The Future of Higher Education: Trash Bears and Pandas

One of my Harvard graduate school pals, long ago, wasn’t happy about the job market for new PhDs. In particular, he was disgusted by the prospect of taking an adjunct teaching job. "I'd rather eat out of a garbage can," he said.

Oh well, I've been eating out of garbage cans for about twenty years, and at about as many different schools, all of them run by presidents who, if you hang around them for more than five minutes, will give you a speech about how education is opening the doors of opportunity for all.

So, for the coming semester, I'll be eating out of garbage cans provided by Fordham University, Westchester Community (SUNY), and LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). The fare is of variable quality, but never more than what $3800 per course, with no benefits, can buy. I'm better off than many of my brothers and sisters in the "majority faculty," by the way, who make on average $2700 per course. I suppose there's a sort of cost-of-living bonus for foragers in the NYC metro area.

I've come to think of myself as a Trash Bear, one of those degraded bruins who rummage through the town dump, or through suburban trash cans. They seem to survive pretty well, and there are more of them now than ever. Though they were clearly not "naturally selected" to do so, they successfully adapted to new and unnatural conditions, and are now able to survive by foraging, often ranging over great distances, for meager resources.

 Now, can they organize?

 I hope so, because my strengthening conviction is that it’s going to be trash bears, not pandas, who save higher education. Pandas, of course, are full-time tenure track—but particularly tenured—faculty, exquisitely adapted to a specific environment in which they depend on huge quantities of rare bamboo and the occasional boiled egg and maybe a little glass of sherry. They are highly specialized mammals, and seriously cute.

 Their habitat is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate, their bamboo groves replaced by huge stainless steel buildings which house 1) The Student Counseling and Loan Center, 2) the Office for Loan Compliance, 3) the Dean's Office for Deanly Affairs, and 4) the Provost's Command Post.

 How can these pandas be saved? They do not wander far from the sweetness of their bamboo, and perhaps do not see the devastation that rolls toward them. But we, the wide-ranging trash bears, we know the lay of the land, and can plan accordingly. If Service Employees International Union (SEIU)  or similiar strategies in higher education organizing are successful, bringing solidarity to this highly dispersed foraging population, it will certainly change the terms of the "education reform" debate, focusing on the link between decent higher ed outcomes and decent faculty working conditions. That should be good for all the animals.

 Here is the key: part-time faculty can organize anywhere--under whatever state law pertains, and in public and private universities—but, among the pandas, only those in the public institutions can do so: a result of the Supreme Court's 1980 Yeshiva University decision, in which full-time faculty at private institutions were designated "management."

 Pandas, already declining in number, have been divided into two distinct and even smaller populations by Yeshiva, and this raises the specter of "minimal viability": at some point they won't be able to reproduce. But trash bears? No minimal viability there: they've been growing in number for forty years. And ask yourself, by the way, is any court likely to declare that part-timers are part of "management"?

In the past, it's true, trash bears have often foraged alone but, as their numbers have grown, and their travels have become more frequent and wide ranging--through private and public and even for-profit higher ed garbage cans--they are becoming more capable, and increasingly more willing, to share information and resources, and to plan ahead, with others of their kind.

 That's my view, and I think it's in sync with SEIU organizing campaigns for part-time adjunct faculty. In a recent NYT article, Adrianna Kezar, director of the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, was quoted as saying that “The S.E.I.U. strategy has the momentum right now.” She also said “And we know that unionizing leads to pay increases and at least the beginnings of benefits.”

More on that SEIU "momentum": That would be Adjunct Action, a national contingent organizing campaign with a great track record beginning in the Washington D.C. metro area, with SEIU’s Local 500, which now represents part-time adjuncts at  George Washington University—where I got my first degree—American University,  Georgetown University, and Montgomery College. More recently, Tufts University and Lesley College (Boston metro region) are active, as are University of LaVerne and Loyola Marymount, and Whittier College (Los Angeles metro). And now, we’re seeing Adjunct Action at work in New York State: stay tuned. 

Most higher ed faculty aren't pandas, and to pretend otherwise is a disservice to all faculty, and to students, and to the future of higher education itself. Unless we are able to understand our own condition, and to accept the truth of it, we'll hardly be able to fight for better things.

