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 you could use it to calculate eligibility for food stamps.

That’s because in order to actually keep writing, instead of simply howling my outrage, I have a flip tendency to handle rhetorically, ironically, and sarcastically the actual, bitter experience of faculty, students, and staff cheerfully exploited by half-million-dollar-a-year pigs at the trough and their cronies in the trustees’ skybox.

Food stamps are a federal program, administered by individual states. There are generally eligibility calculators made available by the relevant agencies in each state, such as this one in Oregon.

There are often special eligibility rules for students, such as in Massachusetts.

If you are eligible for food stamps in your state, you may also be eligible for emergency food assistance at a food bank and, if you are pregnant or have young children the WIC supplemental nutrition program.

Make sure you let your local newspapers know that you’re a campus employee and, if you have the time, mention what your top administrators earn and how much they spent on bricks & mortar, such as business centers and sports facilities in the past couple of decades.

Millions of Americans, many of them enrolled in or employed by higher education, are receiving food assistance, and with the rising cost of transporting oneself to multiple part-time jobs (yep, it costs more to be poor — just ask your administrator with a vehicle allowance), millions more are enrolling.

Millions of others are supplementing their loans with family assistance and credit card debt.

Nope, no problems here.

At least none that the god Market can’t fix.

Oh, and USC? (You know which one I mean by now.) I’ll catch you next week.

Before I get to the proper business of this post, here’s something that really deserves a post of its own, but I know I’ll neglect if I don’t just link to it now.

Must-read bloggery over at Historiann on workplace bullying in higher ed. If you want to learn more on this topic, check out the thoughtful, gentle, amazing David Yamada and his New Workplace Institute.

Now to the advertised matter.

This just in from Jon Curtiss of the essential CGEU (Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions) discussion list, which I think all graduate students should join.

Jon urges all graduate employee organizers and associations to make use of the living wage calculator produced by Penn State’s Amy K. Glasmeier, as part of the Poverty in America project.

The calculator is organized by state, county, and municipality across the United States, with typical wages for many occupations listed.

Use it to find out who’s eligible for food stamps on your campus–graduate employees, contingent faculty, gardeners, undergraduate carpenters, outsourced restaurant and cleaning staff are a good place to start.

Then, just for kicks, compare their sub-poverty wages against the salaries of the deans, president, and provost–plus the associate deans, associate provosts, financial staff, and business/law/medical school faculty.

When you’ve tabulated the results for your campus, go ahead and tell me education is rendering class struggle obsolete in the United States.

As a preview of the postponed entry on the University of South Carolina, check the data for Richland County, where that campus is based. Not too many of the grads are making anywhere near a living wage. Many don’t earn half the living wage (and it’s pretty freaking low.)

Oh, and I learned today that South Carolina grad students don’t like to be described as attending the “other USC,” and that some of them think I’m sometimes not very nice to administrators.

Yes, doubtless the kind, gentle administration will have a nice conversation with you and say, “Gosh, fellas, we didn’t notice how little we were paying you. Here, let’s rectify that promptly. We’ll double what you’re making. Would you like us to backdate that to the date of your matriculation?”

Here’s an alternate title. Join us at the University of South Carolina–Where You Have the Right to Work, But Not the Right to Eat.

A point of information: the most pompous of the faculty I used to work with, and that’s saying quite a bit, in a right-to-work state, used to wander around ignorantly harumphing to any grad student that would listen that “unions were illegal” in the state. Not true. Certain rights associated with strong unionism might be curtailed in those states, but unions aren’t “illegal.”

In fact, in nearly all right to work states, many groups–police officers, municipal workers, community college teachers, schoolteachers–form associations that may not have collective bargaining rights, but which still have a powerful influence on wages and working conditions.

Historically, the most unionized group of U.S. employees today–public employees–had to act in organized fashion to change laws that made their self-organization illegal or ineffective. Martin Luther King was shot while supporting an “illegal” strike for recognition of their union by municipal sanitation workers in Memphis.

Of course, I’m sure we’re all ever so much smarter than sanitation workers.

Oh. Wait. They get paid more. And have better retirement plans.

Oops, so do police officers. And firefighters. And municipal employees.

Huh. What do they know that we eggheads don’t know?

Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace (1935). “Hicks’s voice was sharp as he swung around. ‘Except when I was in the army, people have tried to make me feel like that all of my life–that, if things went wrong, it wasn’t that there was something the matter with the system, but that there was something the matter with me. Well, I don’t fall for it any more. And I don’t want you to think that I’m just going to lie down and take it, either, because I’m not.’”

