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 […]

photo: Louis Lanzano, Associated Press
So yesterday I suggested that some other person take up a camera and assist the trustees to introduce themselves.But then I thought, why wait?
These clever, selfless folks have overseen the vicious gutting of the faculty–earnestly saving on our wages and benefits (”$1000 a class–what great managers we are! maybe next […]

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 […]

Many thanks for the suggestions on the Academic Labor Bookshelf. Later in the summer, I’ll reissue it, revised, expanded, and with commentary.
A couple of weeks back, I linked to a report by Phil Jack on AFT’s Face Talk about the case of Margaret West, a 20-year veteran part-timer at Edmonds Community College in Washington State, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’ health plans–Obama’s really won’t cover many people and Clinton’s enthusiastically endorses tiering of care.
As we move closer to the likelihood of an Obama presidency, isn’t it time to start moving the candidate toward questioning his own lousy health-care plan?
His plan is simply […]

“It’s broadly recognized, certainly by contingent faculty themselves, that they really don’t possess academic freedom,” Cary Nelson says, at least not “in the way that the American academy has assumed for basically half a century that everyone who teaches does.”
In the first segment of our interview, the 49th president of the AAUP suggests that the […]

crossposted at Brainstorm
So it’s neck and neck in the Democratic race, and since neither candidate has promised to end poverty in academia, I wonder: which of the candidates has a viable plan for treating contingent faculty diagnosed with cancer, or heart disease? (Since “quality management” and “executive leadership” doesn’t take responsibility for these issues, while […]

Right now, I’m editing the Cary Nelson interview and breathlessly awaiting East Coast poll closings, at which point I will open a bottle of local wine (Santa Cruz Mountains) and sink into the spectacle.
Before getting my politico-oenological fix on, I thought I’d share a provocative post from one of my colleagues at Brainstorm, Dan Greenberg. […]

“Wal-mart workers know they’re being had,” Michelle Masse says. “Academics don’t.”
In part 2 of our interview, she argues that the call to service in higher education has been a vector for cynical exploitation by administrations, but also for willing submission to exploitative demands. This is especially the case for women faculty, but also for men […]

In today’s mailbag, Miriam at The Little Professor has a nice reading of HTUW, and raises a couple of good questions in relation to the book. She wants to learn more about the way affect or “teaching for love” helps drive exploitation and wants to know what could happen to contingent faculty if contingent work […]

Thanks to Feminist Law Profs for putting HTUW on the recommended bookshelf, together with a great article by Marina Angel. “Women of All Colors Steered to Contingent Positions in Law Schools and Law Firms.” I’ve excerpted the abstract below.
The sexist division of labor in the academy (via the feminization of disciplines and the permatemping of […]

It used to be that feminists adhered to a “pipeline” theory of progress in gender equity in higher ed–the more women with PhDs, the more tenure-stream women, the more women in leadership.
It hasn’t turned out that way. The majority of women teaching in academe get paid in the same range as men working as […]

I’ve been asked to update