cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.

It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”

The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision making.

My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Last week, which I’d dedicated primarily to family time, I jumped on to post breaking news about UAW’s successful organizing of 5,000 University of California postdocs, and a fairly uncontroversial AP profile of Cary Nelson’s service as AAUP president.

In the profile, Cary gets credit for turning around organizational missteps in the membership office and staff leadership, and leading a long-overdue structural overhaul to create interlocking but legally distinct operations for collective bargaining, professional association, and a foundation in support of academic freedom. From its low point of 39,000 during the era of Greed is Good, membership has climbed to 47,000; a capital campaign has made significant progess, and the problems in the membership office responsible for the nonrenewal of thousands of members have been resolved. Most...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So I’ve been taking a few days for non-academic desk work—chiefly editing about twenty hours of Emile video (aged six weeks to five months: first swim in the lake, first rice cereal) into forty minutes that a grandparent would enjoy, notwithstanding the Oakland funk sound track.

But I find tons of interesting stuff in my email box that I can share with you, including these killer opening lines to a Joy James essay (“Academic Addiction”) for a volume to which I’m providing an afterword: “I have been mainlining white supremacy for so long that I’ve lost clarity and spirit. I could blame this on the university, the degrees, publishing, narcissism, and careerism….yet I was hooked long before I went to graduate school and long before I got the green light for tenure track, tenure, and promotion.”

The book’s called Academic Repression:...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Seems that 5,000 University of California postdocs just chose UAW as their collective bargaining representative.

In recent years, UAW’s success in organizing the majority contingent faculty has spurred on the efforts of NEA, AFT, and AAUP.

Majority of the University of California’s 5,000 Postdoctoral Researchers Choose Collective Bargaining

by Matthew “Oki” O’Connor, PRO/UAW

San Francisco, Calif. — As a result of an ongoing, state-wide grassroots organizing campaign, a majority of the 5,000 Postdoctoral Researchers (Postdocs) working at the University of California (UC) have signed cards authorizing their Union, Postdoctoral Researchers Organize/United Auto Workers (PRO/UAW), to represent them in collective bargaining.

Based on this majority mandate, PRO/UAW has filed a petition with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB)...

Maybe you just got this e-mail too, signed by all the major airlines and quite a few minor ones.

Gee, fellas, I dunno. We could never regulate a market. That would be sacrilegious. I mean, the stars would fall out of their places in the heavens and disrupt the flatness of the earth. Markets are ordained by the church and speak directly to his Holy Halliburton.

But if you think the oil market needs regulating and protection from baddies who might abuse and manipulate it, kids — let’s not stop there.

Let’s regulate the “market” in contingent labor too. Ah, heck. Let’s regulate the “market” in tenure track jobs.

C’mon. Just as the corporations say, “by pulling together, we can all do something” about these haywire markets.

And gosh-all-get-out: I wonder, does the manipulation of the “market” in academic labor by the Quality Baddies have anything at all to do with the...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So I’ve been camping out in Stan Katz’s corner of the ‘storm for about 24 hours, off and on. Completely hogging the comments section: There are 45 comments, and maybe 8 of them are long-windedly mine. (It’s still going on, and you may want to get in on the conversation — as good an opportunity as any to have your ideas about the “job market” rattled a bit.)

Anyway, it drives me bonkers, the crazy things that folks — who obviously think they’re both educated and bright — have to say about “the economy.”

If I were an economist, I’d be appalled at just how badly we were doing at teaching folks anything. For instance, check out Sgt Rock, an engineering prof, below. He thinks he understands economic reality very well.

Thing is, I spend a fair amount of time with people who aren’t humanities profs —schoolteachers, printers, maids,...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The Moore College of Art and Design has been trying to crush its faculty for two decades. Since 1990, when it employed mostly tenure-stream faculty, it has been converted into an academic Wal-Mart, with 31 full-timers on contracts and 70 adjuncts, draconian violations of shared governance and academic freedom norms, including a code prohibiting artists (!) from “doing anything that might negatively reflect on the college,” and, AFT alleges, a history of interfering with the union’s elections and bargaining.

When Steve Sherman, a popular faculty member of 20 years’ standing with glowing evaluations took the helm of the Moore Federation of Teachers in 2005, he opposed the vocationalization of the curriculum and, according to the AFT Free Exchange blog, became “a fierce advocate for the rights of adjunct faculty to receive pay and...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

When I showed up at my first tenure-track job in a right-to-work, kind of Southern state, adjunct writing faculty were being asked to pay tuition for a summer pedagogy seminar run by the writing director in an illegal “pay-to-work” scheme.

(Unless the prospective adjuncts were spouses of tenure-track faculty, in which case they still had to take the course, but were graciously comped the graft.)

This was 1998, at the University of Louisville. Six-year graduation rates under aggressive “quality management” were around 30 percent (where they remain). And the latest innovation in “enabling access to higher education” was indenturing college hopefuls to UPS and discarding them without a degree, in a scam I’ve previously discussed as Extreme Work-Study.

Ten years later, the South writhes again.

According to a detailed survey...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In part 1, I reminisced about my own years in a right-to-work state and quoted the quantitative portion of the compensation report generated by impoverished grad students at the University of South Carolina, which — in close relation to the poverty of its workforce — is bristling with new buildings, institutes, and fat paychecks for administrators thoroughly versed in that species of doltery known as quality management.

This part is devoted to extracts from the qualitative responses. You can read them all (warning, large pdf).

Before I do that, I should say that I’ve received more private email from faculty at USC — before I even released the blog post — than I have on any other student-oriented post. Even the posts about McGill, with 80 or 90 commenters on the blog, didn’t generate as much private email.

In general, this email...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Earlier this week, I posted on the subject of faculty on food stamps. That seems like an appropriate theme to continue in recognition of the profound failure of economic democracy in America — and higher education’s role in that failure.

So I give you a couple of links to early videos on the theme in my soon-to-be-restarted series. All of the clips are just three or four minutes long. Oh yeah, hurray for higher ed and the USA!