Imagining Academic Labor in the US University

This article examines how scholar-teachers have imagined and theorized academic labor in US research universities since the late nineteenth century. Steffen identifies and defines four models of academic labor operating in scholar-teachers' critical and narrative writing: professional, unionist, vocational, and, since the 1980s, entrepreneurial. These models represent different ways that scholar-teachers have understood their relationships to the institutions, social groups, and political economies that constrain and enable academic work. While disagreeing on many points, professionalists, unionists, and vocationalists assert a common vision of academic labor that can achieve its goals and adhere to its values only when freed from the imperatives of the market. By actively seeking to discredit and replace that vision, Steffen argues, the new "third wave" of academic entrepreneurialism functions (in practice if not always intentionally) to bolster the neoliberal logics behind casualization and privatization.