on food stamps in Ohio alone has doubled since 2001, now at over 1.1 million. There’s more: Another half million are eligible but aren’t enrolled. One reason they aren’t enrolled? What they get is about $1 per meal, or a little more than a thousand bucks a year.
How’d […]

The AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) walked off the job at 5 am this morning, shutting down classes, construction sites, and loading docks at the University of Michigan, with the support of undergraduates and union workers.

The goal of the two-day walkout was to get the attention of the administration during contract negotiations that had […]

When you teach for love, how do you pay your teaching assistants?
I completed my app. with style and perfection
Now I wonder how long before you make your selection
I hope you don’t mind that I’m being persistent
But, I really want to be your teaching assistant
–”JD,” March 13, 2008, applying for a “HotForWords” position
I left off […]

Note: discussions on this thread, including a post by Marina herself, have begun separately at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm and The Valve.
“Dude, her metrics are awesome!” Teaching for love, indeed.
Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really […]

In an essential new tract for the majority of faculty who serve contingently, Joe Berry explains how sleazeball administrations game the social-service system to vacuum every last dime from your pocket.
It takes a village to pay for the ultra-low wages that most contingent faculty are paid. The math is simple: since paying someone fifteen or […]

With the whole first-time dad thing, I’ve been a bit behind on the video project! I have twenty interviews on the external hard drive and another thirty or so scheduled for this spring (I’m taking advantage of my book tour to collect more important testimony than my own). At the rate of one interview […]

What does a young Yalie think it takes to fix our “broken schools”? $125,000 a year for teachers.
I’m not generally a big fan of “charter schools,” which more often than not are sleazy operations that combine experimenting on other people’s children with transparent attempts to break schoolteacher unions.
But one NYC charter school really breaks the […]

In this final season of David Simon’s The Wire, we see the dystopic contemporary Baltimore created by the class war from above. It’s a city ravaged by “quality management,” the same philosophy that administrations across the country have adopted in shunting the overwhelming majority of college faculty into contingent positions.
As Time magazine […]

It’s reasonable to question the views that humanities faculty have regarding enterprise. But does that mean five philosophers teaching full-time should earn less than one nurse?
Some of the issues I’ve been raising have been batted about in the Chronicle’s discussion forums. One member of the business faculty initiated an exchange by complaining that some […]

In our abortive exchange over at Brainstorm, Stephen Trachtenberg a) repeatedly ignored my very polite request to talk about the circumstances of the overwhelming majority of faculty, those who serve contingently; b) said I could leave the academy if I didn’t like it; c) affected that I was a tricky fellow using rhetoric and d) […]

I was a bit surprised that Stephen Trachtenberg chose to ignore my second invitation to talk about the plight of the majority faculty–those who serve contingently–and, instead, indulged in a speculative ad hominem flight of fancy that ends with inviting me to leave the academy!
I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy… Surely […]

One of the co-contributors over at Brainstorm, Stephen Trachtenberg, president emeritus at G-Dub, recently posted on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators, then followed it with a post in which he questioned the usefulness of tenure for faculty, at least for those profs he described as “burnt-out”:
The academy needs better, more imaginative ways for […]

In a couple of recent posts, I raised questions about both Democratic candidates