1. Are graduate students apprentices, with their feudal roots, or employees,
with their modern trappings (Vaughn, 1998)? Depending on the issue at hand,
and on which status enables the institution to withhold or appropriate more
value from the student, academic managers have said that they are both.
However, depending on the issue at hand and the particular graduate student
population in question, and depending on which status enables students to
claim more by way of entitlement from the institution (and from faculty),
graduate students have also invoked both images. I suggest that in the
post-industrial university graduate students should move beyond these binary
categories and beware the shortcomings of both statuses. Neither affords
full protection of basic rights to which graduate students might aspire.
Both offer the possibility of degrading (Braverman, 1974) essential
dimensions of academic work. To cast one's lot, then, with either of these
binary choices, is to ennoble one over the other, overlooking the threats to
professional labor that are embedded in each. Perhaps graduate students
should fashion a status that combines the best and minimizes the worst
elements of the medieval and the modern, of social compact and economic
contract. Perhaps they should fashion a status that goes beyond defining
themselves purely in terms of their officially determined work within the
organization. Perhaps they should fashion a status that enables them to
play a role they have historically played, particularly in other countries,
challenging institutions and society to live up to their claims and to
change in ways that serve social justice, serve the broad public interest.
Making these choices involves rethinking the metaphors and mechanisms by
which one organizes academic work(ers).
2. Due to the timeliness of the struggle of teaching assistants and other
graduate student employees to gain collective bargaining rights, and because
such efforts are prominent among graduate students in English, I foreground
a focus on unions. At the same time, I don't want to lose sight of another
recent struggle undertaken by graduate school deans and students to force
faculty to provide more mentoring for graduate students. The former effort
is designed to create a contractual employment agreement between graduate
students and the institution. The latter effort is designed to strengthen
an educational social compact between graduate students and faculty,
enforced by academic managers. If these struggles are in some ways
distinct, in other ways they have much in common. First, in seeking to
further formalize dimensions of dependence, neither confronts key challenges
to the position not just of graduate students but of the academic
profession. Whether in regard to workload, academic freedom, job security,
use of instructional technology, or intellectual property, neither the
medieval compact nor the modernist contract necessarily advances the
position of graduate students (and faculty) in the post-industrial
university. Second, in focusing on the teaching and employing organization,
neither questions the role of graduate students being cast as subjects of
educational work and objects of economic work. Whether in the classroom as
learning place or as workplace, neither the apprentice nor the employee role
affords graduate students an active role in the world of education or of
work. Both encourage students to focus narrowly on their own formal role
within an organization, eschewing any broader conceptions of education,
work, and their relationship to society and social change.
3. Recently, in response to the efforts of University of California graduate
students to unionize, system President Richard Atkinson argued to the
California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) that collective bargaining
rights should be denied graduate students because they are apprentices, not
employees (the PERB rejected that and other arguments). The irony of the
UC's argument is that on matters of intellectual property rights, leading
research universities have taken quite the opposite position--claiming that
students are employees (if they receive remuneration through the university)
and that whatever intellectual property (patents and software, for example)
they create is owned by the university. The university's position about the
status of a student varies depending on the economic savings and gains that
attach to different designations.
4. Yet there are also ironies embedded in the actions of graduate students.
At the same time that state-employed, instructionally-oriented graduate
students are fighting for employee status, other graduate students,
generally in the sciences, and often research assistants who are being
supported on external research grants, seem relatively content with the
status of (research) apprentice (which can pay better than the position of
instructional apprentice--just as faculty salaries vary dramatically by
field, with some assistant professors in Business and Engineering making
more than some full professors in English--see Rhoades, 1998). Also at the
same time, many other graduate students (including some of those who are
working for employee status) have been pushing for what could be called
enhanced apprenticeship rights--the right to be mentored, to have contact
with the masters, and to have a quality experience. Such apprenticeship
rights are quite distinct from the rights than come with employee status.
In other words, graduate students' position about their status varies
depending on the economic and educational benefits that attach to different
designations.
5. There is an additional, particular irony in the choice of UC graduate
students to be represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW)--postmodern
graduate students in post-industrial institutions turning for support to the
modernist structure of an industrial trade union. In the United States,
unionization in the private sector (largely in industry) has declined
dramatically in the last two decades, as compared to increased unionization
among white collar employees in the public sector (Johnston, 1994). Only
12% of the workforce in the private sector is covered by collective
bargaining agreements, nearly a third of what it was in organized labor's
heyday. Autoworkers are a particularly striking example of such changes.
