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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
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
30 Seconds From Humiliation | Comment [5]
Certify, Retool -- or Stand and Fight? | Comment [9]
'Adjuncts' to the Barricades! | Comment [41]
Unions and Academic Democracy | Comment [1]
Pushback | Comment
The Painter and the Gangsters
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
The Moore College of Art and Design has been trying to crush its faculty for two decades. Since 1990, when it employed mostly tenure-stream faculty, it has been converted into an academic Wal-Mart, with 31 full-timers on contracts and 70 adjuncts, draconian violations of shared governance and academic freedom norms, including a code prohibiting artists (!) from “doing anything that might negatively reflect on the college,” and, AFT alleges, a history of interfering with the union’s elections and bargaining.
When Steve Sherman, a popular faculty member of 20 years’ standing with glowing evaluations took the helm of the Moore Federation of Teachers in 2005, he opposed the vocationalization of the curriculum and, according to the AFT Free Exchange blog, became “a fierce advocate for the rights of adjunct faculty to receive pay and benefits commensurate with their full-time colleagues, and a champion of the faculty’s role in college governance.”
This is a particularly arrogant administration, as Scott Jaschik reports:
For example, in 2006, the college imposed a new “code of ethics” that the union believed infringed on academic freedom and amounted to a non-negotiated change in its contract. Among other things, the code barred employees from doing anything that might negatively reflect on the college. Since many art professors are themselves artists, and since artists regularly create works that offend all kinds of people, the union said that this effectively would limit their artistic expression. A federal administrative judge ruled for the union and found that imposing the code without negotiation amounted to an unfair labor practice.
Emboldened by actually having the law on his side, not to mention the AFT, Sherman fought the gangsters at every step, including a last-ditch effort to block a department merger.
In turn, they went after him hard, according to the AFT, who believed that the administration had already interefered with the union’s bargaining team and election process, leading to the union securing third-party oversight of officer elections.
Suddenly Sherman was acting “unprofessionally” at every turn, in every aspect of his working life — in his communications regarding governance, in his relations with students, etc.
After a couple of trumped-up “final warnings,” they fired him without any due process.
An arbitrator found that “Sherman was clearly “pugnacious” and used some “inflammatory” language,” but said, “I find no evidence that Mr. Sherman acted in any other fashion that would justify a disciplinary ‘final warning,’ including no evidence that he acted ‘unprofessionally’:
the policing of diction that is short of slander or ethnically pejorative, or the penalizing of a demeanor that is short of threatening or assaultive, constitutes a censorship that is incompatible with the robust free-speech environment of a collegiate institution.
Better get used to this sort of thing, kids. The administration’s actions — what I’ve been calling “gangsterism” — were just great “quality management,” streamlining the institution to make it “market responsive” and “mission focused,” and trimming the deadwood represented by any opposition to administration’s notion of “mission.”
But when you get tired of it, you know where to go.
(Image from Photobucket.com)
Posted at 07:26:04 AM on July 8, 2008 | All postings by Marc BousquetComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Quality Management in South Carolina 1
Next: Educated Into Astonishing Ignorance
Where to go? Isn’t it the AAUP which isn’t sure it will investigate in the current case of the New Mexico State professors? (http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/07/3725n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en)
And don’t look to the National Labor College for a better full-time to adjunct ratio, either; it’s worse there (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/on_campus/marapr08/nlc_glance.htm). The National Labor College part-time faculty recently organized under AFT, by the way. Not that AFT is a saint – far from it. But someone had to unionize the NLC adjuncts in order to collect those dues and fees – for doing precious little for contingent faculty, this Moore College case being an exception (e.g., cf. http://www.adjunctnation.com/blog/archive/10188/).
And didn’t the blog host admit that he didn’t attend the AAUP National Council meeting of which he is an elected member — in order to not miss his son’s first airplane ride?
This is all far too complicated for words…isn’t it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 9, 02:11 PM · #
Addendum to Comment 1:
The missed (or at least abbreviated) Council meeting is in Comment 8 of this thread: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/theyll-be-watching-you
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 9, 02:22 PM · #
I’ve been chatting about these issues over at Stan’s corner of the blog on and off all day. It’s worth a look.
As for you, AHA, I’d have thought this nuttery was beyond even you. Really? You’re suggesting malfeasance ‘cause I missed a meeting?
Is that really you out there? Or do you have an even nuttier stalker who’s trying and not quite succeeding at capturing your voice(s)?
— Marc Bousquet · Jul 9, 09:19 PM · #
On Comment 3:
The National Council of the AAUP, as one gleans from the AAUP Website, is the equivalent of its Board of Directors. Also, from the Website and perhaps even this blog, one learns that the AAUP was discussing some sort of major reorganization plan.
Thus, to miss the Board of Directors meeting may not be “malfeasance” of the highest legal order, but of the higher moral order in such an organization as AAUP, certainly.
P.S. The reason our email addresses are submitted but not published is, one would suppose, precisely for CHE to be able to know whether the same person is posting or not. But I could be wrong….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 02:20 PM · #
AHA, get real. Numerous Council members miss a meeting or two in the course of a term or two. It’s not news and you’re being ridiculous.
As for the big events of the meeting, it wasn’t reorganization, which I played a role in as it unfolded over several years. The reorg. simply culminated in an essentially foregone conclusion approval vote after the careful previous preparation. There was substantial other work accomplished, though, some of which I participated in by email.
But keep up the silliness, why don’t you? You might first look up the meanings of gadfly and troll.
— Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 04:42 PM · #
On Comment 5 of the blog host:
“The lady doth protest too much methinks.” – Shakespeare. Hamlet
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 05:13 PM · #
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response1 or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.2
AHA: the topic of this post was Moore College and the AFT. This is the Nth time you’ve introduced your obsession with AAUP and its shutdown of its shrunken listserv after trolls chased its subscription down to fewer than 200. You were probably one of the trolls responsible for the shutdown. I don’t know. But for me, your absurd charges here—and drawing my son into it—are the end.
If I were running Brainstorm, I’d moderate it, and place the burden of civility and relevance on commenters. I’d spent a lot less time being accused of being impolite to jerks.
In any event, I’ve just instituted my own ‘storm anti-troll policy—just for you. CHE might not block you, but you’ve received your last feeding from me. Bye.
— Marc Bousquet · Jul 10, 06:54 PM · #
The readers of the CHE blogs will be the ultimate judges of who is neither civil nor relevant – e.g., who was that, exactly, who first mentioned a son and an airplane ride, if not the blog host himself.
And as for the AAUP listserv shut-down, it is clear that at least one member of its National Council recommends top-down censorship at the slightest “provocation” while exhorting the readership to join the organization (in the last sentence of this thread’s posting). Obviously, the AAUP doesn’t embarass easily.
Academic freedom and free speech fighters, indeed. Quod erat demonstrandum.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 10, 07:09 PM · #
Stop being a fucking dumbass, aha.
— anon · Jul 11, 01:25 AM · #
On Comment 9:
Cf. The next thread of this blog, especially Comments 9, 14, and 20.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 11, 09:50 PM · #
I was a student from this school and am shocked by this article. I find it most disheartening to hear that a respected and talented man could be bullied out of a job he cared about. The school appears to have a narrow view and he is probably better off but what a shame for Moore.
— elizabeth stone · Jul 23, 10:28 AM · #