Now, what's with all my trash talking here?

So, two weeks ago, at the American Philological Association's annual meeting in Chicago, I participated in an excellent panel entitled “Contingent Labor in Classics: The New Faculty Majority?” My contribution was a version of the trash bear/panda theme I’m playing with here—I also tossed in some language about “monstrous hybrids” that I thought would be appealing to classicists, and which reflects some of the work that gets done in my own field, cultural anthropology. Mutant unnatural hybrid adjunct/contingent swarm organizes. You get the idea. 

While it was all received, as intended, amiably, there was some unease as well. Some people clearly found it divisive and, in fact, not just the "trash bear" idea, but the idea of a "new faculty majority" itself: don't these ideas divide us?

 I don’t think so. The labels, the metaphors, do not divide us. Divisions have been made. They are real. They have created real obstacles to communication and movement. We’ve been divided. But the divisions have created a few opportunities, I think, of which the most significant is the potential of part-time adjunct faculty labor to build solidarity across institutions and throughout "metro" and regional higher ed territory. Pandas can't do that yet, but, who knows? When the day comes, I hope all the bears will have a big picnic.

How to Attack and Destroy Higher Ed Labor Evil: The Secret revealed

Read this post, commit it to memory, and destroy, ok? 

Top secret.

Cadmo Totally Kills this Dragon

The SEIU Local 500 Coalition of Academic Labor Fourth Annual Forum on Part-time Faculty Unions, Caste and Classes: Contingent Academic Labor Confronting Inequalities in Higher Education

The Prime Hypocrisy of Higher Education Now

A trio of strong speakers, in remarks moderated by New Faculty Majority President Maria Maisto, opened up with powerful views about education. Speakers railed against the current intolerable conditions of the majority faculty, preached on the need for alliances between adcons and other communities—both more and less exploited—and robustly defended higher ed's true character as a public right and a public good--the only context in which the rights and working conditions of adjunct and contingent faculty will be genuinely addressed. 

It was wonderful.

Gary Rhoades, of the Center for the Study of Higher Education, at University of Arizona, started out with enthusiasm for the wonderful promise of SEIU's Metro DC strategy, discussed below, and called out the "prime hypocrisy" of an academy in which 2/3 to 3/4 of the faculty are not living any kind of that much ballyhooed "dream" that's supposed to be connected to higher education. He reaffirmed his well-known commitment to higher education for the least served communities, and made a case that contingent faculty are the faculty with the most creativity, energy, and informed commitment to students. 

And then Pablo Eisenberg, Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, weighed in with an appeal to all of us to be in support and dialogue and action with other-than-adcon groups in our nation who are being driven "down the ladder." He surveyed, with clear and grounded authority, the state of play of "living wage," and other campus-based social justice that ought to be running at full steam and in concert with drives for adjunct/contingent equity. And are not. He called the assembly—and they were ready to be called, I think—to renew their efforts against the selfish and self-injuring indifference, of too many adcons, to the problems of other workers. 

After which, Wayne Langley, Director of the Higher Education Division for SEIU Local 615, pumped out some fine material of the sort we just sometimes want, real bad. Like, current higher education practice is "driving a stake though the heart of the American dream." That I liked, and also the insistence that "All education is public"—Maria, Gary and Pablo had all said this in one way or another, but Wayne also offered us a new bit, or one I hadn’t heard before in this formulation: "You get a 4-year critical thinking education," he said, if you're a member of that shrinking number of citizens who are going to be allowed to develop the tools they need to be informed, and critical, and empowered to advocate and act for the public good. 

Otherwise, if anything, "you get trade school." 

Now that's the "vision" you get, isn't it. A few folks allowed into the critical thinking club. Trade school for the rest. That’s the vision from that bunch Wayne dubs "Mandarins pretending to be leaders." I like that too.

Later on, he examined a question he’d heard while organizing Harvard’s janitorial and cleaning staff: “Why should a janitor care about higher education?” Everybody at this conference, SEIU or not, liked the answer, which sums up, I think, the goals of this first panel which was, after all, about "Caste and Classes, and "linking our struggle for the rights of contingent faculty to the larger struggle to maintain a middle class, ensure access to quality education for all, and save the dignity of work for everyone from professors to janitors." 

