Departments

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academic labor

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    2/1/2023

    We've Reached the Execution Stage of the Profession's Demise

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    "The decisions which ravaged the future for coming generations of Ph.D.s were made not just by consultants and suits, but by those with Ph.D.s and likely a few peer-reviewed publications. This was scholar-on-scholar violence."

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    1/21/2023

    Julia Schleck on The Function of the University Today

    by Michael Meranze

    Julia Schleck's work ties the idea of academic freedom to the social role of the university and its internal labor practices, which threatens scholars with attacks from inside and outside the campus. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    1/14/2023

    Why Are We Arguing About History But Letting the Profession Die?

    by Daniel Bessner

    If nobody can expect to earn a decent living researching and writing history, then vast swaths of our past will be unknown to the future, and the history that is written will suit the whims of the rich hobbyists who can afford to do the work. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    1/5/2022

    So, You Want to be a History Professor?

    by David A. Bell

    Faculty who are advising potential graduate students need to have a plan beyond hoping that the abysmal job market will make a sudden U-turn. Here's one radical package of solutions. 

  • SOURCE: Contingent
    1/7/2023

    A Profession, If You Can Keep It

    by Erin Bartram

    "Let’s be clear: this “burnout” that secure scholars are feeling is phantom pain where their colleagues should be.... You are suffering from the effects of intentional systemic understaffing."

  • SOURCE: CNN
    1/9/2023

    The Hamline Fiasco is no Isolated Incident

    by David M. Perry

    The key issues at stake in the dismissal of an adjunct art history professor for showing a reverential image of the Prophet Muhammad aren't about campus culture or religious freedom. They're about administrative power and labor relations in modern academia. 

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    1/3/2023

    Assessing the UC Grad Strike

    by Laura J. Mitchell

    Despite winning increases in wages and benefits, University of California graduate student workers still face the problem of working amid the rubble of a social contract uniting universities, students, and the public around the idea of the university as a public good. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    12/29/2022

    Most of All, Hamline's Decision Offends Me as a Muslim

    by Amna Khalid

    Hamline University, in firing an art history instructor for showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad (with a content warning, in an optional exercise), has not only exemplified how risk-averse bureaucracies use inclusive language to dismiss faculty expertise, it also insulted Muslims by associating a vast and diverse set of cultures with fundamentalist theology. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    12/13/2022

    Is a College Progressive if Instructors Make Poverty Wages?

    At the New School (as well as at image-minded companies like Starbucks) an educated workforce and a progressive clientele increasingly expects management's treatment of workers to match its stated values, writes Post columnist Helaine Olen. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    12/8/2022

    The University of California is Also a Landlord

    The system, which approximates a real estate investment firm that also confers degrees, is squeezing its graduate students both as their wage-payer and as a large-scale landlord that contributes to a housing market that is unaffordable to graduate assistants and postdoctoral researchers. 

  • SOURCE: TIME
    11/28/2022

    Can the UC Strike Remake Higher Education?

    The strike is driven by the crises in both academic labor and housing costs, which make poverty wages for graduate student workers far less tolerable than they used to be. Historian James Vernon is one faculty member cancelling his classes in solidarity. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/29/2022

    What's at Stake in the UC Grad Strike

    by Jay Caspian Kang

    While public support for unions has grown in recent years, it's not clear if the public understands that the working class is now likely to be involved in knowledge work. The strike by University of California graduate workers hopes to change that. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    11/29/2022

    The Cultural Workers Go On Strike

    A "black turtleneck uprising" of museum workers and adjunct professors tells us that brain work has become gig work, challenging cherished myths about education, opportunity and meritocracy.