academic labor 
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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SOURCE: Nature
1/11/2023
UC Strike is Energizing a Movement of Research Workers
Collective actions at the University of California campuses and elsewhere are influencing research workers to view the work that they do in the lab as labor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
12/12/2022
Students are the Key Swing Constituents in the UC Grad Worker Strike
Withholding grading labor as students return to campus after the COVID years is a risky move but at the New School, faculty built some solidarity with students that bolstered their position. Will that work in the University of California system?
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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.
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/6/2022
New School's Adjuncts Demand Better Pay in Increasingly Acrimonious Strike
The institution's historical left-leaning roots are coming into conflict with the New School administration's efforts to shift teaching labor to temporary, adjunct and contingent faculty and intransigence in bargaining with their union.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
12/5/2022
The UC Grad Worker Strike is the Most Important Labor Action in the History of Higher Ed
by Nelson Lichtenstein
The strike aims not only at raising the pay of graduate workers and postdocs, but reversing the austerity politics that have gutted California's public higher education and created a climate of precarity for intellectual workers in the system.
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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.
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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.
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SOURCE: Vox
11/21/2022
Demographics and the Shrinking Future of College
As the number of students promises to contract in coming years, the workforces and communities that depend on small colleges and regional public universities face dire prospects.
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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.
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SOURCE: Substack
11/17/2022
Tenured Faculty are the 18% – What Will They Do for the 82?
by Claire Potter
"Go to any faculty meeting, and you will hear what the 18% really believes: that if contract and contingent faculty deserved tenure-stream positions, they would have them."
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SOURCE: Defector
11/15/2022
48,000 UC Academic Workers Striking: You Can't Eat Prestige
"Without its armada of researchers and grad students, the UC system is essentially a baroque real estate scam." Those workers argue they deserve much more from the system in exchange for the labor that makes it run.
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