Veteran Hicks returns to a job at a metal lathe, acquiring conciousness of his expendability. Becomes a reporter for the labor newspaper. Disillusioned by opportunistic labor bureaucrats, joins a liberal tabloid and marries. Buys a home on rent-to-own terms. Begins an affair with a woman of the leisure class. Wife becomes an advertising writer, and they hire a nanny. Through his lover’s connections, he writes a lucrative column pimping a radio company. They build a nicer home, keeping the first as an investment. “Everyone” is making money in the stock market. Mortgage crisis and depression ensue. Their wages are cut and their home is repossessed. Hicks repudiates professional-managerial opportunism:

“I’m just not going to kid myself any more. Im sick of being jerked around like a monkey on a stick, dancin’ around on top of the workers’ shoulders till the shakedown comes and then trying to scramble up again. That’s what your father’s been doing all his life–and look at him! That’s what we’ll be doing, too, till we wake up and realize that the only way we’ll ever get anywhere is with the workers.”

Albert Maltz, The Underground Stream: An Historical Novel of a Moment in the American Winter (1940). A communist union organizer, an auto plant personnel manager, and a small businessman at the head of fascist cell meet fatefully over a three-day period in February 1936. Auto is not yet unionized, membership in the Communist Party is not illegal, and fascist terror is on the rise.

“‘…We know the power of capitalism in this country. When it comes to a test, the progressive forces in this country are going to be smashed. The trade union movement will be smashed. And the Communist Party will be smashed first of all, to pave way for the others.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Man, be serious! You don’t have to keep up face for me. I’m not someone you need to convert.’

Princey shrugged.

‘Fascism will take power here, and you know it.’

With no idea where this conversation was leading, he asked, ‘Suppose it does?’

Grebb reacted with astonishment. ‘Can a Communist ask that so casually? You know what it will mean: Generations of suffering, increasingly lower standards of living for the mass of people, a bleeding country, a stifled science, an idiotic art–finance and gangsterism in the saddle!’

‘Well?’ Princey managed.

‘I know the way to overthrow Fascism quickly!’

‘How?’

‘By working inside it! Listen to me, Princey. I beg you to listen seriously. This is a tragic time for the world. Those who hold back from new political paths will be judged by history to be as guilty as those who openly opposed the working-class movement. …It would have been so easy for me to leave my job, to denounce finance capital, to give every cent of money I have to the Communist Party. That’s what I should have liked to do. The harder thing is what I’ve decided to do: To remain within the ranks of capital. To gain power in the growing Fascist movement! …Then, when the time is ripe, you and I will be in command. We’ll be able to act for Socialism from within the camp of its enemies.‘”

In the next installment of this series I’ll feature Upton Sinclair, The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence. (1907), including Sinclair on Brooks Adams’s The New Empire. Adams: “Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder.”

photo: Louis Lanzano, Associated Press

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 year we can get it down to $950! oh boy!”) in order to build themselves business centers, business colleges, and sky boxes. Being such wizards of ethics, administration, and the greater good, many of these gentle, accomplished souls have already found ways to introduce themselves to wider public notice.

The inspiration for this series is John The Boot LeBoutillier, too much of a right-wing fanatic for even Reagan’s Congress, author of Harvard Hates America, now dividing his time between higher education trusteeship and his real passion, the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”

In the typology of trustees, Ideological Nutters like The Boot probably make up the largest category, right after Insufferable Nabobs. But there are others worthy of scrutiny.

Take the interesting category of trustees running afoul of the criminal justice system. No shortage of candidates in this group, but here are three, just to get the ball rolling.

There’s Ralph Cioffi, pictured above, arrested last week and charged with insider trading, securities and wire fraud. A Bear, Stearns fund manager and proud 1978 graduate of St. Michael’s College in Vermont, he recently chaired the President’s Medallion Society for big donors, and served in the 1990s to “provide leadership” on the Board of Trustees on the Audit and Investment committees, the Burlington Free Press reported.

And Ignacio Pena, convicted of fraud in California for creating a shell company to provide over a million dollars’ worth of outsourced teaching, books, and sports programming to Compton College, where he served as trustee. A million bucks would have bought a lot of outsourced teaching, except Pena never delivered any.

