cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is part 2 of a short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).

Secession, Fusion and Compromise

There is a substantial tradition of thinking about this problem from below—especially from the most subordinated position, of writing. Most of the more prescient and convincing accounts come from scholars attempting to re-imagine English studies from the disciplinary location of rhetoric and composition.

The most circulated analysis in this vein is Stephen North’s account of a mid-nineties reform of the doctoral program at SUNY Albany, which presents a taxonomy of prescriptions for disciplinary change (principally by way of reorganizing graduate study) going back to a 1984 summit meeting at Wayzata, Minnesota.

As the accounts by North and others have it, discussants representing the major disciplinary associations in English studies made three sorts of proposal for the future: secession, in which disaffected faculty would establish programs and departments of their own (or else join established departments and programs that would treat them better); compromise, in which the discipline and individual departments would seek a unifying term for tactical and pragmatic purposes (“rhetoric” was especially favored in the eighties); and fusion, in which departments and possibly the profession would go beyond a merely rhetorical unification and transform themselves “into a single new entity, one quite distinct from any of the original components” (73). The result of the “fusion” effort at Albany was the department’s much-reported PhD Program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism.”

One of the more useful subsequent commentaries on North is Bruce McComiskey’s immensely approachable introductory essay to English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. McComiskey updates North by discussing additional fields and adding a fourth possible prescription, integration, by which he means a strategy of acknowledging that the various fields have increasingly developed different methods and interests—different disciplinary or proto-disciplinary discourses, hence the plural disciplines——but nonetheless may have a mutual interest in the health of an umbrella field, ie, “reimagining English studies as a coherent community of disciplines”(41).

Rather than fusion, McComiskey proposes something more like a federation, in which the different fields recognize methodological and intellectual autonomy but in a relationship of rough equality—which might mean, he points out, rearticulating the relationship between the disciplines in the many departments where literary studies holds most of the power.

What’s most attractive about McComiskey’s proposal is the unifying rubric he offers: “the goal of this integrated English studies should be the analysis, critique and production of discourse in social context”(43).

What’s missing from McComiskey’s account, on the other hand, is the critical analysis of disciplinarity itself offered by David Downing, by Stephen North, by James Berlin, and many others, including myself, especially with attention to labor practice.

I personally prefer to read both McComiskey and North’s taxonomy not as prescriptions for the future, but as reasonably good descriptions of four different tactics that have been utilized by many departments over the past three decades, often in very different flavors and combinations, sometimes as the result of reflection and planning, sometimes organically, frequently in a series of ad hoc decisions arising out of externally -framed opportunities, strictures and imperatives.

McComiskey’s federated model of English studies, for instance, turns out to be a decent description of where North’s SUNY Albany PhD ended up. The fusion represented by North and Knoblauch’s doctoral program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism” lasted over a decade, but in recent years gave way to a more conventional “PhD in English” with four tracks or concentrations, roughly: literature, theory, writing, and cultural studies. Some of the fusion language of the 1992 effort survives in the program and university documents.

Discipline-wide, however, probably the most important form of “fusion” has taken place in the research and teaching of individual faculty, where cultural studies, theory, women’s studies, and ethnic studies easily pass across the border that “writing” and “literature” have fortified against each other.

These four tactics have been used in different mixes at institutions of all types, not merely at doctoral institutions. Among the most common iterations of McComiskey’s federation or integration strategy, for instance, is the rapid proliferation of writing tracks, minors, and concentrations at undergraduate institutions, even undergraduate-only liberal arts colleges.

The 2100 students of Allegheny College (Meadville, Pa), for instance, can choose from four separate writing tracks in the English major—technical and professional, journalism, creative—even a new environmental writing track.

Similarly, though by way of a secession from English of a stand-alone writing program, any of the 18,000 students at the University of California Santa Barbara can elect a minor in professional writing offering distinct tracks in multimedia, editing, and business communication. Brown’s undergraduate English department has a concentration and honors program in nonfiction writing.

There are literally hundreds of such “integrations,” some of them involving elements of secession—many of the growing number of stand-alone writing programs remain functionally integrated with English departments on multiple levels, from joint appointments and initiatives, to administering teaching fellowships for English graduate study.

There is just as much diversity in the forms of secession. Some of the secessions are of the deplorable sort that feature a wholly untenurable labor force, as at Duke, Princeton, and Stanford, though these too can be integrated with English departments at a variety of levels—eg, Stanford, where the English department hosts the tenure of the “stand-alone” program’s administrator (but no one else with a research profile in rhet-comp). In stark contrast, the secession of the Syracuse writing program led to department status, a substantially tenured faculty, an exceptionally well-conceived writing major and minor, and a respected doctorate.

It’s not at all clear that the English department at Syracuse has done well from this secession. While the department features a string of notable scholars in literature and cultural studies, it has just over a dozen doctoral candidates and somewhat fewer students in its master’s program; the departmental self description is an object lesson in how difficult it is to describe English without the frame of writing, and gives the sense of manning the barricades “We are a dedicated group of faculty and students who represent the complex discipline that “English” has become in the contemporary university and in today’s society.”

By contrast, the new Writing major is framed in terms I’d call confident and clear:

The Writing and Rhetoric Major focuses on different genres and practices of writing as enacted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Students write in a wide range of genres: advanced argument, research writing, digital writing, civic writing, professional writing, technical writing, creative nonfiction, and the public essay. In the process of exploring and practicing these genres, students study and analyze the interaction of diverse rhetorical traditions and writing technologies and assess how these factors shape the nature, scope, and impact of writing in a variety of contexts. The major also asks students to examine writing and rhetoric as embedded in culture, and looks at writing identities, their emergences in cultures and subgroups, and the relations among writing, rhetoric, identity, literacy, and power. Graduates of the Writing and Rhetoric Major will be well equipped for public and private sector careers that require knowledge of advanced communication strategies and writing skills. The major is open to any SU student, and may be especially useful to students pursuing careers in teaching, the law, business, public advocacy, and editing and publishing.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Writing Program is “better” than the English department, and I think it could be easily argued that they’d be stronger as a unit—if they could ever “re-integrate” as McComiskey proposes. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the achievements of the Syracuse writing program would have been utterly impossible in a literature-dominated department.

Other secessions offer mixed narratives—Derek Owens’ Writing Institute at St. John’s began with a wholly nontenurable (but full-time and unionized) faculty, but within three years had succeeded in a mass conversion of all of the appointments to tenure-track assistant professorships—this in 2009, a year when nearly every institution of higher education was cancelling tenure-track hires.

