Vanessa Vaile's List: academic labor

• quest to figure just what the Hell to do with our supremely messed up system of academia
• Reading this book reminded me of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox,"
• The one big thing he knows is well worth bearing in mind: universities run on a system of contingent labor that has been willfully imposed by university administrators enamored with the values of neoliberal capitalism.
• Bousquet is most definitely a hedgehog
• Bousquet's analysis owes a great debt to the most influential of philosophical hedgehogs, Karl Marx.
• a reasonably convincing case for a Marxist analysis of academic labor
• who benefits from this system?
• Bousquet persuasively argues that it is set up to benefit university administrators, who desire a workforce that is as inexpensive, compliant, and "flexible" as possible.
• academia is undergoing the same wave of casualization and part-timing of labor that has stripped protections and wages from workers in other fields
• the money that could be going towards faculty salaries and benefits is being spent on sports facilities, modern dorms, and student centers full of new flat screen TVs on campuses where humanities faculty labor on outmoded computers
• two fascinating chapters that don't fit the overall structure of the book very well.
• example to highlight the ways in which more and more students have become workers, and how we should not put "student" and "worker" into two separate, reified categories
• Bowen Report, which promised plentiful academic jobs once the Boomers retired
• Bowen did not account for the rising and ever expanding sector of part-time and adjunct labor
• "supply side" solution ignores the real problem: the casualization of labor has limited the number of full time jobs
• Relatedly, Bousquet makes the rather startling contention that PhDs themselves are the "waste-product" of the current academic system
• There's a lot to like about this book, especially its call for academics to stop being so pretentious and to stop pretending that doing "mental labor" puts them above the bullshit that bedevils less exalted workers
• much of what is justified as economic necessity by administrators is actually just a case of misplaced priorities
• there are considerable flaws in Bousquet's book
• financial crisis there will be even more pressure
• too optimistic about the possibility of graduate students and faculty organzing
• lack of union activity along with extremely repressive labor laws and a general conservatism will prevent unionization campaigns from forming anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line
• the highly casual nature of adjunct labor makes these workers very difficult to organize
• I saw a different reality. The school was growing so big so fast that the department I worked for was essentially throwing academic shock workers into classrooms with an exponential growth in the number of students
• though Bousquet may be a bit too doctrinaire for his own good at times, he makes a powerful case for faculty and grad student unionization and for placing the struggles of contingent faculty where they belong at the center of any discussion on what needs to be reformed in academia

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• an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a "shortage" of U.S. scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an "oversupply" of persons with doctorates in science
• both camps are wrong.
• There is no shortage of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers and there's no oversupply of persons with doctorates in science or any other field.
• The name for this restructuring is casualization
• , the making temporary (and cheap, and controllable) of work that used to be secure (and more expensive, and more difficult to manage). This restructuring has been occurring since 1970, when roughly 3/4 of faculty were tenured or in the tenure stream.
• . Less if you address pervasive undercounting of nontenurable faculty, and teaching by staff employees and graduate students. The trend line points steeply down.
• 1/4 of faculty are tenured or in the tenure stream
• taking students out of the work force and working toward full employment for faculty would be an actual stimulus plan.
• If the problem is casualization, why is all the policy noise whirling about in the "shortage/oversupply" contradiction?
• both wrong answers are useful to those whose interests are served by casualization.
• agendas are served by either or both of these fictions.
• Gates makes that claim because he likes to hire cheaply and contingently
• borrowed the Microserfs model for his "campus" from higher education
• support of those who want to diminish further the role of teachers and faculty in curricula, and hand schools over to Walmart and other corporations
• less strong on the second half of the equation, the "oversupply of Ph.D.'s" fiction
• the "oversupply" claim, as I've made clear many times, is that it obscures restructuring
• zero "undersupply" of persons with doctorates if that work is given back to them
• failed structure
• a core question such as: Well, is a Ph.D. really only for researchers at R1 schools?
• Or is a Ph.D. for those with teaching-intensive positions as well
• speed-up of the tenured minority and casualization of the majority
• isn't the case now, nor was it well back into the last century
• junk responses to restructuring
• the MLA's many stages of denial regarding the restructuring of academic labor
• The New York Times
• learning
• continues to publish drivel about the radical transformation of the academic work force.
• disciplinary association
• other journalistic coverage is getting better in recent years
• jobs they've trained for will already have been cannibalized into other "student learning opportunities."

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• • and adjunct faculty will not be treated as colleagues as long as contingent labor is categorized as 'work for hire' 

  • equally relevant to other academic labor done by those "lost souls euphemistically referred to as 'contingent labor'"
• Consciously ignoring disparities in the institutional status of your collaborators is just as bad as being unthinkingly complicit in the problems these disparities create.
• This is because of the careless way your disregard reads to the people it damages.
• the lost souls euphemistically referred to as “contingent labor;”
• service personnel. This latter group includes programmers, sysadmins, instructional technologists, and credentialed librarians and cultural heritage workers.
• There is another reason, beyond discomfort, that we don’t really talk about how status factors in collaborative work.
• they highlight the degree to which new works of scholarship are the work of many hands,
• the digital humanities bring into focus any failure to acknowledge our collaborators appropriately
• The problem was this professor’s assertion of a right — granted to lead faculty members on collaborative research projects by our institutional policies — to intellectual property over the whole concept of our shared work.
• the category of “work for hire,” no matter how intellectually rich and critical to the project these contributions were

