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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13.
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

My son Emile Amitai arrived on Valentine’s Day at 5 am. To the best of my knowledge based on our brief acquaintance, he is healthy, intelligent, big-boned and goodlooking.  If all goes as planned, eighteen years from now he’ll be a big man on campus somewhere.
But what will that campus look like?
If current trends continue, […]

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 […]

In the very unscientific polls I placed at DailyKos and the Chronicle of Higher Ed nontenure-track forum, a 3/4 majority responded, “neither–we need a single-payer system.” This seems to reflect at least one of the candidate’s own judgments: Clinton appeared to acknowledge in the last debate that single-payer was preferable, just not in her […]

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. […]

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 […]

Derek Blackadder, organizer for Canada’s major faculty union, was just banned from Facebook. If you’re a facebook member, you can join this group in support of his reinstatement. Yes, you can friend me on Facebook while you’re there.

I’ve been asked to update this piece by several folks with a link to the Chronicle discussion, and some commentary on the student’s memoir. Rather than hazard a translation myself, I am providing, warts and all, a few paragraphs from the Dictionary.com translation. (Yes, we reside part time in Quebec, but my francophone neighbors […]

Play PhD Casino! was the top video in the “education” issues section on Youtube’s elections 2008 page, racking up 1600 views in two days, many of them folks who are new to the realities of higher education employment. It’s not Britney or lonelygirl15, but not bad, people, not bad at all! Thanks to Monica Jacobe […]

Thinking of grad school in the humanities? Are you ready to gamble your future–your marriage–your kids’ future–your health–your retirement? In part 2 of my interview with Monica Jacobe, she describes how graduate school resembles a lottery. “You can do everything right, ” she says, “and you still won’t get a job.” After a median […]

NYU Press has kindly made available a pdf of chapter 4, which is suitable for undergraduate reading. It discusses the nightmarish experience of working-class students recruited to work midnight shifts five school nights every week at UPS on the promise of education benefits that few persist to receive.
Per shift, they earn about what administrators spend […]

Oh. My. God.
I thought I’d heard all the stories already. Wrong. In the discussion of the Faculty on Food Stamps video over in the non-tenure track forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education, plenty of others chimed in that they’d been forced to take their families on public assistance. One guy even slept in […]

At the New Hampshire presidential debates Saturday, Charlie Gibson imagined that a faculty couple at the host institution were in the $200,000 income bracket.
They laughed so hard he practically blushed through his makeup.
The reality: in the absence of spousal hiring policies, faculty couples tend to be one tenure-stream, one not: combined incomes for most such […]

Teaching as much as an 8/8 load… raising children on food stamps and without health insurance… flying the freeways over hundreds of miles… crashing on couches and holding student conferences in hallways and fast-food restaurants… just another lousy job in the service economy.
All over the country, administrations have established contingency as the norm in academic […]