(I've gotten some interesting comments on my blog about my "Last
Professors" review that I thought I would share.)
“Reclaiming the Ivory Tower” by Joe Berry is a good account of adjuncts
and their union organizing, full of good strategies and tactics for
organizing. I edited this book for Monthly Review Press. He has plenty
to say about the tenured professors’ disdain toward and obliviousness to
the situation of adjuncts. My first published article, co-authored with
my late friend Bruce Williams, was called “Down from the Ivory Tower”
(very early 1970s), and already then we were talking about some of the
things the author of the book Louis talks about is saying now. Of
course, Veblen was saying some of this in 1920. Colleges and
universities are real cesspools of dishonesty and corruption. As a
character of Finley Peter Dunne answers in reply to a question about
whether the colleges do good, “Do you think tis the mill that makes the
water run?”
Comment by Michael Yates — June 19, 2008 @ 2:44 am | Edit This
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College education inflation is at seven percent at year. The question
is: where does the money go? It’s not for paying professors, that’s for
sure.
I wanted to get a Ph.D. in history, but shockingly low pay has deterred
me. Now history is more a hobby than a career.
Comment by Niraj — June 19, 2008 @ 2:44 pm | Edit This
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Great piece, Lou (and thanks for several great references, thanks also
to Michael). My only comment is that most academics in the liberal arts,
very much unlike most computer techs, often have not only a passing
familiarity with but a rich grounding in various radical political
traditions. Of course the presence of these ideas and the failures of
the intellectual left since the 1960s have made the universities a place
where theory is most nakedly divorced from practice, but the ideas are
still there, for what they are worth, bubbling under the surface…
Comment by Isaac — June 19, 2008 @ 10:12 pm | Edit This
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Right on target. In Puerto Rico we are dealing with a similar, perhaps
worst, scenario not only because there is a similar, growing trend in
the use of adjunct professors by the state university. There is also a
significant gap in salaries compare to the US, a considerably higher
workload -four courses per semester at the state university- and the
almost total absence of tenure in private universities. I think the
increasing use of adjunct professors is also the result of capitalism’s
search for “flexibility” at the work place i. e. the extension and
intensification of the labor process. As the article correctly points
the picture becomes more complex as professors try to maintain their
professional commitment while adapting to the increasingly restrictive
economic policies of administrators (Easthope & Easthope: 2000) refuse
to accept their pauperized working class status and struggle
accordingly. It would be interesting to look at the growing use of
contingent academic labor in the context of: the prospect of a knowledge
based economy and society, the European Bologna project and the recent
decision by the EU of extending the duration of the work week to 60 - 65
hours.
Comment by Argeo T. Quinones Perez — June 20, 2008 @ 1:29 am | Edit This
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Thanks for reading my book, and for your elaboration of the adjunct
labor system. Joe Berry’s book is excellent because it’s essentially a
how-to manual for doing something about the exploitation, which, I think
will reach a tipping point before too long. Marc Bousquet’s new book,
How the University Works, takes aim at the same issues, and his earlier
writings influenced my thinking a great deal. And Micki McGee has a
great essay about working as an adjunct in NYC (Social Text, 2000 or so).
Keep up the great site!
Comment by Frank Donoghue — June 20, 2008 @ 4:40 am | Edit This
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