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• overuse of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty is the most prominent characteristic of a new employment strategy sometimes referred to as the two or multi tiered labor system.
• emerged over the past thirty years
• corporatization of the university
• response to this system is public education and collective action
• academic citizenship
• 1972-1977 marked the first surge and greatest relative growth in the use of adjunct faculty
• mid-century social contract, underwent profound revision
• disinvestment, the ascendancy of a corporate style of management, and the subsequent shifting of costs
• students would increasingly carry a greater burden of the costs
• mid-1970s, slower economic growth
• In a broad historical sense, the accumulated costs of industry and war had become a significant obstacle to maximizing profits and business leaders sought to shift or externalize those costs.
• strategy of shifting costs brought an end to a period of rising material wealth
• even as corporate profits grew
• cuts in funding for higher education
• the two or multi tiered workforce became one of the most effective strategies for realizing corporate and administrative goals
• new or younger employees are not offered the same level of compensation and job security as existing staff
• Part-time faculty have grown four-times (103%) more than full-time (27%). The number of non-tenure-track faculty has increased by 92% while the number of probationary (tenure-track) faculty has actually declined by 12%
• change since 1975
• The issue of contingent work has finally gained so much attention because the numbers of contingent faculty are approaching a majority
• There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that these trends will stop without policy intervention and our activism.
• multi tiered approach succeeded because it blunted opposition by promising not to affect existing constituencies
• enticed tenured faculty with short-term benefits
• depends on our complicity
• not worth risking the destruction of the university
• next context
• Corporatization is the reorganization of our great national resources including higher education and the use of their capacities to maximize profits
• stagnation in public funding
• university has been gradually redirected
• The most striking symptoms of corporatization are
• concentration of university resources on areas where wealth is created
• marginalization of the liberal arts and all areas of research not conducive to the creation of wealth
• increasing corporate funding and control over academic research
• privatization and outsourcing
• authoritarian governance practices
• rising tuition and debt loads
• stagnant wages for faculty and poverty wages with low or no benefits for university workers

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• Collaborating takes time and care, but it can work wonders.
• Challenges associated with the increasing use of contingent faculty appointments in American higher education are mounting. The AAUP and other professional groups have identified several major problems: unacceptable conditions and compensation for contingent faculty members, poor learning outcomes for students, and the potential erosion of academic freedom.
• collaboration among the part-time faculty, the university administration, and the tenure-line faculty
• goal of concretely improving conditions for those teaching part time
• Background
• grounded in the Catholic, Marianist tradition
• Part-time faculty surveys
• evealed significant inequities and problems
• unacceptably low pay
• part-time faculty representative with full voting rights
• a campus voice and an identified liaison
• long-term employment relationship
• most are active in professional societies, campus activities, or university service
• imperative that they be treated equitably and included fully in the university community
• steps to improve working conditions
• educational workshops specifically for part-time instructors
• faculty development
• formal orientations
• handbook
• problems continued to exist
• treatment of part-time faculty members varied widely across campus, ranging from examples that could be considered “best practice” to some that were simply unacceptable.
• sense of disenfranchisement
• establish explicit norms
• applied consistently
• Partnership for Progress
• Recent studies
• 2008 by Paul Umbach and Audrey Jaeger)
• learning decreases in an environment with unsupported, disconnected, and disenfranchised part-time faculty members. Therefore, broad improvement in the integration of these instructors as valued members of the university community should enhance the environment for students, the faculty, and the university in general.
• a comprehensive inventory of issues and concerns based on the results of previous surveys, analysis of administrative data on part-time faculty members, input from a range of campus constituents, and review of the published literature.
• a wide range of issues emerged, some easily resolved
• more intractable
• per credit hour, part-time faculty members are paid less than half of what full-time professors
• errors of omission rather than of commission
• many part-time instructors were not aware of all the benefits to which they were already entitled
• grouped the key issues into four categories:
• (1) those that could be solved immediately
• (3) those that could be solved in the near future
• (2) those that could be solved within the academic year
• (4) those that could not be resolved in the immediate future.
• outline of university-wide standards that might improve not just the working conditions for part-time faculty members but also their performance and level of commitment
• series of
• forums and meetings with a wide range of campus representatives. At each meeting, we presented the issues and our proposed solutions and encouraged discussion and suggestions from attendees
• Issues Addressed and Outcomes
• ompiled a document called “The Role of Part-Time Faculty: A Statement of Practice.”
• explicit expectations
• addressing issues such as recruitment, hiring, departmental support of part-time instructors, and the number of courses that a part-time instructor can teach each semester
• the part-time faculty salary floor
• regularize part-time faculty
• a list of practices by both university units and part-time faculty members that would be considered unacceptable
• clarified some points that are not always well understood
• a list of lesser-known benefits for which they were eligible
• administrative in nature and easily resolved
• more challenging
• paychecks were delayed
• Changing this ingrained administrative procedure
• question of what titles contingent faculty members should hold
• Formal faculty title definitions are under the jurisdiction of the academic senate, and part-time faculty preferences vary
• most intractable issue was, predictably and understandably, part-time faculty salaries.
• converting some part-time faculty positions into fulltime non-tenure-track lecturer positions with benefits,
• economic reality
• feasible steps
• Future Work
• A major focus, of course, is to work with university units to ensure that the statement of practice is fully implemented.
• compensation disparity
• multiple-term contracts
• increasing the part-time faculty representation
• The issues surrounding part-time faculty members are substantial and almost universal across American higher education
• The collaborative process we used at UD does not offer one-size-fits-all solutions for every institution
• encouraging results
• transferable to other institutions
• Those considering embarking on this type of discussion will need to be mindful of the unique mission and culture of their own institutions
• enhanced student learning should be maintained as the central goal

