Contingent teaching, corporate universities, and the academic labor movement (1).

The movement to unionize teaching assistants and adjuncts has come a long way since I first joined the organizing committee of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale in 1994. Since then, over 15 graduate student unions, at both private and public universities, have won or begun efforts to win recognition, bringing the total number of TA labor organizations to over 30. Adjuncts, too, have held union elections at several campuses and formed a nation-wide coalition, the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), to coordinate their efforts. In a landmark decision in 2000, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled unanimously that graduate students at New York University are employees under federal labor law and thus eligible for a federally certified union election. In 2002, NYU's TA union became the first at a private institution to win recognition and sign a contract.

Yet recently these advances have been met with growing resistance, both at local institutions and in global arenas of politics and economics. Graduate students at a handful of campuses have voted against unionization and in July 2004, the Republican-controlled NLRB overturned the 2000 decision that facilitated the victory at NYU, ruling along party lines, 3-2, that graduate student teachers and researchers at Brown University are not employees. As Nelson Lichtenstein recently suggested, this ruling represents another salvo in the long and largely successful fight that conservatives have waged to diminish and marginalize the labor movement. (2) Indeed, it suggests that as local organizing drives have begun to gain traction, national political opposition is coming together in an increasingly determined effort to undercut the larger significance of specific campaigns. And perhaps most discouraging, because most systemic, the casualization of academic labor--the trans formation, begun in the 1970s, of fulltime, tenure-track jobs into contingent and temporary jobs--shows no signs of slowing. In fact, the most recent Modern Languages Association (MLA) newsletter reports that the number of assistant professor positions posted in the Association's job list has decreased steadily over the past three years.

Although the notion of a job market "crisis" suggests a short-term problem, it is in fact the product of deeply rooted, long-term changes in the economic structure of the university and of global capital more generally. And it's worth stepping back briefly to look at the bigger picture. In the 1970s, in response to the economic downturn and calls for smaller government and lower taxes, public spending on higher education plummeted, inaugurating an era of divestment that continues today. (3) In an effort to compensate for reduced federal and state funding, universities began shifting part of the burden to students (by raising tuition rates) and, especially, to academic workers by initiating a massive replacement of fulltime, tenure-track jobs with temporary and part-time positions. The transformation of academic labor has been dramatic: the proportion of academic adjuncts rose from 22 percent in 1970 to 46 percent in the late 1990s. Non-tenure-track appointments now account for about 70 percent of all faculty positions across all institutions. In effect, universities have created a two-tier labor system, with a shrinking pool of tenure-stream positions at the top and a massive sea of contingent, low- or no-benefit jobs at the bottom.

The accelerating use of flexible academic labor mirrors the downsizing and outsourcing occurring across economic sectors and is more directly the result of an elemental trend: the corporatization of universities. By this I mean the tendency of universities to behave like, and make closer ties with, multinational, for-profit businesses. Increasingly, universities are using the profit-driven strategies of globalizing corporations, creating revenue by cutting labor costs and commodifying their products and resources--education and research. Within this new, "managed" university, "the goals of higher education are increasingly fashioned in the language of debits and credits, cost analyses, and the bottom line," in the words of Henry Giroux. (4) Key features of the new academic capitalism include the privatization and outsourcing of university functions and institutions, including food service, maintenance, and book stores; the growing presence of corporate CEOs on university trustee boards; the rapid expansion of industry financing and control over scientific research, ideas, and technologies; the promotion of a consumer attitude towards education (in which students become "customers"); the movement of resources away from the liberal arts and other areas of knowledge that are not potential income generators; and rising tuition costs and debt loads for students. (5)

The corporate transformation of universities and the casualization of academic labor have devastating implications for higher education. Perhaps most significant, the widespread rise of contingent teaching is undermining three fundamental benefits of academic work won by professionals early in the twentieth century and consolidated during the post-World War II period of university expansion: tenure, academic freedom, and faculty governance. As Cary Nelson, editor of Will Teach For Food (1996), observes: "The gradual shift to part-time teachers has accompanied a gradual reduction in the percentage of tenured or tenure-track faculty, the only faculty with reasonable guarantees of free speech and with a significant role in institutional governance." (6) The numbers tell a shocking story of tenure's demise. In 1969, only 3.3 percent of faculty appointments were off the tenure track; by the 1990s, over half of new, full-time appointments were to non-tenure track positions. In recent years, only 25 percent of all new appointments have been to full-time, tenure track jobs. (7) We work, increasingly, in a post-tenure academy. Rather than a right or even an expectation, tenure is now a privilege, available only to a select few whose privileges are, increasingly, predicated upon the exploitation of the vast majority of university teachers. As in many other industrial sectors, in which the job security and benefits won by skilled and unionized workers during the post-War period are falling victim to post-Fordist dictates of "flexibility," outsourcing, and "lean production," the academic workplace is witnessing a full-scale assault on what were, for a generation, the basic terms of life oil the job. Moreover, as the number of faculty members who have bona fide institutional power decreases, the void in governance is being filled by administrators and corporate board members. (8) Thus, in addition to undermining academic freedom, the casualization of pedagogical labor is also silently, but steadily, undermining the viability of a faculty-centered university.

