academic labor

• 
• 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: 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. 

• 
• 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: 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? 

• 
• 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: 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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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: 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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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."

• 
• 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. 

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  11/9/2022
  

  Will an Academic Worker Strike Tarnish University of California System?

  It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, argue the L.A. Times editors, that the University of California system must make wage concessions to allow their graduate student workers to afford housing anywhere near their campuses. 

• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  11/1/2022
  

  On Going Back Off the Tenure Track

  by Sarah Handley-Cousins

  "I had watched my historian friends pack up their families, leave the towns where they’d earned their PhDs, and move to take jobs, but it became slowly and devastatingly clear my situation was different."