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• The liberal arts are not gone yet, but they seem on their way out of an American higher education establishment increasingly defined by the narrower needs of the American economy
• if the liberal tradition is not to die, American culture may need to find another carrier for it.
• The Academic Labor Question
• Distinct from but related to the decline of the liberal arts on campus is the deprofessionalization or proletarianization of college teaching.
• the goal of management is, increasingly, to keep the number of permanent, salaried employees as small as possible by transferring as much of the aggregate workload as possible to temporary employees
• Writing in New The Republic, Michael Walzer
• It is now possible to imagine an economy in which the American workforce will be divided into a full-time elite and a large number of harried, unhappy and exploited workers rushing from one part-time or temporary job to another
• more than fifty percent of all class hours in higher education in California, private as well as public, are taught by such disposable academic workers
• Tenured faculty, the aristocracy of the university, have been disgracefully complicit in the creation of an academic helot class to subsidize their own upper-middle-class salaries, but the helots are progressively replacing the aristocrats as the latter retire and are replaced by helots rather than by other aristocrats.
• This career, although it included teaching, was not narrowly confined to teaching in the way that the work of adjunct faculty is narrowly confined -- indeed brutally reduced
• Barring a labor movement of unprecedented scope, the less talented among them will then sink into academe's permanent underclass
• If half (a conservative estimate) of all humanities Ph.D.s graduating after June 1998, join the already large number of their kind who have no permanent, salaried academic employment, then a body of expertise exists outside academe which, reinvested, could -- in more ways than one -- step into the breach created by academe's progressive disinvestment in the liberal arts.
• phrase free lance is an interesting one
• Its opposite, never used, is paid lance or soldier
• three questions abut one another when we ask where and how academics displaced into the general labor market -- soldiers become free lances
• First, will free-lance writers and thinkers unsalaried by any college or university ever coalesce into a new form of intellectual army
• George Dennis O'Brien, in a book entitled All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education,
• franchising" movement in Great Britain
• For venture capital moving into online education, they constitute a fully trained and readily available workforce and therefore a potential business asset.
• Second, whether or not college teaching is reorganized in this way, are there other cultural institutions in this country that may be inseminated by an academic immigration?
• Third (the likeliest outcome, I believe), will the experience of displaced or never-placed academics in nonacademic venues ever fuse with their academic training to produce a new, more avocational style of liberal arts research and publication?
• secular learning was an avocation rather than a vocation.
• who might keep the tradition alive by pursuing it as an avocation.
• Change often begins at the margin. The central actors in American higher education as we have known it it in recent decades have been the administrators, the tenured faculty, and the students. Adjunct faculty have been marginal.
• I am thinking, above all, of three categories of nonfaculty campus professional: the librarian, the museum curator, and the director of academic computing.
• If Peter Drucker is right and if thirty years from now the university as we have known it is no more
• are we to assume that the university library, the university art museum, and the various university data bases and computer networks will also have shut down?
• An alliance of the now marginal may inherit what will remain of the center.
• Is there a word for such people?
• The term that comes most readily to hand, I submit, is intellectual

• Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual
• I did the graduate students a disservice by lending credence to the view that American-style doctoral education makes sense as a preparation for a wide variety of careers. I doubt that it does.
• delays a young person's entry into the general marketplace, burdens him or her with enormous debt, and inculcates over the years the self-destructive habit of constant subtle deference.
• • Gramsci's distinction between organic and inorganic intellectuals
• To a point, American culture has the same relationship to the humanities and the fine arts that business has to business education, medicine to medical education, and so forth.
• "market-model university"
• yet classic liberal arts education and research clearly differ from professional training for book publishing, journalism, music, commercial art, film-making, advertising, scriptwriting, pastoral ministry, and the other gainful occupations in which the humanities and the fine arts figure.
• professional training programs exist. It is to these programs rather than to the humanities Ph.D. that a consideration of the liberal arts market would lead by induction.
• these training programs, not to disparage them, do not meet American culture's broader needs for preservation and refreshment.
• • 2nd difference: specialist vs generalist

  • 1st difference: different audiences
• fraternity of college teaching attracts those who are attracted by fraternity in general, but what some find sustaining others find confining
• Nonetheless, at a first approximation, the difference between an academic and an intellectual may be stated as follows: An academic has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated public.
• The second difference between an academic and an intellectual is the familiar difference between a specialist and a generalist, the academic being the specialist and the intellectual the generalist.
• A generalist must write from the full breadth of a general education that has not ended at graduation or been confined to a discipline.
• what the larger audience responds to is something quite different: It is specialized knowledge sharply reconceptualized and resituated in an enlarged context.
• The generalist assumes, as the specialist too seldom does, that he is writing for readers no less intelligent than himself but trained in other areas.
• What is called for, paradoxically, is less a store of knowledge than a "store" of ignorance.
• A generalist is someone with a keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about.
• a generalist is unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more
• Popularization, which certainly has its place, conveys the specialist's confidence but also his or her isolation. Generalization conveys the generalist's diffidence but also his or her connectedness and openness to further connections.
• A secretary of culture, to return to that mental experiment, should want both generalists and specialists on his staff, but he would be ill-advised to regard the generalist as the specialist simplified.
• • not at all like the French or even European concept of public intellectual
• assumption is implicit in a tart statement by a participant in a recent discussion of "public intellectuals" at the University of Chicago:
• Public intellectuals are academics who become journalists while maintaining their posts in colleges and universities.
• The publics they serve can generally be identified with the readership of relatively low-circulation magazines and tabloid format periodicals
• Who in academe has not heard of a generalist effort dismissed at the departmental meeting with an arch witticism or discounted
• academic life proceeds by the channeling of curiosity,
• which is to say by the benign but systematic suppression of unchanneled, general curiosity.
• the methodical channeling of effort is of necessity a confinement as well.
• To confinement by field, academe too often adds a further, more interpersonal deformation.
• The difference between an intellectual and an academic, then, lies in the greater freedom that the intellectual has to be, without penalty, an explorer and a generalist.
• The division of labor is the very organizational principle of the university
• The human mind does not naturally or spontaneously remain in externally appointed channels. Only intense training and steady policing can make it perform in this way.
• An academic is a specialist who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does otherwise.
• The third difference between an intellectual and an academic is the relative attachment of each to writing as a fine rather than a merely practical art. "If you happen to write well," Gustave Flaubert once wrote, "you are accused of lacking ideas."
• Each defeats his enemy by ingesting him.
• This is the third criterion by which, as I see the matter, academics differ from intellectuals. An academic is honored for "making a contribution to the field" whether his contribution was well written or not.
• Writers are too selfish, too concerned with themselves, to work that way, and they offer their work too widely to know for whom they are writing. An intellectual novelist does not have, as a professor of English does, an audience defined in advance.
• expression counts more for an intellectual than for an academic.
• The literary enterprise is not communal but personal,
• And if they answered that they did not read for pleasure, he would pass them over, for no one can provide pleasure who never seeks pleasure, and no one who never reads for beauty will ever write beautifully.
• Shelter for the Homeless Humanities
• most public intellectuals would be more accurately called public academics
• There is a striking difference between the two groups, one that shines forth in the complaints commonly lodged against public intellectuals by their "straight" academic colleagues
• Resentment at such behavior on the part of those left behind to pick up the pieces is understandable. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I can only note with interest how well the offenders usually illustrate the three criteria mentioned above. They prefer to deal with adults rather than with youth; they address the public agenda in all its variety rather than the agenda of a discipline; and they cultivate a literary style a notch above the average for the fraternity they would transcend
• To consummate this transformation, the academic should ideally renounce his or her academic appointment
• An adjunct professor, a graduate student, a layman who knew as much as the dean of the graduate school and who could talk as well to a general audience would have, in principle, an identical claim on that audience
• Academics are farmers. They have fields, and they cultivate their fields well. Intellectuals are hunters. An intellectual does not have a field but a quarry which he pursues across as many fields as necessary, often losing sight of it altogether. Hunters cannot replace farmers, or vice versa;
• One cannot easily be either a farmer or a professor by avocation.
• By contrast, one may rather easily be a hunter or an intellectual by avocation.
• But hunting does not differ from farming only by being more hazardous and less reliable. Off campus, the liberal arts may, at least on occasion, enjoy a wild adventure and an extraordinary feast.

