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Will Teach for Food Academic Labor in Crisis Cary Nelson, editor |
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A compelling examination of the human cost of today’s corporate colleges and universities. "When an elite institution dedicated to scholarship and education uses strong-arm tactics to suppress its own graduate students, when it starts asking its employees to susbist on poverty-level or sub-poverty-level wages—this is more than a little disillusioning. It's like finding out that an elegant old gentleman you've always admired at a distance has a secret life as a mugger and a thug. It's painful to watch. But of course it's happening everywhere." —Barbara Ehrenreich, from the foreword Academic labor has never been more vulnerable to exploitation, or more galvanized into action. Threats to tenure, job shortages for new Ph.D.s, and an increasing reliance on poorly paid graduate students and adjunct faculty for teaching are the harsh reality on campuses across the nation. Will Teach for Food provides a clarion call to academic workers, summoning them to take action against the continued decline in working conditions on American campuses. When graduate students at Yale University held a "grade strike" during the 1995-96 academic year, they were protesting policies such as downsizing, subcontracting, and outsourcing--strategies currently wreaking havoc on the larger U.S. workforce. The debates at Yale mirror those on many campuses: whether graduate student teaching assistants are students or employees of the university; whether faculty are management or staff; what constitutes a reasonable teaching load and fair compensation. In Part I of Will Teach for Food, participants describe the Yale student strike and examine what workers on other campuses can learn from this action. In Part II, activists and scholars place the challenge to academic workers in the context of U.S. labor history and assess the impact of university "corporatization" on the communities that surround them and on higher education as a whole. "In Will Teach for Food, Nelson assembles essays by professors and graduate students from many disciplines, mixing long views of academic labor with post mortems on the failed 1995 grade strike by organized graduate students at Yale. This book offers an indispensable crash course in the deterioration of labor conditions on American campuses." —In These Times "By bringing together persuasive stories and useful analyses, Will Teach for Food serves as a useful text in academic labor education." —Composition Studies "Whether or not one is interested in higher education, this book is a great read for those who get off on corporate porn. It exposes the lurid spectacle of profs and grad students-drowsily emerging from their library cubicles-being gang-banged by corporate thugs who cry poverty as they pick the pockets of their confused prey. Will Teach for Food provides a much needed example of leadership rare in the current academic scene: smart people using their wits to address the bean-counter powers that be rather than merely scrambling to protect their own hides. Balanced and all the more scathing in their understatement, the essays in this collection portray a scene of obscene exploitation by administrators who shamelessly market the 'prestige' of an increasingly shoddy educational 'product' to unwitting consumers, i.e., students. In these excellently documented essays the professors scrutinize a university that has already recast them as burger flippers in the brave new McDonald's of the mind." —Village Voice "Will Teach for Food is a book that every grad student, part-timer, and even full professor doesn't want to read, but should. Urgent? Yes. Bleak? Surprisingly not. The collection offers arguments, analyses, and advice to those who are, in Aronowitz's words, 'agents of a new educational immagination." —Texas Observer "The contributors are teachers, tenured, part-time and unemployed; union organizers and activists; public intellectuals and graduate students. These categories are clearly not exclusive. Many of the contributors are several of these at once: what they all share is that they are all workers. The cumulative effect of these essays is to point out that even while the number of students may be increasing, the number of tenure track positions is declining, rapidly. The apprentice metaphor is no longer universally applicable, collegiality is non-existent at several levels, and the new university is a post-Fordist one in which trustees, often the same corporate executives who are rapidly firing employees to increase already bloated corporate profits, are now turning their attention to the college and university labor force." —Against the Current "Nelson has succeeded in producing a timely and much-needed look at the current crisis afflicting labor in higher education. The collection is a valuable effort on a serious problem with potentially long-lasting and far-reaching repercussions." —Labor Studies Journal "Will Teach for Food provides a clarion call to academic workers, summoning them to take action against the continued decline in working conditions on American campuses." —Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. He is the editor and author of numerous books, including Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997). 248 pages | 1997 Table of Contents Foreword: What Yale is Teaching Us?, Barbara Ehrenreich Part One: A Yale Strike Dossier
Part Two: Academic Workers Face the New Millennium
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$24.00 Paper