Johnson, Benjamin; Kavanagh, Patrick; and Mattson, Kevin (Eds.). (2003). Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement. New York: Routledge.
Pp. vi + 265
$18.95 ISBN: 0-415-93484-2
Reviewed by John Rothfork
Northern Arizona University
June 19, 2004
If you are only casually aware of the academic labor movement, this book may offer more information or militancy than you care for. Most of my colleagues (including graduate students) are too busy with their own classes, committees, research, department politics, and careers to have more than an occasional knowledge of the “burgeoning labor movement [that] has arisen to combat the corporatization” of higher education (236). Even among those who are aware of the academic labor movement, most are likely to see it as dedicated to improving conditions for graduate assistants at a specific school rather than as a method or tactic used to combat market forces that threaten to turn higher education into a corporation offering a consumer service. When they do examine the connection, some may wonder if legal fights—led by union organizers with lawyers on both sides to form UAW (United Auto Workers) unions to collectively bargain with university presidents—promote rather than hinder a shift to corporate values and methods. I suspect that views may be more entrenched in the Northeast where many of these battles were fought (NYU, Yale, Boston) and continue to be fought, such as at Columbia University where graduate students are on strike to force the university to recognize their right to form a union for the purpose of collective bargaining. For the administration view (which illustrates many of the themes identified in Steal This University), see: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/04/04/gsu_strike.html. For part of the student view, see the story in the student newspaper, Columbia Spectator: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/04/16/407f 985647d6a.
The allusion in the title to Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book (http://www.pieman.org/stealthisbook.html) indicates that the authors of the anthology share leftist views. Two are proud to be Wobblies, card carrying members of the Industrial Workers of the World (http://www.iww.org/). Some of the writers are nostalgic for the highly politicized campus of the late 1960s and early 70s when organizing protests for civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam were more engrossing for many students than going to class. Such leftist theorists as Paul Goodman (11) and Herbert Marcuse (7) are invoked for inspiration. But the authors do more than indulge in nostalgia and leftist rhetoric. Today the academic labor movement offers serious politics and UAW labor unions. The authors of the 13 essays all assume the university has been stolen from the people (namely, graduate students) by administrator-henchmen of the marketplace bent on subverting either the past glory or the future promise of the university as a place where everyone can freely choose creative and socially useful labor without the interference of administrators who worry about paying the bills, balancing the budget, and giving an account to regents.
What is the academic labor movement?
This is the idea or recognition that “colleges and universities have increasingly taken corporations—premised on the idea of profitable efficiency—as their model for internal organization” and consequently seek to employ labor at the lowest possible cost (232). This model subverts the university in at least three areas.
- Adjuncts: When a professor retires or moves, his
tenure track job is often downsized, being split into adjunct
positions for which the university does not have to worry about
tenure or paying costly benefits. “In the mid-1990s, only
one out of three tenure-track slots was replaced by another
tenure-track appointment” (68). One of the authors tells us
about the California State University system, “the largest
public higher education system in the country,” which
employs 22,000 faculty and staff, and enrolls 350,000 students
(221). Between 1995 and 2000 “the number of
full-time-equivalent students increased by thirty-five thousand.
The net increase in tenure-track positions during that same
period was one position.” In contrast, “CSU
management ranks . . . increased by 24 percent” (226). The
book’s cover blurb announces that “60% of tenured
professors have been supplanted by underpaid graduate students or
part-time adjuncts” (back cover). A study of humanities and
social sciences classes taught at Yale in 1999 found that
tenure-track faculty taught 30 percent of the classes, adjuncts
taught 30 percent of the classes, and graduate assistants taught
40 percent of the classes (66-7). The Department of Education
reports that “in the fall of 1999, there were 1,028,000
faculty members in degree-granting institutions.” Of that
figure, 42.5% or 437,000 were part-time faculty
(http://www.policyalmanac.org/education/archive/doe_state_of_education.shtml).
