Academia & Strategizing Posted by christian h., 02 May 2007 09:53 pm

Organizing when our dayjob is a labor of love.

By Dr. Free Ride

This week, I voted to ratify our new faculty contract with the California State University system. The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-day walkouts at each of the 23 campuses in the system. When strike dates were announced (and, we are told, with some serious political pressure behind the scenes to avert a strike that would have garnered national and international media coverage), the administration came back to the bargaining table with a contract the negotiating team deemed reasonably good. The vote this week should indicate whether the CSU faculty share that judgment (I’m betting they will).

The staggering thing to me is that we went almost two years without a contract before we could bring ourselves to the point where we were ready to strike.

I’ve been reflecting upon this, and it occurs to me that there are certain features of a good many faculty members that make it hard for us to embark easily on a job action. In honor of May Day, I’ll describe them here.

University teaching is a caring profession.

We care about our students. Many of us see our life’s work as giving these students the best education we can, because we understand, in a way that our students (and administrators and legislators and taxpayers) often do not, the ways that education can play a role in human flourishing. We are not just training docile workers with specific skill sets that plug into the current or anticipated needs of the capitalist system (as I discuss here). We are trying to provide the tools of critical thought and the space in which our students can evaluate everything — including the status quo. Professorial types, especially at teaching-oriented public universities like those in the CSU, regard a life of the mind as something from which every human being might benefit, rather than as a luxury item that only the rich kids in private schools have use for.

We empathize with our students. We take their interests seriously, and we see their interests as deeply tied to our own in terms of the society we will share.

In the event of a job action, we know the students will be affected. The administration may have to deal with bad publicity, but our students miss a day of instruction. We don’t want to hurt our students. So, until our situation gets dire, we find it hard to work up enthusiasm to strike.

Faculty have gotten used to trying to do more with less.

When you’ve spent years in school (as most faculty have), your sense of how much there is to know is expansive. Trying to fit any sensible subset of knowledge into the bounds of four years of study, or fifteen weeks of a semester, is already a challenge. Further, we have to face the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day — and that the majority of our students have jobs or family responsibilities or both — which means that there are only so many pages that can be read, only so many problem sets assigned, only so many papers written. (The 24-hour day similarly limits how much grading and preparation for class we can accomplish.) Even in the best of circumstances, an academic can feel pretty MacGuyverish, cobbling together clever pedagogical plans that are amazing when they succeed.

We have not, at least in the time I have been on the faculty, been working in the best of circumstances. Our resources have been driven by enrollments, which means our class sizes have grown. Larger classes make it harder to engage students in the classroom, and harder to respond as usefully to student work. The limited resources also mean that fewer classes are offered, so students have a harder time getting the classes they want or need to graduate, and thus are stuck paying fees for more semesters than they would otherwise. Meanwhile, tuition has skyrocketed.

We see the students getting squeezed along with the academic departments. We want to help them get what they deserve. So we accommodate the larger classes and either cut back on the useful feedback to the students (via multiple-choice tests marked by computers), or cut back on our sleep that we may provide something like useful feedback.

What are we supposed to do as the enrollment targets creep upward and the resources dwindle? What options for pushing back are available that won’t hurt our students or our departments? We grow so used to stretching what we have that it takes us a while to notice when we have crossed into territory where we are being asked to do the impossible.

And that attitude carries over to our paychecks.

Years of graduate school warp our relationship to self-interest.

Many of us professorial types still remember the days when our dinners alternated between rice and lentils and instant ramen noodles. I have friends who economized by living in their vehicles during the summer. Spending years after college graduation working like mad but getting paid just enough not to qualify for food stamps warped us. Finding out what our college classmates were making in the real world would make our jaws go slack.

The first academic job offer, just by virtue of paying some significant amount more than a graduate stipend, seemed a wondrous thing.

And it was not just the almost-a-grown-up-salary (at least as far as we could tell, emerging from our caves) that seemed so wondrous. The very fact of getting an academic job offer in a market that, in many fields, seemed flooded by an excess of Ph.D.s seemed like a stroke of good luck. Many worthy scholars and teachers did not get job offers. This fact planted a seed of fear: I am easily replaced.

Between the lean years that we brought upon ourselves by pursuing graduate studies and the abundance of talented but unemployed people who might fill our positions just as well as we do, it can feel almost like we’re tempting the universe to smack us down if we complain too strenuously about our compensation. Shouldn’t I regard it as lucky even to be able to find work as a philosopher? (My parents, on some level, are still surprised I’m not living on their couch.)

