Crisis and Resistance: A Union Fights Back

Ten years ago, many of us in the academy were jolted awake by a series of books that together revealed a crisis in American higher education—books like Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson's Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, Gary Rhoades's Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor and Randy Martin's Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University named what many of us had only partially perceived: that the core had been eaten out of American higher education. ¹ Under neo-liberal economic policies, higher education's funding base had been eviscerated, control had shifted from faculty to non-academic managers, and the ugly system of part-time labor had taken root.

We may now be in the grip of a new crisis, one whose way was paved by changes in funding, hiring and control. Since at least September 11, academic freedom has been under renewed attack by conservative extremists. Far-right initiatives that only a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable are now our daily reality. Students at UCLA were offered money to report on their professors' liberal statements in class; twenty-four state legislatures have introduced the so-called "Academic Bill of Rights," which mandates government control of the political positions of college faculty; and witch-hunts of progressive faculty have gained scary legitimacy. David Horowitz's book promising to unmask the 101 "most dangerous" professors in the country is only the latest salvo in a campaign that takes advantage of the weakened position of faculty nationally when so few have secure jobs. ² The latest assault on academic freedom is directly related to the restructuring of the academic labor force; the loss of full-time, tenured positions dramatically reduces the percentage of the professoriate whose freedom of inquiry and teaching are protected. What can academic freedom mean when it exists for fewer than a third of college faculty? This may be a moment, under the pressure of new attacks, to reconsider the academic labor crisis and take stock of efforts to solve it.

How we experience the crisis in academic labor depends on where—and what—we teach, but it would be hard to find an institution of American higher education that is untouched. (Neo-liberal economic policies worldwide have meant that the same crisis exists internationally, and the resemblance is often uncanny. Read documents from universities in Mexico or New Zealand, Britain or Kenya, and you could be reading the pronouncements of your own college administrations. More important, read the accounts of how our colleagues in other locations are fighting back. ³ ) Closer to home, the statistics are sobering. By 2003, only 29.2 percent of all American college faculty were in full-time positions either with tenure or on the tenure track. ⁴ What's remarkable, given this reality, is how persistent the myth of the full-time tenured college professor remains.

However successful college managers have been in nurturing the myth, the fact is that higher education constitutes one of the most degraded labor systems in the country. Even at a time of nationwide erosion of job security, higher education is at the extreme edge of the trend. In 2003, 30 percent of all jobs nationwide were part-time or contingent; in the same year, the figure in higher education was 70 percent. The facts shatter the cherished notion (shattered long ago for those at the bottom of the faculty employment pyramid) that higher education is a different kind of workplace, uniquely immune to crass realities like employment trends or managerial control. Quite the contrary: colleges and universities are leading the rush toward insecure, underpaid employment for all but a privileged few and presiding over a decline in the working conditions of those few because of the availability of a cheaper workforce right behind them.

Between 1995 and 2003, as the number of college students nationally continued to grow, the number of traditional faculty positions—full-time with tenure or on the tenure track— increased by only 5.7 percent. The number of...