The disparity in numbers between Yale and Department of Education is likely caused by university administration claims (reflected in the Department of Education figure) that the primary intent of graduate teaching assistantships is to offer instruction, guidance, and practice in how to teach rather than to hire cheap academic labor: “the work being done by graduate students at the university is so closely related to their academic work that the work itself is simply education” (153). Consequently, the university does not report graduate teaching assistants as part-time instructors.
Since the 1970s we have told each other that the employment crisis for new Ph.D.s is caused by admitting too many students to Ph.D. programs. The argument by the academic labor movement is that the crisis results from the marketplace decision by universities “to slough off work that should be done by regular faculty onto adjuncts, postdocs, and graduate students” because it is cheaper (67). The same author writes that universities “employ graduate students to teach thousands upon thousands of sections, seminars, and labs. No wonder so many graduate programs have continued to admit Ph.D. students even when unable to secure academic jobs for their graduates” (65); because they supply cheap labor. The “profits” support senior research faculty and administrators.
- Penury: Employment terms for adjuncts often seem to be
taken from the pages of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard
Times where the school master, Thomas Gradgrind, is
introduced as “A man of realities. A man of fact and
calculations.” Typically, adjuncts are hired for a semester
with job security that ends with the semester. A 1995 survey
found that adjuncts make an “average of just $2000 per
course.” More recent data reveals “that 75 percent of
part-timers are paid less than $3,000 per course and fewer than a
quarter have health insurance” benefits (69). One author
reports a conversation he had with a foundation director who
gleefully asked, “As long as people continue to work for
those wages, and you get quality people . . . why raise the
wages?” (69). Adjuncts typically have no academic turf,
such as an office with a phone or a computer with Internet
access. Often treated as strangers by tenured faculty, adjuncts
have scant opportunity to associate with fellow part-time
faculty. After a few years eking out a living as an adjunct,
resumes begin to develop a pariah watermark: too many schools,
too little publishing. Many adjuncts recognize that their lot is
worse than it was when they were graduate assistants with
offices, colleagues, and insurance benefits. As graduate
assistants they made more money per class than they do as
adjuncts. All royalties earned from Steal This University
are committed to the AAUP Contingent Faculty Fund
(http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/).
- Courseware: To turn education into a commodity for sale, something of the classroom experience must be turned into “courseware.” This is usually done in association with distance education to develop courses for Internet delivery. Once done, the faculty member who developed the courseware becomes too expensive to “deliver” it. “The administration is now in a position to hire less skilled, and hence cheaper, workers to deliver the technologically prepackaged course.” This process also creates an opportunity for greater “administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline, and even censorship” (39) evident, for example, at the University of Phoenix where “centrally developed lesson plans allow Phoenix’s administration to dictate how a professor spends time, right down to fifteen-minute intervals” (22).
The 13 essays in Steal This University advocate that graduate teaching assistants and adjunct faculty form labor unions to collectively bargain with university presidents. In addition to gaining better working conditions, the authors claim that this will also stop “The Rise of the Corporate University” (the book’s subtitle) evidently by forcing universities to pay a living wage to all of its teachers.
University of Phoenix
The most hectoring essay in the collection obliquely focuses on the nature of education rather than on what teachers are paid. I say “obliquely” because Ana Maire Cox offers only a negative illustration of education in the form of “for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix,” which she indicts as “the Enrons of higher education.” After suggesting that the University of Phoenix is fraudulent, she concedes that “catering to the practical needs of students undoubtedly appeals to the working adults that make up the overwhelming majority of Phoenix students, and it’s unlikely that it actively harms their education” (23). Which is it, I wonder, criminal fraud or simply a deplorable choice of education that government is not paternalistic enough to prevent? The answer is implied in Cox’s rhetorical question, “Is job training really education?” (26); and in her contempt for John Sperling, the founder and developer of the University of Phoenix who boasted that “we are not trying to develop their [students] value systems or go in for the ‘expand their minds’ bullshit” (quoted by Cox, 19). In response to such militant capitalism, Cox preaches for a socialist government: “We need changes in our political culture that articulate wider civic needs over short-term benefits.” Apparently thinking that we are deluded by capitalist propaganda that has made the University of Phoenix the largest private university in America, Cox says, “We need to have political discussions in this country that challenge us to become something more than just self-interested individuals” (32). I can hear Richard Rorty quietly and innocuously asking, “Why?” And on whose authority? America was designed for “self-interested individuals.” Enlightened self-interest is the basis of the Utilitarian program, including its capitalist economic theory.