This assault on faculty control is part of a full-scale de-professionalization--indeed a proletarianization--of academic work, a process that has grave consequences not only for those with PhDs, but for those in "training" to become academics. The dramatic shrinkage of full-time teaching positions has decreased the number of jobs for PhDs and yet has caused many universities to maintain large graduate programs in order to staff their courses. In the most brutal of paradoxes, then, universities are using graduate teachers to eliminate the very jobs those students hoped to obtain upon graduation. Marc Bousquet, one of the most trenchant and incisive critics of the new academic labor regime, has suggested that, in such an environment, the PhD "degree holder is really the 'waste product' of a labor system that primarily makes use of graduate schools to maintain a pool of cheap labor." (9)

The widespread use and exploitation of contingent teachers also has serious pedagogical implications. The conditions of flex teaching--low pay, high job turnover, institutional invisibility, little or no funding for research and professional development--discourage scholarly growth, pedagogical innovation, and individual attention to students. What's growing in the new, corporate university is on-line, flexible, consumer-oriented education that is short on face-to-face teacher-student contact and long on "delivery" of information. Moreover, because contingent faculty members, typically working on semester-by-semester contracts, are vulnerable to both student complaint and the slightest administrative disapproval, they do not have the same freedom as ladder faculty to teach controversial subjects or risk the resistance that might accompany heavy reading assignments and rigorous grading. (10)

If the casualization of academic labor degrades the teaching conditions of virtually an entire generation of teachers, it also compounds the historic disadvantages of women and persons of color, who occupy a disproportionate number of temporary and contingent teaching positions. Scholars of color, for instance, account for only 9.6 percent of senior faculty, but 17.6 percent of non-ladder faculty. (11) In 2000, women represented 55 percent of lecturers and 58 percent of instructors, but only 36 percent of associate professors and 21 percent of full professors. (12) In a cruel, but perhaps not coincidental twist, the participation of women and persons of color in academe is increasing just as the opportunities for tenure are disappearing.

Finally, the massive shift to low-cost, contingent labor has devalued not only the work of those in casual positions, but academic labor as a whole. Contingent faculty--including graduate student teaching assistants, instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, teachers on short-term "fellowships"--teach the same students and many of the same classes as tenure-track faculty. Yet they are, as we know, paid a pittance to do it: a 2002 survey by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American Historical Association (AHA) found that only 25 percent of adjuncts earn over $20,000 a year, and the vast majority receive no health care. (13) From the point of view of university administrators, these teachers are effectively "disposable faculty." These developments are not only reprehensible in and of themselves, but also send a message that academic work in general isn't valuable. Indeed, what does it say to students and to the public when a university deems the faculty who teach many of its (core) courses to be unworthy of a living wage or steady work? By effectively allowing the casualization of academic labor, tenured and tenure-track faculty are thus participating in the devaluation of their own work, too.

Having briefly sketched the contours of the current academic labor regime, I want to return to the story of contingent organizing, understood as resistance to both local and global forces. While the massive replacement of faculty with non- and sub-faculty labor has radically altered the academic landscape, it has been met with some creative and at times forceful opposition. Since 1980, graduate students have launched over 25 unionization drives at both public and private universities across the U.S. and Canada. Several of these campaigns have won inspiring and historic victories. In the late 1990s, for instance, graduate student teachers in the University of California staged a massive, system-wide strike. The Campaign to Organize Graduate Students, the TA union at the University of Iowa, won a dramatic representation election in 1996 despite having lost an election two years earlier. Graduate teachers at the University of Illinois staged sit-ins and occupied buildings to establish the right to a union election, which the union won, 1188-347, in 2002. (14) The emergence in the last three years of campaigns at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Tufts suggest that the TA union movement is spreading.

Adjuncts have also made significant strides. Faculty unions at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Western Michigan University, and the City University of New York have bargained to win important gains for contingent faculty members. Within the last three years, adjuncts at Emerson College, the New School University, and NYU have all voted in favor of collective bargaining. COCAL, the national network of adjunct unions, works to coordinate organizing activities around the country such as Campus Equity Week, an annual, nation-wide event that draws attention to the plight of contingent university workers.

In addition to winning several local, institutional victories, adjunct and TA organizing has helped to build an emerging network of progressive fulltime faculty members, intellectuals, and activists. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has made the casualization of academic labor one of its primary concerns and has issued several studies and policy papers urging departments to limit their reliance on part-timers and to increase compensation and benefits for adjunct teachers. Several major academic professional associations, including the MLA, the AHA, the OAH, have also issued statements supporting the right of contingent teachers to unionize. In 1999, the MLA membership endorsed "the right of all academic employees--full- and part-time faculty members, graduate employees, and support staff--to engage in collective bargaining if they choose to do so." Scholars from across the academic spectrum have collaborated on conferences, teach-ins, books (beginning with the landmark Will Teach for Food and including such recent books as Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement and Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor), and on-line journals (most notably Workplace) that constitute an expanding forum within which progressives can communicate and strategize. (15)

In my most optimistic moments, I feel that recent struggles have given birth to a nascent movement culture. Door-to-door, lab-to-lab organizing has, in many places, sparked new forms of intellectual discourse and forms of sociability founded on a sense of collective purpose and common interests. My own experience suggests that, despite the fact that GESO has not been formally recognized by Yale, it has created--in federation with the other university unions--a dynamic culture of democratic engagement and struggle that reaches beyond the university's walls, linking graduate students to the city's wider civic culture and to the national labor movement. Indeed, the most significant counter-trend to the corporate influence on university life has been the formation of creative, previously untapped cross-class and inter-union alliances that have fought to improve working conditions for university workers of all kinds and to connect their struggles to other segments of the labor movement. These coalitions have not only won significant material gains for contingent teachers at schools across the country, they have also made the casualization of university labor a national issue by linking it to the patterns of downsizing in other industries and by launching a thoroughgoing labor-based critique of the political economy of American higher education. This critique, and the creative organizing out of which it has grown, have given a new generation of academic workers a deeply political perspective on the university system and a crucial message about the need to forge new lines of solidarity with other workers, intellectuals, and activists.

However, in the face of the systemic economic, political, and institutional forces that are driving the corporatizatioo of universities and the proletarianization of academic labor, the gains made by teachers and their allies feel frustratingly small and tenuous. Despite the growth of TA and adjunct unions, the vast majority of contingent workers are not protected by collective bargaining agreements. Moreover, among many academic workers, the ideology of intellectual exceptionalism--the idea that, as creative brain-workers, academics are not suited to unions--remains pervasive. This ideology underpins the Supreme Court's 1980 Yeshiva ruling, which asserted that faculty members at private universities are managers, not workers, and thus don't have the right to organize. Despite the dramatic transformations of academic labor since it was issued, Yeshiva remains intact. And, as universities shrink full-time faculties, full-timers are forced to take on more administrative responsibilities, managing the contingent workers--from adjuncts to graduate employees--who are doing the very teaching which, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, those tenured and tenure-track faculty performed. (16) To make matters worse, the recent recession has only placed more pressure on universities, especially public ones, to reduce costs, which they have in recent years accomplished by cutting labor costs and inviting corporations to take a greater role in shaping research. This, combined with the re-election of George W. Bush, suggest that the economic and political contexts in which organizing takes place will be more adversarial than ever.

Our hopes lie in forging a movement that can fight on multiple fronts simultaneously. Such a movement must place labor straggles at its center, but it must do more than that. It must imagine itself as what Michael Denning calls a social movement unionism--a labor movement that is also a campaign for social and cultural justice. (17) Such a movement will take different forms in different settings. It must foster ongoing and emerging local struggles at individual institutions, such as TA and adjunct organizing drives, living wage and anti-sweat shop campaigns, ethnic studies and minority student support initiatives. But these local struggles must also think and act globally, connecting themselves to new and established large-scale organizations, including sympathetic union internationals (including, among others, the UAW, the AFT, the Service Employees International Union, and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union) as well as progressive academic and intellectual networks such as COCAL, the AAUP, the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, United Students Against Sweatshops, and the MLA Radical Caucus.

