Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education.

RECLAIMING THE IVORY TOWER: ORGANIZING ADJUNCTS TO CHANGE HIGHER EDUCATION 

By Joe Berry. Monthly Review Press, 2005

As many of you already know all too well, professors are rapidly being turned into something akin to fast food workers. More than half of all faculty jobs in higher education are now "contingent"/"adjunct"/"part-time" positions that offer ridiculously low pay, no health or retirement benefits, and absolutely no job security. Yet many of us continue to work in these conditions of extreme exploitation because of our love of teaching and our desire to work in an area that is connected to our professional expertise--it is, as Joe Berry aptly puts it, "good work but a bad living." In the new climate of corporate academic managers, appeals to fairness, justice, and the good of the profession fall on deaf ears. The power of collectivism thus provides the only opportunity for contingent faculty to turn a bad living into a good living, or at least a minimally decent living.

While in the past few years there have been a number of books that attempt loosely to document the higher ed adjunct faculty situation, usually by sharing stories of humiliation, misery, and Spartan survival, little has been published in the way of practical advice for those seeking to improve their lot. Berry's volume admirably fills this niche; it is a concise handbook for organizing contingent faculty, written by a contingent faculty member and organizer and addressed primarily to his fellow contingents.

The book does open with a few poignant adjunct experiences; in one, a college vice-president tells several of his part-timers, "you are not considered to be faculty, or even people. You are units of flexibility." But Berry does not wallow in despair; what follows is straightforward information, documentation, and advice on collectivism and unionization.

Three lengthy chapters dominate the work. The first, "Contingent Faculty Organizing," serves as a useful overview for readers who are not fully aware of their existence as members of an exploited class, and who may have little knowledge of collective organizing. In the process, Berry usefully suggests that respect should be a central organizing theme. I wholeheartedly agree: while potential activists come from a wide range of circumstances, and it may be hard to find completely common ground, the most universal and often the deepest cut of adjuncting is the experience of being a highly intelligent professional who is treated like dirt. And, usually, the only way to achieve respect is to form a highly militant group that forces the ruling class to amend its attitude of absolute superiority.

There is also some discussion of the issue of competitive unionism--whether or not it is good to have national unions competing to organize contingents on a given campus. Berry endorses the "inside-out" strategy, which means grass-roots organizing on each campus with flexibility about what will best serve the interests of the contingents in a given situation, including non-union advocacy groups as well as traditional academic unions. This is the same approach that we took with the Boston chapter of COCAL (Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor) a few years back, with some success, though I must say that the inevitable problem with trying to organize underpaid, overworked people is a scarcity of available resources and volunteer time. National unions, or at least some of them, can help in this regard. In any case, the overall goal is not unionization per se, but movement building--and indeed this is really the purpose of the book--to spark a wave of class consciousness and insurgency in adjuncts nation wide.

"The Chicago Experience" is a set of key excerpts from interviews with local organizers in the metro Chicago area where Berry is based. The comments are grouped by topic, forming a rich set of experiences and insights on contingent organizing from diverse voices. One of the notable themes that keep cropping up is the major role that fear plays for adjuncts, both the fear of termination and the related fear of speaking up to perceived authority figures. While the obvious barriers to organizing contingents are the inability to contact people and their unavailability for meetings, fear may be the real, underlying obstacle.

The final chapter provides an "Organizer's Toolbox," though in truth the whole book fulfills this objective. One idea here that I think is particularly good is the response to the problem of an isolated individual feeling overwhelmed with the goal of single-handedly getting together a big organizing committee--"what can one person do?" Berry's clever solution is to suggest that a person can begin by simply finding one other like-minded colleague and starting with a committee of two. All projects must begin somewhere, and even a large group will have a few highly motivated and insightful people at its core. Two is indeed a committee.

I have a substantial amount of experience organizing contingent faculty, and there's no major topic that I can think of that Berry leaves out--it's all here: methods of contact and the value of in-person contact, compiling and maintaining lists (I say you know you're an organizer when you begin to dream about lists), the need for a diverse and representative organizing committee, administrators' attitudes and tactics, acting like a union even without formal recognition, the need to stay militant even after a successful contract negotiation, salary differences and the goal of equalizing upward, overcoming the isolation of adjuncts, and much, much more.

Not all of the information will be useful to everyone--for instance, those outside of a large city area will not draw much from the discussion of metro organizing strategies- but everyone will find a wealth of material relevant to their situation. Tenure-stream faculty who want to educate themselves about the contingent situation and figure out how they can help should read this book, and already unionized contingents will find useful ideas to apply in running their locals, but the primary audience that should study this work are non-unionized contingent faculty members. I urge all of you to obtain a copy (a mere $10 from www.reclaimingtheivorytower .org), find a colleague on your campus, and start your committee. As Berry says, "anything you do is better than nothing."