Mar

22

What Contingent Faculty Really Want?

Category: Precarity, academic labor system, faculty on food stamps, feminization of the humanities, graduate education, health care for all faculty, intellectuals are workers, proletarian thought, solidarity and a tiered workforce, youth is a category through which class is lived | 5 Comments

A new survey conducted for AFT adds confusion to the already muddled debate about the majority of faculty serving outside the tenure system. Ultimately the union is interested in a particular problem–organizing–for which in many states part-time status represents a legal boundary for the construction of bargaining units.
This legalistic definition of the group, and the […]

Mar

16

Higher Ed Inspires Labor “Videos of the Year”

Category: "job market theory" and why it's silly, "quality" and other fighting words, Precarity, academic labor system, administrators, corporate university, feminization of the humanities, graduate education, health care for all faculty, intellectuals are workers, proletarian thought, real institutional sleaze, solidarity and a tiered workforce, the videos, this blogging life, youth is a category through which class is lived | Leave a Comment

 
Eric Lee’s Labour Start clearinghouse for global labor news has just announced nominees for its first-ever award, Labor Video of the Year. Two of the five finalists are inspired by working conditions in higher ed. I think both are among the three likeliest to win.
My top choice is the clever, often hilarious series of 30-second […]

Mar

9

Baddest of the Bad

Category: academic freedom, current events, david horowitz and ABOR legislation, decline of the west (hurray!), disciplines, intellectuals are workers, this blogging life, trolls | 2 Comments

What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.
The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top […]

Mar

2

Learning to Remember: After March 4

Category: "quality" and other fighting words, Precarity, academic labor system, administrators, coming attractions, corporate university, current events, decline of the west (hurray!), faculty on food stamps, graduate education, health care for all faculty, proletarian thought, solidarity and a tiered workforce, tuition gold rush, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived | 2 Comments

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
It began with […]