Indeed, it is probably in part their steep declines in membership that
contributed to the UAW's courtship of graduate students.
6. Affiliation with the UAW highlights the contingent nature of graduate
students' organizing victory. It also underscores a choice that graduate
students need to address in pursuing unionism. In many regards, students
can gain a good deal by unionizing--most obviously, better wages and
benefits. What are the limits of what they have gained, and what are they
in danger of losing?
7. A consideration of legislation, the state, and higher education is useful
in this regard. Graduate students can benefit from reflecting on the
post-industrial condition of universities internationally (see Slaughter and
Leslie, 1997). They can also learn from the experience of unionized faculty
nationwide (see Rhoades, 1998). There are at least two patterns of
appropriation that are particularly relevant to the condition of graduate
students. First, there is the pattern of financial appropriations from the
federal and state government to support students and institutions. The
pattern is of marketization and privatization. By that I mean that the
federal government has increasingly moved to link higher education to the
private sector and corporate marketplace, in research support and student
aid. In the former, which includes monies for graduate student support,
there is a supply side pattern of reducing monies to fields in the social
sciences, humanities, and education, and increasing monies to engineering
and science, with a push for these fields to engage less is curiosity driven
and more in commercially relevant work. In the case of student aid, the
explicit policy has been high tuition and high aid, with two provisos--the
high aid never fully materialized, and the aid shifted from a predominance
of grants to loans. At the same time, financial appropriations to higher
education at the state level have declined as a share of total state
appropriations, and state monies have declined as a share of public research
universities' budgets. The pressure from both levels of government has
encouraged an academic capitalism that is particularly evident in public
research universities, but is found elsewhere in higher education as well
(Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). More and more there is an emphasis within the
institution of maximizing revenue generating units and activities.
Productive work is increasingly equated with work that has immediate
commercial value, and service activities and fields are increasingly
undervalued. More and more there is a pattern within institutions of
supply-side appropriations of state and tuition dollars (Rhoades and
Slaughter, 1997).
8. The pattern of academic capitalism is linked to a second pattern of
legislative appropriation, with significant implications for activities
within universities. In the 1980s and 1990s, at the federal and state
levels, legislation has been enacted that enables and encourages public
universities to own the patents prosecuted by "their" faculty. The
legislative push has been to make employment in the public sector more like
that in the private sector, with the employing organization owning all the
time and products of its employees. Graduate students are at double
jeopardy in this process. On the one hand, as apprentices, their
discoveries are often appropriated by the masters. On the other hand, in
receiving any financial support from a university (e.g., as a teaching or
research assistant, or simply receiving a tuition waiver) they are treated
as "employees", and the institution lays claim to whatever they produce.
Another legislative push focuses not on intellectual product but on process,
on workload and academic freedom. Increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s,
legislatures are demanding more accountability, are attempting to define
workload as an issue that is outside the scope of collective bargaining, and
are according managers the power to determine the form of instructional
delivery (using instructional technology, promoting distance education).
Again, graduate students find themselves squeezed in the middle, as
institutions are criticized for using too many teaching assistants and as
institutions hire increasing numbers of part-time faculty (cheaper than
teaching assistants) to deliver ever larger portions of the undergraduate
curriculum. Overall, social relations within the university are being
privatized, increasingly modeled on social relations in the business world,
with students becoming customers, administrators becoming managers, and
faculty the production employees whose work is increasingly monitored and
controlled externally.
9. As increasingly managed and stratified professionals (Rhoades, 1998),
what exactly are the terms of labor for unionized faculty, what strategies
have faculty bargaining agents utilized, and what are the implications for
graduate students? In the following paragraphs I walk through some of the
basic terms of faculty employment, examining the benefits and limits of
working collectively as employees or independently as apprentices. In the
process, I offer some alternatives in negotiating the position of graduate
students in capitalist, postindustrial universities.