In the end Cox reveals that she is not interested in improving education in a capitalist society, which focuses on serving interests and needs as perceived by individuals. She does not even want to talk about how the university may be a special case and consequently largely exempt from the bottom line measurement of the marketplace. Instead she wants a “change in our political culture” that would support some collective over “self-interested individuals” to, for example, require “mandatory community service as a means of educating young people” (32). All of the authors hope to speak for a more authoritarian government that would actively curb the caveat emptor spirit that allows for-profit schools to dupe gullible students and bilk the federal treasury. Cox blames for-profit schools for milking the present system, saying that “few for-profit institutions could afford to exist without Title IV monies.” She reports that in 1999-2000 the comparatively few for-profit schools “made up a whopping 35.4 percent of all institutions participating in the Federal Pell Grant Program, and received about $945 million in Pell monies” (19).
Digital Diploma Mills
The subtext for all the essays is social class in both a Marxist sense and in an East Coast aristocratic sense. For example, when David Noble claims that the model for efforts to make the university into a corporate entity was “the commoditization of the research function of the university” in the 1980s by the military-industrial complex, I discern a class bias that considers science to be either an aristocratic amusement or a noble end-in-itself, which makes it the same thing, an amusement. Aristocrats naturally deplore “transforming scientific and engineering knowledge into commercially viable proprietary products” (34). It is a strange alliance: socialist academics in the humanities hoping to cozy up to scientific aristocrats to banish bourgeois marketplace concerns from the university.
It hardly needs to be said that there is not a single scientist or engineer among the authors. Almost all the essays betray a provincial concern for local conditions and a naiveté that assumes that all administrators are plantation owners who could free their slaves but for their iniquity. David Noble, however, looks beyond the campus to recognize that “the foremost promoters of this transformation” of the university into a corporate service industry are “the vendors of the network hardware, software, and ‘content’—Apple, IBM, Bell, the cable companies, Microsoft, and the edutainment and publishing companies Disney, Simon and Schuster, Prentice-Hall et al.—which view education as a market for their wares” (36). Even though he deplores it, Noble understands that the university is part of a capitalist society and not a world apart. Noble also identifies the conflict of values between the marketplace and the university. University administrators and state legislators dedicated to marketplace values advocate “computer-based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs—fewer teachers and classrooms—while at the same time undermining the autonomy and independence of faculty” (37). But, says Noble, “Quality education is labor-intensive; it depends upon a low teacher-student ratio and significant interaction between the two parties.” Consequently, “any effort to offer quality in education must therefore presuppose a substantial and sustained investment in education labor” (46).
This argument agrees with capitalism that education is a social construction that has a price tag. Good education is expensive because it requires the time and attention of highly skilled masters in various fields who coach dedicated students. In the sciences, education often requires multi-million dollar instruments and laboratories. The authors in the anthology believe that quality education is an inherent right rather than a socially contracted benefit or a personal investment. The argument over who can afford quality education is answered in class struggle. The editors end the collection of essays with a contemptuous prediction: “Liberal education may survive, but only as a window dressing at a few elite places encrusted with ivy, so that our rulers can have things to talk about other than the recalcitrance of their servants at their cocktail parties” (240). For the plebeians, distance education will have to suffice. And again education is restricted to the humanities (“liberal education”). This is more than an imprudent and foolish social policy. The writers uniformly view it as unjust because they believe that quality education belongs to the people as a social right. Doesn’t this view also “commodify” education rather than recognize it as a social relationship between a master and apprentice?
