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 .

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.

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.

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).

This month, I’ll be making a series of book-related appearances. Hope to see you there!

Special thanks for reviews or generous mentions by Bill Pannapacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Global Sociologist, Gregory Zobel of Adjunct Advice, Emily Hegarty of Open Admissions, Chuck Tryon, Leslie Madsen Brooks of Blogher.com, Miriam Burstein of The Little Professor, Scott Jaschik and Scott McLemee (recently elected to the National Book Critics Circle–yay, Scott) at Inside Higher Ed, Sound & Fury, Purse Lips Square Jaw, Jan Clausen (”coerce u.”) at ablationsite.org, Gerry Canavan, Professor Zero, Subaltered, Historiann, Dave Mazella of Long Eighteenth, Lila Harper at FACEtalk, the Citizen of Somewhere Else, and Gifthub.org.

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”

Next month, I begin a series of book-related appearances with April stops in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and New York. I’ll publish all the details soon–hope to see you there!

I may have a third segment’s worth in the conversation with Cary Nelson, who is running for re-election as AAUP president. As it happens, I’m also running for re-election, to the national Council. It actually doesn’t matter whether I’m re-elected–my “opponent” is just as committed to the issues as I am, and I expect both of us will continue to serve the cause whether we’re on the Council or not. This is the case with many of the Council races: as it should be, they’re a win for the AAUP either way. Nonetheless, the presidential election in which Nelson figures is quite important with genuine philosphical differences between Nelson and his opponent: if you’re an AAUP member, you will have recently received a ballot. I urge you to read both candidates’ statements and VOTE.

If you’re not an AAUP member, you really should join, especially if you’re a graduate student or faculty member serving contingently. Why do I think that? In partial answer, I’ve copied my candidate statement below

The wholesale permatemping of the academic workplace is the global warming of our professional lives. Forty years ago most faculty were in the tenure stream. Today, the overwhelming majority are contingent faculty and graduate students. Many graduate students are laboring in the only academic job they’ll ever have. The turnover among contingent faculty, including full-time contingent faculty, is extraordinarily high, because their pay, benefits, security, and rights to due process—including those protecting academic freedom–are appallingly low.

This explosion of ill-paid, ill-protected contingent work hurts everyone concerned with higher ed, not just contingent faculty themselves. Undergraduate students are particularly harmed, suffering lower retention and graduation rates in connection with the insecurity, uncertain intellectual freedoms, and substandard employment conditions of the new majority.

The tenure-stream faculty are harmed as well. In the short term, individual groups of tenurable faculty may have the sense of retaining their status and benefits by acquiescing to representations of the “necessity” for ever-more contingent faculty and graduate employees. However the long term consequence of over-reliance on insecure faculty is quite the opposite. Just as in any other field of endeavor, academic wages and workplace rights trend in the direction of the poorest paid and least protected, as is already obvious by the steadily growing wage inequality between tenured faculty in fields where contingent labor is most employed and those where it is least employed.

The association has for years been moving in the right direction to serve our “new majority,” with significant policy statements, reduced fees, leadership roles, and the devotion of staff positions. But we can and must do more: devote additional staff time, interlock more vigorously with accreditation agencies, initiate public policy debate in federal and state venues devoted particularly to the substitution of flex labor for tenurable faculty, engage in public relations examining the relationship between teaching conditions and learning conditions, and so on. Over the next eighteen months the association can, and must, communicate to every member of the majority faculty that their needs are concretely and unwaveringly central to its mission.

Spring 2008

March 19, Interview with P.D. Lesko, for Adjunct Advocate
March, unscheduled, Interview with Gregory Zobel, for Adjunct Advice
March, unscheduled, Interview with Jason Jones, for Vanguard

April 10-11, U Minnesota
April 12   Eastern Michigan University

April 15-17, University of Cincinnati
April 17 University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
April 18 University of Chicago

April 28-29: Duke University
April 30-May 1: CUNY Graduate Center

Fall 2008

Central Connecticut State University (no date, not confirmed)
Illinois State University (no date, not confirmed)

October 16-19 Albuquerque, NM (American Studies Association)
November 21-22 Washington DC (AAUP Council, if re-elected)
December 27-30 San Francisco (MLA)

Very special thanks to Christine Monnier over at the GlobalSociology edublog for an incredibly detailed, thoughtful, and generous review of HTUW. Ditto for a kind mention by Lila Harper over at AFT’s FACEtalk blog.

You can preview part 1, Twilight of Academic Freedom, of my 3-segment interview with Cary Nelson in the mini-player above, or by following the link in the right column. It’s a doozy. I’ll write a proper intro for it tomorrow.

Finally: if you notice the “On Resentment” thread disappearing, it’s because I’ve decided on a firm anti-troll policy. When you have a gentle, kind zen master and experienced unionist like The Constructivist getting so frustrated that he smokes the troll with an “F-bomb,” you know it’s time to pull the plug.

In the meanwhile, I’ve had a commentator respond to both of my posts so far at Brainstorm, neither really on-topic, both expressing a perfectly understandable anger at the tenured. I’ll just share one of the comments and my response:

1. Once again, how about some tales from MB about how he and other tenured faculty have themselves worked “in the trenches”, so to speak, for the betterment of the lives of adjuncts….

   The dirty little open secret of academe is that faculty in large universities teach only one or two courses per semester (indeed, once tenured, whether or not they actually do engage in research – which has prompted the invention of academic freedom-endangering “post-tenure” reviews). The contingent labor force exists to support that system of abandoned, trickle-down work.

   So, when we see the MacDonald’s drive-by faculty who must live from the crumbs that fall from the table of the high-priced faculty in the professions and sciences (to a lesser degree,the humanities), well, just where exactly is reform supposed to start?

   Look homeward, angel….

   — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Feb 7, 10:45 AM · #

2. Actually, I find your resentment perfectly understandable. Not only that, I think your complaint has more validity than you might expect—because in a very real sense, the tenure stream has morphed into the candidate pool for administration. Of course a number in the tenure stream have and will remain primarily researchers. Others primarily teach.

   But the numbers are clear. As administrative positions multiply and the tenure stream shrinks toward a quarter of the faculty, or less, one of the largest functions of the tenure process is to produce candidates for administration.

   One unpleasant conclusion that has to be drawn from this, AH Advocate, is that you can’t expect much from the tenured in terms of “reform” on behalf of the contingent. The contingent are the faculty, by an overwhelming majoirity. They are the only realistic agent of change. Unionize—force enabling legislation—wildcat if you must. But you are perfectly correct, I fear, that waiting for the tenured to fix things will be a long haul, indeed. Solidarity, M