Nelson, Cary (Ed.) (1997). Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Reviewed by Henry Goode

Nelson, Cary (Ed.) (1997). Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 299 pp. ISBN 0-8166-3033-X $19.95 Reviewed by Henry Goode Arizona State University June 22, 1998       Will Teach for Food is a collection of fifteen articles, a Foreword, and an Introduction by different authors describing the circumstances leading to the strike by teaching assistants at Yale University in December 1995 and January 1996. Part I, A Yale Strike Dossier provides a history of the people and background events prior to the strike. Part II, Academic Workers Face the New Millennium analyzes the aftermath of the strike and looks into the future of teaching assistants, full-time and part-time faculty at colleges and universities. The authors include the editor Cary Nelson, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Wihelm, Corey Robin and Michelle Stephens, Kathy M. Newman, Rick Wolff, Duncan Kennedy, Andrew Ross, Robin F.G. Kelley, Michael Berube, Stanley Aronowitz, Daniel Czitrom, Stephen Watt, James D. Sullivan, Linda Ray Pratt, Karen Thompson, and Ellen Schrecker.       "Between Crisis and Opportunity: The Future of the Academic Workplace." In his introduction, Cary Nelson writes that "the academy has become a place to build workplace solidarity that crosses class lines" (p.6). This potential for solidarity within employee groups is the "opportunity" Nelson is referring to in his title. Nelson is urging everyone to resist the "crisis" of the current campus-wide adoption of marginal employment practices such as downsizing, subcontracting, and outsourcing of positions, all familiar terms from American industry in the last decade. Will Teach for Food is a book devoted to both the deepening crisis and the increasing opportunity. John Wihelm begins his A Short History of Unionization at Yale" with an excerpt from Methodist Minister George Butler's 1938 report on working conditions for the service staff at Yale. The report describes a seven day work week, long hours, inadequate compensation and layoffs during school vacations. Wilhelm uses this 1938 report to draw a between similar working lives then and conditions for staff and teaching assistants (TAs) in the 1990s. In "Against the Grain: Organizing TAs at Yale," Corey Robin and Michelle Stephens describe the organizing of the 1995 strike by 250 TAs demanding that a university with a $5 billion endowment recognize the Graduate Employees and Student Organization (GESO) as a collective bargaining unit. Specifically, three TAs are highlighted in describing how the strike was organized. The focus of GESO is collective thinking and confrontation.       "Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or, Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph.D.' " Kathy M. Newman describes the mainstream image of TAs as social misfits, welfare types and as a leisure class. In popular culture and in movies, the graduate student is portrayed as a "lonely misfit and crazed killer," (p.114). Furthermore, this popular image of graduate students has not been transformed outside the academy including the mainstream press to "grad students fight class struggle"(p.114) or that of a "sign-waving proletariat crusader" (p.118). In "Why Provoke This Strike? Yale and the U.S. Economy," Rick Wolff asks "how can we make sense of the strike at Yale?" (p.124). Wolf points out that Yale is the fourth richest university in the United States and the largest employer in the fourth poorest large city in the United States. However, the university wants to lower pay for non-faculty staff and cut back on benefits to save money. Yale's yearly income exceeds its budget by millions which adds to the endowment yet it pleads virtual poverty. In "Boola!" Duncan Kennedy asserts at this time the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the charter of organized labor, may not apply to graduate students. The consequences of coverage or non-coverage are great. If not covered by the NLRA, an employer may use union busting tactics that would be illegal if there were coverage by the act. If not covered by the NLRA or a similar state statute, an employer can discipline or terminate an employee for union activity such as organizing or striking.       Andrew Ross writes in "The Labor Behind the Cult of Work" that the "real story here is the long-term elimination of organized labor at Yale. This is the principle of faith among corporate executives who sit on the board of the Yale Corporation and whose advocacy of such a policy is therefore as natural as breathing boardroom air"(p.138)."Yale's labor strategies are little different from any other local corporation operating in a pro- scarcity climate" (p.138). In "The Proletariat Goes to College," Robin F.G. Kelley describes how "university officials work hard to project an image of their campuses as places of free exchange and inquiry. That universities are often the biggest exploiters of labor, not to mention the biggest landlords in some cities, is a fact their PR people try to bury"(p.149). Further, the question of unionization is not just a pragmatic issue. "What kinds of unions should university employees build, especially if their work brings them in contact with students? What should be the relationship between low-wage workers, faculty, students and the larger community?"(p.147) Michael Berube in "The Blessed of the Earth" quotes author Peter Brooks, "they are among the blessed of the earth," ("Walking the Line," March/April 1996:56)."They are not, after all, just any garden-variety cheap labor; they are cheap labor at Yale"(p.166).       "Academic Workers Face the New Millennium" differs from the prior section in that the discussion shifts from the events leading to and encompassing the Yale strike to addressing the conditions of academic labor in general. Furthermore, setting academic unionization in the general context of the changing character of higher education is mixed with broad analysis and case histories to set the stage for future academic employment.       