As teachers, or want-to-be teachers, the authors have an obvious interest in claiming education as a right that is sullied by the mention of money or administrative policy. It is much more gratifying to claim “a harkening back to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of democratic education” (14) and a “more noble purpose of educating citizens for the responsibility of self-government and democracy” (240). No one can oppose this demagoguery, but we can question the congruence between the political agendas of the authors and democratic process as an instrument—for example, by recognizing the socialist views of Cox that so animates her judgment of the University of Phoenix as fraud, or by recognizing partisan intransigence when, after three years of struggle, the University of Minnesota graduate students rejected unionization whereupon the authors, instead of taking “no” for an answer, examine the failed political strategies in hopes of laying “the groundwork for our victory in the next union campaign” (187). This is not democracy. It is characteristic of a militancy in which zealots are convinced that they, and they alone, have all the answers and that those who do not accept their “liberation” and leadership are either deluded or iniquitous.
Yale
The struggle by graduate students at Yale to establish a labor union illustrates the logic by which do-gooders become intolerant. They offer quality education (as they define it), which enables the volk to exercise democratic choice. But if the choice is, say, to enroll at the University of Phoenix or to resist a UAW union, then someone must have failed and the exercise is repeated until it reaches the right democratic outcome. The choices are as rigged by the socialists as they are by the aristocrats, which made the struggle at Yale—between academic aristocrats and socialist graduate student leaders—especially vicious, because each side was so thoroughly convinced of its virtue.
Corey Robin accuses “the Yale professoriat” of breaking “all the rules of academic fair play” (108). He suggests that if the issues were shifted to the abstract academic contexts of postcolonialism or postmodernism, faculty would decry the events as an outrage. “The administration” threatened “students with blacklisting, loss of employment, and worse” (115). Class sensitivity was aroused because “striking TAs were telling the world that learning and civilization depend upon the tedious work of low-paid, often dissatisfied employees, while the university insisted that higher education—at least at Yale—was a sacred vocation that did not partake of the grubby or the profane” (110). Robin suggests that university officials had a special distaste for acknowledging “that the TA union was affiliated with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union,” which implied that Yale was graduating nothing more than kitchen help. Robin also suggests that the faculty were little different than George Wallace in Alabama, fearing that graduate students were “carrying out the orders of union bosses in Washington” (117). The more convincing recognition was that “the faculty were also in the grip of a raging class anxiety” (118) that might be expressed simply as, “who do you think you are, a mere graduate student, to presume to tell me, a Yale faculty member, what to do? At Yale the faculty lecture and students appreciatively take notes.”
Another author who testifies to the viciousness of the struggle at Yale vents special ire at “postcolonialism theorist Sara Suleri” who “turned in her student teaching assistant, then crisscrossed the country in a mink coat purchased with profits from the Goodyear company’s Asian rubber plantations; one suspects she regretted the coat was not lined with the hides of her teaching assistants” (201-2). Suleri’s preferences are for feminism, Islam, and postmodernism. Because the philosophical assumptions of each of three outlooks is incommensurate with the others, she writes an especially turgid and self-righteous prose. For example, she literally prays in a footnote to be forgiven for feeling compelled by the rhetoric of her feminist methods to ask about The Satanic Verses, “what narratives of male desire are being enacted when the homoeroticism of the colonial paradigm is conflated with the body of the prophet of Islam?” (Suleri 198). She literally prays in a footnote, “God of Islam, prevent in your beneficence and mercy any true believer from reading this sentence” (Suleri 218 n. 14)! In her final footnote, Suleri writes a condescending letter to Salman Rushdie, saying she was struck by an entry in a visitor’s book at a “charming little church” located in an Indian hill-station. Evidently not finding the church so charming, the first visitor wrote, “Thank God I am a Muslim!” Suleri confesses to Rushdie that “The chill it gave me was somewhat similar to the depression induced by your ‘I am a Muslim’ piece in the [New York] Times” (see: Salman Rushdie, “Now I can Say, I am a Muslim,” New York Times, 28 Dec. 1990: 35). Suleri suspects that Rushdie’s “apparent” acceptance of religion “as a series of immutable beliefs that can be universal and transhistorical” is merely a ruse to avoid being hunted down and executed. Ever self-righteous, Suleri accuses Rushdie of death threats, asking: “Is your conversion somehow willing the death of fundamentalist Islam?” (Suleri 218-19, n. 19).
