About Marc
Marc Bousquet is a tenured asssociate professor at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in radical U.S. culture, internet studies, and writing with new media. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by NYU Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
Email Address: pmbousquet@gmail.com
Website: http://howtheuniversityworks.com/
Posts by Marc
Thursday, August 28, 2008
AAUP Completes Dream Team
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Gary Rhoades, who transformed our understanding of the professoriate with the publication of Managed Professsionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy, will join Cary Nelson at the helm of the AAUP in January. As director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, he is already a leading international authority on the complex of issues most pressing for AAUP: the assault on faculty culture by administration via the forced introduction of academic-capitalist values and practices; deprofessionalization and casualization; and the complex global-economic relations between state, market, and campus actors.
Taking on the General Secretary’s position, Rhoades will disrupt his existence at the peak of his career (with two more major books in progress) and relocate to Washington. There he’ll oversee tthe historical reorganization of the association into three interlocking organizations--the umbrella professional association, a labor union, and a foundation.
There really couldn’t be a better person for this job; what’s amazing--unless you know him--is that he was willing to do it. And the pairing with Nelson is brilliant, an irresistible one-two punch, two of the greatest thinkers about higher education since Dewey (who helmed both AFT and AAUP) working together.
Of critical importance are his priorities.
His career-long first commitment is to the issues of the new majority faculty, the 80 percent or more who serve as graduate students and off the tenure track.
He is equally dedicated to the issues of family, dual academic careers and work-life balance--toward making higher education a good place to work again. And he has superb relationships with AFT and NEA and may succeed in forging agreements for joint organizing with both organizations.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Downwardly Mobile
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1 of an interview with Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure-track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
MB. How would you describe your situation?
MH. Downwardly mobile! I was a teaching assistant at an Ivy League school. I taught my dissertation at a proto-Ivy school. Then I taught the gamut of English courses at a second-tier school. I taught four years of composition at a tuition-driven third-tier private institution. Now I’m unemployed.
MB. As many as one-third of faculty have faculty partners. Did your decision to live with your husband and children affect your ability to find employment or get interviews?
MH. Interviews? Are you kidding? I’ve never had an interview… When the MLA Profession 2007 reports that there isn’t a lost generation of scholars, I have to say I am one. There is a lost generation of scholars. Here we all are. I’m not working. I’m depending on the kindness of my husband.
Read more: Job Market Theory (pdf, pp 15-20) and The Waste Product of Graduate Education (pdf, pp21-27).
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
30 Seconds From Humiliation
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Anonymous details some of the daily humiliations of the majority of higher education faculty, those serving contingently.
Anon. I looked at everyone sitting around me. ‘Slavetrading’? ...Nobody reacted.
MB. But you kept working there.
Anon. I had no choice. We needed the money.
Next I’ll feature Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
After that, a four-parter with members of GSOC-UAW.
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Friday, August 08, 2008
Certify, Re-Tool--or Stand and Fight?
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Two new certification scams. Tired of teaching philosophy for pennies? Get retooled as a marketing prof.
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
‘Adjuncts’ To The Barricades!
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
In response to the fake teacher shortage “requiring” some communities to import education workers from abroad, one of my colleagues at “Brainstorm” (hereafter simply “BS") wondered whether we should send higher education faculty serving contingently into schoolteaching.
To which I replied as follows.
Faculty who serve contingently are not surplus labor that need to be shunted into another line of work. It should be obvious to anyone without “market"-themed toilet paper stuck to their shoes that there’s plenty of work in higher education for all of these people—they’re all working, duh!—it’s just that the work has been converted from what used to be a decent job into adjunctery and nontenurable drudgery by well-paid, generally tenured management knuckleheads who get off on spending money squeezed from your wages on skyboxes and “centers of excellence” for their cronies.
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
Pushback
Activists describe the high cost of organizing--pushback from faculty members, fellow graduate students, and the administration.
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
The 17th Annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions begins today, and features appearances by major union figures, including my friend Barbara Bowen, who came to power in the CUNY union as part of an innovative coalition of tenure-stream faculty, graduate employees and faculty serving contingently, with a small role played by yours truly in the CUNY Adjunct Project.
Eight years later, she’s facing some of the same demands and complaints from faculty serving contingently that she made in connection with the previous union leadership. (My own view is that this militance from the faculty serving contingently is a great thing. I’d very much welcome them mobilizing to reject this contract--ultimately it places the union leadership in a far stronger position to negotiate, having demonstrated militance.)
Next week, to mark the opening of COCAL VIII, I’ll begin releasing some great video featuring some smoking mad contingent faculty: Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship and a book contract who has served as full-time contingent faculty for ten years; Elizabeth Hoffman, an activist with the California Faculty Association; and “Anonymous,” a long-term part-time lecturer.
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
I’ll Be Watching You
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Hey, I just got my invitation from the National Association of “Scholars” to join their Golden Snitch project--they called it the Argus project, but I didn’t get what that means, ‘cause I’m in English and that reference requires a course in Classics. Like most NAS invitees, I insist on coloring inside the lines.
My invite arrived by OWL post and invited me to inform on Dumbledore and Harry whenever they vary from the syllabus thoughtfully provided by the trustees and their pals over at 4-Profit Degrees, Inc ("our assessment instruments prove you get _exactly_ the same learning outcomes as at Swarthmore!")
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Monday, July 28, 2008
Ballad of the Dissertators
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
In the original version, cowhands leave their employer’s “bones to bleach in the sun,” Joe Feinberg says.
Part 2 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago. They sing “Ballad of the Marooned Dissertation Writers,” by radical folklorist Joe Grim Feinberg.
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Monday, July 21, 2008
The Churchill Case Goes to Trial: What Should AAUP Do?
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.
It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”
The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision-making.
My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.
Cheyfitz, who examined the investigating committee’s report and testified about it before a UC panel, concluded that the charges were “fabricated” and “fundamentally baseless,” and flow from “problems in the investigating committee’s own flawed scholarship.”
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Sunday, July 20, 2008
AAUP and the Ward Churchill case
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Over at Brainstorm, a furor erupted based on one reader’s remark, “The AAUP’s defense of Churchill also prevents me from renewing my membership. What a waste of resources!”
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
AP Profile of Cary Nelson at Helm of AAUP: “It’s Like Poetry”
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Ernst Benjamin says Nelson’s tendencies as a “born rebel” sometimes run up against the constraints of running an organization. But he insists the energy he provides is also essential.
“It’s like poetry, isn’t it?” Benjamin said, comparing Nelson’s AAUP and scholarly work. “You have to have creativity and you have to have discipline.”
And Benjamin said anyone who had produced 25 books, as Nelson has, “has to have some discipline.”
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
Educated into Astonishing Ignorance
“If you don’t like it, why doncha leave?"
So I’ve been camping out in Stan Katz’s corner of the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” for about 24 hours, off and on. Completely hogging the comments section: there are 45 comments, and maybe 8 of them are long-windedly mine. (It’s still going on, and you may want to get in on the conversation--as good an opportunity as any to have your ideas about the “job market” rattled a bit.)
Anyway, it drives me bonkers, the crazy things that folks--who obviously think they’re both educated and bright--have to say about “the economy.”
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008
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.”
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Monday, July 07, 2008
Right to Work vs Rights at Work
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
When I showed up at my first tenure-track job in a right-to-work, kind of Southern state, adjunct writing faculty were being asked to pay tuition for a summer pedagogy seminar run by the writing director in an illegal “pay-to-work” scheme.
(Unless the prospective adjuncts were spouses of tenure-track faculty, in which case they still had to take the course, but were graciously comped the graft.)
This was 1998, at the University of Louisville. Six-year graduation rates under aggressive “quality management” were around 30% (where they remain). And the latest innovation in “enabling access to higher education” was indenturing college hopefuls to UPS and discarding them without a degree, in a scam I’ve previously discussed as Extreme Work-Study.
Ten years later, the South writhes again.
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Friday, July 04, 2008
Happy Fourth? How To Get Food Stamps
I can’t think of a better July 4th message than this, originally posted July 1 on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm group blog. Here’s to all the trustees, administrators & legislators that made this message possible.
A couple of days ago, I posted a link to the Living Wage Calculator, and casually & rhetorically—but not accurately—said that you could use it to calculate eligibility for food stamps.
That’s because in order to actually keep writing, instead of simply howling my outrage, I have a flip tendency to handle rhetorically, ironically, and sarcastically the actual, bitter experience of faculty, students, and staff cheerfully exploited by half-million-dollar-a-year pigs at the trough and their cronies in the trustees’ skybox.
Food stamps are a federal program, administered by individual states. There are generally eligibility calculators made available by the relevant agencies in each state, such as this one in Oregon.
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