The Politics of Faculty Unionization: The Experience of Three New England Universities, and: The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (review)

These two books both address faculty activism and unions. Arnold focuses upon the faculty unionization at the Universities of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, while Aronowitz analyzes trends in higher education generally, with a heavy focus on the actions and potentials of faculty unions.

Politics of Faculty Unionization details the process and context of the struggle by faculty at these schools in the 1970s. Arnold explains why in New England, the flagship public schools unionized, unlike the major state schools in most other states. He attributes it largely to the historic primacy of the private universities in New England. Based upon interviews and extensive documents, the three studies are well done.

Unfortunately, the book's current usefulness is limited by a number of omissions. The two contextual chapters surveying the history of faculty unionization focus disproportionately upon full-time tenure track faculty and upon research universities, both of which are minorities in higher education. The case studies themselves use a definition of unionization that only goes through the election, not the first contract negotiations, and also largely omit mention of contingent faculty. Given that most current higher education organizing is either among graduate employees or other contingent faculty in non-research I institutions, this volume should be in libraries but is hard to recommend for personal purchase by labor educators, given its high price.

The second book is by Stanley Aronowitz, a noted sociologist and faculty union leader (Professional Staff Congress/American Federation of Teachers) now trying to apply his ideas to the university workplace. Aronowitz gives us two reasons to pay attention: higher education is a big business, major employer, and site of important struggles; and what happens in employment at the university level is of increasing importance to the rest of society.

Aronowitz differentiates critical "higher learning" from training, which prepares students for an occupation, and even from education which offers students society's dominant beliefs and values. His description of why many working class youth still avoid college, even with its financial rewards, and why many faculty come to it, despite bigger money in corporations, is materialist but not mechanical. He briefly tells the history of higher education, its growth and differentiation into tiers, and the evolving roles of each tier, quoting Clark Kerr, "university as factory" and then Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement. Aronowitz's alternative vision strikes me as serious, but tainted with romanticism for a humanist past.

The core of the book for labor educators is his chapters on academic labor and then his strategy for change. Despite some factual errors when he crosses the Hudson to the West, he passionately documents the impact of corporatization upon the national higher education workforce. His description of the growing graduate employees' movement and the varied reactions to it is generally well done. He explains how the corporatizers are not only revamping the curriculum and mission of higher education, but also transforming the workforce, especially through increased use of graduates and adjunct faculty.

Aronowitz is not confused about which side he is on in this fight. He reveals some parochialism by missing the fact that many adjuncts are in unions, mostly in community colleges, where the majority of full-time faculty unionists are as well. He unambiguously puts forward a strategy that emphasizes the important role of faculty and staff unions in both defending and transforming the institutions.

I would recommend this volume to our colleagues in other departments, to graduate employees and adjuncts trying to organize, and for any opportunities we have to "commit formal labor education" upon other faculty unionists.