Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor

(Hardback)

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Introduces the reader to the academic union movement and describes the conflicts and challenges inherent in this "professional unionism" among full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and graduate-employees on campuses across the United States and Canada. Contributors discuss the impact of today's "casualized" academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between "professional" and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the "othering" of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty. By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.

Reviews

By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace. * Sociological Abstracts *
The book's chapters are consistently readable, accessible, and of good quality. The volume should be of much value to readers of varied interest. The most natural audience is those interested in academic labor, and in unions. More than that, and regardless of one's perspective on unions, the volume offers insight into important features of academic workplaces, graduate student activism, and restructuring. . . . [C]ogs in the Classroom Factory is an excellent contribution to the literature, with rich insights into the details of graduate employee and contingent faculty organizing and work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the restructuring of academic work, for its focus on the identities of employees and their unions addresses a key factor in organizing academic work in the 21st-century workplace. * The Journal of Higher Education *
The energy evident in the struggles documented in this volume, as well as the fact that higher education is now one of the most heavily unionized sectors in the United States, argues that academics are increasingly identifying and organizing as workers, not only for better working conditions but also for better universities. For researchers interested in the new labor movement in higher education, this collection is a valuable new addition. * Work and Occupations *
How do you take weak-willed academic suck-ups and turn them into militant union members in less than a year It is in answering this question that Cogs makes its most useful contribution. . . . While the answers vary, and there is obviously no formula, the richness of the book is it's ability to place the concrete details of campaign stories in the context of this theoretical question of how unions transform the consciousness of their members. . . . [T]hese essays should prove valuable to organizers of a wide range of professional workers. Labor educators preparing to teach organizing skills to academic unionistsor teaching credit classes to graduate studentswill also find this book useful. * Labor Studies Journal *
Cogs in the Classroom Factory will be of interest to those in academia, particularly those at large universities, who are interested in organizing their ranks to achieve greater rights, benefits, and democracy in the workplace-graduate employees, adjunct faculty, tenured and not-yet-tenured full-time faculty, and union organizers. * NEA Higher Education Journal *
This book combines valuable case studies with useful and suggestive analysis of the contemporary process of academic restructuring. . . . [T]his book is a powerful tonic for those days where you feel worn down by the grind and resigned to the inevitability of the changes we confront. * CAUT Bulletin *

Author Bio

Deborah M. Herman is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. Julie M. Schmid received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa.