cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Gary Rhoades, who transformed our understanding of the professoriate with the publication of Managed Professionals 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 international authority on the complex of issues most pressing for AAUP: the assault on faculty culture by administration via the forced introduction of academic-capitalist values and practices; deprofessionalization and casualization; and the complex global-economic relations between state, market, and campus actors.

Taking on the General Secretary’s position, Rhoades will disrupt his existence at the peak of his career (with two more major books in progress) and relocate to Washington. There he’ll oversee...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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 school. I taught my dissertation at a proto-Ivy school. Then I taught the gamut of English courses at a second-tier school. I taught four years of composition at a tuition-driven third-tier private institution. Now I’m unemployed.

MB. As many as one-third of faculty have faculty partners. Did your decision to live with your husband and children affect your ability to find employment or get interviews?

MH. Interviews? Are you kidding? I’ve never had an interview… When the MLA Profession 20...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Anonymous details some of the daily humiliations of the majority of higher-education faculty, those serving contingently.

Anon. I looked at everyone sitting around me. ‘Slave trading’? … 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 appointments for 10 years, and a four-parter with members of GSOC-UAW.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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, president and founder of SoCAFE (Society of Certified Adjunct Faculty Educators) and she promises to “increase your marketability as an adjunct faculty educator” with the “prestigious academic certification” she just Made Up in Her Own Head. “Prestigious” in this case refers to the proud reaction of Ma and Pa Santopoalo, and the southeast corner of the break room at Phoenix.

Tenure-stream folks tired of earning bartenders’ wages are being offered their own certification scam, but it’s quite a bit more...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Faculty who serve contingently are not surplus labor that need to be shunted into another line of work. It should be obvious to anyone without “market”-themed toilet paper stuck to their shoes that there’s plenty of work in higher education for all of these people — they’re all working, duh! — it’s just that the work has been converted from what used to be a decent job into adjunctery and nontenurable drudgery by well-paid, generally tenured management knuckleheads who get off on spending money squeezed from your wages on skyboxes and “centers of excellence” for their cronies.

Faculty serving contingently are a boatload smarter on the academic workplace than management, who are paid not for their intelligence but for their dulled ethical sense and their embrace of a spectacularly vacuous corporate culture.

You can hear some of their ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The 17th Annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference finished yesterday, and the 4th Annual Canadian Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions conference begins Thursday.

Click the Flash player above to screen part 4 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, a portrait of an emerging union drive at a private institution. They reflect on the benefits of organizing, whether unionism is an end in itself, and on the nature, purpose, and extent of democracy in higher education.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll feature another grad-employee four-parter with a group of activists from GSOC-UAW at NYU, another private institution, but at entirely a different point in their experience. The NYU folks reflect on a successful organizing drive and first contract, setbacks...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The 17th Annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions begins today, and features appearances by major union figures, including my friend Barbara Bowen, who came to power in the CUNY union as part of an innovative coalition of tenure-stream faculty, graduate employees, and faculty serving contingently, with a small role played by yours truly in the CUNY Adjunct Project.

Eight years later, she’s facing some of the same demands and complaints from faculty serving contingently that she made in connection with the previous union leadership. (My own view is that this militance from the faculty serving contingently is a great thing. I’d very much welcome them mobilizing to reject this contract — ultimately it places the union leadership in a far stronger position to negotiate, having demonstrated militance.)

Next week, to mark the opening ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Hey, I just got my invitation from the National Association of “Scholars” to join their Golden Snitch project — they called it the Argus project, but I didn’t get what that means, ‘cause I’m in English and that reference requires a course in Classics. Like most NAS invitees, I insist on coloring inside the lines.

My invite arrived by OWL post and invited me to inform on Dumbledore and Harry whenever they vary from the syllabus thoughtfully provided by the trustees and their pals over at 4-Profit Degrees, Inc (“our assessment instruments prove you get exactly the same learning outcomes as at Swarthmore!”)

Every time I catch someone who thinks we should all have health care, I get a prize, working all the way up to a flying broomstick!

They took a poll at some Completely Reliable Web site in order to sniff out “those attracted by...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, a portrait of an emerging union drive at a private institution. Graduate employee unionization in the U.S. is more advanced at public institutions, and organizing at private schools stalled for a while in the aftermath of the Bush mob’s hijack of the NLRB, but there is a resurgence of militancy among grad employees at private institutions.

Part 2: Ballad of the Dissertators Part 3: Pushback Part 4: Unions and Academic Democracy

I’ve restarted the video series in connection with the summer conferences of contingent faculty and graduate employees in the U.S. and Canada. The next installments will feature an interview with leaders of the graduate employee union at NYU and with faculty serving contingently: Melanie Hubbard, a ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 2 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago. They sing “Ballad of the Marooned Dissertation Writers,” by radical folklorist Joe Grim Feinberg. Graduate employee unionization in the U.S. is more advanced at public institutions, and organizing at private schools stalled for a while in the aftermath of the Bush mob’s hijack of the NLRB, but there is a resurgence of militancy among grad employees at private institutions.

Part 1: Why Graduate Students Unionize Part 3: Pushback Part 4: Unions and Academic Democracy

I’ve restarted the video series in connection with the summer conferences of contingent faculty and graduate employees in the U.S. and Canada. The next installments will feature an interview with leaders of the graduate employee union at NYU and with faculty...