Pessimism about changing our conditions.

Faculty are adaptable. And we know our students can change and grow because we see it before our eyes. But how to get administrators to change is a great mystery.

They control our resources on campus. At the highest levels of the system, they decide how much money to ask the legislature for, often without asking us what we need in the trenches. They seem bent on understanding our larger purpose as akin to producing widgets, while we see educated people and their production as fundamentally unwidget-like. Yet our attempts to explain seem never to change things. Decisions seem always to be made from above, and to rain down on us below. It almost seems like we believe the situation is as unchangeable as gravity.

Who in their right mind fights gravity?

Fear of short-term pain for long-term improvement.

Resisting larger class sizes, or “mission creep” when it comes to assessment, or dwindling pools of instructional resources, scares us. To draw the line and say, “With what you give us, we can do this much and no more!” could mean leaving some students without classes they need, or losing faculty billets. We don’t want to lose colleagues or hurt students. We resent being asked to do the impossible, but we often can’t stomach the short-term costs of fighting for what we need to do the job well.

It took us nearly two years to get to the point where we were willing to sacrifice ONE day of instruction in each of our classes to push back against unrealistic work conditions. Many of our students skip more class than that for far more trivial reasons.

I do not think it is a bad thing that faculty take their students’ interests so seriously. But I worry that we are in a situation where, having lost cabin pressure, we need to remember to put on our own oxygen masks first so we can better assist those who depend on us for help.

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Responses to “Organizing when our dayjob is a labor of love.”

  1. on 03 May 2007 at 8:49 am 1. spyder said …

    I do not think it is a bad thing that faculty take their students’ interests so seriously. But I worry that we are in a situation where, having lost cabin pressure, we need to remember to put on our own oxygen masks first so we can better assist those who depend on us for help.

    Wow, this says it so damn well; it needs to be something that the NEA and AFT pick up as part of their sloganeering. {disclaimer: when i retired from CA public education service three years ago, i also retired as a local chapter association president, and had been a member of both CFA and CTA} I have followed this story for a long time, and was partially relieved that the contract had been put up for a vote. I say partially because of all the points you make in your post regarding the ease with which administrations discover that faculty (and teachers across this nation) will put their students first, and their more immediate concerns for their own welfare second. And, as you so painfully remarked: all educators are easily replaceable from the eyes of the bosses, and more importantly through the ignorant eyes of the legislators.

    In a comprehensive survey conducted in CA (as i recall it was 2002 that we got the full report) concerning the views of the electorate towards funding of public education, we all were quite surprised to find that direct support for taxes that paid for direct instruction and education ran in the 60 to 70% range (staggeringly this held true for seniors with no grandchildren, as well as for GLBT constituents with no children as well). It was overwhelming clear that the citizens of CA supported the teachers, the faculties, but did not support the administration of the systems. And herein laid the conundrum. Legislators listen to their constituents, but first to their contributors and to the lobbyists. The money, vast immense sums of it, are collected from the taxpayers and redistributed, through legislation: to corporate interests either, as direct contracts for capital projects or the vast logistic services, or more indirectly, in the form of salaries that are spent on houses, vehicles, food, and so forth. Those citizens, who so passionately support the efforts of the educators, are not privy to the problems of the systems until, as you say, the serious threats of striking (blue flu, work slow-down, delayed or deferred class starts, etc.) are made public.

    Thank you for saying what you have said, so much better than i ever did. Who in their right mind fights gravity? Perhaps more public service professional associations will be inspired to become the tornadoes of change; helping the legislators who pay to hire the administrators, that (at least for now) the real people on top are the citizens of this democratic republic.

  2. on 03 May 2007 at 10:21 am 2. The Constructivist said …

    Here are more (putting on my ex-VP of Academics for a UUP chapter):

    In NY, it’s illegal for a public employee union to strike. And there’s little chance of and incentive for revisiting the law that made it so, even with a Democratic governor for the first time in ages.

    As union members and leaders, exposing deep-seated problems in the management of a college or university can be deeply satisfying and productive of change. But as professors in that college and university, we realize that doing so could lead to loss of morale among students and parents, discourage future applications, reduce or roll back any enrollment growth and alumni donations, make enemies of potential allies (even with its flaws, my institution’s management is made up of former professors who all teach every so often and who seem to have the best interests of the institution at heart, even if their heads aren’t always where facluly would want them to be), and give further incentives to enemies (particularly the Republican-appointed SUNY Trustees) to further dismantle public higher ed in NY.

