This review has been accessed  times since June 22, 1998
Nelson, Cary (Ed.) (1997). Will Teach for Food: Academic
Labor in Crisis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
299 pp.
ISBN 0-8166-3033-X $19.95
Reviewed by Henry Goode
Arizona State University
June 22, 1998
Will Teach for Food
is a collection of fifteen articles, a
Foreword, and an Introduction by different authors describing the
circumstances leading to the strike by teaching assistants at
Yale University in December 1995 and January 1996. Part I, A
Yale Strike Dossier provides a history of the people and
background events prior to the strike. Part II, Academic
Workers Face the New Millennium analyzes the aftermath of the
strike and looks into the future of teaching assistants,
full-time and part-time faculty at colleges and universities. The
authors include the editor Cary Nelson, Barbara Ehrenreich, John
Wihelm, Corey Robin and Michelle Stephens, Kathy M. Newman, Rick
Wolff, Duncan Kennedy, Andrew Ross, Robin F.G. Kelley, Michael
Berube, Stanley Aronowitz, Daniel Czitrom, Stephen Watt, James D.
Sullivan, Linda Ray Pratt, Karen Thompson, and Ellen Schrecker.
"Between Crisis and Opportunity:
The Future of the Academic
Workplace." In his introduction, Cary Nelson writes that "the
academy has become a place to build workplace solidarity that
crosses class lines" (p.6). This potential for solidarity within
employee groups is the "opportunity" Nelson is referring to in
his title. Nelson is urging everyone to resist the "crisis" of
the current campus-wide adoption of marginal employment practices
such as downsizing, subcontracting, and outsourcing of positions,
all familiar terms from American industry in the last decade.
Will Teach for Food is a book devoted to both the
deepening crisis and the increasing opportunity. John Wihelm
begins his A Short History of Unionization at Yale" with an
excerpt from Methodist Minister George Butler's 1938 report on
working conditions for the service staff at Yale. The report
describes a seven day work week, long hours, inadequate
compensation and layoffs during school vacations. Wilhelm uses
this 1938 report to draw a between similar working lives then and
conditions for staff and teaching assistants (TAs) in the 1990s.
In "Against the Grain: Organizing TAs at Yale," Corey Robin and
Michelle Stephens describe the organizing of the 1995 strike by
250 TAs demanding that a university with a $5 billion endowment
recognize the Graduate Employees and Student Organization (GESO)
as a collective bargaining unit. Specifically, three TAs are
highlighted in describing how the strike was organized. The
focus of GESO is collective thinking and confrontation.
"Poor, Hungry, and Desperate?
Or, Privileged, Histrionic, and
Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph.D.' " Kathy M.
Newman describes the mainstream image of TAs as social misfits,
welfare types and as a leisure class. In popular culture and in
movies, the graduate student is portrayed as a "lonely misfit and
crazed killer," (p.114). Furthermore, this popular image of
graduate students has not been transformed outside the academy
including the mainstream press to "grad students fight class
struggle"(p.114) or that of a "sign-waving proletariat crusader"
(p.118). In "Why Provoke This Strike? Yale and the U.S.
Economy," Rick Wolff asks "how can we make sense of the strike at
Yale?" (p.124). Wolf points out that Yale is the fourth richest
university in the United States and the largest employer in the
fourth poorest large city in the United States. However, the
university wants to lower pay for non-faculty staff and cut back
on benefits to save money. Yale's yearly income exceeds its
budget by millions which adds to the endowment yet it pleads
virtual poverty. In "Boola!" Duncan Kennedy asserts at this time
the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the charter of organized
labor, may not apply to graduate students. The consequences of
coverage or non-coverage are great. If not covered by the NLRA,
an employer may use union busting tactics that would be illegal
if there were coverage by the act. If not covered by the NLRA or
a similar state statute, an employer can discipline or terminate
an employee for union activity such as organizing or striking.
