Table Of Content“We need people we can abuse, exploit and then turn loose.”
—Dean Ann Marcus, NYU, on how to hire adjunct
professors in the School of Education*
*From a captured e-mail used for evidence in the case of Joel Westheimer.
STEAL THIS
UNIVERSITY
THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY
AND THE ACADEMIC LABOR MOVEMENT
Edited by Benjamin Johnson,
Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson
R
OUTLEDGE
New York & London
Published in 2003 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk
Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here-
after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steal this university: the rise of the corporate university and an
academic labor movement/edited by Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh,
and Kevin Mattson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93483-4—ISBN 0-415-93484-2 (pbk.)
1. Universities and colleges—Employees—Labor
unions—Organizing—United States. 2. College teachers’ unions—United
States. 3. Education, Higher—Economic aspects—United States. 4.
Universities and colleges—Employees—United States—Social conditions.
I. Johnson, Benjamin, 1972– II. Kavanagh, Patrick, 1972– III. Mattson,
Kevin, 1966–
LB2335.865.U6 S43 2003
331.88'11'378120973–dc21
2002009326
ISBN 0-203-46549-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-47225-X (Adobe eReader Format)
Contents
Introduction: Not Your Parents’ University or 1
Labor Movement Any Longer
SECTION ONE The Rise of the Corporate University 11
CHAPTER 1 None of Your Business: The Rise of the 15
University of Phoenix and For-Profit
Education—and Why It Will Fail Us All
Ana Marie Cox
CHAPTER 2 Digital Diploma Mills 33
David Noble
CHAPTER 3 Inefficient Efficiency: A Critique of Merit Pay 49
Denise Marie Tanguay
CHAPTER 4 The Drain-O of Higher Education: 61
Casual Labor and University Teaching
Benjamin Johnson
SECTION TWO Laboring Within 81
CHAPTER 5 How I Became a Worker 87
Kevin Mattson
CHAPTER 6 The Art of Work in the Age of the Adjunct 97
Alexis Moore
CHAPTER 7 Blacklisted and Blue: On Theory and 107
Practice at Yale
Corey Robin
CHAPTER 8 Tenure Denied: Union Busting and 123
Anti-Intellectualism in the Corporate University
Joel Westheimer
v
vi Contents
SECTION THREE Organizing 139
CHAPTER 9 The Campaign for Union Rights at NYU 145
Lisa Jessup
CHAPTER 10 Democracy Is an Endless Organizing Drive: 171
Learning from the Failure and Future of
Graduate Student Organizing at the
University of Minnesota
Michael Brown, Ronda Copher, and Katy Gray Brown
CHAPTER 11 Moving River Barges: Labor Activism 189
and Academic Organizations
Cary Nelson
CHAPTER 12 Social Movement Unionism and 207
Adjunct Faculty Organizing in Boston
Barbara Gottfried and Gary Zabel
CHAPTER 13 Renewing Academic Unions and 221
Democracy at the Same Time: The Case
of the California Faculty Association
Susan Meisenhelder (with Kevin Mattson)
Conclusion: The Future of Higher 231
Education and Academic Labor
Notes 241
Notes on Contributors and Editors 251
Index 257
Introduction
Not Your Parents’ University or
Labor Movement Any Longer
Myths and stereotypes die hard. So it is with academia—a world that seems
so populated by stereotypes and myths as if to be literally unreal. The im-
ages are easy to conjure up: pipe-smoking, absentminded, tweedy professors
giving rambling lectures that echo within ivy-covered buildings secluded from
the rest of the world. For much of the public, the university is disembodied,
abstract thought divorced from the lives of normal people trying to make a
living. The “community of scholars” is insular, protected, safe from all else.
The walls around it are both literal and metaphorical. University leaders—
seemingly stuck in the genteel values of the past—look down upon the world
of mammon and disdain efficiency in favor of older, classical values. Students
pursue questions soon forgotten as they assume the responsibilities and
demands of jobs in what so many call the “real world.”
The culture wars of the 1990s added to the pool of academic stereo-
types. Listen to conservative cultural critics and you imagine the modern
university a haven for left-wing wackos, snobbishly out of touch with the
beliefs of most Americans. Academics are the type that the right-wing populist
George Wallace complained about during the late 1960s—“pointy headed
intellectuals who can’t park their bikes straight.” It’s just that now these
pointy heads are searching out the politically incorrect thoughts of their
students. Or they blather on about deconstruction, feminism, or Marxism
in a language that few care to understand. The humanists may have been
displaced by politicos, but still academic conversations stay behind ivy-
covered walls. They have nothing to do with the realities of American
society, we are told. Academics care only about the realms of culture and
language—those abstract realms that they themselves inhabit.