    Faculty are conservative on many institutional issues (often with good reason). And even when they’re allowed by law and choose to have unions, they tend to want their unions conservative, too, in the business unionism model of “bringing home the bacon” (salaries and benefits). More experienced folks have their retirement accounts to protect and less either have families to support or student loans to pay or both. And we all know salaries at public institutions lag far behind the well-endowed privates (so to speak).

    I remember emailing Wayne Booth a long time ago about the Yale grade withholding “strike” and while he wrote back to me that he supported the grad students on their issues and right to unionize, he opposed any measures that hurt their students. After I got over my shock that Wayne. Booth. emailed me back, I didn’t have a good answer, so thanks for this post, Doc FR!

  3. on 03 May 2007 at 10:52 am 3. Seattle said …

    I read this post from the perspective of one of those who chose not to go into acedemia. Financial issues hemmed in that decision on every side-while working on my Master’s at UW I discovered that many of the PhD students were fleeing the very system I hoped to be employed in-the community colleges. I wanted to teach at the community college level because from my own experiences, I perceived my educators at that level had more time to actually teach, which is what I wanted to do. However, Washington State had turned community college instructors into the academic equiv of the temp employee, and instructors of my generation were spending their time driving from one part time temporary position to another. This was driven home a few years later when I took a continuing ed course at North Seattle Community College and was literally told by the instructors not to make my paper too long because they didn’t have time to read long papers and didn’t get paid for the time they took to grade either.

    My mother taught nursing at a community college and retired as a full time instructor. She mourned the changes in the program to what had been a 3 year program in her youth to a 2 year program-forcing her and her fellow instructors to cram more information into less time. Also due to the expense involved to the students, she was frequently confronted by students who assumed that if they had made it through Anatomy and Physiology and Bio-chem to make it into the nursing program, they could not fail the actual nursing courses. Um, wrong.

    Teaching at every level in this country is considered a sacrifice job. When I was layed off a couple of years ago I once again revisited the idea of teaching. I checked the K-12 options and once again had to go with feeding and keeping a roof over my family’s heads rather than teaching. Ticks me off. So I take phone calls and make more money than I would teaching.

  4. on 03 May 2007 at 12:10 pm 4. The Constructivist said …

    One of my childhood friends has lost more money on a few Sundays in the LPGA this spring than I’m going to make this year. Pity us.

    But what’s the solution? As my alumni office continually informs me, it costs twice the total tuition/room and board at that very expensive and small private liberal arts college to actually educate each student there, so they rely on alumni (and corporate and federal giving and capital gains on their huge and growing endowment) to cover the rest. The institution that I teach at full-time has been raising tuition at this relatively inexpensive and small public comprehensive university on the theory that user fees are fairer than taxes. One of my colleagues there has argued for privatization of all public higher ed and vouchers to pay for the costs of education. I’ve argued against him.

    What I haven’t yet blogged on is some kind of “public service for tuition” deal on the order of the GI Bill, one that expands the notion of “public service” beyond military service. My main reason is pedagogical–too many 18-year-olds don’t have the maturity or life experience to take advantage of all four (or more) years of college. Another reason is access–even those who could afford some kind of higher ed with financial aid are too intimidated by sticker shock to even look into it (did you see Jesus’ General’s admission of this awhile back?). We only graduate from high school arond two-thirds of a 9th-grade cohort and only half of those who do end up graduating graduate from college or university. That’s bad news, even if you don’t buy the “more education is good for the economy” line. A further reason is stability for public higher ed–pegging the tuition remission at, say, the average cost of a year at a public high ed institution in your home state would encourage more people to apply to public higher ed institutions (and all).

    It’s not as radical as the free higher ed idea proposed by Adolph Reed and others, but it does address the free rider problem and links the learning from real-world service experience with “higher” learning. So is this a terrible idea or what?

  5. on 03 May 2007 at 3:31 pm 5. Seattle said …

    Oh to hell with it, I say! The masses were so much more easily swayed when they couldn’t read anyway!