Secessions at some institutions produce marriages of convenience, as at the Michigan State’s 2003 shotgun merger, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, offering one BA in American Studies and another conceptually unrelated BA in Professional Writing, as well as all “Tier 1” writing courses—while the English department holds onto English Education, most American literature faculty, including specialists in Chicana/Chicano culture, and creative writing, as well as the graduate programs (though sending many of them to WRAC to fund their studies).

Other English departments have seen multiple spin-offs, as at MIT, where linguistics long ago formed a happier partnership with philosophy; drama bunks down with music; and digital media have three homes (Henry Jenkins’ department of comparative media studies, the program in Science, Technology and Society, and the graduate studio program in Media Arts and Sciences).

Literature at MIT stands alone, but the “program in writing and humanistic studies” administers no less than three majors (science writing, creative writing, digital media), as well as three minors in the same fields, a concentration in writing that can be adapted to any field of study, the entire first-year writing program, and a graduate program in science writing.

I’ve said the least about North’s “compromise” option, which is a bit of a misnomer. As a prescription, it sounds the least appetizing, because it involves one field taking managerial responsibility for the others, but at least—when framed as a deliberate choice—it sounds like a negotiation of complex circumstances between stakeholders.

On the other hand, considered as a description, it’s probably the most accurate account of what’s taken place over the long term: after literary criticism’s ascent, as McComiskey and many others observe, it remained perpetually in control through most of the last century in most departments, with “the ‘other’ disciplines as trailers” (42).

There have been prospective discussions about choosing another unifying term—rhetoric, cultural studies, literacy, textual studies, etc—and numerous deployments of these alternatives, especially in connection with acts of secession. However, these are the exceptions, and emergence of literature into its present position as the governing term didn’t occur as an act of deliberation or negotiation.

Similarly, if some other governing term replaces literature, it will likely occur without the consent of literature faculty. Such a replacement is far from certain, of course. Literature, literary study, and the practice of criticism aren’t disappearing. In any reasonable estimation, literature will retain substantial cultural capital with large groups of disproportionately wealthy and influential people for centuries to come. For the foreseeable future, it will continue to do enormous diversity work and revisionist cultural history, and remain a centerpiece of great works, core and juvenile curricula.

It’s hard to imagine that the large and evidently growing number of students who enjoy writing won’t continue to read widely in the sort of imaginative works presently acknowledged as literary. And, already—in innumerable acts of fusion by individual faculty—what counts as literary is being changed under our feet.

There’s no reason not to expect hundreds more thoughtful, deliberate acts of integration by departments and colleges. Some of these integrations will be motivated by the achievements of secession. Other integrations will be motivated by fear of community-college style consolidation into generalist “humanities” or “liberal studies” departments.

But if literature’s continued survival is not in question, the terms under which it survives certainly are. It may well be the case, for instance, that literature survives under the sign of “teaching,” and writing becomes the figure under which research-intensive appointments are distributed.

Whether voluntary, forced, or negotiated, most of those changes will be to a balance of disciplinary power over which literature’s grip is slipping—and most will involve the figure of writing.

Works Cited

Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Parlor Press, 2003 (repr of 1996 NCTE edition with response essays).

Bousquet, Marc. How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.

Connors, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Downing, David. “Beyond Disciplinary English: Integrating Reading and Writing By Reforming Academic Labor.” Pp 23-38 in David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu, eds. Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.

——. The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

McComiskey, Bruce, ed. English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. Urbana, NCTE, 2006.

Miller, Richard. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling.” College English 61.1(September 1998): 10-28.

Modern Language Association. Education in the Balance: A report on the Academic Workforce in English. Web publication, 10 December 2008. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/workforce_rpt02.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.

——. Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature. Web publication, February 2009. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/2008_mla_whitepaper.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.

North, Stephen. Refiguring the PhD in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Urbana: NCTE, 2000.

Syracuse University English Department. “Home Page.” Available at: http://english.syr.edu/ Accessed June 1, 2009.

Syracuse University Writing Program. “Description of the Writing Major.” Available at: http://wrt.syr.edu/major/ Accessed June 1, 2009.

(Brainstorm illustration derived from photos by Flickr users dbdbrobot and Moriza)

June 19, 2009

Single Payer: the New American Exception

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

A funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The one-time supporter of the only kind of national health insurance proven to work (single payer) rolled over for the insurance industry and adopted the single most ridiculous health-care plan offered during the 2007-2008 Democratic primaries. Against all the evidence, candidate Obama asserted that “lowering costs” would lead to universal health coverage.

All the evidence has it the other way around: universal coverage causes the lowering of costs. Most educators will understand this clearly, because it’s parallel to our situation. Most of the actual expense to be saved is in administrator bloat, the armies of staff to collect the bills and whole country clubs full of vice presidents to “manage the care,” i.e., invent the hoops that separate physicians from patients.

When yours truly pointed this out across the Dem blogosphere, the responses ranged from the Insane Hero Worshipper position (Obama is my God and you shall have no other Gods before him!) to the Wisdom of the Political Insider, who argued that absurd as candidate Obama’s fake health plan appeared, after the election the political process would take over, and we’d get something better, perhaps even single payer. In other words: President Obama would not be wedded to the health-care industry just because Candidate Obama let them get to third base at the drive-in.

That political process is happening now. Two-thirds of all Americans favor single payer. A massive national coalition supports that preference, comprising in addition to hundreds of student and citizen organizations, physicians, labor, and even a few legislators .

Nonetheless single-payer is all but off the table, with Kennedy and Baucus picking up where Obama left off at the drive-in, and The One’s mouthpiece yammering red, white, and blue nonsense. “What we need is an American solution to an American problem,” Kathleen Sebelius gabbled to NPR the other day.

FAIR blames the corporate media quarantine for consistently ignoring single-payer, or mentioning it only to describe it as impossible or unlikely. Bill Moyers agrees, saying that Obama’s White House and Congress “have kept the lid on.”

What can you do? Sign up with socialist Bernie Sanders, for starters.

May 22, 2009

No Problem With Student Debt?

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In this week’s lead story at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson has a spread of four pieces scoffing at the notion of a national problem with undergraduate debt: A Lifetime of Debt? Not Likely.

Splashed above the fold on the front page — during Congressional hearings regarding major reforms in student lending — this story flies in the face of massive public and legislator concern about the funding of higher education, including a longrunning series of scandals in student lending: corruption among state and federal education officials, predatory lending, abusive collections, lax oversight, outrageous executive pay, perks, and bonuses.

While acknowledging that what she dubs a vocal minority of undergraduate borrowers have “very real” problems with the system of college financing, Wilson asserts that students in loan trouble are “more often” the victims of their own bad choices, especially those “determined to attend their dream college, no matter the cost.”

The hero of Wilson’s piece is a 2007 graduate of a Roman Catholic college who lives rent-free with her mother, foregoing “for now” such unrealistic expectations as her eventual plan to “live in an apartment in Boston with a friend.”

This young woman’s story, Wilson claims, is emblematic of a “silent majority” of borrowers paying off car-loan-sized debt “without much complaint.” For those who need more convincing, Wilson helpfully provides three more tales — all of young, married, well-employed couples with children making small middle-class sacrifices to pay down their debt. It’s all very Ozzie and Harriet, in low-cost-of-living locales like Iowa and West Virgina — the most coastal of the couples lives a 40-minute commute from Philadelphia.

Wilson defends the one-dimensionality of her sidebars as a necessary corrective — a “stark contrast” — to the several thousand stories of student loan woe told by the nearly 200,000 members of a new Facebook group, Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy, or at The Project on Student Debt, or Generation Debt, or Student Loan Justice, among others.

Wilson seems particularly disturbed that the gullible folks at CNN, USA Today, and The New York Times appear to have been taken in by these complaints (not to mention three or four years of scandal and public outcry). There’s “confusion” about the issue, Wilson says, because many people, like the founder of the Facebook page, are counting graduate-school debt.

So — to help us out with our confusion — Wilson artificially separates out the grad-school debt and then invites us to share her pose of mystification that so many people appear to be complaining angrily about what amounts to a new-car loan.

Among the many inconvenient facts that Wilson leaves out is that present trends suggest that 40 to 50 percent of all persons with bachelor’s degrees in 2009 will eventually go on to graduate or professional school.* Those debts can be enormous, and when one acknowledges the real chances that any individual with a B.A. will go on to grad school the “lifetime of debt” is indeed more “likely.”

(Even if we accepted Wilson’s rhetorical carving-off of undergraduate debt from other debt — and further accepted her definition of borrowers with real problems as in the range of 8 or 10 percent — that would still be many millions of people affected by the student loans carried by someone in their family — a spouse, parent, or child.)

Wilson ignores that students also carry thousands of dollars in credit-card debt, often with the complicity of the campus.

Their parents are also borrowing more, and in some cases parents out of the workforce are going back to work primarily to help pay for tuition. (Fifteen percent of graduating seniors have parents that take PLUS loans; the average is approaching $20,000).

Students are working more too, and most of those who are employed are working longer hours than is compatible with academic success and persistence.

Equally relevant is the trajectory of debt — that many more people are borrowing, and borrowing much more; the average debts has recently doubled under Bush-era policies and without policy change may well double again.

Students with lower incomes borrow more and work more, and have less success. Does taking on larger and larger undergraduate debt provide a barrier to graduate school for persons of disadvantaged backgrounds?

The piece could have considered the consequences of education debt for those who don’t persist, or don’t go in the first place. It could have considered the rising default rate (or the lousy way we’ve been calculating default rates), or the different default rates for different kinds of schools, like the especially high default rates in the for-profit sector.

But even if we accept the focus on those who get degrees and find employment, and ignore what for many is the inevitability of grad-school debt, what about those in the current graduating class — who aren’t finding jobs with employers planning on hiring 20 percent fewer college grads and offering lower salaries to 20 percent of those they do hire? Even recent grads from good schools with econ degrees are going on food stamps. Hard stats on this are going to take a while, but one of the good indicators is this one from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (hat tip to Anya Kamenetz):

ACE’s 2009 Student Survey shows that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one. In comparison, 51 percent of those graduating in 2007 and 26 percent of those graduating in 2008 who had applied for a job had one in hand by the time of graduation.

For that matter, it would have been worthwhile to consider how the so-called going-to-college bonus in wages is:

1) more of a going-to-grad-school bonus, and
2) not so much a bonus as a penalty.

Yup, a penalty — for staying out of college. Since the 1970s, the gap between those with a sheepskin and those without has grown, but not because the wages of the B.A.-educated have risen.

Far from it. They’ve just stagnated less than the wages of those without a B.A., whose wages have been driven down in the era of Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes.

Absent from the piece are the voices of the indebted or their spokespeople, like Kamenetz, Tamara Draut, or Jeffrey Williams.

Also absent is any consideration of most of the core contemporary policy issues about student loans. Even USA Today — under the subhead Helping Gamblers, Not Students — managed to explore the policy universe of student loans more thoughtfully, raising the issue of bankruptcy reform.

Loans aren’t the only thing that are broken about higher education, but an article like this one (“No problems here!”) does the conversation little good. Robin Wilson is entitled to her opinion, but this front-page lead story wasn’t presented as an editorial — and it lends credibility to Cat Warren’s concerns about fair coverage. I don’t mean to be a grouch here, and I know I’ve been a little tough on the higher-education press lately, but The Chron loses credibility when it gets out-thought on student loan issues by USA Today.

*Educational Attainment in the United States, 25 years and over: 2008, US Census (excel file)

May 5, 2009

We Work 1

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This essay is drawn from the final issue of minnesota review to be edited by Jeffrey Williams, featuring a series of statements of professional commitment or belief — credos — by representative scholars. It’s a very special series of essays, and a worthy capstone to Williams’s extraordinary run as editor.

The issue also brings nearly to a close Williams’s spectacular series of in-depth interviews. Often twenty pages in print, these leisurely portrait-of-an-era conversations have been typically longer than the articles in the same issue. Despite Williams’ normally unerring judgment, the issue includes a talk with me, “Higher Exploitation.”

for the minnesota review, winter/spring 2009

I once shocked a colleague by responding to one of those newspaper stories about a prof “caught” mowing his lawn on a Wednesday afternoon by saying that many tenured faculty were morally entitled to think of their salaries after tenure as something similar to a pension.

After all, in some fields, many folks will not receive tenure until they’ve been working for low wages for 20 years or more: a dozen years to get the degree, another three to four years serving contingently — and then, finally, a “probationary” appointment lasting seven years at wages commonly lower than those of a similarly experienced bartender.

In the humanities, the journey to tenure is often a quarter of a century and rarely less than 15 years: If you didn’t go to a top-five or top-10 graduate school in your field, you probably taught several classes a year as a graduate student, usually while researching, publishing, and doing substantial service to the profession — writing book reviews, supervising other faculty and students, serving on committees, etc.

Call it, charitably, a mean of 20 years in some fields. Averaging the probationary years, contingent/postdoc years, and graduate student years together, you get an average annual take in contemporary dollars of $25,000 or less. The low wage is only the beginning of the story. There’s the structural racism of the wealth gap, to which I’ll return, and the heartbreak and structural sexism for families trying to negotiate child rearing during that brutal two decades. In most fields, most of those who begin doctoral study with the intention of an academic career fall away long before grasping the brass ring.

So at the end of all that, you have a person who is earning within $10,000 or $15,000 dollars of $70,000 and has perhaps 15 or 20 years of career ahead of them.

All of the reasonable studies of faculty work suggest that this person will put in between 50 and 55 hours a week for most of those years, more or less voluntarily. There are plenty of enforcement mechanisms to make sure that most faculty will teach, serve, and do scholarship in some rough proportion to their abilities and inclination, but after a quarter-century of strict selection and socialization, it is rarely necessary to invoke them to get the faculty to do their jobs.

By comparison to the 20-year probation leading to academic tenure, police officers, kindergarten teachers, and civil servants earn tenure or job security in a year or two, often less. During training, a high-school-educated police recruit in 2009 generally earns a salary of between $30,000 and $40,000, or about twice what a doctoral student earns during graduate school. Today’s starting salaries for 20- or 21-year old metropolitan police officers and state troopers are generally in the forties.

They receive bonuses for completing two- and four-year postsecondary degrees, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in supplemental pay for overtime and special duty. In Cincinnati, for example, a recruit will earn $31,000 a year during a six-month training period, and then begin work at $46,000. Five years later — at age 26 — they will expect to earn a base pay of $56,000, or about what junior faculty in many arts and sciences fields are being offered after their 20-year apprenticeships, in their early forties.

The 26-year-old police officer earning about the same base pay as our 40-year-old assistant professor can expect to work as little as another 15 or 20 years, keeping up with inflation whether or not promotions are awarded, collecting additional fair compensation in such forms, as the Cincinnati metro police site promises, “overtime earnings, court pay, certification pay, training allowance, and night differential pay.”

The Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund estimator estimates that in 2009 a 48-year-old retiree who had done nothing to save additionally and earned just under $70,000 in his final year as a 27-year veteran would receive a pension of about $42,000. That 48-year-old would then be free to work another job—a corporate security position, or a supervisory position overseeing poorly-paid retail guards, or real estate, or whatever, earning, say $60,000 a year, for a total annual income of six figures. Or the retired officer could work part time, 20 hours a week or so, and still pull in about $80,000 or $90,000 — likely quite a bit more than our largely fictional time-serving 55-year-old associate prof is pulling in on the imaginary 20-hour work week of just showing up to teach from old notes.

Pension benefits for military service and certain civil-service positions are similar: Your average worker aged 48 to 55 without too many promotions but with a quarter-century or more of service will be eligible for pensions of between $30,000 and $60,000, or the equivalent of between about $800,000 and $1,500,000 in your Fidelity or TIAA-CREF accounts.

No matter how you slice it, most public servants earn a better return on education and effort over the course of a career than most faculty, including those on the tenure track. It’s hard to make a case that the rather unusual instances of lifetime associate profs who skate by on 20- or 30-hour work weeks are gaming the system.

Instead, they are the unusual few who have refused to allow the system to game them.

Whatever one thinks of these rare birds, one has to acknowledge the strength of character it takes to refuse the overwhelming appeal of the administration, the ideology of the profession, and the continuous hailing of their students and colleagues to give so much more than the standard set by other workers in the public service.

Furthermore, comparing professorial salaries to career patrolmen and high-school-educated infantry is bending over backward to prove the point. A more accurate and fair comparison would be to college-educated military officers. Someone who retires in 2010 aged 46 with the rank of Officer-4 or Officer-5 on a scale that rises to Officer-10 is eligible for a pension of $50-$60,000 a year.

So after twenty-five years, a moderately successful commissioned officer can cash in and collect a decent professor’s paycheck for doing not a darned thing. If he does choose to exert himself, he can go to work as a corporate middle manager, earning about what a dean earns. Either way, it’s his choice. He can work a bit and whack down a dean’s salary. Or not — and still collect more than our hypothetical time-serving prof pulls in for actually working. Similar comparisons can be made in state or federal civil-service employment, in K-12 teaching, and in many private-sector careers.

When you get right down to it, considering the long years of preparation and strain, it’s hard to find any position so poorly compensated as tenure-track college faculty — except, of course, most of the rest of college faculty, the majority who don’t ever become eligible for tenure and earn even less.

Go to part 2

Note: Thanks to Doug Campbell for a correction regarding the pay of retired military officers. Learn more about military pay and benefits:

Defense Finance and Accounting Service:

Military Officers Association of America

Office of the Secretary of Defense Final Pay Retirement Calculator:

We Work 2

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 2 of my contribution to the “my credo” issue of minnesota review. Return to Part 1

Now you may well say that all of this tawdry consideration may not make for much of a credo.

But we can take this line of thought in a number of interesting ways, many of which are fairly important for anyone thinking about the situation of culture and critique today.

One way to take this line of thought is toward straightforward observations regarding the social logic and policy environment of the United States: the low regard in which education is held, the possible virtues of greater rationalization of faculty careers, and so forth. I’ve already suggested that public institutions in the United States should treat faculty salaries like the civil service or military pay grades — winning some startled coverage in the mainstream press, though there are plenty of real-world precedents for this kind of rationalization, including in the United States, where many unions at public institutions have achieved step scales with excellent results for faculty retention and satisfaction.

Another route is analytical and psychological: We should probably pause to look at this irrational system of compensation and to ask, why does it function so well?

Despite the injustice and impracticality of the arrangement, large numbers of young people continue to present themselves to the meat grinder of doctoral study. Most fall away, but a sufficient number persist, and of the persisting few, only the tiniest fraction take advantage of tenure to refuse steadily mounting demands.

These are questions that corporate managers have been examining for decades with a keen sense of envy. How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for 50 or 60 hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all?

An established analytical path on this question is the idea that in the great marketplace of labor, some of those who must sell their labor-time in order to live will discount their wages for the more pleasant occupations — that in some professions the presence of a “psychic wage” encourages workers to accept a lower cash price.

There are certainly problems with this observation: For instance, all too conveniently it is offered as an explanation of the lower wages of the workplaces and job descriptions in which women predominate. In the United States, the psychic wage theory correlates less closely to variations in wages of comparably difficult positions than race and gender: Other things being equal, the job description is likely to pay more if mostly white men are doing it.

Nonetheless the notion of a voluntary discount of wages helps to understand the group psychology of the professoriate. If a person can make millions as a tax attorney with less effort than they can impoverish themselves for poetry, why do it?

At least to an extent the foregone millions of the could-have-been tax attorney inside the literary critic earning a bartender’s wage gives us a sense of just how much a human being values even a small degree of workplace autonomy — or the chance of having that autonomy.

Every year, thousands of young people, having been warned about the poor chances of winning a tenure-track job, nonetheless gamble their futures on the possibility of spending their lives doing something for love (rather than for the hate and greed that is parsing the tax code for the shareholder class). From the fact that most people at some level refuse to even attempt to sell their labor-time in this way, we can probably deduce something hopeful about our common humanity, that we collectively prefer not just autonomy, but integrity, even when tempted by a million dollars a year.

We can probably deduce something hopeful about the professoriate as well. Despite our role in the reproduction of a class society, and the collision of many of our highly-educated tastes with those of the leisure class, we are more like the mass of humanity in choosing as much integrity and dignity as our circumstances permit over the false rationality of the highest possible price for our labor-time. If a willingness to give up wages to “do what we love” is a marker of a broader refusal of capitalist inhumanity, it is something that unites the faculty with most other people, rather than divides them.

This human drive — toward integrity, autonomy, and dignity in our work — is so powerful that capital’s latest round of innovation depends on it, far more so than it depends on “technological” innovation of the production process. Contemporary management innovation in and out of the academy revolves around creating workplace conditions that they hope will induce workers to freely discount their wage.

In the administration of higher education, this means a delicate balancing act, in which management continuously tries to seize control of institutional mission without killing the academic goose laying its golden eggs. The history of workplace change in higher education over the past 40 years is a slow, grinding war of position or culture struggle, with administration continuously pushing to see just how partial or inauthentic it can make the autonomy, integrity, and dignity of academic endeavor without inducing the faculty to fall out of love with their work.

Likewise, the history of corporate management’s effort to imitate the success of higher education workplaces can be expressed as, “How can we adjust our corporate culture to resemble campus culture, so that our workforce will fall in love with their work too?” That is, the managers desperately want to know, how can we emulate higher education in moving from simple exploitation to the vast harvest of bounty represented by super-exploitation?

There are any number of paths to super-exploitation, including various forms of forced, conscripted, or partly conscripted labor. Versions of forced donation of labor still exist globally, in China, South America, Africa, and India, but also in the U.S. informal, fast-food, and personal-service sectors — in such forms as working through breaks, working after clocking out, refusal of overtime — not to mention prison labor, economic conscription into the military, and so forth.

But in the United States by far the major innovations in productivity improvement all involve ideology, the highly inventive calling forth by management of voluntary, rather than forced, forms of super-exploitation.

So far the most common examples for the average worker involve the donation of additional time represented by the ideology of professionalism. Workers not previously considered professional and not compensated like professionals now routinely donate countless hours to their employers: doing one’s e-mail at 6 a.m., taking phone calls in the evening, writing reports on weekends, traveling and attending employer events on personal time, and so forth. Certainly the massification of higher education experience plays a role in this expansive professionalization without a professional’s paycheck.

In turn the massification of faux professionalism works to erode the privileges of those who were formerly professional, such as higher education faculty — initially in what Gary Rhoades describes as the emergence of “managed” forms of professionalism, and subsequently, as I would argue, in the gradual but steady conversion of residually “professional” positions (professor, lawyer, physician) into ever more straightforwardly managerial positions.

That is, the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function — they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage nonphysician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

Higher education legitimates the explosive growth of super-exploitation and casualization across the global economy in countless ways, especially the fact of its own practice, as I’ve already suggested in How the University Works.

In addition to collecting revenue from tuition, fees, grants, appropriations, and commercial transactions of all kinds, contemporary U.S. institutions and their partners are generally structurally reliant on the value they harvest from student time — not just time denominated “labor” but also time allocated to “leisure” and “education.”

Low-wage undergraduates, many of them filling positions formerly occupied by full-time staff, are often the largest workforce on campus, but the institution harvests value from their spending, their athletic activities, their blogging and journalism, even the time the dance team spends in practice and in tanning salons.

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

The substitution of students for full-time workers, as facilitated over four decades by managerial “innovators” in university-corporate partnership, has ricocheted throughout an economy organized around the model of the full-time job (for health insurance, retirement savings, home ownership, etc). Low-wage campus work and cheerful building of the campus brand is just the tip of the iceberg — as low- and no-wage internships, service learning, and the economic conscription of rising tuition force students into more and more hours at low-wage off-campus employment.

This arrangement is not just painful to the students; it displaces other workers, both staff and faculty, including other workers with college degrees and even graduate educations.

The situation of the graduate student who has been teaching for a decade but can’t get a professor’s job after earning the doctorate (because new graduate students or former graduate students without a doctorate are doing the teaching) is parallel to the circumstance of the journalism majors whose reporting is published by a consortium of Florida newspapers who have fired staff reporters: The journalism student, despite having worked successfully as a student reporter, will have trouble finding a job in journalism because more and more of the work will have been allocated to other journalism majors (who in turn will have yet more trouble finding work, and so on).

The super-discounted labor of students is ultimately, therefore, just as costly to the students themselves as to those they’ve displaced — in the end, they’re displacing themselves. The super-discounting of faculty labor is similarly far more costly than it appears at first: One can reasonably ask, what harm is done if some book-besotted fools want to work cheaply?

One form of harm should be obvious: However enjoyable, the work pays so poorly that only those who can afford to subsidize their employer need apply; in many circumstances, the modesty of the wages simply does not support individuals without access to a secondary source of income, typically a professional-managerial spouse or family wealth. This has profound implications for the class, race, and gender of the professoriate, and the curriculum they choose to teach.

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

There are certainly ways that the faculty’s love for what they do is paradigmatic — hence “professing” — nonetheless most people have similarly tried to find corners and pieces of dignity and autonomy in their working lives.

Like the faculty, most other workers strive to protect their integrity and avoid the taint of administration. So what has happened to the faculty — because we love what we do, sometimes to the point of denying that our wages matter at all — is important not because the faculty are special, but because we are typical.

April 29, 2009

May Day Meditation: Who Benefits From the Tuition Gold Rush?

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

EVERY DAY



MAY DAY!

Thursday, April 30 is May Day for faculty serving contingently, according to the fledgling New Faculty Majority coalition. Major support provided by Bob Samuels, president of the California Federation of Teachers, representing nontenurable faculty at five UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Riverside, San Diego and Santa Cruz. Support ‘em by wearing red to work tomorrow.

On the same day, the University of Colorado AAUP chapter will push my kind of radicalism, putting Suzanne Hudson’s Instructor Tenure Proposal to a vote in the Faculty Assembly.

Image: Lenin Pointing the Way Forward! pose struck by Emile Bousquet, 13 mos. Sweater fashion by Jamie Owen Daniel, former Marxist Literary Group president, denied tenure by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish during his theatrical run as a “campus leader” at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

If you think I’ve been hard on Mark C. Taylor and The New York Times for their “Hey! I went to graduate school, therefore” theories of higher education, you should consider that bad journalism and bad leadership have real consequences for people I care about, like Jamie Owen Daniel and the young fellow pictured above.

In point of fact: I was rather tame by comparison to pretty much everyone else who actually knows anything about academic labor, especially the always-blistering Historiann and Jonathan Rees. Even the guy over at Savage Minds who wants to agree with Taylor admits, “this op-ed sucks.”

I answered most of the responses in the comments portion of the original post, such as where to find the data.

Among the excellent responses, I felt one deserved a post of its own. It went something like this: “well, if demand for education is rising, and tuition is soaring, where does the money go, if not to the faculty?”

For that, I promised to reprint this post from before I joined Brainstorm.

Who Benefits From the Tuition Gold Rush?
The logic of the HMO increasingly rules higher education. Management closely rations professor time. Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable. Only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or nontenurable basis.

Today, those proportions are reversed.

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate, and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system.

In your other three classes, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it, was hired by a manager not professional peers, may never publish in the field he is teaching, or who got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because they were willing to work for wages around the official poverty line.

In almost all courses in most disciplines using nontenurable or adjunct faculty, a person with a recently-earned Ph.D. was available, and would gladly have taught your other three courses. But they could not afford to pay their loans and house themselves on the wage being offered.

Higher education employers can only pay those wages in the knowledge that their employees are subsidized in a variety of ways. In the case of student employees, the massive debt load subsidizes the wage. For poorly paid contingent faculty, who are women by a substantial majority*, the strategies vary, but include consumer debt, reliance on another job, or the income from a domestic partner.

Like Wal-Mart employees, the majority female contingent academic workforce relies on a patchwork of other sources of income, including such forms of public assistance as food stamps and unemployment compensation.

It is perfectly common for contingent university faculty to work as grocery clerks and restaurant servers, earning higher salaries at those positions, or to have been retired from such former occupations as bus driving, steelwork, and auto assembly, enjoying from those better-compensated professions a sufficient pension to enable them to serve a “second career” as college faculty.

The system of cheap teaching doesn’t sort for the best teachers. It sorts for persons who are in a financial position to accept compensation below the living wage. As a result of management’s irresponsible staffing practices, more students drop out, take longer to graduate, and fail to acquire essential literacies, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on a credential that has little merit in the eyes of employers.

The real “Profscam” isn’t the imaginary one depicted in Charles Sykes’ fanciful 1988 book, which concocted the image of a lazy tenured faculty voluntarily absenting themselves from teaching.

Instead the “prof scam” turns out to be a shell game conducted by management, who keep a tenurable stratum around for marketing purposes and to generate funded research, but who are spread so thin with respect to undergraduate teaching that even the most privileged undergraduates spend most of their education with para faculty working in increasingly unprofessional circumstances.

As the union activists of the nontenurable will tell you, the problem is not with the intellectual quality, talent, or commitment of the individual persons working on a nonprofessorial basis; it’s the degraded circumstances in which higher education management compels them to work, teaching too many students in too many classes too quickly, without security, status, or an office; working from standardized syllabi; outsourced tutorial, remedial, and even grading services, providing no time for research and professional development.

Working in McDonald’s “kitchen,” even the talent of Wolfgang Puck is pressed into service of the Quarter Pounder.

Despite the tens of billions “saved” on faculty wages by substituting a throwaway workforce for professionals scrutinized by the tenure system, managed higher education grows ever more expensive.

Tuition soared 38 percent between 2000 and 2005, outpacing nearly every other economic indicator.

Where does the money from stratospheric tuition and slashed faculty salaries go? At for-profit institutions, the answer is obvious: It goes into shareholder pockets. Lacking even the veneer of a tenurable stratum, the dollars squeezed from a 100-percent casual faculty joined tax money and tuition from the country’s poorest families in enriching the shareholders of education vendors. But in nonprofit education, which only “pretends” to “act like” a corporation, where have the billions gone?

At first glance, there are no shareholders and no dividends.

However, the uses to which the university has been put do benefit corporate shareholders. These include shouldering the cost of job training, generation of patentable intellectual property, provision of sports spectacle, vending goods and services to captive student markets, and the conversion of student aid into a cheap or even free labor pool. So one sizable trail to follow is the relationship between the financial transactions of nonprofits and the ballooning dividends enjoyed by the shareholder class.

The shareholders of private corporations aren’t the only beneficiaries of faculty proletarianization and the tuition gold rush.

Because public nonprofits have been receiving steadily lower direct subsidies from federal and state sources, there has been a general belief that higher tuition and staff exploitation has all somehow been accomplished by sharp-eyed, tight-fighted managers with at least one version of public well-being in mind, if only within the narrow framework of “reduced spending.” But that belief is open to question, since managers have been spending fairly freely in a number of areas.

One area in which nonprofit education management has been freely spending is on themselves.

Over three decades, the number of administrators has skyrocketed in close correspondence to the ever-growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has soared as well, also in close relation to the shrinking compensation of other campus workers. In a couple of decades, administrative work has morphed from an occasional service component in a professorial life to a “desirable career path” in its own right (Lazerson et al, A72).

Nonprofits support arts and sciences deans, chairs, associate deans, and program heads comfortably in six figures. Salaries rise into the mid six figures for many medical, engineering, business, and legal administrators. University presidents have begun to earn seven figures, close on the heels of their basketball coaches, who can earn $3-million annually and are often the highest-paid public employees in their state. In 30 years of managed higher education, the typical faculty member has become a female nontenurable part-timer earning a few thousand dollars a year without health benefits. The typical administrator is male, enjoys tenure, a six-figure income, little or no teaching, generous vacations and great health care.

There are lots of other areas in which nonprofit administrators have spent even more. With the support of activist legislatures, they’ve especially enjoyed playing venture capitalist with campus resources and tax dollars by engaging in “corporate partnerships” that generally yield financial benefit to the corporate partner but not the campus (Washburn).

More prosaically, they’ve engaged in what most observers call an “arms race” of spending on the expansion of facilities and physical plant. And as Murray Sperber and others have documented, they’ve spent recklessly on sports activities that — despite in some cases millions in broadcast revenue — generally lose huge sums of money.

The commercialization of college sport has raised the bar for participation so high that students who’d like to play can’t afford the time required for practice. Students who’d like to watch can’t afford the ticket prices.

Traditionally, the phenomenon known as “cross-subsidy,” the support of one program by revenue generated by another program, primarily meant a modest surplus provided by the higher tuition and lower salaries associated with undergraduate education, used in support of research activity that was unlikely to find an outside funding agent.

Under managed higher education, cross-subsidy has eroded undergraduate learning throughout the curriculum while becoming a gold mine for all kinds of activities satisfying the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobby horses of administrators:

Digitizing the curriculum! Building the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bringing more souls to God! Winning the all-conference championship!

Why have those who control nonprofit colleges and universities so readily fallen into the idea that the institution should act like a profit-seeking corporation? At least part of our answer must be that it offers individuals in that position some compelling gratifications, both material and emotional.

This is an age of executive license. In addition to a decent salary and splendid benefits, George Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. College administrators commonly enjoy larger salaries and comparable benefits, and have the privilege of declaring war on their sports rivals, or on illiteracy, teen pregnancy, or industrial pollution.

It feels good to be president.

As a “decision maker,” one can often arrange to strike a blow on behalf of at least some of one’s values.

What must be swept under the rug is that the ability to do these things is founded on their willingness to continuously squeeze the compensation of nearly all other campus workers.

The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine. If in nonprofits it accumulates in some form other than dividends, there’s all the more surplus for administrators, trustees, local politicians, and a handful of influential faculty to spend on a discretionary basis.

*While women and men are about equal in numbers in pt ntt positions, women outnumber men in ft ntt lines, the fastest growing appointment category. The statistically significant subcategory of well-paid contingent faculty tend to be men. The more poorly paid, insecure and lower the status, the more likely contingent faculty are to be women. Women are over-represented in contingent positions relative to tt positions almost everywhere, and women with children are 2x as likely to serve contingently as men with children.

April 27, 2009

More Drivel From 'The New York Times'

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 fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the “excess” doctorates in many fields.

The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of “demand” so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master’s or a B.A., or even by undergraduates. During the whole period of time that The New York Times has been pimping junk analysis of graduate education (that there’s an “oversupply” of doctorates), the percentage of faculty with doctorates has been dropping, not rising.

The piece is hilariously out of touch — noting the rise of adjunct labor, the Columbia philosopher of religion and author of 20 books wrings his hands that per-course pay is “as low as” $5,000 dollars a class.

BWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Reality? Annual income for many adjuncts is about $5,000 dollars a year. On pay that can be lower than a grand per class.

They’re on food stamps.

But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will insure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.‘s will be able to work for those wages.

Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.

How’s that working out? Well, gee, we’re graduating a very poor percentage of students. Various literacies are kinda low. We don’t have a racially diverse faculty, and women, especially women with children, are far more likely to have the low-paying low-status faculty jobs.

Nice! Let’s get more of that!

It’s not just his inadequate grasp of the facts. Taylor’s whole analysis is wrong. His idea is that higher education is too Fordist. (“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning,” he intones.)

But higher education isn’t too Fordist — it’s actually the brilliant, innovative post-Fordist employer par excellence. Every other employer wants to employ its people on the model of the campus — to get people who work for love, as perpetual students, eagerly discounting their labor in hopes of a future reward that someone else will provide.

I dunno if we should end the university as The New York Times or Mark C. Taylor claims to know it.

But we really oughta end the university as the rest of us know it — as not merely exploitative, but as a creatively super-exploitative employer.

April 21, 2009

Bush Gone, NYU Scrambles to Escape Anticipated NLRB Ruling

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 faculty about the administration’s plan to restructure graduate education in response to the appointments of Liebman and Solis, which most observers feel will trigger a reversal of the absurd Brown decision, to which Liebman provided a scathing dissent. (That was the ruling that the Bush mob unapologetically used to overturn the landmark, unanimous, and bipartisan GSOC-UAW ruling that forced NYU to the table.)

Now NYU claims that all of their thuggery and intimidation — you know, like firing Joel Westheimer — was all a misunderstanding. They want grad students to join a union — just not the union they chose and built for themselves, GSOC-UAW. Instead, the administration wants to force them into the union of faculty serving contingently, ACT-UAW which, ironically, formed as a result of GSOC.

In future, NYU graduate-school officials have recently informed the community, grad students will be admitted either with funding or without, but teaching will not be part of their funding package. All teaching will be officially optional — though still conventionally expected in most fields. Interestingly, the new teaching-optional mentality contradicts the central argument made by NYU’s attorneys before the NLRB, that grad students couldn’t simultaneously be Yankees fans workers, because teaching was a necessary part of their education.

What will this plan mean in practice? Some students will teach less than now, especially if they are well off or in fields where grant money is available. And some will teach about the same but at an awkward time in the arc of their studies, in the sixth year and beyond.

It also seems likely that some students will teach more than the current standard, and quite a bit more than the upper tiers of future students. Some units will apparently be admitting more unfunded students who will have to “choose” to teach their way through as contingent labor. It seems pretty clear that this strategy is aimed toward undermining GSOC-UAW’s support with at least some entering students, and at the NLRB, though it’s far from certain that the “what we said last year was full of crap” strategy is going to win with Liebman at the helm.

The administration probably also hopes for a divide-and-conquer dividend with ACT-UAW. If they succeed in forcing doctoral students into the contingent faculty union, management may accomplish some dilution of purpose (since under the new plan some doctoral students will only enter that union for a couple of years, rather than the eight or so they’d belong to GSOC).

I spoke to GSOC’s Rana Jaleel and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein when I was in New York earlier this month and, later in my travels, with some other faculty and students who wish to remain uncredited. And I discussed the situation further with Andrew Ross over e-mail in the last 24 hours. Ross is the author of the just-released Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, about which I will have a lot of nice things to say, when I can find time to say them.

My exchange with Ross follows.