In "Academic Unionism and the Future of Higher Education," Stanley Aronowitz reminds the reader that one of the forgotten stories of the 1960s was the explosive growth of public employee unionism and the birth of a new era of professional unionism as well. He points out that by 1975, four million public and service employees had joined unions, about the same number as the industrial workers movement of the 1930s. This growth in "white collar" unionism occurred concurrently with the rise of feminism and many other social movements. In 1969, the author, as a result of his union organizing history, was asked to meet with the leadership of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The university in their argument against the TAs referred to the TAs as students, or professors in training, not as employees. The TAs were recognized by the university after a strike and negotiated a contract. However, after this contract, the university started a campaign to decertify the TAA as a bargaining unit. Professor Aronowitz points out that colleges and universities, public as well as private, have adopted the ideology of the large corporation including such actions as "downsizing" and reducing benefits. Further, the author contends that budget cuts have been used to shift power from faculty to administration. Institutions have become more bureaucratized in the past twenty years and presidents and chancellors are more like CEOs than they are like academic leaders. The challenge for academic unions, according to Professor Aronowitz, is "to accept responsibility for the academic system rather than remaining representatives of specific interests of faculty and staff within its technologically defined boundaries. The challenge is to become agents of a new educational imagination that is, to join with others in counter planning that aims both to retain mass higher education as a right and to suggest what education is in the new, postregulation, postwork era"(p.213-214).       Daniel Czitrom, in "Reeling in the Years: Looking Back on the TAA," provides a history of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison beginning in 1966. In 1971, the author enrolled as a Ph.D. student and TA at the university. He served as the history department shop steward from 1973 to 1976. Many of the initial members of the TAA were antiwar protesters who were concerned that giving a failing grade to a male student under the draft laws of the day was the equivalent of sending him to the Vietnam. In "On Apprentices and Company Towns," Stephen Watt notes that "At Yale, they will begin building lifelong networks of other influential people, meet brilliant scholars of the opposite sex, marry, have brilliant children and generally live the life of Riley. Talk about the haves and the have nots: Yale's teaching assistants are among the most pampered people in America" (p.229). Watt discusses apprenticeships in terms of student employment. Apprenticeships in trades are carefully defined, usually measured in years or in hours of job training. This is not reflected in most teaching assistant positions. The term "company town" is chosen to suggest that the employer knows before the student agrees to a contract that the stipend is inadequate.       James Sullivan writes in "The Scarlet L: Gender and Status in Academe," of a new type of position in an American university advertised in 1995. It is a tenure track lecturer in English, not eligible for promotion. After a probationary period, tenure would be granted but not promotion. The teaching load would be set at four courses, and include a negotiable salary, believed to be in the mid-twenty thousand dollar range. In "Disposable Faculty: Part-Time Exploitation as Management Strategy," Linda Ray Pratt deals with the saga of a career in part-time teaching as a slow track to nowhere. Pay scales are low and static and the jobs rarely convert to tenure track positions. Further, a record of part-time faculty employment damages one's prospects in the job market. A new feature in this form of teaching employment is that the letter of appointment will also contain the notice of termination at the end of the employment period.       In "Alchemy in the Academy: Moving Part-Time Faculty from Piecework to Parity," Karen Thompson describes how part-time and temporary employees are generally excluded from unions and are extremely difficult to organize. The status of part-time employees is important as they comprise nearly half of college and university teaching staffs. The author mentions that one of the attractions for hiring part-time employees in addition to cost savings and flexibility is their likelihood of remaining unorganized. There is also the suggestion that since there are no laws relevant to part-time workers and organizing, that in effect government policy may actually make organizing difficult. Professor Thompson, part-time faculty herself, describes her involvement in organizing non-full-time teachers at Rutgers. The Professor states that a number of lessons were learned through the organizing and negotiating process. One lesson learned is that temporary teachers cannot make gains by themselves. According to the author, organizing, alliance building and networking may not be enough. It is important to recognize the opposition movement is seeking to reduce the commitment to social needs and public services. Education is one of its main targets.       Ellen Schrecker, in her chapter "Will Technology Make Academic Freedom Obsolete?", begins the discussion with technology, the electronic classroom and how her university's first attempt with this technology failed. The problems were systemic but she thinks the university will try again with video teleconferencing as an attempt to reduce the cost of instruction. There is the belief among administrators that the "electronic academy" (p.293) will enable the entire institutional superstructure of higher education to be eliminated. The university must now adopt an "industrial model"(p.293) concerned with the bottom line. The mission of education will be to turn out "a product as cheaply as possible"(p.293). Professor Schrecker considers that just about everything is negotiable. University boards of directors, trustees and governing bodies, are downsizing facilities, increasing the size of classes, and are attacking the tenure system. The university is pitting "an aristocracy of full time, full paid tenured and tenure track teachers against a displaced peasantry of underpaid, overworked, and insecure adjuncts"(p.294). However, Professor Schrecker advises against too much nostalgia for the crumbling traditional university. "Its stated concern for intellectual freedom and cultural diversity was often more rhetorical than real and almost always limited by an unacknowledged deference to the powers that be"(p.295). A bottom line philosophy and funding cuts are also altering intellectual autonomy. Professor Schrecker suggests collective action as a possible alternative to the current trend. "Individuals simply do not have the power to reverse the inequities that the business community has foisted upon American society" (p.297). The author contends that the concept of academic freedom should recognize a connection between free speech and collective action, such as GESO action at Yale.       Will Teach for Food achieves its goal of portraying the scenario leading to the teaching assistants strike at Yale University in December, 1995 and January, 1996. Furthermore, the articles in the second part question in detail how the terms and conditions of faculty employment in the future are changing. Each of the authors was either involved in the strike or has professional knowledge of the subject matter from their careers. This first-hand knowledge of the subjects by the authors lends credibility to the chapters. About the Reviewer       Henry Goode works for the Arizona Board of Regents.