  6. on 03 May 2007 at 4:39 pm 6. christian h. said …

    Dr. Free Ride, thank you for this post. The university I am at, and the one I will be at (University of Illinois system, both), are not unionized - even though one often wishes they were. In fact, I’d go with the IWW way of organizing, and have all workers at the university - from the janitors to the professors - organized in one union. I say this because I sometimes wonder: would I cross a picket line of, say, janitors, to get to class? Give an exam? How would I act if the graduate employees struck - would I accept the use of scabs (e.g., people from other schools in the city temporarily brought in) as TA’s in my classes?

  7. on 03 May 2007 at 4:59 pm 7. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    Many, many other unions promised not to cross the picket line if we had gone on strike, but our university staff, who had already gotten a contract from the administration, were bound by that contract not to honor our picket.

    The administration seems to think dividing us is a good strategy. However, I know of a number of staff members who were holding on to sick days and personal days to use if necessary to support us.

    The beauty part of the 2-day rolling strike plan is that there just wouldn’t be any point in bringing in replacement workers. Even with syllabi in hand, our courses are not easily staffed with subs on short notice. Reasonably, someone would need my notes (some of which are pretty darned cryptic) — and if I’m walking a picket line, I’m not going into my office to dig out my notes and hand them over to a scab.

  8. on 03 May 2007 at 6:13 pm 8. James Killus said …

    The flip side of all this is credentialism. As John Stewart blurted about the job qualifications required by Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s (the D.C. Madame) escort service, “You need two years of college to be a hooker?!?”

    The Dean of Engineering at RPI once told me to wait a while before going for a PhD, because if you have one, you price yourself out of a lot of valuable experience (that’s not true in subjects other than engineering, probably). I took his advice, and some years later was wondering whether I should go back to school when a friend said, “Why do that when you’re so productive?” And she had me there; I was at that time publishing much more than most academics, and I’d given up correcting people who addressed me as “Dr. Killus.”

    But over time, the non-university, non-government lab research money dried up in my field, so my research career came to an end. But I can still find plenty of things to learn, to research even, and I’ve got half a dozen papers to varying degrees of completion that I’ll either get to one day or I won’t.

    In any case, I alternate between admiration for those who manage to still accomplish good things within the system and feeling that if the whole thing came crashing down it wouldn’t be a terrible thing. It sure looks like another room in The Big Casino, with a few top slots held out as jackpots and the rest of the suckers putting in more coins than they ever get out. And that always makes me wonder who owns the Casino, and what are the house odds, anyway?

  9. on 03 May 2007 at 7:02 pm 9. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, I think the time has come for the inmates to seize and run the Casino.

  10. on 04 May 2007 at 11:39 am 10. spyder said …

    If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, I think the time has come for the inmates to seize and run the Casino.

    And first we kick out all those retro-60s thru 80s reunion tour bands that reprise all that is hideous and vile about this country.

  11. on 04 May 2007 at 11:51 am 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    I think the time has come for the inmates to seize and run the Casino.

    Caesar’s to Open Prison-Theme Hotel & Casino on Las Vegas Strip … Ok, it’s satire.

  12. on 04 May 2007 at 1:24 pm 12. JP Stormcrow said …

    The very fact of getting an academic job offer in a market that, in many fields, seemed flooded by an excess of Ph.D.s seemed like a stroke of good luck

    P.F. Kluge (author of Eddie and the Cruisers and the article on a bank robbery which became the basis of Dog Day Afternoon) wrote a very nice little book in the early ’90s , Alma Mater in which he wrote about a year in the life of Kenyon College (I know - a very different institution.) It seemed to be one of the more candid glimpses into academia I had seen (at least until I found academic bloggers on teh ‘nets.) One of the things he writes about is the search for a tenure track position in the Philosophy department. Pretty sobering.

    Banning has just one toy to give - that tenure-track position in Philosophy - and about 175 stockings to stuff.So: lots of lumps of coal. He sifts through the application pile … . They are all exemplary people, it seems, with glowing recommendations, superior transcripts, their commitment to cutting-edge philosophy matched only by their wish to enrich the classrooms at a small liberal arts college.

    And I suspect the end of the last sentence could be easily morphed into: their commitment to cutting-edge philosophy matched only by their wish to enrich the classrooms at a “teaching-oriented public university” … even for the same person.

  13. on 04 May 2007 at 1:35 pm 13. Oaktown Girl said …

    And first we kick out all those retro-60s thru 80s reunion tour bands that reprise all that is hideous and vile about this country.