10. Unions have most clearly benefitted faculty in an area of much concern
to graduate students--salaries and benefits. Salaries for unionized faculty
are higher than those for non-unionized faculty in comparable institutions,
although the difference is decreasing. General salary dispersion (the gap
between average salaries in higher and lower paying fields), as well as the
gender gap in salaries, is less for unionized than for non-unionized
faculty, although again the difference is decreasing. But before one
celebrates the success of faculty unions too much, a few provisos should be
noted. First, controlling for inflation, faculty salaries nationally have
remained the same throughout the 1990s, and about the same as the early
1970s. Second, throughout the country bargaining agents are fighting a
losing battle against cuts in benefits. Third, unions do not have a good
record either of organizing or of securing livable wages and benefits for
part-time faculty, to whose situation graduate students are closer than to
that of full-time faculty. Nevertheless, the alternative model for graduate
students, of relying as apprentices on the good will of the university and
the masters, has proved for many to be untenable.
11. The emphasis on wages is part of a long standing, trade-union strategy
of focusing on wages and protections in the collective bargaining process.
In the increasingly capitalistic domain of higher education, this has proved
problematic, as it has in the business world. What is the pattern in the
private sector of our economy--increased layoffs, fewer full-time jobs and
more part-time and contingent employment, increased use of technology to the
detriment of full-time production employees? Each of these patterns is
found in higher education as well. Faculty unions have negotiated
retrenchment/layoff clauses that seek to extend and complicate the process,
establishing procedures such as consultation, notice, and layoff order, that
make it too difficult and time consuming for managers to lay off full-time
faculty. Yet the courts have sided with managerial prerogatives in laying
off tenured faculty for a range of economic and academic reasons, as simple
as engaging in a reorganization of academic programs. And what campus in
this country has not experienced some reorganization effort? A few
contracts specify certain ratios of full to part-time faculty, to protect
the number of full-time faculty positions. However, the overwhelming number
fail to ensure either the future of full-time faculty positions or
professional conditions of work for the current part-time faculty workforce.
And in the last two decades the number of part-time faculty has doubled, to
account for between 41 and 45 percent of total faculty (with the numbers
being even higher in some fields and institutions). Academic managers are
increasingly investing in instructional technology, at great expense,
expanding the delivery of courses and programs at a distance (by part-time
faculty), and pushing for the increased use of technology in traditional
classes. Just over 50 percent of collective bargaining agreements
nationally fail to even address the issue of instructional technology. Of
those that do, they offer some protection for current faculty--ensuring that
the use of technology is voluntary, that it will not displace current
faculty, that it will not be used for surveillance of faculty, and that
faculty have some say in the reuse of courses that they have produced.
However, few contracts ensure that current employees will receive adequate
support and training (and pro-rated compensation) for utilizing new
technologies. Few ensure that instructional workload will not
increase--e.g., with increased demands for preparation, increased time
interacting with students, teaching more students, and on and on. In short,
faculty unions have been unable to sufficiently protect faculty's basic
working conditions.
12. Of course, for all the shortcomings of faculty unions' wage and
protection approach, the alternative does not hold much attraction either.
Restructuring and marketization in higher education have had drastic
consequences for graduate students, particularly in fields that are not seen
as being close to corporate markets, and particularly in the area of
instruction. In research universities, the number of tenure-track faculty
positions is stagnant, academic workload is being increased, and the
emphasis is on productivity and accountability in terms of undergraduate
credit hours and students. All of this bodes ill for the apprentice
graduate students--their employment futures are bleak and in the current
context they are not the priority of their masters. Moreover, as
apprentices, graduate students are left with little recourse, with no course
of collective action.
13. Some alternatives approaches to the current situation are being pursued
among faculty unions. Most prominent is a push for a "new unionism" that is
focused on quality and professionalism, and on interest based bargaining or
co-management (Rhoades, 1999). In my view, such an approach needs to be
conceived much more broadly than is currently the case. In the face of the
trends identified above, faculty (and graduate students) need to continue to
pursue a healthy measure of so-called "old unionism." Wages and basic
benefits and job protections are under assault by academic managers intent
on increased flexibility and control of the workforce. At the same time,
bargaining agents should also be more proactive in their strategies. That
means ensuring faculty and student involvement in basic strategic and
budgetary decisions surrounding reorganization, use of part-time faculty,
and use of instructional technology. It means not just reacting to the
plans that management has developed, being consulted (as in, meet and
defer). Rather, it means being in the room and at the table developing
plans. It also means paying attention not only to the protection of current
employees, but to the future position of the profession.
