In Focus: Academic Labor

For some, "academic labor" may sound like a contaminated phrase. Academics may work, but they are not workers. At a time when the Society of Cinema Studies (SCS) was formed, professors may have had the luxury of believing in that distinction. Certainly a new discipline seeking academic respectability was more invested in intellectual recognition than working conditions. Issues of Cinema Journal stressed the importance of raising standards of scholarly rigor, not raising salaries or reducing workloads for teachers and staff. The Editor's Introduction from fall 1982, for example, conveys some of this concern:

though the Journal will consider critical, theoretical, sociological and historical articles equally, it will apply the most rigorous scholarly standards to all. ¹

Ten years later, the president's report in Cinema Journal (Summer 1993) discussed "retrenchment" (management jargon for dismissal or firing) in some communications departments, part of "restructuring," and asked how media scholars can respond to such threats. The report cited attacks on cinema and media studies for "political correctness" and "academic workload" (demanding more attention to teaching). But the report's proposals for responding to these attacks, all professional in nature, and perfectly reasonable, did not even mention the issue of labor. If jobs are being threatened, how can workers respond? "All of us should support the efforts of some who are countering the offensives against the academy either by creating opportunities for exchanges among those who hold differing views, by adding to our resources as teachers, or by legitimizing our scholarship to wider audiences. These kinds of endeavors constitute, to my mind, a large part of the rationale for the existence of professional organizations like SCS." ² Such measures sought to secure a seat at the academic table for cinema and media studies. But even by 1993, the nature of the table was changing.

In the same years that Cinema Journal was insisting on rigorous standards of scholarship, governments began slashing budgets, attacking social welfare programs, and launching real and ideological assaults on unions. Higher education institutions, especially public colleges and universities, raised tuition to compensate for budget cuts. The Clinton years hardly reversed those trends, as the intoxicating discourse of globalization tried to salve the pains of job losses and falling real wages. The Bush victories found the best way of ensuring budget cuts by reducing tax revenues and imposing a permanent war economy with record-breaking deficits.

All of this is well known.

The effects of these developments in higher education are perhaps less well known in our professional enclave of Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), hence the look at academic labor in this installment of "In Focus." While it is easy to chart the de-funding of public higher education and the inadequate (and unfair) replacement of public funding by tuition, the new financial landscape has transformed the culture of higher education. No doubt Cinema Journal editor Jon Lewis was right when he wrote recently in an "In Focus" on the state of the discipline that "No one in academia today worth listening to argues that film studies does not matter." ³ While Lewis was reflecting on questions of disciplinary identity, and the field and Journal have certainly opened out to progressive issues—of race, gender, sexuality, etc.—the Journal has previously paid little attention to the institution of academic labor in higher education. The articles in this section offer some perspectives on the transformation of academic labor and academic institutions, changes that have crossed national borders as part of the march of globalization.

The corporatization of higher education has brought the same depredations to colleges and universities that it has brought to other working people: reduced job security, shrinking health care coverage, increasing part-time work, managerial encroachment on faculty governance. Faced with revenue pressures, management proclaims that it must cut its expenses. In higher education, those expenses essentially mean compensation for faculty and staff. Thus, schools hire part-time or non-tenure contract labor instead of investing in full-time, tenure-track lines. If possible, they try to raise the teaching load of full-time faculty, by adding courses to their load and/or expanding...