crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com In recent years, faculty serving contingently have rung up a series of important successes through unionization, often raising salaries substantially. They’ve also begun to bargain for job security. At some public institutions, notably Cal State, faculty have a contractual pathway to renewable appointments. At private schools, the UAW contract with the New School guarantees not only elements of job security, but contributions toward health care, family leave, and retirement.

Now a recently formed AFT affiliate, the 900-member Union of Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State, has made job security the centerpiece of its bargaining. Like workers in every other industry, they believe that working part-time does not deprive faculty of the protections of seniority and continuing appointment.

Organizers feel that the bargaining has reached an impasse...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So Brainstorm comrade Dan Greenberg has had a couple of great posts about academic labor in the sciences recently. A few days ago, he commented on the fake undersupply of scientists, essentially pointing out that labor markets are socially structured. When capitalists, universities, and farm employers don’t want to pay fair wages for work, they ask governments to help by saying that fruit pickers or software engineers are “in short supply,” so can they please import some workers willing to accept the low wages?

What this really means is that they’re in short supply at the crappy wages being offered, and the employers are begging the government to rig — I mean “socially structure” — the market in their favor. As Dan puts it: “The abundantly endowed Gates Foundation might attempt a useful experiment in talent supply. Advertise doubled pay for ...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

News flash today: the number of folks on food stamps in Ohio alone has doubled since 2001, now at over 1.1 million. There’s more: Another half-million are eligible but aren’t enrolled. One reason they aren’t enrolled? What they get is about $1 per meal, or a little more than a thousand bucks a year.

How’d that happen?

Quality management.

Ever since the first Clinton came to office, we’ve had bipartisan agreement that the quality management of everything — the military, municipalities, colleges, philanthropies — was going to magically reduce expenditures and raise revenue by encouraging market orientation and market behaviors. All we needed was better, leaner leadership in ever stronger control of institutional mission.

With quality, we’ve achieved wonderful “efficiencies” by driving down wages and benefits, with the result that many...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) walked off the job at 5 am this morning, shutting down classes, construction sites, and loading docks at the University of Michigan, with the support of undergraduates and union workers.

The goal of the two-day walkout was to get the attention of the administration during contract negotiations that had not been taking seriously the union’s demand that teaching assistants earn a living wage in the Ann Arbor area, representing a one-time increase of over 9%, to be followed by regular cost-of-living increases.

That demand appears to have succeeded, with the university requesting that bargaining re-commence.

GEO is one of the most successful graduate employee unions in the...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I completed my app. with style and perfection Now I wonder how long before you make your selection I hope you don’t mind that I’m being persistent But, I really want to be your teaching assistant —“JD,” March 13, 2008, applying for a “HotForWords” position

I left off last week with a note on YouTube phenom HotForWords as an exemplar of what’s produced at the shabby intersection of driving the humanities into the cellar of “teaching for love” and the “market-driven” and “metric-accessible” administrator notions of educational quality.

There were a bunch of interesting reactions. At The Valve (“A Literary Organ”), the responses trended toward the hormonally clever: “By and large I prefer the natural linguistics teachers to the silicone kind,” notes John Emerson.

At Brainstorm, the ever-trenchant Richard Tabor Greene tested the...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really can realize the administration’s dream in the form of the ultimate “quality” process.

The 27-year-old Russian philologist is a former Ph.D. aspirant and high-school literature teacher with nearly 30 million views of her videos explaining various linguistic puzzles, such as — in the featured clip — how “dope” can mean both stupid and excellent.

One might ask the same about the term “quality,” which for administrators means, well, this.

Seriously, there’s no disputing her metrics. It’s teaching as “vaudeville,” as The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan points out, but her curriculum is customer-defined and market-oriented. She is a self-funding responsibility center. She gets great student...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The first two segments of the HBO miniseries “John Adams” screened last night, featuring the title character as an unwilling professional-managerial incendiary.

Repelled by the melodramatic “join or die” rhetoric of the Sons of Liberty and not entirely unaware of the advantages of currying favor with the administration, Adams enters the picture deeply invested in colonial shared governance, declaring “The crown is misguided, but it is not despotic — I firmly believe that.”

The most compelling aspect of the Adams character in these segments is his movement from a faith in shared governance to outraged revolutionary. Professorial in demeanor and temperament, Adams’s personal journey to democracy is perhaps farther even than his journey to dissent. Praising Britain’s “strong governance,” he tells his wife Abigail, “most men are weak and...

“There’s your income. . . . No . . . there! . . . No . . . there! . . .”

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

It takes a village to pay the ultra-low wages that most contingent faculty are paid. The math is simple: Since paying someone 15 or 18 grand a year for a full-time load is well below a living wage nearly everywhere in the country, especially when that person has massive student-loan debt, someone is supplementing the wage so the teacher can live. It could be a spouse, parents, a retirement fund, or another employer. Sometimes it’s human services, in the form of welfare or food assistance. The money “saved” by cheap faculty labor is actually paid in to the system by taxpayers, other employers, and family members.

Meanwhile, the funds that would otherwise be spent on faculty are spent on the plague of locusts called administrators: As the most recent data have it...

crossposted from The Valve

So I’m spending a lot of time these days encouraging my son to vomit on my shoulder, which translates into more time than usual with my friend Tivo, and there is a sort of pause in the Democratic knife fight (except for the part where Ferraro pours gasoline on the Clinton candidacy and lights it while Hillary wonders whether a fire extinguisher is required).

Anyway.

So in the middle of the night I tune in to what all the kids are watching — National Geographic Channel, Animal Planet, all that.

And I watch “Aftermath: Population Zero,” appearing on National Geographic. The concept isn’t the worst: the producers ask, what will the planet look like after humanity? As you’d expect, it’s a platform for exploring all the unsustainable things that humans do. Subtract humanity, and watch how the planet finds a balance. For popular science, not bad, though...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

With the whole first-time dad thing, I’ve been a bit behind on the video project! I have 20 interviews on the external hard drive and another 30 or so scheduled for this spring (I’m taking advantage of my book tour to collect more important testimony than my own). At the rate of one interview a week — a rate I haven’t really kept up, I’ll be at this another year.

I may have a third segment’s worth in the conversation with Cary Nelson, who is running for re-election as AAUP president. As it happens, I’m also running for re-election, to the national Council. It actually doesn’t matter whether I’m re-elected — my “opponent” is just as committed to the issues as I am, and I expect both of us will continue to serve the cause whether we’re on the Council or not. This is the case with many of the Council races: as it should be, they’re a win for ...