Some of your trustees straddle multiple categories, like Peter Lewis, President and CEO of the Progressive auto insurance company, Princeton ‘55, and trustee of that institution. No question he’s an Insufferable Nabob, but he’s also a bit of an Ideological Nutter, bankrolling the movement to legalize medical marijuana (not recreational marijuana, just medicine for those who can afford the good scrips).

And like so many of us regular folks, his sincerely held values relentlessly led Lewis afoul of state power, as customs officers in New Zealand nabbed him in possession of more than quarter-pound of hash and quality doobage, not to mention “assorted smoking pipes and bongs.” That was in 2000, shortly after he made his first $50 million gift. To overcome his embarassment, he dropped another 60 mil on them the next year, and another $101 million in 2006. Now the entire campus is named after him.

And I laughed at all my Yale pals in the early 80s who, with cherubic sincerity over their bongs, kegs, and freemasonry, swore they were going into investment banking and white-shoe law firms in order to “fight the system from the inside.” None of those folks have delivered on their promise to build socialism while pulling in seven figures, but Lewis’s story gives one hope.

Good for you, trustee Lewis. They’re cheering you on in dorms, eating clubs and the crypts of secret societies up and down the Atlantic coast. You keep stickin’ it to the man like that and we’ll have a better world in our lifetime.

Apparently concerned by the administration’s efforts to transfer students into a program staffed by non-union faculty, the leadership of a creative independent union, the Adjunct Faculty Association at Nassau Community College, began an investigation into whether the arrangement violated federal law, using retired FBI agents working as private investigators.

The retired agents visted NCC trustees at home on Long Island last week, including the chair of the board, Mary Adams and the vice chair, John LeBoutillier. According to a Newsday account of the affair, both Adams and LeBoutillier, a loudmouth right-wing pundit and former Republican Congressman, claimed to have felt “intimidated.”

“I said it is very improper,” LeBoutillier huffed, according to the Newsday report. And LeBoutillier knows something about proper interrogation techniques. In addition to his highly qualified contributions to higher education as an NCC trustee, LeBoutillier’s main off-campus passion is the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”

His expertise about the Vietnam war came the hard way–dodging the verbal slings and arrows of campus liberals and radicals who opposed the war while he was a Harvard Young Republican in the early 1970s. Styling himself “The Boot,” he brags about having made his political career as a low-rent imitator of William F. Buckley–authoring Harvard Hates America and an equally cheesy political novel.

By way of a postscript: Like adjunct faculty unionism, sending detectives to the homes of trustees is an idea whose time has come. Indeed, it’s long overdue.

I have a proposal, Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed–better yet, AFT or NEA. (I’d say AAUP, but we don’t have the cash!)

Hire a young, disaffected Ph.D. candidate. Give her a video camera. Tell her to watch Stephen Colbert’s interviews with the members of the U.S. Congress.

Then have her interview college trustees–just let them be themselves.

We’ll be watching.

A couple of weeks back, I linked to a report by Phil Jack on AFT’s Face Talk about the case of Margaret West, a 20-year veteran part-timer at Edmonds Community College in Washington State, and the incoming president of its AFT union local, a mixed unit that bargains for faculty serving both tenurably and nontenurably. She has joined administrators to testify on behalf of education funding and led the faculty team in six bargaining negotiations.

Even though her performance had won her several guarantees of continuing employment under her AFT contract’s “Assurance of Employment” clause, the new dean of her college didn’t renew West’s contract when it came up, on the verge of her becoming the first faculty member serving part-time to helm the local. Asked why, the dean consulted his diploma from the Dick Cheney school of human relations, thrust out his lower lip, and shrugged.

“Because I can,” he said.

But maybe he can’t. As Jack explains in his follow-up, AFT Washington is slamming the administration with a publicity campaign, two grievances, an unfair labor practice charge, and a human-rights complaint on the grounds of age discrimination.

“All of this activity and attention has also resulted in several legislators and the Governor’s office beginning to look into the situation,” Jack says.

In my first post, I asked about the “Assurance of Employment” clause, and subsequently discussed it with the president of Washington AFT, Sandra Schroeder.

She explained that it is only a term-to-term guarantee for faculty serving part-time. “It only ‘assures’ employment for a year at a time,” she noted.

Schroeder called the bargaining climate in Washington–which legally limits the scope of bargaining to a cat-fight over the raise pool between institutions and bargaining units–”hellaciously hard,” especially at the two-year schools, “which are ground zero for the worst of the academic staffing crisis.”