    A few days ago on TV I saw a reunion of the band “Cream” with Eric Clapton (either I haven’t seen him in a very long time, or he sure got old in a hurry!). Anyway, it was like a whole band of Crypt Keepers. Kind of creepy, I thought.

  14. on 04 May 2007 at 2:04 pm 14. JP Stormcrow said …

    Apologies up from to Dr.F-R for the (lack of) comment thread discipline…but,

    And first we kick out all those retro-60s thru 80s reunion tour bands

    Hey,
    you’re talking about my generation!
    I hope we die before we get really, really, really, freaking old.

    You can’t be ninety and Retro Tour,
    Though you think that you’re leaving there too soon,
    leaving there too soon.

    Actually I think Keith Richard is really Elrond (or Sauron) and will live forever. (… maybe they are all elves - the ships from the Gray Havens on Middle Earth brought them here to be ’60s rock stars.)
    So belated ABF Friday - match Middle-Earth characters to ’60s music stars.

  15. on 04 May 2007 at 2:17 pm 15. James Killus said …

    Ohhhhh
    It’s a long, long rope they use to hang you soon I hope
    And I wonder why this hasn’t happened
    Why why why
    And I think about the dirt that I’ll be wearing for a shirt
    And I hope that I get old before I die
    –They Might Be Giants

  16. on 05 May 2007 at 8:00 am 16. peter ramus said …

    As a day-late, dollar short side-note, Dr Free-Ride, in any anticipated job action, professors can directly guage apprehensions about their own duty to students by encouraging those students to organize a response to their plight.

    Likely enough their answer will be, “Hey, we’re with you 100%. We weren’t planning on doing much learning the next few weeks anyhow. Have at the bastards.”

    Of course there will always be those who take a student’s seat to be like a chair in a barbershop, where, for that kind of money, they deserve a good trim and not a lot of bother, and they will be bothered a lot by an organized job action and will make it known.

    But that’s the way in any labor dispute. Always an innocent affected population is caught up, and though some of them are irritated and let it be known, often enough the mass of the affected population is quite willing to be inconvenienced, to give a hand in fact, if that’s what it takes to resolve the job action in your favor.

    Demonstrating to students that this is the way adults redress grievances, by organizing and requiring the ear of authority, by actually bending that ear until it hears and accommodates the unified grumbling of the group, is certainly one of the fundamental lessons of American civics that any student should be confronted with, though, unaccountably, to my mind, it doesn’t seem to find its way into the curriculum all that much.

  17. on 05 May 2007 at 2:04 pm 17. The Constructivist said …

    Hmm, just realized that I’ve never plugged Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor here. As a former co-editor, this is simply inexcusable. BTW, Doc FR, this post has gotten a few neat responses at Lumpenproletariat and one other place whose name escapes me.

  18. on 06 May 2007 at 11:12 pm 18. JP Stormcrow said …

    A very late comment, now that I’ve enjoyed my 2-day weekend, thanks to the generous vision of late-19th century industrialists…

    From the cloistered perspective of a “white-collar” employee in the private sector in the US, my continuing reaction is always “Wow! Some University professors are Organized!” So it’s like the dog that plays the piano, intrigued that you are organized at all, who cares if you may not be very “fervently” organized - or that you are cautious about using the levers it brings. I do not know how far organizing will make it in to white-collar private sector in the US - there are a few potetnial levers such as healthcare, overseas “outsourcing” and extra hours - but I think the mindset is a long way from being established. From my experience there tend to be a lot of Labor Union Urban Myths or cautionary tales that float around - which reinforce and reflect a generally negative view. (at a minimum it is assumed to necessarily be bad, see for instance this Union Advoidance Workshop.)However, in companies with significant union presence, most are aware that the white-collar health care and other bennies tends to “follow” the results of the union negotiations. I wonder if there are any good studies that examine white collar benefits (especially health care) at firms with and without unions.

    Anyway it is encouraging to see the ultimate “knowledge workers” at least lending their legitimacy to unions as being a mechanism for establishing a relationship with their administration/management. I also appreciate the care with which it is approached - like public school teacher unions, yours is one which has the potential for much publicity and unforunately, given current media profiles, interests and points of view, the potential is much greater for “bad” publicity from a particular event, rather than coverage which pointed out the potential for longer term benefits such as overall quality of staff etc.

    For me your post on separation of the private and public selves was quite timely for my writing this comment.