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 you could use it to calculate eligibility for food stamps.

That’s because in order to actually keep writing, instead of simply howling my outrage, I have a flip tendency to handle rhetorically, ironically, and sarcastically the actual, bitter experience of faculty, students, and staff cheerfully exploited by half-million-dollar-a-year pigs at the trough and their cronies in the trustees’ skybox.

Food stamps are a federal program, administered by individual states. There are generally eligibility calculators made available by the relevant agencies in each state, such as this one in Oregon.

There are often special eligibility rules for students, such as in Massachusetts.

If you are eligible for food stamps in your state, you may also be eligible for emergency food assistance at a food bank and, if you are pregnant or have young children the WIC supplemental nutrition program.

Make sure you let your local newspapers know that you’re a campus employee and, if you have the time, mention what your top administrators earn and how much they spent on bricks & mortar, such as business centers and sports facilities in the past couple of decades.

Millions of Americans, many of them enrolled in or employed by higher education, are receiving food assistance, and with the rising cost of transporting oneself to multiple part-time jobs (yep, it costs more to be poor — just ask your administrator with a vehicle allowance), millions more are enrolling.

Millions of others are supplementing their loans with family assistance and credit card debt.

Nope, no problems here.

At least none that the god Market can’t fix.

Oh, and USC? (You know which one I mean by now.) I’ll catch you next week.

photo: Louis Lanzano, Associated Press

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 year we can get it down to $950! oh boy!”) in order to build themselves business centers, business colleges, and sky boxes. Being such wizards of ethics, administration, and the greater good, many of these gentle, accomplished souls have already found ways to introduce themselves to wider public notice.

The inspiration for this series is John The Boot LeBoutillier, too much of a right-wing fanatic for even Reagan’s Congress, author of Harvard Hates America, now dividing his time between higher education trusteeship and his real passion, the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”

In the typology of trustees, Ideological Nutters like The Boot probably make up the largest category, right after Insufferable Nabobs. But there are others worthy of scrutiny.

Take the interesting category of trustees running afoul of the criminal justice system. No shortage of candidates in this group, but here are three, just to get the ball rolling.

There’s Ralph Cioffi, pictured above, arrested last week and charged with insider trading, securities and wire fraud. A Bear, Stearns fund manager and proud 1978 graduate of St. Michael’s College in Vermont, he recently chaired the President’s Medallion Society for big donors, and served in the 1990s to “provide leadership” on the Board of Trustees on the Audit and Investment committees, the Burlington Free Press reported.

And Ignacio Pena, convicted of fraud in California for creating a shell company to provide over a million dollars’ worth of outsourced teaching, books, and sports programming to Compton College, where he served as trustee. A million bucks would have bought a lot of outsourced teaching, except Pena never delivered any.

Some of your trustees straddle multiple categories, like Peter Lewis, President and CEO of the Progressive auto insurance company, Princeton ‘55, and trustee of that institution. No question he’s an Insufferable Nabob, but he’s also a bit of an Ideological Nutter, bankrolling the movement to legalize medical marijuana (not recreational marijuana, just medicine for those who can afford the good scrips).

And like so many of us regular folks, his sincerely held values relentlessly led Lewis afoul of state power, as customs officers in New Zealand nabbed him in possession of more than quarter-pound of hash and quality doobage, not to mention “assorted smoking pipes and bongs.” That was in 2000, shortly after he made his first $50 million gift. To overcome his embarassment, he dropped another 60 mil on them the next year, and another $101 million in 2006. Now the entire campus is named after him.

And I laughed at all my Yale pals in the early 80s who, with cherubic sincerity over their bongs, kegs, and freemasonry, swore they were going into investment banking and white-shoe law firms in order to “fight the system from the inside.” None of those folks have delivered on their promise to build socialism while pulling in seven figures, but Lewis’s story gives one hope.

Good for you, trustee Lewis. They’re cheering you on in dorms, eating clubs and the crypts of secret societies up and down the Atlantic coast. You keep stickin’ it to the man like that and we’ll have a better world in our lifetime.

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 the arrangement violated federal law, using retired FBI agents working as private investigators.

The retired agents visted NCC trustees at home on Long Island last week, including the chair of the board, Mary Adams and the vice chair, John LeBoutillier. According to a Newsday account of the affair, both Adams and LeBoutillier, a loudmouth right-wing pundit and former Republican Congressman, claimed to have felt “intimidated.”

“I said it is very improper,” LeBoutillier huffed, according to the Newsday report. And LeBoutillier knows something about proper interrogation techniques. In addition to his highly qualified contributions to higher education as an NCC trustee, LeBoutillier’s main off-campus passion is the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”

His expertise about the Vietnam war came the hard way–dodging the verbal slings and arrows of campus liberals and radicals who opposed the war while he was a Harvard Young Republican in the early 1970s. Styling himself “The Boot,” he brags about having made his political career as a low-rent imitator of William F. Buckley–authoring Harvard Hates America and an equally cheesy political novel.