“We would all say Edmonds ‘assurance’ needs to be strengthened,” she said, “but it is slow going.”

I have rather arbitrarily focused on books and online resources, and not made any attempt to select individual chapters or provide a list of relevant journal articles, which means, for instance, that I didn’t mention such indispensable essays as Andrew Ross’s definitive discussion of “The Mental Labor Problem” in Social Text, or the many essays appearing in minnesota review on the subject during the past two decades under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship. I also didn’t attempt to provide any of the incredibly helpful theorization of the general intellect by Italian autonomixt Marxists (the folks that brought you Empire, for instance.)

Nor did I delve into the literature of white-collar proletarianization that flows through C. Wright Mills and Harry Braverman to Aronowitz, whose first book has a brilliant chapter on the question.

Finally, many of the figures I have included have produced substantial, additional, relevant work well worth adding to your own lists. This includes such figures as Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Eileen Schell, Jennifer Washburn, Joe Berry, Michael Berube, and Cary Nelson. I’ve certainly overlooked a few things inadvertently as well, and am happy to update this list periodically based on feedback!

For those seeking more, there are a number of online bibliographies on such topics as contingent forms of employment. My favorites are Owen Thomas’s detailed-but-selective resource list for the Ohio Contract Faculty Association, Wayne Ross’s comprehensive aggregation at the Workplace blog, and two recent review-essays by Jeffrey Williams and Vincent Leitch. Both include detailed taxonomies:

Vincent Leitch, “Work Theory.” Critical Inquiry Winter 2005: 286-301
Jeffrey Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History (ALH) 2006 18: 190-216

Academic labor as a system

Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.
Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education.
Randy Martin, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University.
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education, and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Also see: Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Nelson & Berube, Higher Education Under Fire.
Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor.
Sheila Slaughter & Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education.

Contingent Faculty

Faculty serving contingently are the overwhelming majority of all faculty today. Contingency is the norm of faculty life, and organizing this sector is the cutting edge of academic labor issues right now. The best sources are contemporary and available online.

In addition to the reporting at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, see Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, COCAL, and join the ADJ-L discussion list hosted by Vinnie Tirelli. All three of the major higher-education unions — AAUP, AFT, and NEA — produce indispensable scholarship and policy papers on contingent academic labor. The testimony of faculty serving contingently is available at a growing number of locations in the blogosphere. Some of those sites are listed in my blogroll, and other stories are captured in the videos at my youtube channel.

Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education
Joe Berry, Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, Access to Unemployment Benefits for Contingent Faculty: A manual for applicants and a strategy to gain full rights to benefits, published by Chicago COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor), with financial assistance from AFT, AAUP, and NEA.
Michael Dubson, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty –and the Price We All Pay.
Nelson, Cary, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.
Eileen Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
Eileen Schell and Patrica Lambert Stock, eds., Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education.
Barbara Wolf, Degrees of Shame (film) email her at: barbara@barbarawolf.com

Graduate Employee Unions

The most important source for graduate-employee labor news is the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) email list and Web site, which links to most of the North American established unions and organizing campaigns.

Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid, Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (public institutions)
Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (mostly private institutions).

Theory and Practice of Higher-Ed Administration

The single most important thing you can do to educate yourself about the intentions of higher-education administration is to read the discourse of higher-ed administrators themselves. Their self-description of their aims is far scarier than anything I can tell you about them.

The best one-volume source for administrator-think is the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Reader, Organization and Governance in Higher Education, edited by Christopher M. Brown. The 5th edition (2000) is available used. The 6th edition from Pearson Custom Publishing is promised for this year (2008), but is not currently available.

The best one-volume discussion of the role of management theory in U.S. intellectual life is the indispensable Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. For a contrasting view, see Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.

Corporatization, Corporate Influence, Privatization, Militarization

Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters.
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928.
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Also see: Theory and Resistance in Education and Aronowitz & Giroux, Education Still Under Seige..
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class.
David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.
Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Also see The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education and (with David Gabbard), Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step.
Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
Geoffry White and Flannery Hauck, eds., Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower

Theory, Disciplinarity & Social Logic of the University

Michael Berube, The Employment of English.
Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors.
David Downing, The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace.
Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.
Evan Watkins, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.
Jeffrey Williams, ed., The Institution of Literature.

