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1. Initially, I thought of this paper as an update on a talk I gave at
the graduate student caucus' session at the December '96 MLA, a panel
which discussed union organizing for grad employees and adjunct faculty.
At the time, I was participating in a union organizing campaign on the
Unversity of Pittsburgh campus involving grad students, which I had hoped
would expand to include part-time and adjunct instructors. In that
paper, I spoke of the long and difficult history of attempts to organize
employees on the Pitt campus. The immediate catastrophe was a plan
announced by the Provost to follow the recommendations of consultants and
eliminate various graduate programs, a plan all too familiar now on many
campuses.
2. My focus quickly turned to my own immediate future in January, when it
became clear that funding for the part-time budget in my department was on
the chopping block. This had been foreseen for some time, but was now
imminent. The Dean insisted on reducing the budget and despite the largest-EVER freshman class at Pitt, I
lost my job. In April I received a letter telling me I would be offered
no classes to teach. The
first casualty was my health insurance, which had been crucial to a long
recovery from a chronic illness.
3. Since then, I've been kinda depressed and wondering what to
do! Should I finish my degree? Should I look for an organizing job?
Why was I worried about career meltdown, since I'd never been particularly
invested in the idea of an academic career (could it be the fear of
having to repay tens of thousands of dollars I owe for student loans, with
no concrete job prospects)? After ten years of work with very little to
show for it, I have wiped out. It feels kinda like the secret shame of
having an STD - we all know it's a social disease, but it's difficult to
talk about in polite company, and doesn't everyone seem to want to avoid
contact with the infected individual?
4. But I'm not prepared to be polite about this. I'm still justifiably
angry at the Chancellor, Provost, Deans, Board of Directors (oops!
Trustees), et. al., for their management policy of reducing faculty, full-
and part-time, while touting an Initiative for Undergradute Education. Of
course, they don't just pick on the faculty and staff. While they give
big pay boosts to already-overpaid administrators and buy new Harleys for
the campus police, they deny the police and maintenance workers' unions
reasonable contracts.
5. What I've learned in the last few years is that, for many of us who
make the university work, accessible and affordable education, once one of
the dreams offered by the Great Society, has been supplanted by the
nightmare of "just-in-time education" (thank you, David Noble). Trustees
at institutions like Pitt have made their neoliberal goals quite clear:
"world-class" is a codeword for bringing the global economy home,
producing technicians for transnational industries, while the labor that
runs the university is "casualized" (grotesquerie!), to make the
institution more "competitive". And since the editors of WORKPLACE have
graciously granted me the opportunity to vent my anger, I'd like to
rant about what's wrong with the workplace known as the research
university (and this is by no means a comprehensive or representative
list...)
6. FORGET THE COMPANY UNION MENTALITY!!!!!!!!!!
I am contemptuous of the way my Department Chair and Literature Director
avoided eye contact with me after I was laid off. Why should they hang
their heads if they did the right thing? Because they didn't do the right
thing, and they know it. These are among the overwhelming majority of
faculty in my department who voted to join a faculty union in the most
recent organizing campaign, but who would never dream of engaging in a
job action to actually save jobs.
7. Academic bureaucrats of America, you (collectively) have not done the
right thing for about 20 years, by my count, and it's time to hold you
accountable. Many of you suffer from the mentality that says put your
career first and let others work as hard as you or be as talented as you
or get as lucky as you and maybe they'll do ok, too. That won't wash
anymore. We're experiencing a major structural crisis which now requires
massive political action. Since Boards of Trustees, Chancellors, Provosts,
Deans and Department Chairs have together mostly collaborated to allow the
crisis of un/underemployment to worsen, cheapening the value of our work,
I'm holding you accountable. Why should I be out of work when I did my
job and you're making from $60,000 to $400,000 a year and you didn't do
yours? And in case there's any confusion, let me make plain what I mean
by doing your job - making sure that educational institutions continue to
educate! Graduate programs are the means by which universities reproduce
themselves AS educational institutions, and not simply as funnels for
supplying technicians to employers or patents to industry. Doesn't that make me the
equivalent of an academic partial-birth abortion?
