Patrick Kavanagh
1. Karen Thompson is a pain in the neck.
2. For those of you who don't know Karen, this may seem like an odd way
to begin an essay that is meant to introduce you to an academic activist.
For those of you who do know Karen, or have had the opportunity to work with
her in the MLA, CCCC, AAUP, or at Rutgers University, you will recognize
this as perhaps the highest praise for her work as an educator, an agitator,
and an organizer.
3. Karen is each of these things and what is perhaps most notable is
that she has been able to develop a style of activism that has enabled her
to unite the principles of education, agitation, and organization into an
effective formula for advocacy on the campus of Rutgers University and in
the various disciplinary and professional associations where she has been
active. As you will read in the interview that follows, in all of her work,
Karen has been insistent and persistent in the belief that academic workers
must have a voice in the ways that universities are being redefined and
restructured. Karen has been committed to protecting and promoting the
rights of academic workers at the local and national level for two decades.
As she said to me recently, "I'll do the things that most people won't, and
I'll keep doing them." This commitment has made Karen not just an effective
activist, but an example for all of us involved in the academic labor
movement.
4. As the nature of work in the academy has changed in response to an
institutional workplace that is seemingly driven less and less by the
pursuit of high quality, affordable education and increasingly by the
principles of cost-cutting managerial practices, the calls for academic
workers--full-time faculty, part-time faculty, non-tenure track faculty, and
graduate student employees--to "organize, organize, organize" have become
deafening. For those of us who have become active in the academic labor
movement within the last five to ten years, the call to organize as academic
workers in response to changes taking place in higher education is now taken
for granted. Not only are the issues of fewer full-time tenure-track jobs
and the over-reliance and abuse of part-time, non-tenure track, and graduate
student employees in wider circulation today, we have many success stories
by which to be inspired. Obviously this does not make the work of
organizing contingent workers significantly easier, but what it does signify
is the increasing acceptance of the notion that the future of higher
education depends upon a unified and organized academic workforce.
5. We owe much of the current acceptance of the issues and success
stories that inspired them to longtime committed activists like Karen
Thompson. Karen was introduced to activism, and the art of being a pain in
the neck, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It
was there that she became active in movements for social and political
change--civil rights, antiwar, and feminist most notably. As was the case
for so many, these experiences made clear the necessity and power of
collective action against injustice and oppression and they have remained an
activist touchstone. Years later, as a graduate student at UW-Madison, Karen
was a witness to the successful efforts to organize the first graduate
student employee union. When she began teaching as a part-time lecturer in
the English department Writing Program at Rutgers University in 1979, the
full-time faculty and teaching/graduate assistants had been unionized with
the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for almost a
decade. The numbers of part-time faculty at this large state university,
however, were growing and the terms and conditions of their employment paled
in comparison to the full-time faculty and teaching assistants.
6. Karen joined the staff of the AAUP chapter at Rutgers in 1985. A
year later, with the support of the full-time faculty/graduate student
employee union, she began the work of organizing part-time faculty. Today,
the issues seem familiar: part-time faculty were experienced, credentialed
teachers, yet remained among the lowest paid employees at the university
with no benefits, no job security and no voice in the governance of the
university. They were, in short, invisible. After two years of hall
walking, office visits, and intensive written communication, enough cards
had been signed to file for an election with the New Jersey Public Employee
Relations Commission. In the summer of 1988, by overwhelming vote of the
members, the Part-Time Lecturer Faculty Chapter of the AAUP was formally
recognized. For the past ten years, full-time faculty, part-time faculty,
and graduate student employees have worked together to protect and promote
issues of academic labor and the need for affordable, quality higher
education at Rutgers and throughout the state.
7. As a result of her success at Rutgers, Karen has become a
spokesperson for part-time faculty issues at the national level. From
1993-97, Karen was a member of the Executive Committee of the Discussion
Group on Part-Time Faculty of the MLA. She is currently, the co-chair of the
CCCC Task Force on Improving the Working Conditions of Part-Time/Adjunct
Faculty. Since 1990, Karen has been a member of the National AAUP Committee
on Part-Time and Non-Tenure Track Faculty, chairing the committee from
1994-1999. Under Karen's leadership, the National AAUP became a leader in
promoting part-time faculty issues. The 1993 report on the Status of
Non-Tenure Track Faculty included the Guidelines for Good
Practice for part-time and non-tenure track faculty that has become a
policy model for colleges and universities across the country. In 1996,
Committee G published Working For Academic Renewal: A Kit for Organizing
On the Issues of Part-Time and Non-Tenure Track Faculty. In addition to
a chapter on collective bargaining, the kit includes sections on other
campus-based organizing initiatives, statewide activities, and the
importance of full/part-time alliances.
8. Karen will be the first to say that while the successful drive to
organize part-time faculty was certainly a significant accomplishment, the
work of organizing is never complete. Despite unionization and collective
bargaining privileges, part-time faculty at Rutgers and elsewhere are always
at risk of being invisible. Like all managers, administrators will go to
great lengths to stifle resistance and, as we know, with part-time faculty
it is often difficult to find leaders willing to continue taking the risks
that are necessary for change. Whether it is stall tactics at the
bargaining table or the denial of campus mail privileges for the purposes of
communication, part-time faculty are always engaged in a struggle for
recognition and respect for the work they do, work without which the
university could not function. For this reason, the work of organizing,
educating, and agitating is never done.
9. As Karen says in the interview, "we have to try to enter the arenas
where change is occurring." In this area, she has led by example. By
promoting academic labor issues on campus, during accreditation visits,
before the Board of Governors, before the New Jersey State Legislature, and
at statewide higher education meetings and conferences, Karen's work is
evidence that effective education, agitation, and organization must take
place in different venues--from our disciplinary and professional
associations to our campus and state communities.
10. In all of this work, Karen has maintained that the working
conditions of faculty are the learning conditions for our students. The
relationship between the quality of work life and the quality of education
may seem obvious to us, but it remains one of the central issues around
which we must continue to organize, educate, and agitate. Part-time faculty,
non-tenure track faculty, and graduate student employees must continue to
fight for recognition and respect in the academic workplace. We should be
inspired by recent victories; we should learn from setbacks, and we should
continue to do what is necessary to achieve workplace justice and quality
higher education. To do so, we will have to continue doing "the things
other people won't do." That has been Karen's contribution to the academic
labor movement and, more importantly, has become the model for those of us
that have had the opportunity to work with and learn from her.
Patrick Kavanagh, Rutgers University
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