Robin ends by saying that the Yale faculty were “ineluctably pulled by a not-so-exalted tradition of elitism. Knowledge and privilege are, for them, necessarily fused” (122). As Professor Suleri’s behavior and writing illustrate, aristocrats do not feel obliged to be logical; they simply require reverence.
Science at Minnesota
The history of attempts to create a graduate student union at the University of Minnesota illustrate that all the talk about democracy really means accepting the left’s political culture. The authors lament that “the work of hundreds of committed students over three years” of effort in their third attempt to create a union “was undermined by a handful of busters with access to resources and a computer.” They unconvincingly say they failed only because of a last-minute “blitzkrieg of misinformation” offered by the other side at a Website. Saying “no” to the issue is not an acceptable answer for the authors who, with a tone of martyrdom, say that “the drive for democracy, however, continues” at the University of Minnesota (187).
Who were these union “busters”? The authors confess that among those who signed cards in support of unionization, “there were areas of thin support, such as chemistry, engineering, and computer science” (177). After describing “a slick and easy-to-navigate website rife with misleading information and arguments against unionization,” the authors tell us that the Graduate Students Against Unionization (GSAU) was “founded by two students in chemical engineering.” They then “explain” that science students are not really dedicated to the university because they are focused on industry jobs and “could find profitable employment without completing a Ph.D.” They explain that assistantships in the sciences “are viewed as apprenticeship periods” in contrast to the humanities where they think teaching assistants simply provide cheap labor and where graduate students apparently have few realistic career opportunities after graduation (179). The authors reveal that the final “vote was roughly split along this line, with TAs largely supporting the union” and RAs (research associates) voting against it. Predictably, when the authors do a post-mortem in hopes of “reconstructing our ideal union through the Diversity Working Group” there is no mention of science and engineering or recognition of the cultural divide between the cultures of science and the humanities that nixed the previous effort.
Modern Language Association
Cary Nelson recounts his efforts to move the Modern Language Association from a self-involved “gentlemen’s club” (which now has 30,000 members) to be a more compassionate organization exhibiting some concern for “the problems of academic labor, and/or to improve working conditions for graduate employees and part-time faculty and gradually increase the number of full-time faculty positions throughout the country” (192). In 1999 Nelson thought that “what part-timers needed in order to organize for change was detailed data in each region [of the country] with all departments listed by name alongside their salary and benefits data” for 5,200 English and foreign-language departments (197). Two years earlier, in the inaugural review of the online journal, Workplace, Stephen Watt offered a long analysis of the MLA’s Committee on Professional Employment (CPE) that he thought offered the kind of thing “one might expect from an organization like the MLA.” Watt explained that the MLA is “Too self-protective and overly insulated from dissent, too self-congratulatory; like the gentlemen in 1883 [who founded the MLA], still too unaware of professional practices out there on the frontier and too concerned with the ‘etiquette’ of professional life . . . and, thus, too slow to evolve from an elitist gentlemen's club into a professional association” that could, for example, exercise meaningful sanctions (Watt).
Nelson characterizes MLA national committee members as “simultaneously accomplished and clueless.” He found that “The only time they all became energized was at the annual opportunity to appoint friends and colleagues to committees” (204). MLA staff develop a “culture partly contemptuous of members,” especially upstart members who demand that the organization “stop honoring faux activists who refuse to condemn the exploitation of their lower-paid colleagues” and demand that the organization produce the facts to embarrass its Brahmin members. Not surprisingly, Nelson found “that the MLA’s lawyers say what the executive director want them to say” (203) and that “the MLA’s executive director has been hostile toward all” the efforts to militate on behalf of graduate students and adjuncts (206).