Andrew Ross writes in "The
Labor Behind the Cult of Work" that
the "real story here is the long-term elimination of organized
labor at Yale. This is the principle of faith among corporate
executives who sit on the board of the Yale Corporation and whose
advocacy of such a policy is therefore as natural as breathing
boardroom air"(p.138)."Yale's labor strategies are little
different from any other local corporation operating in a pro-
scarcity climate" (p.138). In "The Proletariat Goes to College,"
Robin F.G. Kelley describes how "university officials work hard
to project an image of their campuses as places of free exchange
and inquiry. That universities are often the biggest exploiters
of labor, not to mention the biggest landlords in some cities, is
a fact their PR people try to bury"(p.149). Further, the
question of unionization is not just a pragmatic issue. "What
kinds of unions should university employees build, especially if
their work brings them in contact with students? What should be
the relationship between low-wage workers, faculty, students and
the larger community?"(p.147) Michael Berube in "The Blessed of
the Earth" quotes author Peter Brooks, "they are among the
blessed of the earth," ("Walking the Line," March/April
1996:56)."They are not, after all, just any garden-variety cheap
labor; they are cheap labor at Yale"(p.166).
"Academic Workers Face the New
Millennium" differs from the prior
section in that the discussion shifts from the events leading to
and encompassing the Yale strike to addressing the conditions of
academic labor in general. Furthermore, setting academic
unionization in the general context of the changing character of
higher education is mixed with broad analysis and case histories
to set the stage for future academic employment.
In "Academic Unionism and
the Future of Higher Education,"
Stanley Aronowitz reminds the reader that one of the forgotten
stories of the 1960s was the explosive growth of public employee
unionism and the birth of a new era of professional unionism as
well. He points out that by 1975, four million public and service
employees had joined unions, about the same number as the
industrial workers movement of the 1930s. This growth in "white
collar" unionism occurred concurrently with the rise of feminism
and many other social movements. In 1969, the author, as a result
of his union organizing history, was asked to meet with the
leadership of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. The university in their
argument against the TAs referred to the TAs as students, or
professors in training, not as employees. The TAs were recognized
by the university after a strike and negotiated a contract.
However, after this contract, the university started a campaign
to decertify the TAA as a bargaining unit. Professor Aronowitz
points out that colleges and universities, public as well as
private, have adopted the ideology of the large corporation
including such actions as "downsizing" and reducing benefits.
Further, the author contends that budget cuts have been used to
shift power from faculty to administration. Institutions have
become more bureaucratized in the past twenty years and
presidents and chancellors are more like CEOs than they are like
academic leaders. The challenge for academic unions, according to
Professor Aronowitz, is "to accept responsibility for the
academic system rather than remaining representatives of specific
interests of faculty and staff within its technologically defined
boundaries. The challenge is to become agents of a new
educational imagination that is, to join with others in
counter planning that aims both to retain mass higher education
as a right and to suggest what education is in the new,
postregulation, postwork era"(p.213-214).
Daniel Czitrom, in "Reeling
in the Years: Looking Back on the
TAA," provides a history of the Teaching Assistants Association
(TAA) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison beginning in 1966.
In 1971, the author enrolled as a Ph.D. student and TA at the
university. He served as the history department shop steward
from 1973 to 1976. Many of the initial members of the TAA were
antiwar protesters who were concerned that giving a failing grade
to a male student under the draft laws of the day was the
equivalent of sending him to the Vietnam. In "On Apprentices and
Company Towns," Stephen Watt notes that "At Yale, they will begin
building lifelong networks of other influential people, meet
brilliant scholars of the opposite sex, marry, have brilliant
children and generally live the life of Riley. Talk about the
haves and the have nots: Yale's teaching assistants are among the
most pampered people in America" (p.229). Watt discusses
apprenticeships in terms of student employment. Apprenticeships
in trades are carefully defined, usually measured in years or in
hours of job training. This is not reflected in most teaching
assistant positions. The term "company town" is chosen to suggest
that the employer knows before the student agrees to a contract
that the stipend is inadequate.