By way of a postscript: Like adjunct faculty unionism, sending detectives to the homes of trustees is an idea whose time has come. Indeed, it’s long overdue.

I have a proposal, Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed–better yet, AFT or NEA. (I’d say AAUP, but we don’t have the cash!)

Hire a young, disaffected Ph.D. candidate. Give her a video camera. Tell her to watch Stephen Colbert’s interviews with the members of the U.S. Congress.

Then have her interview college trustees–just let them be themselves.

We’ll be watching.

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, and the incoming president of its AFT union local, a mixed unit that bargains for faculty serving both tenurably and nontenurably. She has joined administrators to testify on behalf of education funding and led the faculty team in six bargaining negotiations.

Even though her performance had won her several guarantees of continuing employment under her AFT contract’s “Assurance of Employment” clause, the new dean of her college didn’t renew West’s contract when it came up, on the verge of her becoming the first faculty member serving part-time to helm the local. Asked why, the dean consulted his diploma from the Dick Cheney school of human relations, thrust out his lower lip, and shrugged.

“Because I can,” he said.

But maybe he can’t. As Jack explains in his follow-up, AFT Washington is slamming the administration with a publicity campaign, two grievances, an unfair labor practice charge, and a human-rights complaint on the grounds of age discrimination.

“All of this activity and attention has also resulted in several legislators and the Governor’s office beginning to look into the situation,” Jack says.

In my first post, I asked about the “Assurance of Employment” clause, and subsequently discussed it with the president of Washington AFT, Sandra Schroeder.

She explained that it is only a term-to-term guarantee for faculty serving part-time. “It only ‘assures’ employment for a year at a time,” she noted.

Schroeder called the bargaining climate in Washington–which legally limits the scope of bargaining to a cat-fight over the raise pool between institutions and bargaining units–”hellaciously hard,” especially at the two-year schools, “which are ground zero for the worst of the academic staffing crisis.”

“We would all say Edmonds ‘assurance’ needs to be strengthened,” she said, “but it is slow going.”

I have rather arbitrarily focused on books and online resources, and not made any attempt to select individual chapters or provide a list of relevant journal articles, which means, for instance, that I didn’t mention such indispensable essays as Andrew Ross’s definitive discussion of “The Mental Labor Problem” in Social Text, or the many essays appearing in minnesota review on the subject during the past two decades under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship. I also didn’t attempt to provide any of the incredibly helpful theorization of the general intellect by Italian autonomixt Marxists (the folks that brought you Empire, for instance.)

Nor did I delve into the literature of white-collar proletarianization that flows through C. Wright Mills and Harry Braverman to Aronowitz, whose first book has a brilliant chapter on the question.

Finally, many of the figures I have included have produced substantial, additional, relevant work well worth adding to your own lists. This includes such figures as Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Eileen Schell, Jennifer Washburn, Joe Berry, Michael Berube, and Cary Nelson. I’ve certainly overlooked a few things inadvertently as well, and am happy to update this list periodically based on feedback!

For those seeking more, there are a number of online bibliographies on such topics as contingent forms of employment. My favorites are Owen Thomas’s detailed-but-selective resource list for the Ohio Contract Faculty Association, Wayne Ross’s comprehensive aggregation at the Workplace blog, and two recent review-essays by Jeffrey Williams and Vincent Leitch. Both include detailed taxonomies:

Vincent Leitch, “Work Theory.” Critical Inquiry Winter 2005: 286-301
Jeffrey Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History (ALH) 2006 18: 190-216

Academic labor as a system

Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.
Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education.
Randy Martin, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University.
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education, and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Also see: Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Nelson & Berube, Higher Education Under Fire.
Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor.
Sheila Slaughter & Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education.

Contingent Faculty

Faculty serving contingently are the overwhelming majority of all faculty today. Contingency is the norm of faculty life, and organizing this sector is the cutting edge of academic labor issues right now. The best sources are contemporary and available online.

In addition to the reporting at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, see Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, COCAL, and join the ADJ-L discussion list hosted by Vinnie Tirelli. All three of the major higher-education unions — AAUP, AFT, and NEA — produce indispensable scholarship and policy papers on contingent academic labor. The testimony of faculty serving contingently is available at a growing number of locations in the blogosphere. Some of those sites are listed in my blogroll, and other stories are captured in the videos at my youtube channel.

Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education
Joe Berry, Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, Access to Unemployment Benefits for Contingent Faculty: A manual for applicants and a strategy to gain full rights to benefits, published by Chicago COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor), with financial assistance from AFT, AAUP, and NEA.
Michael Dubson, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty –and the Price We All Pay.
Nelson, Cary, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.
Eileen Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
Eileen Schell and Patrica Lambert Stock, eds., Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education.
Barbara Wolf, Degrees of Shame (film) email her at: barbara@barbarawolf.com

Graduate Employee Unions

The most important source for graduate-employee labor news is the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) email list and Web site, which links to most of the North American established unions and organizing campaigns.

Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid, Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (public institutions)
Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (mostly private institutions).

Theory and Practice of Higher-Ed Administration

The single most important thing you can do to educate yourself about the intentions of higher-education administration is to read the discourse of higher-ed administrators themselves. Their self-description of their aims is far scarier than anything I can tell you about them.

The best one-volume source for administrator-think is the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Reader, Organization and Governance in Higher Education, edited by Christopher M. Brown. The 5th edition (2000) is available used. The 6th edition from Pearson Custom Publishing is promised for this year (2008), but is not currently available.

The best one-volume discussion of the role of management theory in U.S. intellectual life is the indispensable Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. For a contrasting view, see Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.

Corporatization, Corporate Influence, Privatization, Militarization

Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters.
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928.
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Also see: Theory and Resistance in Education and Aronowitz & Giroux, Education Still Under Seige..
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class.
David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.
Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Also see The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education and (with David Gabbard), Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step.
Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
Geoffry White and Flannery Hauck, eds., Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower

Theory, Disciplinarity & Social Logic of the University

Michael Berube, The Employment of English.
Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors.
David Downing, The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace.
Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.
Evan Watkins, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.
Jeffrey Williams, ed., The Institution of Literature.

But shortly after she announced that she was the unopposed candidate for president of her local, and would therefore become the first part-timer to lead the unit, a dean with less than a year on the job terminated her.

Why? she asked.

“Because I can,” he replied.

This does lead one to wonder about the worth of the “Assurance of Employment” clause–it doesn’t seem to have modified the at-will relationship in this case. I’d like to hear more from Phil Ray Jack, or someone with close knowledge of the contract, about this one.

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 in direct performance of his governance duties, is one of the most-forwarded emails of the past year, appearing on half-a-dozen lists and blogs that I regularly read. It’s a chilling ruling that crudely applies the Garcetti case (permitting retaliation, including demotion and discharge, against public employees for speech in relation to their duties).

Yeah, you read that correctly. He was retaliated against for speech in direct relation to his governance duties, and the court upheld it. If he had issued pro-Nazi sentiments, he would have been safe. But because he said permatemping is bad, they could drive him out with impunity. (He has since retired.)

I’ve reproduced Levinson’s remarks in full below, and you can read a pdf of the complete amicus brief that she prepared for Hong’s appeal. The AAUP pays for Levinson’s (highly-discounted) work, its extensive advocacy efforts, lobbying, scholarship, and policy statements, and the travel & meeting expenses of a fleet of faculty volunteer officers like myself–out of the dues of just 45,000 members. That number is 1/2 the number of dues-paying members in 1972, and the total annual budget is smaller than that of many disciplinary associations.

Forgive my bluntness, but, dude, you want this work to continue? Then click here and join. Like, right away. Faculty serving contingently and graduate employees pay highly discounted rates.

Faculty Speech and the First Amendment
by Rachel Levinson, AAUP Senior Counsel

Imagine that you are teaching at a public university that not only supports but encourages your participation in institutional governance. You speak up on several matters that you think undermine the faculty role or your students’ experience—and for your trouble, you are denied a raise, saddled with additional work, or even fired. Do the university’s actions violate the First Amendment?

The AAUP and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression recently filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in such a case. The brief, which was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, supports the appeal of Dr. Juan Hong in his First Amendment lawsuit against the administration of the University of California, Irvine. The case could have significant implications for faculty members at all public colleges and universities—and, ironically, could have the strongest negative impact on faculty that are encouraged to participate in university governance.

Dr. Hong, a full professor at UCI, allegedly angered university administrators by opposing certain faculty hiring and promotion decisions and the university’s use of lecturers in place of professors. After Dr. Hong was denied a merit salary increase and given an increased workload, he filed suit, claiming that the university violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

