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Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Academic Labor Bookshelf
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Despite its length, this “bookshelf” is quite selective and personal. I’ve left out many helpful individual texts, and entire categories of useful material...
Despite its length, this “bookshelf” is quite selective and personal. I’ve left out many helpful individual texts, and entire categories of useful material, including histories of academic unionism, studies of comparable worth and gender inequity, the idea of the university discourse, together with studies of postmodernity, disciplinarity, and professionalism. I’ve also largely neglected the larger discourse of schooling, democracy, and assessment, with one or two exceptions. I didn’t mention Adolph Reed and the Labor Party’s crucial “Free Higher Education” platform. Nor have I included the long list of efforts that argue for “making peace with the marketplace,” such as those by Derek Bok and David Kirp, and I’ve also left out many of the the projects that study nontenurable employment from what I view as largely an administrative standpoint, as well as administrator self-adulation and the self-interested material produced by individuals profiting from contingency.
I have rather arbitrarily focused on books and online resources, and not made any attempt to select individual chapters or provide a list of relevant journal articles, which means, for instance, that I didn’t mention such indispensable essays as Andrew Ross’s definitive discussion of “The Mental Labor Problem” in Social Text, or the many essays appearing in minnesota review on the subject during the past two decades under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship. I also didn’t attempt to provide any of the incredibly helpful theorization of the general intellect by Italian autonomixt Marxists (the folks that brought you Empire, for instance.)
Nor did I delve into the literature of white-collar proletarianization that flows through C. Wright Mills and Harry Braverman to Aronowitz, whose first book has a brilliant chapter on the question.
Finally, many of the figures I have included have produced substantial, additional, relevant work well worth adding to your own lists. This includes such figures as Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Eileen Schell, Jennifer Washburn, Joe Berry, Michael Berube, and Cary Nelson. I’ve certainly overlooked a few things inadvertently as well, and am happy to update this list periodically based on feedback!
For those seeking more, there are a number of online bibliographies on such topics as contingent forms of employment. My favorites are Owen Thomas’s detailed-but-selective resource list for the Ohio Contract Faculty Association, Wayne Ross’s comprehensive aggregation at the Workplace blog, and two recent review-essays by Jeffrey Williams and Vincent Leitch. Both include detailed taxonomies:
Vincent Leitch, “Work Theory.” Critical Inquiry Winter 2005: 286-301
Jeffrey Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History (ALH) 2006 18: 190-216
Academic labor as a system
Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.
Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education.
Randy Martin, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University.
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education, and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Also see: Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Nelson & Berube, Higher Education Under Fire.
Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor.
Sheila Slaughter & Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education.
Contingent Faculty
Faculty serving contingently are the overwhelming majority of all faculty today. Contingency is the norm of faculty life, and organizing this sector is the cutting edge of academic labor issues right now. The best sources are contemporary and available online.
In addition to the reporting at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, see Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, COCAL, and join the ADJ-L discussion list hosted by Vinnie Tirelli. All three of the major higher-education unions—AAUP, AFT, and NEA—produce indispensable scholarship and policy papers on contingent academic labor. The testimony of faculty serving contingently is available at a growing number of locations in the blogosphere. Some of those sites are listed in my blogroll, and other stories are captured in the videos at my youtube channel.
Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education
Joe Berry, Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, Access to Unemployment Benefits for Contingent Faculty: A manual for applicants and a strategy to gain full rights to benefits, published by Chicago COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor), with financial assistance from AFT, AAUP, and NEA.
Michael Dubson, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty --and the Price We All Pay.
Nelson, Cary, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.
Eileen Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
Eileen Schell and Patrica Lambert Stock, eds., Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education.
Barbara Wolf, Degrees of Shame (film) email her at: barbara@barbarawolf.com
Graduate Employee Unions
The most important source for graduate-employee labor news is the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) email list and Web site, which links to most of the North American established unions and organizing campaigns.
Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid, Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (public institutions)
Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (mostly private institutions).
Theory and Practice of Higher-Ed Administration
The single most important thing you can do to educate yourself about the intentions of higher-education administration is to read the discourse of higher-ed administrators themselves. Their self-description of their aims is far scarier than anything I can tell you about them.
The best one-volume source for administrator-think is the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Reader, Organization and Governance in Higher Education, edited by Christopher M. Brown. The 5th edition (2000) is available used. The 6th edition from Pearson Custom Publishing is promised for this year (2008), but is not currently available.
The best one-volume discussion of the role of management theory in U.S. intellectual life is the indispensable Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. For a contrasting view, see Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.
Corporatization, Corporate Influence, Privatization, Militarization
Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters.
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928.
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Also see: Theory and Resistance in Education and Aronowitz & Giroux, Education Still Under Seige..
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class.
David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.
Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Also see The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education and (with David Gabbard), Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step.
Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
Geoffry White and Flannery Hauck, eds., Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower
Theory, Disciplinarity & Social Logic of the University
Michael Berube, The Employment of English.
Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors.
David Downing, The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace.
Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.
Evan Watkins, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.
Jeffrey Williams, ed., The Institution of Literature..
Comments
"Theory, Disciplinarity & Social Logic of the University”
Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation and maybe Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or The University in Deconstruction (although the latter might be a bit narrow in scope relative to the category).
Also, Hunter, Meredyth, Smith and Stokes (eds). Accounting for the Humanities: The Language of Culture and the Logic of Government along with Ian Hunter’s “Humanities without Humanism”, Meanijin 51, 479-90. However, both of these should be followed immediately by the numerous critiques of Hunter’s take: e.g. John Frow, “Rationalization and the Public Sphere”, Meanijin 51, 505-16; and Tony Thwaites, “Crossing the Floor: Hunter’s Governmentality”, Continuum 12, 187-95.
Hunter’s take on the humanities is generally blinkered and flawed in spots, but it’s also very powerful and worth a look at.
These suggestions are great, and remind me that among the many things available as essays that I left out are Stefano Harney’s pieces, some co-authored with Fred Moten, on governmentality, contingency, the undercommons and the university labor process. Got an interview with him in April, though, that I’ll try to get edited and online soon.
Happy to have more suggestions like these. Solidarity, M
Also, I’ve already had some private mail pointing out that I haven’t provided a biblio section for the area that interests me most right now--the circumstances of the undergraduate as labor (as discussed, for instance, in the last-completed chapter of HTUW, the “extreme work-study” mode of youth exploitation).
That’s because I’m still sifting through it. I’m very happy to have suggestions, especially, about undergraduate work, critical takes on “service learning” and the donation of labor, or the unpaid creation of value for the university through sports, cheerleading, campus journalism, undergraduate research, etc etc.
I’m also happy to have my contact info shared with undergraduates potentially willing to talk about their work/service/exploitative “extracurricular” experiences, with confidentiality assured.
fyi, four ex-grad employee leaders with aft connections are now a-blogging over at organizinggrievances.blogspot.com
One other book worth looking at, though it may be hard to find (and, like Hunter et al., it is focused on the Australian university system):
Simon Cooper, John Hinkson and Geoff Sharp (eds) Scholars and Entrepreneurs: The Universities in Crisis Arena Publications, 2002, 318 pp. ISBN: 0-9598181-6-2 (pbk)