crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’s editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines.

In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com In 2004, the Bush mob’s infamous executive arrogance in the Brown decision jammed the brakes on the organizing of graduate student employees at private universities (previously green-lighted by a bipartisan unanimous NLRB decision consistent with the law governing grad employees at public institutions, affirming the victory of GSOC-UAW at NYU).

Despite the setback, organizing is once more on the front burner at private universities in the U.S., including by committed, activist grad employees at the University of Chicago, outraged by an unfair stipend arrangement and by some of the lowest wages for teaching in the country (as low as $1,500 per quarter). As a result of graduate employee agitation, commonly through collective bargaining, 3/4 of university employers pay for graduate employee health insurance; the University of Chicago does not...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com ADMINISTRATOR: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator. —Joe Camhi, “Screw U, a play in one act” performed at Portland Community College

One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture — targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This administrative movement shot into high gear in the mid 1970s after anti-union labor economist Clark Kerr and...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

McGill grad employees have been picketing since April 8 This is an era of executive license, exemplified by the Bush mob’s trampling on labor rights, habeas corpus, international law, and even the remnant trappings of democracy in the United States and in its various client outposts across the globe.

Now the administration of McGill University seems determined to show its continuing alienation from the Quebec mainstream by hitching up its jeans and defying provincial labor law in a great imitation of George W. Bush’s style of executive bullying.

According to multiple sources, including an official Quebec Labor Department report, and the independent reporting of the Montreal Gazette, McGill...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So I’m back from Illinois and Ohio with some kind of Andromeda strain eating away at my lungs and sinuses, but wanted to quickly post the interesting news that Ted Kennedy has — after several years’ dithering — at last waded into the fray over bargaining rights for graduate employees at private institutions.

Graduate-employee bargaining rights have been won in numerous public institutions (where they are covered by state law) and were won for private institutions, which are covered by federal law, during the Clinton administration. The critical case was GSOC-UAW, representing grad employees at NYU, and was decided unanimously by a bipartisan NLRB — only to be shabbily reversed by Bush appointees during the Brown decision. You can read the scathing dissent to the sleazeball work of the Bush mob on my site and at the NLRB.

In all...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

University of Chicago grads march on the provost’s office to protest unequal stipends

Chicago remains one of the few bastions of labor militancy in the United States and graduate employees have had enough at the biggest private and public campuses in the city.

Last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where unionized graduate student employees teach one-third of all credit hours, 150 UIC-GEO members rallied against a sleazy “tuition differential” fee structure that adds as much as $10,000 to the cost of graduate education for some members. The fees are not included in the “general tuition” waived for graduate student employees and offload such costs as high salaries for business faculty onto student workers.

Increasingly ...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com So I’m French Canadian by extraction, not very recently, but I’m pretty much related to everyone with my last name in North America. We spend every summer in the Laurentian foothills, a couple of hours from Ottawa, three from Montreal. (I have the heritage, but my spouse has the language skills.)

It’s far from a perfect culture, wracked with its own issues of racism and xenophobia, but one of the things we really like about residing in Quebec is the profoundly pro-social commitments: day care, health care, women’s rights, and, especially, labor rights.

Even anglophone McGill benefits from the Quebec labor code. When the grads went on strike for smaller classes, office space, better teacher training and better pay yesterday, they’re protected by the toughest labor law in North America:

TAs have a legal right to strike and interfering ...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13.

One of the sessions will feature Jeff Williams, Heather Steffen, David Cerniglia, and Eric Leuschner on the importance of engaging undergraduates in debates about the meaning, purpose, funding, and nature of higher education.

This is a persuasive position since undergraduates are the largest group of stakeholders in the institution, yet draw their information about it from a hodgepodge of under-informed and often mendacious sources.

I’m particularly interested in Steffen and Cerniglia’s paper, “Composing the University,” which reflects on their experience of teaching the university in a first-year writing course. Ultimately, they are making the arguments made by Jefferson and Dewey. “The university ...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13. In attendance will be plenty of Minnesota folks, like Paula Rabinowitz and Lisa Disch, as well as a great lineup from GSOC-UAW (who have a new book out regarding the landmark strike of graduate employees at NYU), David Downing, Dick Ohmann, Jeff Williams, and many others.

Also in attendance will be Frank Donoghue from Ohio State, whose new book The Last Professors portrays the swift demise of the tenurable minority in the permatemped disciplines, arguing that with respect to silent acquiescence to casualization, “professors of the humanities have already gone too far to rescue themselves.”

This is a vigorous, approachable, and often angry book that seeks to hold the tenurable minority responsible for...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I posted yesterday on the campaign of 900-member United Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State, an AFT affiliate, to win job security for faculty serving contingently. Like workers in most fields, they believe that serving part-time doesn’t exempt faculty from workplace due process, seniority, and continuing appointment.

I wrote my letter to WSU president Irvin Reid and copied the union as below: April 2, 2008 To: president@wayne.edu, uptf@aftmichigan.org Subject: End Permatemping Now

Hi, Irvin. I understand you’re having a little trouble with your 900 permanently temporary faculty. The thing to do here is follow the lead of John Sexton and Bob Kerrey of NYU and the New School, who made quick deals with the 4,000 faculty represented by Academics Come Together (ACT-UAW Local 7902) — deals that made the faculty and students happy, didn’t...