James Sullivan writes in
"The Scarlet L: Gender and Status in
Academe," of a new type of position in an American university
advertised in 1995. It is a tenure track lecturer in English,
not eligible for promotion. After a probationary period, tenure
would be granted but not promotion. The teaching load would be
set at four courses, and include a negotiable salary, believed to
be in the mid-twenty thousand dollar range. In "Disposable
Faculty: Part-Time Exploitation as Management Strategy," Linda
Ray Pratt deals with the saga of a career in part-time teaching
as a slow track to nowhere. Pay scales are low and static and
the jobs rarely convert to tenure track positions. Further, a
record of part-time faculty employment damages one's prospects in
the job market. A new feature in this form of teaching
employment is that the letter of appointment will also contain
the notice of termination at the end of the employment period.
In "Alchemy in the Academy:
Moving Part-Time Faculty from
Piecework to Parity," Karen Thompson describes how part-time and
temporary employees are generally excluded from unions and are
extremely difficult to organize. The status of part-time
employees is important as they comprise nearly half of college
and university teaching staffs. The author mentions that one of
the attractions for hiring part-time employees in addition to
cost savings and flexibility is their likelihood of remaining
unorganized. There is also the suggestion that since there are
no laws relevant to part-time workers and organizing, that in
effect government policy may actually make organizing difficult.
Professor Thompson, part-time faculty herself, describes her
involvement in organizing non-full-time teachers at Rutgers. The
Professor states that a number of lessons were learned through
the organizing and negotiating process. One lesson learned is
that temporary teachers cannot make gains by themselves.
According to the author, organizing, alliance building and
networking may not be enough. It is important to recognize the
opposition movement is seeking to reduce the commitment to social
needs and public services. Education is one of its main targets.
Ellen Schrecker, in her chapter
"Will Technology Make Academic
Freedom Obsolete?", begins the discussion with technology, the
electronic classroom and how her university's first attempt with
this technology failed. The problems were systemic but she
thinks the university will try again with video teleconferencing
as an attempt to reduce the cost of instruction. There is the
belief among administrators that the "electronic academy" (p.293)
will enable the entire institutional superstructure of higher
education to be eliminated. The university must now adopt an
"industrial model"(p.293) concerned with the bottom line. The
mission of education will be to turn out "a product as cheaply as
possible"(p.293). Professor Schrecker considers that just about
everything is negotiable. University boards of directors,
trustees and governing bodies, are downsizing facilities,
increasing the size of classes, and are attacking the tenure
system. The university is pitting "an aristocracy of full time,
full paid tenured and tenure track teachers against a displaced
peasantry of underpaid, overworked, and insecure
adjuncts"(p.294). However, Professor Schrecker advises against
too much nostalgia for the crumbling traditional university.
"Its stated concern for intellectual freedom and cultural
diversity was often more rhetorical than real and almost always
limited by an unacknowledged deference to the powers that
be"(p.295). A bottom line philosophy and funding cuts are also
altering intellectual autonomy. Professor Schrecker suggests
collective action as a possible alternative to the current trend.
"Individuals simply do not have the power to reverse the
inequities that the business community has foisted upon American
society" (p.297). The author contends that the concept of
academic freedom should recognize a connection between free
speech and collective action, such as GESO action at Yale.
Will Teach for Food
achieves its goal of portraying the
scenario leading to the teaching assistants strike at Yale
University in December, 1995 and January, 1996. Furthermore, the
articles in the second part question in detail how the terms and
conditions of faculty employment in the future are changing.
Each of the authors was either involved in the strike or has
professional knowledge of the subject matter from their careers.
This first-hand knowledge of the subjects by the authors lends
credibility to the chapters.
About the Reviewer
Henry Goode works for the Arizona
Board of Regents.
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