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• the best learning to emerge from these MOOCs is learning to deal with the MOOC itself, regardless of the content about which the MOOC is organized
• shifts a participant immediately and radically away from the command-and-control structures of traditional education and into the connect-and-collaborate structures of rhizomatic learning spaces
• the key idea is to approach a MOOC from your own position
• This is radically different from the way we approach most college classes, which come to us whole and contained.
• When we engage a traditional college class, we enter an existing structure with fixed content, fixed authorities, fixed space, place, and times, fixed goals, fixed paths to those goals, and fixed assessments to determine how far along the path we managed to travel within the prescribed time. Good students are often those who have learned to quickly identify the fixed markers, determine the right answers, and give them to the teacher.
• Just jump through the hoops and move on.
• MOOCs do not function this way. Very little is fixed, other than the general topic
• This lack of fixed reference points is disorienting, especially to good students who have mastered the traditional classroom
• cannot succeed in a MOOC without being extremely self-aware.
• our very presence and engagement itself changes the MOOC
• more complicated than that.
• In a MOOC, it always matters who is in and who isn't. In a MOOC, membership is everything
• This is why Dave suggests that we first pick a few points in the system to anchor ourselves.
• The Home Page of the website is a good anchor.
• Elluminate sessions are good anchors
• our own professional interests are good anchors.
• Daily Digest is an anchor.
• from those anchors we scan and connect to other points
• We begin to create our own gravity
• we cluster, that we fall into synchronized orbits with similar objects that attract us. We pull other objects into our orbits. We make many connections, follow some and abandon others
• interplay between our own path and the paths of all the others

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• Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc have issued a call to return to what they think matters the most: teaching, and teaching in an "integrative" way that moves past individual disciplines.
• The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal
• Q: What are the major problems in higher education that you hope your approach will alleviate?
• what are the larger, fundamental shortcomings of higher education
• what are the true aims of higher education?
• long "neglect of purposes."
• engaging students concerning the purpose and meaning of their lives,
• occasion to develop personal values, self-understanding, and "to find purpose in my life." We neglect these educational tasks -- which form the heart of higher education
• truncated notion of knowing and learning, and a cost-benefit approach to ethics
• marry the unique set of problems an institution faces with the larger principles and aims of a comprehensive, integrative education
• Q: Many in higher education today feel overwhelmed by dealing with the impact of budget cuts. Why should they focus on this agenda?
• The change strategy that we advocate is drawn from community organizing. It requires little or no extra funding because the profession from which it comes almost always works in settings where there is little financial capital to fuel change — so community organizers learn to fuel change with human and social capital
• harnesses the enthusiasm, creativity, and common concerns
• how collegial conversations can be initiated and sustained on campus
• a method and a philosophical infrastructure
• Q: What is "integrative education" and how can it be promoted?
• Our world is multidimensional; so is higher education.
• each captures only a fragment of the whole, offers only a partial picture of the full reality and so lacks breadth.
• At the first level, integrative education combines mastery of a single discipline with a vibrant engagement with other disciplines, near and far.
• But this level of integration redresses only the breadth dimension of education, and fails to treat the heights and depths
• Integrative education cannot shy away from questions of meaning, purpose and values.
• Finally, all learning is situated, we live our lives within community and we should not neglect our responsibilities it
• Q: In several places in the book, you criticize various kinds of boundaries that are well guarded in the academy. Why has higher education embraced so many divisions and how can they be eliminated?
• Francis Bacon’s bold 17th century efforts at the reclassification of knowledge as the dawn of its modern fragmentation.
• codified by the Enlightenment figures Diderot and D’Alembert in their encyclopedia project. Each of the departments of knowledge they defined became the fiefdom of a community of scholars
• For every step we make toward specialization and fragmentation, we need simultaneously to take steps toward integration and synthesis.
• social forms and practices that bring us together across disciplines,
• The world is an interconnected whole; our learning and praxis should reflect the reality of that interconnectedness.
• Q: What are some current efforts at colleges that you particularly admire for their commitment to the ideas you discuss?
• examples of significant attempts to make higher education more integrative
• "contemplative pedagogy."
• (For detail see the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.)
• University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT).
• program simultaneously employs and encourages the use of multiple modes of knowing
• These are great ideas, but again I wish I saw reflected in the authors' answers to the interviewer a greater awareness of the potential limitations imposed on their implementation by academic hiring policies and practices that continue to obstruct attempts to provide students with a high quality education.
• Contingent faculty are not integrated enough into the life and activity of departments to be able to participate meaningfully in "collegial conversation" about "pedagogical innovation." Indeed, how many of their tenured/tenure track co-educators even regard them as "colleagues"?
• Adjuncts who serve as de facto permanent faculty members need to be integrated into the institutional life and work of their departments.
• need to begin with academic labor reform.
• look to the increasing corporatization of education
• 1. Are we not talking about a core curriculum? Still possible in small liberal arts colleges but not so in research universities.
• My concern, like those of "former adjunct" and Max Sand, is the contradiction between the values and aspirations that higher education professes in works like these and those that it practices with respect to the treatment of non-tenure-eligible colleagues, and, by extension, with respect to students.
• more awareness among tenure-stream faculty and administrators
• dependence on contingent hiring creates deep structural obstacles
• practical obstacles to educators' ability to *practice* integrative education, contingency, in itself, actually *is* the antithesis of integrative education, because it demeans, devalues, and exploits educators and therefore students and whole communities.