A federal trial judge in California rejected Dr. Hong’s claim. The judge reviewed Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect public employees from discharge for statements made “pursuant to their official duties” but declined to decide whether its ruling extended to “speech related to scholarship or teaching.” The judge in Dr. Hong’s case concluded that Dr. Hong’s participation in faculty governance was “pursuant to his official duties,” and that the university’s retaliation therefore did not violate the First Amendment. The court failed to acknowledge, however, that the Garcetti decision explicitly set aside the question of protection for academic speech, and held that “UCI is entitled to unfettered discretion when it restricts statements an employee makes on the job and according to his professional responsibilities.”
The AAUP’s amicus brief focuses on the unique status granted to academic speech, and its relation to shared governance. The brief notes that faculty speech has been accorded special First Amendment protection by the Supreme Court since Sweezy v. State of New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957). The hallmark of such cases, the brief notes, is the recognition that academic freedom merits distinctive First Amendment protection against repressive action from within or outside the campus community.
The AAUP brief argues that participation in faculty governance is part and parcel of professors’ First Amendment-protected right of academic freedom to speak without fear of retaliation. The brief also observes that the court failed to distinguish between faculty rights and responsibilities, and argues that the court’s decision will empower universities with strong policies in favor of shared governance to discipline faculty members who annoy administrators through their involvement in university governance.

Luke, I am your father.

Junior faculty report being advised to file grades in violation of Quebec law, and “not to say anything, because it could affect your tenure case.” There are numerous reports of graduate students denied full payment of pre-strike hourly earnings, including both teaching wages and research stipends from grant funds completely unrelated to teaching activities.

Last week, the administration overplayed its hand in an amateurish attempt to bypass union leadership and the bargaining process itself by electronically self-publishing what it called a “global offer” to teaching assistants. Students were fired up by the arrogant paternalism of the move–essentially saying to union members, “the heck with bargaining and your leadership, just sign here, kids.” But they also understood the offer as a sleazy effort to get them to agree that other university employees could do their work, essentially giving up core labor protections in the Quebec code. The “offer” was rejected overwhelmingly, by 86% of voting members.

Frustrated by the thumping rejection, McGill returned to the table but adopted an unprofessional and hectoring tone, accusing the grad students of attacking the role of the professoriate and academic freedom, and, most egregiously, telling the union’s bargaining team to”grow up and take responsibility,” resulting in the students’ walking out of the session and this response by Richard Hink, AGSEM president.

This past Thursday and Friday, the administration continued its hijinx at the bargaining table, making a verbal agreement with grad employees to a version of the workload form consistent with Quebec law, then repudiating the agreement the next day. “This deal occurred at the table with a provincial conciliator present — everyone in the room agreed. This morning, we returned to the table and the Administration informed us that they were retracting the deal,” an AGSEM official informed me “This is a stab in the back and we’re looking into legal action for bad-faith bargaining. Our position is that the text was accepted and remains part of the workload form.”

“They’re stalling,” my faculty source told me. “The administration doesn’t appear willing to bargain in good faith. It’s not just about the TAs. Their negotiations with the clerical workers’ union (MUNACA) have also been dragging on. The administration appears more interested in control than in saving money.This is the politics of neoliberalism.”

Grad student activists appear to share this view. “McGill appears to be trying to make an example out of the TA union because the administration is currently in negotiations with clerical, technical, library assistants, nurses and others. If MUNACA goes on strike, the University shuts down,” he said. He thinks the university’s hardball tactics are backfiring. “If anything, the support from MUNACA members on the TAs’ picket line indicates that our refusal to give in to pressure tactics has only inspired their membership to fight.” The same source offered several examples of McGill’s corporatization, including centralization of food services and the shutdown of student-run businesses and the takeover of spaces traditionally controlled by faculty and students:

The attempt to bust the TA union is only one part of a general plan to not only obliterate student autonomy, their organisations, and places of discussion, publication, dissemination, and thus, dissent, but to make circumstances very difficult in which students, faculty and staff could freely meet each other and discuss issues pertaining to their workplace and the increasingly stifling campus climate.

While faculty feeling about unionism is mixed, some have been questioning the role of their own faculty association, the MAUT, described by many as a classic company union. As one commenter in an earlier blog post on the strike noted:

As a junior McGill professor, I can say that it is par for the course for our faculty association to be another arm of the administration. In fact, most of the administration is part of the faculty association. Who is going to show up at a MAUT meeting and ask the faculty to cross the administration when their dean is sitting beside them? The main role of MAUT seems to be to keep the salaries rising nicely and to monitor the pension fund. Real concerns, like workloads for junior faculty, access to daycare, conflicts with management, etc., are not things that interest MAUT. The result is that the faculty are financially probably better off than many places with unions, but we have no bargaining power on other issues.

The Montreal Gazette reported one faculty member who took an even dimmer view of MAUT’s response: “I guess the MAUT folks don’t want to rile the administration [while negotiating their own salaries], but for one group of teachers to ignore the efforts of another group to improve their working conditions is shameful, at least.”

Many of the faculty support the union, and some individual profs wear AGSEM buttons, walk the picket line, distribute strike literature and are trying to find ways to help students to replace the lost income.

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?

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 .