14. Yet, I would suggest going even further still in pursuing alternative
strategies. It has been argued that the key for public sector unions is to
gain community support (Johnston, 1994; Rhoades, 1998). The modernist,
economic industrial union strategies do not work so well for professional
workers, ironically because of the feudal social compact between
professionals and society. White-collar, professional, public sector unions
do best when they develop political strategies that enable them to win the
political support of the public. Neither faculty nor graduate students have
that support. Indeed, they are the subject of much public and political
critique. That suggests that part of any collective strategy must involve
connecting the interests of the academic profession (faculty and graduate
students) to the broader public interest. The major public interest issues
in higher education today are not unlike what applied to the critique and
reorganization of health care--cost (in the case of higher education,
tuition), access, and quality (not in terms of internal professional
standards, but in terms of the quality of social relations with clients, and
acting in the interests of one's clients). Graduate students should address
these interests both within and beyond the confines of collective bargaining
agreements. Contractually, that means building in provisions that have to
do with peer review and time with students to be included in calculating
instructional load. It means providing for the evaluation of the use of
instructional technology--in terms of the quality of the overall program,
its costs (relative to traditional classroom instruction), and who gains
access (underserved populations?). It means not just negotiating over who
owns and gets the profits from intellectual property, but defining a certain
proportion of those proceeds that will be used to address high profile
issues of public interest. In going beyond the contracts, addressing the
public interest means addressing issues of child poverty, school (and
university) dropout rates, and of access for students of color. By this I
mean more than announcing political positions and making political demands
on administration to "do something." Instead, I mean that graduate students
should themselves "do something"--perhaps defining some such outreach and
educational activities as part of the calculation of their workload.
15. In making the above suggestions, it is critical that graduate students
recognize their position vis-a-vis "the public." Graduate students are not
proletarianized workers. You are part of an educational elite--nationally,
less than 10 percent of the population has advanced degrees. I understand
that you are at the bottom of the professional food chain, and I understand
that the doors of that profession are only very narrowly open. But in your
political action you must understand that you are not in the position of a
"worker." Indeed, much of the public questions whether what you (and I) do
is real work. Many might ask, in words different than I am using, what
surplus value you (and I) are creating. Virtually none of the public would
understand the language we are using. I hope that you will forgive my
digression here, and that you will give me a postmodern break. I am not
just a tenured full professor, relatively comfortably ensconced in an air
conditioned office of a public research university. I am also the son of a
theologian born of the working class, and spouse of a former (bilingual)
elementary school teacher who taught in East Los Angeles, where the average
child lived in federal project housing. In my graduate school days, a group
of radical students from UCLA (all white, and virtually all upper middle
class) marched on May Day in East Los Angeles. They did the things that
radical students in those days did--offering up chants and waving placards
and burning flags. They were violently attacked by the "locals," some of
whom were gang members, and escaped only with the help of the LAPD. What
happened? They didn't understand their audience. They didn't understand
the territory(iality). Not a lot of UCLA graduates live in East L.A. But a
lot of families there have sons who were killed in Vietnam, because one of
the few professions open to them was the military. To people whose daily
lived experience is grinding, real poverty, the complaints of privileged
university students about their position ring false. Other, less dramatic
stories would offer the same moral with regard to people of various other
social class backgrounds. My point here is not to say, quit complaining and
be happy with what you've got. Rather, my point is that you, we, need to
understand how we are viewed by the "external" world, if we are to connect
our interests with the general public interest, and if we are to obtain
community support.
16. Before I conclude, let me offer one other thought about the role of
students, in our society, and in our higher education institutions. In this
country, and even more so in most other countries, there is an important
history of time and again of students successfully challenging society (and
higher education) to live up to its publicly pronounced values. In each of
the last four decades, student movements have been a central part of not
just criticizing but transforming key institutions and practices--from the
civil rights movement (e.g., freedom summer) and anti-war protests to
divestment in South Africa and sweatshops overseas. If some would have us
believe that today's students are less socially conscious and politically
active than the students of the 1960s, data on the extraordinary range and
depth of current student activism belies that view (Levine and Cureton,
1998; Rhoads, 1998). By taking on an apprenticeship role, as mentee, or an
employee role, graduate students run the risk of losing sight of the
critical social role they have played historically.