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• critical pedagogy
• teaching for critical thinking, dialogical pedagogy, or critical literacy
• frequently appropriated by academics, adult educators, and others who inhabit the ideology of the West in ways that often reduce it to a pedagogical technique or method
• often contradict the use of Freire's work as a revolutionary pedagogical practice
• profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse
• how a politics of location works in the interest of privilege and power
• Paulo Freire's work must be read as a postcolonial text and that North Americans, in particular, must engage in a radical form of border crossing in order to reconstruct Freire's work in the specificity of its historical and political construction
• politics of location situated in the privilege and power of the West
• becoming a border crosser engaged in a productive dialogue with others means producing a space in which those dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that erase the specificity of the voice of the other must be challenged and overcome.
• Homelessness and the Border Intellectual

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• A Market-Clearing Wage?
• I recently lost one of my best adjuncts completely to a higher paying institution
• a "Adjunct Lecture Position?" A position that would allow an adjunct to teach 4 or 5 classes a semester, but be paid $20-24,000 rather than $38,000 (Approx starting salary at our institution for full-time faculty members)?
• decreased institutional responsibilities for these new faculty members, no obligation to support a student club, no committee work, 30-hour work week, 9 month contract, remove the no-competition clause
• new brand of adjuncts,
• 1) consistency among the adjunct ranks
• 2) provide more consistent employment for the adjunct
• 3) Evening and weekend Adjuncts
• position could allow me to better utilize these faculty across evening and weekends by making that part of the job description and an expectation of employment
• 4) Keeping good Adjuncts
• retain, and even reward good instruction by providing stability and financial security
• Admittedly there are some huge issues to this
• hire what should be normal full-time faculty positions as "Adjunct Lecture Positions
• less people around to do the day-to-day non-instructional work,
• Establishing a new class of instructors who have no significant impact on the administrative aspects of the campus, but are here all day anyway may cause some grumbling.
• To be honest, some of my adjuncts are better professors than their full-time counter parts, and it hurts a little bit to see them go...
• an economist proposed a “market-clearing wage” as a way to solve both the Ph.D. glut and the cost spiral of higher ed
• bring full-time salaries down to the point where supply and demand meet.
• institutional appeal
• incentive to prefer it to traditional full-time positions
• moral hazard for bad institutional behavior
• would both improve the lives of many adjuncts, and come closer to real equality than the current system.
• the “extras” that need to get done
• only get done reliably by people who are paid to do more than just teach.
• It may be the case that over time, the division of labor will become more stark as the economic argument for craft production becomes impossible to sustain
• Would it make sense to move to a market-clearing approach, or should we defend the current structure at the cost of leaving adjuncts in the cold?
• why, in metropolitan areas with multiple institutions of higher learning that draw on the same adjunct pool, there is not some kind of centralized exchange for part-time faculty--perhaps that exchange could hire adjuncts and then provide them via contract to area colleges and universities. The exchange could then provide a 401K and health insurance at group rates. Or at least the exchange could act as a clearinghouse for part-time faculty so that the kind of four- or five-section load could be at just one or two places instead of three or four.
• At some point, of course, adjuncts will get tired of being exploited and simply stop applying to teach
• a moment in the pre-civil war era when a choice become evident in rational planning for improvements to the port of New Orleans: should we use slaves in this dangerous work and risk the loss of vaulable property in whom (!) we have considerable investment, or should we just hire Irishmen, who, if they die in the course of hazardous work, will cost us nothing except the bother of hiring another one?
• I have no great faith in the academic personnel system. It's essentially a closed system.
• Tier One: Many full-time lecturers who earn a decent (but not large) salary, with health insurance, pension plans, guarantees of academic freedom, and due process
• Some -- a few -- adjunct positions do exist,
• Tier Two: A few -- a very few -- research professorships with associated positions for doctoral students and postdocs.

