cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Yesterday, 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 you...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This begins an occasional series. Tomorrow’s post will feature The Other USC: Graduate Students on Food Stamps in South Carolina.

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....

Photo: Louis Lanzano, Associated Press

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So yesterday I suggested that some other person take up a camera and assist the trustees to introduce themselves.

But then I thought, why wait?

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 skyboxes. 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 ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This one comes over Vinnie Tirelli’s indispensable ADJ-L discussion list, courtesy of active list member, AAUP past president Jane Buck.

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 visited 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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Many thanks for the suggestions on the Academic Labor Bookshelf. Later in the summer, I’ll reissue it, revised, expanded, and with commentary.

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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is a three-segment post, this introductory note and a two-part “Academic Labor Bookshelf.” The first section of the bookshelf contains what I view as helpful texts about 1) academic labor as a system and 2) the majority of faculty, those serving contingently, as well as 3) graduate employee unionization.

The companion segment addresses 4) The theory and practice of higher ed administration, 5) corporatization, privatization, militarization, and 6) the theory and social logic of the university.

Despite its length, this “bookshelf” is quite selective and personal. I’ve left out many helpful individual texts, and entire categories of useful material, including histories of academic unionism, studies of comparable worth and gender inequity, the idea of the university discourse, together with studies of postmodernity, disciplinarity, a...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Very short fiction by Richard Dean

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 more …

Courtesy of Sisyphus, by way of the redoubtable Craig...