Aug

28

AAUP Completes Dream Team

Category: academic freedom, academic labor system, higher ed in the news, intellectuals are workers | Leave a Comment

Gary Rhoades, who transformed our understanding of the professoriate with the publication of Managed Professsionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy, will join Cary Nelson at the helm of the AAUP in January. As director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, he is already a leading […]

Aug

26

Downwardly Mobile!

Category: "job market theory" and why it's silly, MLA, Precarity, academic labor system, faculty couples, feminization of the humanities, graduate education | 3 Comments

Part 1 of an interview with Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure-track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
MB. How would you describe your situation?
MH. Downwardly mobile! I was a teaching assistant at an Ivy League […]

Aug

19

30 Seconds From Humiliation

Category: Precarity, academic freedom, academic labor system, administrators, feminization of the humanities, gender, intellectuals are workers, proletarian thought | 1 Comment

Anon. I looked at everyone sitting around me. ‘Slavetrading’? …Nobody reacted.
MB. But you kept working there.
Anon. I had no choice. We needed the money.
Next I’ll feature Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure track job while serving on full-time contingent […]

Aug

8

Certify, Re-Tool, or Stand and Fight

Category: Precarity, academic labor system, intellectuals are workers, solidarity and a tiered workforce | 2 Comments

Faculty serving contingently are already laughing this idea into deserved obscurity over at ADJ-L and Inside Higher Ed, but a University of Phoenix adjunct is trying to get herself a piece of the for-profit pie, and squeeze $400 apiece from as many suckers as she can with a “certification” scam.
Write your check to Rochelle Santopoalo, […]

Aug

6

Ivory Tower Inc, Coerce U, and other Recent Reviews

Category: academic labor system, administrators, corporate university, faculty on food stamps, getting the book, graduate education, solidarity and a tiered workforce, this blogging life | 1 Comment

I’m humbled and touched by a slew of spring/summer 2008 reviews, by Stanley Aronowitz (below), Jan Clausen (below), Louis Proyect (the Unrepentant Marxist), Jon Whiten of In These Times, Mr. Adjunct Whore , Anna Creech at BlogCritics, Gregory Zobel at Adjunct Advice,  Delight and Instruct, and Paolo Do in Posse (Italian only), and of course the very […]

Aug

5

‘Adjuncts’ to the Barricades!

Category: "job market theory" and why it's silly, academic labor system, administrators, faculty on food stamps, health care for all faculty, intellectuals are workers | Leave a Comment

In response to the fake teacher shortage “requiring” some communities to import education workers from abroad, one of my colleagues at “Brainstorm” (hereafter simply “BS”) wondered whether we should send higher education faculty serving contingently into schoolteaching.
To which I replied as follows.
Faculty who serve contingently are not surplus labor that need to be shunted into […]