17. How then to conclude? By suggesting a rethinking of the metaphors and
mechanisms by which one organizes academic work(ers). In some ways,
medieval and professional metaphors and their attendant mechanisms can be
useful for students in that they connote obligations and responsibilities
(of master to apprentice, of professional to client-student), and in that
they enable the individual to win favor through "merit". Although these
metaphors are not very powerful in a context of academic capitalism, there
is some benefit currently that graduate students gain from their designation
as students, and from negotiating their position as such interpersonally and
individually. As such, they can make certain claims on the
university--claims that are weakened if they simply become employees. For
instance, they move from being customers whom the enterprise should try to
satisfy, to employees who are largely seeking to satisfy other customers
(e.g., undergraduates) and whose own satisfaction is essentially immaterial.
Still, the mechanism for advancing claims is very limited and not
particularly powerful. In some ways the modern metaphor of employee and
mechanism of collective bargaining can be useful to students in that they
connote a set of conditions to which they are entitled (wages, benefits),
and about which they are entitled to negotiate as a group. However, there
is another side to modern, economic metaphors. They reduce students to
credit hour generators, workers who must be productive and be accountable
for any shortcomings (rather than simply be learning). Most importantly,
the modern metaphors reduce students to the status of people who are managed
by others, in a context that is not particularly supportive of conventional
union tactics and culture, and in a time when academic managers are gaining
and exercising greater discretion in restructuring higher education and
professional work. That would suggest the need for some change in
mechanisms, towards a more proactive and public interest oriented approach
to collective action.
18. In short, I would argue for a post-modern approach to agency and action.
Reject the implied forced choice between competing metaphors and mechanisms,
between apprentice or employee, between private, individual negotiation and
public collective bargaining. Such universals are too all encompassing, and
they inhibit students' ability to call on other historical roles and
strategies. Instead, pursue post-modern spaces such that the metaphors,
mechanisms, and definitions are not all confining. Proactively reshape a
multiplicity of complex metaphors, from apprentice to employee to student to
social critic to change agent to.... Similarly proactively enact a
multiplicity of complex mechanisms, from the private to public, the
individual to the collective, and from the campus and the employment
contract to the social compact and social movements that reach beyond the
academy.
19. Do not get me wrong. The postindustrial university is neither
post-structural nor post-modern in the pressure and convergence of
distinctively modernist structures of social relations--whether feudal,
professional, or capitalist--on the lives of graduate students. In this
understanding of the restructuring of universities and professional labor, I
am, as I have written elsewhere, unabashedly modernist and structuralist
(Rhoades and Slaughter, 1997). However, I am also convinced that for
faculty, and graduate students, adopting a modernist stance in the context
of current U.S. higher education is to ensure defeat in the struggle to
improve the terms and conditions of professional work. As higher education
privatizes, it would be well to recognize that the modernist struggle
between employers and employed has already been played out in the private
sector, to the definite disadvantage of employees. Thus, in challenging the
prevailing patterns of social relations in the postindustrial university, I
believe that a post-structural, post-modern stance makes sense, to the
extent that it is built on an understanding of the powerful modernist forces
at play. Part of that political economic struggle is defining the terms of
the negotiation. Universities are indeed workplaces. But they are much
more than that. To the extent that universities become only that, or only
places where students prepare for the workplace, a major part of the
negotiation is over. To the extent that graduate students and faculty take
on the metaphors and mechanisms only of modern workplaces, they accept and
further push the academy down its current "postindustrial" path of increased
corporatization.
References
Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Johnston, Paul. 1994. Success Where Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism
and the Public Workplace. Cornell: ILR Press.
Levine, Arthur, and Jeanette S. Cureton. 1998. "Student Politics: The New
Localism." The Review of Higher Education 21.2: 137-50.
Rhoades, Gary. 1998. Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and
Restructuring Academic Labor. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rhoades, Gary. 1999. "Managed Professionals and the New Unionism." Paper
presented to the annual NEA Higher Education Presidents Meeting, August,
1999, San Francisco.
Rhoades, Gary, and Sheila Slaughter. 1997. "Academic Capitalism, Managed
Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education." Social Text
51/15.2: 9-38. Reprinted in Randy Martin, ed. Chalk Lines:
The Politics of Work in the Managed University. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998.
Rhoads, Robert A. 1998. Freedom's Web: Student Activism in an Age of
Cultural Diversity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics,
Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Vaughn, William. 1999. "Apprentice or Employee? Graduate Students and their
Unions." Academe 84.6: 43-49.
Gary Rhoades, University of
Arizona
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