Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Today the Grey Lady lent the op-ed page to yet another Columbia prof with the same old faux “analysis” of graduate education.

Why golly, the problem with the university is that there aren’t enough teaching positions out there to employ all of our excess doctorates Mark C. Taylor says: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).” Because there are just too many folks with Ph.D.‘s out there, “there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.”

Um, nope. Wrong. The New York Times loves this bad theory and has been pushing it for decades, but the reality is clear.

In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the “excess doctorates” out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

During a break from writing a column or blogging, you imagine that you’re going to return with a magisterial survey of all the events that transpired while you were away. Instead, of course, you are just plunged right back into the fray. Thirty interviews recorded but not edited; a dozen interviews promised but not done. Not to mention book reviews, self-indulgent columns about your offspring, and the never-ending fountain of administrator outrages demanding immediate attention: cancelled sabbaticals, slashed pay for faculty serving contingently, prison labor on campus, and pleas for federal money to erect more monuments to administrator vanity. I’ll get to all of these promises and topics in time. (Thanks to the intrepid John Protevi for the prison labor tip: more on that ASAP.)

While I was on the road, I heard from NYU students and...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Most campuses are structurally reliant on student labor, in arrangements that are often exploitative with serious harms to the students, as I’ve noted before in Extreme Work-Study.

In many cases, the campus’s own undergraduate population is the single largest segment of the workforce.

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Let’s say you own a house. It’s your only asset, but you own it outright. Five years ago, that house was worth $200,000. But then a big employer came to your town, and your home gained 50 percent in value. You congratulate yourself on your investment choices and you tell the kids: “Guess what? We’re worth $300,000.” You feel rich and maybe you buy the large size of popcorn at the movies for a while.

But then the big employer pulls out, or a farm is sold to a developer, and in a matter of weeks or months, your house plummets to $200,000 again.

Then what? You’re ticked off because your investments have “crashed” to a previous valuation. You’re determined that your net worth must be $300,000 at all costs.

So you put your kids on a diet of peanut-butter and jelly — no sports, no new clothes, no movies — total austerity, until you’ve made ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then — I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. —from Carl Sandburg, “I am the People”

A few months ago, Eileen Schell wrote me along the lines of the Sandburg poem above. “We have a habit of reinventing ourselves” with respect to the...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com The most popular interview on my YouTube channel is Play PhD Casino! with Monica Jacobe

Saturday’s report on academic employment by The New York Times hangs on the peg of a fact: In many fields, tenure-track hiring will be down this year. Accompanying the story by culture reporter Patricia Cohen is a photograph of a forlorn-looking UT-Austin doctoral candidate in sociology who “after two dozen applications” still “has no job offer.”

Zounds! Shocking! He cut and pasted the addresses of twenty-four search committees into a job letter, and the capable young fellow still doesn’t have a tenure-track job?

By jove, it must be “the bad economy” causing this sad state of affairs!

Indeed so, Cohen informs us, duly noting that half the candidate’s rejection letters mention the economy and that there were “300 applications” to some of the ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

If modern man’s producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave man, why then, in the United States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged. —Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)

Lately I’ve been fooling around with the hypothesis that there’s a growing split in the professional-managerial class.

On the one hand,...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Hundreds of students showed up to support the approximately 80 students occupying an NYU cafeteria last week. Organized by the TakeBackNYU coalition of dozens of student organizations, the occupying students asked for increased campus democracy, transparency in operations, and accountability from the administration to faculty and students. Specific demands included tuition stabilization, collective bargaining with student employees, socially responsible investing, fair labor practice on offshore NYU campuses, and 13 scholarships for students displaced by the bombing of Gaza.

The occupation followed on the heels of a similar occupation at the New School that won concessions from that school’s administration including amnesty for participants and a student voice in campus building, administrative search, and investment policy. Militant...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

“The Adjuncts” by Chloe Smolarski, City University of New York, CUNY Contingents Unite

Academic freedom is the subject of three major conferences and at least two substantial journal issues this season, and they’ll all get a fair amount of ink and electrons when Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado commences next month in Denver. Churchill’s campus process was wrongly decided in the fallout of a political witch hunt, featuring a faculty committee that generated spurious charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct” that will not bear the scrutiny of history (nor, one hopes, the district court).

You can read Churchill’s essay on the case in a massive, just-released special issue of Works and Days, guest-edited by Edward Carvalho and available for just $12 by emailing Tracy Lassiter (t.j.lassiter@iup.edu) or...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

My son turned one this weekend, and so far, as I’ve said, I can’t see that Obama’s plans to stimulate higher ed will make much difference to Emile’s first year on campus, now just 17 years from today.

For the most part, the federal money will replace some state funds.

That’s what happened in the first round of federal “public works spending” under Hoover and FDR — weak efforts that merely replaced a percentage of state-level cuts, with no net gain in spending until the more ambitious “Second New Deal.”

Obama’s gotten a free ride from students and faculty so far. And replacing the state aid was the right move. But to win the Lincoln plus FDR rep he craves, he’s going to have to do a lot better than wish for the easy sellouts that history handed Clinton.

Unlike Clinton, Obama has no choice but to face up to four decades of higher...