Boston
The authors claim there are 58 “institutions of higher learning within a ten-mile radius of the urban center” giving Boston “the highest concentration of colleges and universities in proportion to population of any city in the world” (209). They acknowledge “the class character of higher education” recognizing that “nearly 75 percent of all students are educated in comparatively low-cost public institutions, including a large number of community colleges” (208). From the view of students in these schools, an expensive Ivy League education seems to be an unattainable aristocratic privilege. Charged with this class dimension, the struggle of graduate students at Yale must seem to many as the whining of spoiled rich kids (see, for example, this list of graduate school benefits: http://www.yale.edu/opa/gradschool/faq.html). Indeed, the struggles recounted in the anthology must strike some readers as urban, East Coast, and largely Ivy League. The current battle at Columbia University does little to change this impression.
Conclusion
The authors recognize that “labor solidarity and
militancy are nourished by the concrete face-to-face relations
that bind workers together on the job” (210). This point is
reiterated in the “Conclusion” where the editors say,
“The building blocks of this effort [for labor unions] will
likely remain individual organizing drives on specific campuses,
aimed at forcing schools to sign collective bargaining agreements
with their instructors” (236).
The current graduate student struggle at Columbia University is being watched by graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Tufts University, Brown University, and the University of Southern California to name only some of the universities that are actively struggling to form graduate student labor unions to collectively bargain with university administrators. At the University of Massachusetts, where TAs already have a UAW union, RAs are now fighting for a similar union. So far adjuncts and part-time teachers have been less active in forming unions to militate for better working conditions even though their plight often seems more hopeless than that of graduate students (see Breslin). The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) represents “35,000 part-time faculty in two- and four-year colleges and universities” (http://www.cpfa.org/aftequalpay.html). The AFT Website reports recent union victories for part-time instructors at the University of Vermont and at the College of the Canyon, located just north of Los Angeles. In addition to graduate students, part-time instructors and adjuncts, the editors also suggest tenure-track faculty will increasingly seek an “explicit engagement with the question of the purpose of education” (239) at least in terms of money and working conditions. If so, doesn’t this seem to invoke rather than resist corporate values?
Many of us, not directly involved in these struggles, are shocked by the acrimony on both sides. One of the authors asks, “Why on tests of political point of view do professionals who are often liberal seem so conservative and timid within their workplaces?” Her first answer involves class consciousness and the “feeling that ‘getting political’ and ‘taking a stand’ are somehow unprofessional.” Secondly, she recognizes that American capitalism and the university are intensely competitive. Professors may force students to work on bogus team projects in class, but “they retreat in fear at the mere suggestion of joining with others in struggle” (227). Her third answer involves self-righteousness and something close to religiosity with the feeling that teaching “presumes a calling—a vocation—a dedication to service” (228). If so, the clergy are enraged when novitiate graduate students seem to debase the calling and faith by defining what they do as academic labor, which implies something repetitive rather than creative and something that requires little if any personal dedication. The editors add another dimension by writing that “elite faculty, however, are loath to acknowledge” that their “tenure-track jobs” depend “on the grad students and adjuncts whose teaching frees up senior faculty for leaves and light teaching loads” (234).
