Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (review)

One of the great things about academic unions is that they take people whose job is creating insightful analysis, usually of someone else's problems, and force them to point their lens toward the questions of power and resistance, ideology and rebellion in their own lives. At its best, this engagement produces a sophisticated yet thoroughly real-world description of how power functions in the workplace. At its best, Deborah Herman and Julie Schmid's Cogs in the Classroom Factory provides such an analysis of the question of how academic employees come to adopt the identity of union activists.

Cogs is a collection of ten essays by participants in faculty, adjunct, and graduate student unions. While much has been written in recent years about the growth of academic unions, these essays focus specifically on the question of identity: how does the professional identity of academics, or of students, prevent people from become militant union activists? How do anti-union university managers prey on employees' allegiance to those identities in order to defeat organizing drives? What kind of identity shift is needed for organizing campaigns to succeed?

While these questions are not unique to academia, they are understandably central to campus unions. As one organizer once remarked, the difficulty of organizing a graduate student union is that, in order to be a graduate student, one must have been the teacher's pet in every previous stage of life; naturally, each individual grad student thinks that she doesn't need a union because she'll just charm her way through the system as usual. Moreover, everything about academia encourages an obsession with individual achievement and discourages collectivism of any kind. For academic unions to succeed, they don't merely have to beat the boss; first, they have to change the way employees think about themselves.

In parts, Cogs makes too much of the need for academics to stop thinking of themselves as "students" or "academics" and instead "embrace their worker identity," as urged by Eric Dirnbach and Susan Chimonas in an otherwise insightful essay on the University of Michigan graduate union. Realizing that one is an employee of a large corporation does not by itself make one a unionist, as witnessed by the millions of corporate employees without any union consciousness. Moreover, the issues faced by graduate employees are similar to many other professions. Nurses, for example, may cling tightly to a professional superiority to the unionized employees in lower-grade occupations, or may insist that their commitment to patient care means they could never participate in a job action. The critical shift needed is not to think of oneself as a "worker," but to take on an oppositional identity—to be willing to fight the power. Indeed, as Darla Williams notes in her essay "The Politics of Constructing Dissent," the professional identity of academics can be a critical tool in union organizing. As universities have become increasingly corporatized, it is the faculty and grad student unions that have been left as the sole defenders of traditional values such as small classes, basic science research, and academic freedom. By presenting themselves as the guardians of such values, Williams notes, unions can appropriate the professional identity of academics as their own.

As many of the authors in this volume note, there is one aspect of campus unions that is in fact unique: the ceaseless turnover of membership. Even in other high-turnover industries, there is generally a significant core of long-term employees, and it is often this core that drives the union. By contrast, graduate student unions face hundreds of members each year who have just arrived, flush with the pride and gratitude of having been admitted to graduate school, full of good will toward management, and in no mood to hear trash talked about the institution. Moreover, the school year schedule means that, for job actions to be effective, the membership must be...