8. But more to the point of the company union mentality - either you
collaborate with administrators to downsize and underemploy your
workforce, or you share your limited power with junior faculty, adjuncts
and part-time faculty, grad students/employees and staff to assure that
there be education of students, parents and citizens about the crisis,
education which leads to collective political action to stop the current
trend. Do parents and students want to continue to pay more for less
educational value? I don't think so. Take a simple test to know whether
you have the company union mentality. Do you support administrators who
cut costs by cutting personnel, salaries, benefits or other
employee-related expenses? OR do you support the students, adjuncts and
junior faculty whose quality of life depends on the promotion of education
and demotion of botton-line thinking? If you're in neither camp, you're
nowhere. And making things worse. Visit the campus union organizing
campaign of grad employees/adjuncts, staff or maintenance workers nearest
you for some hints on what you should do.
9. ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA; IT'S A NECESSITY
Much has been written and said about the attacks on tenure, but we need to
organize to defend the practice of academic freedom, without playing into
the neoliberal dissing of tenured radicals. As long as academic freedom is a
concept primarily linked with tenure, it will remain a privilege, not a
right. Those most in need of the protection for scholarly work are those
most marginally employed - grad employees, part-timers and adjuncts. In a
survey of grad students conducted at Pitt in 1996, we found that those
with partial funding (less than 20 hours per week) reported the most
self-censorship. Presumably, they molded their work to go along with the
dominant flow of funded work, or self-censored when it seemed to help get
access to the funding flow. Considering the attacks on the tenure-stream,
funding cuts and intimidation of organizing drives, academic freedoms
needs to be transformed from a lost hope or slogan, to a standard which
represents the integrity and independence of our work. If it is not
extended as a right to all, it will be lost as the privilege of the
tenured few.
10. EDUCATION =/= CREDENTIALING
When I talked to my students about their college education experience,
there was a striking tendency to discuss it as a credentialing exercise.
My classes were filled because they met a writing requirement and fit into
students' schedules. Still, students were usually happy to be engaged
with topics which weren't necessarily usable for career purposes, and were
especially attentive when discussing the process of university education.
Particularly among upperclassmen, I found anger about the raw deal they
were getting educationally. As one Pitt undergrad said to me, "I bought
my degree". While scrambling to play the credentialing game the best they
could, undergrads seemed cynical about the possibilities of changing the
high cost, limited options, competitiveness, and narrow dimensions of a
college-education-cum-survival-of-the-fittest. But there's tremendous
potentional to address that anger and mobilize it, to make allies of
undergrads. Rather than invoking tired refrains aobut the humanistic OR
practical benefits of a college education, try asking your students about
their expectations vs. experience, and teach them how to critique the
institution. I asked one class about their plans after graduation, and
nearly three-fourths hoped to go to graduate school! I was stunned by
this response and felt compelled to discuss the brutal job prospects, but
it led to a better understanding of the politics of the classroom. I
wished I had done this early and often in my teaching practice.
11. That so many of us are "willing" to teach for low compensation and
lousy job security is perhaps our greatest weakness and our greatest
strength. I wonder how many of us wanted to work in academia because,
despite the economic hardships of grad school, it appeared as a refuge
from corporate-think, cube cities and life as Dilbert-clones. But we were
also lured to Ph.D. programs at one point by the promise of jobs, especially the
infamous MLA report which suggested an increase in the number of
tenure-stream jobs in the early 90s. I remember reading a summary of it while in a Master's program at the
University of Texas at Austin. It was posted on a bulletin board in the
Department of English, and I'm not sure I would have pursued a Ph.D.
without such a rosy picture of the future. Shame on me for wanting to
believe its veracity, but what about those who wrote it, as well as those
who publicized it, without looking around to analyze the corporatization
of the academy and increasing exploitation of adjunct faculty? Shame on
you for being bad scholars & politically naive!
12. But enough of my anger. We didn't make the mess we're in,
but the only out of it is to organize. That's why I've joined
the labor movement. And not a moment too soon. To paraphrase Rich
Trumka, THE civil rights issue of the next millenium is the right to
organize. Just do it.
Barbara A. White, Pitt University
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by Barbara A. White
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