1
2 STEAL THIS UNIVERSITY
Certainly these stereotypes exist in reality; there really are absentminded
professors and politically correct ones to boot. But to focus on them would
be to overlook the enormous sea changes that have taken place in academia
over the past twenty years. We now live in a time when the walls between
the “real world” and academia have fallen down. Professors are no longer
comfortable or tweedy (in the deeper sense of that term); they increasingly
take the form of underpaid graduate students or part-time adjuncts rushing
from one university to the next. The professoriate is not a “community of
scholars” that governs itself; rather its work is reviewed by administrators
who chant “accountability” while throwing merit pay rewards at those lucky
enough to have full-time jobs. University leaders don’t sneer at the profit
seekers at their gates; rather they welcome them with open arms, cutting
deals and pioneering high-tech schemes that put courses online, packaged
cheaply for worldwide consumption. Welcome to academia, twenty-first-
century style.
Of course, some might argue that the business imperative has always
invaded the hallowed halls of academia. Toward the end of the nineteenth
century, social critic Thorstein Veblen noted that those who gave their
dollars to the universities—the Gilded Age wealthy who sought out new
forms of conspicuous consumption—did so in order to build up their
reputations. They wanted their names on buildings, their reputations
bolstered by being connected to genteel institutions of higher learning. If
some professor espoused radical politics, the pressure might be turned on,
and said professor would hit the pavement. Trustees called the shots, no
doubt, making clear that wealth spoke clearly and audibly in the hallowed
halls of academia even a century ago.
Today, business leaders have gone one step further. They want to assert
not just influence but much more control over the educational processes
themselves, and understanding this transition is crucial. Our au courant
jetsetting business types concern themselves not just with conspicuous
consumption but with direct management of education on their own terms:
They don’t want ivory-covered buildings with their names on them but
rather training camps for their workforce. They probably don’t even care
all that much if nutty left-wing profs shoot their mouths off. They’ve got
more important things on their minds, namely what the new managerial
theorists call “just in time” knowledge. Corporate leaders want their
employees to gain knowledge now, immediately, not on the plodding terms
set by the ivory tower of yesteryear but the terms set by corporations,
providing only enough knowledge for their employees to get their jobs
done, not to ask fundamental questions about the society in which they
Introduction 3
live. If need be, corporations will do the educating themselves (but, for
obvious reasons, still prefer others to float the costs). In his Free Agent Nation,
a manifesto for today’s new economy, Daniel Pink glorifies the radiant
promises of distance learning—the selling of courses online by for-profit
educational institutions. “More free agent teachers and more free agent
students,” he writes, “will create tremendous liquidity in the learning market—
with the Internet serving as the matchmaker and market maker for this
marketplace of learning.”1 The use of the term “market” three times in a
single sentence tells us something about the demands that the new economy
is putting on higher education. The message is clear: So long, ivy-covered
walls, tweedy professors, and genteel university presidents—hello to markets,
profits, and computers.
If you want to get a better sense of this, just read about John Sperling,
CEO of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix.
He’s no Rockefeller who hands out money to the University of Chicago
and then sits back and waits for the prestige to rise; this is a man who
wants to call the shots—down to ensuring that his temporary teachers make
next to nothing and have no say in course content as they conduct job
training that is shamefacedly called higher education. Sperling is not someone
who hopes to lift up his name by attaching it to an institution of genteel
culture; this is a man who would probably like to dynamite the universities
that still exist physically (those like Rockefeller’s University of Chicago)
and replace them with for-profit entities. Sperling symbolizes the
revolutionary power of market thinking in terms of the world of higher
education.
This love affair between the market and higher education has helped
prompt some within academia to rethink their status as laborers and their
relation to labor unions. Once again, noticing historical changes that have
taken place is crucial. Sure, there have been professional associations and
faculty unions since the early twentieth century, but they’ve often been old
boy networks, looking out for the academic freedom of a select few.
Historically, organizations like the American Association of University
Professors (AAUP) stepped into occasional political disputes, sanctioning
schools for threatening the professoriate’s civil liberties in time of war, for
instance. Today, academic unions might still be concerned with academic
freedom, but the terms have changed. The threat is no longer an occasional
war or political crisis, but the ever present pressures of corporatization.
Now unions are fighting for academic freedom, plus some much more
basic needs—pay that can put food on the table, health-care benefits. You
will read in this collection how graduate students organized themselves into
Description:Steal This University explores the paradox of academic labor. Universities do not exist to generate a profit from capital investment, yet contemporary universities are increasingly using corporations as their model for internal organization. While the media, politicians, business leaders and the gen
