February 24, 2008, 09:22 PM ET

Trachtenberg II: The Academic Working Poor

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I was a bit surprised that Stephen chose to ignore my second invitation to talk about the plight of the majority faculty — those who serve contingently — and, instead, indulged in a speculative ad hominem flight of fancy that ends with inviting me to leave the academy!

(“I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy… Surely so articulate a man could do many things. I disliked being a lawyer so I found an alternative career.”)

For the record, I’m very happy in the academy. Like the hundreds of thousands of academic unionists and many others, I’m willing to stay and fight to make this a place where administrations don’t reside in mansions on half-million dollar salaries when an impoverished faculty are standing in line for free cheese.

I don’t think going ad hominem was wise for Stephen, who will recognize in that last sentence a reference to his own housing and salary while he was fighting the unionization of adjunct faculty at GWU, ending in the judgment by a Bush-packed NLRB that his administration had broken the law in its creative efforts to justify its refusal to bargain with the legally elected representative of the faculty, SEIU.

In part III of my reply, unless Stephen has something substantial to say about the actual issues of actual faculty, I’ll say more about contingency at GWU. In Part IV, I’ll explain the concept of “feminization” of sectors of the workforce, and how it affects gender equity. Either in that part or a follow-up, I’ll discuss the tired old canard that “the market” is the reason male-dominated disciplines have fat salaries. (In a nutshell: markets are socially constructed — corporations are the first to complain when they feel a “market” needs “adjusting.”)

In the meanwhile, do take a look at Part II of my interview with Cary Nelson, The Academic Working Poor.