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• questioned whether or not real change in higher education is possible. Now I’m beginning to question whether or not I want higher education to change. At least, change in the direction currently being pushed as the “solution” to all of our higher education ills.
• recent comments made by Lumina Foundation CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about improving higher education
• nowhere is it mentioned that funding levels to public education be restored, to either the K-12 or post-secondary systems.
• how the university is supposed to replace laid-off librarians, learning specialists or reduce class sizes
• how universities prepare educators and train administrators
• to base their financial aid awards on their academic performances
• providing “useful” degrees
• those ideas screams: “we need more adjuncts!” More people with “real world” experience. More people who cost less. More people we can easily replace if they are unwilling or unable to comply
• having full-time faculty improves retention rates and online education doesn’t work for those most at-risk.
• it ensures that non-traditional students get a fundamentally different education than their “traditional”
• I’m not saying that everyone needs or wants the liberal-arts college experience, but we seem to be sacrificing the rich variety of educational experiences available to students in the name of accessibility
• conforming to a narrow definition and vision of what higher education should be.

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• Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system   dramatically, but how?
• Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer,   most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
• Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of   exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially   intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children   in more creative play.
• one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically   unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private   schools in Finland."
• There   are no private universities, either. This means that practically every   person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
• The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything   America's school reformers are trying to do.
• Finland has no standardized tests
• teachers are trained to assess children   in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
• "There's no word for accountability in Finnish,"
• "Accountability is something   that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
• what   matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given   prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is   required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among   the most selective professional schools in the country. I
• while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that   nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line   from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete."
• There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main   driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between   schools, but cooperation.
• Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the   goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success   today, was never excellence. It was equity.
• Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the   idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn,   regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education   has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers,   but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
• But   subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland
• was producing academic excellence through its  particular policy focus on equity.
• That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems   especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy   Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into   such sharp focus.
• All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States. 
• But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education
• Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.
• Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level.
• despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common.
• Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well,
• it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
• The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed.

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• We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale
• While we understand that there might be short-term challenges associated with this effort, we believe that there will be great short-, medium-, and long-term economic, health, social and environmental benefits, including achieving energy independence for the U.S. as quickly as possible.
• We believe colleges and universities must exercise leadership
• Campuses that address the climate challenge by reducing global warming emissions and by integrating sustainability into their curriculum will better serve their students and meet their social mandate to help create a thriving, ethical and civil society.
• We further believe that colleges and universities that exert leadership in addressing
• Accordingly, we commit our institutions to taking the following steps
• Initiate the development of a comprehensive plan
• create institutional structures to guide the development and implementation of the plan.
• complete a comprehensive inventory
• develop an institutional action plan
• Initiate two or more of the following tangible actions
• Make the action plan, inventory, and periodic progress reports publicly available
• In recognition of the need to build support for this effort among college and university administrations across America, we will encourage other presidents to join this effort and become signatories to this commitment.

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• Michael Bérubé, the organization's new president, has been spending time writing his first letter to members.

  • Looks like Lee's and John's twitter conversations had an effect
• to discuss what the MLA can realistically do at such a volatile moment for language and literature studies, and during a time when there are growing calls for the association to retool itself and assume more of an advocacy role.
• What effect, if any, does debt have on our students' choices of majors and careers?
• What role, if any, should scholarly associations play in responding
• What can the MLA do to advance discussions of alternative career paths
• reach out to the growing number of scholars who are working in "alt-ac," academic jobs that are off the tenure track
• How can he encourage more non-tenure-track faculty members to join the MLA?
• How can the MLA become more of an advocacy enterprise?
• During his tenure at the MLA, he says he plans to accelerate the group's activism, particularly on behalf of the growing numbers of non-tenure-track faculty in humanities fields.
• Scholarly associations "are not just about the networking, resources, and places to interview for jobs," he says. "They are also about literally addressing the declining working conditions of faculty across the board."
• A liberal voice, he has frequently criticized corporate incursion into academe and articulated his strong views on his personal blog and in opinion essays
• A public defender of the humanities during the culture wars of the 1990s
• supported adjuncts and graduate students at Penn State by persuading administrators to adopt MLA recommendations for fair treatment of nontenure faculty
• At Penn State he supported voting rights for nontenure faculty and helped create a nontenure-faculty review committee
• supported graduate-student unionization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• By all those measures, he is more of an activist than many of his predecessors who have led the MLA. So what does Mr. Bérubé expect to get done at the MLA during his yearlong term?
• four-point agenda
• raise faculty consciousness about providing reasonable classroom accommodations for students with disabilities
• deteriorating labor conditions of non-tenure-track faculty
• rising student debt
• These four areas are at the core of his presidential theme, which he calls "Avenues of Access."
• adapt to changes to scholarly communications in the digital age
• The most-urgent item on his agenda, he says, is the plight of non-tenure-track faculty, whose ranks continue to grow.
• make sure that non-tenure-track faculty have access to campus resources and professional development
• His goals are
• meaningful role in their departments
• job security and professional dignity for non-tenure-track faculty
• Critics of the MLA, including an anonymous group of non-tenure-track faculty who used blogs and a Twitter feed to announce plans to "occupy" the MLA
• "The MLA has guidelines and recommendations for standard wages for faculty, and we would love to simply implement them campus by campus, but we can't," he says. "It's true. We haven't done enough to get our recommendations and guidelines out there to the people who can implement them."
• challenge for his leadership will be to move the MLA "beyond making recommendations to actual actions,"
• "We can't negotiate labor contracts. We don't do investigations. We don't have the investigative staff and legal teams like the AAUP, but we can articulate what we think are ethical standards for the treatment of our members,"

  • per proposed compact modeled on AAUC climate challenge but with less teeth than the Phi Beta Kappa policy
• There's no way that one scholarly organization alone can broadly improve non-tenure-track labor conditions, Mr. Bérubé says. That is something that has to be done through building alliances, which he plans to do, with organizations such as the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the New Faculty Majority, the AAUP, and accreditors. He hopes that his dual roles with the MLA and the AAUP will help.
• Reducing time to degree, he says, would reduce student debt

