Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Volume 12)

by Cary Nelson

Academic labor has never been more vulnerable to exploitation, or more galvanized into action. Threats to tenure, job shortages for new Ph.D.s, and an increasing reliance on poorly paid graduate students and adjunct faculty for teaching are the harsh reality on campuses across the nation. Will Teach for Food provides a clarion call to academic workers, summoning them to take action against the continued decline in working conditions on American campuses. When graduate students at Yale University held a "grade strike" during the 1995-96 academic year, they were protesting policies such as downsizing, subcontracting, and outsourcing -- strategies currently wreaking havoc on the larger U.S. workforce. The debates at Yale mirror those on many whether graduate student teaching assistants are students or employees of the university; whether faculty are management or staff; what constitutes a reasonable teaching load and fair compensation. In Part I of Will Teach for Food, participants describe the Yale student strike and examine what workers on other campuses can learn from this action. In Part II, activists and scholars place the challenge to academic workers in the context of U.S. labor history and assess the impact of university "corporatization" on the communities that surround them and on higher education as a whole. A compelling examination of the human cost of today's corporate colleges and universities. "When an elite institution dedicated to scholarship and education uses strong-arm tactics to suppress its own graduate students, when it starts asking its employees to susbist on poverty-level or sub-poverty-level wages -- this is more than a little disillusioning.It's like finding out that an elegant old gentleman you've always admired at a distance has a secret life as a mugger and a thug. It's painful to watch. But of course it's happening everywhere". Barbara Ehrenreich, from the Foreword

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

The majority of this book reprints Social Text #49's Yale Strike Dossier, a reportback from the Yale Grade Strike and its aftermath. Many of these essays are excellent and important contributions to the literature on academic labor. John Wilhelm's introduction frames GESO's fight within the longer history of industrial unionism at Yale, while Robin Kelley's "The Proletariat Goes To College" is a short, insightful account of the labor politics of noninstructional university workers. Corey Robin and Michelle Stephens' essay on organizing and Kathleen Newman's piece on the cultural politics of graduate student poverty are probably my two favorite contributions to the volume. Michael Berube's contribution names names of faculty who publicly attacked the union and explores the rhetoric and poltiics of faculty reaction to grad organizing. As such, it complements other similar pieces, especially Cynthia Young's "On Strike At Yale," which appeared in The Minnesota Review just before this volume was published and should have been included here as well. Corey Robin addresses the same subject in his "Blacklisted and Blue," which was published in the 2003 volume Steal This University". In addition to the Yale material, this book also reprints several other social text essays by Stanley Aronowitz and others which comment more generally on the casualization of academic labor.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is rather disturbing how relevant this book still is so many years later. While part one deals with the experience of Yale graduate students, part two is a more comprehensive look at hiring practices in higher education. The plight of contingent (disposable) faculty is as real today as it was then, only the percentages of faculty in this category has continued to grow every year.