I think much of the ire on the faculty side rises from what Thomas Kuhn identified as “science in crisis” when rules and methods are questioned instead of simply employed. In such a crisis there is an air of distrust and a feeling that professional methods are arbitrary and invoked only to obtain secondary goals, such as money and power. Hard-won accomplishment, prestige, and authority seem to invite sneers from some. In his review of Steal This University, Floyd Olive writes, “nominally liberal professors take leave of all self-awareness and intellectual coherence when faced with what they perceive as a challenge to their authority.” More bluntly, senior faculty are accustomed to lecturing and giving professional and career advice to deferential and appreciative graduate students. Like Agamemnon, willing to “trample the lovely grace of things untouchable” in order to purchase power at any cost, the academic labor movement of graduate students appears to vandalize the intangible values of academe. Faculty, who pose self-righteously in their perennial battle for raises against the familiar enemy of administration, are dazed and then enraged by the apparent ingratitude and disloyalty of the labor movement, which seems to have conspired with those committed to the marketplace to define the university as nothing more than another place to work. If graduate students defect to the enemy, who will be left to fight the battle against the “Rise of the Corporate University?” Certainly not UAW unions and their lawyers.
I am not necessarily arguing for a conservative stand against labor unions and collective bargaining in higher education. If I were a young person stuck in a collection of dead-end adjunct jobs, I would likely fix my hopes on what a labor union might do to improve my lot. I have tried to make two points. The first is that the efforts of the academic labor movement to legally define and bargain for the precise terms of a faculty service contract seem more likely to accelerate rather than hinder the market forces that threaten to turn the university into a corporate entity where everyone is just hired help and where the presumption is that you put in the necessary number of contracted hours until you can leave to go to another place where you do not watch the clock or meticulously define contracted terms because you are dedicated to the values located in this chosen community. Many consider the university to be such a community of scholars. I can anticipate the response from the other side that says, “We are happy for you. You can easily fulfill the specific contracted services and make a personal choice to hang around the university to do even more.” True enough, but this succeeds in defining the university as a corporation with no more moral authority than any other capitalist enterprise and with no exemption from the reductive values of the marketplace. I am reminded of the parallel processes at work in Protestant denominations. When the minister is “called by his flock” and negotiates a contract for his pastoral services there is an obvious clash in values. From one view he is no different from any other capitalist agent. But this view negates the very understanding of who the minister is and why his service is important to the congregation. It creates a crisis or paradox in explaining just what a Christian congregation hopes to buy in contracting for services with a minister. This clash of values in many Protestant denominations suggests why medieval vestiges of Catholicism and Anglicanism held fascination for those like Thomas Merton and T. S. Eliot who wanted a world different from that offered by capitalist business.
This brings me to my second point. Like the church, the military, or the communities of law, medicine, science, or the arts, the university offers its own world view in which the ceremony of teaching intellectual skills to those who aspire to learn them from someone who has demonstrated mastery of the skill—this is a professional commitment from both sides that takes place at the university and that cannot be measured by money. Yes, the teacher asks for a fee, but he cannot deliver the goods without the trust of the student. The student pays the fee, but he cannot receive the goods without a sincere dedication to the process that for a time switches his identity from consumer to student and apprentice. Professional communities, religion, and the university do not ask for total exemption from the marketplace; they ask for the recognition that the marketplace cannot fully measure the worth of what they do in rendering justice, beauty, truth, or victory for the benefit of society as a whole. The university has persevered and prospered as a central Western institution for five hundred years. What the university is—from Yale to the University of Phoenix to thousands of community colleges—must be negotiated with society in necessarily ambiguous and changing language rather than offered in take-it-or-leave-it legal terms. In this context the academic labor movement is one force. It is not the only force in defining the university. Nor is it the only agent with moral dedication and virtue.
References
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Berry, David A. “Community Colleges and Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty,” Organization of American Historians at http://www.oah.org/pubs/commcoll/berry.html.
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UAW Local 2865 (California) at http://www.uaw2865.org/.
“UAW Wins Majority at Cal State,” UAWNews, 17 March 2004: http://www.uaw.org/news/newsarticle.cfm?ArtId=249. “ASE” is an acronym for “associated student employee.”
Watt, Stephen. “What Is an “Organization Like the MLA?” Workplace 1.1 (Feb 1998) http://www.workplace-gsc.com/features1/watt.html.
About the Reviewer
John Rothfork
English Department
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
John.Rothfork@nau.edu
John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/.
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