Cary Nelson - How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

How the University Works

C ULTURAL F RONT
General Editor: Michael Brub

Manifesto of a Tenured Radical
Cary Nelson

Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life
Edited by the Bad Subjects Production Team

Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity
Simi Linton

The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the
Future of Literary Studies
Michael Brub

Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress
Bruce Robbins

Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture
Rita Felski

Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital
Edited by Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston

Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and
Other Difficult Positions
Lennard J. Davis

After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority
Mike Hill

Critics at Work: Interviews 19932003
Edited by Jeffrey J. Williams

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
Robert McRuer

How the University Works: Higher Education and the
Low-Wage Nation
Marc Bousquet; Foreword by Cary Nelson

Higher Education and the
Low-Wage Nation

Marc Bousquet

Foreword by Cary Nelson

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2008 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bousquet, Marc
How the university works : higher education and the low-wage
nation / Marc Bousquet; foreword by Cary Nelson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9974-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-9974-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9975-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-9975-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. College teachersSalaries, etc.United States. 2. Universities
and collegesEmployeesSalaries, etc.United States. I. Title.
LB2334.B58 2007
331.28137812dc22 2007029790

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Heather

For an Organization of Intellectual Workers

I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.

On the first-mentioned, the economic side, the working class may serve us as a model: they have succeeded, at least to some extent, in protecting their economic interests. We can learn from them too how this problem can be solved by the method of organization. And also, we can learn from them what is our gravest danger, which we ourselves must seek to avoid: the weakening through inner dissensions, which, when things reach that point, make cooperation difficult and result in quarrels between the constituent groups.

The intellectual worker, due to his lack of organization, is less well protected against arbitrariness and exploitation than a member of any other calling.

An organization of intellectual workers can have the greatest significance for society as a whole by influencing public opinion through publicity and education. Indeed it is its proper task to defend academic freedom, without which a healthy development of democracy is impossible. An outstandingly important task for an organization of intellectual workers at the present moment is to fight for the establishment of a supranational political force as a protection against fresh wars of aggression.

Albert Einstein, 1949

Appendix A: Yeshiva University 444 US 672,
Justice Brennan, Dissenting

Appendix B: Brown University 1-RC-21368,
Liebman and Walsh, Dissenting

This book could not have appeared without the unflagging support and encouragement of a long list of activist intellectuals, especially those who comprise the editorial collective of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor ( www.workplace-gsc.com ). These include, among many others, Dick Ohmann, Paul Lauter, Gary Rhoades, Bill Vaughn, Katherine Wills, Eileen Schell, Bruce Simon, Christian Gregory, Steve Parks, Laura Sullivan, Karen Thompson, Cary Nelson, Michael Brub, Vicky Smallman, Randy Martin, Steve Watt, Matt Gold, Tony OBrien, Gregory Bezkorovainy, Ali Zaidi, Susan OMalley, Vinny Tirelli, Greg Meyerson, Julie Schmid, Kirsten Christensen, Felicia Carr, Ray Watkins, Noreen OConnor, Barbara Foley, Jamie Owen Daniel, Rich Daniels, Bill Hendricks, Don Lazere, Joe Aimone, Mary Refling, and Kent Puckett. Some of the collective, like Aimone, are responsible for drafting me into the movement; others, like Refling, Daniel, and Smallman, for keeping the movement going; still others, like Nelson, Lauter, and Martin, for continuing to provide intellectual leadership and generous support at critical junctures in the journey. All of them have contributed in some very significant way to this project, in ways simply too various to catalog.

Of foundational importance was my experience at the City University of New York, where I first began to understand the prospects for greater equality and democracy represented by public higher education. Among my CUNY comrades I especially have to thank Eric Marshall of the Adjunct Project and Leo Parascondola, Barbara Bowen, Stanley Aronowitz, and George Otte, who first suggested I attend a union meeting. At CUNY and thereafter, my friend Granville Ganters contributions to this project ran the gamut from critic and copyeditor to matchmaker and mixologist.

I doubt that I would have written this book without the years I spent as an assistant and then tenured associate professor at the University of Louisville, in a right-to-work state with a powerless faculty, and where public university coaches and presidents cart their compensation home in wheelbarrows while spectacularly failing to serve student need. While in Louisville, I was especially grateful for the friendship of fellow transients Susan Erdmann, Stephen Dougherty, Wayne Ross, and Sandra Mathison and for the indispensable intellectual partnership of a courageous network of activist graduate students, especially Chris Carter (now at the University of Oklahoma), Tony Scott, (University of North CarolinaCharlotte), Laura Bartlett (University of OhioMarion), and Steve Wexler (California StateNorthridge). Upon arriving at Santa Clara, I benefited from research support and a subvention in partial support of this book. Thanks to John Kloss for permission to reprint his academic labor cartoons. With respect to Thomas Nasts cartoon The American Twins, I am very grateful for the gifts of time and knowledge donated by Delinda Buie, Mildred Franks, and Harry Rubenstein, curator for labor history at the Smithsonian Institution.

Portions of this project have appeared, sometimes in different form, in Social Text, JAC (Journal of Advanced Composition), College English, Workplace, Works and Days, Cinema Journal, and minnesota review. Im grateful to the editors for permission to reprint, but also in many cases for meaningful intellectual contributions to this project, notably Lynn Worsham, Jeanne Gunner, and Randy Martin. Among the editorial supporters of this project, I have to emphatically thank Pittsburgh neighbors, rival editors, and friends David Downing and Jeffrey Williams. For over a decade, Williams has supported this project with a steady stream of queries, challenges, reading suggestions, offprints, invitations, complaints, and introductions. Under his leadership,