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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
About Brainstorm
Brainstorm is The Chronicle Review's team of bloggers on ideas, culture, and the arts.
Gina Barreca
Mark Bauerlein Marc Bousquet Laurie Fendrich Dan Greenberg Stan Katz Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Bob Zemsky Recent PostsThe End of 'Minnesota Review'? | Comment [10] Grad Student Union Launched at U. of Chicago | Comment Administration's Culture War From Above | Comment [5] McGill Joins the Bush League | Comment [72] Kennedy Wades In | Comment [11] 
May 8, 2008The End of 'Minnesota Review'?crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’s editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines. In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’s editorship, mr garnered more mentions in The Chronicle of Higher Education than any other academic journal. But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.” Upon arriving at CMU, Williams’s two-year deal for support of mr was similar to the arrangements he’d had previously at the University of Missouri and East Carolina University: modest subvention for office space and mailing, and just $9,000 for graduate-student labor, plus a single course release and one month of summer pay. Hardly a fortune in a world of $50,000 vehicle allowances and $6-million mansion renovations for university “leadership.” And a real bargain for a school like CMU with an engineering rep and a confessed need to brush up its humanities cred. As Williams notes wryly, the level of support he negotiated from CMU — and believed would continue, or he would have negotiated a longer arrangement — was provided without question by the “much less wealthy and prestigious institutions” where he’d previously worked. But at the end of his first year there, Williams found himself without warning (surprise! managerial “innovation” at work!) pressed to “do more with less.” It was suggested — just as a for-instance — that he could get one graduate student to do the work of two, and thereby shave a princely $4,500 off the hefty nine grand they chipped off of CMU’s mighty fiscal block. He quickly assembled a roster of luminaries (Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand) to defend the journal, and limped through for another three years, when, in 2007-8, the demands were renewed, this time more firmly. This time he was offered the option, instead of shortchanging the graduate-student employees, of giving back his month of summer pay — doing the same work as before, but for a 12-percent cut in pay. There’s a slim chance that the quality clowns will relent, with the possibility of resistance emerging from Williams’s departmental colleagues and graduate students in the literature and cultural-studies program at a meeting tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, though, Williams has taken the line that enough is freaking enough. He’ll give up the journal if another editor can be found and — more likely — if not, he’s made plans for a final issue. Inspired by the 1950s “My Credo” issue of Kenyon Review featuring short, passionate essays by, among others, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and Austin Warren, Williams has invited 16 cultural-studies intellectuals to contribute credos and reflections about the dismal state of the profession for an issue that he feels would fittingly mark his retirement. You know, there’s a thread over at (union-busting former university president) Trachtenberg’s corner of this blog on “education gurus.” Twenty Chronicle of Higher Ed readers offered their thoughts. Nobody mentioned Aronowitz. Nobody mentioned Slaughter, Leslie, and Rhoades, or Bill Readings. Henry Giroux? Cary Nelson? You gotta be kidding. Nobody mentioned even centrist disappointments like Bok or Kirp. Quality management? It’s all about taking actual, tangible, meaningful, intellectual quality and turning it into fresh paint for the business school in quest of enhanced revenue. Responsibility-centered management theorist William Massy (download and play his revolting Virtual U training game — it’s scarier than anything I could tell you about it — once opined, in the midst of an essay praising the work of the HMO, that starving the revenue-poor locations in the university made great sense, saying that if you had six gold mines, you’d want to invest most in the one with the greatest assay. But if you have six runners on your team, are you helping the organization by giving nine lungs to the fastest? If you play football, do you win by giving everyone’s meal to the quarterback? Comment [10]May 7, 2008Grad Student Union Launched at U. of Chicagocrossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com Despite the setback, organizing is once more on the front burner at private universities in the U.S., including by committed, activist grad employees at the University of Chicago, outraged by an unfair stipend arrangement and by some of the lowest wages for teaching in the country (as low as $1,500 per quarter). As a result of graduate employee agitation, commonly through collective bargaining, 3/4 of university employers pay for graduate employee health insurance; the University of Chicago does not. Among the graduate employee organizers that I met last month was one who was funding his degree by working for his department chair as a gardener. On May 2, the members of Graduate Students United announced a membership drive for an independent union with a philosophy of “active solidarity with other workers in the university and the community of which the university is a part.” Asking for annual dues of just $5, and leaving for later consideration such questions as possible affiliation with a national organization, the card drive netted 70 members at their first event and has an innovative membership structure relying on open organization and mass electronic referenda for significant decisions. After a year of preliminary organizing, the group looks to the future with confidence. “Over the past year we organized two well-attended demonstrations, collected about 500 signatures on a petition with demands for the administration, and set up a basic organizational structure,” said organizer Joe Grim Feinberg. “We are optimistic about our chances.” When I resume the video series in the next couple of weeks, I’ll begin with my recent interview with some of the Graduate Students United core organizers. I taped them singing one of Joe Feinberg’s songs for the union, conducting an intentional culture-struggle from below. It’s good stuff. In the meanwhile, here are some of the lyrics from a new piece he penned for the May 2 event:
Give ‘em hell, Joe & co. Rumor has it, the Kennedy bill reversing the sleazeball work of the Brown decision — supported by both Obama and Clinton — was partly inspired by the U. Chicago organizers, as well as by the continuing determination of the GSOC-UAW membership. I can believe it. Next couple of posts: 1) thanks to the quality trolls, is it the end for minnesota review? 2) Update on McGill Joins the Bush League which has racked up 70 comments and counting. CommentApril 27, 2008Administration's Culture War From Abovecross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture — targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This administrative movement shot into high gear in the mid 1970s after anti-union labor economist Clark Kerr and his pet Carnegie Commission gazed with trepidation at the then-rising faculty-union movement. Just as the 1960s had been the “decade of student power,” Kerr wrote, the rising culture of faculty solidarity seemed certain to make the 1970s the “decade of faculty power.” What we need, Kerr suggested, is a “management science of reaction.” And boy, did he get what he wanted. Administrations have succeeded hugely in substituting for faculty values their sick culture of competition, quality engineering, market responsiveness, and mission-centeredness — academic capitalism, in the indispensable formulation of Leslie, Slaughter, and Rhoades. The studies I’ve read conclude that university administration has achieved a profound “corporatization of the self” in most faculty, despite occasional “concrete opposition” in faculty institutions, chiefly unions. But there is an emergent culture of struggling back from below, evident in the self-organization of graduate employees and contingent faculty. California COCAL used to have a great online resource of some of the Wobbly-style agit-prop performed by the West-coast contingent faculty associations: I hope they get it back up soon. And I just taped a Wobbly grad student activist at the University of Chicago and his comrades singing a truly affecting resistance song. These performances work, communicating the dishonesty and bad faith of administrations to students, parents, and legislators. In the taped Portland Community College productions and following open-mike responses of the students, you can hear the horror in the voices of the students when they learn that their faculty earn less than $20,000 a year. The Philadelphia academic unions have been very active in supporting the campaigns and rights of other workers in the metropolitan area, and the proceeds will go in support of fired Embassy Suites housekeepers affiliated with UNITE HERE. If you’re in the Philadelphia area on Saturday May 3, check out the award-winning play about the bad-asses at TUGSA/AFT Local 6290 (the Temple grad employees’ union), sponsored by the Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT Local 4531, the Temple University faculty and librarians’ union, and co-written by Lonnie Carter and Rich Klimmer. Location: Saturday evening, May 3 at 7:30, Rock Hall, Cecil B. Moore and Broad St., Temple main campus. If you can’t make it, you can send a check to: TAUP- AFT Local #4531 AFL-CIO, 1900 N.13th Street, Barton Hall Room A231, Philadelphia PA 19122-6013, or write April C. Logan, TUGSA/AFT #6290, Department of English, Temple University, AprilCLogan (at) aol.com . Comment [5]April 24, 2008McGill Joins the Bush Leaguecross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com  McGill grad employees have been picketing since April 8 This is an era of executive license, exemplified by the Bush mob’s trampling on labor rights, habeas corpus, international law, and even the remnant trappings of democracy in the United States and in its various client outposts across the globe. Now the administration of McGill University seems determined to show its continuing alienation from the Quebec mainstream by hitching up its jeans and defying provincial labor law in a great imitation of George W. Bush’s style of executive bullying. According to multiple sources, including an official Quebec Labor Department report, and the independent reporting of the Montreal Gazette, McGill administrators have illegally pressured faculty, including vulnerable untenured juniors, to do the work of striking grad employees as scabs. Additionally, they have fired striking unionized grad employees from various additional-income positions that are not covered by the union contract — including positions as exam graders and summer session instructors. A second story on McGill’s emulation of the Bush mob in the Gazette quotes a grad employee calling these moves “retaliation,” and then rips into the faculty association, which has bleated about the plight of junior faculty forced into scabbing — asking for them to be taken off the tenure clock until they’re done helping the administration to break the spirit of the grad employees: The McGill Association of University Teachers says it has been “very insistent that everything possible be done to help faculty members who are seriously overburdened by the consequences of the strike.” It has proposed “stopping the tenure clock” for junior faculty unable to complete projects, cancelling committee work and postponing deadlines for annual reports. Keep up with the story on AGSEM’s shame campaign on Facebook. And I’ll have updates and individual stories in the coming weeks. Good show, McGill. It’s nice to know that my fellow Americans residing in gated communities have a place to call home when visiting Canada. Maybe you can give Dick Cheney a visiting professorship in labor relations as well. Comment [72]April 22, 2008Kennedy Wades Incrossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com So I’m back from Illinois and Ohio with some kind of Andromeda strain eating away at my lungs and sinuses, but wanted to quickly post the interesting news that Ted Kennedy has — after several years’ dithering — at last waded into the fray over bargaining rights for graduate employees at private institutions. Graduate-employee bargaining rights have been won in numerous public institutions (where they are covered by state law) and were won for private institutions, which are covered by federal law, during the Clinton administration. The critical case was GSOC-UAW, representing grad employees at NYU, and was decided unanimously by a bipartisan NLRB — only to be shabbily reversed by Bush appointees during the Brown decision. You can read the scathing dissent to the sleazeball work of the Bush mob on my site and at the NLRB. In all likelihood, a Democratic presidential victory will see those bargaining rights restored. But Kennedy has introduced a bill guaranteeing those rights, seeking to put them beyond the increasingly dishonest political manipulation of the NLRB:
Of course changing the law won’t magically fix the problems of grad students — I put this question to the GSOC-UAW organizers and others in an interview recently. The key will have to be maintaining an organization that can express the united power of the student employees regardless of who seizes control of the law. More on that after I’ve defeated the Andromeda strain. Oh, and I know I should weigh in on the whole discussion of tenure raised by comrade Fendrich. I’ll have to save up my energy for that. Comment [11]April 13, 2008Student Unrest in Chicagocrossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Chicago remains one of the few bastions of labor militancy in the United States and graduate employees have had enough at the biggest private and public campuses in the city. Last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where unionized graduate student employees teach one-third of all credit hours, 150 UIC-GEO members rallied against a sleazy “tuition differential” fee structure that adds as much as $10,000 to the cost of graduate education for some members. The fees are not included in the “general tuition” waived for graduate student employees and offload such costs as high salaries for business faculty onto student workers. Increasingly students find that the administration is using the fee structure to get around the contract and consume these working students’ already meager stipends. Numerous students arrive on campus believing that their assistantships covered their expenses only to find that the fees eat up half or more of their extremely modest stipends. Amber Cooper of UIC-GEO says that the grads will rally at Springfield on April 30: Thousands of other higher ed union workers from universities and community colleges across Illinois will be there with us to make sure they fund higher education so that our Deans and Board of Trustee won’t have to look to us to balance their budgets. At the University of Chicago, students have been rallying since February against a plan by administrators that substantially raised stipends for graduate students newly enrolled in 2007-2008 to $19,000 while continuing to pay earlier-enrolled grads as little as $5,000. Many of the latter are eligible for food stamps and unable to pay medical bills. Read more on their blog. According to a report by Robin Wilson, some of the disgruntled grads are talking about unionization. I’ll be on the University of Chicago campus Friday, April 18, 2-4 pm, in Harper Hall Room No. 140, 1116 E. 59th Street, giving a talk entitled “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.” Comment [3]April 10, 2008McGill Grad Employees Strike!crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com It’s far from a perfect culture, wracked with its own issues of racism and xenophobia, but one of the things we really like about residing in Quebec is the profoundly pro-social commitments: day care, health care, women’s rights, and, especially, labor rights. Even anglophone McGill benefits from the Quebec labor code. When the grads went on strike for smaller classes, office space, better teacher training and better pay yesterday, they’re protected by the toughest labor law in North America:
Now, that’s my people! Comment [6]April 8, 2008Teach the University!crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13. One of the sessions will feature Jeff Williams, Heather Steffen, David Cerniglia, and Eric Leuschner on the importance of engaging undergraduates in debates about the meaning, purpose, funding, and nature of higher education. This is a persuasive position since undergraduates are the largest group of stakeholders in the institution, yet draw their information about it from a hodgepodge of under-informed and often mendacious sources. I’m particularly interested in Steffen and Cerniglia’s paper, “Composing the University,” which reflects on their experience of teaching the university in a first-year writing course. Ultimately, they are making the arguments made by Jefferson and Dewey. “The university as a topic for composition courses makes sense for both their humanities gen ed content goals and their writing goals,” Steffen says: Our ultimate objective in teaching the university and in thinking about its potential as a pedagogical move is to discover whether knowing more about the institution in which they spend four — or often more — years of their lives can help to make students more critical, active citizens of the university and, by extension, other communities in which they participate. Steffen and Cerniglia are Jeff Williams’s research assistants for minnesota review, a widely-respected humanities journal that may soon discontinue publication due to the quality-management of Carnegie Mellon University. (By continually pressing for such “quality improvements” as asking one graduate student to do the work of two, or for the editor to edit without summer pay, etc.) Williams’s own paper draws on his recent article for Pedagogy (Winter 2008), and makes a series of arguments against continuing the notion that the university is a transparent or neutral place from which to accomplish other things. “Next to healthcare,” Williams says, higher education “is the most significant public institution of our day that speaks to the distribution of resources and the welfare of citizens. Prompting students to reflect on how they are formed, where modern institutions come from and how they work, is, I should think, a primary pedagogical goal of higher education and especially of criticism.” The Pedagogy article offers many suggestions for courses fulfilling this ideal — from a course in the academic novel, to a historical survey of the changing idea of the university, to courses treating “the student” as an anthropological, sociological, or internationally comparative subject, or a course on particular themes relevant to student life — such as the growing problem of debt or the hyper-exploitation of the undergraduate as a source of cheap labor. More on the latter tomorrow with respect to my own contribution, Extreme Work-Study. Comment [10]April 7, 2008The Last Professors?crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11 to 13. In attendance will be plenty of Minnesota folks, like Paula Rabinowitz and Lisa Disch, as well as a great lineup from GSOC-UAW (who have a new book out regarding the landmark strike of graduate employees at NYU), David Downing, Dick Ohmann, Jeff Williams, and many others. Also in attendance will be Frank Donoghue from Ohio State, whose new book The Last Professors portrays the swift demise of the tenurable minority in the permatemped disciplines, arguing that with respect to silent acquiescence to casualization, “professors of the humanities have already gone too far to rescue themselves.” This is a vigorous, approachable, and often angry book that seeks to hold the tenurable minority responsible for the steady flowering of multiple tiers of labor — the “new majority” serving contingently as well as graduate employees. To that end, he offers a trenchant critique of the communications of disciplinary associations and graduate-program advisers that tend to paint the graduate-employee-as-disposable-worker as the victims of their own bad choices, bad preparation, or bad timing “on the market.” As a result, the relentless “job-market” propaganda and pseudo-knowledge produces a graduate-student subjectivity that willingly self-fashions as a commodity: This take-charge, self-help approach is perfectly pitched to an audience of job-seekers who have survived graduate school and earned the Ph.D., and who cannot bring themselves to admit that the academic labor system is rigged against them. Instead, they deny it, or, more accurately, they don’t believe that the system will personally victimize them. If they fail, it is because they were “underprepared.” Ideally, they believe that their personal merit and thorough preparation will override the workings of the ‘market.’ … If you believe that success or failure is largely up to you, the job search itself becomes an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit. (40) Donoghue goes on to note that the intensified world of competition hardly ends with the job search but continues throughout the life-cycle of the tenured minority, noting the sheer unsustainability of speed-up at this level (and, one might add, at wages often much lower than those of nurses, bartenders, and police officers). The one caveat I’ll raise with Frank this weekend regards the general probem of using “vanishing” tropes. As many have observed, the “vanishing Indian” didn’t actually disappear, but moved to degraded circumstances with a limited purchase on the public sphere. We might say the same for the faculty. Since future higher education won’t be “professorless,” but filled with faculty — research professors of retail marketing, distinguished chairs in business ethics, but $1000-per-course lecturers in Homer — there will remain opportunities for resistance, for political action, especially by way of activist unions of the faculty serving contingently, including those faculty who serve contingently as graduate employees. This is the argument of The University Against Itself, the GSOC-NYU collection just released by Temple University Press: Corporatization is neither inevitable nor impersonal. It is a matter of human, political reality that we can make or unmake as we choose — if we choose. Tomorrow I’ll write about the importance of Jeff Williams’ mantra to “Teach the University,” and perhaps the day after, I’ll say something about my presentation, Extreme Work-Study. Comment [12]April 2, 2008Do the Right Thing, Irvincrossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com I posted yesterday on the campaign of 900-member United Part-Time Faculty at Wayne State, an AFT affiliate, to win job security for faculty serving contingently. Like workers in most fields, they believe that serving part-time doesn’t exempt faculty from workplace due process, seniority, and continuing appointment. I wrote my letter to WSU president Irvin Reid and copied the union as below: Hi, Irvin. I understand you’re having a little trouble with your 900 permanently temporary faculty. The thing to do here is follow the lead of John Sexton and Bob Kerrey of NYU and the New School, who made quick deals with the 4,000 faculty represented by Academics Come Together (ACT-UAW Local 7902) — deals that made the faculty and students happy, didn’t bankrupt the school, and kept “the business of education” rolling on smoothly. The folks of UPTF have quite wisely made job security the core of their project. It sounds to me like they’re pretty serious, as they should be. And as I read the political atmosphere these days, I think their position is going to end up sounding pretty reasonable to most folks — including journalists, who for the past five years have experienced a whole lot of permatemping themselves. If I were you, I’d give some thought to doing the right thing here. It didn’t hurt the careers of Sexton or Kerrey. I would guess this isn’t the right time to play the pugnacious executive and get booed in every stadium and auditorium you enter for the next several years. In solidarity with UPTF, Marc Bousquet. Comment [2] |
