How The University Works

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, […]

I don’t know how long this ultra-discounted price will last, but Amazon has just posted the lowest price for the book ($15.84, matching the Barnes & Noble ‘member’ price, and the NYU Press “convention discount.”)
Next month, I begin a series of book-related appearances with April stops in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and New […]

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 […]

John Adams goes to war on behalf of the professional-managerial class.
The first two segments of the HBO miniseries “John Adams” screened last night, featuring the title character as an unwilling professional-managerial incendiary.
Repelled by the melodramatic “join or die” rhetoric of the Sons of Liberty and not entirely unaware of the advantages of currying favor […]

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 […]