Full Description
Brings together essays by tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and graduate employees from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in an analysis of the changing identity of academic labor. The essays included suggest alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom and reshaping the academic workplace.
Contributors discuss the impact of today's casualized academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty.
By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.
Contents
Foreword: Preserving Our Independence, Acting Together by David Montgomery Introduction: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor by Julie M. Schmid and Deborah M. Herman A New Divide: Faculty and Others Above and Below; Mapping Social Positions within the Academy by Wesley Shumar and Jonathan T. Church Dueling Identities and Faculty Unions: A Canadian Case Study by Mike Burke and Joanne Naiman In a Leftover Office in Chicago by Joe Berry A New Generation, Charting New Waters More Than Academic: Labor Consciousness and the Rise of UE Local 896-COGS by Susan Roth Breitzer Pyrrhic Victory at UC Santa Barbara: The Struggle for Labor's New Identity by Richard Sullivan Unfinished Chapters: Institutional Alliances and Changing Identities in a Graduate Employee Union by James Thompson New Tactics, Old Battlegrounds Shutting Down the Academic Factory: Developing Worker Identity in Graduate Unions by Eric Dirnbach and Susan Chimonas Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an Employee?: Contesting Grad Labor in the Academy by William Vaughn The Politics of Constructing Dissent: The Rhetorical Construction of Faculty Union Membership by Darla S. Williams Afterword: Classroom, Lab, Factory Floor: Common Labor Struggles by Carl Rosen Index