Progressive faculty members can contribute to this work in several ways. If we teach in unionized schools, we can insist that our bargaining units work vigorously on behalf of adjuncts and teaching assistants. Faculties at non-unionized schools can also play an important role. In particular, as labor historian and former OAH President David Montgomery has recently asserted, ladder faculty must take responsibility, within their own departments, for the conditions under which adjuncts and teaching assistants work: "There will be little progress made ... until history [and, by implication, all] departments around the country address their own use and treatment of part-time and adjunct teachers." (18) In addition, concerned faculty can organize themselves and their colleagues in a range of forms--from department-based labor support committees, to AAUP chapters, to student-faculty anti-sweat shop alliances. As Brenda Carter, a GESO staff member suggests, "Even if [faculty] can't imagine immediately organizing themselves into unions, they should develop some organizing structure on their campuses, whether through faculty senate-type organizations, the AAUP, or [other venues] in order to talk about the crisis of casualization, corporate influence, and academic freedom in universities, and to figure out ways to exert some influence over their own administrations ... [W]hat we really need is to secure more power for academics overall at universities, and faculty need to figure out a way to start doing that, whether through unions or not." (19)

Let me conclude with a question: given the transformation of university work and research in the last thirty years, what premises should our movement build on? Specifically, do we fight to preserve the idea of the university as a special institution and a fortress of professional arrangements? Or should we forge a new vision of the university based on the notion that teachers are subject to the same historical pressures as workers in other sectors? The university has never been an innocent institution; indeed, it has always served dominant state and economic forces. Yet the massive assault on the professional protections and benefits that is underway does, I think, signal a new era, one in which the university is now part of the global assembly line. At the same time, the status of the university (public or private) as a not-for-profit institution chartered to operate in the public interest offers a point of leverage to contest the growing dominance of for-profit interests in higher education. Should we fight to preserve this traditional vision of the university as a model institution, committed to fostering critical thinking relatively free of the demands of the marketplace? I find this vision compelling, but its fate seems unclear. What is clear is that progressives need to take a lead both in imagining a utopian yet viable future for the university and in fighting in alliance with other workers, intellectuals, and activists to bring that vision into being.

(1) I'd like to thank Marjorie Feld, Louis Kampf, and Brenda Carter for their support and suggestions. I owe a special debt to Richard Ohmann, who encouraged me to write this piece in the first place and whose editorial guidance has greatly improved what I've written.

(2) Nelson Lichtenstein, "Graduate Education Is a Seamless Web of Learning and Work, Not Class Warfare," The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 6, 2004.

(3) For more on this trend, see the July-August 2004 issue of Academe.

(4) Henry A. Giroux, "The Corporate War Against Higher Education," Workplace 5 no. 1 (Oct. 2002).

(5) See Richard Moser, "The New Academic Labor System, Corporatization, and the Renewal of Academic Citizenship" http://www.aaup.org/Issues/ part-time/cewmose.htm; Richard Ohmann, "Academic Freedom, 2000 and After," Radical Teacher 62 (Winter 2001-2002) and "The Politics of Teaching," Radical Teacher 69 (2004); Stanley Aronowitz, "The New Corporate University: Higher Education Becomes Higher Training," Dollars and Sense (March/April 1998); Jeffrey Williams, "Brave New University," College English 61, no. 6 (July 1999).

(6) Cary Nelson, "Introduction: Between Crisis and Opportunity: The Future of the Academic Workplace," in Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.

(7) Gwendolyn Bradley, "Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System," Academe 90, no. 1 (January-February 2004) http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2004/04jf/04jfbr ad.htm.

(8) Jeffrey Williams, citing data from Paul Lauter, notes that non-teaching professional staff expanded by 61 percent between 1975 and 1985, a period of deep retrenchment in full-time faculty employment. Williams, "Brave New University," 747.

(9) Marc Bousquet, "Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers," minnesota review nos. 58-60 (2003), which is available on-line at: http://www.theminnesotareview. org/ns58/bousquet.htm.

(10) See GESO, Blackboard Blues: Yale Teachers on Teaching. September 2003.

(11) CGEU, Casual Nation: A Report by the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (2003), 4.

(12) AAUP, "Policy Statement: Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession." Adopted November 9, 2003. http://aaup.org/statements/ SpchState/Statements/ contingent.htm.

(13) Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Part-Time Employment Hurts the Entire Profession." OAH Newsletter, August 2003. http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/ 2003aug/hall.htm.

(14) David Scott Kamper, Review of Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor, edited by Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid. In Workplace 6, no. 1 (February 2004) http://www.louisville.edu/ journal/workplace/issue6p1/ kamperl.html.

(15) Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003); Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid, eds., Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor can be found at: http://www.workplace-gsc.com/.

(16) For a discussion of the growing managerial role of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the new university, see Bousquet, "Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers."

(17) See Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), especially Chapter 11.

(18) David Montgomery, "Colleagues On and Off the Tenure Track," OAH Newsletter (August 2003) http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/ 2003aug/montgomery.html.

(19) Email from Brenda Carter to the author, September 2004.