  • d'uh

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• Over the last few decades, corporatization has fragmented faculty.  It has resulted in a caste-like structure with primarily two tiers.  The majority of the faculty occupies the lower tier and is recognized as performing only a portion of the job, classroom instruction; these faculty tend to be compensated at a rate of pay in violation of the principle of “equal pay for equal work,”
• despite decades of activism, widely published and publicized issues, and Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) gatherings and other conferences, the movement for reform has not been able to coalesce around a focused set of goals
• We are sharing it with the NFM Board and membership in the hope of eliciting further suggestions and support, and plan to submit it for official NFM endorsement according to the procedures set out in the NFM Bylaws.
• The Program for Change will benefit contingent faculty to be sure.  But it will also benefit the whole of higher education and, most significantly, students and our collective future.   Higher education is key for achieving social mobility for the individual and growth and wellbeing for society.  
• Indeed, the dysfunctional two-tiered system defies American ethical values related to fairness and equal pay for equal work and decency.
• The Program for Change is a strategic plan that we feel is necessary to establish true and healthy normative standards that would revitalize the integrity of the post-secondary teaching profession over the next generation
• both short-term and long-term goals but, mindful of the difficult nature of change, proposes accomplishing these goals through incremental steps
• Program supports the use of any means available in addition to collective bargaining: negotiation with progressive administrations, legislative changes, informal direct action and protest, and/or court rulings.
• identifies over thirty aspects of post-secondary work and suggests incremental improvements to each, usually over five-year time frames
• it is not meant to be prescriptive or proscriptive
• achievements depend on local conditions
• normalization, by which we mean that after a faculty member has undergone a defined probationary period, he or she becomes a normal employee whose status is no longer probationary or contingent, with the attendant rights and protections that accompany non-probationary status
• no-cost measures, such as establishment of a seniority system and seniority rights, a defined period of probation, fair evaluations subject to due process, protection of academic freedom provisions, and termination only for just cause with due process
• measures that do involve costs, such as a single salary scale for all faculty, health insurance, paid leaves, compensatory rights if layoff or termination does occur, and opportunities for professional development
• Normalization means raising the rights, salary, and job security of the bottom tier to a level of normal equity
• egardless of the length and full-time or part-time status of the initial appointment that faculty start with probationary status or in a probationary phase
• After successfully completing a fair and timely evaluation process, an individual faculty person will be converted to normal, regular, or non-probationary status regardless of their time-status
• accrue further seniority on an equal basis with full-timers
• layoff protection rights
• transfer rights, severance, and/or recall rights
• contingent faculty routinely suppress inclinations to exercise or claim what should be their right to academic freedom
• lack of job security and appropriate pay often leads to the necessity of taking on multiple jobs, which can lead to having to compromise their commitment to their students, or an aversion to wider participation in the affairs of the institution or the community
• unable or reluctant to speak their mind or join their union, fearing that doing so could cast them in a negative light and thus undermine their chances of future work assignments
• Academic Freedom protection provisions for all faculty from first hire, regardless of their status
• provisions protecting faculty members with the due process protection through of grievance rights and/or institutional process rights
• unions and departments to democratically include all faculty members as full members
• consequence of a perpetual probationary status and discounted pay for contingent faculty is the erosion of their ability to maintain their dedication to their teaching discipline and the reading, writing, and research that are phases of post-secondary teaching
• such advances cannot usually be attained wholly-formed
• does not threaten the institution of tenure or propose to replace it
• that eventually tenure be delinked from salary and time-status
• Program for Change identifies over 30 changes that can be immediately worked on, any one of which can have an immediate impact on the professional life of a non-tenured faculty
• the most important of all relate to job security and seniority
• require little to no funding or legislation
• even the most benign proposals could likely encounter resistance from those asked to relinquish control
• a force in keeping the issue at the forefront of local and national conversations about the future of higher education
• Stakeholders will have to be accountable to their own mission: achieving a just and equitable workplace committed to providing students with the highest possible quality of education.
• detailed action plan on over thirty aspects of employment
• holistic vision of what an equitable workplace would look like
• To the greatest extent possible, the Program relies on ending the distinctions between full-time and part-time employment and the resulting discrimination from those distinctions.
• enforceable protections of academic freedom to all faculty
• teachers and scholars, reunited into a single community

