cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Contrary to administrative propaganda (and the self-image of many faculty members), tenure-stream professors are not tweedy library mice or individualistic mavericks wildly hostile to collective endeavor.

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 percent of typical U.S. workers. Graduate employees are close behind with, according to Gordon Lafer, a nearly 20-percent 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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So I learned that a good way to help your 3-month-old with his first flight is to pretend that takeoffs and landings are your favorite things in the world. Even when they’re not. I also suspect that loudly pretending that you are having a great time with takeoff and landing is just as irritating to other passengers as listening to your offspring cry. In any event, Emile laughed and chuckled his way into the air and back down to earth.

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...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is a continuation of Extreme Work-Study 1. NYU has made a pdf of the entire chapter available for free download: it’s written for general readership and is suitable for undergraduate reading. Ask your students about their working lives—you’ll be shocked at what they endure.

The UPS partnership appears to have increased rather than decreased the economic distress of participants. According to the company’s own fact sheet, student workers giving up five nights’ sleep will typically be paid for just fifteen to twenty hours a week. Since the wage ranges from just $8.50 to $9.50, this can mean net pay below $100 a week, and averaging a little over $120. The rate of pay bears emphasizing: because the students must report five nights a week and are commonly let go after just three hours, their take-home pay for sleep deprivation and...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Not that most of you will care very much, but one of the best contenders for the thoroughbred Triple Crown will race this Saturday. The horse’s moniker, “Big Brown,” expresses the owner’s gratitude to shipping giant UPS for renewing a contract with his trucking company. For folks like him, for full-time Teamster drivers, and for the customers who want their online-ordered crap at their doors tomorrow, UPS represents a good deal. The company’s also received plenty of good ink for its “Earn and Learn” financial-aid packages for part-time student employees.

Coincidentally, the chapter of HTUW that usually gets the most attention from non-academic readers is the one questioning whether involvement with the company really has been a good deal for the tens of thousands of students it claims to have “aided” over the past decade.

Most...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Last week I posted on the scary case of Juan Hong, a tenured full professor at UC Irvine, who was retaliated against for his speech in connection with his governance duties. Because he dissented from the majority on a couple of personnel decisions, and expressed concern about the impact of nontenurable hiring on undergraduate learning, he attracted the ire of administrators and was denied a merit raise and assigned additional work. He has since retired, but is appealing his case, which has truly chilling implications for the rest of us: if you don’t have speech protections when engaging in governance, where do you have it? And how meaningful can “shared” governance be if you can be hounded off the campus for disagreeing with the administration?

Of course Bob Dole’s ranting response to Scott McClellan’s memoir of his years in the Bush...

My department just circulated its annual call for summer reading suggestions. I have long promised an “academic labor bookshelf” series of entries, and will probably deliver on that in a few weeks.

In the meanwhile, my three suggestions for summer fiction:

Chris Bachelder, US! (2006). hilarious, relevant political novel based on the conceit that Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil!) is serially resurrected (and serially assassinated.)

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (1993). Hilarious, brilliant, irreverent, captivating, and defies description. My favorite North American novel of the past 30 years. If you must describe it, it’s by far the most readable piece of postmodern historiographic metafiction ever written. So full of ideas, so full of references, and all handled deftly, with incisive wit and a light touch.

Upton Sinclair, Oil! The “base” of There Will Be Blood, ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Margaret West has worked for Edmonds Community College for 21 years, serving for more than a decade on her union’s executive board, and for most of that time serving under her American Federation of Teachers contract’s “Assurance of Employment” clause. She has joined administrators to testify on behalf of education funding and led the faculty team, according to Phil Ray Jack on AFT’s FACE Talk, in no less than six bargaining negotiations.

But shortly after she announced that she was the unopposed candidate for president of her local, and would therefore become the first part-timer to lead the unit, a dean with less than a year on the job terminated her.

Why? she asked.

“Because I can,” he replied.

This does lead one to wonder about the worth of the “Assurance of Employment” clause — it doesn’t seem to have modified the at-will...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

AAUP senior counsel Rachel Levinson has taken to sending occasional emails to AAUP members about the truly scary state of case law affecting traditional faculty rights. Her latest, on the retaliation against Irvine professor Juan Hong for speech in direct performance of his governance duties, is one of the most-forwarded emails of the past year, appearing on half-a-dozen lists and blogs that I regularly read. It’s a chilling ruling that crudely applies the Garcetti case (permitting retaliation, including demotion and discharge, against federal employees for speech in relation to their duties).

Yeah, you read that correctly. He was retaliated against for speech in direct relation to his governance duties, and the court upheld it. If he had issued pro-Nazi sentiments, he would have been safe. But because he said permatemping is bad, they...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Luke, I am your father.

Counseled by a major union-busting law firm, McGill is playing hardball with AGSEM, the union of its striking grad employees. It’s employing what some faculty are describing as “pressure tactics” and erratic behavior at the bargaining table in an effort to stall bargaining, break the strike, and get individual students to sign workload agreements that repudiate some of their rights under Quebec law.

Last month, the university fired striking teaching assistants from their non-union positions at the school, claiming that the Quebec labor code compelled them to do so, while—in blatant violation of the code, also forcing faculty to do the grading work reserved for the graduate employees. “The firings have really galvanized the...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

About six weeks ago, I reported on the decision by the Union of Part-Time Faculty to make job security the core demand of their first contract negotiation at Wayne State, where graduate employees and faculty serving on a full-time basis are already unionized.

In the tentative agreement reached between the administration and UPTF-AFT, the faculty forced the administration to accept job security after six consecutive semesters (to one-year renewable contracts with seniority protections) and, after six more terms, two-year renewable contracts with seniority protections. Salaries were raised to a minimum of $700/credit hour (from a current low of $582), with a floor of $1,000/credit hour in the most secure tier. Above these minimums are 15 salary levels to avoid wage compression.

They did not press on health insurance and the percentage ...