The answer, basically, is that janitors can figure it out, can figure out what higher education really means. Check here for another version.

Fighting Back with Data? Yes!

Some folks yawn when they see this sort of thing, and/or, reach for a mallet, a can of Metricide, but my advice is, don't. 

We can use numbers too, and it’s a way of fighting back, and fighting hard, as we heard from the next panel, “Professor Staff Organizes – addressing contingent faculty working conditions, student impacts, and education policy.”

To begin, New Faculty Majority's Esther Merves brought us up to date on the design and use of the "Back-to-school" survey instrument. Then came Dan Maxey, researcher from USC and the Pullias Center for Higher Education and Delphi Project (Adrianna Kezar is associate director). 

I cannot now completely analyze either the “Back to School” survey strategy, or the strategy associated with the Pullias Center, but I will say this: I’m convinced that both are going to be sucking devoted participation, in sci-fi tractor-beam fashion, from ever-increasing numbers of sin-sick administrators who would not otherwise be open to the saving grace of the true gospel, by which I mean four-square adcon-liberation theology. 

Again, read this, commit to memory, and burn, bothers and sisters. Those who are ready will see: meanwhile, mum’s the word, though I wouldn’t discourage you from walking around campus while leafing through a Back-to-School instrument or one or another Delphi Project report.

In this same panel, finally, Michael Best of SEIU, and Thomas Vadakkeveetil, adjunct at George Washington University and Strayer University, showed us some appalling numbers about public monies in private for-profit higher ed, and detailed how some of these were put before a Congressional committee investigating abuses.

Again, there are those who get annoyed at the thought of "another study," and I am sometimes one of them, but in all three cases here, we could see the pragmatic nature of the collecting enterprise, and I think it is key part of taking back our authority—the authority of the faculty. And we’re getting better at it.

Students Support for Adjunct Faculty Organizing

I have been slow to grasp the value of this, and slow to recognize opportunities when they arise, but now I see the light. We were all impressed. The support of the students on this panel, for adjunct and contingent faculty, was certainly evident, in their specific presentations, and in videos about American University and Georgetown University where adcon organizing is/has been underway. Also, their terrific energy, autonomous drive, and splendid grasp of the natural linkage with other social justice campaigns, which dovetailed wonderfully with what Pablo Eisenberg had counseled earlier, was an education unto itself.

Ethan Miller, an activist at American University, and an articulate and skilled blogger on high ed ed issues, spoke about the AU campaign. (He was also, I think, the most accomplished conference tweeter, and taught me a few things, which I'll probably forget: old dogitude syndrome).

KB Brower, of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), was a fine analytic presence as well, and I very much liked her advice to us that we never lose an opportunity to "inoculate" students against some of the noxious ideas to which they are sometimes susceptible: living wage campaigns, for instance, presented as potent tuition-hike drivers. (The annual USAS conference agenda, by the way, can be seen here.)

Marissa Allison, also on this panel, brought her particular graduate student point of view to the table. As a prime mover in the George Mason University Graduate Student Sociological Association, and as an observer of grad student challenges as they mesh with structures of control and direction, formally or otherwise, she was able to sketch out for us the linkage between at least one style of contemporary grad experience and the adcon dilemma. I don't have her whole argument to give you here, but the title of just one of her projects will give you a flavor of her commitment and analytic perspective: "Media Rhetoric on the Feminization of Higher Education: Uncovering a Paradox of Neoliberalism in the Academy" I'm ready for more of that.  

I've got Several Day Jobs 

So, look, you know what? I have to get my laundry out of the drier, and then do some class prep. And I believe I have a class observation tomorrow at LaGuardia Community College, so I'd like to get all freshened up pedagogically, and just, you know, presentable.

So, I will hope to get the rest of this wonderful conference described later--by Wednesday? In the meantime, here are the higher-ed journalism accounts, from Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education.

I think the Peter Schmidt piece in CHE is better than the Colleen Flaherty in IHE, but, you be the judge. Neither of them seem to feel, as I do, that history is being made. I suppose it's not their job to feel as I do. Could that be true? For us, though, I'm urging that we be on the case, following the comments, contributing our own comments, and generally not allowing the usual troll population to run amok.