Q. What do you know about the plans to restructure graduate education at NYU?

The plan was first proposed during the GSOC strike by a group of faculty — referred to as the Third Way at the time — who were trying to broker a clean exit strategy for the NYU administration from any obligation to deal with the union. It was not taken up then but it has emerged as the horse to back for NYU and other private universities as they contemplate another NLRB reversal. Basically, the plan is to offer full five-year fellowships with no built-in teaching obligations. TAships will therefore disappear, and graduate students will teach — there will be an expectation that they will do so — as adjuncts and will be classified as such.

Q. What sort of inequities could a plan like this produce?

It re-introduces a culture of informality into the workplace, where intimidation will undoubtedly flourish. Department chairs will need TA’s no matter what, and will lean on students to teach even though they may not want to. The plan is a recipe for intimidation in fact. It explicitly reverses the benign impact of the original GSOC contract which brought some formal rules about work into the classroom.

In addition, there will be a three-tier student body, those with family support will not teach much at all, and the gap between them and the more disadvantaged tier will be more visible. The plan also calls for the admission of unfunded students — as a third tier that will presumably be available to teach very cheaply at the drop of a hat.

International students will have an especially tough time, after the five year period, because of visa restrictions on their freedom to work.

Domestic students who, in their five years of funding, have not been bullied into teaching through the “moral authority” of their mentors, will then be eminently available in subsequent years to teach at adjunct rates that are far below those currently afforded to TA’s.

Q. Are there any other drawbacks? Will programs and admissions shrink?

In a time of fiscal retrenchment, full-fellowship packages will be more expensive, so we expect that the total number will be cut. Also, the administration is presenting the plan as a way to make NYU more competitive with its would-be peers. As more and more elite private colleges adopt this kind of graduate funding package (and if they want to avoid dealing with GA unions, they almost certainly will) then the gap between the privates and the publics will further widen.

Q. Who will be doing the work currently done by graduate student teachers?

The same graduate students for the most part. This will not be lost on the NLRB. Simply because you change a job title doesn’t mean the work is any different, and if it’s the same folks teaching then the NLRB case is not much altered. What will change more is the role of chairs and DGS’s, they will become direct managers of teaching labor in all sorts of ways, reinforcing the Yeshiva claim that faculty are managerial positions. I’m actually concerned about how faculty in these administrative positions may be legally exposed to NLRB inquiries into unfair labor practices.

Q. What do you think motivates the administration?

It’s no secret that this is an effort to eliminate the union. This is openly discussed in deans’ meetings with chairs that I have attended. More hypocritical is the administration’s effort to portray it as a “victory for labor,” since the students in question will be “allowed” to join the adjunct union. No one in GSOC was consulted, and students continue to want their own union, as far as we can tell. More telling, no NYU administrator has ever contacted the adjunct union about this plan. No one has asked union officers how they feel about having student members who will clearly have preferential access to certain kinds of teaching. It remains legally questionable whether students will be able to join that union under these circumstances.

Q. Rana Jaleel of GSOC-UAW calls this an attempt by the administration
to make an “end run” around the union. Do you agree? How do you think
the union might react?

Rana is stating a fact, in my view, not an opinion. How the union reacts is not my call, of course, but I do think the administration is making many mistakes, and that this bungled effort to preempt the NLRB may well backfire on them.

Q. How would you contextualize this plan in connection with
TakeBackNYU and the occupations at the New School?

It’s too easy to see this as part of a continuum with the “anomalous wave” of worldwide student protest. I think it has more to do with NYU trying to close the books on the legacy of the 2005 strike.

Q. This isn’t a strategy that most other administrations can afford to
adopt. Where do you think this will leave the movement to unionize
grad employees at private schools?

It will be a great blow to the academic labor movement if GSOC gets snuffed out. The current generation of GSOC organizers is strong and resourceful. Even if they are absorbed into the adjunct union, that’s simply not an option at most private schools where there is no adjunct union.

March 9, 2009

Sometimes I Growl

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 academic labor issues that are so evident in rhetoric and composition, she said, “People wake up and start things, then they atrophy or people get burned out and do other things or opt out.”

I guess this is the typical nature of anything, but I’ve found it to be particularly true of labor issues in our field. It’s on people’s radar screen, they work on it for awhile, then they get on to other things , burn out, or just drift away. Some avoid labor issues like the plague! Most people don’t know the history of labor issues in our field/larger culture, either, and don’t seem to feel responsible for our complex labor history — it’s almost as if every time labor issues come up, it’s there for the first time because people are feeling it differently based on where they are and who they are and how much time they have to even get into any of this history when they are fighting to survive. Yet there is a basic level of literacy that [we] should have, I think. That’s why I get impatient…

The occasion of our correspondence was messaging via Facebook with Seth Kahn to revive the Labor Special Interest Group (SIG) at this week’s Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) up the peninsula in San Francisco. If you’ll be at CCCC, and you want to participate, be sure to join Seth, Eileen, and a few dozen others at the Hotel Serrano at 5pm on Thursday, March 12.

If you can’t be there, be sure to watch for the splendid oral history of the Wyoming Resolution that Eileen is preparing with Jim McDonald. Already two of the major figures in the events leading to the resolution, James Slevin and James Sledd, have passed away. McDonald and Schell’s aim, they say, is to use “history as a whip” to those who encourage forgetfulness and silence. And rightly so.

I’ll be making a short appearance with Eileen at a workshop for faculty serving contingently, mostly talking about the successes, failures, and stresses connected with an effort to stabilize some writing faculty here at Santa Clara. In a nutshell, my conclusion is that the writing faculty involved succeeded to the extent they self-organized, and failed to the extent they relied on tenure-stream faculty and/or administrators to do the right thing/take pity on them/fix their problems from above, etc, etc.

The all-day workshop will be held at the Hilton Wednesday March 11 and is organized by the very thoughtful Greg Zobel. The workshop features a lineup of persons who are extremely visible writers, researchers and organizers in the movement. These are the best brains in academic labor, and well worth your time. They range from old hands like the essential Joe Berry to newer faces. Monica Jacobe, who is on her way to being a YouTube celebrity, will even sign your t-shirt.

915-10:30
Sue Doe: researching faculty serving contingently at a large university;
Monica Jacobe: the national picture of contingent appointments
Betsy Smith: using research in contract/union negotiations

1-2
Gregory Zobel: blogging about faculty serving contingently;
Sandy Baringer: newspaper writing, editing, and publishing
Michael Dixon: professor smartass

245-415
Bob Samuels: professional development funding;
Joe Berry: participatory action research; organizing
Marc Bousquet: employment security for faculty serving contingently;
Eileen Schell: translation of research to practice; the pov of administration.

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