One of our issues in this strike is to take back decision-making power over the issues that matter to us—curriculum, teaching conditions, the distribution of money, and the like. The administration is fighting ferociously to retain that power—since giving it up would in effect be returning it from management to workers.
But are professors really workers? When we were organizing, the administration kept telling us we weren’t—we were professionals. And, in fact, at UIC, we belong to the Illinois Federation of Teachers, which does indeed describe itself as a “Union of Professionals.” If you’ve done any work on the history of professionalization, you know that one of the original points of the whole concept of the professional—as it applied to ministers, doctors, lawyers, and professors—was to distinguish them from workers. But what we’ve all begun to realize is that, whatever it meant in the late 19th and early 20th century, in the 21st century that distinction is pure ideology. Professionals are workers—and professors are workers. full: http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/02/18/why-were-on-strike/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