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• how things also looked from within the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and educational reform movements at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s, as the nation’s former land grant universities morphed into corporate grant universities
• The Classroom and the Plaza
• having gone from being a Young Turk into being an Old Fart
• a product of the two realms: the classroom and the plaza. (I include in the “plaza,” a number of places, both on and off campus, including Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, meeting venues, demonstrations, ad hoc panels, and public debates.) I realize now how much I am indebted to both realms and to the American university
• In the plaza (in the extended sense) I learned not only about politics—how to think politically and speak publicly
• intellectual topics and subjects outside the curriculum of the classrooms
• the university itself—its historic purposes and contested character
• Kerr’s just-published Uses of the University made a number of claims about the institution that were widely celebrated—though not by students
• • still; no formal courses on what is the university (but a plethora of online opinions), maybe something to address.  and of course he is just speaking of the Important and Traditional Research University, not colleges, third tier universities, or community colleges
• There were no formal courses about the institution despite its long and rich history and despite it being the place we were all gathered, working together. The situation is the same, I think, today.
• origins of the university in 12th century Bologna and Paris
• about things like the liberal arts and academic freedom
• Cardinal Newman, Robert Hutchins, and James B. Conant
• that the Puritans established Harvard, the nation’s first higher education institution as early as 1636.
• dissenting efforts, in union activities
• expression and outgrowth of ideas about the university
• the university which embodies them is an embattled figure in the public domain, besieged not just by state disinvestment in higher education but by institutional trends and theories within the universities themselves.
• Defining the University
• (1) its role with the liberal arts, (2) its political role, and (3) its character as a community.
• students are exposed to humanities courses and ways of thinking while at college, and that the spirit of the liberal arts—creative, critical, and contextualizing—has extended to even the teaching of things like engineering, the sciences,
• • a freedom that depended on slavery
• The Greeks and Romans saw the liberal arts as those skills that were necessary to make a person free.
• the necessity of knowing beauty and being given the eyes with which to see it is about as good a statement of one aspect of the liberal arts approach as you’ll find.
• university helps students develop their powers, helps them to develop “lives of rich significance.
• C. Wright Mills noted in his writings on education, “is the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.”
• • I am reminded of Meriel's comments about the artificiality of Davis
• this liberal arts culture sets the university off from the rest of the society.
• Preserving it requires a certain autonomy from that society.
• The liberal arts could not be jettisoned from the university and its autonomy lost without changing what the institution fundamentally is.
• • supremely patronizing
• A second fundamental purpose of public higher education in America has been political.
• Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed that a key purpose of higher education was to help in the formation of a self-governing people
• higher education was made tuition-free in California back in 1868
• “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the rights and liberties of the people
• a main task of the state college system as the “democratization” of higher education.
• C. Wright Mills summarized this larger point in the 1950s by saying that, “the prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was politics: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and judge of public affairs.”
• The campus may be, in fact, one of the last training grounds left in the society for teaching students about real public life.
• A third aspect of the university I’ve thought about in recent years is its historic character as a community.
• • the true knowledge commons is now online with open online courses and the OER movement
• And you need a community to maintain what I’ll call the knowledge commons, around which the university was historically built
• A commons also entails aspects of a gift economy,
• The University Besieged
• theories and models are taken over largely from the world of business
• commodifying activities in worlds that had previously lain outside the marketplace: hospitals and medical care, the arts, political campaigns
• the university as a whole is not a business
• Seeing the university in business terms, first and foremost, sidelines the liberal arts and reduces support
• It was never the aim of the liberal arts to raise lifetime incomes
• Second, this view of our tasks marginalizes public life and the training of citizens because it is not “relevant to prospective employers.”
• And third, the new model tries to supplant the roles and relationships of a community by those of the corporation,
• used to see the campus serving the economy indirectly
• now see it as a direct site of capital accumulation
• In a community genuinely dedicated, as a community, to higher education, no manager would accept tens of thousands of dollars of salary increases while the real salaries of those who fulfilled its core mission were being cut.
• If our managers retained an allegiance to the universities’ real character and purposes, even the current budget cuts might have been weathered without a loss of morale and a decline in educational quality.
• signs of the attempted redefinition of the university
• new economic terms displace the older educational vocabulary.
• reduce the faculty to the status of employees
• new managers would just as soon get rid of academic customs like shared governance, academic autonomy, and, of course, tenure
• Gulf Coast University in Florida (a campus without tenure) and announced “faculty culture must change,”
• Those who promote a business model of higher education, finally, would wipe out the university’s autonomy and its character as a “sanctuary” or “island of difference”
• part of the politics of privatization
• Faculty Must Draw the Line
• clash between two different visions of higher education and its functions
• It was the first signs of the new mindset and model, I now see, that we ran up against on one campus in the ‘60s
• ies:  How do we respond to what are ultimately political threats
• How do we sustain a university-level education

• I hope the stand will be against this new business and corporate model of education.

   

  If it is not, we will help to work a profound inversion in the functions of the American university
• • and we are supposed to trust that to the tenured faculty who have by and large turned their backs on adjunct faculty?
• But if it is to be contested, who is to do it?
• • compare to NFM mission to educate the public
• As public educators we have to reeducate the larger public about the purposes of higher education,
• we have remained indecisive about our public role and mostly silent. This silence needs to end. We need to become activist professionals, or we will cease to be professionals at all.
• Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920

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• I respect that he positions himself as a listener, as someone who has something to learn from the NFM and from the part-time and contingent faculty who now teach two-thirds of all courses in college and universities.
• some problems with his report.
• Bérubé sets up an interesting (and false) opposition between “college faculty” and “communities already devastated by prolonged economic hardship.” Academic hiring practices are nothing new. The number of low-wage and contingent faculty teaching in American colleges and universities has been growing for more than thirty years.
• Why should it be difficult to state the obvious?
• Unfortunately, Bérubé’s assumption that college faculty and devastated communities are not the same people informs his strategy for change.
• the number of adjuncts in higher education is a labor crisis that relegates the majority of college teachers to low-wage marginality and professional invisibility
• Bérubé suggests that the only way to persuade others of the seriousness of the problem is by addressing them as consumers. What are you getting for your money?
• he unhelpful claim that faculty are fundamentally different from other workers by arguing that they require something special.
• Doesn’t everyone who labors for a paycheck deserve a “measure of job security”?
• Doesn’t everyone need freedom to think independently, in ways that may challenge the status quo, without fear of getting fired?
• an emphasis on “academic freedom” perpetuates the notion that academics are different because they’re intellectuals
• let’s not perpetuate the notion that academics are the only ones who deserve to be able to think freely, to challenge authority, and to act creatively on the job.
• To sum up, my problem with Bérubé’s analysis is that he cannot seem to let go of the idea that the academy is special and that it operates somewhat independently of the larger economy that structures the labor market for everyone else
• Trends towards part-time and contract work dominate in other fields as well.
• the struggles are essentially the same, but academics keep insisting on a distinction that doesn’t exist, so they don’t take advantage of opportunities to forge solidarity coalitions with those who occupy precarious and exploited positions in other sectors of the economy.
• academics have to stop pretending that they have special grievances all their own.
• we have to start declaring, loudly and with conviction, what’s really true, which is that we are them and they are us.

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