He just might get part-time teaching work at one of the several universities in the area, but there were no guarantees. He might well end up working at a grocery store, or a bar, or, if things went really badly, at a convenience store or fast food place. He shuddered, thinking of the injustice of one of the bright young minds in his field selling beer and cigarettes to the scum of the earth, or asking some imbecile if he wanted to super-size his order.

Raymond stared out the window of his office for a few minutes, morosely sipping his whiskey and imagining the very worst possible scenarios. When he turned back to his computer, he was surprised to find a job listing glowing on the screen with what seemed to be an unusual luminosity… read moreCourtesy of Sisyphus, by way of the redoubtable Craig Smith, of AFT’s FACE Talk.

In fact, by the calculation of the brilliant, indispensable Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy), nearly half of all faculty in the tenure stream bargain collectively–a rate more than 300% of typical U.S. workers. Graduate employees are close behind with, according to Gordon Lafer, a nearly 20% unionization rate. Both rates would be higher without the scandalous violation of international human rights represented by the laughable 5-4 Yeshiva decision and the Bush mob’s arrogant reversal of the NYU decision.

I’m reprinting the announcement below in its entirety from the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions mailing list.

The 17th Annual CGEU conference will be held at Yale University in New Haven, CT on July 31 - Aug 3, 2008.

Please contact Mary Reynolds, UNITE HERE/GESO, for more information: mary@yaleunions.org or 203-500-4698.

Higher education is one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy. Despite the economic downturn, many university endowments are hitting record highs (at Yale, for example, the endowment topped $22 billion in 2007). Public and private universities are competing in a race to open campuses abroad and build partnerships with foreignuniversities, particularly in the Middle East and China. In the United States, campuses are expanding to attract a record number of potential undergraduates.

The CGEU and the academic labor movement can provide a model for how to combat the increasing corporatization and casualization in the academy. Graduate teachers and researchers have an opportunity to use the expansion in higher education and our contract negotiations or demands for recognition to increase the number of good, union faculty jobs on our campuses. We must create and strengthen coalitions with other workers and unions on our campuses and across the academy, develop legislative and bargaining strategies to protect and expand organizing rights for more workers, and build consensus that union growth and power is the most important issue facing all academic workers.

Workshops could include:

Privatization at Public Universities

University of Michigan Victory: A Case Study

Building Power: Union density and lining up our contracts

Coalition Building: How to build alliances with other workers on campus, academic and non-academic?

The Changing Face of Higher Ed: Casualization, Race, Gender, and LGBTQ concerns

University Growth, Faculty Shrinkage: Endowments, Development and the Restructuring of Academic Work

The Global University and organizing global scholars

The Local University and organizing within our local communities

Legal and legislative strategies: Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Employee Free Choice Act

Bargaining Strategies: How can unions help universities help themselves? How to use grad research to improve health care, create
innovative job strategies, etc.?

Building organizing committees: High Turnover, the memory problem, and the union difference

Thanks to Mark Bauerlein for starting a thread on academic labor, including a very kind mention of How The University Works and spurring me to deliver on my now-five-month-stale promise to post some thoughts on core academic-labor readings — an Academic Labor Bookshelf. I’ll make that a two-parter and publish it this week.

For now, here are the details of academic labor’s most important conference, the Coaliton of Contingent Academic Labor event, held biennially. This year, COCAL VIII is organized by the indomitable Mary-Ellen Goodwin and will be hosted at San Diego State August 8-10, 2008.

The overwhelming majority of faculty serve contingently. Contingency is the norm of faculty employment in the United States.

I’ve long urged COCAL and CGEU (the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions), which also organizes a summer conference, to meet jointly.

Together the folks attending these events comprehend the system of academic labor better than most of us writing about it.

COCAL was born out of activist events and a contingent-labor congress held conjointly with the 1996 Modern Language Association, and organized by, among others, a core group of CUNY adjunct activists and MLA Graduate Student Caucus agitators, including among many, many others, Eric Marshall, Vinny Tirelli, Vicky Smallman and yours truly. In the aftermath, at Stanley Aronowitz’s urging, I founded Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, and, like some of us, took a tenure-track job: with almost as many others, like AAUP’s Julie Schmid and Debby Herman, Eric and Vicky joined the labor movement.

In short, COCAL was born out of a collaboration between the major academic unions, faculty serving contingently, and graduate-employee activists. IMHO, that collaboration is not only the future of the organization; it’s the future of the academy.