Steal This University The Rise of the Corporate University and an Academic Labor Movement -- edited by Benjamin Herber Johnson , Kevin Mattson , Patrick Kavanagh Publisher: Routledge Pub Date: 01/2003 Pages: 272 pages Size: 6 x 9 ISBN: 0415934834 Edition: First
About the Book Welcome to academia in the 21st century, where 60% of tenured professors have been supplanted by underpaid graduate students or part-time adjuncts. The professoriate is no longer a "community of scholars" that governs itself, but a group of employees whose work is reviewed by administrators who cut deals to put cheaply packaged courses on-line for worldwide consumption. Where have the ivy-covered walls, tweedy professors, and genteel university presidents gone? Replaced, say the authors of this provocative work, by markets, profits, and computers. Steal This University documents the rise of the corporate university over the past twenty years as well as the academic labor movement that has developed in response. Universities are increasingly looking to corporations as their model for reform, investing in merit-pay packages, partnerships with hi-tech companies, and anything that will reap profits from their creations. With controversial, personal stories of workplace exploitation, tenure battles, and union organizing, the book shows the challenges of working within this new system and explains the countermovement working to restore independence to university teachers. >From New York University's outrageous union-busting techniques to the rise of for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix, Steal This University is both an indictment of current trends and a blueprint for combating them. Reviews Anyone with an interest in the future of American higher education will benefit from reading this collection of provocative and often brilliant essays. There are lucid and cogent analyses of the excessive and often corrupt influence of corporations on curricula and research, profiteering by academic entrepreneurs, the imposition of a demonstrably flawed corporate structure on the academy, and the overuse and abuse of poorly paid contingent faculty. The volume concludes with a call to recapture the university for the good of our students and our society.. Jane Buck, Ph.D., National President, American Association of University Professors ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Table of Contents INTRODUCTION:Not Your Father's University or Labor Movement Any Longer Part I:THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY 1. None of Your Business:The Rise of the University of Phoenix and For-profit Education - and Why it Will Fail Us All, Ana Marie Cox 2. Digital Diploma Mills, David Noble 3. Inefficient Efficiency:A Critique of Merit Pay, Denise Tanguay 4. The Drain-o of Higher Education:Casual Labor and University Teaching, Benjamin Johnson PART II:LABORING WITHIN 5. How I Became a Worker, Kevin Mattson 6. The Art of Work in the Age of the Adjunct, Alexis Moore 7.Blacklisted and Blue:On Theory and Practice at Yale, Corey Robin 8. Tenure Denied:Union-Busting and Anti-Intellectualism in the Corporate University, Joel Westheimer PART III:ORGANIZING 9.The Campaign for Union Rights at NYU, Lisa Jessup 10. Democracy is an Endless Organizing Drive:Learning from the Failure and Future of Graduate Student Organizing at the University of Minnesota, Michael Brown, Ronda Copher, and Katy Gray Brown 11. Moving River Barges:Labor Activism and Academic Organizations, Cary Nelson 12. Social Movement Unionism and Adjunct Faculty Organizing in Boston, Barbara Gottfried and Gary Zabel 13. Renewing Unions and Democracy at the Same Time:The Case of the California Faculty Association, Susan Meisenhelder (with the writing assistance of Kevin Mattson) Conclusion Notes on Contributors
